About 1922

Searching for something else, I find this:

In the context of the other papers it's bundles with, I'd say it's from about 2004. I think it's a plan for one of several interations of a book that I'd started writing in about 1991, with the rather presumptuous idea of updating Ulysses and moving it to London. The “one-eyed man” is presumably the equivalent of Joyce's bigoted Cyclops and I guess the fictional pubs and cafés (if that's what they are) are meant to be analogous to the places where Bloom and Dedalus hang out. 

The middle column is packed with references to what I was probably reading around that time. I'd hope that Coupland, Zadie and M Amis are self-explanatory; The Mezzanine is by Nicholson Baker, Mystery Train by Greil Marcus (unless it’s the Jim Jarmusch movie or the Elvis song) and Mammon Inc, which I confess I'd entirely forgotten, by Hwee Hwee Tan. But why are they there? Is Dorian about Oscar Wilde or Will Self or the next-door neighbour from Birds of a Feather? Habbakuk? Jaspberry Ram? And as for the third column, what the hell might “crap food typing qvc” mean? 

The most coherent (or least incoherent) references (“hollow men”; “weialala”; “coffeespoons”) are to TS Eliot and I think I had the idea of weaving these into the cod-Joyce framework on the basis that, well, Ulysses and The Waste Land were both published in 1922, so, er, there's that. Which means that if I hadn't mislaid this scrap amidst a bundle of letters from my bank and cuttings about Morrissey, I might have come up with something that was worth publication this year.

And then I remember that I had the bright idea of inserting myself in the narrative, rather as Martin Amis does in Money. The gag was that I’d be working in a cloakroom (maybe in club “”, almost certainly a nod to the Modern Review’s love-hate relationship with ironic quotation marks) and would filch a peanut-packed chocolate bar from the protagonist’s jacket, enabling me to deploy a riff on the line, “and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker”. Which, apart from being a truly lame joke, is from Prufrock rather than The Waste Land. That said, there does seem to be a reference (“brekkek”) to Finnegans Wake in there, which I haven’t even read (who has?), so maybe I was just chucking around several fistfuls of supposedly cool quotations and hoping that some of them would stick.

Anyway, what pet projects did you think were a good idea at the time, but now you’re deeply thankful they never saw the light of day?

PS: Rather good documentary about The Waste Land, on BBC2 of all places.