Time at the Bar

"Last orders!"

Dirty Martinis all round. Tonight they're on the house. 

Many of you will be familiar with this bar and its literary-themed conversations, but for those who've joined us for the venue's final evening, here's a short history of the opening and the closing of The Neon Sapphire.

Thinking needs to stop for writing to begin. Thinking is for editing.

Coffee aids the production of documents, but alcohol arrests thought and turns any old biro into The Red Pen. The state of mind in which my cursive print races itself to the end of every line, and I marvel at the results while working my way through a bottle of Bulleit, is a virtual lounge of cool blue light I prefer to any manifest bar. It's a twenty four-hour licensed venue named The Neon Sapphire, and I've been as likely to be confronted with challenges to my choices here as I was to be congratulated for them by peers. There are no straw men to be set up and knocked aside in a venue such as this, host as it has been to literary Titans. In here you stand your ground when you have evidence for your opinion, or else you shut up and listen with humility to those who know better; you take notes and allow expert testimonies to change you in ways you didn't want, didn't believe you could be, but find that you're happy with when they do.

I discovered this writers' venue and its iridescent signwork only when I decided that it was time to try writing about writing, and learning very quickly that this pursuit becomes easier when you're drinking and writing about writing. @TheNeonSapphire became a neat social media handle because I wanted this phase in my Red-Shoed tango with the Printed Word to involve and be challenged by other people slave to the siren song of the blank page. The pieces I produced during this period (October 2017 to June 2018) took the form of blog posts whose links were offered to the world on Twitter, and the subject of each essay was chosen in no order and by no discipline other than to write about whatever novel, author, point of orthography or grammar, inspiration, or issue with self-publishing and self-promotion fascinated or bothered me at the time.

Sadly, but for the very flattering and very brief exchanges with Glenn Albrecht, Richard King, Eric Idle, and with Margarita Pracatan (sharing our admiration of Clive James), very few of the people who followed me during this period (a maximum of only around 1400 in early 2018, reduced to 870 at the time of writing as my Twitter presence became jaded) chose to engage in agreement or debate with my on-line musings. This was certainly due to my poor judgement since I always hoped that conversation would be instigated on Twitter and then move on to occur in The Neon Sapphire itself, commodiously hosted by Blogger where my essays were presented, rather than via Tweets. My interests, and the literary world they view in awe, are too expansive to be expressed or summarised in 140 characters or less, which of course is the whole point of Twitter, and I suppose which is what appeals to its more committed users.

The project might have kept me interested a little longer if it had received a little more engagement, even if it had been only literary-minded trolls who replied to my posts with the kind of self-righteous rage for which social media allows an outlet. “Chekov's Gun? A libtard leftist like you would've banned it! Fuck off back to the #EULiberalElite! #2ndAmendment!”

And it was just this kind of mindless invective that began to invade and dominate the more thoughtful and respectful debate at The Neon Sapphire. Simplistic prejudice expressed as inviolable, jack-booted “fact” from both ends of the political spectrum wishes only to trample conversation, not nurture or learn from it. Every tweet I read containing the phrase “I'm not racist but...” or “Let that sink in,” or some virture-signalling parable involving a 4-year-old child spouting crystalline emetic judgement, further proved to me that, while it's easy to avoid engagement with this toxic form, it's impossible to ignore it. Despite following people who describe creative pursuits in their Twitter bio, my tweet feed seemed constantly filled with shouty fools whose view of the political world is populated only by either “Nazis!” or “Communists!” I'm sure that these people are an on-line minority as they are in the off-line world, but they certainly seem louder than everyone else, and my cheerfully inebriated discussion with an Australian professor about ecological neologisms suddenly seemed timid, if not irrelevant, when held alongside the capitalised banalities of thugs.

Of course, discussion of this issue would itself have been an appropriate subject for an essay penned at the bar of The Neon Sapphire, but it would have felt like watching the medium begin to eat itself and then choke on the bitterness. No, I prefer to accept the advent of this change in on-line climate as my cue to close the doors of the venue, drink a final Dirty Martini with regulars such as yourself, reflect on the time we've enjoyed holding forth at this very bar, pretentiously summarise the whole period as A Literary Phase, and then preserve the place in the condition of its all-too-brief heyday.

So I have produced a collection called Notes from The Neon Sapphire, (link below) and you won't be surprised when I tell you that it contains every Note from The Neon Sapphire, while our glasses contain inspiration and enthusiasm for whatever we entertain next.

Here's to your very good health. 

"Time at the bar!" 

 M.C. Netley Marsh, August 2020

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08GG2SX3P/