Matthew Hurst

Abandoned: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt 📚 There’s something good there, but it’s very well hidden. I lost patience with looking for it. #bookstodon #booksky

I say ‘thing’ because it’s a serial, and yet… more than just a bunch of chapters delivered to a schedule. There’ll be collateral, or assets, or whatever we want to call them, but they’re also very much part of the story and not random bits of ‘worldbuilding’. If I was the sort of person who used the term ‘leaning in’, I’d say it was leaning in to Substack’s very soul.

I’ll be uploading some bit of things to set it up between now and November, and more as I go along.

Sign up here at fupperynewsletter.substack.com (all free, natch), and check out my existing writing on stubsackfiction.substack,com

I was a semi-pro jazz musician in my teens. I gigged at least one night a week in a swing big band, and we were deeply uncool. Four saxes, trumpets, trombones, piano, playing Glen Miller, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington to old people in village halls and community centres round Norfolk. We wore the coloured blazers swing bands used to wear. In public. On stage.

We were not cool.

But we did get paid.

Cool via the medium of jazz would’ve been possible in the 1980s because pop producers had half-rediscovered jazz. They had sanded down any edginess until it could be slotted into a CD tray. Bryan Ferry, Sade and ABC picked up on the visuals and the outfits which looked good in shallow depth of field on MTV.

We band nerds knew about real jazz, and real British jazzmen, like Humphrey Lyttelton. He had last been even slightly cool in the 1950s, but even then he was trying to revive the New Orleans jazz from 1920s. Former Royal Guardsman and Eton schoolboy — read, extremely posh — and then a Soho-based miscreant and cartoonist, Lyttelton played jazz when jazz was about as respectable as grind. In the 1980s He was still playing, but respectably, in provincial theatres and for the Queen at Royal Variety Performances. He had a jazz show on BBC Radio Two, the most risible of radio stations. I listened to it religiously.

I learned to differentiate Bix from Louis, Coleman from Young and I sneered down on the pop imposters from the heights of nerdery, smirking at the deep bodied guitars, the lack of improvisation, the simplistic harmonies, and the failure to swing. They couldn’t fool me or the other nerds. I preferred my regular cycle of vinyl LPs from the local record library.

I had a tiny record collection of my own, bought with money from the gigs from the weird tiny jazz record shop a couple of miles away. It was nowhere near any other shops and I must have been the only customer under 50 but it felt safe. As one living anachronism, it was comforting to find another one so near.

I bought records on the basis of what was said about them in a book I’d stolen from the school library: The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History by James Lincoln Collier. I had no real idea what I was buying till I got it home. It mostly turned out to be junk, because that was all I could afford, but occasionally I accidentally picked up a classic like the Miles Davies and Tadd Dameron in live in Paris in 1949.

I listened to them repeatedly as I pretended to revise for my O levels. They were scratched and battered and sounded terrible through my stereo, which had a blown speaker cone and the music blotted out the sound of arguing parents downstairs.

We nerds also played in our school wind bands (I also played trombone, astonishingly badly, but they needed trombone players, so they never chucked me out) and then came out on Saturday mornings to the back room of a pub, dragging at least one parent, to rehearse music from 40 years ago, because to us this was more fun. At fourteen, we could sight read read pretty complicated music. We discussed Miles Davies jazz at breaks. We were mostly teenagers, though with the odd old amateur jazzer around too, although these were more local teachers and office staff who liked jazz. They weren’t in any way, actual jazz musicians.

I played guitar, avoiding the limelight by sitting in the general environment of the piano and bass, and almost never taking a solo. Guitar in a swing band is about keeping a tight rhythm going, locking in with the drums and bass, pushing the horns along and keep it swinging. Freddie Green, Count Basie’s guitarist was the man for this. I had no time for Hendrix, Jimmy Page, or Slash. I pointed out that French gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt was clearly more rock’n’roll than any of them, still playing scorching solos despite having two fingers burnt into paralysis when he saved his guitar from his burning caravan.

My own guitar was bought secondhand through the newspaper classifieds. Cello-topped semi-acoustics looked cool enough for the New Romantics, but that also made them too expensive so I had an Ibanez Roadster. Black, stratocaster shaped, no pick guard, but with the pickup selector in the bridge position, it played and sounded pretty good even though it too was an anachronism.

I learned chords from the Mickey Baker Guitar Method, which was the jazz equivalent of Bert Weedon’s book. So much nerdy theory, so many chord substitutions, so many chords with long names, and so many licks to learn. I’d sooth myself to sleep thinking of workable chord inversions.

I didn’t use them though. Even I couldn’t really hear the difference when I played a minor seventh and a minor seventh/ninth, so I knew nobody else was going to. All anyone wanted was that steady chug-chug-chug-chug downward strum, relentless, just a tiny tiny bit ahead of the beat, to push things forward, like Django and Freddie. Plus, I knew that there was a good chance the weirder notes in those chords might clash with what the saxes and brass were doing. Most nerdily of all, I knew those weird chords didn’t pop up in jazz till ten years after the stuff we were playing, when bop pushed swing off the cramped brownstone stages of New York. I knew this because of The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History by James Lincoln Collier, which I had largely memorised. It would be musically and historically wrong to play those chords.

I’d built my own guitar amp. I made the cab from plywood, three feet square and a foot deep, painted it sky blue and cut four holes for the four as-new Celestion speakers I’d found in the classified ads in the back of the paper. I made the front grill from plastic garden fence which rattled if you turned it up much. But the head was a Vox AC50 and since we never played Shea Stadium, the volume never needed to over three or four. Regardless, every gig, it got crammed in the back of my father’s car, and lugged up steps, through cramped doorways, onto dusty unglamorous stages, and I set up like a Marshall stack, and I plugged my guitar through it.

After one of the gigs, the bandleader (a dimension nerdier than me, and a year younger, but somehow with the ability to run a swing band) announced that Humphrey Lyttelton was going to be playing at the local theatre, and we’d be supporting him. He had some mystical ability to blag things like this.

Although - ‘supporting’ might be an exaggeration. The big band had a six piece small band which did the lesser gigs - sax, trumpet, trombone, drums, guitar, bass. Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw and the others had done this too. This small band would be playing in the foyer before, after and during the intermission. But still. It was kind of with him, anyway.

At this point, there should really be the musical equivalent of a training montage. Jazzers call it ‘woodshedding’: going into the woodshed and practising till you bleed. It’s what Miles Davies did after he got rejected from bands the first time round. But we were actually pretty together already, since we played a lot. So we just rolled up and played. And watched Humph from the back of the theatre, feeling like peers and musicians, the coming generation listening to their idols. Next in line.

We played, and we played okay, and got applause, and eventually, Humph came over and had a chat, and was gracious and charming and signed the LPs we’d all bought. Mine says ‘a fine little band’.

It’s not the coolest of stories, I admit. But then, we weren’t the coolest of people.

Genuine question for indie authors as I’m thinking about an ‘author’s newsletter’. Not to be rude, but it would surprise me if anyone gave a fig about my ‘process’. Do you get much traction for posts about how you’ve had a great/terrible/random week’s writing?

Read: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck 📚 East German love affair round end of East Germany, trans. Michael Hoffman, booker winner 2024 Intense and Germanic and pervy. Worth another go at reading when I have the headspace.

Read: Death on the Island by Eliza Reid 📚Christie fanfic, right down to the island location, and Roger Ackroyd shaped red herring. Passed the time and didn’t annoy me, so there’s that.

Read: City of Vengeance by D. V. Bishop 📚Very readable and atmospheric. I kept wanting to return to it despite the central murder mystery being puny and the outcome of the Medici political shenanigans being well known.

I learned by my teens that the sides of stairs don’t squeak. I needed to stay inaudible and invisible to my parents while they screamed at each other in the living room.

Even though it was past bedtime, I knew they could easily turn their venomous, never ending vitriol on me instead of each other, and I needed to hear them to get an early warning. That was why I was creeping down the stairs. And I needed to stay invisible while I got close enough to the plywood doors in their 1960s suburban chalet while I did it.

My parents had been screaming at each since I could remember. Well, almost. There were periods of tense silence, peaking with the glorious happiness of a few hours here and there where there was no tension at all. But ‘assume screaming’ was the safe money option.

There was always the danger, as my bare feet stepped softly down the stairs’ cheap nylon carpet, that the door would burst open and they’d catch me spying on them. Disappearing like Bilbo Baggins would have been ideal but I had no magical ring.

So my Plan B was to divert to the kitchen, pretending I was coming downstairs from the safety of my bedroom to get a snack. The dog had learned a similar trick in reverse — if a human spotted it heading upstairs, it had learned to abort quickly and steer into my father’s office at the bottom of the stairs.

It generally worked. In fact, over a couple of years, I used Plan B enough that I put on a lot of weight, making me even less likely to disappear even though I wanted to more and more.

I hit a downward spiral. I got fatter, I hated myself even more, became more anxious, needed to know what was going on even more, ate more chocolate biscuits, became larger, got more of a sugar hit, ate more chocolate biscuits, got fatter.

On the photos from my 18th birthday, I was puzzled by the why my shirt seemed to take a long way down to reach my jeans. Friends pointed out it had to go over my belly.

Somewhere in my head, I knew I was miserable, and rationally it seemed likely that there was more going on than my mother’s opinion of greed and laziness.

Turns out my intuition was right, because there’s a pretty convincing theory that, sugar addiction aside, trauma can play out by not being able to resist food.

It’s a spin on the Marshmallow Test [link]. You get a young — probably pre school age — child and put them in a room with a marshmallow on the table. Then you leave them, saying you’ll be back later and you’ll bring another marshmallow, which they can have if they’re a well behaved child and don’t eat the one in front of them while they’re alone.

With this paper from 1970 and this paper from 1972 to back it up.

Like anyone under well-designed torture, the subjects almost always break. Fortunately for university research ethics committees, the downside is they get a marshmallow instead of life changing injuries. Eating cupcake is not yet a life-changing injury. The only metric is how long it takes.

And that metric, for the sadists who designed this experiment, measures executive function, and specifically the element of executive function we call self control. The longer you hold back from wolfing the marshmallow, the better you’ll do as an adult.

It’s your adulting number, kind of.

I simplify grotesquely, but broadly speaking, it’s one of the best predictors of success in future life. When the experiment was originally carried out, it looked like self control was innate, or close enough. Maybe it came from intelligence, maybe imagination, but whatever, it was interpreted as a cause, not an effect. Besides, an effect of what, exactly?

For forty years.

Then researchers had another think about it, and upended the cupcake to consider if it might be the effect of something. Like, say the trauma of growing up with parents who saw you as the convenient one-stop destination for their own apocalyptic dysfunction.

How would that work?

Often one of markers of a traumatic environment is unpredictability. Abusers give, and abusers take away, and they do it randomly in order to create their effects (which you could trace back to B F Skinner and his rats, if you wanted, but nobody does because determinism is frowned upon these days).

More on Skinner and his rats here and here.

Plus a video.

Case in point. Once when I was at high school, I forgot I had band practice and got home from school an hour and a half late, bracing myself for my mother’s fury at not telling her. But she didn’t notice. A couple of days later, I got in ten minutes late and got a full on vitriol-bombardment, the kind that only the children of abusers understand.

With good-enough parenting, a child does a thing, and their your parent responds. You draw a conclusion - this was a bad thing, not to be repeated, or a good thing to be done as much as possible.

With the dysfunction outsourcing model of parenting, next time that situation comes up, you carefully avoid doing it — and you get screamed at for not doing it. Or, if it was apparently a good thing the first time, you’re careful to do it again. This time however, it’s a mortal sin and you are damned for all time.

The child can’t draw any inferences about how the world works, and since drawing inferences about the world is one of the main things children spend their time doing, it is most definitely A Thing.

The parent acts like this because to them, the child is just the outsourcing contractor for their own dysfunction. The dysfunction is too intense for the parent to think about anything else, such as the effect on their child.

It helps that people are more malleable when they don’t have a clue what’s going on. When the child is baffled and scared, it’s going to hide and let the parent get on with their dysfunction, which is what the parent wants. So for a parent on the Dark Triad as my mother probably was, it’s win-win.

Meanwhile, the child concludes that the future is entirely beyond prediction, let alone control, so logically, the most rational option becomes to grab what you can, when you can.

Like marshmallows.

Someone might take it off you, randomly. So eat it now. Eat all of them now.

It doesn’t take a genius to extend the principle: eat all chocolate, drink all the beer, pop all the drugs, shag all the strangers, spend all the pay cheque.

Your brain lives in a scarcity market where it’s logical to not wait. Executive function, schmexecutive function.

So back to little me sneaking past the living room door, feet on the non-squeaking sides of the stairs, stressed about being caught. My logical solution - ‘just getting a snack’ was fine in the moment: sugar, dopamine, quelling the cortisol and avoiding getting screamed at.

In the longer term, of course I got fat.

The question, as Marx pointed out, was to change it.

More of the same, it turns out, for me, until a few years ago, and alone and emotionally broken, and with the line from Les Miserables ‘… no one is coming to help you to die’ in my head, I decided I needed to do something different. Anything, pretty much.

So I started Couch to 5k, and I’ve kept it up since, and added a bunch of other sportsing to my life. Planned runs and other sportsing, planned meals, planned work stuff.

Weirdly for teenage me, I enjoy the sportsing and the eating healthily that goes with it. I’m terrible at sport and I’ve always liked fruit and veg and the healthy stuff. There are biochemicals going on with this of course, but maybe something else. It feels like I’ve flipped the cupcake. If unpredictability caused the lack of impulse control, then being predictable, routine, and generally boring (compared at least to the random emotional apocalypse of my childhood) makes impulse control easier. I know what’s coming. I have my weeks, days, hours planned. I’m no longer frozen on the stairs waiting for the living room door to fly open and the terrible onslaught to start.

I want one that ‘just works’. I want to be able to work in Linux or Windows in my dualbooting laptop with my data in its own partition, so LibreOffice on Windows and LibreOffice on Linux are accessing the same files. Then I want those files from that partition to sync to the cloud, whether I’m using Linux or Windows.

Not feeding AI, and keeping my stuff private in general would be great, but at this point I’m ready to settle for ‘Just Works’ which seems to be beyond the abilities of any cloud services.

Here’s my experience:

• OneDrive: takes over Windows and doesn’t have proper sync on Linux
• iCloud: no integration with Linux, just a standalone app
• Google: uses weird strings of characters for filenames in Linux to work with them, and this screws up access from other systems. Also, it’s Google.
• @pCloud : in Linux, doesn’t automount, and when it does mount, frequently doubles up. Flakey integration with file managers.
• Filen: flakiness in general and similar mounting problems. Plus the company doesn’t seem the stablest.
• Mega: persistently duplicating files by uploading them from both Linux and Windows, effectively halving my available space and introducing syncing issues. Their support is currently being slow and obtuse.
• Dropbox: horrendously expensive
• Box: no integration with Linux, just a standalone app

I want to use Linux, because it’s a Good Thing, but it seems to be the weak link here. If I didn’t use Linux, then OneDrive, iCloud, Google and Box would be fine. Probably the others too.

And no, not gonna self host or spend ages tweaking bash scripts on Linux. That sounds like even more of a nightmare.

#Linux

It is a dead parrot.

Read: Death on the Island by Eliza Reid 📚 Christie fanfic, right down to the island location, and Roger Ackroyd shaped red herring. Passed the time and didn’t annoy me, so there’s that. #Bookstodon #BookSky #booksky #iamreading

The other thing that’s putting me off Linux at the moment is the flakey cloud services. Theoretically, Ubuntu’s Network package should make it seamless with the big ones like Google but it does weird shit with filenames in practice, and seems inconsistent with offline access. I’ve tried pCloud, Filen and MEGA and they all have some combination of not mounting, not unmounting, duplicating mounts, costing stupid amounts, and seeming a bit flakey as a company.

I just want something I can set up and forget about. I don’t have the time, nerdy fanaticism or patience to mess around with scripts, rsync and rclone, and from what I’ve seen they need regular tending too. For the same reason, I’m not selfhosting.

Whereas on Windows (and Mac, when I used one), OneDrive, Google, iCloud, Box, and MEGA (and many others) Just Work and integrate seamlessly.

Yes I know MS, Google, Apple et al put obstacles in the way of small developers, and open source by its nature is full of plucky fighter for Free As In Speech And Beer - but still. I don’t want to pay a cloud service over the odds and still have to tit about with rsync in the command line to get it to work.

Asda: re your Times Radio advert in which someone identifies herself as a ‘colleague’. Your corporate decision to replace the word ‘employee’ with the less exploitative sounding ‘colleague’ does not make this woman my colleague. I do not work with her. #asda #uk #TimesRadio

Breaking news: a slim young guy on the opposite pavement suddenly stopped, put down the coke bottles he had in each hand, pulled his t shirt up, and watched himself slapping his pale white stomach a few times. Then he replaced the t shirt, picked up the bottles and moved on. #writing

Rewriting is so much easier than the initial writing. Sadly, I can’t rewrite without having writ. #writing #amwriting #writingcommunity

Abandoned: Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck 📚 DNF. East German love affair round end of East Germany, trans. Michael Hoffman, booker winner 2024 Intense and Germanic and pervy. Worth another go at reading when I have the headspace.

Read: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas 📚 Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes Rebecca, and both elements are Good Things. #booksky #BookSky #bookstodon #amreading

Read: Astor by Anderson Cooper 📚 Wearying and padded out with tangential ‘context’. Most bios can be top and tailed: first 2 chapters for the origin story, then the last quarter of the book because there’s actual story. Everything in between is predictable. #booksky #BookSky #bookstodon #amreading

Read: Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel 📚 Recognisably, POTUS goes mad and wants to take over Canada, and surveil everyone. Unrecognisably, the power elite try to stop him rather than saying ‘where’s my share?’. Shonky and dated in some ways but weirdly relevant. #booksky #bookstodon #amreading

Very, very difficult to get my head round the most powerful, richest, and until recently, in many ways the free-est country in the world flip into authoritarian Fascism in a few months. It’s going to change everything in the same way the fall of Communism did.

I only need 100-200g and I’m fine with the standard levels of security. I’m using it for synching mostly documents and photos across devices, and as an offsite backup. Not scraping for AI would be good, but it’s not a dealbreaker. What I definitely need is synching and mounting automatically. I mostly work on Win11 or Linux Mint laptop but being able to get at documents sometimes on my iPad and occasionally on my iPhone would be useful.

Currently, I’m using …

• Google Drive (100g) - works smoothly across Windows and iOS but flakey on Linux. Plus it’s, you know, Google.
• iCloud (50g) - Great on my iOS devices, integrates okay with Win 11, but clunky to the point of useless on Linux.

I also have an old legacy Box account.

I’ve tried pCloud but found it flakey in terms of mounting problems, and slow to update at times. It’s also a bit small and new which worries me when it comes to data security.

I’ve used OneDrive through employers in the past, but it seemed two chunky and corporate for my liking, and at one point it just didn’t have synching between devices. You had to reupload another file. I think they’ve got over that now but still not keen.

Currently giving Mega a trial because it looks to be best integrated across the various OSes.

Anyone have Thoughts?

Read: Ardis a life on water by Timothy Paleczny 📚 I’m a sucker for wartime shenanigans and science, so this was great for me, with spying and marine biology against the backdrop of WW2 Portugal, plus walk on parts for Ian Fleming and Kim Philby. It weaves together a cast of characters as a nuanced way into the humanity and morality of the hard moral choices forced by wartime, More Graham Greene than James Bond, but more charm and warmth than either of them.

Just finished the vomit draft of quick side-project short story that was only going to be a couple of thousand words then back to the main gig. Quick side project is currently 9500 words. Anyhow, put it away for a week then I’ll come back to do some rewriting. #writingcommunity #amwriting

Read: Transcription by Kate Atkinson 📚 Fictionalised version of actual counter-spy operations in England against the Germans in WW2. I read the nonfiction book it’s abased on ages ago, and this is pretty much the same ground, but through the eyes of an invented young spy. Atkinson’s funny and perceptive, as usual, and it’s fun to spot the roman-a-clef elements. There’s definitely a Mitford or two knocking about, for instance. There’s also the obligatory queer-wartime-London plotline too.