Free Gandalph Cohen & The Land at the End of the Working Day by Peter Crowther

“Talk Time”

    Introduction by Ian McDonald

    Listen now. Not a lot of people know this, but in some alternate (and more honest) Earth, Pete Crowther is the man who shot Quentin Tarantino. When archeologists a thousand years up the line excavate the remains of late twentieth century society, they may well conclude that ours was a society that worshipped excrement. Trash, in every manifestation, was sacred. People were defined by what they threw away. The disposable was eternal, and the cultural middens of previous decades were dredged for ‘retro chic’ and ‘ironic cool’. Which is why, in an age when American culture—and that’s Planet earth culture, for good or ill—strip-mines its past and canonizes the ephemeral as ‘camp’, Pete Crowther is the nemesis of the ‘kitsch-cool’ of Quentin Tarantino. Quentin sneers at this stuff; Pete genuinely loves it.
    Listen now. You can hear it in every word on the pages that follow. Pure love for those concrete canyons, those salmonella hotdogs, those step-down bars and cheap hotels. For Pete has seen the true America beneath the neon, the one which defines itself not through cultural ephemera and tiresome jigs of ‘cool’, but by words. For this is how the world is constructed: not by the objects we buy and dispose of, but by the words we speak. People, talking to people, build the world we know and maintain its existence from moment-to-moment. And Pete understands, as do all the true mages, that if ever the Babelogue stops then the world disappears.
    For the true irony is that material things are un-enduring, while words—spoken, heard, blown away in a moment—are eternal. So listen now to the stories we tell ourselves. Nothing deep, nothing profound, no philosophical truths and dazzling insights, certainly nothing cool or ironic, except this: that people, talking to people, keep the world turning.
    That’s what this story—and this bar—is about: words. Words and melancholy.
    There’s comfort in melancholy. Who hasn’t looked at an Edward Hopper painting and imagined themselves at the end of that diner bar, at that table by the window, visible to the world through that sheet of glass and yet utterly private and enclosed? Who hasn?t enjoyed that prospect? For an hour, an evening, maybe a lifetime?
    We’re taught to fear melancholy. In our relentlessly ‘up’ age of creative visualisation and self-help psychobabble, if there’s a single moment of our days when we’re not radiating positivity, then it’s a sign of major personal failure. Let me tell you: melancholy matters. It’s old, it’s a fine vintage. Melancholy allows us to savour the small joys.
    The Land at the End of the Working Day is a place of beautiful melancholy and small joys. It’s that great New York bar where everyone knows your name. Of course it’s downstairs. People wear hats. There’s beer by the pitcher and martinis so dry on the vermouth they’re homeopathic. There’s soft jazz on the pa system and in the corner Tom Waits is practising scales.
    As writers we vainly imagine our words drive the world. We’re not far from the truth, but it’s not the recorded, imprisoned word on a page. It’s the ephemeral word, the spoken word. Words blowing from life to life; our conversations, our jokes, our witticisms and observations, all of them here for a moment, then gone. Can you remember that crack you made yesterday, that great one-liner than came out of nowhere, that simile, that sweet riposte? They’re gone. You throw them into the wind and they blow away. Conversation is perhaps the keenest of small joys. It is much more like a life than a book is. Conversation is one of the things that the Land at the End of the Working Day is about. The truth is another. And those small joys, those tiny moments of communion with another, must be savoured because they are so short and, like spoken words, they blow away.
    This is an urban fantasy. Let me explain that a little. In this time when