On Shape, Spunk-Gerbils, and the Fight For Good Writing

On Art, Al Murray, Stewart Lee, and a phallic onion.

I’m less bothered, these days, by the threat of AI than I am by the threat of keyboards still in the possession of scabietic spunk-gerbils called Colin in Leverhulme who are suddenly interested in politics because he couldn’t understand a word said to him by his Amazon delivery driver when delivering his copy of Al Murray’s latest WW2 Spankathon.

That’s not to say that AI isn’t a threat, but its analytical skills far exceed its ability to create anything fresh or original. Try chatting with an AI chatbot about a subject that interests you and you’ll probably find it illuminating. Ask it to do something new in that space and it will fall on its back flapping its digital paws in the air and quoting Ibsen… in Greek.

No, the problem remains that everybody has something to say but, as the great Normal Distribution curve continues to prove, only about 5% of people have anything worth saying.

It’s not for me to judge, of course, whether I’m in that 5%. But I also don’t write enough to Substack, largely on account of too many people writing too much on Substack. This morning, I got three newsletters I don’t remember subscribing to but found immensely easy to ignore.

The people I want to read generally aren’t on here. Some, like Stewart Lee, formerly of The Observer, write newsletters (see below) but today I noticed even those have again stopped coming to my email. Meanwhile, others won’t stop sending me emails, no matter how many times I click the Unsubscribe, Please Stop It Now, and FUCK OFF IF YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU buttons.

The world is a funny place (despite Al Murray) and I find myself increasingly uncomfortable in it, biting my tongue as I see the worst writers, terrible poets, and bad cartoonists thrive.

I wish I could name names but I’m far too polite. I hope you know who they are.

Here’s a badly drawn duck saying “I’m a duck and I’m mallard.” (And even that would wittier than about 90% of the crap they produce.)

Or to put that into poetic terms:

Slippery eels skin of unfettered diurnal radiance my phallic onion rides a green unicorn and shouts ancient Gaelic and I shiver in your vuvanic butteryness.

There are some awful people out there, brutalising their chosen art forms.

It’s why, for the past two months, I’ve been mostly absent. I’ve been happy sitting here with my bitterness, detached from the world to work on things without thinking twice about whether they have any value beyond myself. I like what I’ve written and that’s enough.

Well, I say “that’s enough”, but I’ve also been submitting work everywhere, which is sure to end in tears. But I’ve decided to make a stand with the kind of work I think is important. The kind of work I value. If I’m going down, I’m going to start swinging for the fences (to borrow an old baseball saying, which I barely understand and I’m sure it mixed, anyway).

You might say I have strong views about art. Not so much illustration, though people seem to think I’m a cartoonist. I always say I am primarily a writer and that’s what I enjoy doing more than anything. Drawing is a hobby I had to teach myself. Writing is intuitive. I spent about 90% of my time thinking about the written word. My first book accepted for publication was a novel. I spent 10 years in academia working to get my doctorate which isn’t in cartoons but in words.

Good writing gives shape to the world in immeasurably valuable ways. Great writing challenges entropy. Bad writing embraces entropy. It’s why poetry, for me, is in a bad place. It’s why I abandoned it after I left university and why I’ve been trying to restore my faith in it. It started after my Mum died and I’ve been lingering in that space for the best part of two years now, reacquainting myself with writers like Larkin, (Les) Murray, and Heaney but also discovering writers like Milosz, Micheal O’Siadhail, and Elizabeth Bishop. I’ve gone back to my formalist roots. I’ve been rereading Shelly, Blake, Byron, and some Keats. I’ve even attempted to read Geoffrey Hill.

These are not writers who write shapelessly, destroying form or breaking down the barriers of language, or whatever the current bullshit rationale is for bad writing. These are people who agonise over a comma. Those are my people.

The reverse is everything that’s going wrong. People who don’t care about craft.

Maybe I’m just a man out of time but I want shape. I value it the most when shape pretends not to be shaped: the cartoons of Ronald Searle and Ralph Steadman are perfect examples of that. Hunter S. Thompson’s prose is another example: a true stylist hiding in the guise of a Gonza radical. Even the comedy of Lee does the same: craft in the guise of no craft. It’s the ultimate in form.

I might post more of my work on here once it’s been through the grinder of slush piles and rejection. There’s a lot of it. Assuming I don’t succumb to the usual self-destructive impulse to bin everything. And I want to publish more here because I’m still convinced that form matters and those of us who believe in something beyond postmodern jargon should carry on that fight.

Is Substack the right place for that? I still hope so.

I watched Lee interviewed on Channel 4 recently and he was as articulate as ever but also as annoyingly self-defeating. He was worried about legal threats should he use Substack, which admittedly might worry me… if every other bugger weren’t already writing freely on Substack. It’s the eternal dilemma of thinking people: those who think the most deeply about things and care the most are the people least likely to talk about things.

“The more you know, the more you realize you don't know,” said Aristotle during a badly received set at the Athens Laugh-A-Minute Comedy Club in 313BC.