Graffiti 3/3

Locality

A loose trilogy of novels taking place in fictional apparitions of Leicester, UK and Nice, France.

They are about places and the way communities are formed, the way individuals enter new places, build community and observe being and belonging.

They each have a degree of paranoiac experience, which increases in each subsequent book.

None of them have endings that resolve. The characters are left within the spaces.

I wanted to write a couple of posts, exploring a little bit about each of the texts. Or at least the memory of them now.

Graffiti

A city in fragments, in the grips of a synthetic drug, Wrench. Paranoiac fragments relating to depression, suicide, murder, frequent drug use, homelessness.

A Portuguese man named Elvis, works as a car park attendant. He is accused of stealing a bicycle and loses his job. Whilst trying to find the bicycle he meets different people who occupy the city, including a ghost.

This text, like the previous, combined a couple of different ideas or fragments of character.

It also revisited some ideas that had been fairly well along to being something filmed, a collaboration with an incredibly talented friend, that I screwed up. I wasn't good enough and the thing fell apart. It fucked up everything between us. I don't carry around too many regrets, but that one stings. But anyway, that had been an exploration of this city we were both living in and had lots of feelings about. I moved away, and then when I came back I picked up those feelings and the ghosts we'd spoken about. A couple of the characters in Graffiti, directly echo the other thing. They attempt to be in the same world. When we worked on that, we thought we were exploring the psyche of the city.

I was working a job that involved a lot of walking around the streets, picking up the histories, observing what was happening and the different seams of folk that make the place home.

Different agendas and structures of power, control this, shape it and force things.

People get tangled up in the systems and with each other.

The main character, Elvis, is a fragile shell - observer, observed, mostly alone. There isn't a sense of things moving forward. They just happen. He does make decisions, but they don't come to much. They pass.

Like A Moiré and perhaps Monument also, much of what happens translate for me to real people, moments and places. The experience of transforming it into something else, a slim narrative, allows it to press back into the real. My memories of the place are shattered. I'll glimpse people and think first perhaps, of a description that could have been them.

I thought the moment described in Graffiti had passed and that the city was changing more now - but I don't think it has so much. The world is getting harder for almost everyone. We're all more bruised than we were before. There is desperation in the seeking out of community.

https://ghostglyph.itch.io/graffiti

• post to be continued