Words fail me. I am suffering from reader’s block. I have just finished The Atrocity Exhibition. I have been reading it for ten days. I have looked up a series of words in the dictionary: hypogeum; nystagmus; blastosphere; caisson. I have notes on the way he uses the word “mimetisized”. I have copied out certain sentences I particularly admire. I am intending to find out more about the artists he mentions, especially Bellmer. I want to visit the reservoirs near Staines.
It’s over. No it’s not you, it’s me. You haven’t done anything, you haven’t changed. I’m finished. I’m finishing you. She’s finished me. Like a holiday romance, the thing had it’s own limit built in. With a book that’s only 184 pages long, you know it’s only going to be a short affair. It’s been exciting. You’ve been the first thing I thought about every day for ten days. You went everywhere with me.
I don’t know. I didn’t really understand him. He was difficult. All that stuff about his wife. We did have a lot in common. The Kennedy thing, atomic weapons, The Manic Street Preachers, David Cronenberg films. I liked being with him. It made me feel important. The sex was only okay.
I’ve felt sick all day; bereft. I can’t be alone. Sometimes I think it would be good for me. Just my own thoughts, my own sentences, my own vocabulary. Impossible. I don’t know what to read next. More Ballard? I’ve reserved Super-Cannes at the library. A yellow postcard will arrive when it comes. Someone in Macclesfield is enjoying it at the moment. I have got other Ballard in the house: Empire of the Sun; Low Flying Aircraft. But I’ve never managed to start them before and now I’m faced with it, nothing’s changed.
Evening comes. I pick up several books. I think about reading some big non-fiction things. I should read some Virginia Woolf someone’s lent me. But I hate to read something I feel I ought to read. I start reading a true-crime book, but I only get as far as the preface (again). How many times do I read these prefaces? I think about digging out some old books from the cupboard under the stairs. In a drawer upstairs I’ve stashed some WW2 escape books that I found in the loft. I want to read that book about the Elephant Man. So many biographies I want to read. Somehow I can’t bear to read another novel straight away. The last three books I read have been novels. I need to read something no-one else I know would read. I’ve got a lot to prove. I’ve got lists. Lists of books I’ve read. Books I plan to read. Books I want to buy. Why do I keep buying books in charity shops? I can buy a book in seconds but it may take me ten days to read it. Why does some trashy thing in the library attract my attention? Why is it difficult to connect with a book that’s been in the house for a while? I haven’t read it yet, what’s changed? What’s changed? Why should I read it now? Am I just in the right mood? I settle on a book on physics I’ve had for years. I start to take notes: “who is the experimenter?”; lexane; the subvisible; “[A]nything can happen once”; “There are maps for every occasion”. Yes. This is me.
I have to tell you that reading for me is delicious interfacing. The dance of alternating yielding and regaining control. The semi-automatic space-ship docking sequences in sci-fi epics. The almost-resisted insertion of the heroin syringe. Direct jacking into the web: Existenz; Neuromancer. It’s a dance in which I give myself helplessly to the slam and shake of the prose pulse. Then claw back consciousness to enjoy a verbal echo, or scribe a line in my notebook. At some point I fall into the book. Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb seizes me instantly. Reading has me shivering across that border of total loss of self while a semi-autonomous cortical zone picks up clues on what to read next.