TriumphOfTheNow.com – a Manifesto (a Personifesto)

TriumphOfTheNow.com – a Manifesto (a Personifesto)

Subtitle: it’s all about me, for good or bad

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while.

Not so much update the “About & Contact” page on this site but do something a little more direct, a little more dramatic, a little more… “pinned to the homepage indefinitely”…

I’ve been hoping to (and planning to) collate my thoughts on what this blog is (at this point in time), what I am (at this point in time) and what it is I hope to get from continuing to regularly splurge thoughts – at varying degrees of mental digestion – here for anyone to read.

I’ve kinda done it. Yes. I kinda have.

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ONE: WHAT IS TRIUMPH OF THE NOW DOT COM SLASH SCOTT MANLEY HADLEY?

Great question!

This blog began in Spring 2013 with a two-fold intention: the first, and simplest, was for me to have a regular and public writing practice as a warm up to the Masters degree in Creative Writing I began that Autumn.

At that point, the literary work I aspired to create could best be characterised by the following three words: sleaze, metatextuality and aversion.

The aversion was to “norms”, both literary (in terms of form), but also content.

I harboured dreams in my early twenties of being seen as a British Bret Easton Ellis, a “Brit Easton Ellis”, if you will, and wrote accordingly. Eww.

When I began the blog, I was working on a “Catholic cocaine novel” titled White Lines, Black Truffles, a fiction text that in its first draft ran to around 160,000 words (comparable to Dracula lol), though in its “final” form was about half of that.

I say “final” in inverted commas, because the novel was never published, never finalised, never signed off, and ultimately it was abandoned rather than honed to perfection. Maybe one day it will see the light of day. More likely it won’t.

That novel was about decadence and lust, an attempt at dramatising and rendering harmless or immaterial the experiences of moving around glamorous or luxury spaces as someone who grew up elsewhere.

The narrator of that novel, Paul Simmons, was never quite scott manley hadley, yet was someone who shared things with me.

Paul had the kind of childhood I wish that I’d had, and he had the comfort and confidence to exist within a different adulthood while moving forward with his life.

He was able to listen to himself and his own body and accept, acknowledge and work towards the things that he wanted, and in many ways I envied that in him.

Paul Simmons felt shame when he did things he regretted, Paul Simmons partied too much and Paul Simmons stayed in relationships that didn’t work for far too long, yet was able to leave and, eventually, thrive in a London that wasn’t his “by birthright”.

Paul Simmons was an exercise in what I both feared and hoped to be: alone, selfish, self-motivated and able to respond to and work within his own desires. He knew what he wanted and he pursued it, to varying levels of success… The ending of the novel oscillated the most between drafts: though scott manley hadley of their mid-20s was miserable, wasted, broken, this upwards-looking avatar was either gifted joy or damned with failure depending on whether the author felt they deserved punishment or relief, likely based on how many negronis I’d had during that editing session…

Accepting, though, that WLBT wasn’t marketable, fashionable and/or competent enough to be published in full (though several passages did appear in indie lit magazines!), I moved on when I started my Masters degree, and began a second novelistic project, which would take most of my time and attention through until the end of 2014.

This one did get a little more positive attention and some read-throughs from literary agents, but it also never made it onto bound paper (aside from the section submitted as my MA portfolio/dissertation).

It was also much more ambitious, though arguably even more self-involved.

Titled The Body and the Baptist, it purported to be a sexed-up, sleazed-up, hyper-violent Biblical novel, telling the life and death of John the Baptist. Zooming in on the courtesans and torturers of the court of Herod Antipas (a fan of scat play) with the Baptist in custody prior to his beheading, the Baptist became an increasingly extreme version of himself as gaolers drip-fed to him rumours of the escalating career of his former mentee and now rival, Jesus of Nazareth, a person whose divine identity the Baptist [of my novel] denied.

Jesus, the Messiah, was – of course of course of course of course – based almost entirely on scott manley hadley.

With the extreme violence and scat hedonism of Herod Antipas on one side and the extreme piousness and bodily joylessness of the Baptist on the other, Jesus was cast as the sensible moderate, preaching love and responsible sexuality, the joys of bodily and romantic intoxication but with moderation and kindness imbedded in. 

If anything, this second novel displayed a further dissociation from my own understanding of my own miserable life. Yearning towards wisdom, feeling inclined towards extremes or excesses, this novel was meant to function, too, as something that stated a set of beliefs and values, yet packaged in a work of fiction that revelled in the very things – cruelty, selfishness, violence, joyless hedonism, snobbery, classism, bigotry – the novel was supposedly written to preach against.

It seems inevitable, then, that my writing would progress towards something even more self-centred. In the Summer of 2013, while editing the long manuscript of White Lines, Black Truffles and before work on The Body and the Baptist began, I spent about a month and a half travelling around the Mediterranean, using funds from the same unexpected four figure inheritance that allowed me to do a Masters degree.

That trip was documented in detail, publicly, on this blog, but was accompanied by a private (for now) book length travel journal titled Alone But Not Lonely (a title from a Suede lyric), which I hoped to eventually integrate with the published blog into a picaresque, chaste (though not lustless) piece of travel writing.

A similar thing happened in 2016, when I had (probably?) the most spiritually and physically satisfying month of my life and hiked, mostly along the traditional route of the Camino de Santiago, from Lourdes in the South of France to Santiago de Compostela.

While hiking, I sought to read the entirety of the King James Bible, with the aim of creating a long-form text – titled I Is The Way – that was both travel journal and casual exploration of the Bible as literature.

The Bible is massive and hiking 40 kilometres a day is hard (and also I was very unhappy with the life I had to return to and knew, in my heart and soul that my life was going to get worse when I returned, which it did), so I didn’t get as far through that book as I’d hoped, but the outline, book-length text I wrote during that trip contains some of the rawest, wittiest, but also most upsetting work I’ve ever put onto the page.

One day, I think, this is a project that I will finish and publish, however I’ve never yet (even almost a decade on) been in a position where the pain and misery of my younger self included on those pages hasn’t been too much for me to bear…

On that trip, I concluded that I probably should kill myself.

I was certain that a hopeful future looked unlikely, and that hiking for those 30/35 days was the best my life was ever going to get.

And maybe it was true, and it certainly felt like it for a long time after I returned to London later that Summer (the Summer of Pokémon Go, which had already fizzled out by the time I got back from Spain and tried to join in) and began the darkest period of my life.

I continued blogging and writing in this period, the blog – often intense, often inappropriate, often ignorant and confused – being the iceberg of what my then-self viewed as acceptable to publish.

I was publishing volumes of work in online newspapers and indie lit magazines at that point, and I began making an interview web series, and really did try to make connections and work and work and work through the increasing psychological pain of a deeply unsustainable life. 

The blog kept going.

And, eventually, things reached a point of turn, of change, and slowly – sailing past financial loss of thousands of pounds due to a botched attempt to move onto a houseboat, a loss which later felt good for having both sanitised my bank account and meant that I didn’t end up living on a houseboat – things began to improve.

I left London, hopefully for good, and spent six months teaching English as a foreign language in Barcelona and then three and a bit years working in the events and hospitality sector in Toronto, during which time the world fell apart in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and I, too, floundered.

During those six months in Barcelona and the fractious months before (couch-surfing in London), I began writing poetry in earnest, something I felt comfortable doing after briefly dating someone who produced live poetry shows and found myself exposed to how low the quality of nominally “successful” poetry was. “I could do as well as that,” I thought to myself. And I did, with Bad Boy Poet, my debut poetry collection published by Open Pen in the Autumn of 2018, going on to be ‘Highly Commended’ in the Forward Prizes for Poetry. Lol.

In Barcelona, too, with the relief of no longer being and feeling trapped in an emotionally and economically unsustainable London, I wrote at length, and edited and refined and polished. I wrote the first draft of my later book, hip-hop-o-crit, I worked on many of the pieces to be included, later, in the pleasure of regret, and I worked on the edits of my father, from a distance, the chapbook I published in the year after my poetry collection.

Things were looking up – the views on this blog continued to steadily grow, and though (once I moved to Toronto), the flow of free review copies of indie press books gradually dried up, I kept at it, with the up and down swings of recovering from the deep lows of my twenties, through into the psychological and practical chaos that occurred as a result of the pandemic and the ways in which pretty much every aspect of our lives changed, paused, etc..

And the blog kept on.

And then I returned to the UK, not very happily, and the blog continued, though the only works I’d published since 2021’s hip-hop-o-crit have been self-published “TRUTHER PRESS” humour works, which I’d also written, I think, before I left Canada.

And the blog kept on, even as I have returned to a place I left with the most intentionality I’ve ever, really, done anything in my life, and my time back here (over three years at the time of writing, and it often feels like a humiliation, tbh) has mostly been unproductive, unfulfilling, embarrassing and like a real backwards step, in terms of practicalities.

What I have been able to do, what I have managed to do, though, is develop a performance practice this time, and though (yes) i haven’t been writing properly, I haven’t finished off the travel journals or polished and published the novels, I have been writing and performing increasingly complex and personal comedic works. And, alongside that, the blog continues.

For most of my time back in London, I was writing the blog by using speech-to-text automatic dictation and then editing/refining at a later point, though about six months ago I broke the screen on my phone and (having a particularly tough month financially) chose to forgo fixing it and instead began using a much older handset, where the dictation function doesn’t, well, function.

So since the late Spring of 2025, everything I’ve been publishing here has, once again, been typed from composition to editing by my dull, doughy, fingers. So, perhaps, it’s strange that the posts have got longer and more digressive once again, but it also makes sense that the readership statistics have absolutely shot up.

(I’ve just realised I started this piece with a “PART ONE” heading and I haven’t added a PART TWO yet, but I will – it’s coming).

Triumph of the Now was named, when it began, for my desire to try and live more within the present, to see and reflect and exist, rather than be exclusively stuck, or stuck-feeling.

And that didn’t really happen, and that isn’t happening now.

And though, sure, my life may be emotionally sustainable at this point in time, but I’m working freelance and living (albeit at a distance from the centre that renders it barely so) in one of the most expensive cities in the world, so perhaps not economically sustainable… However, what I keep doing, what I keep doing (because, for me, it’s perhaps the only part of life that works the way it’s meant to) is this blog.

Is scrawling down how I feel about books that I’ve read or, often, how I’ve felt while reading a particular book. 

Sometimes these ideas and confessions and opinions are expressed neatly, sometimes succinctly, sometimes kindly, sometimes ignorantly, sometimes digressively, sometimes with just way too many words to be acceptable, sometimes meanly, sometimes boredly, sometimes boringly, sometimes excitingly, sometimes formally, sometimes chattily, but what I aim for is always, to some extent, a form of sincerity.

And, yes, some of the posts have the title of a book at the top of the webpage but barely mention that book.

Some of the posts express opinions I don’t have any longer, are confessions of youthful ignorance and naïveté persisting perhaps too far into my twenties (arguably beyond), but other than a scathing review of a book by someone who I found out was going to be teaching on a course I’d booked onto, I’ve never (yet!) deleted anything. And, probably, yes, probably I should, because the person I was in 2013 is not the person I am now, in 2025, and that wasn’t the person I was in 2016 or 2018 or 2021 or any other point, either.

I don’t believe personal stasis is aspirational.

I don’t believe a ribald lifetime commitment to ideas or opinions is something one should aspire to, but there are certain ideas and ideals I have increasingly come to value and recognise as consistent across my life, which – even as increasing awareness of global political realities has shaped my reading of and understanding (or misunderstanding) of texts and my own opinions of them and the world – I am now going to explore.

TWO. LIKES AND DISLIKES

I dislike insincerity.

I fundamentally believe that a failure to offer emotional or human engagement with ideas or narratives, on an empathetic and cathartic level, renders a work of prose as functionless, akin to something machine-made and for machines.

I don’t need emotional journeys or developments or change, I just need a human with feelings to be present in a text, however tangentially or partially or implicitly. A text that is ideas without heart is like a body without a soul. Essentially a snake or a slug or a snail: disposable.

I dislike and am ideologically opposed to the current socioeconomic and cultural status quo.

I think that inequality and cruelty and exploitation is rife and normalised at all stratas of the current global economic system, and that only through a revolutionary upheaval of all standardised and ongoing trade and political norms is a route for any kind of meaningful positive and equitable future possible.

Fundamentally, I would describe my politics (if I had to) as anarchistic, believing that any form of institution that operates with top down or centralised control is likely to lead to corruption, especially when we exist in a world where personal enrichment/economic hoarding is not only legal and tolerated, but, bluntly, considered aspirational.

In a world where value and ownership is permitted on a scale far beyond personal use (in a world without property a person would obviously still “possess” the items they use every day for work and play – a spoon, medicine, musical instrument, pens, tools, etc), it is inevitable that selfishness can be exploited.

A person who colludes against the mass should be castigated and, if unwilling to change to positive communitarian behaviours, cast out.

In a world, though, where nothing is hoarded, it would be those who yearn to hoard that would be the uncomfortable outcasts, as opposed to the reverse of that as exists now…

Within that, I support and champion the values of progressive, respectful, kind and generous use of identity and personal senses of self.

There is no better world to be built if the foundations of mutual respect on behalf of difference are not respected – you will not build an anarchistic soviet if you believe movements for economic equity trump those for personal freedoms and abilities to live as wanted.

Barriers created by capitalistic elites to encourage division along lines of race, religion, sex, sexuality, gender, age, education levels, interests, health/physical and psychological differences etc must be ravished before the revolution, as the bodies of groupings if riven by class and race and physical abilities will remain so.

In short, I think that people who do not see the value of respectful language and behaviours towards those considered “beneath” them in the current society will not be able to integrate into a society sans these blunt divisions.

If it is hard for a white man to drop the slang words minoritised groups in their society object to, then how the hell is he going to drop the idea of yearning to own his own home and have a private bank account?

Until everything, pretty much, can be collectivised, nothing can. And if a person can’t perform respect in pursuit of economic realignment, I believe that person isn’t willing to give up the far more numerous privileges that would by necessity be lost without the institutional powers we now labour underneath.

What I’m saying there, millennially (perhaps), is that I fundamentally believe that equitable language and respect is a key and manifest part of fundamental change. If your socialism, if your anarchism, your restorative justice, your wealth redistribution, your anti-capitalism, has no interest in building on patterns of respect for racialised, trans, queer, disabled and other minoritised people[s], then it is built on nothing but personal resentment.

A better world will not be built for all by those who think that the need to have the freedom to joke around “ironically” (or not) with slurs.

How can we trust someone to watch their consumption, their sharing, their community, when they can’t even watch their own mouth?

Identity politics – like all things – have been co-opted by capitalism as a means of marketing, but it is not inherently capitalistic to push for language and opportunities to maximise the comfort and safety of all.

To acknowledge difference is not inherently to emphasise it: the needs and the interests of people differ, and it is only when those interests create meaningful and/or incompatible pain that they should be mistrusted. The world as it stands has sufficient resource[s] to feed, clothe, water and shelter everyone currently living on it. There are not sufficient resources for everyone to live in a palace surrounded by luxury. The inequality is rampant, is baked in. And systemic.

That’s politics.

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Literarily, though, it’s probably easier, here, to bullet point things that I do like:

• I really like non-fictional essays or afterwords that reflect on the process or meaning of a fictional text from the perspective of the writer. E.g. the final chapter of A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven (Karl Ove Knausgaard), the bits in between the stories in Bloodchild and Other Stories (Octavia Butler), the final third of Doris Lessing’s The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. I’ve recently read Richard Flanaghan’s Question 7, which I think probably functions like a version of this for The Narrow Road To The Great North, though I haven’t read that, so maybe it doesn’t.
• I like, and always have, novels (often thinly veiled memoir) about depressed alcoholics careening towards tragedy, e.g. Under The Volcano (Malcolm Lowry), Tender Is The Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald), most of Lowry’s posthumous works… I think it is this thread that leaves me with uncharacteristically immature memories of Infinite Jest, something I’ve never re-read (and likely never will) that I don’t hold in psycho-critical contempt like maybe I should…
• I like clarity and emotional reach.
  I think a dismissal of emotional connections between writers and readers creates distance and sadness and loneliness.
  Reading a text (regardless of length) is permitting a person to hold forth to you (in their own “true” voice or in any kind of fictionalised/fake/dishonest one), and if that person isn’t saying anything of heft, then what’s the point?
  Intelligence, verbosity, a need for polysyllabic so-called precision can often be a tactic to distract from an empty vessel.
  The “right” word for something is not necessarily the “best” one…

& things I don’t like:

• I don’t like writing that functions as akin to a puzzle, whose intended meanings are locked behind verbal dexterity/obfuscation.
  If I wanted to try and eke out a meaning of a phrase, I’d learn how to do cryptic crosswords.
  No.
  No thank you.
  Not for me.
• If jargon or deliberately non-standard language is in use in a text and it isn’t apparent what the meaning is due to context clues, that’s a no for me.
  I’m more than happy to muddle through a text in Spanish with a dictionary or Google Translate to hand, but I’m not doing that for the language I fluently speak.
• Contrary to those above points, I don’t mind writing that makes me feel stupid!
  What I dislike is writing that seems to revel in use of near-opaque language.
  I think intentional “difficulty” is the same as intentional “vagueness” and an absence of clarity, and often speaks to a writer who disregards – or fails to imagine – a reader.
  And that is fine, some writing is (arguably like this blog, I suppose) intended more as a personal activity rather than a communicable one…. Some things are private or personal or, otherwise, not intended to be read, but (again, in my opinion), the difference between a book or something otherwise published in a formal, intentional, way (i.e. in a magazine, a newspaper, etc.) and texts that were not initially written for readers (letters, diaries, journals, Commonplace Books, blogs, email records etc) is that there is an implied additional layer of care, of something having been tweaked and shaped with a reader in mind. Posthumous and unfinished works don’t – and shouldn’t – bear the same scrutiny. In my opinion. If something is asking to be read, it should be expecting to be read…

In the last few years, I’ve also started reading more genre fiction, which was something I snobbishly eschewed for many years (from puberty to early 30s). What I’ve enjoyed here has been, bluntly, vampires and time travel (not together).

Overall, though, what I yearn for is honesty. Is the projection of honesty. Is the implication of honesty.

I want to feel a coherent truth, be that a fictionalised, narrative, one or the truth of a real person baring their soul. Bearing their soul, maybe, too. If a soul is a struggle to bear (to carry), it likely makes for an interesting exploration. 

And that’s what I (tried, at least) to do in the book-length works that I published a few years ago. An attempt to convey, in sometimes excruciating detail, exactly what it is like to live as I have done.

And that’s what the notes and essays and reviews and digressions and asides of this blog are also all trying to do.

Not describe a book to you, not review a piece of literature, sometimes not even to mention it at all.

The books that I read – something that has always been a crutch of mine for longer than I have memory – are mere anchors to tie on my thoughts from that week or day or afternoon…

It’s all, everything on this blog… it’s all about me.

And sometimes, yes, maybe I have accidentally stumbled upon insightful critiques of some texts, sometimes I have gotten bitchier than I meant to, sometimes (often!) I have misinterpreted and misunderstood and frustrated myself and the writers whose work I have written about/around/responded to…

But none of these pieces of writing, or this website itself, are about the name of the book in the post heading: that’s just the book I had in my hand at the time.

The books mark the passage of time.

They don’t matter.

I could re-read the same text a hundred times on a hundred different days in a hundred different places and write something with the same focus every time: because this isn’t a website about books. It isn’t even a website about reading. TriumphOfTheNow.com is a website about scott manley hadley.

And that’s it.

Anything else that’s mentioned, well, it’s just there by mistake…

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And I sometimes do interviews. These are sometimes in exchange for donations to cover the cost of running the website, sometimes are just with people who I think are interesting, though (ideally) are both.

I also sometimes post videos of me performing or singing or chatting or exploring the world. That also won’t stop.

Please post any questions in the comments below and I’ll get back to you asap.