things i don't want to know

pompidou centre, paris, 2018.

i turned down a book by deborah levy that was trying to come to me in an interesting way yesterday and that was possibly a mistake because i am very interested in reading her — not so much the novels, more her ‘living autobiographies’ and this was the first of them, things i don’t want to know which is a great title. but it was in dutch (dingen die ik niet wil weten 😜) and it seems stupid to read writers in translation if i can read them in the original — unfortunately for me that means either english or dutch — unless it’s purely for amusement, like reading random pages from ‘op weg’.

whyread smeone

this is from this annoyingly gushy article in the grauniad which makes her out to be some kind of semi-deity :

“I want to make something new of the old story,” Deborah Levy says. “How do you make the novel as complicated as life, as interesting as life? That’s what I want to do.”

but yes. and/but also as boring, and as sad and painful, as completely devastating. that’s what i … not want to do as such … more like what i find my-so-called-self doing — and that too is amusing to me. am i really writing this? ha ha yes well it seems like i am. omg no one is ever going to read this, let alone publish it. i am writing an unreadable, unpublishable book, great. that will make the world a better place.

but something happened when i made the connection between writing and the work i made in a different life, when i was an artist. for twenty five years i made art no one was interested in, no one came to see when i exhibited it and no one wanted exhibit it anyway, except twice and once it was because i was fucking the curator, no wait she didn’t become to curator until after i got the show. were we already fucking? i can’t remember. it doesn’t matter.

writing the first book i wanted it to be publishable, that was my mission but now i am writing something no one is going to want to read — or if they do want to read it and they start reading it they stop because its unreadable. and it doesn’t matter to me. it’s the writing that matters, it’s making that text exist. that is what matters.