Obviously there’s the fear of failing to remember, the fear of the loss of this or that detail, the fear that you’ll forget what you were shopping for. All of that is exactly what you’d expect. But the additional – the real – fear behind notebooking, the fear these fears disguise, is the fear of not having seen in the first place; and in that sense, keeping a notebook quickly becomes the act of seeing in itself. A note, or it never happened. A note, or you didn’t look. So write this down before it goes: a stag’s antlers imagined at the end of the garden, at the end of the day, among the browning leaves of last year’s iris! Write this: sand. Write this: a lacquer box. Write this: ‘Bought, contents unseen.’ And this: ‘Some birds viewed from a distance.’ Write that their wings are as flat as planks when they turn against the sky. Write that Friday approaches and recedes but it’s never where you are. Warm air, sunshine, rowan blossom like a confectioner’s shop, and further off, the junkman’s wonky bugle call. Write a note, or this sunshine never fell through this window on to this minor, unnoticed, unreviewed event. A note, in a notebook, has this exact air of desperation to it. It invites yet refutes the act of reclamation. Today I thought I might describe every single step of the staircase, every crack, flaw and grain in the oak as if it were a landscape. But if I can’t describe what’s outside the window – the way the winter sunshine falls on houses half a mile away while the High Street lies in shadow – how can I attempt something that much more complex? Close up, as far as language is concerned, the stairs exist off the edge of resolution, they are both the largest & the smallest structure in the universe. (Location 86)
Though causes are everywhere present and dependable, the search for causality is to welter around looking for explanations you can’t have, using epistemologies and ontologies at best provisional. (Location 263)
I’m not sure life is a dream. But if your attempts to map it don’t feel like one, you may be making a serious error about what being awake actually is, or where and in what conditions it is carried out. (Location 271)
What is science fiction if it is not on one hand the powerful lens or episteme we are stuck with – an era’s adopted way of looking at things – or on the other, the fulfilment of the wish, and as such, only an impulse to fantasy? (Location 340)
It was my condition then to believe that I was haunted: but I was the haunting, & understanding that eventually taught me a lot. Light is cast forward by memories like these but always arrives too late. Every tense you can use to describe this kind of ghost falls to pieces under the strain. It’s a failed foreshadowing (or fore-illuminating). Evolution gave us metaphor – a ghost of meaning in itself – for times like this. The instructions scribbled on the box read, ‘I mean, it might be of some use, just see what you can do with it.’ (Location 835)
Note: Metaphor - the romanticised view but none the worse for that - metaphor connection as being a future or past haunting
The Weird is a way of writing about the real. It evolved slowly across the twentieth century and then faster than the eye could follow across the first two decades of the twenty-first, arising from constant collisions, engagements and exchanges of fluids between the horror story, the ghost story, landscape writing, the hauntological and psychogeographical perspectives. All fictions are cultural, but at the moment the Weird is intensely cultural & self-aware. (Location 889)
The Weird is not ‘Lovecraftian’: it does not belong to H. P. Lovecraft. Neither is it a subset of the Gothic. It is not the same as Freud’s uncanny. (Location 896)
Writing is the pure relief of not having to discuss everything that happens in an attempt to agree the world into being; it is, for instance, the reverse of Twitter. (Location 972)
A few years ago I began to wonder if obsessive-compulsive worldbuilding was really a kind of guilt, essentially an attempt to pretend that you weren’t writing fiction at all. (Location 984)
Everyone claims to be doing that, from scientists to brand managers. As a result the whole thing has become nauseating. When asked, I now reply: I make things up, like everyone else in this very doomed & self-fictionalising culture. (Location 997)
Edgelands: I’m beginning to hate that word, because even more than ‘psychogeography’ it’s so attractive and easy to use but so obviously a gentrifying label, an attempt to plant a flag in the zone. Not only have liminal spaces become culturally mainstream, there’s a mainstream of liminal-space thinking; a kitsch of liminal zones is now inevitable. (Location 1022)
and now, of course, Covid, the first of the great collapse-generated pandemics, the first taste of ‘the future’ (Location 1141)
Because of those elves, adverse change of any kind is a thing of the past or perhaps other less fortunate countries. I’m sure you’re right & of course I bow to your superior understanding of history; although I wonder if, when you insist that the disaster can never happen to us, you really mean that it must never happen to us – it’s a reversal so upsetting that it can’t even be contemplated. (Location 1150)
This is it: consumption. This is the offer. This is how it is. This is the sheer inevitability of these goods: an elite who pretend to be populists manage the rest of the population and offer in return this locked-in set of opportunities. This is what we take from you: work all your life. This is what you get in return: the digital funfair and fatty sugared-up meat our people can make look really good. But aren’t you sick of there being about five basic avenues of satisfaction, each internally graded for price? And aren’t you sick of being obsessed with your hobby? Your house? Your car? Wow, those cars have fucking radar and everything. And everyone can have a wrist radio and speak into it as if their errand is a mission and their mission is more important than anyone else’s in this jam-packed, Covid-ridden space. Hello? (Location 1248)
Science fiction has always defined a future as a global trend successfully isolated & described: the futurologist’s future, the cultural analyst’s future. All that interests the SF writer is the collapse of the wavefront, the shock of the new. But the future is also the context of those it overtakes, and who muddle on – accepting this, rejecting that, failing to acknowledge or even detect major shifts. In fact that’s really the only actual future, the non-discourse future, the unsophisticated, non-speculative, non-theoretical, non-futurist future, the future on the ground. It’s all around, now. One of the ways science fiction might delimit itself is to write in that direction. But of course there are so many others. (Location 1263)
Science fiction is not science. There is no shared project. (Location 1295)
Go away to another town. When you get there, don’t ‘write’: instead begin recording what you see. Describe a life you can only be on the edge of. Get those people down. (Location 1462)
Look for situations, Beatrice always says, in which you can make bad decisions. Otherwise you’re writing from a template. Find (Location 1487)
