Faint but pursuing

Some of you may know that in earlyish February I got a call from the director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes, saying I had been awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction of $175,000. I was in Amsterdam in a place whose internet service had been disconnected, but when I managed to read the email setting out the requirements I saw that they included not only attendance at a festival at Yale in September and a few other contributions over the summer but an immediate flurry of activity to prepare for promotion of the prize upon its announcement on April 8.

I was in a very bad way; while I thought I could probably manage the festival, I was simply not able to do some of the other things they required. There was a long, messy series of exchanges – messy partly because of absence of wifi in the apartment, partly because it later seemed (false alarm, but I didn’t know) that my Germany-based cellphone was about to be cut off since close to its data limit – in which I kept explaining what I could not do and the director kept explaining what they absolutely could not do without. I could not sign a contract undertaking to do things I could not do, so after about two weeks I had to decline.

The prizes were to be kept secret until the announcemeent on April 8; I respected their wish for confidentiality, but I did write up this messy business – to my mind, quite false to the original intention of the prizes – after returning to Berlin. On April 8 I posted the long account on my blog and a shorter version in a thread on Twitter.

I’d meant to post the long account on Substack – surely subscribers should have the inside track – but Substack doesn’t allow simple block indents, which I’d used to make a VERY LONG narrative slightly less impenetrable. So I’d put it on my blog (the whole thing here), meaning at least to put a link on Substack. Meanwhile there were a lot of responses, some sympathetic, some indignant on behalf of the ill-used director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes. Was a bit worn out. Kept meaning to post something on Substack and then putting it off, and here we are.

A few days after my blog post and thread I got an email saying I had been awarded an Emergent Ventures grant of $175,000 with no strings attached. My understanding is that Patrick Collison is funding (co-funding?) a new programme under the Emergent Ventures umbrella, New Aesthetics, and this was its first award. Needless to say, this was extraordinarily generous – and really should have pushed me to write something for subscribers to Substack, if only to say that no one should have the slightest qualm about having a free subscription, or, for that matter, about reverting from paid to free. But, as I say, here we are.

There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life.

I should say more, but as some wise person on Twitter once said, procrastination is how you preserve the fantasy of your potential. Let us, for the time being, eschew the fantasy and ORANGES.