Threatend by the Bell Tolls of Time book tour/notes on writing
Unpacking the themes which arose across launches in seven cities
Photo by Lauren Hanrahan
Thanks to all the venues that hosted launches - Gratitude Skateshop, Spit & Sawdust, Lost Art Skateshop, Skate Nottingham, Welcome Skate Store, Clan Skates, Cow Skateshop and Beak Brewery - to Northern Monk for supplying the refreshments in Leeds and Liverpool, and to Josh Sutton AKA Red Fez Books.
Get hold of Threatend by the Bell Tolls of Time here.
After releasing my second book, Threatend by the Bell Tolls of Time, me and Red Fez Josh decided that we might as well celebrate the release by dragging boxes of the things from town to town (even if we never did find any Mad Dog in 7/11, or in fact even a 7/11 without it) and seeing what we could organise with skate shops and otherwise laudable skate-related organisations in those areas. With a tangential theme of ‘how to write about skateboarding’ guiding our talks – at least until the flow of the evening took it in myriad other directions – we ended up with a tangled skein of ideas which were related but eclectic, touching upon semiotics, neo-Marxist critiques of space, Vic & Bob, Roland Barthes, chucking bottles of piss at Margaret Thatcher’s grave, the decline of print media, Napalm Death, Anthony Bourdain, Charles Baudelaire, and whatever other subject was thrown to me in a scattergun fashion decided by not just those in attendance, but how many units of alcohol I’d consumed and what I’d been reading, watching or listening to in the lead up to each event. Somehow, from this mess, there might be something to be gleaned on how to approach the act of writing about skateboarding; God knows it has to mean something, otherwise the universe might be based upon no principles comprehendible to the mind of man and humanity is just a random accident of cosmic proportions, the intergalactic equivalent of a cat climbing in through the kitchen window you left open in an act of absent-mindedness and being sick in your slippers before slipping away again before you’ve even witnessed its presence. But, assuming for the sake of our collective sanity that this isn’t the case, and presuming once again that if you are reading this you’ve occasionally found yourself idly thinking, “I wonder how to approach writing about the physical act of skateboarding without succumbing to cliche or what Werner Herzog sneeringly deems ‘an accountant’s truth’,” you might as well keep reading; if, for no other purpose, than to ward off the sensation of being just one more miscellaneous meat parasite inhabiting a wet rock hurtling through the unfeeling void.
So, how do you write about something that is based so much on sensation, on intangible emotions and thoughts and internal chemical reactions, without sounding trite and without floundering into ‘So-and-so did this here, then we went here, then we did this”? It is the problem of all writing - how to convey what is felt rather than just witnessed? The writer essentially wants to capture something that the reader can relate to. Writing about a shared passion does not necessarily make this easier, bringing as it does a burden of responsibility to do right by your subject, taking you to a strange nexus between phenomenology and semiotics. Such a physical act as skateboarding is a particularly hard thing to discuss in any meaningful way. After spending five years roaming the drizzle-soaked landmass often described satirically as the ‘United Kingdom’, exploring the cultural siren call of car parks, brown belt land and architectural oddities as sites of skateboard pilgrimage, I ended up with a series of notes of which the list in the above paragraph only scratches the iceberg.
Having spent so long sitting in solitude mulling these ideas over, a book tour seemed like the obvious way to bring people together and hear some other thoughts on the subject. After some planning we settled on places residing in various locations featured in the book, which also boasted spaces in which to host launches and Q&As on skateboard writing, from which it was planned would emerge these notes. Then, after speaking to these venues, we pencilled in a loose itinerary which thankfully had enough give in it to withstand multiple date, venue, season and weather changes without coming out the other side too battered and misshapen.
The ‘Threatend by the Bell Tolls of Time’ book tour began in Bristol, at the skate shop and community hub that is Gratitude Skate Shop. Each location for the tour was chosen for its involvement in community projects and Gratitude is the perfect example of this, putting on everything from community BBQs at nearby Dean Lane Skatepark to skate video premieres to classic film screenings. Discussion aptly revolved around the importance of DIY culture in the face of the sometimes overwhelming facelessness of the chain store-heavy high street, in itself being destroyed by the rise of internet shopping, a Milton Friedman-birthed ouroboros which sees ever-decreasing circles of human interaction as contact is reduced to consumerism. Whilst we are all hypocrites in late Capitalism, it is heartening to see shops like Gratitude use the model of supply and demand to create something greater than the sum of its parts; a shop-cum-social space in which the discussions held within are as essential as the hardware bought to keep its customers rolling. Discussion, fittingly, revolved around the importance of DIY culture; of the creativity which skateboarding seems to unlock and whether this is more a result of the act itself unlocking some kind of ‘flow’ state which the user then has easier access to in the rest of their time, or of the wider scene incorporating so many creative elements that thereafter seem more attainable by those coming into skateboarding.
We eventually came around to the importance of external influences; from broader literature to films, music, TV, all those cultural artefacts which display the creative urge which lies within us all. Before the talk, I had bought a photo book by Sergej Vutuc which ably illustrated this point – a Balkan artist working in photography and film whose work is influenced by the DIY ethos of skateboarding and punk music and who eschews the perceived wisdom in these mediums by exposing his film to a variety of external variants in order to alter the outcome. This kickstarted a discussion around ‘the mystique of the mundane’ and how we can use seemingly trivial details of our surroundings to tell broader stories; that abandoned building whose surroundings you can now skate without fear of security giving you the boot, for example, is a symptom of a broader social decline which at another point of the spectrum will affect the price of your skateboard, your rent, and which was closed at the expense of numerous jobs and to the detriment of numerous lives.
The following evening, we head west of the border. Spit & Sawdust Skatepark, from its place on the outskirts of something which the term ‘retail park’ does a disservice to, its actual description being lost somewhere in the no man’s land between American strip mall and J.G. Ballard dystopia, somehow takes the negative energy of its surroundings and creates something wholly positive, involving itself in community projects and social initiatives. An art space and studios offer creative outlets beyond the act of skateboarding itself. The building has hosted skate lessons for refugees, with food either cooked by the café’s chefs or by refugees sharing the food of their home country. They are involved with the Trebanog Project, a social initiative which aims to create an ongoing dialogue about community, place and the usefulness and potential of art in helping people work together. Skateboarding can sometimes feel, from both inside and out, like something tribal, built up of a shared language, of tropes and cultural touchstones; but, in spaces like Spit & Sawdust, we see this transcended.
Back in England, we head north, to Liverpool and to the long running Lost Art Skateshop. The shop is next to New Bird DIY, one of the oldest DIY skateparks in the UK and an example of what can be achieved when grassroots action is not interfered with by the council and can flourish. But first, after a roll at the aforementioned guerrilla build, we take a detour along the docks. The launch happened to coincide with the opening night of an exhibition at Open Eye Gallery of the work of Stephen ‘Kingy’ King, someone long involved in the skate community but who was being celebrated here for his work in a separate field. ‘Firehawks’ is a body of work which explores firesetting behaviour amongst young people in the UK; the experiences and traumas which can trigger this, and the services who are primed to deal with it. It feeds into my later launch – the importance of lived experience informing the work you create, something which as a skateboarder you learn early on. A line from Saul Bellow, in a letter written to Bette Howland, comes to mind;
“Use different emotional states, highs and lows, to your advantage: “One should cook and eat one’s misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness it like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.”
His exhibition also forefronts the urge to capture a thought or concept using something more than just the bare facts. Again, we return to what many may perceive as mundane, but which perhaps a handful of people find meaningful. And, in that meaning, there is demanded of those who would document it a duty of care; it must be approached with respect, and with patience. There is no right or wrong way to surmount this obstacle, only practice, trial and error. Like photography, writing about something is a way of trying to capture its essence, and then to share it with others.
Kingy’s exhibition uses the medium of photography to explore a specific social issue, but all photography aims to make some kind of statement on the social, cultural or political milieu from whence it was birthed; and skateboard writing, whether it means to or not, does the same. To use Roland Barthes’ essay on photography, Camera Lucida, as a guide, the studium of the subject matter – the act of skateboarding, the cultural knowledge many viewers will have of the social factors which has led to the moment described – should ideally be subordinated to the punctum – that artistry of image and framing (both as relevant for writing as they are for photography) which captures the viewer at a subconscious level (“A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me.”)
There is another exhibition on the walls back at Lost Art, featuring the work of another photographer, Skin Phillips, who spent much of the 1990s and 2000s in the US working for first Transworld Skateboard Magazine and then adidas. The work flits between carefully timed photographs of tricks and images of pro skaters hanging out, indulging in other hobbies, killing time on the road; the overall effect, punctum personified. Writers can also use skateboarding as a lens through which to explore the world in which the act itself takes place, offering endless scope in terms of where it can be taken. You basically have a blank canvas – deciding whether to write about stories from the road, metaphysical musings, a list of who injured what, a list of culinary reviews from your week away, the time you ate mushrooms and read the ingredients list on the back of a packet of Space Raiders for three hours; the canvas is intimidatingly blank, the results infinitely rewarding.
Leaving Liverpool the next morning, we head for the Midlands. Nottingham was not on my original list of book tour locations, with Forty Two Skateshop sadly having closed its doors earlier that year, but the crew at Skate Nottingham had asked me and Josh to give a talk on skateboard-centric writing as part of their third ‘Skateboard in the City’ event. This event, in conjunction with Nottingham council, saw events take place at various skateparks in the city, temporary skateable obstacles installed in the centre, and panel talks on various subjects related to both the act of, and culture around, skateboarding, take place in The People’s Hall – at one point in the 19th century used as a ‘working-man’s hall’, and reopened so recently that the space still had no bathrooms or heating. Still, regardless of discomfort (and with the help of the nearest cafe, whom I believe probably regretted their largesse by the weekend’s end), it was incredible to see such a historically important space being used for public projects again.
It was also inspiring to see how perceptions of skateboarding have changed in the city, with the hard work of Skate Nottingham seeing the council swing from a complete city centre ban to actively supporting the sort of event which sees skateboarders descend from all over the country, with a smattering of those from further afield in attendance, to attend an event loosely themed around how skateboarding can benefit the urban milieu. I speak to woman who says she hopes the book will get her partner into reading more, and I think about what an incredible tool skateboarding is for opening your eyes to the arts; from childhood friends who have become videographers after borrowing their dad’s VX, to finding out about all sorts of music from skate videos, to hunting down innumerable films, TV shows and books after being given the heads up from an article in a skate mag. With regards to the latter, I think about the sad race to the bottom that publishing companies indulged in to chase clickbait, and how the silver lining of the death of the magazine industry was that it meant that magazines became passion projects; went underground, expanded in different, abstract directions, started creating carefully crafted articles rather than just being trapped in the ‘listicle’ circle of hell. Drawing from other mediums is something guaranteed to pique my interest when it comes to skateboard journalism. In Sidewalk Magazine’s heyday, Ben Powell sneaking in 90s and 2000s comedy references was way more interesting than the hundredth article I had read that week with someone talking about how they like going on trips with the homies or ‘hanging out’ in their free time. It is why I’m drawn to Vague editor Guy Jones’ love of The Viz, and how that has affected his work, and why Christian N. Kerr’s guest blog for Simple Magic, which used Yeats’ The Second Coming to cast a critical eye over skateboarding’s industry and culture, was quietly the most interesting piece of skateboard writing released last year. And, with the falcon seemingly as deaf to the falconer’s calls as it has been in some time, it is heartening to see so many people in one place, and a place which has a history of public discourse and community building at that, to share ideas and discuss future projects.
In fact, if this was meant to be more than just a summary of my trip and the themes arising over its course, I’d most likely research a history of the hall, its importance in the community and its subsequent decline and re-emergence, and posit this as a reflection of the recent upswing in skateparks and spots around Nottingham, after a long period where prospects for the city’s scene looked fairly grim. Or perhaps I’d take the curry a bunch of us went for on the Saturday night as the jumping point for a culinary tour a la Anthony Bourdain, before unpicking the discourses around individuality and craftsmanship which run through his writing and using them as a template to examine the sometimes questionable uniformity of modern skatepark design. Because, to belabour a point, you can chuck everything and the kitchen sink at what you’re writing, if you think it’ll work. During the talk we discuss reading widely beyond skate mags – fiction, non fiction, 80s and 90s music mags, they can all throw up interesting ideas for articles and projects. Ben Myers’ essay on ‘You Suffer’, the one second long blast of noise from Napalm Death’s first record, is the best thing I’ve read in a magazine in the last few years.
But, then, I’ve never met anyone else who has read it, because online work is so easily lost in the virtual hubbub. Print media demands a certain level of attention due to its physical presence; a more tactile experience, encompassing more than one of the senses. I only get to reread that Ben Myers article because I have the link saved, and at some point The Quietus may quietly bow out, and the website will sit gathering dust, and my clicks, for a couple of years, and then the domain will be bought and everything on it will disappear; which in some way draws comparison to street spots, in the sense that a city centre redevelopment may be the kick up the arse needed to really make the most of somewhere, that knowledge of a finite lifespan honing your appreciation for something, like me reading and re-reading Myers quoting Proust and Kierkegaard and drawing comparisons to John Cage and Edvard Munch in his discussion of class/cultural snobbery and its impact on the way we see the Midlands metallers. What I am trying to get at was put much more succinctly by Jim Jarmusch, in a feature for Movie Maker Magazine:
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.”
After a short break, we headed to Leeds for a launch at Welcome Skate Shop. Welcome has been active in Leeds for over ten years, hawking skate gear out of various venues before settling in Thornton’s Arcade; one of the covered walkways which run through the centre of the city and always making me consider Walter Benjamin, whose sprawling, unreadable The Arcades Project offers a paean to pre-Hausmann Paris.
“These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need.”
This tension between community and consumerism is a tightrope one which my chosen locations have all navigated with aplomb – as discussed at the start of this article, using their position as a purveyor of goods to create a space in which ideas and actions can take root and flourish. Welcome now operate below Village Books, an independent photo book shop. They raise money for the local women’s football team, do toy drives before Christmas, and organise numerous skateboard-related events around West Yorkshire. Being my former home town, talk turns naturally to skate spots now departed; areas across the city where we spent many hours, building up a relationship with a specific corner of our home, which were bulldozed with no thought for what the space may have meant to the people who used it. Returning to Paris, I think here of Louis Aragon’s words in Paris Peasant:
“Although the life that originally quickened them has drained away, they deserve, nevertheless, to be regarded as the secret repositories of several modern myths: it is only today, when the pickaxe menaces them, that they have at last become the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of damnable pleasures and professions. Places that were incomprehensible yesterday, and that tomorrow will never know.”
It is these tensions, which we navigate unthinkingly in our day to day travels, which can bear fruit in terms of writing inspiration. Following the launch a group of us head for the independent music venue Wharf Chambers, where a number of punk bands are playing. Music venues are in a similar position to skate shops in terms of offering community value on top of their surface level purpose; and this, again, raises questions of financial viability vs community value, the ever-present threat of the developer’s hammer, and the importance of places where formative experiences happen and creativity flourishes.
Sometimes, however, creativity is initiated more by solitude and a lack of stimulus. As I sit on a six hour train to Glasgow a few weeks later, I stare out the window and muse on the importance of using boredom to your advantage. Letting your grey matter simmer for a while, and not intentionally trying to distract yourself from what it does, is one of the most important things I’ve learned during my time putting words to paper or pixels. For that matter, if you’re experiencing some kind of mental block, I highly recommend not taking your phone to the bog; more than one literary masterpiece was probably created mid-shit, without any scrolling distraction. Not to garnish myself with that distinction, but who knows if the seeds for In Search of Lost Time weren’t planted during a particularly lengthy morning outhouse visit after Proust had gorged himself on coffee and madeleines?
Originally meant to take place in Edinburgh, our event moved to Arches DIY Skatepark in Glasgow, in order to talk about DIY spot building and what it can bring to a community, before the weather saw us retreat to Clan Skateshop, one of the longest running skateshops in the UK. Tonight however, it is one which – as the opening time of our launch comes and goes – is worryingly free of people. Here, as with the low turnout in Cardiff, I realise the importance of combining this sort of thing with other local events. Charlie Myatt, who has helped organise the event, tells me that a large event the weekend before probably would have offered plenty of accidental footfall, but it is sadly not the weekend before and so shop owner Jamie Blair takes us for a pint and a curry by way of commiseration.
As Jamie talks us through the area’s history, from 70s skateparks to pubs and restaurants, I think about how these things intermingle to create a very personal, human map. It is these personal and social maps which are being explored ever more closely, as our place at the confluence of capital and technology sees our lives become more deeply depersonalised than they have perhaps ever been. Edward Soja posits in The City and Social Justice that:
“Thinking about space has changed significantly in recent years, from emphasizing flat cartographic notions of space as container or stage of human activity or merely the physical dimensions of fixed form, to an active force shaping human life. A new emphasis on specifically urban spatial causality has emerged to explore the generative effects of urban agglomerations not just on everyday behavior but on such processes as technological innovation, artistic creativity, economic development, social change as well as environmental degradation, social polarization, widening income gaps, international politics, and, more specifically, the production of justice and injustice.”
And we, as skateboarders, are well placed to be in a sense ‘on the ground’ reporters. Jamie discusses the challenge of selling skate literature, positing that perhaps not many skaters read. And I can’t disagree, but why is that? Why are certain people drawn to one activity and not to another, especially when both are so connected in their way of making us pay such close attention to our surroundings, to consider aspects we may otherwise not have done and to reappraise things in a new light?
We examine our surroundings with the obsessive closeness of place poets and psychogeographers, in this sense becoming like Paul Auster’s M.S. Fogg in Moon Palace, commanded by Thomas Effing to describe his surroundings in minute detail;
“A fire hydrant, a taxi cab, a rush of steam pouring up from the pavement—they were deeply familiar to me, and I felt I knew them by heart. But that did not take into account the mutability of those things, the way they changed according to the force and angle of the light, the way their aspect could be altered by what was happening around them: a person walking by, a sudden gust of wind, an odd reflection. Everything is constantly in flux, and though two bricks in a wall might strongly resemble each other, they could never be construed as identical. More to the point, the same brick was never really the same. It was wearing out, imperceptibly crumbling under the effects of the atmosphere, the cold, the heat, the storms that attacked it, and eventually, if one could watch over the course of centuries, it would no longer be there.”
The next day I pay a visit to a DIY skatepark, under a bridge just south of the river. The last time I went it was raining, but dry at the spot. Today the sun is shining, and the spot is soaking wet. You can still hear, however, a barely audible hum, the energy which resides in this concrete, if you listen a certain way. I don’t just mean that as a skateboarder. Two traffic wardens who walk these streets every day can’t give me directions, even from a block and a half away, but while I am there an elderly man taking photos and some nearby builders talk to me about how important they can see the space is for the area. In a run down suburb on the banks of the Clyde, we see grassroots activism take hold. It is these spaces, alongside more accidental receptacles of skateboarding enjoyment, and indeed professionally built skateparks, which my book delves into frequently. Of course, these meanderings are by no means a unique idea based around skateboarding exceptionalism; from Guy Debord to Iain Sinclair, people have been exploring the ruins of modernity for years. Skateboarding does offer, though, a perhaps unique lens through which to view this idea. Whilst Sinclair’s traversal of the M25 is performative, undertaken with the purpose in its entirety of writing about his exploits, thousands of skateboarders are doing what I’ve covered in ‘Threatend’ on a daily basis, with no other motive than to stimulate their creative juices and commune more deeply with the act of skateboarding itself. Back in Leeds, I was interviewed by someone for their undergraduate degree and they asked how much of an influence Guy Debord’s theory of la dérive had been to my work. I’m including my answer in full here to expand upon this idea:
“I can’t claim complete adherence to la dérive – the strict randomness demanded by Debord’s essay is negated by the fact that, even when exploring the city streets, there are normally one or two locations in mind to anchor the day, and the purpose is still fairly set – but reading back through his theory there are very clear connections:
People who “...let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.”
“...it is impossible for there to be more than ten or twelve people without the dérive fragmenting into several simultaneous dérives,” is a statement that should bring a wry smile to the face of anyone who has ever organised a large-scale skate trip.
“The influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives.” Consider a whole day ruined by drizzle, compared to a nice, cold, rejuvenating pint while a shower passes.
So Debord’s work chimed nicely with the thoughts I was putting to paper, but the conceptualisation of the project owes more perhaps to the travel authors of the 1970s, 80s and 90s – Paul Theroux travelling around the UK coastline by train during the Falklands War, or Bruce Chatwin travelling to Patagonia on the strength of a childhood memory of a piece of ‘dinosaur skin’ in his grandparents’ cabinet, or Iain Sinclair walking his tortuous way around the M25. Outliers can be found in W.G. Sebald’s ‘The Rings of Saturn’, in which the narrator’s walking of the Suffolk coastline results in far flung historical and literary musings, and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Hashish in Marseille’, an essay written in 1928 after a hash-fuelled stroll through the port town. These pieces of writing, and many others, helped expand my idea of what travel writing could be. Benjamin especially deserves a mention in so much as he made the connections between Marxist theory and the ‘flâneur’, the city stroller created by Charles Baudelaire, which would later heavily inform Debord and other exponents of psychogeography.”
London, my next destination, is arguably the UK city most fruitful for exploration but also the one in which rent prices make it the least empathetic to community. As a case in point, my original launch destination, Brixton’s Baddest, sadly closed its doors a few months before I could visit. Thankfully London is never short of people wanting to make a positive contribution to the skate (and wider) community, and so I find a similarly inspiring location in the depths of Hackney. Arriving the night before the event, but too tired to manage much more than a glass of wine and about half of the running time of Jaws 2 in my hotel room, I awake refreshed the next day and head for a DIY spot in Homerton. The area is under a bridge and so one of the only dry places to skate, but I am reminded that we are not the only ones in need of shelter when, after ten minutes skating the miniramp, a bleary eyed homeless man pokes his head out from behind the ramp, politely dismisses my apologies, and wanders away. It is a brief interaction, but one which raises a question which is being more and more closely examined by the skate community; how to utilise these spaces for something positive, without making them unusable by those who need them most? In the age of Hypercapitalism, where any potentially subversive activity will be quickly monetised and attempts made to subsume it within the consumerist mass, we must take pains to ensure that we are not weaponised against society’s least fortunate. At Cow Skateshop, my venue for the night, we discuss many previously mentioned subjects, but also the idea of skaters as what Ocean Howell called ‘shock troops of gentrification’. This is not to demonise myself and my peers. I believe that, in some of the aforementioned community activities which I have detailed businesses involving themselves in – a striving for ‘conscious capitalism’, if that isn’t too much of an oxymoron – lies the solution. Cow hook up local rippers with cheap products, organise events, help build skateparks, take trips to other cities to connect with people there and are all round a positive force within London skateboarding.
We leave the sprawl of London and head for Lewes, and my only non-skateboard themed locale of the trip. This is not to say there is no connection, however. Danny, the owner of Beak Brewery, is a skateboarder and friend who has in the past held multiple skate events at his taproom. He is also passionate about literature, and a series of his beers have been canned with their labels featuring extracts of prose and poetry, reminding us of the breadth of the creative urge – from exploring different flavours of beer, to manipulation of the written word, part of the human condition lies in striving to create something different, to play some small part in the conversation which is constantly taking place in the public sphere. As such, it is natural that talk on the evening turns toward the storytelling urge; the need to create a narrative framework being a strange offshoot of human evolution. Close observance to what is going on around us is a theme which quickly emerges, both in searching for skate spots and in searching for stories. When my iPod broke a few years ago and I couldn’t afford a new one, I realised there was a whole world of nonsense being spouted around me that I’d been missing out on. Eavesdropping is fun, free and inspiring. Much as how we think about how a skate spot might be approached, the writer thinks about how people walk, dress and relate to their surroundings, and then how you would put these things to paper. Much as a skate session can be built from the most innocuous corner of a town, prose can be built from the most mundane of observations. I illustrate this with a quote from W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz;
“I remember for instance, that one quiet Sunday morning I was sitting on a bench on the particularly gloomy platform where the boat trains from Harwich came in, watching a man who wore a snow white turban with his shabbat porter’s uniform as he wielded a broom, sweeping up the rubbish scattered on the paving. In doing this job, which in its pointlessness reminded me of the eternal punishments that we are told, said Austerlitz, we must endure after death, the white-turbanned porter, oblivious of all around, performed the same movements over and over again using, instead of a proper dustpan, a cardboard box with one side removed, and nudging it along in front of him with his foot, first up the platform and then down again until he had returned to his point of departure, a low doorway in the builders’ fence reaching up to the second storey of the interior facade of the station.”
At which point I also return to my point of departure, having discussed skateboard literature far and wide and having eventually arrived at the simplest of answers; just sit down and start, and something will occur. To paraphrase Jeff Grosso, “The show’s over, now go out and write.”