Monk Quixote

When I was younger, I had a ‘rejec­tion song’ — for those times when the bot­tom of a pint pot wasn’t quite dark enough, or there was still an ounce of joy (see pre­vi­ous post) hid­ing meekly in my boot, or under an armpit or some­thing (not so much  ‘ode to joy’ as ‘eau de boi’, but I digress). For most of my ‘lost’ years when I should have been in lec­tures or prac­tis­ing some cor­us­cat­ing wit on my tutors (stu­dents were, and are, sheep, for the most part) it was ‘Is she really going out with him?’ by Joe Jack­son (no, not Michael Jackson’s father, the other Joe Jack­son — the tal­ented one).The genius of this song is that the cho­rus is a gen­uine ‘pint aloft’ cel­e­bra­tion, while the verses are ‘smack the pint pot on the counter’ mis­er­able (and you can do it on or off the beat, depend­ing on how much tequila you’ve drunk). You can even, if the need arises, scrum down and spray the words at your fel­low nean­derthals in a shuf­fling ruck near the quiz machine.

C’est la vie, c’est la guerre.

I guess, look­ing back, I didn’t really have many prob­lems in life, so I decided I should sim­ply con­cen­trate them all on the girl with pur­ple hair not lik­ing me enough to make kissy­face, or at least not lik­ing me so much as she liked other boys (and more mem­o­rably, girls — although tup­pencelick­ing merely added to the ‘ecstacy of the ago­nies’ or what­ever teenage male hor­mones become. Sweat and zits, mostly.).  As the ini­tial jaunty chords of Joe’s mag­num opus blared over the juke­box, I would nar­row my eyes and scowl mean­ing­fully over at the cor­ner where the cool kids sat, and per­form some kind of astral pro­jec­tion, will­ing the lyrics to reveal some kind of epiphany to the girls that my per­son­al­ity (if there was one at the time) sim­ply could not. Mean­while, the girl with the pur­ple hair would make a dis­creet exit and go some­where infi­nitely cooler with her boyfriend. Who, you know, prob­a­bly had a car or some­thing. Or didn’t spend every night get­ting smashed into obliv­ion while lis­ten­ing to ado­les­cent anthems in the SU bar.

Sigh. Music to bring you down. The for­got­ten album of for­get­ting. I had an entire ‘fes­tive top seven’, as I termed it. Seven slices of mis­er­able pie to share with the rest of the bar, all for the princely sum of £1 and a lit­tle pride. What’s that Arthur? Oh yes, same again please.…

Any­way, the point — today at least. My mail today was self-addressed — my first grown-up ‘rejec­tions’. Jobs come and go, house near-purchases can sting a lit­tle, even relationships-gone-wrong lose some of their bite after a while. But today I received my first Rejec­tions (cap­i­tal R) in a long time — from lit­er­ary agents.

I have been expect­ing them — sta­tis­ti­cally I think I should even­tu­ally rack up around 22 (although I only have one more query out in the wild at present).  And I can snatch a crumb of com­fort from the fact that the agent I really want hasn’t rejected it — yet. But it’s com­ing, I sus­pect. And open­ing these let­ters reminded me of cop­ing mech­a­nisms of the past. And how I should really pre­pare a rit­ual song for sit­u­a­tions like this. It’s a lit­tle more for­giv­ing than chocolate.

But what should this song be? What, dear reader, should I greet my ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ form let­ters from lit­er­ary agents with?

I need some­thing angry, yet veined with self-doubt, and per­haps some form of sub­tle rebuke hint­ing at their inevitable recog­ni­tion of my genius. (Yes, a dif­fer­ent form of genius from Joe Jackson’s. Although per­haps I should sim­ply put all I have learnt while sit­ting on bar stools watch­ing purple-haired girls make kissy­face with other pur­ple and non-purple-haired folk into song-based form, and make mil­lions. Mil­lions I tell you. Although now that I think about it, I am the most likely tar­get mar­ket. So I would have to sell the song for a mil­lion pounds. Which entails hav­ing a mil­lion pounds to spend on a song. Which might require sell­ing some books first. It’s com­pli­cated, finan­cially, I guess. Which is why I never had a car to attract purple-haired girls in the first place. Though, I could always afford £1 for the jukebox).

So any­way, if you can think of any suit­able songs, do sug­gest them in the com­ments below — I’m gen­uinely curi­ous (and it might cheer me up a little).…