Typewriters Bombs Jellyfish - essays by Tom McCarthy

I've intended to read Remainder and C by Tom McCarthy for quite a while now. They are those books that I stroll past in the shop and kick myself saying 'Gads why did I pick up this biography of Dickens when I really want to get stuck into that?' but then proceed to root through all the Stephen King books, trying to figure out if I've missed one out. (For those who are not familiar with the layout of Foyles bookshop by Tottenham Court Road station, Tom McCarthy would be found roughly at the midpoint of the first floor along the back wall. The horror section is to the back right of the room as you carry on round, and they have an excellent King selection - other bookshops are available). 

The blurb on the back of McCarthy's books read like the perfect kind of weird that I long to get my optic nerves sucked into. As it happens, the first of his books I was finally drawn to say 'fuck it' and take to the counter (at Foyles) was Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. I picked it up last week after finally finishing my blessèd/cursèd MA portfolio. The focused nature of my 2017 reading list up to now had left me bloated - rather like someone who had eaten nothing but carbs for two weeks (hi Japan) - I felt desperate for some fresh fruit and vegetables, and found McCarthy's collection to be a joyous, thought-provoking salad.

I'm not sure if McCarthy's essays are picked thematically, or if they just by matter of happy accident seem to have a fair bit of crossover and convergence. I am the sort of person who will never bother to check, and feel much better thinking its a coincidental alignment of thoughts. Subjects covered are fairly diverse: the weather, Tristram Shandy, Gerhard Richter, Kafka, dodgems, Ulysses, Zinedine Zidane, etc. Each essay knocks me back a step. One essay mentions Burgess and his statement 'how do you write after Ulysses?' - but I felt of asking myself something so much more base: why do I take so much of the world at face value, when the world is so much more interesting and beautiful if considered from oblique angles? McCarthy is the sort of person who takes genuine enjoyment from abstract paintings, old photography, calendar dates, the works of Kathy Acker, while others (such as Rachel Cooke's Guardian review of Acker's recent biography) can only sneer. McCarthy writes about being moved almost to tears by weather changes he sees from his flat, and I'm inclined to believe him.

The beauty of Typewriters Bombs Jellyfish is the exuberant energy and enthusiasm McCarthy clearly has for the subjects he writes about. It very much reminds me of Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter, another book which positively energised me to READ MORE. Typewriters feels like the advice of a close friend who wants you to put down everything and read a certain book, or watch a certain film at once! He finds links and themes between diverse subjects that only someone incredibly well read could manage, McCarthy digresses and roams from one subject to another, pulling disparate threads together to make a whole new picture, a new way of seeing things. If nothing else, read his short essay On Dodgem Jockeys. It originally appeared in The Believer magazine, and is a wonderful, poetic angle on something I've taken for granted, and have always left essentially unconsidered. McCarthy writes:

'Each ride is a performance, a ballet whose choreography is made all the more exquisite by the casual way in which it's executed: glissades disguised as off-hand sidesteps between moving vehicles, coupés as distracted shifts of weight from one fort to the other... A quantum field, vertiginous, abyssal, in whose depths these agents of relativity hover, paradoxically enabling movement to proceed along axes and vectors postulated by old, naive laws of physics from which they themselves have long since been exempted.'

I can always mark my enjoyment of a book by where I'm prepared to read it. Toilet? Standing up on a busy bus when I have two bags? Walking down the street, mothers tutting as I barrel into their prams? Typewriters was an ample Twitter replacement for all of the two days it took me to read it. There is a convergence between the head of Zidane and the shirt of Italy's Materazzi that McCarthy describes as 'perhaps the most decisive rite typography has been accorded in our era' and I felt like head butting someone's chest myself with happiness, much like that kid that ate his present of a Maurice Sendak drawing.

Calling the thing a page-turner feels reductive, because my interest was instead in dwelling on the page; soaking up all these thoughts, these weird off-hand observations of time like the impossibility of the present and how this all relates to the body of work collected together as one. I took snatches of time wherever I could to dip back into this book, which is the highest accolade I can afford it, really. McCarthy has not only motivated me to read more of his works, he's also motivated me to read, examine, play, feel everything he's covered in his collection.