“You understand, during the past few days (and I am especially displeased with this thought and wish now that I had never given it headroom), I’m finding myself more and more reluctant to face up to the fact that all women’s mouths have at some point played hostess to a man’s… They all have. Every last one. Even the old dears, the sainted grannies, the twisted relicts who lurk like pub parrots in the corner of the lounge - they’ve all done it, God damn it. They’ve all done it, or they will soon… I mean, in ten years, twenty, they’ll all have done it by then, every woman alive. Sisters, mothers, grans: ladies, what are you doing? What have you done?

I’m not shocked, just disappointed. My tone is not angry. My tone is concerned, tender, grieving. Imagine, please, my fat beady face, my trustful frown. I wince and shrug. I lay it all before you. Quite a number of you girls have done that thing to me. Thanks. I thoroughly enjoyed it - I was grateful, touched. Thanks again. No, really. But what are you doing? What have you done?

On the other hand, look what the human mouth has to put up with. I’m trying to see it from your point of view. Unimaginable Third World food-mountains are churned and swirled through that delicate processor - pampas of cattle, fathoms of living sea, horizons of spuds and greens, as well as conveyor belts of Wallys and Blastburgers, vats of flavouring and colouring, plus fags, straws, thermometers, dentists’ drills, doctor’s shears, drugs, tongues, fingers, feeding tubes. Is this any way to treat the mouth, the poor mouth, the human mouth? And so perhaps, after all this, the constant cartoon of pigments, textures, and impacts, a man’s dick doesn’t look that bad.”

AARRGHHH AAAARGHHH ARRGHHHH ugh erk ack… mutter mutter… how do the ‘real’ authors do this?!

It’s OK to start a novel without having a title, and it’s OK to finish the novel without having a title, but you certainly can’t submit that mofo to a publisher without one. And it’s killing me.

You wouldn’t think it’d be that hard, eh? I mean, look at your shelves, people. You can name a book after the main character (Oliver Twist, The English Patient) or after something the main character does (Humboldt’s Gift, The Epic of Gilgamesh) or after a really clever idea (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, The Difference Engine, Catch-22) or after a fantastic turn of phrase (Cry the Beloved Country, Light in August, A Hatful of Sky).
You can name it after big sweeping themes, like ‘War and Peace’ (which should have been named ‘Five Hundred Raving Russians’) or ‘Les Miserables’ (which should have been named ‘Five Hundred Fucked-Up Frenchmen’). Or places, like ‘Watership Down.’ Or what the hell, you can just name it whatever you like and hope people will pick it up anyway, like ‘Naked Lunch.’

You’d think, right, with all this inspiration (and three novels before this one, all with titles), I’d be able to come up with something. But I got nothing. The main character doesn’t even have a name. Oh well… you can get away with a lot these days, especially if you claim to be post-modernist or post-structuralist or something. Maybe I can just name it ‘Untitled,’ like Richard Tull’s novel in Martin Amis’ ‘The Information.’ Yeah… ‘Untitled’…

Irrational fears are eating my brain. Once, a long time ago, someone told me, “No one will ever love you enough.” I thought, Hey, that’s not so bad. But it’s funny how the list of fears gets added to all the time, and they never get more rational. Today, for instance, I found myself worrying that I could quite realistically end up in a situation where I haven’t got a single friend who can look me in the eye when they talk to me. Very worrying.