I found this book in one of the car parks at the Barbican (Speed?) in a spot where people leave all kinds of things they don’t want anymore. I didn’t particularly notice the placement at the time but now it does make me a laugh a little…
Didn’t make a mark in this book until page 284—I say that because I want to show you how non-committal I felt whilst reading it, how certain I felt about giving it up
And yet what did I do?
Despite all my doubts?
I kept reading it like a whipped bitch because you frenzied me Mr. Welsch you made me feel shit but still I sought you out
And now I’m pissed.
Pissed because it’s too late.
Pissed because you can’t dump a book you’ve already read—not if you let it take you all the way to the end especially when it’s 500 pages like this one I mean that’s not an accident that’s a series of bad choices…
What was I waiting for anyway?
Clarity?
Redemption?
No.
I’m being unfair.
There was something perversely exciting about seeing Mr. Welsch ape the inside of a girl’s head with his character of Nikki. All the things he thinks girls do when they’re alone like make themselves throw up or brush their hair (routinely speaking…)
But now I’m getting ahead of myself. There are some good one-liners in here.
I’ve put them down so no one else has to read it:
The male ego may seem fragile, but it doesn’t in my experience, take too long to repair itself.
This is a great line. I wave it like a flag as I insult you (politely)
He’s got hyena street cunning skooshing out of every pore.
(skooshing, he said)
There’s some chickies you just smell damage off of… it’s just there in the eyes, that blighted, wounded aspect, manifesting itself in the need to give a destructive love to an evil force, and to keep giving it till it consumes them.
Oof I thought. What a moment to feel seen. And now for my favourite:
The Islington middle classes… they cut some fuckin pieces of ciabatta with a knife and they go: ‘Isn’t this civilised?’ And you want to go: no, you daft cunt, no it’s fuckin well not, because civilisation extends beyond pouring wine & cutting bread, and what you’re really talking about it simply leisure and relaxation.
I don’t think it got much better than that
Or maybe, maybe what ruined everything for me was the relentless phonetic Scottish accent (“ahm roonin oot ah patience here”) which is why it felt like such a relief to get back inside the head of Nikki, and Sick Boy, both of them with their fit Queen’s English—especially Nikki tho. Mostly because we agree on which guy we wanna fuck and yep it’s you Sick Boy. And guess what? We actually get to in chapter 37 AND it’s from his perspective which is so lush & generally more than a girl could ask for—except, of course, he’s a cunt about it:
Having sex with Nikki was excellent but it was that first-shag syndrome: no matter how good it is there’s always a perfunctory element which you can’t help but find distasteful.
Which made me feel alone because I wasn’t sure what he meant. I thought the first time was always good because you go from 0 to 1? Whatever. Soon I get what I’ve been waiting for all along: Sick Boy’s over-the-top desire,
Nikki, so devastating in a red two-piece swimsuit I thought I was going to have some kind of seizure.
I skip down the page past the seafood restaurant and the fried king scallops that wow Nikki until finally,
All I can think about is getting her back to my place.
Oh yeh.
We’re getting close…
But then Irvine ruins the moment—wait no I ruin the moment by mentioning Irvine’s name—
In the back seat of the taxi she has my ballot open.
(Ballot?)
Flash forward to her flat he takes off his “strides”
(Strides?)
I’m able to ignore all of the technical clothing vocabulary at the time even though it sits so weirdly alongside the rest of the text because there’s a nice description of breast-fondling to take my critical eye off things,
he frees my breasts and everything slows down as he strokes them, handling them with a careful awe, like a kid who’s been entrusted with the care of a soft, furry pet
But then it clicks because he brings it back to clothes again just when Nikki’s getting dressed and she’s trying to choose between the “tight cashmere” & the “shapeless Angora” and suddenly I see how Irvine prepared to get inside the head of his female character = by learning loads of technical clothing vocab which he then didn’t know what to do with after so started sprinkling into his novel way too frequently; the realisation is quite funny in real time in a drab sort of way and I’m sorry to have taken it from you because it was probably the highlight of my reading experience.
Basically PORNO taught me how to skim read.
You read but you also don’t.
You skip sentences and half way hope you haven’t missed anything important or randomly beautiful, —you half wonder whether this is what literary theorists would call a ‘male poetics of reading’? A senseless trying to get to the end no matter the cost of meaning? No really I was so desperate to finish this book I didn’t care. I think one day I’ll be bad bitch enough to leave a petty narrative hanging 30 pages from the end—but not yet—not now? Na. I wanna see Irvine officially spunk it. (After watching Aftersun it’s hard not to believe in the transformative power of the end.)
There are of course other ways to read books, officially:
1. a caterpillar poetics of reading (= you read slavishly and eat all the good bits in the hope of becoming a butterfly, foolishly)
2. a topographical poetics of reading (= this is when you choose a book that directly reflects your physical environment. For example you go to Mallorca and only read books set in Mallorca. This is in contradistinction to the usual framing of reading books¹ as escapism. This is book as mirror, magnifying glass or rose-tinted spectacles.)
3. a colourful poetics of reading = this is all about visual aesthetics: ordering books on your bookshelf according to colour and then reading in successive hues. Out of the house it’s all about using a book as an accessory—carrying it (without a bag, always without a bag) to match your outfit and your character.
4. a moral poetics of reading = this is the kind of reading that happens in the wake of listening to Sam Harris’ Waking Up course because there’s a central idea there that we’re always meditating on something, and shaping our brains with it; which creates huge implications for our reading. In this case it’s not just about wasting your time by reading a terrible book, it’s actually a kind of brain damage.
a productive writer’s poetics of reading = this is just about reading books which give you things to say—correction: which make you want to write. This does not always (usually) correlate with enjoying the book.
It’s the next day now. Guess what?
I’m onto the next. I didn’t even finish PORNO. I just said Hey man, let go of the idea of completion. And that was that. It was easy. Yeah—pat my back. Yeah, circles—keep it friendly. I guess I’m finally learning my lesson of cutting it short with guys who don’t deserve my time. And now I’ve got Henry Miller in bed (oops)—until, oh I don’t know, it’s hard? Seeing a book lying there all unfinished like that… and somehow, driven by a weird sense of guilt, I pick it up again because why not just skim-read it till the end? So I do. And that’s when it all comes back! ohhhhhhhhhhh. I did finish it, late last night! It was just so disappointing I couldn’t remember that.
Sorry Irvine. So long.
I’m sure Trainspotting is way better.
My fault for being lured towards the P-word I guess.
This book does not not not go back on my darling little bookshelf.
With the fawning appreciation
of a dead deer,
Tilly
NEXT.