January 7, 2007
How not to write a novel
Spend seven years continuously generating material until it fills up in four large boxes and you cannot find any part of it in a hurry, so inevitably you begin to write that part again. On reflection you see you’ve written three different novels, none of which have an ending. Like constantly knitting the arms of a jumper, without noticing there’s no back nor front to it.
Alice Flaherty has written an interesting book on a neurologist’s perspective on the creative brain, the urge to write and writers block. Usually I would avoid reading books about writing and just stick to writing and or rereading the classics, but was attracted by the brain ingredients in it. Then upon reading it discovered this notion of hypergraphia. She’ll hopefully write a follow-up which explains how the hypergraphic writer fathoms editing without marrying an editor, which given some of the contents of the current publishing catalogues would hardly set the pulse a-racing.
I’ve noticed it’s popular to remark on the writing process in newspaper articles. Writers often are asked about it. Curious then that no one suggests how not to do it. This would likely be far more use. Also, people are largely interested in the writing process once it’s over, which is a terrible pity. It would be more interesting to read an interview with some harried writer half way through, rather than when they are chipper and have forgotten the misery.
Early on New Year’s day I expressed the sentiment to a charming person beside me at a party, who was ruminating on Chick Lit, that it would be a more noble gesture for certain writers (this extends far beyond just the realm of chick lit) to actually read good books, rather than consider writing books at all. I was promptly told to get off my literary high horse.
Giddy up.
Subconsciously, I may already have heeded my own advice.
December 28, 2006
Predictions of man pushing a bicycle
Trundling up the hill with a couple of loaves at the ready last week, as I was conveniently mustering up curmugeonly thoughts about the nuisance of Christmas, I caught sight of a man I didn’t use to live far from and he greets me with a hearty Merry Christmas. I fall into step with him and his bicycle, which he’s pushing with some gusto. I ask after damage to the trees near him following the recent storm and following a detailed report on the tumble of several large branches he swiftly deviates into mumblings along the lines of man being a whirlwind and being headed for calamity. I offer a few global warming hints, but he’s not talking about global warming he’s on some other plain. “Some people,” he says, ” have had certain experiences and these experiences have prevented them from doing things.” He’s getting pretty cryptic at this point, and much as I am tempted to inquire after the variety of these experiences (would it be borstal or moving statues or messages from the beyond, or eating toast?). Mostly I want to inquire to see if perhaps I might have had one, but I resist because if I stop him in his flow we might get into some moral disagreement and then he won’t answer what I really want to know. So on he continues and it’s riveting, but just as the conspiracy of world tumult is getting going he keeps interrupting it to tell me he believes in reincarnation. Again tempted as I am to refer him to neuro Henry and the surgeons view we will not be returning as frogs I keep my replies limited to appropriate “rights, and is that right, yes indeed.”
He’s very keen to express that even though he knows it’s all coming to a head and the world’s essentially on a collision course to an abrupt end that he’s relaxed about it because he’s known about it for a while and besides he believes in reincarnation and so this is what has to happen.
Finally I can no longer contain myself so I ask quietly: would you have clue about a date when you think this might all be due to happen?
And very clearly and confidently he answers “yes around 2012.” I must say that I admire a conspiracy theory where the practical things like dates and times have been nailed.
It’s time to turn left because he’s back to the cryptic crossword talk again. We bid our goodbyes and as he loops into the traffic he raises his arm in the air and encourages me repeatedly to have “fortitude.”
It rather made my day to know there are folks milling around who pay so much attention to detail. There was something almost architectural about the precision and exactness with which he envisaged the future. Obviously he was a little more woolly on the past.
Fortitude indeed.
December 20, 2006
Where is the Iraqi War Literature?
Damascus, Asharq Al Awsat – With a few exceptions of Iraqi writers and artists, the continuous bloodshed in Iraq has failed to elicit any poetry or prose from the Arab men of letters. While political writers expounded and analyzed, the literary writers and artists did not channel this harrowing Arab tragedy into creativity, and neither did they attempt to engage with it.
http://aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=3&id=7322
(interesting article worth reading.)
I’ve been wondering about this for a long while, from a slightly different perspective, why are there so few fiction writers translated into English? The foremost Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh has one of her seven novels available in English according to Words Without Borders. Surely publishers have a significant role to play in it.
Last year I tried to write a piece about Iraqi writers still living in Iraq, it was difficult to get any newspaper to bite on it and even harder to find writers because of communication problems. (ie. no electricity etc) and because I am a complete neophyte on the topic. Then I intended to turn it into a radio essay, but John McGahern died and his passing bumped the beleagured Iraqi writer and the essay turned to him.
I did talk to a number of exiled writers and academics who all had various takes on it, including in one opinion that there was an avoidance of Arabic literature by publishers (Western). I should dig out what I gathered and upload it to a page. At the time I felt rather out of my depth and couldn’t understand why the New York Times had not commissioned some arts journalist to go on the trail of the Iraqi writer. I remember being convinced that if everyone who marched in a protest actually went out and purchased a translated, small press, novel, as a political gesture, it could kick start some kind of financial injection into Iraqi lit or just translated literature generally that would result in more writers having opportunities to publish. But it would have to be novels that people bought, not tomes with angry titles.
One press who had published a significant novel reviewed favourably in the NY Times admitted they had yet to raise the cash to even pay the translation bill and could barely afford to send out review copies. I realized at that point the scale of what they were up against.
Here’s a link to the Baghdad supplement that Al-Ahram did back in 2003.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/634/bo1.htm
The list of blue titles on the right hand side link to different essays and pieces.
December 18, 2006
Mr Pamuk’s take on his dad’s suitcase — audio
Here’s a radio link to an English translation of Orhan Pamuk’s Turkish essay/speech given in response to his recent Nobel Prize cheque.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/pip/56ujd/?focuswin
Is it my imagination or are there a remarkable number of unpublished dads behind published male writers? I’ve never noticed this trend with women. Or mothers handing over their notebooks. Of course, it could be that dads forget to mention their literary ambitions to their daughters. It’s also highly likely that having a writer for a parent would sincerely put you off ever lifting your pen. It’s not exactly like having a footballer or snooker player for a parent, where you can go a few rounds out by the front hedge or bond over the green felt.
December 17, 2006
Flaubert’s take
“However much you fatten human cattle, giving them straw as high as their bellies, and even gilding their stable, they will remain brutes, no matter what one says. All the advance that one can hope for, is to make the brute a little less wicked. But as for elevating the ideas of the mass, giving it a larger and therefore a less human conception of God, I have my doubts”
There now something to brighten up your Sunday morning. Some of Flaubert’s and George Sand’s correspondence can be found ici:
December 11, 2006
Up the pole with Dickens
This is one you’ll enjoy. Simon Gray describes his dementing Tango dance trying to write a play, then film, the radio play, then play about the life of Dickens:
Bernard Shaw said that writing a play was either easy or impossible. My play wasn’t impossible: I’d been at it too long and spent too much of my best blood on it to allow it to be impossible. I reverted to the old tactic of stealing up on it when it wasn’t looking, and then batter, batter, batter: “Come out you bastard, and fight!” etc. But of course I was nearly 40 years older than the last time I’d attempted it, overweight and short of breath, so I gave that up and tried cheating – by putting what I thought to be my best draft on the computer. From it I extracted drafts galore, draft on draft on draft, sometimes attaching the top half of one to the bottom half of another. This is the great thing about the computer, at least for someone of my generation, with my sort of temperament: it gives you the illusion of work. You go to bed at five in the morning with squinty eyes, a befuddled head and an unnatural but satisfied sense of having cut, copied and pasted yourself to well-earned oblivion.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1969190,00.html
I have to confess I loved the batter, batter, batter idea. It’s the closest description I’ve read to the level of loathing one can muster for one’s pet project that continues to evade as the Christmas’s tick by.
I foolishly keep telling myself that there’s method in the madness of continuing to fight for evasive characters in an evasive novel. Then I read a random novel, that in my humble opinion, might have benefitted from another year or two of ruminating and recommit myself to the task. Batter, batter, batter.
This is especially pertinent for my generation, some of whom appear more concerned about producing a stack of books, than actually taking the time to cultivate something deserving of the readers time and attention. This desperate notion of career instead of work is redolent of these by-pass roads. As my mother always says off them “we go onto it from a boreen and we come off the other end into a boreen”. I sometimes think of the novel (from the pov of the writer trying to write one, not as the reader of one) as a pugnacious, drunken git, who for some perplexing reason no matter how poorly he sings, you cannot give up on him/it.
You can hear the results of Gray’s batter, batter, batter on Radio 4 (www.bbc.co.uk/radio4) on Saturday. I think Little Nell might be the title.
December 8, 2006
The Rainey’s/ Ita Kane
The Rolling Wave have a feature on The Rainey’s — a travelling family who played traditional music around County Galway fifty years ago. They were recorded only on one day in 1956 in Letterfrack. The lovely Ita Kane made a documentary for Radio Connemara, where she traced relatives of the Rainey’s, having been inspired years earlier on hearing the only recording of them.
The piece starts 43.13 into the programme if you want to scroll to it. The recordings of the Rainey’s are particularly atmospheric and unique because you can hear people shuffling around nearby and you feel like you could be sitting at the table with them.
There is some other interesting stuff before it about a man who makes flutes, as I recall.
December 5, 2006
Shostakovich
This is what the brain needs. A blast of Shosto.
Tried giving it some exercise today because it hasn’t had any for a very long time and the brain people claim it likes it. After 4 mins according to the dottish clock, what felt to be at least 19 mins by my knee tendons, being of short stature, struggled to find the stop button on this stepping yoke machine, I managed to physically fall off it. This was followed by a bout of that dizzy, trembling they warn you about in the posters. I discovered an additional pulse in my abdomen and retired. I will repeat the experience only because my brain and cardio pipes do very well with only 7 mins total of it and the alternative will be looking for a new hip on ebay.
Recovery was possible with this piece of music.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/lunchtimeconcerts/pip/4dmbl/
It’s only available for a mere matter of days, so get a blast while you can.
Something up with that link .. it’s expired but here’s another lunchtime blast: Shosto comes in at the end, after the first two.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/lunchtimeconcerts/pip/ohtun/
The first piece in that last link did not agree with my particular neurological picnic.
This is more like it: lovely anecdotes at the beginning of this concert about him being a late starter, football coach and deeply suspicious of the postal service sending postcards to himself to check it worked.
November 30, 2006
O’Yawn moment II: Writers revealing their favourite books this year
O’Yawn and alas, this is the time of year when writers are surveyed on their favourite “books of the year” or some such spiel. The remarkable thing is how many of them liked the same book, so the reader hoping to pick up hot, angsty, insightful titles could leave the paragraphs with the view the only man who ever wrote a book was called Edmund.
There should be a ban therefore on repetition. A phonecall should be placed with the message: sorry find another that’s ones been nabbed.
The truth is it’s more likely some manual on the operation of a fifteenth century plough that truly sent them into orbit but because no one can find it at the library or on Amazon .. maybe they don’t want to fess up.
The library and I maintain a fruitful, but bewildering relationship with each other. They sometimes send me these brisk emails “Sorry we will not be buying this book” or I shake my head and ask if they are certain there’s no one else in this city likely to be interested in this particular book about Hispanic males age 24 and the relationship they enjoyed with their mother on a particular city block in the Lower East Side in 1961.
Still they delighted us this week by acquiring for the small Puffin Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons in French (Les Hirondelles?) from the National library in Quebec. Such is its preciousness and age, we can only read it inside the library. I feel like we are getting a peek at the bones of a famous nun. The only remaining dilemma is my woeful French.
November 29, 2006
Rauschenberg, phobia, and Crimestoppers.
Adrian Searle pays tribute to Rauschenberg in the Guardian:During the 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg produced some of the best and most influential art of the decade. Visiting Rome in 1952 with Cy Twombly, he hung small, totemic sculptures called Personal Fetishes from the trees in the Pincio Gardens. Subsequently, he threw all the work he had made and shown in Italy into the Arno River. “It saved a packing problem,” he said. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1958599,00.html
The argument between or about bloggers vs reviewers is still going on interminably over there. I hope someone is close on patenting a decent arthritis pill that doesn’t burn a hole in the tummy, for the degenerating cartilage in the arms of those typing epistles arguing over whether we should be paid very badly to think about books or not be paid at all. Perhaps these folk need to get some phobias …
Jenny Diski admirably managed to overcome her arachnophobia(http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n23/disk01_.html ) in what must surely be akin to the level of surprise or revelation Bernadette experienced when the Virgin Mary turned up in the rosebush beside her (or however that story goes). It offers hope for my rodent and fear of dying anxieties. A hamster moving in helped. The hamster, a dwarf, has gained weight and is more fluffy golf ball than rodent now. I considered a job as an autopsy attendant, tried looking at autopsy websites, an’ came very close to passing out. I think phobias reside in the frontal lobe, sharing the couch with writer’s block and other such joys.
Some medja are suggesting atonement for Ian McEwan. Forget that, his real calling could lie in forming a partnership with Crimestoppers. Since his last novel suggested he may be persuaded of the power of poetry to change the mind of tempestuous criminals. Am surprised the Met police haven’t recorded him reading poetry and then set up some kind of tape deck to blare it on a loop near notorious London crime spots.