WRITE-ON Part One
LITERATURE & CHANGE
WRITE-ON is an underground literary movement operating out of the East and South East of London, set up by Tasmanian Tadhg Muller and Londoner Sean Preston.
BACKDROP: A GENERATION GREW UP, and moved to adulthood, with their guides somehow lost, their judgment driven as much by rising blood as by reason, their courage and their conviction somehow skewed and lost. In an age of greed where the major powers of capital and reaction perverted policy through acts of vengeance on the innocent, acts of retribution on the weak, and a cycle of misunderstanding and hate, where borders were closed and the desperate children of war – the refugees – were moved on, caged in, or shipped out.
All the while Moloch and Baal, the great bankers, managed to ride the economy, that invisible Beast, for all it was worth until Sir Moloch managed to drag the Beast to the ground – not unlike the famous painting of the abortive retreat of British soldiery from Kabul in1842 (Remnants of an Army, Elizabeth Butler, 1842): an image of a soldier’s wild horse collapsing near dead beneath him. Somehow Sir Moloch, the Banker of Souls, has managed to pull up that metaphorical horse, and ride it, ride it, for all it was worth, once again.
This was the hellish mural against which artists and writers of my generation, now in their late twenties and thirties, formed their perspectives. A period of ultra-conservatism admitting no room for disagreement, no room for questioning. Against this backdrop, our generation failed to voice any critique or to find any alternative perspective as to why the steps we had taken, why the road we had trodden, was wrong.
Of course what followed was a further onslaught of materialism, as the global market was further flooded by gimmicks and toys for infantile adults, mobile phones, iPads, Blackberries, Botox, penis extensions, Brazilians, and, worst of all, MA writing courses and a literary market that is rammed to the hilt with empty money to pay for courses.
The universities, now mere players in Sir Moloch’s game, have been willing to foul themselves and provide the formula, the format, for shallow, sentimental, well-wrapped, commercially acceptable works of dedicated shit, that would be picked up by the pimps of the literary world – the agents and the publishing houses, themselves increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, all believing only in filthy lucre.
This was just one step away from the X-Factor or Australian/British Idol in literary form. And the result: well-glossed, presentable, easy to swallow writing, not really willing to attack, in fact the product of writers as servile as any apparatchik in the old Union of Soviet Writers, writers that feed a hollow society with meaningless pap that fuels the shift towards apathy, indifference, disinterest, and worst of all acceptance – acceptance of what we have become, and what our leaders and out-of-control society will continue to do.
A blood transfusion was required, some literary fire, some anarchy and ill-repute.
WRITE ON.
C0-FOUNDERS
TADHG MULLER – tadhgmuller@yahoo.co.uk
SEAN PRESTON – Editor, Open Pen Magazine