Books

New York in the Time of Corona

April 7, 2020 by Joshua Humphreys Leave a Comment

7th April 2020

A sincere and warmest thank you to everyone who chastised or abused me for going for a walk last week. How refreshing it is to be told how precisely to spend the thousand moments of one’s day. And to everyone for calling me selfish and disappointing for putting an April Fool’s Joke into an IG post! May you and I never frequent the same Breathe-easy.

But you all shall be very pleased to know that I am now quite in hiding. Not quarantine. Not self-isolation. Hiding.

My friend’s building last week put out an email banning guests and visitors. I can no longer leave the apartment in which I’m writing this entry, for fear of being seen by the doorman, the super, a neighbour—and recognised, uncovered, accused—as a guest. Of all things to be during a pandemic, fear and unreason have turned being a guest into an offence.

“There is no room for tourists in a world of displaced persons,” said Evelyn Waugh. There appears none either for itinerant writers in a world of coronavirus.

The feeling to me is a familiar one. I have often been a tourist for months on end. In Australia I am subjected to nationalist doubt because I talk not like a bogan and can converse in languages other than English.

It all reminds me of Anaïs, and of The Aeneid upon which some of her story was based:

We wretched Trojans, toss’d on ev’ry shore,
From sea to sea, thy clemency implore…

‘Tossed by innumerable tempests and chased from every shore, at last I am in…’

New York.

“To the wise and good man the whole earth is his fatherland,” said Democritus. All well and good until the apparently globalised world contracts to its selfish fearful self and the writer with the whole earth for a fatherland finds that nowhere at all wishes to be his temporary motherland.

And so I am stuck. Or rather a very patient friend is stuck with me, a friend I’m trying to placate with incessant cleaning and roaring screenshots of my stalker’s inaccurate malice.

Stuck though doesn’t bother me so much. For 4 years my life has been much like your present isolation. Waking in a tiny apartment or hotel room. Working all morning at the desk in that room. Eating lunch there. Working again at the same desk. Going for a run or a walk before watching the sunset. Returning to the apartment or hotel room to eat dinner therein. Working until I can’t think anymore. Watching comedy until I fall asleep.

Literally, these have been the monotonous majority of my days since 2015. Only now I’ve been gifted an extra 2 hours a day in which to read, run The New Cavalier Reading Society, watch comedy.

Anyhow!

Before said guest email, I was daily walking and running around New York and finding it a uniquely fascinating place in a uniquely irrational time—streets emptied by fear, a renowned and adored urbanscape devoid by panic of people, the city that never sleeps snoring through its day.

And on many of those walks and runs I snapped some very unique photos of an entirely empty New York City.

I have a readers-only IG account @joshwritebook, where I’ve just spent the day posting photos & videos of vacant Manhattan streets and videos of rather famous spaces entirely devoid of people.

If you do read my books, and you do support my work as an artist—if you as a reader and patron are making possible the writing of my next book by reading my last—follow @joshwritebook for a great many photos & videos of New York City under coronavirus lockdown!

J O S H W R I T E B L O G

The Stones of Athens Tour

April 4, 2020 by Joshua Humphreys Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading the Greeks and about the Greeks for a decade now, but in the last 3 months I’ve intensified that reading in preparation for October’s Stones of Athens Tour.

Corona has thrown a small measure of doubt on the viability of the tour (Greece is in complete lockdown, but October IS 6 months away) but that hasn’t slowed down the reading. On the contrary, moreso than in times of normality—lockdown, quarantine, isolation, pandemic, covid-19—have accelerated the reading even further.

Nietzsche; Burckhardt, Hamilton; Fox; Homer—The Greeks & Greek Culture; The Classical World; The Greek Way; The Idea of Tragedy; The Iliad; The Preplatonic Philosophers!

At least 6 books open at all times, 2 hours devoted to each throughout alternate days. My reading notes now run to 15,000 words. But still I haven’t formed a full picture of who they were and what they meant, or what they might or should mean to us.

For the spiritual predecessor to Athens—my Stones of Venice Tour—I know that the 3 things which most combined to create Venice’s magnificent 13th century—its first brilliant flowering—were:
· Byzantine suzerainty.
· Geography (Venice is the furthest harbour into Western Europe).
· The 4th Crusade.
All of which gave to Venice a) Greek art, b) Catholicism & prosperity, then c) immediate & unimagined wealth.

So I now spend my days trying to figure out what made Classical Greece.

And while trying to reduce them and their civilisation to intelligibility, reading these Greeks has, in so short a time—and in great time for such intense and maddening isolation—given me a completely new outlook on life.

There’s a strange serenity to every word of The Greeks, an untarnished-ness to them: an optimism enveloped in fatalism, or fatalism enveloped in optimism (I haven’t yet decided which). They have bold calm amid eternity, joy in the face of nothingness, gratitude even for pain. They accept life with its countless miseries and never shrink from hinting—while living more fully than any people since—that it may have been better for us never to have been born.

Just read this from Aeschylus:

“God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. Even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

The Greeks are an enthusiasm that I cannot help sharing with anyone who’s interested, in person or online—so I here include for your reading astonishment a collection of 30 pages from and about The Greeks.

200 quotations from 55 different poets, playwrights, historians, kings,
novelists, psychoanalysts, artists, & adventurers:

[ The Greeks ]

And later in the year, to get to know these Ancient Greeks IN Greece?

The Stones of Athens Tour.

A proper introduction to the history, the art, the architecture, the philosophy (O, the philosophy!), that still makes Ancient Greece the pinnacle of human achievement, and an example to live by, happily.

October 2020. Forging ahead as scheduled.

J O S H W R I T E B L O G

Support Artists Before They’re Forced to Retire

April 1, 2020 by Joshua Humphreys Leave a Comment

Everyone’s doing it tough. And everyone is uncertain, concerned, afraid. To protect entire economies from a virus that kills 1% of those infected, governments have shut down 95% of those entire economies. And so much of the world remains in limbo.

But now more than ever it is vital to support artists. Most artists live hand-to-mouth and months of no commissions, no royalties—no work—is unthinkable, as entirely unliveable, to them.

For many, I suspect, coronavirus will mean the end of their ability to be able to afford to create. Yes, you read that correctly. Most artists do not make money. MOST ARTISTS LOSE MONEY IN ORDER TO CREATE. They certainly do not make excess money. And so they do not save money. Art, and artists, are—as they should be—stubborn bulwarks against the economic totalitarianism ruling the globe. Artists are one of the few forces able to hold out against universal materialism, for they strive to transcend time and filthy lucre.

And now, it is their music that you’re listening to in quarantine, their shows you’re watching through lockdown, their books you’re reading in times of pandemic and isolation.

Personally, I’ve had to cancel or postpone 2 launches because of coronavirus—launches that are the mainstay of my ability to continue working as an artist. The audiobook of Exquisite Hours was to be launched through April. My new novel was to be released in June. The former had to be called off; the latter now looks very unlikely.

Having to return home then surviving through an economic depression, would I imagine be the end of many an artist’s career. Fortunately I don’t have to imagine of my own: I’d be on my brother’s couch with no access even to governmental relief. It would actually end mine. Coronavirus is the closest that Josh Write Book has ever been to ending. No more Joshua Humphreys author. It is, genuinely, right now, almost over.

Now more than ever is the time to support artists—of which I am, in my own humble way, one.

Since embarking upon my literary career the price of one of my books has been set so that one copy equals a meal for its creator. 4 copies covers my rent for the day. This is still the case today. If everyone who reads my captions; if everyone who watches my IG story—if everyone who reads my blog—bought one book, ONE BOOK TODAY, I could literally live and eat for 6 months.

What though are my books like, and are they worth the reading?

I was recently alerted to a blog from a young woman in Scotland who appears to be fond of my books and my writing in general. You can read what she has to say [ here ].

And if you do need books to read during your quarantine, if you have comedy novels to add to your collection, if you believe in supporting the arts and the artists who make them delightful—I here set out, at the age of 34, my corpus, MY BODY OF WORK:

Waxed Exceeding Mighty
My first novel, it tells the story of Adam Athelstan, an innocent young man who grows and sells—and sings to—very rare flowers. Until poor young Adam has his life ruined by everybody around him using their partners to cheat on their partners. Ruined, to the point of being accidentally enslaved as a foreign sex worker then kidnapped and taken to Vietnam. You can own & read Waxed Exceeding Mighty [ here ].

I tout the book as a Woody-Allen-Biblical-Epic-Vietnam-War-novel. And all who read it think it surprisingly enjoyable and even more energetic than…

Exquisite Hours
The book that launched my career. “Anaïs Spencer travels the world lying to men…” In need of little introduction, you may order a copy [here] or, if audiobooks are your thing, I’ve just finished recording Exquisite Hours in my own voice—all 22 chapters—and even included half an hour of outtakes and bloopers. Check the audiobook out on Podbean now!

Grieve
“Hector Grieve is a hellraising soldier of fortune…” Gallivanting on horseback around Cambodia, Hector, is informed that he’s broke and that his beloved father is dying. So he has to return to outer-suburban Melbourne, where he finds himself entirely unemployable, completely out of touch, and infuriatingly bored. In order to win back his high school sweetheart and save his father’s life, Hector soon becomes a modern-day Robin Hood, and plans a bank heist (on horseback) that will see him steal from Australia’s super-rich.

GRIEVE, my grumpiest and my favourite of my novels, can be ordered and enjoyed [ here ].

And in 2018 I released a play! A Shakespearean romcom, called To Save a Forest Virgin. At 4.6/5 on Goodreads, it is there referred to as “a truly marvellous work”. It tells the story of 4 Melburnians who have their love-lives upended by a malevolent and conspiring older brother, who wishes to have them fall in love solely so that he can then break their hearts.
And you can read more of its writing, its story, its lascivious themes [ here ],
or purchase a copy direct from its author [ here ]

But yes.

If everyone who reads my captions; if everyone who watches my IG story—if everyone who reads this blog—bought one book, just one book right now, I could literally live & eat for 6 months.

Support the arts. Support artists. Help to not end a writer’s career. Read a comedy novel.