R.J. Askew's Blog: Indie tester, page 4
October 25, 2012
HOW YOUR POET SCOOPED THE 99CTS INDIE AUTHOR CAGE FIGHTISTAS
More to the point, are there any here (kindle) readers for your stuff (metaphysical zonnets in, mostly, tetrametre)?
It ain't exactly easy on the eye. Maybe you cld just use this place as a shed in which to actually nail it together and then travel back to the 14th century and get some monks to do up a nice illuminated manuscript.
A limited edition might sell. 14 copies at a million quid each. The trick wld be the time travel. The monks cld be squared away with a few carp suppers. And I cld beguile them with 21st century magic, maybe even show them a kindle and an iPhone, make a skype call from the 14th century to report back on progress. Get them to say, 'Hi guys!' Do a piece-to-camera on their life in an abbey.
Getting back to the 21st century with my 14 copies might be tricky, but if I cld get to the 14th in the first place it shouldn't be too bad. I mean I am an experience London commuter with experience of the Jubilee line and Thameslink. So noooo problermo.
And when I got back with my 14 illuminated MSS of my work I wld get them carbon dated to prove that they were a kosher amalgam of 21st verb and 14th century work.
Hell, I live in St.Albans, this should be a doddle as I believe there was a scriptorium in the Abbey here which is just a few hundred yards away.
Yeah, that's the way to scoop the 99cts indie author cage fightistas. Not that I am your rabit competitive manned-up berserker who will do anything to shin up the No.666 devilishly guuud selling amazon lap-dance pole.
I wonder how long it will take the monks to complete the brief? They might need some close editorial management as they will not recongise 21st century English. But then that should be nooooo problermo.
Once I hit them with a few carp suppers and a case or two of Chateau Neuf Du Pape I'm sure they will crank the stuff out like crusaders. Hmmm, I'd better go easy on the CNDP thought, won't get their best work out of them if they have steaming hangovers n shaking hands.
Squaring the Abbot away might be tricky. I guess doing my 14 books will cost him a year's bible supplies. So WTF do I do for the Abbot? The St.Albans abbots were serious players. It might take more than a carp supper or two. Maybe a Beamer wld to the trick. I imagine a Beamer in 14th century England wld prompt a few gasps, even if they are as common as muck middle ego cars in our shiny times.
Yep, that will work.
As to marketing, I wonder if the monks will dig the finer points of branding? Duhhhh, they don't need to! The odd variance in spelling, layout and design will keep legions of over-qualified academics locked in decades of meaningless debaate on marginallia and other brain-numbingly innane minutia for centuries. AND! drive the price up of the individual copies. The absence of fungibility will be a massive USB. Or is it USP? UPS? OFIWFCs!?!
Actually, now that I think about it. A million quid a shot is an absurd price, the total undersell of the millenium. We have to be in the realm of the first BZILLION dollar (or should that be yuan?) piece of art. We are talking prices that even the Scratchi Bros cld not consider in their wildest image action analysis. And -- a stroke of brilliance this! -- let there be an accidental fire in a bar which destroys say 5-6 of the 14 MSS. This wld, of course, squeeze the market for the remainding stock, thus driving the beta-fibbonaci-pricing-coefficient into stochastical paradise i.e. they'd be throwing diamonds THIS BIG! my way.
Yep, I think we are talking about 100 bzillion for the remaining copies. Not that one is money driven, mind. One is a quiet, sensitive, poetic type. *bows*
That said, it wld be worth insuring the 14 and claiming for the fire-loss. The money cld be used to square away the various faces who will doubtless need a bung or two. You know how it is these days.
Item: as to finance this deal, I will have to knock on a few doors amid the faux marble halls of Cannary Wart and get a few IBs to do a little financial engineering and roadshow some tricksy now-y'see-it-now-y'dont derivatives to raise the seed capital needed to tornado the caper into the super mozone. I mean getting back to the 14th century even for a metaphysician of my kidney is not exactly a saunter to the sushi bar. There will be risks.
Actually, it is possible that a better market might be in, say, the 23rd century. Yep, has to be.
So, your 21st century Ver Sir arabesques to the 14th, gets the production work nailed, segues to the 23rd sells the product. Returns to the hear and know. Smirks. Retires to Dorset. Buys a labradoodle. Rents a flat in Covent Garden for weekend use only. And.. And..
Ach, missed her again! NURSE! NURSE GREEN! Oh please don't leave me here like this .. I needs my late night noir (110 percent capitalist cocoa) ..
Things are not all that Rosy or Alice in these cut price Bulgarinan coastal sanatoria for preening paragons of penurious positivism. PTTTH!
It ain't exactly easy on the eye. Maybe you cld just use this place as a shed in which to actually nail it together and then travel back to the 14th century and get some monks to do up a nice illuminated manuscript.
A limited edition might sell. 14 copies at a million quid each. The trick wld be the time travel. The monks cld be squared away with a few carp suppers. And I cld beguile them with 21st century magic, maybe even show them a kindle and an iPhone, make a skype call from the 14th century to report back on progress. Get them to say, 'Hi guys!' Do a piece-to-camera on their life in an abbey.
Getting back to the 21st century with my 14 copies might be tricky, but if I cld get to the 14th in the first place it shouldn't be too bad. I mean I am an experience London commuter with experience of the Jubilee line and Thameslink. So noooo problermo.
And when I got back with my 14 illuminated MSS of my work I wld get them carbon dated to prove that they were a kosher amalgam of 21st verb and 14th century work.
Hell, I live in St.Albans, this should be a doddle as I believe there was a scriptorium in the Abbey here which is just a few hundred yards away.
Yeah, that's the way to scoop the 99cts indie author cage fightistas. Not that I am your rabit competitive manned-up berserker who will do anything to shin up the No.666 devilishly guuud selling amazon lap-dance pole.
I wonder how long it will take the monks to complete the brief? They might need some close editorial management as they will not recongise 21st century English. But then that should be nooooo problermo.
Once I hit them with a few carp suppers and a case or two of Chateau Neuf Du Pape I'm sure they will crank the stuff out like crusaders. Hmmm, I'd better go easy on the CNDP thought, won't get their best work out of them if they have steaming hangovers n shaking hands.
Squaring the Abbot away might be tricky. I guess doing my 14 books will cost him a year's bible supplies. So WTF do I do for the Abbot? The St.Albans abbots were serious players. It might take more than a carp supper or two. Maybe a Beamer wld to the trick. I imagine a Beamer in 14th century England wld prompt a few gasps, even if they are as common as muck middle ego cars in our shiny times.
Yep, that will work.
As to marketing, I wonder if the monks will dig the finer points of branding? Duhhhh, they don't need to! The odd variance in spelling, layout and design will keep legions of over-qualified academics locked in decades of meaningless debaate on marginallia and other brain-numbingly innane minutia for centuries. AND! drive the price up of the individual copies. The absence of fungibility will be a massive USB. Or is it USP? UPS? OFIWFCs!?!
Actually, now that I think about it. A million quid a shot is an absurd price, the total undersell of the millenium. We have to be in the realm of the first BZILLION dollar (or should that be yuan?) piece of art. We are talking prices that even the Scratchi Bros cld not consider in their wildest image action analysis. And -- a stroke of brilliance this! -- let there be an accidental fire in a bar which destroys say 5-6 of the 14 MSS. This wld, of course, squeeze the market for the remainding stock, thus driving the beta-fibbonaci-pricing-coefficient into stochastical paradise i.e. they'd be throwing diamonds THIS BIG! my way.
Yep, I think we are talking about 100 bzillion for the remaining copies. Not that one is money driven, mind. One is a quiet, sensitive, poetic type. *bows*
That said, it wld be worth insuring the 14 and claiming for the fire-loss. The money cld be used to square away the various faces who will doubtless need a bung or two. You know how it is these days.
Item: as to finance this deal, I will have to knock on a few doors amid the faux marble halls of Cannary Wart and get a few IBs to do a little financial engineering and roadshow some tricksy now-y'see-it-now-y'dont derivatives to raise the seed capital needed to tornado the caper into the super mozone. I mean getting back to the 14th century even for a metaphysician of my kidney is not exactly a saunter to the sushi bar. There will be risks.
Actually, it is possible that a better market might be in, say, the 23rd century. Yep, has to be.
So, your 21st century Ver Sir arabesques to the 14th, gets the production work nailed, segues to the 23rd sells the product. Returns to the hear and know. Smirks. Retires to Dorset. Buys a labradoodle. Rents a flat in Covent Garden for weekend use only. And.. And..
Ach, missed her again! NURSE! NURSE GREEN! Oh please don't leave me here like this .. I needs my late night noir (110 percent capitalist cocoa) ..
Things are not all that Rosy or Alice in these cut price Bulgarinan coastal sanatoria for preening paragons of penurious positivism. PTTTH!
October 23, 2012
A Slendid Salmagundi ~ review
I don't know exactly why it is so, and it does not really matter, but those two little eyes peering out from the hidey-hole on the bole of the oak tree on the front cover of this fine anthology really tickle me. There is something engaging about them that seems to perfectly capture the character of this tastefully eclectic salad of writerly talent.
This is not one of the numberless kissass covers to be found at every e-turn from rising authors stutting their 'brand'. I wonder which genius decided that authors now have to be brands? For some reason those two little eyes a-peering out really make me want me to peer into their realm. What shy little creature lurks within?
This is good. I am won more by those two little eyes than by a No.1. cacophany of tartly-branded visual hammer blows. Yes, I am a-judging a book by its cover. But then those two little eyes a-peering out really do make my eyes want to peer in. Because... I do not know why, and it does not matter. All I know is this, if you look at those two eyes for long enough, I swear to you that you will see them blink.
I know this is all a double rum, but I instinctively sense there is a link between those two little bewtiching eyes and the nature of the art to be found within the e-covers of A Splendid Salmagundi, an art which will charm-e the eyes of all those curious enough and wise enough to want to taste it.
The joy of reading anthologies is not knowing what will grab you until you stumbles into its outstretched arms and are half hugged to death by it. You dip in, you try a bit of this, a bit of that on a read-one-like-one-read-one-maybe-read-one-love-one-basis. It wld be a very picky reader indeed who does not find a good few read-one-love-ones here-e. You just don't know what's coming. It's a fairground of writerly rides and coconut shies. You can lose yourself in a book like this. You can hop around. It's great. A reading holiday. A change. New weather. A break from the all the know-where-you-are genres.
Yes, this is not kickass branded product, with a nailed-down narrative gunning for a film deal (yawn). That said, it has most definitely been painstakingly and lovingly arranged by an editor with a fine sense of creative balance - an art in itself - and I commend it to you strongly in the hope that you will enjoy it and in turn re-commend it to your friends, suggest it to your book group, e-gift it to your relatives in chilly Moose Jaw this Christmas, tweet it to Stephen Fry, facebook it, spread the word, Salmagundi, Salmagundi.
Just look into those little front cover eyes. If you see them blink - which I swear you will - have a look inside. You are sure to find something to charm your eyes. I know which is my absolute fave story is and my two next faves, but I am not going to tell you as that wld spoilt if for you and we most certainly can't have that. *add to your trolly now!*
This is not one of the numberless kissass covers to be found at every e-turn from rising authors stutting their 'brand'. I wonder which genius decided that authors now have to be brands? For some reason those two little eyes a-peering out really make me want me to peer into their realm. What shy little creature lurks within?
This is good. I am won more by those two little eyes than by a No.1. cacophany of tartly-branded visual hammer blows. Yes, I am a-judging a book by its cover. But then those two little eyes a-peering out really do make my eyes want to peer in. Because... I do not know why, and it does not matter. All I know is this, if you look at those two eyes for long enough, I swear to you that you will see them blink.
I know this is all a double rum, but I instinctively sense there is a link between those two little bewtiching eyes and the nature of the art to be found within the e-covers of A Splendid Salmagundi, an art which will charm-e the eyes of all those curious enough and wise enough to want to taste it.
The joy of reading anthologies is not knowing what will grab you until you stumbles into its outstretched arms and are half hugged to death by it. You dip in, you try a bit of this, a bit of that on a read-one-like-one-read-one-maybe-read-one-love-one-basis. It wld be a very picky reader indeed who does not find a good few read-one-love-ones here-e. You just don't know what's coming. It's a fairground of writerly rides and coconut shies. You can lose yourself in a book like this. You can hop around. It's great. A reading holiday. A change. New weather. A break from the all the know-where-you-are genres.
Yes, this is not kickass branded product, with a nailed-down narrative gunning for a film deal (yawn). That said, it has most definitely been painstakingly and lovingly arranged by an editor with a fine sense of creative balance - an art in itself - and I commend it to you strongly in the hope that you will enjoy it and in turn re-commend it to your friends, suggest it to your book group, e-gift it to your relatives in chilly Moose Jaw this Christmas, tweet it to Stephen Fry, facebook it, spread the word, Salmagundi, Salmagundi.
Just look into those little front cover eyes. If you see them blink - which I swear you will - have a look inside. You are sure to find something to charm your eyes. I know which is my absolute fave story is and my two next faves, but I am not going to tell you as that wld spoilt if for you and we most certainly can't have that. *add to your trolly now!*
October 20, 2012
AH, THE EM FAUSTUS HUMOUR ~ a review
Dog by Christoper Davison is the most cunning witfeast, witfest, wittly witfully witsome witlord of humour I have been coshed by for some time.
Probably.
Actually, it is. Once I got into the way it hangs I enjoyed every epage chortle of it.
It's about a dick with a cute regulation dick hat, a dick desk, a dick office, a dick smoking habit, a quick dick sidekick, a dick coffee habit, a dick mother of a case, and a dick take on post-structural twenty-first century this n that.
Just don't ever, never ask what EM stands for, and don't never ever never cubed ever diss the film club.
Grate in the zest of 40s and 70s style violence and the screwed up genes of a clutch of inter-genre archytypes including some gone wrong vamps, shape-shifters and a very alluring S&M fairy queen and you are at base camp one of getting the dick pic.
Basically, DOG it will bite your face off and -- I TWEET YOU NOT! -- you will thank it for breathing espresso fumes into your X-factored-out soul.
Probably.
Maybe.
Definitely.
There is lots of lurverly violence. And if you like moral fiber, EM Fasutus IS Mr.Moral-Viber, even if his forehead does slip from time to time to break the odd nose. He is also, lucky-unlucky-lucky in love. And he cleans up.
Sort of.
Tilting the metaphysical trilby which I am actually wearing -- maybe -- out of respect for Faustus (don't ask) as I tap this review out, there is serious stuff, too. Like the odd brilliant insight into the social fabrick-rhymes-with-click-click-dick of Britain now, oh and the nature of gods.
'I had the urge to turn a page,' says Faustus. So did I.
'I invested two years of lust in this woman,' says Faustus. Sigh. We know, oh we soooo know, mate.
And, let the record show, Faustus will josh with you as you read:
Pete looked confused.
'I am confused,' he said.
Told you.
Yesp, Chris Davison was cooking with gas when he created this witty casserole of..
GRAB
SLAB
BANG
.. of .. a sort of rainbow in the prism of the venom.
Psssst, 'I'm 38 you know.'
Ron Askew ~ author of Watching Swifts
Probably.
Actually, it is. Once I got into the way it hangs I enjoyed every epage chortle of it.
It's about a dick with a cute regulation dick hat, a dick desk, a dick office, a dick smoking habit, a quick dick sidekick, a dick coffee habit, a dick mother of a case, and a dick take on post-structural twenty-first century this n that.
Just don't ever, never ask what EM stands for, and don't never ever never cubed ever diss the film club.
Grate in the zest of 40s and 70s style violence and the screwed up genes of a clutch of inter-genre archytypes including some gone wrong vamps, shape-shifters and a very alluring S&M fairy queen and you are at base camp one of getting the dick pic.
Basically, DOG it will bite your face off and -- I TWEET YOU NOT! -- you will thank it for breathing espresso fumes into your X-factored-out soul.
Probably.
Maybe.
Definitely.
There is lots of lurverly violence. And if you like moral fiber, EM Fasutus IS Mr.Moral-Viber, even if his forehead does slip from time to time to break the odd nose. He is also, lucky-unlucky-lucky in love. And he cleans up.
Sort of.
Tilting the metaphysical trilby which I am actually wearing -- maybe -- out of respect for Faustus (don't ask) as I tap this review out, there is serious stuff, too. Like the odd brilliant insight into the social fabrick-rhymes-with-click-click-dick of Britain now, oh and the nature of gods.
'I had the urge to turn a page,' says Faustus. So did I.
'I invested two years of lust in this woman,' says Faustus. Sigh. We know, oh we soooo know, mate.
And, let the record show, Faustus will josh with you as you read:
Pete looked confused.
'I am confused,' he said.
Told you.
Yesp, Chris Davison was cooking with gas when he created this witty casserole of..
GRAB
SLAB
BANG
.. of .. a sort of rainbow in the prism of the venom.
Psssst, 'I'm 38 you know.'
Ron Askew ~ author of Watching Swifts
October 9, 2012
POMPOMBERRY HOUSE - a salty satire on the ferral indie authors behind our ebooks (+spoilers)
Once upon a time you had to be an educated gentleman to write a book. You had to have the leisure to do it and, quite likely, influential friends in London to help with the grubby biz of printing and publishing it. And of course you would probably be wealthy enough not to worry toooo much about your royalties, depending on your thirst for port wine.
Now anyone can write and publish a books. And we do in our thousands, millions even. There has never been a time like this. We may be living in a golden age of creativity. On the other hand... Many, traditionalists esp., see the tidal wave of new creativity as a tsunami of semi-literate slush. Grammar and editing are soooo last century. Does it matter that the story is half-cocked? Noooooo. All that matters now, we are told, is the author's brand .. and sales, sales, sales.
Rosen Trevithick's Pompomberry House dives headfirst into this mosh pit of milling mores and body surfs the heaving brew with verve and style
It is a very witty book.
A swarm of indie authors go on a writers' weekend on a remote Cornish tidal isle. They are all absurd for different reasons and are all mercilessly lampooned for our amusement. The plot creaks a bit and is as ridiculous as they are in some ways. But hey, it doesn't matter because that is part of this charming satire in which the delusions have delusions.
The writing is often vivid and enjoyable. I wrote down loads of grreat dabs which caught my eye, such as this:
-- Her lips were painted a bright, glossy pink and her resting expression left them slightly partedl like a miniature letterbox waiting for a delivery.
But it was the sharp little needle pricks of wit that really make it, such as these:
-- a whale squirming in a microwave
-- a tower of rage in Topshop heels
-- that irksome Buzz Lightyear look about him
Ah yes, and then there is Dee, the innocent abroad, 'clutching her pencil case for comfort' as she finds herself in danger of being eaten alive by the monstrous egotisical vats of vanity she gets stuck with. We feel her discomfort with the extremes of human frailty she finds herself stuck with. She is the best writer of the lot, but they overawe her. She has no escape. This is a great joke as the whole point of her being there is to escape from another disappointing human, her hubby. Poor Dee! She wants to do right but is thwarted at every turn. Yet she is not unaware of her own sales figures and is not lily white as she checks out the guys her weekend throws her way.
One of my fave dabs is a seduction scene where a hunk makes a play for her, which she thwards, but this just drives him crazy:
-- 'I love it! Feisty! Grrrr!' He made claws with his fingers and mauled the air.
Brilliant stuff. And I can't not mention this lurverly dab either. Dee has just had a snog and describes the buzz suffusing her as
-- like a tingle panther
Let the review get a bit like the plot. Hectic.
The seagull I began to think of as perhaps representing, me, us, the readers, a sort of prying presence. Dawn's pig gambit reminded me of Piggy in Lord of the Flies, esp so at the end of the story, as did the island setting. I also thought of Robinson Cruso and The Tempest.
This dab cracked me up: .. the resounding snorting sound that indicates loose snot .. but then this dab made me sigh .. another choral moment in the heavenly hymn of creativity.
PPBH is just soo set in the now: '..people never visit without texting first..' Gareth seems a typical now man with all his naff ways. Much as Dee is such a now woman with her winning ways. Their relationship is soo now also. Maybe this thread of the story anchors the delusional lives of writers. We can't escape right? All this rampant creativity really is potty. There is desperation at every turn in the real and the deulsional lives.
Another dab I love: ..with Danger operating in power-saving mode.. and (pause to breath) this .. I opted instead for a head toss .. I can sooooo see both of those moments.
Now then, Enid. Gulp. Can you keep a secret? Before I started identifying with the seagull I, for the briefest of moments, wanted to high five Enid. This is notnot good, I confess. But this is nothing if not an honest review, and that is how I felt. I am not proud of it. But there we are. I even wondered, if the author sneakily agreed with Enid. Were that the case, then the story becomes a satire of the purest genius. Such a genius, wld throw in a happy ending, too, yes? Ach, this is unworthy. Moving swiftly on.
Actually, Enid has some great lines, esp: '..that's why you're all so bad .. you're not honest with each other..'
The scene with the authors stampeding to exit with the floor rumbling and warping is worthy of the greatest comedy writer of all, the mighty Aristophanes.
Ach, but the absolute killer in this passage is Enid's jealously which trumps her honesty! Marvellous!
There's quite a bit of genteel four-legged frolicing going on as we go along. As you do.
Chapter 17. Things get really intensely serious here. Dee freaks. It feels very real. Coincidentally, I felt a little unhinged for different reasons as I read this chapter.
Ach, and then a little further on. Those pesky gulls again! '..racing around the airspace, [?] with menace.' If they are not readers, they cld represent the author's creative doubts. Or they cld just be there as a conceit to unsttle us.
This passage really puzzles me and I have thought about it a lot: '..the monstrous figure of an oversized seagull poised impatiently on the rock before me'. Yep, it feels like a sort of creative goad urging the author on perhaps. 'Land this story!'
I can't end without saying you had me chuckling with this dab: '.. my heart alomst fell through my vagina ..'
Bravo! PPBH is a cracking satire for our time. It is how we are in so many ways. I was a bit resistant to the the story to begin with because I need to get out more in my reading ways. I am glad I went for PPBH because I found some lovely bits here and there. And I got to like Dee, daft as she is at times. And I bought the happy ending. I even enjoyed getting a bit freaked as I read Ch 17 as it meant the story was working in me in subliminal ways. PPHH was the first story I have read on my new kindle. It got its grappling hooks in my eyes and bossed my curiosity to the end. Oh and Enid dear, there isn't a literal to be found..and, in these post-structural times... Aww, shuddup Askew, they get the picture. And fingers crossed for you that it does become a picture one day. *bows*
Pompomberry House
Now anyone can write and publish a books. And we do in our thousands, millions even. There has never been a time like this. We may be living in a golden age of creativity. On the other hand... Many, traditionalists esp., see the tidal wave of new creativity as a tsunami of semi-literate slush. Grammar and editing are soooo last century. Does it matter that the story is half-cocked? Noooooo. All that matters now, we are told, is the author's brand .. and sales, sales, sales.
Rosen Trevithick's Pompomberry House dives headfirst into this mosh pit of milling mores and body surfs the heaving brew with verve and style
It is a very witty book.
A swarm of indie authors go on a writers' weekend on a remote Cornish tidal isle. They are all absurd for different reasons and are all mercilessly lampooned for our amusement. The plot creaks a bit and is as ridiculous as they are in some ways. But hey, it doesn't matter because that is part of this charming satire in which the delusions have delusions.
The writing is often vivid and enjoyable. I wrote down loads of grreat dabs which caught my eye, such as this:
-- Her lips were painted a bright, glossy pink and her resting expression left them slightly partedl like a miniature letterbox waiting for a delivery.
But it was the sharp little needle pricks of wit that really make it, such as these:
-- a whale squirming in a microwave
-- a tower of rage in Topshop heels
-- that irksome Buzz Lightyear look about him
Ah yes, and then there is Dee, the innocent abroad, 'clutching her pencil case for comfort' as she finds herself in danger of being eaten alive by the monstrous egotisical vats of vanity she gets stuck with. We feel her discomfort with the extremes of human frailty she finds herself stuck with. She is the best writer of the lot, but they overawe her. She has no escape. This is a great joke as the whole point of her being there is to escape from another disappointing human, her hubby. Poor Dee! She wants to do right but is thwarted at every turn. Yet she is not unaware of her own sales figures and is not lily white as she checks out the guys her weekend throws her way.
One of my fave dabs is a seduction scene where a hunk makes a play for her, which she thwards, but this just drives him crazy:
-- 'I love it! Feisty! Grrrr!' He made claws with his fingers and mauled the air.
Brilliant stuff. And I can't not mention this lurverly dab either. Dee has just had a snog and describes the buzz suffusing her as
-- like a tingle panther
Let the review get a bit like the plot. Hectic.
The seagull I began to think of as perhaps representing, me, us, the readers, a sort of prying presence. Dawn's pig gambit reminded me of Piggy in Lord of the Flies, esp so at the end of the story, as did the island setting. I also thought of Robinson Cruso and The Tempest.
This dab cracked me up: .. the resounding snorting sound that indicates loose snot .. but then this dab made me sigh .. another choral moment in the heavenly hymn of creativity.
PPBH is just soo set in the now: '..people never visit without texting first..' Gareth seems a typical now man with all his naff ways. Much as Dee is such a now woman with her winning ways. Their relationship is soo now also. Maybe this thread of the story anchors the delusional lives of writers. We can't escape right? All this rampant creativity really is potty. There is desperation at every turn in the real and the deulsional lives.
Another dab I love: ..with Danger operating in power-saving mode.. and (pause to breath) this .. I opted instead for a head toss .. I can sooooo see both of those moments.
Now then, Enid. Gulp. Can you keep a secret? Before I started identifying with the seagull I, for the briefest of moments, wanted to high five Enid. This is notnot good, I confess. But this is nothing if not an honest review, and that is how I felt. I am not proud of it. But there we are. I even wondered, if the author sneakily agreed with Enid. Were that the case, then the story becomes a satire of the purest genius. Such a genius, wld throw in a happy ending, too, yes? Ach, this is unworthy. Moving swiftly on.
Actually, Enid has some great lines, esp: '..that's why you're all so bad .. you're not honest with each other..'
The scene with the authors stampeding to exit with the floor rumbling and warping is worthy of the greatest comedy writer of all, the mighty Aristophanes.
Ach, but the absolute killer in this passage is Enid's jealously which trumps her honesty! Marvellous!
There's quite a bit of genteel four-legged frolicing going on as we go along. As you do.
Chapter 17. Things get really intensely serious here. Dee freaks. It feels very real. Coincidentally, I felt a little unhinged for different reasons as I read this chapter.
Ach, and then a little further on. Those pesky gulls again! '..racing around the airspace, [?] with menace.' If they are not readers, they cld represent the author's creative doubts. Or they cld just be there as a conceit to unsttle us.
This passage really puzzles me and I have thought about it a lot: '..the monstrous figure of an oversized seagull poised impatiently on the rock before me'. Yep, it feels like a sort of creative goad urging the author on perhaps. 'Land this story!'
I can't end without saying you had me chuckling with this dab: '.. my heart alomst fell through my vagina ..'
Bravo! PPBH is a cracking satire for our time. It is how we are in so many ways. I was a bit resistant to the the story to begin with because I need to get out more in my reading ways. I am glad I went for PPBH because I found some lovely bits here and there. And I got to like Dee, daft as she is at times. And I bought the happy ending. I even enjoyed getting a bit freaked as I read Ch 17 as it meant the story was working in me in subliminal ways. PPHH was the first story I have read on my new kindle. It got its grappling hooks in my eyes and bossed my curiosity to the end. Oh and Enid dear, there isn't a literal to be found..and, in these post-structural times... Aww, shuddup Askew, they get the picture. And fingers crossed for you that it does become a picture one day. *bows*
Pompomberry House
October 3, 2012
INSIGHT INTO AN INDIE AUTHOR'S IN-IN-INKSOMNIA
I wonder if I can get from 70-100 sales. This indie author malarky feels like climing Everest. Hold fast! Don't look up! I look up. Noooo sigh of the summit, just jagged ice-covered rocks. More adept authors than I surge past with the assurance of flies scurrying up a window pane. How do they do it?
Fear refluxes into my throat. I gag. This is intensely physical. Each morning, the same: log on, hit dtp.amazon.com, go to 'reports', hit 'sales this month', the same, no change, cling on in grim desperation. Welcome to the 99cts 77p ebook cage fight.
A YA fantasy writer scrambles over my back with 10 new sales. I feel their foot on my shoulder as they subordinate me. A historical romance writer catches hold of my ankle, pulls herself over my contemplative liteary fiction body. She uses my rib cage like a ladder. She has 15 new sales today. I see them bulging in a sack on her back. She's tweeting with her left hand, txting with her right, while an indie camera crew is doing an arts docu of her 'Indie Author Experience'. The presenter stands on my head as he does voice to camera.
A shrill scream makes us all freeze. A broken-hearted childrens writer hurtles past us as she fall, fall, falls from somewhere up above. I catch a snatch of her parting cry: '..see what your bitchy review has made me dooooooooo..' And then she's gone, vanished, never to be heard of again, perhaps to take up yoga-golf.
The film crew move higher, their skinny arses vanishing into self-declared success. I have my nonentify to myself. I cling on. How much longer will this nightmare run and run? Will I, too, fall the fall of your wannabe talent? I should tweet, but dare not move. No money on my phone. Ach, no phone. I tweet you not, I am a mess.
AGGGGGGH-OWWWWWWWWWWWWW! MY FRACKING STORY'S JUST STUCK IT'S SPURS INTO MY KIDNEYS. BREATH COMES FAST N HARD. I LOOK UP .. 71 .. i reach up .. my weight pulls, pulls, pulls me back .. ANOTHER KICK! WHEN WILL THIS never END? .. i reach up, grab, miss .. up, grab, miss .. pant .. up, grab, miss .. HOLD FAST! My mouth is dry. I lick the water drippling down the rock. Water? This is no water. The bodily fluids of thouuuuuusaaaaands of toiloing writers high above me stream over the rocks. They offer no relief. Why wld they? I am their enemy, albeit a pathetic sub-literal to the majestic Mexican sombrero of their greatness.
I gag. The slipperyness of this place terrifies me. My story Watching Swifts (amazon.com 99cts amazon.co.uk 77p) falls asleep. I read the tattoo on its happening arm: 'Warning: this story WILL bite.'
I sigh in relieved disbelief. Time for a shave and a shower, to go into the world, to forget all this .. blissful desperation .. with the latest best advice of a reader ringing in my 50:50 hearing: 'put more S&M in (or even M&S)' .. and that other comment from the unsmiling Brazilian woman '..it's all about winning Ron..' The lack of M&S in said story is clearly a greater flaw than the lack of S&M, my image action analysis consultant intern, Biggles Gutz, informs me, sales wise.
And so, let this chRONicle of wasted time show, I look up and focus on 71. 'I will have you,' I snarls. 'I WILL have YOU!'
Another broken writer hurtles past me .. hundreds and hundreds of sales won spill said fading talent's sack. I shut my eyes and whimper in thrice distilled terror. A warm stream runs down my trembling leg.
Now what? What ifresh torment be this? A metallic HeiRONymous Boch demon with eight reticulated egos, scurries down and shines a beam in my eye. It shakes it head. It sees no worth, moves on. A kickass London literary agent for you.
Up above, I hears the dragon helicopter once more. There are cheers, a band, P.J.HARTLEY? champage storks, the sound of shortlists being formulated. Said dragon-copter flies back to the publishing houuse in the burning tower.
I press my cheek against the sheer rock face of creative death. My eyes meet those of a mocking nutrino just a-passing on through... 'Check this new yoga-golf offer out, dude,' yells said nutrino. 'I TWEET YOU NOT! You just won't believe the suite of seven star benefits we've made standard in one easy-to-own enhanced premier membership package, just for youza.'
And so, no arse knowingly unlicked, UNLESS YOU BUY Watching Swifts NOWZA! I *WILL* POST MORE HERE. i TWEET YOU NOT!
And if you have already bought said Watching Swifts feel how, behind this flamless flim I love you deeply, eternally, AND! sincerely. I really do. *bows* Licks your ankle and peers up with imploring puppy dog eyes .. please, o please, please, please, can you get your best friend to invest in Watching Swifts or your worst enemy for that matter as that wld be the very best way for you to reciprocate the warmth of this gigantic love I have for you *licks other ankle in the sheerest supplication to your 10-candle genius, wit n brilliance*
Fear refluxes into my throat. I gag. This is intensely physical. Each morning, the same: log on, hit dtp.amazon.com, go to 'reports', hit 'sales this month', the same, no change, cling on in grim desperation. Welcome to the 99cts 77p ebook cage fight.
A YA fantasy writer scrambles over my back with 10 new sales. I feel their foot on my shoulder as they subordinate me. A historical romance writer catches hold of my ankle, pulls herself over my contemplative liteary fiction body. She uses my rib cage like a ladder. She has 15 new sales today. I see them bulging in a sack on her back. She's tweeting with her left hand, txting with her right, while an indie camera crew is doing an arts docu of her 'Indie Author Experience'. The presenter stands on my head as he does voice to camera.
A shrill scream makes us all freeze. A broken-hearted childrens writer hurtles past us as she fall, fall, falls from somewhere up above. I catch a snatch of her parting cry: '..see what your bitchy review has made me dooooooooo..' And then she's gone, vanished, never to be heard of again, perhaps to take up yoga-golf.
The film crew move higher, their skinny arses vanishing into self-declared success. I have my nonentify to myself. I cling on. How much longer will this nightmare run and run? Will I, too, fall the fall of your wannabe talent? I should tweet, but dare not move. No money on my phone. Ach, no phone. I tweet you not, I am a mess.
AGGGGGGH-OWWWWWWWWWWWWW! MY FRACKING STORY'S JUST STUCK IT'S SPURS INTO MY KIDNEYS. BREATH COMES FAST N HARD. I LOOK UP .. 71 .. i reach up .. my weight pulls, pulls, pulls me back .. ANOTHER KICK! WHEN WILL THIS never END? .. i reach up, grab, miss .. up, grab, miss .. pant .. up, grab, miss .. HOLD FAST! My mouth is dry. I lick the water drippling down the rock. Water? This is no water. The bodily fluids of thouuuuuusaaaaands of toiloing writers high above me stream over the rocks. They offer no relief. Why wld they? I am their enemy, albeit a pathetic sub-literal to the majestic Mexican sombrero of their greatness.
I gag. The slipperyness of this place terrifies me. My story Watching Swifts (amazon.com 99cts amazon.co.uk 77p) falls asleep. I read the tattoo on its happening arm: 'Warning: this story WILL bite.'
I sigh in relieved disbelief. Time for a shave and a shower, to go into the world, to forget all this .. blissful desperation .. with the latest best advice of a reader ringing in my 50:50 hearing: 'put more S&M in (or even M&S)' .. and that other comment from the unsmiling Brazilian woman '..it's all about winning Ron..' The lack of M&S in said story is clearly a greater flaw than the lack of S&M, my image action analysis consultant intern, Biggles Gutz, informs me, sales wise.
And so, let this chRONicle of wasted time show, I look up and focus on 71. 'I will have you,' I snarls. 'I WILL have YOU!'
Another broken writer hurtles past me .. hundreds and hundreds of sales won spill said fading talent's sack. I shut my eyes and whimper in thrice distilled terror. A warm stream runs down my trembling leg.
Now what? What ifresh torment be this? A metallic HeiRONymous Boch demon with eight reticulated egos, scurries down and shines a beam in my eye. It shakes it head. It sees no worth, moves on. A kickass London literary agent for you.
Up above, I hears the dragon helicopter once more. There are cheers, a band, P.J.HARTLEY? champage storks, the sound of shortlists being formulated. Said dragon-copter flies back to the publishing houuse in the burning tower.
I press my cheek against the sheer rock face of creative death. My eyes meet those of a mocking nutrino just a-passing on through... 'Check this new yoga-golf offer out, dude,' yells said nutrino. 'I TWEET YOU NOT! You just won't believe the suite of seven star benefits we've made standard in one easy-to-own enhanced premier membership package, just for youza.'
And so, no arse knowingly unlicked, UNLESS YOU BUY Watching Swifts NOWZA! I *WILL* POST MORE HERE. i TWEET YOU NOT!
And if you have already bought said Watching Swifts feel how, behind this flamless flim I love you deeply, eternally, AND! sincerely. I really do. *bows* Licks your ankle and peers up with imploring puppy dog eyes .. please, o please, please, please, can you get your best friend to invest in Watching Swifts or your worst enemy for that matter as that wld be the very best way for you to reciprocate the warmth of this gigantic love I have for you *licks other ankle in the sheerest supplication to your 10-candle genius, wit n brilliance*
September 30, 2012
52FF ~ review
I have not yet met Marc Nash author of 52FF, but I will have no trouble spotting him when I do as he will be the one with the 1,000 word stare of the flash fictionalist. He will, it being the nature of the beast, either be coming down from nailing his latest ff or prepping to write his next.
Flash fiction seems the perfect genre, if that be what it is, for our times. You have an idea. You nail it. Forget beginning-middle-end, as to plan wld not be flash. We txt n tweet our lives into the real time river of whatever. Your flash fictionalist just grabs the raw juice and adds another 990 words to make it into a chunk of art. Is it a big poem? Nope. Is is a tiny novel? Nope. It's a stretched heartbeat of nowness, about a hundred tweets say. Those of us who can't live by txts n tweets alone, who crave more, but are super impatient and either unwill or incapable of reading a 100,000 novel should find the 1,000 word flash a perfect solution. You can flash read. You can take 1,000 words in a few minutes. You don't have to give up half your day. You don't have to work your way into it. Read. Change tubes. Read another. Move on.
To hold the flash reader's attention the flash fictionalist needs must to be nimble.
Marc Nash's creative intellect is exactly that ~ nimble.
I have so far read 17 of the stories in 52FF and can you assure you of this. Marc Nash is a writer who commands great originality in his choice of subject matter, great wit, great sensitivity and, this above all, great dexterity in his skill with da werds. He loves the the sheer pleasure of being in the creative spectrum in the wordfall. But this embellishment never gets in the way of the story, the mood, or whatever each fiction is about, but adds another reason for enjoying the read. My overall impression was of strong contemporay intelligence in full flow. We can learn from Marc Nash's fictions and perhaps adjust our own lives for the better.
I won't spoil your enjoyment of his stories by revealing any of the subjects but I will give you a couple of exmaples of his wording which caught my eye.
(Contemplating a lover who has left) "A labyrinth of hidden plumbing .. how she must still reside there, little tiny shards and spoors of hair, nails and other off-cuts. .. She persecutes me from within the pipes, blow-darting me to a slow ruin."
(A woman studying the elbow of her sleeping lover) "There you could witness the celluar architecture of the human body in all its intricacy. .. Tiny parallelograms .. The shifting orchestration was simply divine."
(An aged actress in her dressing room) "...her own mind's bulbs popped one by one .. no unseen stage hand in her head to replace the burned out filaments."
I love this sort of writing. I am happy when I find one such passage in 50 pages. But I kept coming across such passages ever few pages in 52FF.
I will return to dip into 52FF. And I know exactly how I will do so. I will come back at moments of disappointment, when I am stuck with something, at moments when I need a lift. Because I know that every third or second offering in 52FF will deliver a jold of some some true nourishment to refresh my jaded palette.
Ron Askew ~ Watching Swifts
Flash fiction seems the perfect genre, if that be what it is, for our times. You have an idea. You nail it. Forget beginning-middle-end, as to plan wld not be flash. We txt n tweet our lives into the real time river of whatever. Your flash fictionalist just grabs the raw juice and adds another 990 words to make it into a chunk of art. Is it a big poem? Nope. Is is a tiny novel? Nope. It's a stretched heartbeat of nowness, about a hundred tweets say. Those of us who can't live by txts n tweets alone, who crave more, but are super impatient and either unwill or incapable of reading a 100,000 novel should find the 1,000 word flash a perfect solution. You can flash read. You can take 1,000 words in a few minutes. You don't have to give up half your day. You don't have to work your way into it. Read. Change tubes. Read another. Move on.
To hold the flash reader's attention the flash fictionalist needs must to be nimble.
Marc Nash's creative intellect is exactly that ~ nimble.
I have so far read 17 of the stories in 52FF and can you assure you of this. Marc Nash is a writer who commands great originality in his choice of subject matter, great wit, great sensitivity and, this above all, great dexterity in his skill with da werds. He loves the the sheer pleasure of being in the creative spectrum in the wordfall. But this embellishment never gets in the way of the story, the mood, or whatever each fiction is about, but adds another reason for enjoying the read. My overall impression was of strong contemporay intelligence in full flow. We can learn from Marc Nash's fictions and perhaps adjust our own lives for the better.
I won't spoil your enjoyment of his stories by revealing any of the subjects but I will give you a couple of exmaples of his wording which caught my eye.
(Contemplating a lover who has left) "A labyrinth of hidden plumbing .. how she must still reside there, little tiny shards and spoors of hair, nails and other off-cuts. .. She persecutes me from within the pipes, blow-darting me to a slow ruin."
(A woman studying the elbow of her sleeping lover) "There you could witness the celluar architecture of the human body in all its intricacy. .. Tiny parallelograms .. The shifting orchestration was simply divine."
(An aged actress in her dressing room) "...her own mind's bulbs popped one by one .. no unseen stage hand in her head to replace the burned out filaments."
I love this sort of writing. I am happy when I find one such passage in 50 pages. But I kept coming across such passages ever few pages in 52FF.
I will return to dip into 52FF. And I know exactly how I will do so. I will come back at moments of disappointment, when I am stuck with something, at moments when I need a lift. Because I know that every third or second offering in 52FF will deliver a jold of some some true nourishment to refresh my jaded palette.
Ron Askew ~ Watching Swifts
August 19, 2012
[Re] Awakenings
Re Awakenings, an anthology of Speculative Fiction embraces short stories ranging from sci-fi, to horror and fantasy. This comment focuses on the final story, The Dragon and the Rose, by Gingerlily.
I was immediately taken by the easy playfullness and sheer good fun of this story, which bossed my jaded eyes from start to finish. I read the story stretched out in my garden on the hottest day of the year. Its languid good humour suited the atmosphere perfectly.
The Dragon and Rose is a storyteller's story. The story is all. The writing delivers the story and does not get in the way.
I was won early on by the line, 'it doesn't actually have to make sense.' I surrendered to the story at that point. I mean, why must everything have to make sense anyway? I am cool with things that don't make sense, Life included often.
There is a fairy tail feel to The Dragon and Rose. Rose is a 'vain, self-deceiving and bad-tempered' monster, the archetype of a spoilt western kid. Maybe there is a bit of her in us in our craving for a few servants to bully and order around, though of course we wld never admit this. But that is basically how the first world is set up. We click our fingers and get what we want.
Once I started reading the story as an allegorical fairy tale of how we are I was always going to finish it.
I smiled at the casual post-modern humour of 'market gardening and an MP3 player.' Nothing is ever THAT serious in our western lives. It seemed typical that Rose soon tired of the whole adventure trip. I loved the wit of 'second light', by the way.
I thought of the Dragon as a bit like China for a while. Here we are in the west with our cosy princess lives. Snap, eaten up.
The woods -- in the best tradition of telling stories -- seemed to be Life, a place where we can easily lose our way.
Snap eaten up. And then our little helpers are not there either. Oh dear. Now what?
Strang things happen in fairy tales and Mel C was just right. I even -- is my secret safe with you -- felt a little bit envious of him, as I wish I had a bit of 'mystery and magic' in me to sell, sell, sell. Without Mel C Rosies world cld not but, but typically, she groans. Sigh, reality is sooooo tedious, dahling! Get a job? Sell? Moi? (Look number 6).
But Rose is really in the soup now. This is new for her. Maybe a lot of kids feel a bit like this when they can't get jobs today. Times really are tough, very tough now. Yet her response is to try and boss the poor old dragon! Not a great survival strategy in 2012. Ach, how much longer will we have those jacuzzi and French chefs? What great symbols of our doomed lotus eating western ways.
But there is always the enchanted city. Cld the city represent hope, happiness even? And yet what a place it turns out to be, Bling City. 'Maaaaaan, that Breitling watch and that Maserati! you have some cooooool stuff.' Bling, bling!
How telling that Rose clings onto this fantasy with a vengence. And -- I loved this line -- that to Al, 'it hurt his artistic sensibilities'. Yesp, I was square on with Al at this point. Material girl Rose is inedible and far more monstrous than the dragon.
Things really got interesting in the city which seemed to represent the whole way western economies have mushroomed on the back of Emperor's New Clothes Economics over the last 20 years: 'Hey, want some debt? Have some more debt! Debt is guuuuuuud for you! Sign here.'
And so to ~~ for me ~~ the key line in this archly modern fairytale: LET ALL SPELLS CEASE.
I thoght of everything that has happened since 2008 and is still going on: sub=prime, Lehmans, Northern Rock, the slow-mo euro zone car wreck. If you think of it money is just one gigantic spell! But lets not life that spell!
The way the cat and dragon became men again was also fitting. The mad men of the ad industry and TV create such images of how we should be, of what we should want, that we all want THE PRINCE. Their spells blind us to reality. We look for princes and miss men.
I got into The Dragon and Rose and it got me thinking in all sorts of ways. It held me to the end and above all I enjoyed the read. I wld say from this story that you have the storyteller's pixie dust in your wand.
I was immediately taken by the easy playfullness and sheer good fun of this story, which bossed my jaded eyes from start to finish. I read the story stretched out in my garden on the hottest day of the year. Its languid good humour suited the atmosphere perfectly.
The Dragon and Rose is a storyteller's story. The story is all. The writing delivers the story and does not get in the way.
I was won early on by the line, 'it doesn't actually have to make sense.' I surrendered to the story at that point. I mean, why must everything have to make sense anyway? I am cool with things that don't make sense, Life included often.
There is a fairy tail feel to The Dragon and Rose. Rose is a 'vain, self-deceiving and bad-tempered' monster, the archetype of a spoilt western kid. Maybe there is a bit of her in us in our craving for a few servants to bully and order around, though of course we wld never admit this. But that is basically how the first world is set up. We click our fingers and get what we want.
Once I started reading the story as an allegorical fairy tale of how we are I was always going to finish it.
I smiled at the casual post-modern humour of 'market gardening and an MP3 player.' Nothing is ever THAT serious in our western lives. It seemed typical that Rose soon tired of the whole adventure trip. I loved the wit of 'second light', by the way.
I thought of the Dragon as a bit like China for a while. Here we are in the west with our cosy princess lives. Snap, eaten up.
The woods -- in the best tradition of telling stories -- seemed to be Life, a place where we can easily lose our way.
Snap eaten up. And then our little helpers are not there either. Oh dear. Now what?
Strang things happen in fairy tales and Mel C was just right. I even -- is my secret safe with you -- felt a little bit envious of him, as I wish I had a bit of 'mystery and magic' in me to sell, sell, sell. Without Mel C Rosies world cld not but, but typically, she groans. Sigh, reality is sooooo tedious, dahling! Get a job? Sell? Moi? (Look number 6).
But Rose is really in the soup now. This is new for her. Maybe a lot of kids feel a bit like this when they can't get jobs today. Times really are tough, very tough now. Yet her response is to try and boss the poor old dragon! Not a great survival strategy in 2012. Ach, how much longer will we have those jacuzzi and French chefs? What great symbols of our doomed lotus eating western ways.
But there is always the enchanted city. Cld the city represent hope, happiness even? And yet what a place it turns out to be, Bling City. 'Maaaaaan, that Breitling watch and that Maserati! you have some cooooool stuff.' Bling, bling!
How telling that Rose clings onto this fantasy with a vengence. And -- I loved this line -- that to Al, 'it hurt his artistic sensibilities'. Yesp, I was square on with Al at this point. Material girl Rose is inedible and far more monstrous than the dragon.
Things really got interesting in the city which seemed to represent the whole way western economies have mushroomed on the back of Emperor's New Clothes Economics over the last 20 years: 'Hey, want some debt? Have some more debt! Debt is guuuuuuud for you! Sign here.'
And so to ~~ for me ~~ the key line in this archly modern fairytale: LET ALL SPELLS CEASE.
I thoght of everything that has happened since 2008 and is still going on: sub=prime, Lehmans, Northern Rock, the slow-mo euro zone car wreck. If you think of it money is just one gigantic spell! But lets not life that spell!
The way the cat and dragon became men again was also fitting. The mad men of the ad industry and TV create such images of how we should be, of what we should want, that we all want THE PRINCE. Their spells blind us to reality. We look for princes and miss men.
I got into The Dragon and Rose and it got me thinking in all sorts of ways. It held me to the end and above all I enjoyed the read. I wld say from this story that you have the storyteller's pixie dust in your wand.
August 3, 2012
VIC'S BIG WALK - a review
How does one mark one's 70th birthday? An extra tot of a favoured malt perhaps? Or a lazy cruise in the Med?
Vic Heaney chose to walk almost 2000 kilometres from his home in the south of France to bis birthplace in Blackpool, north-west England.
Vic's Big Walk: From SW France to NW England is an excellent read because of the author's motivation for writing his story and the inspirational nature of the achievment it chronicles, especially, but not exclusively, for anyone approaching their 60s or 70s. VBW is not overtly a self-help book as at no point does it promise to change the reader's life in some wonderful way. Yet this may actually be one of it's secret benefits for some readers because it shows how someone may set themselves an adventurous and difficult goal and then actually knuckle down to work out how to do it and then get on with the achieving of said goal with minimal fuss.
I could not walk some 30 kilometres a day for 70 days on the trot. Something would give, be it physical or mental. The more I got into the read the more I was astonished - a couple of black nails and one or two other wobbles apart - at the author's sheer resilience.
But Vic had a very strong motivation for his feat: charity. The onset of his 70th birthday seemed to become secondary to this more selfless motive. I am sure that Vic's singlemind dedermination to 'do something' for others must have given him great energy on the way.
While VBW chronicles the 70 days of the walk, it also reveals the depth of planning needed over a much longer time, and the indispensible help of Vic's wife Gay at every step. So while the book was about Vic's walk, it is very much the story of a well organised team getting it right. The intelligence and patience required are inspiring.
Vic says himself he did not have any great thoughts on his walk as he was too busy doing the actual walking. As one prone to wallow in sentiment and metaphysical specualtion, this pragmatic approach to a long-term task is very appealing. Vic set out to do something and did it. Simple enough you might say. But in this age of instant pleasures and absurd rush, we often lose sight of the value of taking our time over something worth doing
That said, as Vic's walk neared its conclusion VBW does offer some touching insights into the author's young life in less frantic times. How different we all were then. Life is materially richer for most of us now, but are we the happier for it? Vic the walker notices how fast we drive around, how difficult it is to get away from the sound of traffic, constant traffic in much of England.
And a thousand kilometers back -- the cuckoos of France, endless cuckoos. One of the joys of VBW is the often witty insights into Vic's surroundings. His quest for coffee and blueberry muffins was eternal. His musings on the physical advantage of trees to the walker, on the attitude of the French to their trees, on the vagaries of way often had me chuckling. So, too, his encounters with hostile dogs and coincidental meetings with people were always engaging as were his insights into French history, eepecially in the region in which he now lives.
I felt as if I was on a journey as I read VBW. Perhaps I was measuring myself against Vic, perhaps I was thinking, could I do that, how would I be in that situation. All of which is good. Vic may have strayed from his path a few kilometres here and there, but his moral and compass gave him a true bearing from start to finish from which he did not deviate.
Ron Askew - Watching Swifts
Vic Heaney chose to walk almost 2000 kilometres from his home in the south of France to bis birthplace in Blackpool, north-west England.
Vic's Big Walk: From SW France to NW England is an excellent read because of the author's motivation for writing his story and the inspirational nature of the achievment it chronicles, especially, but not exclusively, for anyone approaching their 60s or 70s. VBW is not overtly a self-help book as at no point does it promise to change the reader's life in some wonderful way. Yet this may actually be one of it's secret benefits for some readers because it shows how someone may set themselves an adventurous and difficult goal and then actually knuckle down to work out how to do it and then get on with the achieving of said goal with minimal fuss.
I could not walk some 30 kilometres a day for 70 days on the trot. Something would give, be it physical or mental. The more I got into the read the more I was astonished - a couple of black nails and one or two other wobbles apart - at the author's sheer resilience.
But Vic had a very strong motivation for his feat: charity. The onset of his 70th birthday seemed to become secondary to this more selfless motive. I am sure that Vic's singlemind dedermination to 'do something' for others must have given him great energy on the way.
While VBW chronicles the 70 days of the walk, it also reveals the depth of planning needed over a much longer time, and the indispensible help of Vic's wife Gay at every step. So while the book was about Vic's walk, it is very much the story of a well organised team getting it right. The intelligence and patience required are inspiring.
Vic says himself he did not have any great thoughts on his walk as he was too busy doing the actual walking. As one prone to wallow in sentiment and metaphysical specualtion, this pragmatic approach to a long-term task is very appealing. Vic set out to do something and did it. Simple enough you might say. But in this age of instant pleasures and absurd rush, we often lose sight of the value of taking our time over something worth doing
That said, as Vic's walk neared its conclusion VBW does offer some touching insights into the author's young life in less frantic times. How different we all were then. Life is materially richer for most of us now, but are we the happier for it? Vic the walker notices how fast we drive around, how difficult it is to get away from the sound of traffic, constant traffic in much of England.
And a thousand kilometers back -- the cuckoos of France, endless cuckoos. One of the joys of VBW is the often witty insights into Vic's surroundings. His quest for coffee and blueberry muffins was eternal. His musings on the physical advantage of trees to the walker, on the attitude of the French to their trees, on the vagaries of way often had me chuckling. So, too, his encounters with hostile dogs and coincidental meetings with people were always engaging as were his insights into French history, eepecially in the region in which he now lives.
I felt as if I was on a journey as I read VBW. Perhaps I was measuring myself against Vic, perhaps I was thinking, could I do that, how would I be in that situation. All of which is good. Vic may have strayed from his path a few kilometres here and there, but his moral and compass gave him a true bearing from start to finish from which he did not deviate.
Ron Askew - Watching Swifts
July 1, 2012
Review of Robert Low's historical novel ~ THE WHALE ROAD
The Whale Road is a thumpingly good viking quest saga set in the mid-tenth century in which the oathsworn crew of the Fjord Elk, led by Einar the dark, rampage violently across the North Sea and then around the Baltic. They follow Hild, a madwoman, into the depths of Russia in search of Attila's burial hoard. Einar the luckless finds his doom in the frenzied climax which leaves young Orm the Bear Slayer to pick up the pieces as the broken band's new jarl.
The WHALE ROAD bossed my eyes from start to finish. It reads like a magic cloak around the shoulders of history making us feel that we are there, in the shield wall, rowing the ship, trudging through the grass sea of the steppes.
I felt the story was in two two parts with the first two thirds or so leading me along, preparing me for the surge of full on action in the last third.
I found the writing to be excellent and especially noted the richness of similies drawing on nature, which strongly evoked a sense of being close to the elements. Here are a few:
-- mouth like a fresh caught cod
-- thoughts in me wheeling and screaming like terns around a fresh catch
-- I shook my head scattering memories like water drops
-- his eyes grey-blue and glassed like a summer sea
-- my mouth dropped open like a droop-lipped horse
-- Einar's head came up with a snap, like a hound on a scent
-- turning now and then like a huge elk at bay
This simile-rich language was prounced in the first part of the story. My favourite among the smilies is this lovely reference to the music of the Fjord Elk powering along: '...the snake hiss of the water under the keel, the deep throat hum of the wind in the ropes, like a struck harp...'
There are many such magical dabs where the writing is so fine that we can, see, feel and hear what is happening with great acuity. Here's another. The oathsworn are about to set go over the hill to raid a Scottish Christ house: 'The sky was milk-white, shading to grey towards us. Somewhere behind that a winter sun fought to cross over the thin, black edge of the world. Trees were skeletal black ... hearing my breathing magnified by the helmet's cheekpieces into a rasp.'
We feel the setting: '...the soft, silent, smirring rain, dripped...a wet mist crept stealthily down the mountain...'
We hear: '...the black sea as is sighed on the shingle.'
We smell a viking's breath: '...strong with herring.'
We smile at: '...no cash-scatterer...' and '...thrown out of Iceland for being too cheerful'.
Being on the poetic side, I especially love this dab: 'Geir Bagnose blew the froth off his fresh horn of ale and began to skald.' Hail poet!
'...a good boar dog...' '...bossless shields...' '...a rune spelled sword...' Dabs like these convince us the author knows. We believe. We are in the Fjord Elk racing through the storm. We experience the flashes of lightning which sear through even closed eyes. We see: '...Illugi Godi, standing alone at the prow, an axe in either hand, chanting prayers. Then he throws them overboard...' We are there. 'Land is a memory,' for us, too.
Such is the exuberance of the first chapters of The WHALE ROAD. We stand with the doomed in the front row of the shield wall, are with them when boar snout slides into positon 'like a cunning toy.' We aim to chop our enemies' feet off. We feel the hurt of our own wounds. We see the hot blood spraying. We begin to dread, 'soup wounds'.
Above all we are on the whale road, can see exactly how the snakeship's sail '...bellied out like some grass-fed mare and the Elk leaped like a goosed housewife...' And we, too, are 'drunk on the sheer beauty of it.'
This is stirring writing. We love history and writing like this breathes life into its lungs. We learn from it. For some of us this is our heritage, for some of us are descended from the very real people who inspired The WHALE ROAD. More than history, they are our ancestors, are in us. And so, for some of us, The WHALE ROAD, reaches something deep within our souls.
As we read we are Orm fixing the edge of our shield, the better to deflect blows. We feel Hild braiding our hair. We smell the farts of those around us and we scratch our lice.
And when the Fjord Elk is burnt to the waterline, we feel the loss of 'our' ship.
BACK INTO THE DIM
The middle of The WHALE ROAD takes us into viking settlements, shows us their trading ways and how they range without limit through what is now Russia, hiring themselves out to local princes. Times are changing for them in one important regard with the arrival of the Christ men. But for now their old ways are only mildly challenged. Indeed, there is a linkage between the ancient viking smiths, who have a mystical status, and the pursuit of a sword thought to have been forged from the metal of the spear driven into Christ. So, too, Christ's cross is reminiscent to them of how one of their own gods was hung from a tree.
The sword is all to them: 'no prize was better than a rune-spelled sword'. This fits in perfectly with the cult of the sword, which is evident throughout literature, from Excalibur to 'biter' in The Hobbit. Swords were potent and precious, symbolic of so much. One dab captures this reverence perfectly: 'blade-bright thought'. And towards the end, 'Hild's voice was the flat of a sword struck on stone'.
And so to the business end of the book.
Einar.
Einar the luckless, Einar the oathbreaker, Einar the doomed. His 'thought-cage warped'. His eyes, 'too full of silver to see clearly'' ... 'his face hidden by the crow wings of his hair.' And this: 'the black waterfall of his hair.'
Who does Einar remind you of? Einar the doomed, flawed hero, who leads his oathsworn people to disaster in the depths of Russia on an insane quest? The thought did cross my mind, 'like a dog chasing a cat'. Most of the oathsworn die in the quest. In truth, the quest, the wild romantic adventure, ends in disaster. Orm survives to pick up what remains.
The vikings are in the midst of destruction defending a siege engine when 'a body plunges to the ground 'with a clatter of iron and breaking bones'. This made me think of Stalingrad.
They are plodding through the grass sea of the steppe following Hild, their mad seerwoman, facing 'the sick realisation that the shrinking band of the oathsworn was the safest place to be for the moment.' How many thousands of German soldiers must have felt exactly that during their retreat from Russia?
'Even whales die on the whale road.' Ach, reality! Again, how many doomed Germans must have felt like Orm: 'I wasn't walking forwards, the whole steppe was moving backwards.' We learn that one of the dead, 'once kept bees in Upsala.' In the midst of the saga the soul hankers for home. The keeping of bees seems a much wiser pursuit that following Einar 'in search of a tale for children'.
Even the skald knows that doom is upon them. He, Bagnose, 'was making verses on his own death'. Doom! Doom!
But then, 'we see the wink of silver, the craft of a thousand smiths'. And Orm is 'drowning in greed'. While Einar is 'spume on a wave, as if a breath would blow him away'. And then Einar of the warped thought-cage is dead 'folded around' Orm's sword as Hilds valkyrie madness and a very real flood fills Attila's bunker-like burial howe.
Jarl Orm promises a new start: 'now we trade'. Like others after them, the vikings, 'could not set foot in the Rus lands now'.
Like others after them, they are broken: 'We had no ship and were crushed with loss'.
'The only safe place was the Great City, Rome, where we had no prospects.' Ach, the Treaty of Rome was signed on the 25th of March, 1957. No prospects indeed!
'What we need is a solid knarr.' To ship our exports around the world! 'A deep-minded plan' indeed!
The epilogue of The WHALE ROAD astonished me because it beautifully captures how we are, the eternal tension between romanace and reality.
On the one hand there is the romance, which lives still: 'You could not be a Northman, have the knowledge of a mountain of silver and leave it there.'
On the other we have the lesson learnt: 'They had not seen what I had seen'.
Depite Orm's wisdom: 'none of my tales of Hild's fetch (ghost) would keep them from going back'.
History repeats herself. We must be wary of the romance of it.
And yet we can't help feeling stirred: 'We were (are) still on the whale road, in the wind that keened and thrummed the ropes.'
The last line of the story is arch: 'I swear I could hear Odin's laugh'.
There is great poetry in those ropes, that thrumming. It stirs our souls. I wrote this a day after finishing Robert Low's most enjoyable story:
JARL TORC
O hear my wind-played ropes a-thrum
Skald axes flying through the sky
To live anew in this word crew
My fetch a-kenning on your mind
My sea you are my whale road free
I swear you are my destiny
In you I am alive anew
O how life's flow through you I row
Alive! alive! alive in you!
I am the jarl of you that's gone
These raven wings on which you fly
Straight through our father's kenning eye
You bear this weight of slivered breath
In you my fetch defies dry death
R. J. Askew ~ goodreads author: Watching Swifts
The WHALE ROAD bossed my eyes from start to finish. It reads like a magic cloak around the shoulders of history making us feel that we are there, in the shield wall, rowing the ship, trudging through the grass sea of the steppes.
I felt the story was in two two parts with the first two thirds or so leading me along, preparing me for the surge of full on action in the last third.
I found the writing to be excellent and especially noted the richness of similies drawing on nature, which strongly evoked a sense of being close to the elements. Here are a few:
-- mouth like a fresh caught cod
-- thoughts in me wheeling and screaming like terns around a fresh catch
-- I shook my head scattering memories like water drops
-- his eyes grey-blue and glassed like a summer sea
-- my mouth dropped open like a droop-lipped horse
-- Einar's head came up with a snap, like a hound on a scent
-- turning now and then like a huge elk at bay
This simile-rich language was prounced in the first part of the story. My favourite among the smilies is this lovely reference to the music of the Fjord Elk powering along: '...the snake hiss of the water under the keel, the deep throat hum of the wind in the ropes, like a struck harp...'
There are many such magical dabs where the writing is so fine that we can, see, feel and hear what is happening with great acuity. Here's another. The oathsworn are about to set go over the hill to raid a Scottish Christ house: 'The sky was milk-white, shading to grey towards us. Somewhere behind that a winter sun fought to cross over the thin, black edge of the world. Trees were skeletal black ... hearing my breathing magnified by the helmet's cheekpieces into a rasp.'
We feel the setting: '...the soft, silent, smirring rain, dripped...a wet mist crept stealthily down the mountain...'
We hear: '...the black sea as is sighed on the shingle.'
We smell a viking's breath: '...strong with herring.'
We smile at: '...no cash-scatterer...' and '...thrown out of Iceland for being too cheerful'.
Being on the poetic side, I especially love this dab: 'Geir Bagnose blew the froth off his fresh horn of ale and began to skald.' Hail poet!
'...a good boar dog...' '...bossless shields...' '...a rune spelled sword...' Dabs like these convince us the author knows. We believe. We are in the Fjord Elk racing through the storm. We experience the flashes of lightning which sear through even closed eyes. We see: '...Illugi Godi, standing alone at the prow, an axe in either hand, chanting prayers. Then he throws them overboard...' We are there. 'Land is a memory,' for us, too.
Such is the exuberance of the first chapters of The WHALE ROAD. We stand with the doomed in the front row of the shield wall, are with them when boar snout slides into positon 'like a cunning toy.' We aim to chop our enemies' feet off. We feel the hurt of our own wounds. We see the hot blood spraying. We begin to dread, 'soup wounds'.
Above all we are on the whale road, can see exactly how the snakeship's sail '...bellied out like some grass-fed mare and the Elk leaped like a goosed housewife...' And we, too, are 'drunk on the sheer beauty of it.'
This is stirring writing. We love history and writing like this breathes life into its lungs. We learn from it. For some of us this is our heritage, for some of us are descended from the very real people who inspired The WHALE ROAD. More than history, they are our ancestors, are in us. And so, for some of us, The WHALE ROAD, reaches something deep within our souls.
As we read we are Orm fixing the edge of our shield, the better to deflect blows. We feel Hild braiding our hair. We smell the farts of those around us and we scratch our lice.
And when the Fjord Elk is burnt to the waterline, we feel the loss of 'our' ship.
BACK INTO THE DIM
The middle of The WHALE ROAD takes us into viking settlements, shows us their trading ways and how they range without limit through what is now Russia, hiring themselves out to local princes. Times are changing for them in one important regard with the arrival of the Christ men. But for now their old ways are only mildly challenged. Indeed, there is a linkage between the ancient viking smiths, who have a mystical status, and the pursuit of a sword thought to have been forged from the metal of the spear driven into Christ. So, too, Christ's cross is reminiscent to them of how one of their own gods was hung from a tree.
The sword is all to them: 'no prize was better than a rune-spelled sword'. This fits in perfectly with the cult of the sword, which is evident throughout literature, from Excalibur to 'biter' in The Hobbit. Swords were potent and precious, symbolic of so much. One dab captures this reverence perfectly: 'blade-bright thought'. And towards the end, 'Hild's voice was the flat of a sword struck on stone'.
And so to the business end of the book.
Einar.
Einar the luckless, Einar the oathbreaker, Einar the doomed. His 'thought-cage warped'. His eyes, 'too full of silver to see clearly'' ... 'his face hidden by the crow wings of his hair.' And this: 'the black waterfall of his hair.'
Who does Einar remind you of? Einar the doomed, flawed hero, who leads his oathsworn people to disaster in the depths of Russia on an insane quest? The thought did cross my mind, 'like a dog chasing a cat'. Most of the oathsworn die in the quest. In truth, the quest, the wild romantic adventure, ends in disaster. Orm survives to pick up what remains.
The vikings are in the midst of destruction defending a siege engine when 'a body plunges to the ground 'with a clatter of iron and breaking bones'. This made me think of Stalingrad.
They are plodding through the grass sea of the steppe following Hild, their mad seerwoman, facing 'the sick realisation that the shrinking band of the oathsworn was the safest place to be for the moment.' How many thousands of German soldiers must have felt exactly that during their retreat from Russia?
'Even whales die on the whale road.' Ach, reality! Again, how many doomed Germans must have felt like Orm: 'I wasn't walking forwards, the whole steppe was moving backwards.' We learn that one of the dead, 'once kept bees in Upsala.' In the midst of the saga the soul hankers for home. The keeping of bees seems a much wiser pursuit that following Einar 'in search of a tale for children'.
Even the skald knows that doom is upon them. He, Bagnose, 'was making verses on his own death'. Doom! Doom!
But then, 'we see the wink of silver, the craft of a thousand smiths'. And Orm is 'drowning in greed'. While Einar is 'spume on a wave, as if a breath would blow him away'. And then Einar of the warped thought-cage is dead 'folded around' Orm's sword as Hilds valkyrie madness and a very real flood fills Attila's bunker-like burial howe.
Jarl Orm promises a new start: 'now we trade'. Like others after them, the vikings, 'could not set foot in the Rus lands now'.
Like others after them, they are broken: 'We had no ship and were crushed with loss'.
'The only safe place was the Great City, Rome, where we had no prospects.' Ach, the Treaty of Rome was signed on the 25th of March, 1957. No prospects indeed!
'What we need is a solid knarr.' To ship our exports around the world! 'A deep-minded plan' indeed!
The epilogue of The WHALE ROAD astonished me because it beautifully captures how we are, the eternal tension between romanace and reality.
On the one hand there is the romance, which lives still: 'You could not be a Northman, have the knowledge of a mountain of silver and leave it there.'
On the other we have the lesson learnt: 'They had not seen what I had seen'.
Depite Orm's wisdom: 'none of my tales of Hild's fetch (ghost) would keep them from going back'.
History repeats herself. We must be wary of the romance of it.
And yet we can't help feeling stirred: 'We were (are) still on the whale road, in the wind that keened and thrummed the ropes.'
The last line of the story is arch: 'I swear I could hear Odin's laugh'.
There is great poetry in those ropes, that thrumming. It stirs our souls. I wrote this a day after finishing Robert Low's most enjoyable story:
JARL TORC
O hear my wind-played ropes a-thrum
Skald axes flying through the sky
To live anew in this word crew
My fetch a-kenning on your mind
My sea you are my whale road free
I swear you are my destiny
In you I am alive anew
O how life's flow through you I row
Alive! alive! alive in you!
I am the jarl of you that's gone
These raven wings on which you fly
Straight through our father's kenning eye
You bear this weight of slivered breath
In you my fetch defies dry death
R. J. Askew ~ goodreads author: Watching Swifts
June 13, 2012
KISSING DAISY ~ review of The Great Gatsby by R.J.Askew
F.Scott Fitzgerald's timeless Gatsby - James Gatz - dies while floating in his own swimming pool, shot by Wilson, "one of those worn out men", who then shoots himself in Gatsby's garden.
Wilson mistakenly thinks Gatsby killed Myrtle Wilson, his sensuous and adulterous wife and suspects Gatsby of being her lover.
Myrtle is in fact mown down accidentally by Daisy - Gatsby's unworthy muse - while she is at the wheel of Gatsby's car after an emotionally turbid time one stifling afternoon in New York.
Daisy' is married to Tom Buchanan, a polo-playing, self-serving hypocrite who is Myrtle's real lover. Tom suspects Gatsby is a lying bootlegger, yet himself breaks Myrtle's nose during a drinking spree at their love nest.
And so most of the more luckless players end up dead while the "careless people", Tom and Daisy, survive the wreck to retreat "back into their money...their vast carelessness".
How arch that Daisy - note the name - sends neither word nor flower to Gatsby's funeral, which only Nick Carraway, Gatsby's neighbour our narrator, attends - along with one mysterious former party goer apart, about whom more anon.
The pathos, bathos and bitterness of the final three of the novella's nine chapters are underscored by Gatsby's "purposeless splendour", which is in turn emphasised by his shocking downfall after "Jay Gatsby had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice".
The story is an ebbing from dream to reality, with Chapter 3 the high fantasy mark from whence we are "borne back ceaselessly into the past" as Gatsby succumbs.
How fitting that Nick retreats to his mid-west when all's done, a state of mind more than a place.
Of the 236 passages I underlined in my 1979 Penguin Gatsby this is the one, this, for me, is the story's beating hear, literally in fact:
"His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her."
Later, Daisy gets up, goes over to Gatsby, pulls his face down in public, "kissing him on the mouth," prompting her friend Jordan to call her "a low, vulgar girl."
Poor old Gatsby.
JAZZ AGE CLASSIC
Of course he is in love, in an odd way: "there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or gesture of exulation a new well-being radiated from him."
Yes, Daisy ends in tears and is driven into a corner where she declares to Tom that she has never loved. She vacillates as Gatsby and Tom struggle to possess her one unbearably hot afternoon. "You love me...you never loved me...did you love me?"
She fails Gatsby, tumbles short of his dreams, "not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion." which had "gone beyond her, beyond everything."
His parties cease when Daisy attends one and he meets her and senses she does not like them.
Yet, his infatuation with her make Nick observe, "he came alive to me delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour."
Many of us have a bit of the Gatsby in us, dream of this and that, sustain grand and unrealisit hopes for years. It is a human trait, at the root of much of our creativity. Others are happier in the Dreamless Tyranny of Fact Based Reality. Perhaps this is why we find Jay Gatsby so compelling. We see our own hopes in his hopes and the way the green light at the end of Daisy's dock sustatains him.
He did his bit in France in 1917, pushing his machine gunners beyond the line. We warm to him. (150,000 copies of The Great Gatsby are distributed to American service men in WW2, such is his popularity.) His parties are legendary. Sometimes his guests - we readers among them perhaps, "came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission."
Perhaps the same may be said of America.
Chapters 3, 6 and 9 are the vital chapters, with Chapter 3 boasting the most ornately magnificent passages of the entire story, reflecting Gatsby in his full pomp and circumstance.
That said, our eyes are also led brilliantly in Chapter 1. The distinctive shape of the Long Island's Eggs, East and West are "...a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead." And then there's our first view of Gatsby's (unnamed) mansion, "The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walls and burning gardens - finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run." And then there's our first marvellous encounter with man himself, seen through the eyes of Nick: "The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and, turning my head to watch it, I saw that i was not alone - fifty feet away a figure had emerged frm the shadow of my neighbour's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pocket regarding the silver pepper of the stars." We see Gatsby through Nicks eyes and the stars through Gatsby's. It is as if we are looking at the origin of Gatsby's dream, and the universal origin of all our dreams, if dream we do.
GENIUS OF F.SCOTT FITZGERALD
So, too, there is Great Wit: "I enjoyed the counter-raid (WW1) so much that I came back resless." And this, "I asked what I thought would be sedative questions." This: "the consoling proximity of millionaires." Ahh, the consoling proximity of F.Scott Fitzgerald, moving our emotions around much as Tom moves his guest Nick around, "like moving a checker to another room." We are, of course, more than happy to be moved by such a master.
But then there is this, on Gatsby's business partner of the astonishingly named Swastica Holding Company: "A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two find growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness." Wolfsheim, "the man who fixed the world series in 1919", aka Shylock, is a stock hate figure, the usurer of old, money. Just like Tom is money. Daisy is money, too. Money is money. America is money. Is that what Gatsby craves the most, to kiss the money? To be himself, money? There is a corrupting terrible hatred in all this, an irreconcileable contradiction in Gatsby's mid-west soul. Money is all, ugly money beauty.
Yet we are fascinated by him, because we see something we recognise in him and something of him in us, too.
The world displays "a ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny." Oh how we, too, know that feeling.
And then, as his dream fades, he becomes James Gatz. We learn his back story. "I turned towards Mr.Gatsby, but he was no longer there." Each chapter peels back his past until at the end we have his humble, confused father revealing his beloved boy's 'SCHEDULE' for self-improvement written in the fly-leaf of 'HOPALONG CASSIDY', 1906.
The shift from the ethereal dream in motion in Chapter 3 to the grim corporeality of a group of bickering people in Chapter 7 one hot New York afternoon is captured when narrator Nick says, "I have a sharp physical memory that , in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs."
The outcome is hinted at, again by Nick who is thirty now and dreading the decade ahead. "So we drove on towards death through the cooling night." So, too, he says when Tom is excoriating his love rival, "The words seem to bite physically into Gatsby." Bullets anon.
Tom the libertine-turned-prig who, during and earlier flight of vanity takes Nick to meet Myrtle his lover, gets drunk and then "with a short deft movement with his open hand", breaks her nose in a petty row.
Poor Myrtle, "carries her flesh sensuously" and whose nerves are "continually smouldering". Tom buys her a puppy on a whim, which in a way symbolises all she is to him.
Meahwhile her dreamless cuckold of a husband mingles "immediatly with the cement colour of the walls."
Poor Myrtle, hemmed in by her suspcious lump of a husband, her own suspicion and jealousy in turn drive her to run from her house and into the path of Daisy speeding along at the wheel of Gatsby's car as she flees the scene of her own love trauma.
SMILING AT YOU, OLD SPORT
Poor Gatsby, in Chapter 3 Nick says of his smile, "It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurace in it, that you come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour."
But that was at the apex of Gatsby's pomp, when at one of his parties we read,"...her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer's basket."
Ach, the magic that was Gastby, the very sight of his yellow coupe brings joy, even to a passing funeral. "I was glad," Nick observes of said sepulchral moment, "that the sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their sombre holiday."
How arch that that same carriage becomes the cause of Myrtle's death as the illusion of Gatby unravels anon.
Are we, I wonder, in the funeral party watching Gatsby pass? Is life death? Are our reading eyes the faded eyes of Doctor T.J.Eckleburg on the advertising hoarding overlooking the ashpits where Mertle Wilson lives and dies?
James Gatz is now walking "a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favours and crushed flowers," the dream of Daisy included.
Nick again, "What had amused me then turned septic on the air now."
As Tom's athletic frame fills a door, blocking out the light, in an early chapter, Myrtle's sensuous frame blocks out the light in another door in anaother chapter. Intimations. Premonitions. Gatsby, whose imagination latches onto "a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing..." Gatsby the stargazer is thwarted by the banality of how we are, physical, banal.
His only real moment of joy with Daisy is when he strews his perfectly folded English shirts before her and Nick as he shows them round his mansion and she buries her face in them ... and crys. His craves to hear her tell Tom that she never loved him, is hardly devoted to her happiness.
Yet, old sport, he did well in the war, moved his machine guns up, held the line. And he is willing to take the rap for Daisy, to say he was driving, that he mowed Myrtle down.
Nick stands by him to the end, too. And we have come to trust Nick, "one of the few honest people I have ever known."
"They're a rotten crowd," Nick shouts across the lawn to Gatsby, his last words to him. "You're worth the whole damn lot of them together."
And so to Gatsby's funeral.
DRUNK IN THE LIBRARY
No one turns up, save Nick and one other, the owl-eyes drunk encountered by Nick in Gatsby's library at one of his revelries. The drunk is admiring a book with a sense of dumbfounded drunken awe. The book, to the drunk's maudlin astonishment, is real. Is that all that is really real in a worthwhile way, the book, the story? Is the drunk in the library the author examining the reality of his existance? F.Scott Fitzgerald was a drinker. Was the drunk the author writing himself into a role at the funeral of his creation, The Great Gatsby? Was the non-drinking Gatsby something of how the author might have preferred himself to be? Did the author romp with the mind of God through his creation? I think yes.
There is little left of Gatsby in the end. Nick, tells us, "I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say." A weakness in the story perhaps. A player as accomplished at Gatsby would surely always have another thread to spin. But maybe this failure makes him a little more human, as if he too is trapped in a creation that is far bigger than can cope with. And maybe he is troubled by his sham: "He hurried the phrase 'educated at Oxford', or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him."
Gatsby's dream dies before he does, leaving him floating in his pool for the first and only time in, "A new workd, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about ... like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding doward hin threough the amorphous trees." Wilson, his killer, a man "so dumb", according to Tom, "he doesn't know he's alive".
The story ends for me almost as it began, with the lawn, which is now, as Nick tells us "grown as long as mine." At the outset said lawn was a live thing racing up from the beach leaping over sundials and becoming vines on Gatsby's mansion through its sheer momentum. We see it being mown prior to Gatsby's meeting with Daisy at Nick's place. Nick and Gatsby's lawns are conjoineed, there is neither fence nor hedge between them.
Ach, the sentiment of Nick's final withdrawal! "I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand."
There follow 30 more closing lines. The lights are going out and there is a ferryboat across the Sound, which could be the Styx, and the "inessential houses" melt away as NIck ponders the dreams of the Dutch sailors who first set eyes on the place and the greatest of all human dreams: "for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent." Ach, the wonder of it! And the wonder of Gatsby The Great Dreamer, when he first saw "the green light at the end of Daisy's dock." Ach, and then Nick sees what Gatsby failed to see, that his dream was already in his past, back in the mid-west, where, he Nick, now returns as the current bears him, too, "back ceaselessly into the past."
If only Gatsby had never kissed Daisy. But he did. And for half a decade the dream of Daisy sustained him and made him Petrachian in his servitude to it, inspired and inspiring, a fabulous failure who dies a ridiculous death.
KISSING DAISY
Your dream lives on in all I do
I dream, I dream, I dream of you
Of consumation in the kiss
I am consumed by winning bliss
On leaping lawns of luscious grass
I cast my stardust in their eyes
All that I am is brilliant lies
Old sport is but a brittle glass
A dream, a dream of broken bars
Who taps his tuning fork on stars
Who dies a somber death alone
And flies - immortal Gatsby known
O how he bleeds so fluently
That we may romp - dreamality
by R.J.Askew, June 2012.
Author Watching Swifts - http://www.amazon.com/WATCHING-SWIFTS...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/WATCHING-SWIF...
Wilson mistakenly thinks Gatsby killed Myrtle Wilson, his sensuous and adulterous wife and suspects Gatsby of being her lover.
Myrtle is in fact mown down accidentally by Daisy - Gatsby's unworthy muse - while she is at the wheel of Gatsby's car after an emotionally turbid time one stifling afternoon in New York.
Daisy' is married to Tom Buchanan, a polo-playing, self-serving hypocrite who is Myrtle's real lover. Tom suspects Gatsby is a lying bootlegger, yet himself breaks Myrtle's nose during a drinking spree at their love nest.
And so most of the more luckless players end up dead while the "careless people", Tom and Daisy, survive the wreck to retreat "back into their money...their vast carelessness".
How arch that Daisy - note the name - sends neither word nor flower to Gatsby's funeral, which only Nick Carraway, Gatsby's neighbour our narrator, attends - along with one mysterious former party goer apart, about whom more anon.
The pathos, bathos and bitterness of the final three of the novella's nine chapters are underscored by Gatsby's "purposeless splendour", which is in turn emphasised by his shocking downfall after "Jay Gatsby had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice".
The story is an ebbing from dream to reality, with Chapter 3 the high fantasy mark from whence we are "borne back ceaselessly into the past" as Gatsby succumbs.
How fitting that Nick retreats to his mid-west when all's done, a state of mind more than a place.
Of the 236 passages I underlined in my 1979 Penguin Gatsby this is the one, this, for me, is the story's beating hear, literally in fact:
"His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her."
Later, Daisy gets up, goes over to Gatsby, pulls his face down in public, "kissing him on the mouth," prompting her friend Jordan to call her "a low, vulgar girl."
Poor old Gatsby.
JAZZ AGE CLASSIC
Of course he is in love, in an odd way: "there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or gesture of exulation a new well-being radiated from him."
Yes, Daisy ends in tears and is driven into a corner where she declares to Tom that she has never loved. She vacillates as Gatsby and Tom struggle to possess her one unbearably hot afternoon. "You love me...you never loved me...did you love me?"
She fails Gatsby, tumbles short of his dreams, "not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion." which had "gone beyond her, beyond everything."
His parties cease when Daisy attends one and he meets her and senses she does not like them.
Yet, his infatuation with her make Nick observe, "he came alive to me delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendour."
Many of us have a bit of the Gatsby in us, dream of this and that, sustain grand and unrealisit hopes for years. It is a human trait, at the root of much of our creativity. Others are happier in the Dreamless Tyranny of Fact Based Reality. Perhaps this is why we find Jay Gatsby so compelling. We see our own hopes in his hopes and the way the green light at the end of Daisy's dock sustatains him.
He did his bit in France in 1917, pushing his machine gunners beyond the line. We warm to him. (150,000 copies of The Great Gatsby are distributed to American service men in WW2, such is his popularity.) His parties are legendary. Sometimes his guests - we readers among them perhaps, "came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission."
Perhaps the same may be said of America.
Chapters 3, 6 and 9 are the vital chapters, with Chapter 3 boasting the most ornately magnificent passages of the entire story, reflecting Gatsby in his full pomp and circumstance.
That said, our eyes are also led brilliantly in Chapter 1. The distinctive shape of the Long Island's Eggs, East and West are "...a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead." And then there's our first view of Gatsby's (unnamed) mansion, "The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walls and burning gardens - finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run." And then there's our first marvellous encounter with man himself, seen through the eyes of Nick: "The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and, turning my head to watch it, I saw that i was not alone - fifty feet away a figure had emerged frm the shadow of my neighbour's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pocket regarding the silver pepper of the stars." We see Gatsby through Nicks eyes and the stars through Gatsby's. It is as if we are looking at the origin of Gatsby's dream, and the universal origin of all our dreams, if dream we do.
GENIUS OF F.SCOTT FITZGERALD
So, too, there is Great Wit: "I enjoyed the counter-raid (WW1) so much that I came back resless." And this, "I asked what I thought would be sedative questions." This: "the consoling proximity of millionaires." Ahh, the consoling proximity of F.Scott Fitzgerald, moving our emotions around much as Tom moves his guest Nick around, "like moving a checker to another room." We are, of course, more than happy to be moved by such a master.
But then there is this, on Gatsby's business partner of the astonishingly named Swastica Holding Company: "A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two find growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half-darkness." Wolfsheim, "the man who fixed the world series in 1919", aka Shylock, is a stock hate figure, the usurer of old, money. Just like Tom is money. Daisy is money, too. Money is money. America is money. Is that what Gatsby craves the most, to kiss the money? To be himself, money? There is a corrupting terrible hatred in all this, an irreconcileable contradiction in Gatsby's mid-west soul. Money is all, ugly money beauty.
Yet we are fascinated by him, because we see something we recognise in him and something of him in us, too.
The world displays "a ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny." Oh how we, too, know that feeling.
And then, as his dream fades, he becomes James Gatz. We learn his back story. "I turned towards Mr.Gatsby, but he was no longer there." Each chapter peels back his past until at the end we have his humble, confused father revealing his beloved boy's 'SCHEDULE' for self-improvement written in the fly-leaf of 'HOPALONG CASSIDY', 1906.
The shift from the ethereal dream in motion in Chapter 3 to the grim corporeality of a group of bickering people in Chapter 7 one hot New York afternoon is captured when narrator Nick says, "I have a sharp physical memory that , in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs."
The outcome is hinted at, again by Nick who is thirty now and dreading the decade ahead. "So we drove on towards death through the cooling night." So, too, he says when Tom is excoriating his love rival, "The words seem to bite physically into Gatsby." Bullets anon.
Tom the libertine-turned-prig who, during and earlier flight of vanity takes Nick to meet Myrtle his lover, gets drunk and then "with a short deft movement with his open hand", breaks her nose in a petty row.
Poor Myrtle, "carries her flesh sensuously" and whose nerves are "continually smouldering". Tom buys her a puppy on a whim, which in a way symbolises all she is to him.
Meahwhile her dreamless cuckold of a husband mingles "immediatly with the cement colour of the walls."
Poor Myrtle, hemmed in by her suspcious lump of a husband, her own suspicion and jealousy in turn drive her to run from her house and into the path of Daisy speeding along at the wheel of Gatsby's car as she flees the scene of her own love trauma.
SMILING AT YOU, OLD SPORT
Poor Gatsby, in Chapter 3 Nick says of his smile, "It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurace in it, that you come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour."
But that was at the apex of Gatsby's pomp, when at one of his parties we read,"...her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer's basket."
Ach, the magic that was Gastby, the very sight of his yellow coupe brings joy, even to a passing funeral. "I was glad," Nick observes of said sepulchral moment, "that the sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their sombre holiday."
How arch that that same carriage becomes the cause of Myrtle's death as the illusion of Gatby unravels anon.
Are we, I wonder, in the funeral party watching Gatsby pass? Is life death? Are our reading eyes the faded eyes of Doctor T.J.Eckleburg on the advertising hoarding overlooking the ashpits where Mertle Wilson lives and dies?
James Gatz is now walking "a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favours and crushed flowers," the dream of Daisy included.
Nick again, "What had amused me then turned septic on the air now."
As Tom's athletic frame fills a door, blocking out the light, in an early chapter, Myrtle's sensuous frame blocks out the light in another door in anaother chapter. Intimations. Premonitions. Gatsby, whose imagination latches onto "a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing..." Gatsby the stargazer is thwarted by the banality of how we are, physical, banal.
His only real moment of joy with Daisy is when he strews his perfectly folded English shirts before her and Nick as he shows them round his mansion and she buries her face in them ... and crys. His craves to hear her tell Tom that she never loved him, is hardly devoted to her happiness.
Yet, old sport, he did well in the war, moved his machine guns up, held the line. And he is willing to take the rap for Daisy, to say he was driving, that he mowed Myrtle down.
Nick stands by him to the end, too. And we have come to trust Nick, "one of the few honest people I have ever known."
"They're a rotten crowd," Nick shouts across the lawn to Gatsby, his last words to him. "You're worth the whole damn lot of them together."
And so to Gatsby's funeral.
DRUNK IN THE LIBRARY
No one turns up, save Nick and one other, the owl-eyes drunk encountered by Nick in Gatsby's library at one of his revelries. The drunk is admiring a book with a sense of dumbfounded drunken awe. The book, to the drunk's maudlin astonishment, is real. Is that all that is really real in a worthwhile way, the book, the story? Is the drunk in the library the author examining the reality of his existance? F.Scott Fitzgerald was a drinker. Was the drunk the author writing himself into a role at the funeral of his creation, The Great Gatsby? Was the non-drinking Gatsby something of how the author might have preferred himself to be? Did the author romp with the mind of God through his creation? I think yes.
There is little left of Gatsby in the end. Nick, tells us, "I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say." A weakness in the story perhaps. A player as accomplished at Gatsby would surely always have another thread to spin. But maybe this failure makes him a little more human, as if he too is trapped in a creation that is far bigger than can cope with. And maybe he is troubled by his sham: "He hurried the phrase 'educated at Oxford', or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him."
Gatsby's dream dies before he does, leaving him floating in his pool for the first and only time in, "A new workd, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about ... like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding doward hin threough the amorphous trees." Wilson, his killer, a man "so dumb", according to Tom, "he doesn't know he's alive".
The story ends for me almost as it began, with the lawn, which is now, as Nick tells us "grown as long as mine." At the outset said lawn was a live thing racing up from the beach leaping over sundials and becoming vines on Gatsby's mansion through its sheer momentum. We see it being mown prior to Gatsby's meeting with Daisy at Nick's place. Nick and Gatsby's lawns are conjoineed, there is neither fence nor hedge between them.
Ach, the sentiment of Nick's final withdrawal! "I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand."
There follow 30 more closing lines. The lights are going out and there is a ferryboat across the Sound, which could be the Styx, and the "inessential houses" melt away as NIck ponders the dreams of the Dutch sailors who first set eyes on the place and the greatest of all human dreams: "for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent." Ach, the wonder of it! And the wonder of Gatsby The Great Dreamer, when he first saw "the green light at the end of Daisy's dock." Ach, and then Nick sees what Gatsby failed to see, that his dream was already in his past, back in the mid-west, where, he Nick, now returns as the current bears him, too, "back ceaselessly into the past."
If only Gatsby had never kissed Daisy. But he did. And for half a decade the dream of Daisy sustained him and made him Petrachian in his servitude to it, inspired and inspiring, a fabulous failure who dies a ridiculous death.
KISSING DAISY
Your dream lives on in all I do
I dream, I dream, I dream of you
Of consumation in the kiss
I am consumed by winning bliss
On leaping lawns of luscious grass
I cast my stardust in their eyes
All that I am is brilliant lies
Old sport is but a brittle glass
A dream, a dream of broken bars
Who taps his tuning fork on stars
Who dies a somber death alone
And flies - immortal Gatsby known
O how he bleeds so fluently
That we may romp - dreamality
by R.J.Askew, June 2012.
Author Watching Swifts - http://www.amazon.com/WATCHING-SWIFTS...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/WATCHING-SWIF...
