Marcus Speh's Blog, page 11

A Week On The Far Side Of The Moon

[image error]For the past year, I thought I could beat Facebook as a place to make contacts and spread the word more effectively, which is why I started Kaffe in Katmandu on Tumblr. I've now been back to Facebook since one month or so and alas, I concede defeat: using it in connection with the "Timeline" feature, it's both fun and fairly effortless. Facebook, you win.

Tumblr is just as clubby and closed as Facebook is. The Tumblr crowd is probably less chatty, more self-involved, younger (yes, you are!) and generally more visually oriented. The Facebook crowd is more diverse and probably more literate (yes, you are!) in terms of lost culture and language. But both of them are clubs for time-losers, enclaves of unmet needs, the harem of an invisible, all-powerful, nameless Sultan.

[image error]Note to alien visitors of our planet: (1) Communities are defined as much by their boundaries (fences to keep out the undesirables) as by what's happening inside them. What you focus on, what's important to you, will change with time; (2) Tumblr is a blog-hosting service. A blog is a ship log without ship, a journal of a journey without going anywhere; (3) Facebook is a social network. Social networks are spider webs without spiders, a fellowship of friend-flies who don't actually want to be social but wish to appear that way (for a variety of reasons); (4) historically, a Sultan is an Autocratic Arabic ruler and lover of roses, poetry, women, fast cars and furry cats.

This morning I was wondering if my Facebook (and Tumblr) texts when taken out of the context of the "Timeline" (which really is a 2D time machine) and put on this blog, look any different. Do they make more or less sense? Here is a selection in chronological order with titles added.

[image error] Sunday: Pink Freud.

I suffer from an uncommon form of writer's block. It doesn't stop me from writing, but it stops me from remembering: my wife just showed me a novella I wrote recently. I looked at it and couldn't recognize it as my work or even remember what it was about AT ALL. I wrote this less than six weeks ago. Where was I, or rather who was I when it happened. Perhaps I need a hot dog from Pink Sigmund.

[Picture: Andre Von Morisse "Pink Freud"]

[image error]Monday: Newspeak.

Will suggest replacing "like" by "uplike" and establish new Facebook term "downlike". Another possibility is "f-off". At the present size of the Facebook community, it's time to commit to our own Newspeak. We may see a Facebook government within the decade.

 

«The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Facebook, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.» (From: George Orwell, The Principles of Newspeak.)

[image error] Tuesday: The Age Of Innocence. American literature is going to break through whatever it is that stands in its way. I can just feel it. It's right there. Next to you, me. If you'd ask me how it'll look like, here's my image: It's a mixture of 7th, 19th and 21st century sensibility minus deconstructivism plus Vonnegut plus Lem minus something the size of an invisible hippo minus the influence of Harry Potter plus the Best Of Alt Lit. It's hairy, too, and gossipy.

[image error]Wednesday: Rejection Drama.

«There are still many more days of failure ahead, whole seasons of failure, things will go terribly wrong, you will have huge disappointments, but you have to prepare for that, you have to expect it and be resolute and follow your own path.»



― Anton Chekhov

Publications this week: ILK Journal; A Baker's Dozen.

[image error] Thursday: Google The Giant.

Modern Sirens: I still haven't figured Google+ out. It's like this parallel infrastructure, like the right brain to Facebook and Twitter's left brain. Or perhaps both aren't brains but two butt cheeks. Must cross post this thought everywhere and then relinquish credit for having it to an anonymous massive collective brain that will suck all of us up and spew us out on Jupiter later this century. Okay, better get to writing it's obvious that I'm spinning…






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Friday: The Discovery Of Hashtags. This brain dead Twitter contribution reveals that the day moves slowly with little to do or to think about. Wintry temperatures paralyse. Time to read some Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer: WILL stuff. Horoscope come to the rescue. Guardian angels fly in for a cup of hot hope or gory gossip.

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Saturday: Birth of a Chapbook. A small press wants to publish one of my short stories as a chapbook. The chapbook is a Victorian concern. I've always wanted to be [in] one and now it looks as if I'm going to. You supposedly slip it in your coat pocket. If you don't have a coat pocket (Victorian gentlemen did have them), the better chapbooks fit in a iPhone leather pouch. You can then give your iPhone to a homeless person and make all your calls with my chapbook. No monthly fees either.

[image error] Sunday: Far Side Of The Moon. I love looking at the far side of the moon. There are so many stories buried there in the rugged, scarred surface, there are so many rocks from so many other worlds lying around there like cigarette butts of visiting tourists carelessly flung on a California beach. I also love the word OUTREACH in connection with this video. The only thing that's missing for me is Sean Connery. He should have spoken the voice over. Time for another James Bond: "The Man In The Moon", car chases on the dark side. Total lack of communication until suddenly Sean Connery whips an iPhone out of his back pocket (on the Moon, James Bond wears jeans, of course) to let his Facebook friends know "I'm Okay," before he turns to his incredibly beautiful blonde Bond girl played by Ellen Page, code name "Juno".

Note: I use my "friends" page for texts and photos and hard-hitting analysis—don't want to bore my friends away; I use my "fan" page only for announcements covered with powdered sugar—don't want to scare those fans away!). I use Twitter indiscriminately to toot my horn on anything. I use Google+ too, but don't ask me what I'm doing there.

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The New Zealand Chronicles

I'm going to change a few things with this post: I will (try to) adhere to proper capitalization. I will be case sensitive, something you can discuss with your shrink to test the waters before fully opening up. I will also break my rambling posts into chunks and I will give each chunk a proper headline. Lastly, I will not swear (as much).

 

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As a boy I saw a film where Asimov wrote SF on a TRS-80. Set me up for a life in computing & possibly SF too.

FINALLY, DAMN: FOUNDATIONS

I've just finally begun to read Asimov's Foundation Series, beginning with the volume "Prelude to Foundation" (written last). Enjoying it very much. Every once in a while, Asimov breaks away from plot and surprises with occasional escapes from pure plot into literature. An example: (ch 5) 

«He thought of the gray day outside when he went to see the Emperor. And he thought of all the gray days and cold days and hot days and rainy days and snowy days on Helicon, his home, and he wondered if one could miss them. Was it possible to sit in a park on Trantor, having ideal weather day after day, so that it felt as though you were surrounded by nothing at all—and coming to miss a howling wind or a biting cold or a breathless humidity?»

Not too shabby, eh? But the plot isn't important for this bit, it's the building of atmosphere leading up to what the reader sees coming: the loss of home; at the same time we're used to the wandering mind of the protagonist, Hari Seldon (given that there's little by way of character building, this is pretty good for Asimov). The series seems to be a massive undertaking, I have some emotional ties to Asimov from my youth and I'm looking forward to learning more about writing a massive series of something massive and futuristic like a city that covers an entire planet (taken—Trantor) or a thinking ocean covering a whole world (taken as well—Solaris), or…

A good beginning to my next blog post at Nothing To Flawnt about New Zealand. How we got there, how we left again. What it all meant so far.

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My work place in the 1990s until I quit. Looks kinda fierce.

FUCKING HELL A NEW CENTURY AND A NEW COUNTRY WHICH IS ACTUALLY AN ISLAND

At the beginning of the 21st century, I'd had enough of the corporate yoke. Admittedly, it hadn't been too much of a yoke: I had enjoyed enormous freedom; I had created my own job, but in order to stand spending what felt like the best part of my life in the bee hive of business, I had to walk around in downtown London for hours shopping, chatting, writing.
A decade later, I'm still enjoying the best part of my life, that's miracle no 1, and I'm still writing, more than ever, that's miracle no 2, and I partly owe it to New Zealand, in not-so-very-direct ways of course. Anything really worth telling that's not also on TV comes in those indirect ways: life's crisscrossing until the texture's just right, and then it's suddenly not right anymore and you have to cut it all up again and start over. At least that's what happened to me.
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Neptune fountain Berlin by R Begas (1888)

So I left my high-powered position, climbed down from the highriser into the nutshell New Zealand. We arrived in spring and my body which had readied itself for our Northern winter (whatever London knows of winter anyway, which isn't too much) couldn't believe where it was for a while. I kept getting colds. Because we had sold our London house, we were swimming in it and feeling richer than we were, we moved into the highest high riser I had ever lived in, overlooking the harbor of the prettiest harbor town, Auckland. When you entered the flat, there was one window on the left covering the entire side of the building on Shortland Street. There was nothing between you and the sea but that single window: I could hear the mermaids singing through it. It wasn't much of a protection against Poseidon. And as a stout follower of Odysseus since my youth, I was weary of the old water god.
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The opposite of corporate: first iBook. It made me want to dye my hair.

Having got rid of my job, any job really, for a while at least, I spent the first hours of every day writing in a backroom with little light. I wrote on my first ever Mac, an iBook that looked like a lady, white and innocent. I filled that thing with stories, a bag full of stories; most of them didn't go anywhere but finally, after months of steady rootless rotten riotous rambunctious work, I grabbed the tail of one of these stories and follow it to some form of conclusion. It still wasn't much of a novel but it looked like one at least and it was my first longer work in English. Then I went back to work, now at the University of Auckland, and forgot about the writing: there was a whole island to discover. Except we never did. Apart from the beach, we never ventured far: I still only know of the spectacular scenery of the South Island through the movies—LOTR.



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"100% Pure New Zealand." Pianos at the beach. Victorian rules. Foam. Barely restrained passion.

TWO BLOODY OCEANS ON THE SAME DAY, BLUE AND BROWN & ART DECO

Our special indulgence was going to two oceans in one afternoon: one blue, one brown. There aren't many places on Earth where you can do that. We got used to Korean food, and my students got used to me. By now, we had moved to Grey Lynn, a suburb not far from downtown with gorgeous Art Deco houses. We lived in one of them—here's a story from that time—good friends lived next door, and our daughter learnt to walk. I rode my motor bike all around town feeling dandy and European, and my wife rented a shack on a hill as a studio. We felt like settling in. There were Barbecues without end. Plenty of Germans, too, and the New Zealanders got them talking. New Zealanders can get you talking about anything. When you're so few, it's important to know how to talk. And then there are the sheep, but you don't talk about the sheep.
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"We don't want you here!" Rejection at spear point.

At home, we fought a lot. It was hard that first year in a new country. The alien island felt like an outpost to us, like one of those planets you always read about: Mars to the first settlers in the "Martian Chronicles". We felt lonely even though there was no shortage of social events and friendship. We had fallen into one big heart, but something was pulling us. So despite much friendliness given to us and given back, too, we left after one year—there also were other reasons: my father was old and he wasn't feeling well. Whenever we spoke, he offered to board a freighter as a ship doctor: this was going to be his last big adventure. But he knew he wasn't up to it—and I wasn't up to letting him die alone. It was a good, but a hard decision.
Later, it turned out the government didn't think we, as a family, were as hot as I felt: a few months after our return to Europe, I received a notice that we weren't allowed to immigrate. They didn't give a reason: I had never shown them my writing, or had I? Had I broken any unwritten laws? It was, and remains, a mystery to me, because we'd have fitted right in. I'd even joined a writing group and a men's group (my first, and one of the most important experiences of my life, stuff for another story).

 

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The Last Martian: "Hello, Captain Wilder. Will you take me back to Earth with you, please?"

MARS, SOD IT

I've only scratched the very surface of my own memories here. The crust. I've not even added my wife's and my daughter's. It's too much even though it was only one year. Maybe there's something about that island, New Zealand, that creates strong memories, memories that go as deep as the Mariana Trench, one of the deepest locations on Earth and a possible final resting place for all of the island in a distant geological future. Maybe we'll all be on Mars then. The people of New Zealand however, they've already tasted what it's like to live on Mars and make it habitable. Not that the island looks anything like the Red Planet: it's lush, it's wet, there're four seasons in a day, or five. But there're Maori ghosts and the ghost of the Kiwi walks there, too, like the Last Martian. Enough said for now. Over to you.

See also: Frankfurt Bookfair 2012—an Aotearoa Affair, Blog Fest organized by Dorothee Lang and Michelle Elvy. Weekly Highlight 24 January: my story The Families/Die Familien (English/German) with an author's note. Follow the carnival on Twitter.
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Auckland skyline by night. The tower is a blue rocket bound for Mars, of course. You can board it any time.

 

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The Man In The Mirror

 

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Death. Decay. Doom.

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My dad. Drawing by my daughter. (Click pic for story)

A few years ago, I missed my dad's death by a few hours. I had business not far from his house, but I decided not to see him. Later that day, he fell over and died, just like that. It was a merciful death, I imagine. That night, paramedics were thumping his wide chest, the chest that I had laid upon many years before and that I will always remember as the safest place anywhere. On the next day after his death, we all went to see what was left of him. He was cold and yellow in the face then, both there and not there. I hadn't been able to see my mother in her death a few years earlier so this became the first time (I was 43) that I ever came face to face with a dead person who wasn't a corpse yet. The dead turn into corpses later, I think, when the soul has properly left. In my father's case his soul was still hanging around looking at us from above. I couldn't see it but I could feel it. My daughter, who was only 5 then, showed scientific interest in the body, mixed with a natural reverie that I hadn't quite expected. She seemed to ask questions not of us and get answers not from us either and I presume she could still see my father's soul and commune with it. Of course she doesn't remember any of this, all she remembers is that her grandpa shouted at her when she broke one of his Viennese porcelain figurines and that he called her "Mümpi", which doesn't mean anything (except to him).

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Carol Novack with poison bottle.

My own birthday's today, and a writer friend, Carol Novack, is dying. After I heard that she was likely to live only a week or so, I wanted to talk to her while she could still speak, but I delayed the call because I didn't know what to say to a person who know that she's dying. I wrote a flash instead, "For Carol Novack". There's a small virtual gathering of writers in Carol's honor over at Fictionaut; a number of people have written tributes. In the town where she lives, friends have gathered around a microphone reading her stories. One of the sad things when a writer dies is that she won't write anything new.

Made plans to go out for lunch and watch a movie — Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol —with the family today. This is a first since on my birthday I usually go off by myself to write, until at some point during the day I begin to feel sorry for myself and lonely and then I come crawling back, not without suggesting, indignantly, that a man shouldn't have to spend his birthday alone. (Apparently, the laws of plain causality are suspended during birthdays.)

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Looks dangerous: C G Jung

I meant to watch "A Dangerous Method", the new Cronenberg, on my birthday—looks like a movie about the competition between Sigmund Freud and his one time disciple, Carl Jung; with a love triangle: these two great men and a wild Russian woman, who, inevitably, will have an affair with at least one of the men and become a great psychoanalyst herself. Inevitably: because that's what clever, resourceful women in the early 20th century did, become psychoanalysts, I don't know why. Watching this movie would have connected me with my family's century-old infatuation with psychoanalysis, but I couldn't hunt down the original version and I didn't feel liked seeing it dubbed. Instead I opted for Tom Cruise, whose women do most certainly not end as shrinks, though they may find themselves lying on a couch. There's always an enemy and death is a commodity in these movies. If you feel like falling over laughing read Roxane Gay's review of "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol" (but beware: full of spoilers). We love her blog posts (and by 'we' I mean everyone around here).

Birthdays are death days. As always, but more so on this day than on any other, I feel the fear of not being able to do what I want to do in this life (and I don't mean presidency, I mean writing). A meaningless fear when I look at it from further away because I can only do what I can do and that's never been little but also, somehow, never been enough. I probably must slow down before I get to 50 (and that day's coming up fast). Fears don't give a damn about meaning, of course. Especially the existential ones don't.

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Successful cog in the machine or spanner in the works?

I've had a successful year as far as a writer: finished a proper novella. Published lots of flash fiction. Was nominated. Wrote another novella in flashes. Edited a story collection to a fine, sharp point. Gave some great interviews. Read publicly on– and offline. Nurtured Kaffe in Katmandu. Started six more novels.

I began with my father and I want to end with my mother, who is somehow linked to my inability to go deeper in my writing. I feel that inability painfully with the text I'm struggling with right now—here's an excerpt from the beginning:

«The writer left the embassy. He knew that he was an alien, normal in one world but not normal in this one. He wasn't unhappy about it. He was already planning on turning anything that made him unhappy, anything that solicited an emotional response, good or bad, into his art. He wasn't worried about being the copy of a man from Mercury. He was worried about one thing and one thing only: his voice.»

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My mother in Paris, ca 1978. (Click pic for story)

The answer to the question how the deepening of my writing is connected with my mother is not available to me at this time. It's just a feeling, or rather, a shapeless knowing, but I didn't want to leave it unmentioned since I believe in living my birthday as I wish to live the rest of my life.

Picking up on my gloomy pre-birthday mood, my lovely, talented, gorgeous wife wrote me a funny birthday card:

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Botticelli, Birth of Venus, 477 years ago. In today's horoscope, R Breszny invites us capricorns "to retrain yourself so that you can thrive in the presence of intense, amazing, and transformative beauty."

«Happy Birthday my dearest husband (or should I say my imperial pretzel). Doom. Death. Decay. Sound of bells tolling for me and thee. See, it's not so bad. Rather jolly, lots of alliteration.»

That cheered me up. Not so bad the story, so far. 48. Plenty of love and lots of looking at the stars. Perhaps we'll spend the day coming up with many  more D-words, driving the demons of death down the drain…

Death, decay, doom? Diddly-squat. Birthdays are dandy and deconstructive. Dollops of delight, don't doubt it.

Since it's my birthday, here's the unabashed vanity part of this post; I've had publications all over the place in December: Northville Review; Airplane Reading; Fatboy Review (ongoing for 12 days until January 5th, 2012); Dogzplot; Letras Caseras; Necessary Fiction (including the first publication of my daughter's art). Very, very happy about that & thanks a lot to all the editors!

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A Professional Good Man—Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis

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Over the past few weeks, I've enjoyed Sinclair Lewis' novel "Elmer Gantry" (as an audio book, beautifully read by Anthony Heald [1]) and it took me a while to figure out why. Published in 1926, this is the story of a "professional good man", a preacher and pastor in those first decades of the 20th century before the Great Depression. In the book, Gantry rises to near-national fame as an evangelist exposing "vice" while being vicious himself throughout, desperately so. [Spoiler:] Though his hypocrisy comes close to being found out several times, he continues to escape and emerge each time more successful, while his antagonists and others who cross his path wither, vanish or perish altogether.

I wondered why I liked the book so much because Gantry, the protagonist, isn't someone to identify with: he's got very little going for him—he's not even evil. He's really just "a hog," as one colleague calls him in the book. He's so forgettable as a character  that it seems writerly sin to assemble an entire novel around him. He does not undergo any growth of character, either in the positive or in the negative. Lewis continually repeats Gantry's phrases and thoughts to underline the repetitiveness and banality of the man and his miserable career — miserable not in terms of worldly success but in terms of meaning and merit. After a few pages I knew all there was to be known about Elmer Gantry—and yet, I felt compelled to finish the book, sighing a lot throughout, but fully engaged to the end.

Once again: why?

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Sin, Sin, Sin. No more.

One reason is the writing itself: it makes you want to listen to Elmer and his shenanigans.  Here is a short excerpt from the first third of the book, describing Elmer's first assignment as a baptist pastor. Behold the beautiful rhythm:

«Brother Gantry was shaking hands all around. His sanctifying ordination, or it might have been his summer of bouncing from pulpit to pulpit, had so elevated him that he could greet them as impressively and fraternally as a sewing-machine agent. He shook hands with a good grip, he looked at all the more aged sisters as though he were moved to give them a holy kiss, he said the right things about the weather, and by luck or inspiration it was to the most acidly devout man in Boone County that he quoted a homicidal text from Malachi.»

Elmer's wholesomeness is deceptive and here as in many other parts of the book, he manages to deceive himself as well, by elevation, as it were. The author's sarcasm is erudite, too: the Book of Malachi (I had to look it up, not being at all well-versed in the bible) contains a critique of the lax religious and social behavior of (Israelite) priests, hereby pointing at one of the issues of the plot: how can any full-blooded, able-bodied man take the religion as seriously as a preacher should? Baptised as  a Catholic, I've always been equally fascinated by the rigor formally imprinted on the soft soul of god's men as by the creativity, anchored both in their personalities and in their organizations, with which they permit themselves breathing space despite the harsh moralistic scaffold. Harsh and boring, in fact:

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Boredom is a form of trance, too. Breaking through to the other side may depend on the right brand of shoes.

"It's all so dull," Elmer cries more than once, and means the doctrine, the learning and the telling of the doctrine and its endless ramifications. Dull and entrancing at once, because dullness, when it drones on and on, has this muzak-like ability to put us into trance before it puts us to sleep. Elmer spends his whole life in that trance, which excuses many of his misdeeds.

The following section illustrates the trance both on the side of the protagonist, and on the side of the reader—it takes place about half way through the book where Elmer muses upon the sight of Sharon Falconer, his only true love and a professional traveling evangelist, very shortly before Sharon dies tragicomically:

«Elmer, sitting back listening, was moved as in his first adoration for her. He had become so tired of her poetizing that he almost admitted to himself that he was tired. But tonight he felt her strangeness again, and in it he was humble. He saw her straight back, shimmering in white satin, he saw her superb arms as she stretched them out to these thousands, and in  hot secret pride he gloated that his beauty, beheld and worshipped of so many, belonged to him alone.»

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Catching and cleansing: professional ratcatchers.

The sequence also illustrates how Sinclair Lewis manipulates POV: he remains an 'involved' narrator (Ursula Le Guin's term for what is often called "omniscient") while he at the same time leans deeply into the protagonist. He performs the same trick  with other important characters, most notably with the sympathetic, ultimately terribly unlucky, preacher Frank Shallard, a one-time classmate of Gantry's. Lewis uses this technique whenever he wants to reflect without leaving the character, and especially when, as in the previous passage, he wishes to paint the picture of ambivalence, which, in this novel, is as deep as the Nile is long.

There is so much more to be said about this book, which is not without weaknesses. Many reviewers mention that it slackens a little in the middle and that the story loses its grip on the reader while following some of Elmer Gantry's less illuminating adventures in industry before he returns to the job of a preacher for good. This may well be—I appreciated this part as a breather and as necessary buildup of Gantry's character (of which there is so little). The pace in this middle section is distinctly different, but Lewis uses it to establish a network of relationships to secondary characters.

These secondary characters, not the antagonists, of which there are few if any, and all of them good men & women (apart from Hettie Dowler and her spouse) are the third secret of the book for me: there is an army of secondary characters, friends and foes of Gantry, representatives of the entire American nation really, and through their scenes (often without Gantry's presence), the world of the early twentieth century comes to life.

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A little drowned out: the female voice.

The one real weakness I see in the book is one which it shares with so many books that I wouldn't know where to begin counting, including most of recent literature: the female characters aren't so fully drawn as to really come to life (with the exception of Gantry's female counterpart, Sharon Falconer). For the modern reader, this is dissatisfying. From the modern female reader it may even bring a death sentence—I hope not, because like all great literature, the book as a whole rises above gender stereotypes by, paradoxically, describing stereotype, but oh-so beautifully rendered.

It's delightful to be filled to the brim by a book once again. It makes me feel young again, perhaps because it brings me back to days when I really just lived for and through books. Those days may be gone, but it is comforting to know that despite all that "stuff" between me and the land of fiction, including my own writing, I can still grow down and let myself be filled. And it's good, too, to step back now, bowing to a master, and analyze his technique and his special effects.

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Elmer Gantry "Le Charlatan"

And now I'm off putting some of these principles to work and upgrading the Wikipedia entry on the novel[2], which is a little undernourished given the rank of this work by a writer, who said "brokenly many things beautiful in their common-ness." (Sinclair Lewis)

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The Serious Writer Occupies Wall Street

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Somerset Maugham, painting by Graham Sutherland (1949); Tate Collection.

When thinking of the commotion surrounding Wall Street, the serious writer gets very upset. But he is distracted by his personal life:  a letter reminds him to pay his taxes, which makes him want to go back to sleep every time. His helper, herself in her mid-eighties and therefore barely younger than the serious writer himself, reminds him to throw in the yellow pill "every hour on the hour, if you please." She says this sitting on the side of his bed in the morning. She says it again later in the day when he has moved from the bed to the chair by the window, looking at the latest news from the ongoing occupation of Earth. "We used to do this stuff," he says to his helper, "and if nobody came to beat us up we knew we hadn't hit a nerve." — "Don't forget to take the yellow pill every hour on the hour," says the helper. "Thank you," says the serious writer, "the yellow pill does calm me down. It pacifies the effects of all the other pills in my system." The helper looks out the window. There is nothing to see. All the action is on the small blueish screen where a young, fat man is now being led away in hand cuffs. He shouts a poem at the policemen. It's a funny poem and even though he teases them they smile. You can see the policemen relax their grip. The serious writer thinks this is heartening and wants to tell his helper but he cannot find the right words just then. He often cannot find the words these days. He thinks and feels in colors and sounds rather than letters. "Who knows," says the helper in that moment, "if they'll ever invent a happy pill. That's the one I'd like to take." — The serious writer points at a row of black bound books in a shelf next to his bed: "I've been reading my grandfather's journals," he says. "he wrote them in Neuengamme concentration camp where he was imprisoned at the end of the war. He explicitly says that there is no 'happy pill'."—"But science has moved on so much since then," she says, "things have changed."—"Yes they have," says the serious writer. He carelessly drops the yellow pill behind the chair where all the other yellow pills lie already like a confused army of yellow ticks, and makes a fist under his blanket. "Yes, they have indeed."

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See also: panel discussion on the Occupy movement and the arts at Six Degrees Left. Also posted at Fictionaut, at Kaffe in Katmandu and at Red Lemonade.

 

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Time Will Tell But We Must Speak Up Now

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It looks as if even the crown supports the peaceful occupation of London. Click to get to the panel discussion.

"You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water." ― Rabindranath Tagore

I was very happy to be asked by Atticus Books to participate in a panel discussion of artists, writers and one musician, pondering questions of responsibility around the OCCUPY movement. The discussion is published in three parts, and I believe if you're tickled by OCCUPY, you'll enjoy the ride. Please spread the information & leave a comment. Don't just stand there and stare at the sea!



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From: OCCUPY WRITERS.

Arguably the by now global OCCUPY movement has a moral cause. To more and more people, certain cynical commercial activities appear immoral even though they're not illegal. Alongside with many others, some writers are upset, too. Which is why "Occupy Writers" exists and gets a lot of support up and down the land (and needs it, too).

[image error]I've written a lot about morality & writing lately. I still feel that I'm often misunderstood because the word "moral" is so terribly charged, esp. in the U.S. If I were a banker, I would perhaps substitute it by "value creation" and there would be no debate. Everybody loves "values". What I really mean when I say art and writing should be "moral" is that they should be "life-affirming". This doesn't take anybody's rights away to do something else or write with different values in mind, but I prefer to call that art by its true name instead of pretend that it's all the same because it isn't: I'd rather be an artistic clown than an agent of death:

«Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy. It is a tragic game, for those who have the wit to take it seriously, because our side must lose; a comic game—or so a troll might say—because only a clown with sawdust brains would take our side and eagerly join in.»

—John Gardner, from On Moral Fiction

I've gathered my own comments from the discussion on a separate page.

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appealing to angels: a london travelogue

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lost among the lights on picadilly circus

went to london last week where i lived for ten years until after our daughter was born & where i hadn't been in four years. walked a lot. noticed how much fuller the city seemed though i have no idea how that's possible. how many more people can you squeeze into this town? no more tower records on picadilly circus, but instead another soulless mega clothing store. how many clothes can you sell to people who're already clothed? how much food to the farting fed? every second person now carries a smartphone in their hand and looks at it, types on it, swipes it while they walk; that movement, the touch screen swipe, used to be reserved for leafing through a book or slapping your mate.



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things you don't see when you look at your phone: yellow stripes leading into the future.

i wonder if the deployment of smartphones to the streets of london in connection with the driving on the other side of the road leads to more casualties. with pedestrians and drivers continuously staring at their displays, a lot more guardian angels are needed to save lives. what if technology drives the heavens nuts: after eons of underemployment because humans looked after themselves, angels now have to substitute where technology either fails or leads us astray. all of this is of course only relevant if there are any angels at all.

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bucky fuller: «god is a verb.»

london is a strong case for the existence of higher powers: as is new york city, tokyo, rome, paris, rio de janeiro, mexico city…these moloch cities would surely collapse unless somebody above would look after us, after the sewage, the sinning and the souls. speaking of souls: i usually visit a church when i travel just to check in with the old verb, but not this week. london sucked all time out of me, always did. i used to ride a motorbike through town feeling like a leathery knight, forever rushing, forever outdoing my own performance. now i walk, slowly, and i enjoy it when others pass me. sometimes they throw insults at me over their shoulders: i can never understand what they're saying, but i know i'm in the way of their way.

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ginger magic: vivienne westwood at occupy london

throughout the week, in cafes, in the hotel room, i worked with a few other panelists on answers for atticus books' six degrees left series. subject: the "occupy wall street" movement (this is the same series that already brought us "stripping down the mfa"); to be published soon.

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those conga drums were crucial for my performance

a propos performance: read on wednesday at the betsey trotwood in farringdon (event hosted by 4'33″); great venue, british audience, a few friends among them. it felt different but good to read to an audience of native speakers for a change. good quality work throughout while the rain drizzled outside. my story worked well, too: some laughs, nobody fainted.

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skype portrait of the middle-aged writer as a bald lion

in the evening i skype-d from the hotel. that was a first. i travel little these days & that makes me happy. traveling is hard on one's heart, with or without angels.

london is full of queues and inside these queues, civilization rules. everybody here is naturally more polite than berliners will ever be, even with specialized training. a vision of hell: london traffic with german behavioral customs. oyster up, traveller.

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Agents need to be technology-savvy.

the emotional and the professional: i was tense before my first meeting with a literary agent. it left me with a sense of the commercial side of writing that i normally manage to push out of the way. the publishing world's so full of rites: it'll take another life time to learn them. as a newcomer to this game, i can only hope to wing it the same way i've winged it before. i remember well: all serious business is improvisation at first.

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photograph of a guardian angel passing through my room

those guardian angels must also be hanging around a writer's head, don't you think? maybe i can catch one of them in a dream and ask him what to do next. apart from the main thing: write. wrote a mini review of a book given to me by the agent: cornelius medvei's "caroline: a mystery." it's different & it's good.

[image error]i ate at our once-favorite japanese restaurant, sakura—just as good as it always was but now without chain-smoking customers. i felt the loss even though i don't smoke. as if to make up for it, i observed the head waiter exchange friendly words (in japanese) with a leaving customer: they bowed to each other incessantly, perhaps ten times, looking like a pair of scissors. i peeked at them from behind my mountainous katsudon.

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Coming up: Pank 6 in print

first thing at home in berlin i had a story accepted by PANK magazine, which brightened my weekend, and the travel memories fizzled out all by themselves, as memories do when there's a life to live.

as it's london, i want to end on a food note: discovered an exquisite fish 'n chips locale in covent garden just around the corner from my hotel: rock & sole plaice. so cheap & good that it hurt to leave. wolfed my dish down next to a smudgy poster of british prime ministers of the last 290 years, which lent a certain incandescence to my meal…i'll be back, london, because i hate you and because i love you.

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What makes good writing?

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Martin Heidegger who once famously wrote about "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" (1969), looking doubtful & rural.

.… is one of the question discussed at Fictionaut in a thread on the "Philosophy Of Writing". There were many fascinating answers to this challenge—ranging from "the goal should always be originality" (Ivan R.) to "write what your heart dictates" (Shel Compton)… I simply could not resist weighing in on the debate:

«Obviously everyone should write when and how s/he pleases. But there's a but, a big, fat philosophical butt to this question, unless philosophy and the history of intellect is dead once and for all & we must fully and solely engage with a reality that knows little of the past & indeed only cares about entertainment and style.

I don't think what your heart dictates is necessarily good writing. I also don't think writing for entertainment produces good writing. Darryl's criteria of "tastes good in every sense of the word" are very tempting (if only because his tastebuds must be very fine, judging from his own work) but it's also too self-involved and poetically idiomatic to serve me well.

What is it then? For me, good writing is always edifying, always moralistic, and it always manages to transport its message, content or whatever you like to call it in a way that's artistically worked through, as it were, namely as story. This does not even exclude poetry, which still tells story but relies on a different texture and fabric perhaps—a differently cut garment perhaps that still covers our quintessential, existential nakedness.

And naked we are, today more so than ever.

Last night, I watched the bloody execution of General Ghaddafi by a mob (don't watch it) & I heard about the Chinese toddler being run over, the dying child being ignored by several passersby.

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Against the discomforts of civilization: Freud's couch.

We need messages and morals as John Gardner demanded thirty years ago in "Moral Fiction", morals which help us keep this civilization going, which is built on (good) art and (good) writing (not the other way around); we must not fall back into the dark night that Sigmund Freud wrote about more than 100 years ago in "Civilization and its Discontents": «One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be "happy" is not included in the plan of "Creation".» We must look into the abyss and return from it speaking the truth.

In extension of what Sheldon Compton and MaryAnn Kolton said already [in the thread], perhaps we need not just one, but thousands, or millions of hearts beating as one in the rhythm of social media, writing for the future of humanity. Which brings me to Writers Occupy Wall Street, but more of that in a couple of weeks from Six Degrees Left…»

In response to this, Ann Bogle asked "what is the moral of today's writer's nakedness?" — I think, if Albert Camus is right, who said

"The pur­pose of a writer is to keep civ­i­liza­tion from destroy­ing itself."

then it is perhaps the nakedness of Cassandra, the messenger whose message nobody really wishes to hear and whom nobody will believe so that he's cast out and (on the whole) disregarded (though the degree of the disrespect for writers strongly varies by country and culture)…but the hearts of men still listen, I believe.

[image error]PS. …when I told my wife how bad I felt all night after watching those videos I talked about (above), she showed me something that is apt to restore everyone's belief in mankind: "Bystanders lift burning car to save pinned motorcyclist". Yes to this story. Yes to humanity. It comes in so many forms—witness the mixture of grief and love implicit in the death of a British couple in their 70s that were swept away in a flash flood together. Just remember: what you write & how you write matters.

 

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What Music Inspires You To Write?

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Not for the faint hearted: score from "English Country Tunes" by M Finnissy. Click on score for audio.

Sally Cooper asked a great question on her blog: "What music inspires you to write?" Here's what I think.

I'm always looking for new music to write with…I'm usually listening to minimalistic stuff (Riley, Reich, Cage, Feldman), or to new classical music. these last few days, it's been Alfred Schnittke's complete string quartets (played by kronos quartet) which have me all but hypnotized; it's also been Michael Finnissy's "Lost Lands" (played by topologies). A hundred years ago, I studied composition with Finnissy & I still hear his actual voice and see him move around the piano when I listen to this. (He's like his music: most gentle, witty, immensely informed.) It influences my writing in ways much deeper than I care to know. When my students ask about what music I like I ask them to imagine cats being tortured & that it's not a pretty sound. They invariably say "Aww, surely you're joking" but when I play them a sample, they realize I wasn't.



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Moondog aka Louis Harding.

This is for fiction. For non-fiction like this, I listen to more digestible music, like Regina Spektor, or I let P J Harvey shake me. Another recent discovery is Martin Grubinger's "drums 'n chants": jazz & gregorian chant sung by Benedictine monks. Modern jazz is usually not my thing but…there's always been moondog — about whom i've written a story now shown at Fictionaut — who blends jazz & voices & god knows what he heard through his viking helmet. Good man, I love him and all he stands for, a splendid freedom, from a great distance.

For some reason, there's no serious writer story about the serious writer and his music. But there's no one on "The Serious Writer And His Hamster" at Pure Slush. It's musical in a spherical kind of way (on the orb of creation, all paths cross eventually: sound, touch, smell…).

So what on your turntable? Which sounds keep your wheels spinning (if any)?

[the illustration above is a score by michael finnissy (from: english country tunes — one of the hardest pieces written for piano that i know, here performed by the composer) that suggests some of what's hanging in the air when i listen to this while writing. it's not harmless, nor is it easy to dance to. the score, like the music, has got so much texture, it's a little like standing in the middle of a traffic island, which may be my ideal place to write. sometimes it gets tiresome, then i will switch the music of altogether.]

 

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