For the past few weeks I have been trying to capture the leaves falling from the trees outside my study window on video. This is harder than it sounds; they come off in bursts, because of a gust of wind, and by the time I realize it’s happening it’s already happened. This is like Autumn itself: I always think how much I love it, the way the leaves glow and the air goes crisp, and how much I’m going to take advantage of it this year, really go for walks, really explore and enjoy it. And then one day I am at my desk, trying to capture the last yellow leaves as they come down, and I realize that I’ve missed it! Again! Already the tree nearest me is bare, save a single red leaf on the tip of a single branch, and soon the cherry trees too will be naked.

So I still have no satisfactory video footage of the leaves falling from the trees outside my study window. I do have lots of short video clips of nothing happening. Someday I will find them and wonder why they’re there. I will wonder this for about ten seconds, and then I will delete them because they’re taking up space, and who wants ten short video clips of the view they see every day?

***

Trying to capture on video something which I cannot capture on video is just one of a number of things I’ve been distracting myself with lately. (By the way, is that the correct phrase – “on video”? It seems curiously analog for a process which involves nothing more than tapping the screen of my iPhone). The problem is that I do actually have something I need to be concentrating on (namely, writing the book which is actually going to be published). I don’t mean that I can’t concentrate (I can concentrate, I sat in the same chair for several hours on Sunday and read Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam in its entirety – not a long novel, but certainly an act which requires a certain degree of concentration). I just mean that I can’t see the connections between what I’m concentrating on very well. So on the one hand I have the thing that I’m mostly working on, the thing where all of my attention should be but isn’t, quite. (Is all of anyone’s attention ever on just one thing? At least part of mine is always on worrying about whether or not I’m paying the thing I need to pay attention to enough attention instead of the thing itself.) And then on the other hand I have these other things on the fringes, which are infringing on my ability to think clearly about anything.

***

One day, convinced that nothing in the world could compel me to do good work, so why bother, I watch an old episode of Silent Witness over lunch. I’m still at my desk, which makes it seem like I haven’t thrown the towel in quite yet, or at least, I haven’t thrown all of the towel in, I’m still clutching on to one corner, like it’s a lifeline. Last week was particularly busy, I tell myself, so I deserve this hour (which turns inevitably into three). But for how long can you honestly say you ‘deserve’ something like that? When has the debt been repaid?

Anyway, watching old episodes of anything is a dangerous game for me. When I’m in the throes of a TV show obsession I am worryingly unable to cope with real life. And as a matter of fact I’ve been spending quite a lot of time watching old episodes of Silent Witness recently. After that first sneaky hour a number of others follow, until they are not sneaky anymore. I am watching an episode at lunch, an episode after lunch, an episode before dinner, an episode during dinner, an episode after dinner. I could pretend that I’m trying to find something relevant in it; that any distraction can actually be warped by willpower into something tangentially but unmistakably useful. I’m studying character development, storytelling through cinematography, whatever. But in the interest of being honest, I’ll tell you the truth, which is that I mostly watch it for the pretty faces.

Last night (or maybe this morning, at about 2 am, just before I fell asleep and had fitful dreams about solving a crime which culminated in two exactly identical bodies lying on the mortuary slabs – not twins, just two versions of the same body) – it occurred to me that I also actually just like the show. There’s no shortage of unrealistic television dramas about people who solve crimes and cut up dead bodies and do vaguely sciencey shit – CSI, the other CSI, the other CSI, and so on – but this one, for whatever reason, is my favorite. It doesn’t make me squeamish, which it should (paper cuts make me squeamish, let alone fake autopsies). It doesn’t frighten me, particularly. It walks a fine line between being too ridiculous to be worth watching and representing very finely some aspects of the human condition – elements of the soap opera combined with elements of an Ian McEwan novel, perhaps.

Between episodes, I spend some time thinking about what it means that there are so many of these kinds of shows out there and so many people watching them. I’m not qualified to speculate on this, of course. I’m sure someone somewhere has done a study on it, or written an article. But in my concentration, I don’t think to look it up. The crime element explains some of the apparently endless appeal (a number of these kinds of series have been running for over a decade) – we’re drawn to mysteries, aren’t we, they’re easy to make compelling even in an hour-long slot. But beyond that is the question of whether it is morbid or wise to surround ourselves with all of these fictional representations of mortality all of the time. These shows may not be subtle, they may not be what astute critics would sneeringly call “good television”, they may stretch the limits of our willingness to suspend disbelief, but at the core is the simple truth of life ending in death. Blah blah blah.

But yeah. Basically what it comes down to is this: I like the show because when Tom Ward and Emilia Fox smile at each other over a microscope or a corpse, it makes me smile, too.

***

To try to trick myself into thinking about the thing I should be thinking about (that’s a retrospective excuse, of course), I start a side project. Or, at least, even though it isn’t fully formed as an idea in my head yet, I describe the latest thing that’s distracting me from the thing I really need to concentrate on as a “side project” in order to validate it (everyone needs a hobby, right? So why can’t the side project just be my hobby?). I try not to make it seem too concrete, because the point at which it becomes concrete is the point at which I need to acknowledge either that it is A Thing I’m Going To Run With or A Thing I’m Going To Put On The Back Burner or, worst of all but probably most likely, Not Really A Thing At All. I try to use words that are so ambiguous that stringing them together adds no meaning: loosely speaking, I say to myself, it’s about death, depression, anxiety, memory, and purpose(lessness). It’s really very funny to me, but I don’t know why. I haven’t yet been able to pinpoint precisely what it is that makes me laugh about this.

Then, of course, I find this piece about how to write funny by Steve Almond. “As a rule,” writes Almond, “the sadder the material, the funnier the prose.”

That’s it, that’s the thing, the idea that’s distracting me, or at least that’s the idea that happens to be distracting me in the moment I read it. Take Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which for an unrelated reason has been heavily on my mind lately. No matter how many times I read it (I’ve lost count, I’m afraid to say), it always makes me laugh. That’s a good sign: if its jokes (which seems woefully the wrong word here) relied solely on something theatrical, circumstantial – misunderstandings, Shakespearean situations – surely their funniness would, gradually, start to diminish. One can generally only be delighted by an engineered joke for so long (wordplay is another matter). But the funniest bits of Vile Bodies are the saddest bits – and the book is a tragedy, really.

There’s also Geoff Dyer, who’s at his funniest when describing – well, anything, but particularly those things which on the surface appear quite serious: anxiety, depression, aging, loneliness, ruin(s). Here he is writing about having a nervous breakdown in Detroit. It’s one of the saddest and funniest things I’ve ever read:

It was raining outside. Not a howling storm, just steady drizzle. The kind of rain that yields no sense of when it might ease up, that seems to be keeping itself in reserve so that it can, if necessary, keep going till the end of time. ‘It was raining outside.’ Gore Vidal derides someone for writing a sentence like that, feigning surprise or relief that it was not raining inside. But that day in the Clique I looked down and saw that it was raining inside as well as outside. My egg-smeared plate was becoming wet. Drops of water were falling on to my toast, moistening my eggy hash browns. As I looked it rained harder and I could not see. I was crying, not sobbing, just this steady leak of tears. And then, as I realized I was crying, I felt that I was in danger of sobbing. I got a grip on myself, stopped the leak, staunched it. I ate my wet eggs and looked at the rain outside, hoping that would take my mind off the rain inside. I’m having a breakdown, I said to myself, I’m having a breakdown while having breakfast. I said this to myself to calm myself down, to try to familiarize and render ordinary the extraordinary turn of events that had led to this internal rain. I stifled my sobs and ate my breakfast which did not taste any worse because I was having a nervous breakdown. When I had finished the eggs I wiped my knife with a napkin and spread butter and apricot jelly on the whole-wheat toast. I finished the rest of my coffee. I calmed down. I was no longer leaking tears but I was no less distraught now than when I was having a nervous breakdown, which I was still having even though I had, to a degree, managed to regain control of myself.

Why is it funny? You might ask that; I’ve asked myself that. But you might just as well ask why it’s sad. The tragedy is in the comedy and the comedy is in the tragedy. That’s right, isn’t it? Like Lorrie Moore (who Almond also mentions in his article). What makes A Gate at the Stairs so funny? Certainly not its wretched outcome – or maybe that’s precisely why it’s funny. Funny for not being funny, like everything else. When I was about six years old my best friend broke her arm trying to do a back handspring in our living room. For some awful reason I began to laugh. I ran into my room with our other friend, another witness, and we giggled inconsolably, behind a shut door. I did not find it funny that my friend was scared, in pain. But something about the inevitability of the situation, perhaps, something about the irreversibility of it, elicited an involuntarily hysterical reaction – like the scene in Outnumbered where Sue submits to a fit of laughter at a funeral.

“So why are these books so funny?” Almond asks, after listing his own favorite funny books – The Catcher in the Rye, Money, Birds of America. “To begin with, because their authors reject the very premise that suffering should be treated only as an occasion for sorrow. They view suffering as something more like an inevitable cosmic joke, one that binds us all…Their characters make us laugh because they tell us the truth at a velocity that exceeds our normal standards of insight. And because they continually violate the normal boundaries of decorum, by confessing thoughts and feelings the rest of us spend our lives concealing. We’re both shocked and gratified at their candor, and so we laugh.”

***

I wish I could connect this to what I started writing about here, but as I’ve said, the bit of my brain that makes connections between things isn’t doing its job. You could blame all the TV or the navel-gazing or the short days or the pleasantly dull routine I’ve settled into or whatever, but I don’t really think it’s symptomatic of anything; it’s just the way things are at the moment.

Anyway that’s more or less what’s been going on in my head/life for the last few weeks.

❧

On Thursday I was on BBC Radio Oxford, talking about the project I’m doing with Oxford band Little Fish. If you’re one of the two people I haven’t guilted into listening to it yet, don’t worry! It’s available online for another four days [edit: my bit starts at around 1:12:00). I haven’t actually listened yet, because every time I hear my own voice I cringe, but I enjoyed the experience. I arrived very early and I’d had too much coffee beforehand, which may explain why every other word out of my mouth is “exciting!” or “excited!”, but mostly it went well, and the Jo, the host, made me feel comfortable and even vaguely interesting. Yay!

In other news the leaves outside my study window are red, the ice cream truck is still driving around the block on weekend afternoons, I can’t seem to find a decent pair of jeans anywhere (but that might be because I can’t seem to bear being in a shop for more than five minutes at a time), I’m alternating between D.H. Lawrence and David Sedaris before bed, and I’ve had cheese on toast for five out of seven lunches this week.

How’s your October been?

❧

Last week I went to London to hear Geoff Dyer speak about Americans. I didn’t have any particular desire to hear Geoff Dyer speak about Americans, but I did – almost desperately – want to hear Geoff Dyer speak, and I did want to know what The School of Life’s secular sermons are like, so I travelled from the Cowley Road to Conway Hall early on a Sunday morning.

It was one of those lukewarm September days. I sat at the front of the hall, perhaps wanting to be noticed, to be (perceived as) bold. A woman in a red and blue military-style jacket (like a drum major’s uniform, perhaps, if I knew what a drum major’s uniform looked like, or even really what a drum major was) stood before us. She wanted us to sing; this really was a sermon, and there were hymns. She said she had changed a little bit of the first hymn – Sinatra’s “New York, New York”, lyrics printed in our pamphlets – and invited Ed, her small blond pianist, to play a few bars so that we could practice the modified verse.

We sang. It still sounded like a hymn, like an English hymn sung in an English church on a rainy English sunday. It had that hymn-rhythm; which is to say, no rhythm at all. I don’t know much about singing, but I’m pretty sure that the way the English sing their hymns makes virtually no sense unless you’ve grown up singing them that way.

After we sang, I felt good; singing in public always makes me feel this way, as if I have achieved some kind of victory (in preschool I was once admonished to the point of tears for mouthing the words to a song rather than singing them out loud). But there was something unnerving about the whole thing, too. There was something strange about this woman, in her drum major’s jacket, with her Shirley Temple curls and her peppy voice, imploring us to loosen up a little, shake our limbs a little. I did not want to shake my arms or my legs like a chicken; I certainly did not want to do so repeatedly, and I most certainly did not want have to pay the bald man sitting next to me a compliment, not because I didn’t think he was worthy of a compliment, but because the compliment would inevitably be forced, even if meant – I like your shirt, I like your blazer, you have a nice smile – and therefore quite meaningless. Moreover, the first thing that had popped into my head was, “I like your hair,” which was definitely not something you could say to a bald man you had never met before. So I just looked the other way; it was easy, I pretended I was on the tube, trying to avoid looking at the person across the aisle whose knees were touching mine.

And the bald man turned to the curly-haired man behind us and said: “I like your hair.” And the curly-haired man said to the bald man, “That’s a great shirt!” And it was a great shirt; I hadn’t noticed before, but it was a great shirt now that the curly-haired man had mentioned it.

***

Then Geoff Dyer – who, even though he makes frequent reference to being tall and thin, is much taller and thinner than you imagine he is – was on the stage, at the pulpit, preaching, or, rather, speaking. He sounded a little like he might be suffering from the onset or aftermath of a mild early Autumn cold; occasionally he paused to sip from a tall glass of water. He told some anecdotes, about Americans, about the British, about the time he went to Big Sur and stood in silence on a bluff overlooking a bank of fog so thick it obscured the sea, everything, and thought how peaceful it was until an American man appeared on the scene and boomed into the quiet: “Sure is peaceful, isn’t it!” I knew I’d remember that anecdote, not because it meant anything much but because I, too, have been to Big Sur and been impressed by the way the fog rolls in and covers the coast but allows you this God-like view over it, this view that makes you think that virtually anything could be going on below you but you are above it, on the sun-bleached hillsides, in the sun. Well, yes, I thought: that is my country.

***

But then, I don’t really know my own country. I’ve probably seen more of England – percentage-wise, at least – than I have of the USA.

Last summer, on our way to Toronto, we had a layover in Minneapolis, and so, for the first time in a long time, I was in my country – though of course I had never been there before, to Minneapolis, to anywhere near Minneapolis.

I passed through immigration. The officer, who looked about my age, did not seemed inclined to interrogate me, but neither did he seemed inclined to let me through without at least making an attempt to understand the apparently complicated circumstances under which I found myself now here, in our country but his city.

“So you live in the UK?” he said, flipping through passport pages, looking at faded stamps and expired visas.

“Yes,” I said.

“But you’re going to Canada.”

“Yes. For a wedding. But not mine,” I added. I laughed, he didn’t. Maybe he was thinking it was perfectly plausible that I was flying to Toronto via Minneapolis for my own wedding to an Englishman. For some reason I started to think, what would happen if I just made a run for it? Would they catch me? Would they detain me? Would I go to jail? How would I explain it?

“So you live in the UK and you’re going to Canada and you’re not staying in Minneapolis?” he summarized.

“Yes,” I said. And he stamped my US passport, and I was home, geographically if not emotionally.

Thirsty in the departures lounge, I bought a bottle of Aquafina water with two stray dollar bills in my wallet. It reminded me of being in high school, buying bottles of water from the vending machine outside the gym during the long, hot volleyball season, which always began in an Indian summer. We would sweat our way through two hours of scrimmages and sprints and inspirational speeches. I was 14 on 9/11 and I remember that afternoon, though we’d spent all day in front of television screens, which they’d produced as if by magic and hauled into all the classrooms, it was business as usual. Drills and sit-ups and bottles of Aquafina from the vending machine. Sometimes it was so hot that we would go across to the pool after practice and leap in. Then I’d spend the long drive home wet, my t-shirt stuck to my sports bra, my hair smelling of chlorine and perspiration.

So Minneapolis is not where I’m from, but in a way, it’s part of where I’m from. The truth is that when I say “my country”, what I really mean is “my parents’ house,” “the farm my best friend grew up on,” “the bit of Boston I used to live in,” “the other bit of Boston I used to live in.” All of these tiny, disconnected places, forming a patchwork map, my map. I love my map. I love those places. I feel patriotic about street corners, particular coves and hilltops, parks and benches and cafés and long winding roads. But I don’t know what Americans are like; I don’t know what America is like. I don’t know what to think of my country as a whole. I don’t even know how to see my country as a whole.

***

I guess the trouble with being an American abroad is that you never know where you stand. Everything depends on politics, and politics cannot be counted on.

In his sermon, Dyer alluded to a period – four or five years ago, when the pound was worth twice what the dollar was worth, when animosity towards George Bush was at a high – during which Americans were treated with a much chillier, more patronizing attitude. I remember that period. That was when I first came here. I was defensive, yes, but I always imagined that people looked at you a bit differently if you were American. It was polite in those days (it may still be polite, in fact) to ask if someone was Canadian if you discerned a North American accent. I remember an aggressive and insecure compére at a comedy show, mistaking my sarcasm for genuine insult, telling me I was just another one of these Americans, spending a few weeks here, pretending to know everything, and why didn’t I just go back to where I’d come from? And then, later, realizing his mistake, he was so apologetic (“the cult of the apology,” Dyer called it, this unmistakably British instinct – “the human equivalent of birdsong”) that I couldn’t help but feel some kind of perverse sympathy for him.

But here we are now, and things have changed, and authors are giving talks in praise of Americans. And in a few years, or a few weeks, something else will change, attitudes will shift, and I, who has not moved, will stand somewhere else.

***

Then there is the issue of friendliness. The American smile. Updike’s quip: “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy”. I started to think about this. As I thought, I realized that I was probably, even in that moment, quite happy to be in London on a sunny Sunday morning listening to one of my favorite authors dole out praise for my countrymen, scowling. I am nearly always scowling. When I work, when I sit, relaxed and reading or listening, my face contorts in a way that is comfortable for me but uncomfortable for everyone else; I’m often asked if I’m okay. Yes, of course I’m okay, I say, can’t you tell?

Needless to say, I don’t have an American smile. I was not invited to join the cult as a child, I missed the meetings where the mechanics of the smile were discussed and practiced until they became an instinct.

I used to work at a school in Oxford. About half of our adult students were Americans doing a semester abroad; the other half came from all over the world to study English. One of my many menial tasks was to print student photos onto ID cards. Even before you checked the files, you could always tell the Americans from the rest, especially the girls: they were the ones with shiny grins as big as the moon, wide eyes, flat hair, heads cocked at a flattering angle. They were not prettier than anyone else – very often the opposite – but they always gave the impression of being prettier than everyone else.

As I listened to Dyer speak about the charm of Americans, I wondered if maybe it wasn’t real charm, not always; maybe sometimes it was the illusion of charm, like those girls smiling up at me from their ID cards, pretending to be prettier than everyone else and therefore convincing me, convincing all of us, that they were.

Even I am charmed when I go back to the US; I am always amazed that shopkeepers want to have such long and involved conversations with me, that cashiers want to make eye contact with me, that the girl at the bank is so genuinely curious about my weekend plans. But I feel like I don’t know how to trick myself into being charming. I feel, frankly, like I’m not a very good American, with my scowl and my shyness and my sorries (I may not be part of the cult of the smile, but I am definitely part of the cult of the apology).

Lately, though I’ve been practicing being more American. I’ve been trying to accentuate my accent, for instance, or to raise my voice above a whisper in the pub. I suppose that the longer I’m here the more strongly I feel the compulsion to assert the fact that I’m from there, to solidify my standing as an outsider even while I feel increasingly like I am part of something.

***

After the sermon was over, after we sang a final hymn, I stood in line to waiting to ask Geoff Dyer to sign a book. I hate asking authors I love to sign books. I’m always hoping that, somehow, perhaps by looking deep into my eyes, they’ll discern that I’m special, that my appreciation for their work is special, that we could be friends, even. At the same time, I know it’s a pointless thing to do: I’m not trying to increase the value of my library, and I’m under no illusion that because an author has scribbled “to Miranda” on the title page, we have any kind of relationship.

But as I stood there before him, presenting my book and my nervous smile, I made a conscious effort to try to be more American than I might ordinarily be. I began to smile and to speak. I gushed about how much I liked his work. I said my name so quickly (perhaps, I hoped, so American-ly) that he had to ask me to repeat it. He signed my book. I said, “have a nice day!” And then I sped off with my heart thumping for no obvious reason, sure I’d made a fool of myself.

Later, waiting for the bus home, sipping a too-large chai latté like I used to do in college, the sun shining limply over Notting Hill, I forgot to care about whether or not I had made a fool of myself. I thought of this, by Jawaharlal Nehru: “But in my own country, also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.” I figured that really, the only country I could claim any ownership of was the one that’s made of memory.

❧

Oh, what a difference a year makes. And maybe that’s just it: maybe it’s circumstantial, maybe it’s related to the fact that a year ago I was there and now I am here, and everything, but also nothing, has changed.

But seriously, have you looked at the internet lately?

I know the internet is not just this Thing, this big mouth-breathing monster that sits in the corner and grunts occasionally and then looks back down at the keyboard. But indulge me for a moment. Pretend it is. And just look at the state of it! Greasy hair, stained t-shirt, dried spittle at the corner of a tea-stained mouth. It hasn’t been exercising enough; it hasn’t been realising its potential or even acknowledging it has worth.

Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I don’t write rants on Sundays. Sometimes I don’t write anything, all day, which is not good when that is basically what I am supposed to be doing all day, every day. But honestly, a lot of the time I can’t actually pinpoint what it is I’m thinking, or what it is exactly that’s annoying me, even when I know something is annoying me. There’s so much noise. It’s like that scene in Arcadia (which I know I reference in every other blog post), when Valentine Coverly says “There’s just too much bloody noise!” and you aren’t sure if he means there’s too much noise around his data, or too much noise in the room, in general.

I am not going to do that thing I hate and blame the Internet Monster, and say that the reason I sometimes can’t write or sometimes can’t identify what it is that’s annoying me is that the Internet Monster has been mouth-breathing in my ear all day and I’m just so…wait, what was I saying? Because I still really, really hate that. I am not going to blame one of the greatest (for better or worse) technological and possibly sociological phenomenons of our age for the fact that sometimes I sit down at my computer and instead of banging out another 2,000 words of my book I look at photos of expensive chairs and impossibly beautiful women in Barbour coats on Tumblr. Because if computers didn’t exist and I was chained to a desk writing my book in my own blood with a stick I would still find ways not to write it. I can promise you that.

But. Part of the reason I don’t write, or I don’t know what’s bothering me, or I can’t figure out what the fuck my book is supposed to be about, is because lately – in the last year, or two, maybe – I haven’t been exercising that part of my brain that ignores everybody. Everything I read or see or hear that involves anything or anyone else in some way influences what it is I think I should be doing. Which isn’t right. And because I read and see and hear a lot, my sense of what I should be doing has been completely diluted by this sense that I’m not doing what they’re doing, how can I be more like them?

I am envious or jealous almost all the time because of what other people are doing. I don’t actually know what other people are doing, of course. The lives I see online are like little icebergs, and I will never collide with most of them, so I will never know what lies beneath. But I can extrapolate from an offhand comment – “what a great day”, for instance – and, because I like to invent things, and in a perfect world I would be inventing them on paper for an adoring public, not in my head for the sake of destroying my own self-esteem, imagine that what this means is that the person who had a great day is, at 24, already a bestselling author with a Booker nomination and a big house.

I guess the thing is, there’s just so much. Of everything. I’m drowning in everything. And it isn’t that I can’t shut it off and it isn’t that the Internet Monster is destroying the world. It’s just that I’ve lost my bearings. I’m stuck in a bad maze. I’m tired of a lot of things, which is fine, but I need to know how to find the things that excite me, rather than just encountering, again and again, in different incarnations, the things I’m tired of.

There’s just so much funny, for instance. There’s so much funny that none of it is funny anymore. It’s too near the bone, or else it means nothing at all. If I read one more girl’s clever blog about her slightly zany life (and, looked at from the right angle, whose life isn’t slightly zany?) that overuses capital letters, sentence fragments and exclamation points to drive home just how FUNNY! It all is! I will probably cry. (And am I guilty of doing this? Yes. Of course I am, sometimes. I’m as susceptible as everyone else, and I know it: that’s the point.).

Meanwhile, on Twitter, that medium for even more transient expression, there are all these jokes! These one-liners that, taken out of context, are mean or meaningless or both. And all this talk about television! Increasingly I wonder if Twitter is actually just a way for people who watch a lot of TV to feel like they’re part of a community. And they can #xfactor to their hearts’ content, and Caitlin Moran can make as many quips about the contestants as she wants, and other people can retweet Caitlin Moran’s quips about the contestants as much as they like (this is not a criticism of Caitlin Moran, by the way: she is a tremendous writer, both funny and poignant, and I have a lot of respect for her). But it’s still a Sunday evening and they’re all still sitting at home alone watching television and talking about how bad it is – or, even more depressing, how good it is.

Am I jaded? Yes, I am, a bit. I’m tired of smug people telling us what they ate and wore and accomplished today. I’m tired of self-referential Techcrunch pieces, self-referential Guardian articles, self-referential tweets. I’m tired of reading blogs about how to be more productive (why do these blogs never suggest “not spending your entire morning reading blogs about productivity” as a tip for being more productive?). I’m tired of feeling perpetually as if I’m not keeping up, even when I know that everyone else feels exactly the same way, because no one could ever keep up, even if they tried.

But I’ll say again: our imaginary Internet Monster, slobbering and abused in the corner, is not the cause of my angst. You know what the cause of my angst is? My self. My negativity. It takes a certain amount of energy and imagination to sift (or, perhaps, see) through a billion photos of well-dressed people standing in the middle of the street and a bunch of blog posts about that really awkward thing I did yesterday or that really funny thing that happened to me involving a bookcase, a dildo and a dwarf, but it can be done. No one says that books should be abolished because there are some really bad authors out there (maybe some people do say that, but they’d be wrong). And no one is standing over me forcing me to spend a few hours every day looking at things that, fundamentally, are making me depressed. I’m doing that all on my own.

What is making me angsty, therefore, is not that there is so much shit: it is that I am allowing myself the luxury of getting down about all the shit, instead of ignoring all the shit. I don’t have to read the things I read, and, more importantly, I don’t have to react negatively to them.

I think maybe a year ago I was too excited about everything to ignore anything, if you see what I mean. I think a lot of us were. But now we have the greatest freedom of all: the freedom to choose what we engage with.

So welcome to the era of accountability: in which the Internet Monster stops doing the work for us, and we have to be discerning enough to discover and promote the content we actually care about, instead of being forever mired in the content we resent. No one said it would be easy.

❧

I’ve been talking about collaborating with my lovely musical friends Little Fish for a while now. Like most good ideas, it was born in a pub after a few pints, and now it’s an actual real thing: I’m writing a book! With them!

It’s called The New Original Little Fish Paper Club Handbook™, though it isn’t exactly a handbook. The subtitle is “essays on a rock n’ roll band”, which is the closest we’ve come to describing it succinctly, and it’s being published through Unbound, which means that you – and anyone you know – can help make it happen.

I wrote about Unbound just after they launched in May, and I’m thrilled to be working with them for all of the reasons I outlined in my original post. But I’m particularly pleased to be working with them on this project, because there’s a lot of overlap between the reasons that Unbound was set up and the reasons that Little Fish – who’ve toured all over the world supporting acts like Supergrass, Placebo, Alice in Chains, Courtney Love and Blondie – chose to leave their label earlier this year, settle down in Oxford, and pursue an independent career. The intention of our book is not to cast the music industry as the big bad wolf, or to suggest that everyone should take a more DIY approach. But we do intend to explore the implications of independence, and the questions it raises, particularly for a band – questions like, “why do we play music?”, “how do we make a living doing this?”, and, indeed, “what is a living?”. (These questions, by the way, are totally transferable: as a writer, I ask myself variations of them every day).

We officially launched the project on Monday evening at an event in Notting Hill with a short pitch and a performance by Little Fish. You can watch the pitch video, read more about the project (including a short excerpt) and pledge your support (if you decide you want to) on the Unbound site. A million very heartfelt thanks to everyone who has supported or intends to support the project, or encouraged us in any other way, however small. It means a lot to me and to Little Fish.

Here’s an excerpt from the pitch and then I promise I’ll shut up about this for at least five minutes:

The New Original Little Fish Paper Club Handbook™ is a book about Little Fish, but it’s also a book about making it work, making your own way, and making stuff – music, comics, t-shirts, fishy paper squares, stickers, badges, vinyl, stop-motion animations, even books. It’s about declaring your independence and rewriting the myths you live by.

You can be part of the Little Fish story by pledging your support. Supporters will get access to a shedful of updates, photos, videos, and free exclusive downloads. And Little Fish will get the chance to share what they know – and don’t know – about what it means to be a band.

❧