Toby Litt's Blog, page 21
June 27, 2017
Lara Pawson in Conversation about This Is the Place to Be
As part of the Birkbeck Summer lecture series, the wonderful Lara Pawson came along to talk to Birkbeck’s Creative Writing MA students, and to me, about writing and other things.
It was one of the best events we’ve ever hosted. Lara was extremely open and full of insights.
You can listen to the podcast here:
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The photo of Lara came from this website https://thecontemporarysmallpress.com/tag/lara-pawson/
Tagged: Birkbeck, Lara Pawson, podcast, This Is the Place to Be
June 26, 2017
Writing Well and Writing to Get Well 4 Podcast
What can writers and teachers of Creative Writing learn from psychiatry, neuroscience, and other medical disciplines about the links between creativity and mental illness?
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Lily Dunn, Nathan Filer and Agata Vitale (Photo by Oscar Windsor-Smith)
The podcast from the fourth Friday evening event, which took place on Friday 19th May 2017, can be listened to here:
Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall, and Agata Vitale, Senior Lecturer in Abnormal/Clinical Psychology at Bath Spa University, discuss Creative Writing and Mental Health with Lily Dunn.
Nathan Filer originally trained and worked as a mental health nurse, then later as a mental health researcher at the University of Bristol. His debut novel The Shock of the Fall – which describes the life of a young man with schizophrenia – was published in 2013 to wide critical acclaim. It won The Costa Book of the Year, The Betty Trask Prize, The National Book Award for Popular Fiction and The Writers’ Guild Award for Best First Novel.
A critic of government cuts to NHS mental health care services, in 2014 Filer was named a Nursing Times Nursing Leader for influencing the way the public thinks about mental illness and mental health nursing. He lives in Bristol with his wife and two children, and lectures in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
Agata Vitale is a Senior Lecturer in Abnormal/ Clinical Psychology at Bath Spa University. Agata’s research interest focuses on assessing the quality of community mental health care from both the service users’ and the health professionals’ perspective.
She is also interested in developing community based interventions to promote the integration of asylum seekers and refugees in England. Agata is currently involved in developing a creative writing intervention for refugees based in Bristol. The aims of this intervention are to promote refugees’ well-being by strengthening their self-esteem, self-development and social relationships, and to support their longer-term integration by encouraging their written and spoken English, acculturation and ability to contribute to the community.
These events are funded by the Birkbeck/Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF).
Tagged: Creative Writing, mental health
May 23, 2017
Writing Well and Writing to Get Well 3 Podcast
What can writers and teachers of Creative Writing learn from psychiatry, neuroscience, and other medical disciplines about the links between creativity and mental illness?
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Toby Litt, Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan and Professor Rodrigo A Bressan (Photo by Oscar Windsor-Smith)
The podcast from the third Friday evening event, which took place on Friday 12th May 2017, can be listened to here:
Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan and Professor Rodrigo A. Bressan discuss Creative Writing and Mental Health with Toby Litt
Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan has been a consultant in neurology since 2004, first working at The Royal London Hospital and now at The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. In that role she has developed an expertise in working with patients with psychogenic disorders alongside her work with those suffering with physical diseases such as epilepsy. Suzanne’s book about psychosomatic illness, It’s All in Your Head, won the Wellcome Book Prize in 2016. Her second book Brainstorm is due to be published in January 2018. She was awarded an MA in Creative Writing by Birkbeck University in 2016
Prof. Rodrigo A. Bressan is professor of psychiatry at the Federal University of Sao Paulo and visiting professor at the Institute of Psychiatry (King’s College London). After his PhD at KCL (2003) he went back to Brazil and lead an integrative neuroscience lab focused in early stages of mental disorders such as schizophrenia. He has written that, “Apart from hard science, I have been working with Jorge Assis who has lived experience of schizophrenia in lecturing, communicating psychiatry and writing books such as ‘Between Reason and Illusion – demystifying madness’. People learn much more from somebody with a mental disorders than from a professor. We have recently founded ‘Y-Mind’, a Brazilian foundation focused in youth mental health. I am currently spending a sabbatical year in London with the family studying adolescence in academia and at home.”
Toby Litt is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. A novelist and short-story writer, he is best-known for writing his books – from Adventures in Capitalism to (so far) Life-Like – in alphabetical order; he is currently working on the non-alphabetical, and non-fictional, Wrestliana. He is a Granta Best of Young British Novelist. He writes this blog.
Funded by the Birkbeck/Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund
Tagged: Creative Writing, mental health, psychiatry, Suzanne O'Sullivan, Toby Litt
Writing Well and Writing to Get Well 2 Podcast
What can writers and teachers of Creative Writing learn from psychiatry, neuroscience, and other medical disciplines about the links between creativity and mental illness?
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Lily Dunn, John O’Donoghue and Dr Lisa Conlan (Photo by Oscar Windsor-Smith)
The podcast from the second Friday evening event, which took place on Friday 5th May 2017, can be listened to here:
(Just audio, not video.)
Here’s a little information about it:
Dr Lisa Conlan and John O’Donoghue discuss Creative Writing and Mental Health with Lily Dunn
Lisa Conlan is a Consultant General Adult Psychiatrist with the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. She has an MSc in Philosophy of Mental Disorder from King’s College London and sits on the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Philosophy of Psychiatry Special Interest Group Executive Committee. Lisa started the psychiatry book group Reading the Mind. She also helped start Art of Psychiatry, a group at The Maudsley Hospital which hosts events exploring the the connection between psychiatry and the creative arts.
John O’Donoghue is the author of Brunch Poems (Waterloo Press, 2009) and Fools & Mad (Waterloo Press, 2014). His memoir Sectioned: A Life Interrupted (John Murray, 2009) was awarded Mind Book of the Year 2010. He lives in Brighton.
Lily Dunn is a published author of fiction and creative nonfiction, teacher and PhD student at Birkbeck. She has been published by Portobello Books and Granta. Her critical work is concerned with questions around the perceived tension between writing for self-expression and literary merit. She is co-founder of London Lit Lab, and teaches creative writing, both within HE and to marginalised groups. She has recently been awarded an Arts Council grant to continue teaching a group of people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, through St Mungo’s.
Funded by the Birkbeck/Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund
Tagged: Birkbeck, Creative Writing, Lily Dunn, mental health
May 16, 2017
Writing Well and Writing to Get Well 1 Podcast
What can writers and teachers of Creative Writing learn from psychiatry, neuroscience, and other medical disciplines about the links between creativity and mental illness?
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Richard Hamblyn, Dr Sarah Jackson and Robert Power (Photo by Oscar Windsor-Smith
The podcast from the first Friday evening Writing Well and Writing to Get Well event, which took place at Birkbeck on Friday 28th April 2017, can be listened to here:
(Just audio, not video.)
Here’s a little information about it:
Dr Sarah Jackson and Robert Power discuss Creative Writing and Mental Health with Richard Hamblyn
Sarah Jackson is an award-winning poet, short-story writer and critic from Nottingham. She is the author of a poetry collection, Pelt (Bloodaxe, 2012), which won the Seamus Heaney Award and was the readers’ nomination for the Guardian First Book Award, and Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Sarah has read her poetry, fiction and criticism throughout the UK and abroad, including at the British Library, the Royal Albert Hall and Cambridge and New York Universities. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, where she is currently writing a book about the telephone.
Robert Power is a geneticist who works to identify the genetic differences that predispose people to illnesses. He has worked on a wide range of health issues, from infectious diseases to psychiatric disorders. Of particular interest is his work on the genetic relationship between creative professions and psychiatric disorders. This Icelandic study showed that individuals with careers as writers, musicians, and painters had a higher genetic risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder than that of the general population. This suggested the same genes might be involved in creativity and these illnesses. He is currently a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at the Africa Health Research Institute, University College London, and a Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.
Richard Hamblyn is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck. An environmental writer and historian, his books include The Invention of Clouds, which won the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Terra: Tales of the Earth (2009), a study of natural disasters; and The Art of Science (2011), an anthology of readable science writing from the Babylonians to the Higgs boson. His most recent book, Tsunami: Nature and Culture (2014), is a cultural history of killer waves from the legend of Atlantis to the Fukushima disaster of 2011.
Funded by the Birkbeck/Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund
Tagged: Birkbeck, Creative Writing, mental health, Richard Hamblyn
May 15, 2017
High-Rise, Ballard and the 1970s – An Exchange with Adam Roberts
I wrote an article titled ‘Sourcedness’ on Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of High-Rise for Critical Quarterly. It’s here. (It’s also here, until Critical Quarterly say no.)
A Facebook post by Adam Roberts on 20th April 2017 seemed to be thinking along the same lines:
The Alec Guinness/BBC “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”, set in the 1970s, *looks* a lot less “1970s” than the more recent film version, also set in the 1970s, because the BBC version *was actually made* in the 1970s, and in the 1970s the 1970s really didn’t look very 1970s, where the 2011 filmmakers went out of their way to make their movie look 1970s.
Jameson’s “Postmodernism” book has something relevant to this.
So I suggested Adam Roberts read what I’d said in CQ:
SOURCEDNESS
The writer-director team Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley is among the most interesting and ambitious working in British cinema, and – exactly because of this – they deserve the kind of attention that Cameron Crowe has Lester Bangs describe in Almost Famous as ‘honest,… and unmerciful.’
I loved High-Rise, but now I’m going to spend a couple of thousand words unmercifully kicking the shit out of it. (Because, in a way that’s entirely necessary for anyone attempting to adapt Ballard, it is full of shit.)
Let’s start with the coffee table.
It sits in Charlotte Melville (Sienna Miller)’s apartment, on top of a zebra-skin rug, surrounded on three sides by low sofas with white and orange throws. It is square in shape, when seen from above, and has polished metal legs, also square if transected, and a smoked glass top.
At one point, during the first of the many party scenes in High-Rise, Wilder (Luke Evans) slides beneath the table and leers up at Charlotte Melville through the brown glass. Meanwhile Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) pretends to chat awkwardly to Wilder’s wife, Helen (Elisabeth Moss), about how he has just moved into the twenty-fifth floor. Different seduction methods, stiff and lithe, vertical and horizontal, are contrasted.
The coffee table was designed by Willy Rizzo (1928-2013) – I know this because every time I go to visit my father, I put my feet up on almost the exact same model. Willy Rizzo was an Italian photographer who switched over to a vastly successful career in furniture design, then switched back again. My father used to be an antique dealer, which is when he acquired the Willy Rizzo coffee table. He has told me numerous times that it is a very beautiful, desirable object and that, when he’s gone, I should be careful not to sell it cheap.
I agree with my father, and I am sure you would agree with my father. The coffee table (not the only Willy Rizzo table in High-Rise) is a beautiful, desirable object; if one were an interior decorator with a time machine, one would almost certainly go back to 1970 and buy one right off the factory floor.
Of course, we don’t have such beings as interior decorators with time machines. What we have instead are historical films with Production Designers.
The Production Designer on High-Rise was Mark Tildesley, whose previous credits include 24 Hour Party People, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, One Day and The Fifth Estate. (Also very involved, I assume, were Set Decorator Paki Smith and Property Master David Carson.) Their collective work on High-Rise is obtrusively good. So much so that it becomes a kind of meta-film – one that I’d like to interrogate (kick).
The main way in which I can tell a film sequence is failing is when, watching the screen, I feel as if I am able to listen in to the discussion in the production meeting. Watching High-Rise, I felt this very often.
For example, there is a bravura sequence early on in the film where the male occupants of the doomed building all, as one, stride out of the lobby and towards the vast, flat, concrete car park containing their grid-parked cars. These are, for the viewers of 2015, vintage cars, but the way they are filmed obviates any possibility of nostalgia. The epic men are wearing period 1970s clothes, but they are not comically naff. Polyester flares are not allowed to swish. Instead, the camera angles lead us to observe with admiration the stylish cut of their trousers. And I feel, rightly or wrongly, that – as I watch all this – I am listening in to the production meeting. Ben Wheatley, Amy Jump, Mark Tildesley and others are present.
‘What we really need to do is get away from that I love the ‘70s clichéd view.’
‘Yeah, we can’t have lazy cultural signifiers – we have to be crisp.’
‘Exactly, we need to make the 1970s look new, cutting edge, undated, desirable.’
‘These men are technocrats – white head of technology, all that.’
‘We need the audience to want to be in that world. It has to look cool –as cool as our world.’
The brief for Production Design is clear. The point to be made is entirely revisionist: make the past seem as much like the present as possible.
And so, returning to the Willy Rizzo coffee table, we get the impression that it has been placed there, in the set of Charlotte Melville’s apartment, by an interior decorator with a time machine. But the time machine has made not one but several journeys – it has started from the production meeting of 2014 and gone back to 1970, in order to source a brand new Willy Rizzo coffee table, and then it has returned to 2014, so that Jump-Wheatley can okay it for the scene, and then it has taken the Willy Rizzo coffee table back to the imaginary 1970s of the High-Rise set, where it can look new and cool and desirable when viewed by the time-machine deprived audience who will eventually got to see it in 2015.
The most important verb here is to source. The Production Design of High-Rise is meticulously sourced. Almost every single object that appears on screen in High-Rise is surrounded by a painful aura of sourcedness. (I will return to the important exceptions soon.)
The Production Designer has done their job too well – their budget was too big, and they haven’t had to cut any corners in sourcing just the right thing. And when you end up with set after set full of hundreds of just the right things, you end up with an oppressive sense of cultural narcissism.
How can the Production Designer be sure that the Willy Rizzo coffee table will look new and cool and desirable to the 2015 audience?
Well, because (at least in England) we live in something like an interior decoration monoculture. Having started with a coffee table and my father, I am now going to move on to a toilet cistern and my mother-in-law: to be more specific, a broken toilet cistern, coloured champagne, that my mother-in-law recently wanted to replace like-for-like, but found she couldn’t. Because all bathroom suites are now white. If she wanted a champagne-coloured cistern, my mother-in-law would have to have gone to extraordinary lengths to source it.
Okay, you say, this may because champagne, avocado, tangerine and aubergine are horribly out of fashion colours for sinks, loos and baths. But it’s not simply that. Google image-search ‘new bathroom suite’ and then scroll down the page. This is the monoculture. Look in an estate agent’s window. See all the clean, light, airy spaces. Try to find a space that isn’t clean, light and airy. In terms of decorative detail, you are essentially looking at the same property a hundred times. If the interior is lived-in, dark and cosy, you will be shown a photograph of the well-lit exterior of the building.
What has been created for High-Rise is not a nod and a wink version of the 1970s, because it doesn’t ever need to nod or wink. No head or eye movement is necessary, because you know and I know and we all know what’s what. We are agreed that the Willy Rizzo coffee table is beautiful and desirable. Watching a silent version of High-Rise would be a form of cultural self-congratulation.
What goes for the visuals of High-Rise might also be expected to apply to the soundtrack. Each 1970s song that we hear operates in what seems, at first, an identical way to the Willy Rizzo coffee table. Can’s ‘Spoon’ and ‘Outside My Door’, Gila’s ‘Sundance Chant’ – they are all painfully sourced. These are cool sounds. No 1970s group has managed to ingratiate itself to the future as totally as Can. (Except the increasingly dated-sounding Kraftwerk; the use of which would have been too obvious or, perhaps, too expensive.) In listening to Can, we hear what we would have liked the 1970s to sound like.
If we were a music producer with a time machine, we would go back to a Can jam session and listen in. When they stopped wailing like hippies or doing bad funk workouts and instead started getting cleanly motorik, we would give the thumbs-up to the musicians and say, ‘Yes, that bit – keep doing that. We will like that.’
However, in High-Rise, the soundtrack (including the sound design) operates differently to the production design. It is established early on that there is a disjunction between image and sound.
In what is one of the film’s best sequences, what sounds to me like a gavotte accompanies visuals of seventies hipsters dancing to something that clearly isn’t a gavotte. (It may be a classical-sounding adaptation of ABBA’s ‘S.O.S.’, elsewhere covered by Portishead.)
This image/sound disjunction cascades down to later scenes – and even when the dancers are moving in time to the music on the soundtrack, we are still open to the possibility that they may not be hearing what are hearing. The soundtrack, in other words, may very different to the ambient sound that would have been gathered were a microphone operating in the room we are viewing.
What we hear at first listen is cultural ingratiation. The likelihood of Can’s ‘Outside My Door’ being played at a party equivalent to Charlotte Melville’s is nearly zero. The song was obscure, released in 1969. And so I suspect that we are intended to factor in the disjunction, and instead imagine that the characters are actually dancing to Brotherhood of Man’s ‘Save All Your Kisses for Me’ (1976) or the Glitter Band’s ‘Love in the Sun’ (1975) or K.C. and the Sunshine Band’s ‘That’s the Way I Like It’ (1975) or ABBA’s original ‘S.O.S’ (1975).
What Can were doing as they jammed their way toward ‘Spoon’ was the opposite of cultural self-congratulation. It was the creation of something that tried its damnedest to be unknowing. We can tell this because they recorded some awful and awfully dated music, probably on the very same day. They left it to the future to do the sorting; we want to pre-sort, because we already know. We’re all hipsters now – that’s the impression High-Rise might seem to give.
We can congratulate ourselves on being right, culturally, but it’s that very cultural self-congratulation that obviates totally any chance of great cultural achievement. It is only radical uncertainty of aesthetic judgement that can bring about true futuristic beauty.
The occasional disjunction between sound and image, though, works to open up a fissure in the aesthetic of the film. The audience is not necessarily being asked to admire and desire everything they see.
When High-Rise starts to come apart at the seams, when you know where the seams are because there occurs a sequence that feels to intense for the surrounding material, those are the moments that give me hope. Hope that Jump-Wheatley are up to something more anguished than congratulation, and that they haven’t created the entire film as a show-reel. (Their editing lack-of-style often tends towards this. It is nervy, reactive. When best, it opens interesting disjunctions; when worst, it shows off.)
High-Rise is clearly not a film about the 1970s. Not only the Willy Rizzo coffee table, and not only the mirrored elevator that featured in the first still image released from the film – the whole thing is rife with reflective surfaces. Throughout, we are forced to examine our own flattened image in the glass (before the glass gets smashed). This seems a very 1980s gambit, almost Bret Easton Ellis – to make the audience confront a radical shallowness in itself.
Reading this you will probably – in fact I hope you will – have been thinking, ‘Surely that’s appropriate for a J.G.Ballard adaptation?’ Self-congratulation. Shallowness. Ballard was publicly and perplexingly keen on the photography of Helmut Newton. (‘I can’t think of anyone better’ – V.Vale & Mike Ryan, J.G.Ballard: Quotes, pg 152.) I was always suspicious that this was simply because Ballard got off on the long-legged Aryan beauties and the jet set luxury of high-gloss interiors.
Why should I give sections of High-Rise a hard time for being the cinematic equivalent of Helmut Newton?
The reason is, Ballard’s novels are better than Ballard’s taste – which was (just listen to his Desert Island Discs) a bit shit. Jim was no barometer of cool. Instead, he was a canary of cultural pollutants. He realised things before he realised he’d realised them – and that’s why he’s still worth reading. The programmatic novels (Millennium People, Kingdom Come), the ones where he knew what he was doing, are less interesting and pertinent than the manic ones (The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash). Everyone knows this, even the hipsters.
I said earlier that I would return to the objects within the film that are exceptional, that do not possess an aura of sourcedness. These all occur in a series of scenes that take place in the building’s supermarket. Here, instead of being merely sourced, each product on the shelves has been commissioned. Rather than settle for putting on display either an original 1975 packet of Kellogg’s Cornflakes or a brand-new, unyellowed, recreated packet of 1975-era design Kellogg’s Cornflakes, the film-makers have had hyper-real (because hyper-minimal) stand-ins created. The effect is something like a less colourful version of the supermarket sections of Pulp’s ‘Common People’ video (1995).
As Laing pushes his trolley down the aisles, another disjunction opens up – this time not between image and sound but between levels of reality in different parts of the film. A sourced 1975 has suddenly become a commissioned 1975 and, as such, is far more obtrusive. (Look, no barcodes!) It’s likely many viewers will not have consciously noticed the Willy Rizzo coffee table; the products in the supermarket, because we have never seen any of them before, are something no-one but a Martian could miss.
In conclusion, I think I would need a time-machine to form any firm judgement of High-Rise. If I were able to travel thirty years into the future, and attend a Jump-Wheatley retrospective, I could let you know. For if they go on to make a series of similarly sourced-looking, show-reely films, High-Rise will signal a decline from A Field in England (which made a great virtue of its micro-budget). If, however, they pursue either extreme of the commissioned or the accidental – if, in other words, there is a sense, looking back, that in making High-Rise they were playing their Production Designer team – using them to condemn themselves, and their self-congratulatory audience – then it is a breakthrough.
Adam Roberts replied:
I agree with you about Wheatley/Jump more broadly, and share your disappointment with High Rise, for some of the same reasons. In the end it was too pure in what it was trying to do, I think. It lacked the disruptive energy it needed. What Wheatley is particularly good up is contaminating one mode of film with another in creatively interesting ways: so Kill List puts the gangster assassin flick together with The Wicker Man and it really oughtn’t to work, although it really does; or A Field in Englandbeautifully poisons an earnest Winstanley-style b+w movie about the civil war with a hallucinogenic pop video from the wackier end of the 1960s. But High Rise was just too refined and polished, as you say.
The odd thing is that Ballard, even at his best, really wasn’t a very ‘pure’ or polished writer. Malcolm Edwards, who was his editor, once told me: ‘I used to say to him, “Jim, you’re a terrible writer, but you’re a great author…”‘, which strikes me as true.
There’s also the issue, which sort of follows on from what you’re saying, of the extent to which modern art (into which bracket I’d be tempted to include cinema) has been hijacked by design. Not that I would want to downplay the latter category, which is important, creative, often beautiful etc. Nor do I want to sound like a cultural luddite, or an old fogey. But when I wander round the Tate Modern I find myself reacting to much of the art on the level of its design, which frontloads a particular sort-of aesthetic: clever, clean, stylish etc.
We would both be interested to hear if you have any thoughts on this. Please do post.
Tagged: Adam Roberts, Amy Jump, Ballard, Ben Wheatley, High-Rise
April 24, 2017
How to Tell a Story to Save the World
Normally, when people come along to a creative writing class, they are hoping to learn how to write better, not how to save the planet.
A couple of years ago, I was teaching a Guardian Masterclass on ‘Storytelling Secrets’. Among those attending were three representatives of an international environmental activist network. They were young, casually stylish, energetic and exhausted. To save a few words, I’ll call them the Greens.
When the time came to speak individually to the writers, the Greens asked if I could speak to the three of them together but for three times as long. ‘Fine,’ I said.
We met, and the Greens explained the reason they were attending – They felt their message about climate change was no longer getting across. They needed to change that message into a story, and a good story, a moving, powerful story, in order to grab people’s attention. Specifically, they had a story about polar ice-melt.
I really wanted to help them. Environmental degradation horrifies and preoccupies me. That changes in the timing and nature of the seasons have happened within my short lifespan is appalling.
However, I have thought a lot about this. And one of the tangential outcomes of that thinking is the story ‘The Gloop’ which appears in the Beacons anthology. I’m not going to summarize it here – if you want to read it, it’s there to be read. Where some of this thinking has lead me is into what might be call ‘Storytelling’s Dirty Secrets’.
I tried to give the Greens a shorthand version of my reasoning.
The problem an environmental group faces is this: In order to create moving, powerful stories, they need to create sympathetic central characters. In order to change people’s behaviour, they need heroes and heroines to act as role models.
But – and it’s one of the biggest ‘buts’ I’ve ever laid down – but it seems to me that the most environmentally degrading force in existence is heroism.
It seems to me that the ultimate cause of environmental degradation is that almost all of us, despite our questionable doings, regard ourselves as sympathetic central characters.
Here is a trivial example. Another kind of butt.
Meet Paul.
As he drives back from work, Paul enjoys a well-earned cigarette. When it’s mostly gone, he winds the window a crack and flicks away the butt.
It doesn’t matter where Paul’s cigarette butt lands – on Streatham High Road or in a field of summer-dry corn in Sussex. The act may have different consequences, but for Paul it’s the same act.
Once the cigarette is out of the moving car, it is out of Paul’s story. And the only reason – I would argue – that Paul has no problem with flicking away the butt is because it feels to him a heroic act.
You hate Paul, don’t you? You can see no defence for what he does with that butt. But Paul doesn’t hate himself. He might feel guilty, but not for long. He has more important things to do.
If you stopped Paul to ask whether he was proud of what he’d done, he might admit that it was probably a bit out of order or he might tell you (not in these words) to mind your own business. But, at the moment he performs it, the act is incidental to his heroic onward journey. He may not even notice what he’s doing. His chosen soundtrack plays. Paul is not stopped, not questioned. Paul’s story, in which Paul is the sympathetic central character, flows onwards.
Paul is his own sympathetic central character because everything in the culture surrounding him is always telling him that he is a sympathetic central character. Every advert. Every story.
The only reason the world functions at all, Paul is told, is because of heroes like you. Even groups need heroes to lead them. Without a leader, any group will collapse into uselessness.
Heroes go on quests. The quests of heroes are righteous. It is righteous of Paul to return from work. Paul’s work pays for things Paul needs. Paul may have cute children. Paul’s children need things. Paul’s partner may also go to work. Paul’s partner goes on quests.
As I was speaking to the Greens, who weren’t looking particularly happy, this is what I tried to say:
In order to get their message about polar ice-melt across to Paul, and to the rest of us, they will need to speak to him in a language he understands. They will need to avoid angering or alienating him. And so, they will try to tell him the most moving, powerful story they can. They will tell him the story of a different kind of heroism. That it is heroic not to flick your cigarette butt out of the window of your moving car as you return from work. It is heroic to put it in the ashtray. Or more than this, that it is heroic to give up smoking. Or even more than this, that it is heroic to take the bus. Or even, that is heroic to change your workplace, so you don’t have to commute. Or even, that it is heroic to change the kind of work you do and to change the kind of society you do it in.
What the Greens should do, but cannot, because it is so undermining, is say to each of us directly:
You are not a hero. Your acts are not righteous. Neither are ours, individually. Our individual illusions of heroic righteousness are catastrophic.
What they should say, but cannot, because it would alienate almost everyone, is what needs most of all to be said:
You are not a sympathetic central character because exactly what centre are we talking about? There are either seven billion equally important centres, in which case if they all behave like you we’re screwed, or there are no centres, in which case we might just stand a chance.
I wrote this blog to help promote the anthology Beacons, published by Oneworld in 2013. As their website seems to have disappeared, I’m reposting it here. The original title was: ARE ECO-FRIENDLY STORIES POSSIBLE?
Tagged: amwriting, environmentalism, heroism, storytelling, sympathetic central character
March 16, 2017
Writing Well and Writing to Get Well: A series of events on Creative Writing and Mental Health
Along with my colleagues at Birkbeck College, Richard Hamblyn and Lily Dunn, I have been organising a big series of events to deal with this question –
What can writers and teachers of Creative Writing learn from psychiatry, neuroscience, and other medical disciplines about the links between creativity and mental illness?
We are delighted to announce that Professor Kay Redfield Jamison, pioneer in this field, and author of the amazing Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, will be giving the keynote address at a major conference on Saturday 27th May 2017.
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In the run-up to this, five public events under the banner Writing Well and Writing to Get Well will take place at Birkbeck each Friday evening from 28th April onwards, establishing a dialogue between medical professionals (often with literary backgrounds) and writers (often with medical experience).
There are eventbrite listings for each evening:
Dr Sarah Jackson and Robert Power, Friday 28 April 2017, 6-7:30pm
Dr Lisa Conlan and John O’Donoghue, Friday 5 May 2017, 6-7:30pm
Suzanne O’Sullivan and Prof Roberto A Bressan, Friday 12 May 2017, 6-7:30pm
Nathan Filer and Agata Vitale, Friday 19 May 2017, 6-7.30pm
Professor Kay Redfield Jamison, Friday 26 May 2017, 6-7:30pm
Creative Writing and Mental Health Conference, Saturday 27 May 2017, 10am-5pm
They will all take place in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD.
We are hoping to bring together not only really great participants but a really great audience, to engage in a discussion of this important and timely subject.
These events are funded by the Birkbeck/Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF)
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Tagged: Birkbeck, Creative Writing, mental health, mental illness, Wellcome Trust
