Steve Evans's Blog: The written world
March 27, 2017
Thomas Bernhard anew
Hello there. It is a crisp and windy morning in the quaint village near the Ruahine range in New Zealand where I am presently parked in a tranquil cottage not far from the railway line. That may seem a contradiction as the wagons roll along the track, but it isn’t – the noise, even at 3 AM, is not at all irritating.
For months I have been working through the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s memoir Gathering evidence, the second of his non-fiction books I have read. That makes it sound like a chore, which in a sense it has been – I am not the only one to complain about the small type of the edition I bought that has made the physical act of reading literally tiresome. This is especially true as one of Bernhard’s stylistic trademarks is not to have paragraphs. He starts, and keeps going. . .and going. . .and going. The writing is however a pleasure in itself; he is arguably the best post-war writer of all I have read. That’s saying a great deal when you consider wonderful stylists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Gunter Grass, but for me it is true.
Even though I enjoy and admire his fiction, Bernhard’s memoirs show him at his finest. There is a gritty integrity to Gathering evidencethat for any writer is a challenge, as there also is to his shorter piece, Wittgenstein’s nephew. Bernhard did not flinch from the world he saw, experienced and depicted, and did not hesitate to draw tough-minded conclusions plainly if without rancour.
Celine, whose approach and style must have influenced Bernhard, wrote that “first you’ve got to pay for it – then you can use it”. Celine’s point was about fiction, made up stories that the French writer argued needed to be based on personal experience. In Celine’s case this experience was often harrowing, if self-inflicted. Bernhard started off badly, an unwanted child born out of wedlock in the Netherlands where his mother had gone to give shameful birth, and made his mark through tough-minded assertiveness. He paid for it and paid for it, then mined it, magically transforming the dross of an often terrible youth into gold.
There were differences between Celine and Bernhard. Celine’s anti-Semitism drove him unwillingly into the arms of France’s Vichy collaborators in their outpost in Sigmaringen, Germany, while Bernhard, who began his adult life as a reporter for a socialist newspaper, turned his most cruel microscope on Austria’s Catholics and Nazis and later on the poseurs of a rekindled Austrian cultural renaissance. Yet both were anarchists. . .and felt deeply for those whose lives were blighted by the system that surrounded and shaped them.
What makes them cousins of the pen beyond perspective, however, is style. Bernhard took his cue from an apparently unending scroll while Celine famously used the ellipse, but for both, the effect was the appearance of raving that is anything but. A film of a Billy Connolly routine shows the wonder comic’s style was very much like that. Connolly tells stories, seems to wander and then comes back to the beginning to make his point. “You thought I had forgotten, hadn’t you?” he scolded his audience. “This is my technique!” Just so. What seems to be effortless and even artless, is high art.
Bernhard wrote the five parts of his memoir in a certain order, ending them with his earliest experiences. The translator of Gathering evidence (or perhaps an editor) chose to put the last one first, to keep the memoir chronological. I should have skipped that one, and read it last as was Bernhard’s intention. I understand what he was doing, and I may read that section again.
For months I have been working through the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard’s memoir Gathering evidence, the second of his non-fiction books I have read. That makes it sound like a chore, which in a sense it has been – I am not the only one to complain about the small type of the edition I bought that has made the physical act of reading literally tiresome. This is especially true as one of Bernhard’s stylistic trademarks is not to have paragraphs. He starts, and keeps going. . .and going. . .and going. The writing is however a pleasure in itself; he is arguably the best post-war writer of all I have read. That’s saying a great deal when you consider wonderful stylists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Gunter Grass, but for me it is true.
Even though I enjoy and admire his fiction, Bernhard’s memoirs show him at his finest. There is a gritty integrity to Gathering evidencethat for any writer is a challenge, as there also is to his shorter piece, Wittgenstein’s nephew. Bernhard did not flinch from the world he saw, experienced and depicted, and did not hesitate to draw tough-minded conclusions plainly if without rancour.
Celine, whose approach and style must have influenced Bernhard, wrote that “first you’ve got to pay for it – then you can use it”. Celine’s point was about fiction, made up stories that the French writer argued needed to be based on personal experience. In Celine’s case this experience was often harrowing, if self-inflicted. Bernhard started off badly, an unwanted child born out of wedlock in the Netherlands where his mother had gone to give shameful birth, and made his mark through tough-minded assertiveness. He paid for it and paid for it, then mined it, magically transforming the dross of an often terrible youth into gold.
There were differences between Celine and Bernhard. Celine’s anti-Semitism drove him unwillingly into the arms of France’s Vichy collaborators in their outpost in Sigmaringen, Germany, while Bernhard, who began his adult life as a reporter for a socialist newspaper, turned his most cruel microscope on Austria’s Catholics and Nazis and later on the poseurs of a rekindled Austrian cultural renaissance. Yet both were anarchists. . .and felt deeply for those whose lives were blighted by the system that surrounded and shaped them.
What makes them cousins of the pen beyond perspective, however, is style. Bernhard took his cue from an apparently unending scroll while Celine famously used the ellipse, but for both, the effect was the appearance of raving that is anything but. A film of a Billy Connolly routine shows the wonder comic’s style was very much like that. Connolly tells stories, seems to wander and then comes back to the beginning to make his point. “You thought I had forgotten, hadn’t you?” he scolded his audience. “This is my technique!” Just so. What seems to be effortless and even artless, is high art.
Bernhard wrote the five parts of his memoir in a certain order, ending them with his earliest experiences. The translator of Gathering evidence (or perhaps an editor) chose to put the last one first, to keep the memoir chronological. I should have skipped that one, and read it last as was Bernhard’s intention. I understand what he was doing, and I may read that section again.
December 26, 2016
Scandinewvian
Hi there. It’s a time when many people eat too much, drink too much, and are miserable for lots of other reasons too. If this is you, I really am very sorry and hope things improve soon. You can console yourself with the thought that this occasion only comes once a year.
I’m no expert, but the occasion of this occasion is the birth of someone who remarked that he brought “not peace but the sword”. He went on to give some unpleasant details about this, and how right he has been proved! The “Prince of Peace” said he wasn’t, straight out, but for some reason people keep wanting to not believe it.
It is true that we don’t have to think like this. We don’t need to feel that we’ve got to get down with the swordplay, and that makes it our own doing, that we go on doing terrible things. It’s our fault – all sides. We really can do something about it, if we want to.
This year, 2016, is about to conclude, and it won’t be back. Good.
While it’s been unraveling before my astonished gaze, I’ve been watching a Danish “noir” television series, The Killing. This had three seasons and I’ve brought the lot on DVD after seeing the final ten-part epic.
Generally I don’t watch television – see my blog post, “Scandinoirvian nights”. But like the Swedish police thriller Wallander, The Killing lifted television beyond its limitations to reach the standard of fine film-making – just. Television’s self-imposed limitations are present in The Killing, especially the apparent need to follow a template – each episode repeats the format so that by the end of the second installment the structure is an obstruction, artifice standing squarely in the way of art: the same music at the same place, the way the opening is interfaced with credits, etc. A film doesn’t have to succumb to this allure, though “franchises” inevitably face the same dilemma – witness the “Indiana Jones” spinoffs, or Star Wars, or James Bond: the very qualities that make the first take a success, tend to render successors trivial. These challenges to film are however splattered all over television series as if they are de rigeur, and it’s not pretty.
Despite this, The Killing is worth watching. It is unlike Wallander in that the episodes are not complete in themselves; each of the three series needs to be seen entire. Fortunately the template was tweaked for each and the last series – which your unworthy correspondent saw first – is better than the first.
The Killing has a lot to say, but it is not always clear whether it means to say it. The series focused on a police homicide detective, Sarah Lund, who was the only woman on the squad. The acrress portraying her, Sophie Grabol, said that initially she had a hard time working out Lund’s personality, but when she realised the character was a man in a woman’s body, it became easier.
The brains behind the series, Soren Sveistrup, might or might not have enjoyed this characterisation. Certainly Lund is a fractured person with an intensity of focus that rattles her colleagues; once the bit is between her teeth she doesn’t let up, even when she is suspended. She is a genius at solving horrific murders, sees things others miss, and is thus invaluable. . .but. . .well, I’m not going to offer any spoilers here.
The series succeeds despite its limitations. If it is to be believed, Denmark is a festering sinkhole of envy, intrigue and corruption – still rotten despite Hamlet’s stable cleansing efforts all those centuries ago. The police force is not only not exempt, but also so flagrantly incompetent it is a wonder any crimes are ever solved, leaping to conclusion after conclusion in the rush to get a conviction. Innocent suspects are dragged into the station to be verbally abused and often have their lives ruined, to be replaced by other innocent suspects, while the police officers spend a lot of time blaming and talking past each other, when not ordering someone else to do something. Meanwhile, victims’ families’ lives are torn apart, politicians are dragged into the affair, while the culprit’s machinations suggest that Hamlet’s* ability to concoct and carry out an involved plan behind a facade was not a one-off and may even be a Danish character trait.
So Sarah Lund succeeds in a man’s world by being more than a man, and it is hard on her psyche. This says something, and for those of you who have followed this blog, you will know what I think, or if you don’t, try “Grand Larssony” and “Toiling with Troilus”. We are talking epochal realignments here, true progress – or not.
Scandinoirvian crime depiction is gruesome. Both Wallander and this series feature murders ranging from draining the blood of the victim while still conscious, torture and dismemberment, to the most brutal rapes and beyond. That the true focus lies in the human relationships of the series verges on contradiction, but ultimately that is the underlying point, and it is a political one, whether authors mean it or not. Certainly Henning Mankell, the man behind Wallander, was a “leftist” radical, and Millennium trilogy author Stieg Larsson’s politics were also well out there.
All this blood and guts and tension, and the year we are finishing up has included a new word imported from Danish into English: “hygge”, which means a kind of comfort that one finds in mug of tea and a blanket on a cold night, especially when shared with loved ones. In Norwegian the concept is given a name that is a semi-cognate of our “cosy”.
The murderers may go out and do despicable things before heading home for a quiet cuppa and a nuzzle with someone dear.
Hopefully this isn’t you, dear reader. Please enjoy this time, and head into 2017 with hope in your heart, a smile on your beautiful lips, and a song in your throat ready to greet the world.
*It has always seemed to me that Hamlet has been unfairly maligned for his supposed inability to act. On the contrary he was plainly a genius who overcame many obstacles to avenge the murder of his father and clean up a corrupt regime, though he was thwarted and died in the attempt.
I’m no expert, but the occasion of this occasion is the birth of someone who remarked that he brought “not peace but the sword”. He went on to give some unpleasant details about this, and how right he has been proved! The “Prince of Peace” said he wasn’t, straight out, but for some reason people keep wanting to not believe it.
It is true that we don’t have to think like this. We don’t need to feel that we’ve got to get down with the swordplay, and that makes it our own doing, that we go on doing terrible things. It’s our fault – all sides. We really can do something about it, if we want to.
This year, 2016, is about to conclude, and it won’t be back. Good.
While it’s been unraveling before my astonished gaze, I’ve been watching a Danish “noir” television series, The Killing. This had three seasons and I’ve brought the lot on DVD after seeing the final ten-part epic.
Generally I don’t watch television – see my blog post, “Scandinoirvian nights”. But like the Swedish police thriller Wallander, The Killing lifted television beyond its limitations to reach the standard of fine film-making – just. Television’s self-imposed limitations are present in The Killing, especially the apparent need to follow a template – each episode repeats the format so that by the end of the second installment the structure is an obstruction, artifice standing squarely in the way of art: the same music at the same place, the way the opening is interfaced with credits, etc. A film doesn’t have to succumb to this allure, though “franchises” inevitably face the same dilemma – witness the “Indiana Jones” spinoffs, or Star Wars, or James Bond: the very qualities that make the first take a success, tend to render successors trivial. These challenges to film are however splattered all over television series as if they are de rigeur, and it’s not pretty.
Despite this, The Killing is worth watching. It is unlike Wallander in that the episodes are not complete in themselves; each of the three series needs to be seen entire. Fortunately the template was tweaked for each and the last series – which your unworthy correspondent saw first – is better than the first.
The Killing has a lot to say, but it is not always clear whether it means to say it. The series focused on a police homicide detective, Sarah Lund, who was the only woman on the squad. The acrress portraying her, Sophie Grabol, said that initially she had a hard time working out Lund’s personality, but when she realised the character was a man in a woman’s body, it became easier.
The brains behind the series, Soren Sveistrup, might or might not have enjoyed this characterisation. Certainly Lund is a fractured person with an intensity of focus that rattles her colleagues; once the bit is between her teeth she doesn’t let up, even when she is suspended. She is a genius at solving horrific murders, sees things others miss, and is thus invaluable. . .but. . .well, I’m not going to offer any spoilers here.
The series succeeds despite its limitations. If it is to be believed, Denmark is a festering sinkhole of envy, intrigue and corruption – still rotten despite Hamlet’s stable cleansing efforts all those centuries ago. The police force is not only not exempt, but also so flagrantly incompetent it is a wonder any crimes are ever solved, leaping to conclusion after conclusion in the rush to get a conviction. Innocent suspects are dragged into the station to be verbally abused and often have their lives ruined, to be replaced by other innocent suspects, while the police officers spend a lot of time blaming and talking past each other, when not ordering someone else to do something. Meanwhile, victims’ families’ lives are torn apart, politicians are dragged into the affair, while the culprit’s machinations suggest that Hamlet’s* ability to concoct and carry out an involved plan behind a facade was not a one-off and may even be a Danish character trait.
So Sarah Lund succeeds in a man’s world by being more than a man, and it is hard on her psyche. This says something, and for those of you who have followed this blog, you will know what I think, or if you don’t, try “Grand Larssony” and “Toiling with Troilus”. We are talking epochal realignments here, true progress – or not.
Scandinoirvian crime depiction is gruesome. Both Wallander and this series feature murders ranging from draining the blood of the victim while still conscious, torture and dismemberment, to the most brutal rapes and beyond. That the true focus lies in the human relationships of the series verges on contradiction, but ultimately that is the underlying point, and it is a political one, whether authors mean it or not. Certainly Henning Mankell, the man behind Wallander, was a “leftist” radical, and Millennium trilogy author Stieg Larsson’s politics were also well out there.
All this blood and guts and tension, and the year we are finishing up has included a new word imported from Danish into English: “hygge”, which means a kind of comfort that one finds in mug of tea and a blanket on a cold night, especially when shared with loved ones. In Norwegian the concept is given a name that is a semi-cognate of our “cosy”.
The murderers may go out and do despicable things before heading home for a quiet cuppa and a nuzzle with someone dear.
Hopefully this isn’t you, dear reader. Please enjoy this time, and head into 2017 with hope in your heart, a smile on your beautiful lips, and a song in your throat ready to greet the world.
*It has always seemed to me that Hamlet has been unfairly maligned for his supposed inability to act. On the contrary he was plainly a genius who overcame many obstacles to avenge the murder of his father and clean up a corrupt regime, though he was thwarted and died in the attempt.
December 11, 2016
So far behind the curve
There is a Russian scientist who believes, or says he believes, that the United States is developing a variety of human being low in intelligence, capable of living on next to nothing, working all hours, and reproducing only when wanted. The scientist heads a nuclear research institute and his brother, a banker, is close to the leadership of the country.
While he is beetling away on nuke projects US President-elect Donald Trump – for yes it is he! – says it is ridiculous that Russian government hackers could have swayed the election that is heading him to the leadership of the world’s mot powerful country. He disputes a CIA report to that effect and has pooh-poohed Congressional concerns, including from his own party.
He says he isn’t too interested in intelligence briefings anyway because he is a “smart guy”.
It is true that he is a smart guy, and if he says it follows that being a smart guy means he doesn’t need to be told things every day, who am I to doubt him? A nobody, that’s who.
Meanwhile, in Balkania – actually it is Macedonia, but it’s probably going on elsewhere in that mercurial region – people are riding around in fine cars on the proceeds of “fake news”. “Fake news” makers cut and paste from whatever sources seem useful into plausible if sensational stories and then put the results on Facebook pages made up to look like news sites. If these generate hits, the hits generate advertising, and the advertising generates income, and the income generates BMWs, flash motorbikes, designer everything, and girlfriends or boyfriends or pet sheep depending on one’s proclivities.
Facebook’s founder, a Mr Zuckerberg, says this is actually no big deal. If a man worth billions, who is handing out zillions to fake news producers says it is no big deal, who am I? etc. Nobody, that’s who.
And the great stories! During the election in the US, people in Macedonia left no stone unturned to find and publish the secrets of the campaign, especially the devilish Clinton plans to usurp the democratic process and destroy freedom everywhere. If there wasn’t a story saying the devil incarnate had entered Ms Clinton’s body and feasted each morning on live babies, it was purely accidental.
Some of these sensational accounts found their way, as they would naturally do, being “truthful” though untrue, into the mainstream press via other websites. Flick, flick, flick – and then shazam!
A man from North Carolina was arrested in Washington DC in a fast food parlour, come to investigate to see if a cabal involving Hillary Clinton – yes, the same former presidential candidate – was going on there. Fortunately no one was injured. However, a man part of President-elect Trump’s “transition team” and the son of a general picked to be his national security adviser, lost his job over this incident as he sent a “tweet” about it to the world. The cabal hadn’t been categorically disproved, his message said.
The poor fellow’s father had assisted his state of mind by repeating other unrelated fake news stories during the campaign.
A question in my mind, insofar as I have one, is whether this is evidence that “Project American sub-human” revealed to the world by the Russian nuclear scientist is actually much more advanced than even he realises.
Many years ago the British magazine Private Eye used to satirise the work of a man named McKay, referred to as “McHacky” by having “him” write, “Isn’t life grandy and dandy” as he celebrated the wonders of modern times. As indeed it is truly is – especially if you are a smart guy, like Donald Trump!
Well, it is troubling to this poor hack. Reality as revealed by the existence of the Russian nuke master and the illusion of reality as portrayed in “fake news” have so inflamed our imaginations that works intended to be seen as of the imagination, fiction to me and fiction to you, don’t stand a chance. Anything a spiritually impoverished writer such as myself can dream up is made trivial when a man hits a pizza stand to see if Hillary Clinton is in the toilet or wherever she was meant to be, conspiring mightily, and a judicious and principled member of a victorious Presidential candidate’s entourage, who simply wants proof of her absence, loses his job! How can I write a novel about anything at all and expect it to be disbelieved?
If the displaced Trumpster is crowd-funding a campaign to get his job back, should I contribute?
Well, you very well may not know me, but if you did know me, you would know that I am reaching into my e-pocket as soon as I can to help the poor man out, even as I lose yet more readers to Facebook illusion. It’s unjust, but help we must.
Thanks for reading.
While he is beetling away on nuke projects US President-elect Donald Trump – for yes it is he! – says it is ridiculous that Russian government hackers could have swayed the election that is heading him to the leadership of the world’s mot powerful country. He disputes a CIA report to that effect and has pooh-poohed Congressional concerns, including from his own party.
He says he isn’t too interested in intelligence briefings anyway because he is a “smart guy”.
It is true that he is a smart guy, and if he says it follows that being a smart guy means he doesn’t need to be told things every day, who am I to doubt him? A nobody, that’s who.
Meanwhile, in Balkania – actually it is Macedonia, but it’s probably going on elsewhere in that mercurial region – people are riding around in fine cars on the proceeds of “fake news”. “Fake news” makers cut and paste from whatever sources seem useful into plausible if sensational stories and then put the results on Facebook pages made up to look like news sites. If these generate hits, the hits generate advertising, and the advertising generates income, and the income generates BMWs, flash motorbikes, designer everything, and girlfriends or boyfriends or pet sheep depending on one’s proclivities.
Facebook’s founder, a Mr Zuckerberg, says this is actually no big deal. If a man worth billions, who is handing out zillions to fake news producers says it is no big deal, who am I? etc. Nobody, that’s who.
And the great stories! During the election in the US, people in Macedonia left no stone unturned to find and publish the secrets of the campaign, especially the devilish Clinton plans to usurp the democratic process and destroy freedom everywhere. If there wasn’t a story saying the devil incarnate had entered Ms Clinton’s body and feasted each morning on live babies, it was purely accidental.
Some of these sensational accounts found their way, as they would naturally do, being “truthful” though untrue, into the mainstream press via other websites. Flick, flick, flick – and then shazam!
A man from North Carolina was arrested in Washington DC in a fast food parlour, come to investigate to see if a cabal involving Hillary Clinton – yes, the same former presidential candidate – was going on there. Fortunately no one was injured. However, a man part of President-elect Trump’s “transition team” and the son of a general picked to be his national security adviser, lost his job over this incident as he sent a “tweet” about it to the world. The cabal hadn’t been categorically disproved, his message said.
The poor fellow’s father had assisted his state of mind by repeating other unrelated fake news stories during the campaign.
A question in my mind, insofar as I have one, is whether this is evidence that “Project American sub-human” revealed to the world by the Russian nuclear scientist is actually much more advanced than even he realises.
Many years ago the British magazine Private Eye used to satirise the work of a man named McKay, referred to as “McHacky” by having “him” write, “Isn’t life grandy and dandy” as he celebrated the wonders of modern times. As indeed it is truly is – especially if you are a smart guy, like Donald Trump!
Well, it is troubling to this poor hack. Reality as revealed by the existence of the Russian nuke master and the illusion of reality as portrayed in “fake news” have so inflamed our imaginations that works intended to be seen as of the imagination, fiction to me and fiction to you, don’t stand a chance. Anything a spiritually impoverished writer such as myself can dream up is made trivial when a man hits a pizza stand to see if Hillary Clinton is in the toilet or wherever she was meant to be, conspiring mightily, and a judicious and principled member of a victorious Presidential candidate’s entourage, who simply wants proof of her absence, loses his job! How can I write a novel about anything at all and expect it to be disbelieved?
If the displaced Trumpster is crowd-funding a campaign to get his job back, should I contribute?
Well, you very well may not know me, but if you did know me, you would know that I am reaching into my e-pocket as soon as I can to help the poor man out, even as I lose yet more readers to Facebook illusion. It’s unjust, but help we must.
Thanks for reading.
October 13, 2016
Thank you, Bob
Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first song-writer to receive the world’s most coveted literary award. Wow!
Of course Dylan is not only a song-writer and singer. He has written prose as well as verse, painted, acted, but to my mind beyond all these, been. Dylan has been an amazing force in the cultural life not merely of his native United States, or even the Anglophone world, but every country on earth. More than 50 years since he began to perform, he is still out there – apparently in Las Vegas as I write.
There is a post on this blog about him, and he figures in another, “Fifty years with and without Frank Sinatra.”
It is often said that Dylan’s words are what matter and that he can’t sing. This is, like much else about the man, very unfair. Dylan chooses to sing as he does, and his voice is an effective instrument. True, the words stick with us, but so does the sly, insinuating, intelligent voice that brings them to our ears.
The words do matter. They are important for what they say, and for the devices they use – as a writer, Dylan is a true genius.
But he is much more than that. He has made the words matter by who he is, has opened doors for artists of every stripe, legitimised what was previously unthinkable in popular music but far beyond it. The huge cultural changes that have taken place in my lifetime have been charted but also partly created by this elusive force for good.
Thank you, Bob.
Of course Dylan is not only a song-writer and singer. He has written prose as well as verse, painted, acted, but to my mind beyond all these, been. Dylan has been an amazing force in the cultural life not merely of his native United States, or even the Anglophone world, but every country on earth. More than 50 years since he began to perform, he is still out there – apparently in Las Vegas as I write.
There is a post on this blog about him, and he figures in another, “Fifty years with and without Frank Sinatra.”
It is often said that Dylan’s words are what matter and that he can’t sing. This is, like much else about the man, very unfair. Dylan chooses to sing as he does, and his voice is an effective instrument. True, the words stick with us, but so does the sly, insinuating, intelligent voice that brings them to our ears.
The words do matter. They are important for what they say, and for the devices they use – as a writer, Dylan is a true genius.
But he is much more than that. He has made the words matter by who he is, has opened doors for artists of every stripe, legitimised what was previously unthinkable in popular music but far beyond it. The huge cultural changes that have taken place in my lifetime have been charted but also partly created by this elusive force for good.
Thank you, Bob.
September 3, 2016
Saint Jane
Hello there. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Life can interfere with my very best and well-meant plans, and such it is now. Two posts I have been thinking of writing remain figments of my admittedly feverish imagination. Meanwhile, I have had other things to do as well as think about.
These nettlesome intrusions have not prevented at least a tiny amount of effort on my part to become educated. I really want to do this! One of my many lacunae is 19th century English literature. Writers as diverse as Trollope and the Brontes are totally foreign to me, while Dickens is a chance acquaintance. My excuse for ignorance is that I am still, after more decades than I wish to concede, enthralled by the English renaissance, the renaissance full stop, and the classics. Euripides! Wow! That fellow strode the boards ahead of all others for about 2000 years. Two thousand! He had competition too – Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Sophocles among the Greeks, Plautus, Terence and other Romans. . .There is a post in this blog on the man, though perhaps not a very good one, but if you have not tried The Trojan Women, or The Medea, or the Iphigenia plays, or Alcestis* you too need some larnin’. Honest. Anyway I haven’t finished with the oldies, and keep telling myself to work up to the moderns. . .the 18th and 19th century moderns. Sheridan I know but. . .
So lately I have been schooling myself in the scandal of Jane Austen. When a film of Pride and Prejudice came out, I read the novel and was mightily impressed. It seemed to me – and still seems – that Austen showed herself to be the first truly modern writer. Her airy and concise style and her ironic detachment from the characters she created, made for a very good read. Her style stands up very well against later, more florid writers like Balzac, whatever their respective intellectual grunt
Lately I’ve decided to try some of her other works. Emma put me off and so did Northanger Abbey but I have got through Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility.
Were my first impressions^ justified? Well, yes. Austen wrote in a genre peopled by thousands perhaps and stands out. She still seems to me a pathbreaker. Naturally pathbreakers are riddled with faults – look at my books!** The wrinkles get ironed out by those who follow and it can be easy to criticise in that patronising way writers employ. Mark Twain ridiculed her though it is unclear if he really meant it***.
Certainly in a writing sense she does not conform to the rules of our time, and probably not of her own. As happened then, her books would likely be spiked if submitted to publishers today: on a superficial level they “tell, not show” well past a fault. To give a contrasting example, one of Graham Greene’s later novels, Monsignor Quixote, begins as a Spanish priest picks up a Vatican bigwig whose car has broken down, and while waiting for it to be repaired, takes the man to his home for lunch. The larder is bare apart from horsemeat, and the priest tells his cook/housekeeper to serve it up.
The Vatican fellow eats the meat with gusto, and several weeks later the priest discovers he has been made a monsignor.
This is an example of “show, don’t tell”. Greene never tells the reader that the reason for this award is that the priest showed his humility in serving what he had to his guest.
Austen does this too, but it is harder to decide when she really means it. She tells, and tells, and tells so often that any attempt to say what she “really meant” otherwise inevitably runs into opposition.. What rescues her for “modernity” is the ironic detachment she shows in the telling. She mocks and scorns characters, even nice ones.
There are some negatives; there always are. Reading her books one after the other shows a sameness that is pretty much a yawn really. Mansfield Park, her most controversial, is also her most overwritten – it is perhaps twice as long as it needed to be. Sense and Sensibility could also do with a trim. Nonetheless there are sparkling dialogues well worth the effort, and Sense especially, after a slow start, is a real ripper for the most part, before stuttering to a bizarre and unbelievable conclusion that had me thinking, Nonsense and insensibility.
In Mansfield Park and Sense Austen addresses the reader directly in what today might be seen as experimental and to her might have been an attempt at seeming to be reading to her audience, as she read her books to her family. It’s nice.
Yet to me the most attractive and intriguing feature of her style is a willingness to be really mean. Here for example, the Middletons, Sir John and his Lady, who have gone out of their way to provide the heroines a place to live, and want them to come visit, often:
“. . .they kept more company of every kind than any other family in the neighbourhood. It was necessary for the happiness of both; for however dissimilar in temper and outward behaviour, they strongly resembled each other in that total want of talent and taste which confined their employments, unconnected as such which society produced, within a very narrow compass. Sir John was a sportsman, Lady Middleton a mother. He hunted and shot, and she humoured her children, and these were their only resources.”
Well!
Lady Middleton gets both barrels a short time later, as the Dashwoods (heroines) visit the Middleton mansion:
“There was nothing in any of the party which could recommend them as companions to the Dashwoods, but the cold insipidity of Lady Middleton was so particularly repulsive, that in comparison of it the gravity of Colonel Brandon, and even the boisterous mirth of Sir John and his mother-in-law was interesting.”
Austen’s remarks are often said to be “gently mocking”.
Readers of this blog know that I am partial to a French writer, Celine, who was amazing for his insights and appalling for his beliefs. Celine got his shrewd perceptions of humanity from what are sometimes styled “petit bourgeois” origins. His family had a lace shop in an arcade in Paris and his father, who worked for an insurance company, was a wannabe all his life. Their son was sent to Germany and to England to learn the local language in a strategy designed to make him successful at business. Instead, he became a doctor and one of the most notorious authors of the 20th century.
Celine’s nightmare visions of the whole of humanity sprang from hatred and envy of those above, and fear and loathing of those below. Always on the edge of being tipped into the latter, careful not to offend and desirous of joining the former, the precarious existence of the petit bourgeois in early 19th century England is strikingly brought to life by Austen. Her main characters are genteel poor single women seeking to marry a man at least able to look after them, and having very little alternative. Austen’s caustic eye never fails to judge the landed wealthy and those associated with them, finding the good among them much more rare than the morally bankrupt. These last attain their status in a plethora of ways, from fornication, adultery, and blithe materialism to profiting from slavery. Their code of values reeks of hypocritical sanctimony.
Much of the talk in Austen’s books revolves around money. No man is really eligible for marriage without a good amount of it, usually as interest income from some principal, and the fortunate woman endowed with the same is much admired and desired. So-and-so is “worth 20,000” or “has an income of 2,000 a year” is rating talk among would-be brides and their advisors.
Despite this trenchant critique of the English moneyed and landed classes of her time, Austen’s books have happy endings. The good do not die though they may get sick. They are rejected, but are lucky in it. They marry the right fellow after all. . .their morality sees them through.
Nice, innit? Austen thus ends up supporting and bolstering the society she otherwise ridicules. There is no hint that the forms of servitude of the vast mass of English people – as servants in homes, workers in factories or fields, or desperate paupers – are anything but jolly glad to be alive; for the most part, they do not even exist. In Sense for example, the lovely widow Mrs Jennings takes two unmarried sisters from their country cottage to her home in London. They arrive, and dinner is served two hours later. Mrs Jennings has been in the country for quite some time, and whoever cooked the meal was. . .was. . .was. . .doing what while she was away? The widow tries to find employment for a sister of one of her staff, giving her a glowing reference (as she does). That’s about it.
Throughout Austen's books, things get done by this faceless mass, who when they are seen at all seem overjoyed to serve. Horses are fed and retrieved, coaches are driven, washing is washed, needlework needled, gardens are dug and maintained, entire villages belonging to the gentry are peopled, their tithes providing income for the lesser sons of the manse who get a “living” from preaching the virtues of stoic acceptance, or so one supposes.
As a backdrop, as the stuff of her narratives, then, “the system” of Austen’s novels stinks. The beneficiaries of its hypocritical values are almost universally excruciatingly unworthy to receive its largesse. The exceptions cannot prove the rule. And yet – one and all, happy endings. The virtuous women who have resisted the evil that surrounds them do find the honorable man whose honesty and integrity saves them, and by implication, the world.
This is not a contradiction Austen can escape really. Yet her many admirers wish her perfect in every way, and flay any brave enough to think otherwise.
Of course the critics can get it wrong. Edward Said famously excoriated Austen’s “failure” to condemn slavery and the society it enriched, yet at least arguably Austen (who was known to oppose slavery) was showing in Mansfield Park that the slave-owning Bertram family whose estate owes its wealth and family its luxury to slave holdings in the West Indies was morally ruined by it. The heroine, Fanny Price, queries the patriarch Sir Thomas Bertram, about it, but receives no answer. It is not what is said by Austen that matters, but what happens – the family;s four children corrupted by their ease and its source. The oldest son nearly dies and is a profligate wastrel; the two daughters are immoral quasi trollops, one eloping and the other running away from her husband with a man who had been unsuccessfully pursuing Fanny. Only the fourth, who escapes the clutches of an unworthy but wealthy woman, has the moral strength one can admire.
To my mind, that’s what counts. Wicked wealth has wicked consequences, yeah? Yeah. Showing not telling.
Austen’s reputation can need rescuing from her fans, too. Also in Mansfield Park is the single bawdy remark in the Austen “canon”. It is disputed.
Mary Crawford and her brother Henry come to stay in the parsonage of the Bertram estate. They had been living with their retired admiral uncle but he installed a mistress in his home after his wife died and it was no longer seemly for respectable people to stay. Of course not!
Mary and the second son of the family, Edmund, flirt. She is worldly where he is not, having been in company of seafaring men who evidently have very different ideas about what is acceptable discourse, and she tells Edmund so in the following passage:
"Of various admirals, I could tell you a great deal; of them and their flags, and the gradation of their pay, and their bickerings and jealousies. But in general, I can assure you that they are all passed over, and all very ill used. Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices, I saw enough. Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat."
This is a very clever way of showing worldliness. Mary shows that she knows what “rears and vices” together mean while giving herself the ability to deny it. A surprising number of attempts to exonerate Austen (and in the process Mary) by Austenphiles seems to me to fail, though it is true that it is easy to be anachronistic. But hey – in this case, it’s what it says on the tin.
Austen puritans allege that their darling was highly moral and would not have written this with sexual intent. One counter explanation is that it refers to flogging, because buggery was a capital offence at the time, with more hangings for it than murders in the navy, while flogging was legal.
That won’t wash really. If flogging was meant, why was it a vice instead of a punishment? Unless. . .but that would never do. And if there were more hangings for buggery than murder, it just might be because there was rather a lot of it about. It would certainly be the occasion of jokes then as now. Austen had relations who were admirals and may be assumed to have a good knowledge of salty talk. She does not shy in Mansfield Park from writing of adultery, or in Sense and Sensibility of fornication.
And her purpose in this passage is to show a low character as Mary turns out to be. Austen is not approving of buggery any more than she is of adultery by Mary’s brother, or fornication by the jilting beau of Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.
And and and! there must have been some purpose behind burning Austen’s letters and papers after her death. Her tongue was sharp and she may have had rude things to say about powerful people^^^, but she may just as well also have peppered her private correspondence with sauce.
Rule on, Saint Jane.
*Alcestis has been rendered into English by Ted Hughes. It is truly frightening.
^This is a joke. If you get it, you know more about Jane Austen than I do.
** OK, OK. Just having fun.
***Twain enjoyed jousting with his admirer and good friend William Dean Howells (Howells aptly called Twain “the Lincoln of our literature”), who was also an admirer of Austen. Twain took a very pointed stick to James Fenimore Cooper, trashing him for stated literary crimes, but only fulminates over Austen. His tongue may have been in his cheek.
^^^See Wiki for an example of Austen’s kicking against the pricks by satirising the librarian of the Prince Regent, an admirer.
These nettlesome intrusions have not prevented at least a tiny amount of effort on my part to become educated. I really want to do this! One of my many lacunae is 19th century English literature. Writers as diverse as Trollope and the Brontes are totally foreign to me, while Dickens is a chance acquaintance. My excuse for ignorance is that I am still, after more decades than I wish to concede, enthralled by the English renaissance, the renaissance full stop, and the classics. Euripides! Wow! That fellow strode the boards ahead of all others for about 2000 years. Two thousand! He had competition too – Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Sophocles among the Greeks, Plautus, Terence and other Romans. . .There is a post in this blog on the man, though perhaps not a very good one, but if you have not tried The Trojan Women, or The Medea, or the Iphigenia plays, or Alcestis* you too need some larnin’. Honest. Anyway I haven’t finished with the oldies, and keep telling myself to work up to the moderns. . .the 18th and 19th century moderns. Sheridan I know but. . .
So lately I have been schooling myself in the scandal of Jane Austen. When a film of Pride and Prejudice came out, I read the novel and was mightily impressed. It seemed to me – and still seems – that Austen showed herself to be the first truly modern writer. Her airy and concise style and her ironic detachment from the characters she created, made for a very good read. Her style stands up very well against later, more florid writers like Balzac, whatever their respective intellectual grunt
Lately I’ve decided to try some of her other works. Emma put me off and so did Northanger Abbey but I have got through Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility.
Were my first impressions^ justified? Well, yes. Austen wrote in a genre peopled by thousands perhaps and stands out. She still seems to me a pathbreaker. Naturally pathbreakers are riddled with faults – look at my books!** The wrinkles get ironed out by those who follow and it can be easy to criticise in that patronising way writers employ. Mark Twain ridiculed her though it is unclear if he really meant it***.
Certainly in a writing sense she does not conform to the rules of our time, and probably not of her own. As happened then, her books would likely be spiked if submitted to publishers today: on a superficial level they “tell, not show” well past a fault. To give a contrasting example, one of Graham Greene’s later novels, Monsignor Quixote, begins as a Spanish priest picks up a Vatican bigwig whose car has broken down, and while waiting for it to be repaired, takes the man to his home for lunch. The larder is bare apart from horsemeat, and the priest tells his cook/housekeeper to serve it up.
The Vatican fellow eats the meat with gusto, and several weeks later the priest discovers he has been made a monsignor.
This is an example of “show, don’t tell”. Greene never tells the reader that the reason for this award is that the priest showed his humility in serving what he had to his guest.
Austen does this too, but it is harder to decide when she really means it. She tells, and tells, and tells so often that any attempt to say what she “really meant” otherwise inevitably runs into opposition.. What rescues her for “modernity” is the ironic detachment she shows in the telling. She mocks and scorns characters, even nice ones.
There are some negatives; there always are. Reading her books one after the other shows a sameness that is pretty much a yawn really. Mansfield Park, her most controversial, is also her most overwritten – it is perhaps twice as long as it needed to be. Sense and Sensibility could also do with a trim. Nonetheless there are sparkling dialogues well worth the effort, and Sense especially, after a slow start, is a real ripper for the most part, before stuttering to a bizarre and unbelievable conclusion that had me thinking, Nonsense and insensibility.
In Mansfield Park and Sense Austen addresses the reader directly in what today might be seen as experimental and to her might have been an attempt at seeming to be reading to her audience, as she read her books to her family. It’s nice.
Yet to me the most attractive and intriguing feature of her style is a willingness to be really mean. Here for example, the Middletons, Sir John and his Lady, who have gone out of their way to provide the heroines a place to live, and want them to come visit, often:
“. . .they kept more company of every kind than any other family in the neighbourhood. It was necessary for the happiness of both; for however dissimilar in temper and outward behaviour, they strongly resembled each other in that total want of talent and taste which confined their employments, unconnected as such which society produced, within a very narrow compass. Sir John was a sportsman, Lady Middleton a mother. He hunted and shot, and she humoured her children, and these were their only resources.”
Well!
Lady Middleton gets both barrels a short time later, as the Dashwoods (heroines) visit the Middleton mansion:
“There was nothing in any of the party which could recommend them as companions to the Dashwoods, but the cold insipidity of Lady Middleton was so particularly repulsive, that in comparison of it the gravity of Colonel Brandon, and even the boisterous mirth of Sir John and his mother-in-law was interesting.”
Austen’s remarks are often said to be “gently mocking”.
Readers of this blog know that I am partial to a French writer, Celine, who was amazing for his insights and appalling for his beliefs. Celine got his shrewd perceptions of humanity from what are sometimes styled “petit bourgeois” origins. His family had a lace shop in an arcade in Paris and his father, who worked for an insurance company, was a wannabe all his life. Their son was sent to Germany and to England to learn the local language in a strategy designed to make him successful at business. Instead, he became a doctor and one of the most notorious authors of the 20th century.
Celine’s nightmare visions of the whole of humanity sprang from hatred and envy of those above, and fear and loathing of those below. Always on the edge of being tipped into the latter, careful not to offend and desirous of joining the former, the precarious existence of the petit bourgeois in early 19th century England is strikingly brought to life by Austen. Her main characters are genteel poor single women seeking to marry a man at least able to look after them, and having very little alternative. Austen’s caustic eye never fails to judge the landed wealthy and those associated with them, finding the good among them much more rare than the morally bankrupt. These last attain their status in a plethora of ways, from fornication, adultery, and blithe materialism to profiting from slavery. Their code of values reeks of hypocritical sanctimony.
Much of the talk in Austen’s books revolves around money. No man is really eligible for marriage without a good amount of it, usually as interest income from some principal, and the fortunate woman endowed with the same is much admired and desired. So-and-so is “worth 20,000” or “has an income of 2,000 a year” is rating talk among would-be brides and their advisors.
Despite this trenchant critique of the English moneyed and landed classes of her time, Austen’s books have happy endings. The good do not die though they may get sick. They are rejected, but are lucky in it. They marry the right fellow after all. . .their morality sees them through.
Nice, innit? Austen thus ends up supporting and bolstering the society she otherwise ridicules. There is no hint that the forms of servitude of the vast mass of English people – as servants in homes, workers in factories or fields, or desperate paupers – are anything but jolly glad to be alive; for the most part, they do not even exist. In Sense for example, the lovely widow Mrs Jennings takes two unmarried sisters from their country cottage to her home in London. They arrive, and dinner is served two hours later. Mrs Jennings has been in the country for quite some time, and whoever cooked the meal was. . .was. . .was. . .doing what while she was away? The widow tries to find employment for a sister of one of her staff, giving her a glowing reference (as she does). That’s about it.
Throughout Austen's books, things get done by this faceless mass, who when they are seen at all seem overjoyed to serve. Horses are fed and retrieved, coaches are driven, washing is washed, needlework needled, gardens are dug and maintained, entire villages belonging to the gentry are peopled, their tithes providing income for the lesser sons of the manse who get a “living” from preaching the virtues of stoic acceptance, or so one supposes.
As a backdrop, as the stuff of her narratives, then, “the system” of Austen’s novels stinks. The beneficiaries of its hypocritical values are almost universally excruciatingly unworthy to receive its largesse. The exceptions cannot prove the rule. And yet – one and all, happy endings. The virtuous women who have resisted the evil that surrounds them do find the honorable man whose honesty and integrity saves them, and by implication, the world.
This is not a contradiction Austen can escape really. Yet her many admirers wish her perfect in every way, and flay any brave enough to think otherwise.
Of course the critics can get it wrong. Edward Said famously excoriated Austen’s “failure” to condemn slavery and the society it enriched, yet at least arguably Austen (who was known to oppose slavery) was showing in Mansfield Park that the slave-owning Bertram family whose estate owes its wealth and family its luxury to slave holdings in the West Indies was morally ruined by it. The heroine, Fanny Price, queries the patriarch Sir Thomas Bertram, about it, but receives no answer. It is not what is said by Austen that matters, but what happens – the family;s four children corrupted by their ease and its source. The oldest son nearly dies and is a profligate wastrel; the two daughters are immoral quasi trollops, one eloping and the other running away from her husband with a man who had been unsuccessfully pursuing Fanny. Only the fourth, who escapes the clutches of an unworthy but wealthy woman, has the moral strength one can admire.
To my mind, that’s what counts. Wicked wealth has wicked consequences, yeah? Yeah. Showing not telling.
Austen’s reputation can need rescuing from her fans, too. Also in Mansfield Park is the single bawdy remark in the Austen “canon”. It is disputed.
Mary Crawford and her brother Henry come to stay in the parsonage of the Bertram estate. They had been living with their retired admiral uncle but he installed a mistress in his home after his wife died and it was no longer seemly for respectable people to stay. Of course not!
Mary and the second son of the family, Edmund, flirt. She is worldly where he is not, having been in company of seafaring men who evidently have very different ideas about what is acceptable discourse, and she tells Edmund so in the following passage:
"Of various admirals, I could tell you a great deal; of them and their flags, and the gradation of their pay, and their bickerings and jealousies. But in general, I can assure you that they are all passed over, and all very ill used. Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices, I saw enough. Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat."
This is a very clever way of showing worldliness. Mary shows that she knows what “rears and vices” together mean while giving herself the ability to deny it. A surprising number of attempts to exonerate Austen (and in the process Mary) by Austenphiles seems to me to fail, though it is true that it is easy to be anachronistic. But hey – in this case, it’s what it says on the tin.
Austen puritans allege that their darling was highly moral and would not have written this with sexual intent. One counter explanation is that it refers to flogging, because buggery was a capital offence at the time, with more hangings for it than murders in the navy, while flogging was legal.
That won’t wash really. If flogging was meant, why was it a vice instead of a punishment? Unless. . .but that would never do. And if there were more hangings for buggery than murder, it just might be because there was rather a lot of it about. It would certainly be the occasion of jokes then as now. Austen had relations who were admirals and may be assumed to have a good knowledge of salty talk. She does not shy in Mansfield Park from writing of adultery, or in Sense and Sensibility of fornication.
And her purpose in this passage is to show a low character as Mary turns out to be. Austen is not approving of buggery any more than she is of adultery by Mary’s brother, or fornication by the jilting beau of Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.
And and and! there must have been some purpose behind burning Austen’s letters and papers after her death. Her tongue was sharp and she may have had rude things to say about powerful people^^^, but she may just as well also have peppered her private correspondence with sauce.
Rule on, Saint Jane.
*Alcestis has been rendered into English by Ted Hughes. It is truly frightening.
^This is a joke. If you get it, you know more about Jane Austen than I do.
** OK, OK. Just having fun.
***Twain enjoyed jousting with his admirer and good friend William Dean Howells (Howells aptly called Twain “the Lincoln of our literature”), who was also an admirer of Austen. Twain took a very pointed stick to James Fenimore Cooper, trashing him for stated literary crimes, but only fulminates over Austen. His tongue may have been in his cheek.
^^^See Wiki for an example of Austen’s kicking against the pricks by satirising the librarian of the Prince Regent, an admirer.
April 18, 2016
Shakespeare to a T
Hello readers – it is fine but a bit windy on an autumn day in New Zealand, where I live. Wherever you are, I hope your weather is at least as fine.
My part of the universe is otherwise mostly OK too. Just now I am thinking and researching a new novel, while I try to persuade the part of the universe that is not my part to buy my latest one. And all the other ones. And even the ones people think I wrote but didn’t.
The new one has the working title of Lapchicken Rules, and the aim is to write something funny for a change. If I have a contemporary model in this, it would be Tom Sharpe. His best books are funny while retaining a serious – and even savage – purpose: witness The Throwback and The Great Pursuit.
Writing humour is not easy, especially at length. Some of my posts in this blog are meant to raise a smile at least but sixty thousand words or more of guffaws are a different matter altogether. And I do not mean just to be funny.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece film, Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is a good example. This film starred Peter Sellers in three roles, including Dr Strangelove, an ex-Nazi physicist in a wheelchair who kept having to drag his arm down from a Hitler salute, the president of the United States, looking suspiciously like Adlai Stevenson, and an English flight lieutenant who almost but not quite saves the world.
It would be nice to digress here, so I will. Adlai Stevenson was one of many American politicians with an odd first name. You would think a weird name would tend to disqualify but it seems to have acted as a magnet for the bearer to wish to be President of the Yew-nited States! I mean, Adlai! Harry Truman you think was normal but his middle name was an initial – S. Lyndon Johnson may have put a stop to this agreeable tradition until Barack Obama, as all the Presidents in between have had normal names, if sometimes a bit boring and candidates with odd ones have gone south. I mean, would you want a President named Mitt? This is a baseball glove! Or Hubert? He lost to a Richard, who really was a dick. This election year has a Donald, a Marco, a Rafael (“Ted” Cruz), and a Bernard, but nothing like Dwight or Adlai or Ulysses, or Millard. Millard Fillmore! Wow! Adlai’s grandfather was actually Vice-President (1893-1897) so it wasn’t a handicap back then but it was in 1952 and 1956 against a Dwight. Dwight isn’t that great either so he called himself “Ike” to compensate for his surname being so long and German – Eisenhower. There is a musician whose surname was Dwight but he changed it to John. His first name was Reginald and he wasn’t too keen on that either and struck out wildly for a catchy “Elton”. Elton’s new middle name is Hercules. You probably already knew this. He doesn’t want to be President – or if he does, is disqualified by being British. Is he resentful? Write him and ask.
I am back! If you are still here hope you enjoyed that side trip. Dr Strangelove was rightly termed a comedy of terrors rather than errors as Shakespeare had it. This was a film about the end of the cold war via meltdown, through a nutty American Air Force general who kept muttering about “precious bodily fluids” and sent his nuclear squadrons off to flatten the Commos. One does. End of film and story, and us!
Kubrick’s film is often very funny. It is full of gags – one liners it would be wrong to put here for those who have not seen the film.
My idea is to write something funny like that, only different – of course. But just as brill.
Shakespeare as always is a kind of exemplar. The bard’s comedies are not necessarily all funny, and typically they have an underlying life-threatening premise. There are heaps of laughs but the characters may need death defying courage before they discover bliss and (usually) true love. As You Like It is how we like it! The more serious dramas, and tragedies, can also have humorous interludes that give point to the terrible events that surround them. There are, for example, quite a number of gags in Hamlet.
The storyline of the new one is not yet complete, and the research is ongoing and will be right through the final passages. But so far, it’s fun! Writing is not always fun, and the writing part quite frequently is as terrifying as it is satisfying – even simultaneously!
You could say that’s part of the point for a writer. My best prose – according to me of course – has given me goosebumps as I’ve written it, and repeated re-readings have still held that delicious frisson, if at a reduced rate. Sometimes this blog does that too and when a reader writes that s/he has laughed out loud at something, my anaemic chest swells with pride. “Not enough plumage, bird-brain” is my self-criticism, but I do it anyway.
So the adventure continues. There is a lot between here and there – characters ah “fleshed out”, storyline ditto, which includes place, time, duration of time, and lots more. . .but the idea is there and the premise. And I’m beetling on.
Thanks for reading.
My part of the universe is otherwise mostly OK too. Just now I am thinking and researching a new novel, while I try to persuade the part of the universe that is not my part to buy my latest one. And all the other ones. And even the ones people think I wrote but didn’t.
The new one has the working title of Lapchicken Rules, and the aim is to write something funny for a change. If I have a contemporary model in this, it would be Tom Sharpe. His best books are funny while retaining a serious – and even savage – purpose: witness The Throwback and The Great Pursuit.
Writing humour is not easy, especially at length. Some of my posts in this blog are meant to raise a smile at least but sixty thousand words or more of guffaws are a different matter altogether. And I do not mean just to be funny.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece film, Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is a good example. This film starred Peter Sellers in three roles, including Dr Strangelove, an ex-Nazi physicist in a wheelchair who kept having to drag his arm down from a Hitler salute, the president of the United States, looking suspiciously like Adlai Stevenson, and an English flight lieutenant who almost but not quite saves the world.
It would be nice to digress here, so I will. Adlai Stevenson was one of many American politicians with an odd first name. You would think a weird name would tend to disqualify but it seems to have acted as a magnet for the bearer to wish to be President of the Yew-nited States! I mean, Adlai! Harry Truman you think was normal but his middle name was an initial – S. Lyndon Johnson may have put a stop to this agreeable tradition until Barack Obama, as all the Presidents in between have had normal names, if sometimes a bit boring and candidates with odd ones have gone south. I mean, would you want a President named Mitt? This is a baseball glove! Or Hubert? He lost to a Richard, who really was a dick. This election year has a Donald, a Marco, a Rafael (“Ted” Cruz), and a Bernard, but nothing like Dwight or Adlai or Ulysses, or Millard. Millard Fillmore! Wow! Adlai’s grandfather was actually Vice-President (1893-1897) so it wasn’t a handicap back then but it was in 1952 and 1956 against a Dwight. Dwight isn’t that great either so he called himself “Ike” to compensate for his surname being so long and German – Eisenhower. There is a musician whose surname was Dwight but he changed it to John. His first name was Reginald and he wasn’t too keen on that either and struck out wildly for a catchy “Elton”. Elton’s new middle name is Hercules. You probably already knew this. He doesn’t want to be President – or if he does, is disqualified by being British. Is he resentful? Write him and ask.
I am back! If you are still here hope you enjoyed that side trip. Dr Strangelove was rightly termed a comedy of terrors rather than errors as Shakespeare had it. This was a film about the end of the cold war via meltdown, through a nutty American Air Force general who kept muttering about “precious bodily fluids” and sent his nuclear squadrons off to flatten the Commos. One does. End of film and story, and us!
Kubrick’s film is often very funny. It is full of gags – one liners it would be wrong to put here for those who have not seen the film.
My idea is to write something funny like that, only different – of course. But just as brill.
Shakespeare as always is a kind of exemplar. The bard’s comedies are not necessarily all funny, and typically they have an underlying life-threatening premise. There are heaps of laughs but the characters may need death defying courage before they discover bliss and (usually) true love. As You Like It is how we like it! The more serious dramas, and tragedies, can also have humorous interludes that give point to the terrible events that surround them. There are, for example, quite a number of gags in Hamlet.
The storyline of the new one is not yet complete, and the research is ongoing and will be right through the final passages. But so far, it’s fun! Writing is not always fun, and the writing part quite frequently is as terrifying as it is satisfying – even simultaneously!
You could say that’s part of the point for a writer. My best prose – according to me of course – has given me goosebumps as I’ve written it, and repeated re-readings have still held that delicious frisson, if at a reduced rate. Sometimes this blog does that too and when a reader writes that s/he has laughed out loud at something, my anaemic chest swells with pride. “Not enough plumage, bird-brain” is my self-criticism, but I do it anyway.
So the adventure continues. There is a lot between here and there – characters ah “fleshed out”, storyline ditto, which includes place, time, duration of time, and lots more. . .but the idea is there and the premise. And I’m beetling on.
Thanks for reading.
March 29, 2016
I want to tell you. . .
The title of this post is from a George Harrison song that had a very insistent beat. George, the best-looking Beatle in my opinion, wanted to convince people of things. He went beyond observation and statement. He really wanted to tell us!
That could be satire. On an earlier album, Revolver, he got stuck into the British government over its tax policies with “Taxman”. At the time the top marginal rate there was 95 per cent, and no doubt the Beatles’ advisors were hard at it avoiding that grim reaper. “If five per cent appears too small,” George sang, “be thankful I don’t take it all – cause I’m the taxman (yeah, I’m the taxman) and you’re working for no one but me.”
Once George got turned on to Hindu philosophy he went quite otherworldly for the most part, forgot about the taxman and kept badgering us about love, spending the rest of his life Hare Krishna bound. For me, this became a bit twee really, especially watching interviews with him where he was breathing spirituality through cigarette smoke. It killed him.
All the same, he had this message and he kept at it: “We were talking”, “While my guitar gently weeps”, “My sweet lord”. . .and that is admirable for its openness and its commitment.
I’m just not built like that. The stickability required for flower power and beads is absent. Sorry, life.
There is, however, stickability and stickability, and I’ve got some other forms of the stuff, even unto absurd proportions. For more than fifteen years I’ve been trying to make it as a novelist, in my own way, ignoring practically all advice including “you really aren’t very good at this are you, Steve?”
And I’ll keep going. There is something in me that makes me write – this kind of navel-gazing stuff, and fiction, and who knows what all.
Not only that, I want to be read! That may be an absurd proposition after all this time, but it is true. I’m not going to speak for other writers but for me writing carries with it that desire to communicate, if only to coax a grin or a tear on some far-away cheek, the belief of having something to say, about the world, about life as it really is and as it may be, about love and hate and all that amazing stuff that we fill it up with.
My latest book, The living end, is not actually – not the end for me. I won’t give up. This Don Quixote of the spiritual wastes has his lance and there is quite a beguiling number of windmills out yonder, waiting for me to tilt at them. And the pen as lance can be infinitely sharpened according to me. Tom Paine too. . .it really is mightier than the sword, even unto and after death.
My latest wheeze of attracting readers is to cut the price of my books, to the minimum allowed apart from giving them away: US 0.99. Yes, 99 cents – for you, dear reader of this blog! I’ll leave it it there I think. . .maybe a few of you decide to leap boldly with your credit card where you have not previously ventured. Go on – it’s ok. I promise. The worst that can happen to you is boredom.
Thanks for reading.
That could be satire. On an earlier album, Revolver, he got stuck into the British government over its tax policies with “Taxman”. At the time the top marginal rate there was 95 per cent, and no doubt the Beatles’ advisors were hard at it avoiding that grim reaper. “If five per cent appears too small,” George sang, “be thankful I don’t take it all – cause I’m the taxman (yeah, I’m the taxman) and you’re working for no one but me.”
Once George got turned on to Hindu philosophy he went quite otherworldly for the most part, forgot about the taxman and kept badgering us about love, spending the rest of his life Hare Krishna bound. For me, this became a bit twee really, especially watching interviews with him where he was breathing spirituality through cigarette smoke. It killed him.
All the same, he had this message and he kept at it: “We were talking”, “While my guitar gently weeps”, “My sweet lord”. . .and that is admirable for its openness and its commitment.
I’m just not built like that. The stickability required for flower power and beads is absent. Sorry, life.
There is, however, stickability and stickability, and I’ve got some other forms of the stuff, even unto absurd proportions. For more than fifteen years I’ve been trying to make it as a novelist, in my own way, ignoring practically all advice including “you really aren’t very good at this are you, Steve?”
And I’ll keep going. There is something in me that makes me write – this kind of navel-gazing stuff, and fiction, and who knows what all.
Not only that, I want to be read! That may be an absurd proposition after all this time, but it is true. I’m not going to speak for other writers but for me writing carries with it that desire to communicate, if only to coax a grin or a tear on some far-away cheek, the belief of having something to say, about the world, about life as it really is and as it may be, about love and hate and all that amazing stuff that we fill it up with.
My latest book, The living end, is not actually – not the end for me. I won’t give up. This Don Quixote of the spiritual wastes has his lance and there is quite a beguiling number of windmills out yonder, waiting for me to tilt at them. And the pen as lance can be infinitely sharpened according to me. Tom Paine too. . .it really is mightier than the sword, even unto and after death.
My latest wheeze of attracting readers is to cut the price of my books, to the minimum allowed apart from giving them away: US 0.99. Yes, 99 cents – for you, dear reader of this blog! I’ll leave it it there I think. . .maybe a few of you decide to leap boldly with your credit card where you have not previously ventured. Go on – it’s ok. I promise. The worst that can happen to you is boredom.
Thanks for reading.
March 18, 2016
Shaking our Willies
Esteemed readers! It’s not as it seems! Please! Relax! It’s going to be OK! . . .
It is 2016. It’s a big year. Immense. Really, I do mean this! It is a time travel spectacular in which millions of people will move backwards in their minds to London in the early 17th century, or even further, to the late 16th, or if they abandon all pretense, to some very old place like Troy, or Rome at the time Julius or Anthony or further, Coriolanus, shook the earth with ominous tread.
They might even flip their inspired lids completely and lose every contact with any past or present reality and soak up the magic, the true magic, of the man who penetrated more deeply into and cut a wider swathe through the human condition than any before or since – William Shakespeare.
If you didn’t know that 2016 marks 400 years since the great one’s death well, you do now.
Actually, there is even more severance from reality on offer, given that there are more than a few who, seeing a man identified on a theatre marquee as William Shakespeare, will transform him magically into another man altogether – Francis Bacon, say. There’s a lot of it about.
Such a man as Shakespeare existed, these people say, but he was not the author of the plays. Some one else done them. A number of people have been put up as the real deal: Francis Bacon was the first*, and most notable. Bacon was, after all, a writer as well as a scientist and is known for a utopian novel. And as a crook – which he very definitely was – he had the devious mind required to secretly write some 37 plays, many in collaboration with other conspirators able to keep their mouths shut, as well as poems galore. Bacon was even able to keep a straight face when the collected works were published in 1623 with a preface by a fellow playwright who said he “loved the man this side idolatry” and criticised his learning and some of his writing.
Bacon is not alone. What he shares with the other pretenders is what Shakespeare lacked: noble blood. It just doesn’t do for these people that a commoner, with “little Latin and less Greek” as Jonson put it, from a dubious background, could have learned the crafts and arts of literature and beyond, and swept all before him.
So far as I know no one has put forth the notion that a woman really wrote Shakespeare’s stuff but given the times…
These determined souls will participate in the proceedings of 2016 with the grim satisfaction that it was not at all Shakespeare. . .it was X, Y, or Z. ..
They spout nonsense, as anyone who goes deeply enough into the works themselves will come to realise. There is also a wealth of material about the man that circumstantially boxes in the authorship so that it was that one – himself – and none other.
What is striking about the people who think they’ve found the real author is that they have in their minds someone who is not the man himself, and relate, as they must, to him. When they read or watch, they see meanings and nuance applicable only to this champion of letters.
The “canon” of Shakespeare becomes indisputably and irrevocably not just different in authorship, but in kind. It’s new work. Universes of interpretation open up depending on the author in question.
It is easy to smile at this kind of elitism. I do. See the post on this blog, “Charles’ secret spell on the throne”. Attempt to ennoble Shakespeare in another’s skin actually diminish him. Shakespeare’s genius rose from his common origins, his ready familiarity with the wide avenues of humanity thronging the narrow streets of London and wherever else he traveled. Of course he piled more onto his common upbringing with its “little Latin and less Greek” – a ready wit, an excellent mimicry, a terrific ear, and a creative spark that four hundred years later lights raging fires in the heart.
It is true there are those who don’t get it. They find Shakespeare boring, or worse – impenetrable. If you, dear reader, are among these, I wish for you to discover this amazing writer and embark on a journey that will tire you only at the end.
I cut my Bardo-teeth on Classics Illustrated, a wonderful comic book series for kids, so had an idea, but didn’t then really get stuck into him until I was around 40. Then the magic hit.
The edition that did it for me was the Arden series, each play being given an entire book, with a good-length forward, notes on the text as it went along, and a sort of postscript of materials that Shakespeare used when writing.
And the Arden that was first off the rank for me was Frank Kermode’s edition of The Tempest. Now, I had seen this play a few times, and enjoyed it, but Kermode opened my eyes to a much bigger play than I thought I’d seen. The Tempest is a multifaceted marvel. It canvases classical (or “pagan” meaning Greek and Roman) lore and symbolism, the emerging colonial empire of Britain, voyages of discovery, the “noble savage”, racism, magic, philosophy, morals, and more, all while providing a masque for the aristocratic patrons of Shakespeare and his company, including James I (who began his royal career as James VI of Scotland). Even tiny sidelights can have an abiding significance for me, as for example the model for Prospero, the “white magician”** who is the centre of the play. See my post “Storm splashes out of teacup, washes over saucer, stains tablecloth, trousers and reputation”, which attempts to show that the magus is based not on the Englishman John Dee, a contemporary of Shakespeare, but Giovanni Pico dellla Mirandola, a Renaissance philosopher quite a long time dead. The title of my post is misleading in that I don’t have a reputation to stain, but it is my proud footnote to the play and the Bard, and so far I’m sticking to it!
That is just one play! And while it is taken to be Shakespeare’s crowning achievement by many, there are heaps more to behold in wonder. The great tragedies – Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear – comedies like Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Midsummer Night’s Dream, the “history plays”. . .one Arden argues that Shakespeare conceived an eight-parter before writing King John through Henry IV one and two, Henry V, Henry VI in three, ending in Richard III. That’s amazing to me. True, he had a ready source in Holinshed’s Chronicles, but even so. . .he didn’t find Falstaff in Holinshed, and even the historical characters in the series get a life they surely did not live through the quick quill of the man from Stratford.
Diligent followers of this blog – that’s you, isn’t it? – will know that the play that most gets me going is Troilus and Cressida (see the post “Toiling with Troilus” in case you have forgotten). It has so many mysteries attached to it – starting with the conundrum of whether it is a tragedy, or a comedy, but there is much, much more to that astonishing play. . .give it a try. . .with the David Bevington edition.
Whatever I write, there is more to Shakespeare. So many facets to behold, glittering jewels turned this way and that. When Ted Hughes wrote Shakespeare and the goddess of complete being he mounted an argument about 14 of the plays. – just over a third of his dramatic works that have come down to us – that is in itself a marvel of imaginative argument.
So what I would like is for the entire planet to get as turned on, as transfixed by Shakespeare as I am over this “festival” year. It won’t happen, but I’d still like it.
For those who do discover, or rediscover, or just keep discovering the amazing qualities of the man and through him his times, his contemporaries, the reality of living then and living today, all masks for the reality and meaning of life itself, this will be a supercharged year. Each of us will have our special Bard, the one who belongs to us and no one else, and hence – you’ve been waiting, haven’t you? and here it is! – the title of this post. Whatever your gender, your age or your interests, you will have your own personal Willie the Shake. We may learn much, have our idea of Shakespeare transformed, ah, “shaken”, but down in the part of our souls where we hold tight to our hard-won understandings and insights, this man remains ours alone.
Thanks for reading,
*There is a chapter on the authorship question in Bill Bryson’s popular biography that is worth reading.
** During the Renaissance a distinction was made between black magic – evil, evil, evil – and its opposite which was practised for good. This distinction enabled philosophers like Pico to delve into these arts, but authorities were always on the lookout for the horned one lurking behind the exalted claims.
It is 2016. It’s a big year. Immense. Really, I do mean this! It is a time travel spectacular in which millions of people will move backwards in their minds to London in the early 17th century, or even further, to the late 16th, or if they abandon all pretense, to some very old place like Troy, or Rome at the time Julius or Anthony or further, Coriolanus, shook the earth with ominous tread.
They might even flip their inspired lids completely and lose every contact with any past or present reality and soak up the magic, the true magic, of the man who penetrated more deeply into and cut a wider swathe through the human condition than any before or since – William Shakespeare.
If you didn’t know that 2016 marks 400 years since the great one’s death well, you do now.
Actually, there is even more severance from reality on offer, given that there are more than a few who, seeing a man identified on a theatre marquee as William Shakespeare, will transform him magically into another man altogether – Francis Bacon, say. There’s a lot of it about.
Such a man as Shakespeare existed, these people say, but he was not the author of the plays. Some one else done them. A number of people have been put up as the real deal: Francis Bacon was the first*, and most notable. Bacon was, after all, a writer as well as a scientist and is known for a utopian novel. And as a crook – which he very definitely was – he had the devious mind required to secretly write some 37 plays, many in collaboration with other conspirators able to keep their mouths shut, as well as poems galore. Bacon was even able to keep a straight face when the collected works were published in 1623 with a preface by a fellow playwright who said he “loved the man this side idolatry” and criticised his learning and some of his writing.
Bacon is not alone. What he shares with the other pretenders is what Shakespeare lacked: noble blood. It just doesn’t do for these people that a commoner, with “little Latin and less Greek” as Jonson put it, from a dubious background, could have learned the crafts and arts of literature and beyond, and swept all before him.
So far as I know no one has put forth the notion that a woman really wrote Shakespeare’s stuff but given the times…
These determined souls will participate in the proceedings of 2016 with the grim satisfaction that it was not at all Shakespeare. . .it was X, Y, or Z. ..
They spout nonsense, as anyone who goes deeply enough into the works themselves will come to realise. There is also a wealth of material about the man that circumstantially boxes in the authorship so that it was that one – himself – and none other.
What is striking about the people who think they’ve found the real author is that they have in their minds someone who is not the man himself, and relate, as they must, to him. When they read or watch, they see meanings and nuance applicable only to this champion of letters.
The “canon” of Shakespeare becomes indisputably and irrevocably not just different in authorship, but in kind. It’s new work. Universes of interpretation open up depending on the author in question.
It is easy to smile at this kind of elitism. I do. See the post on this blog, “Charles’ secret spell on the throne”. Attempt to ennoble Shakespeare in another’s skin actually diminish him. Shakespeare’s genius rose from his common origins, his ready familiarity with the wide avenues of humanity thronging the narrow streets of London and wherever else he traveled. Of course he piled more onto his common upbringing with its “little Latin and less Greek” – a ready wit, an excellent mimicry, a terrific ear, and a creative spark that four hundred years later lights raging fires in the heart.
It is true there are those who don’t get it. They find Shakespeare boring, or worse – impenetrable. If you, dear reader, are among these, I wish for you to discover this amazing writer and embark on a journey that will tire you only at the end.
I cut my Bardo-teeth on Classics Illustrated, a wonderful comic book series for kids, so had an idea, but didn’t then really get stuck into him until I was around 40. Then the magic hit.
The edition that did it for me was the Arden series, each play being given an entire book, with a good-length forward, notes on the text as it went along, and a sort of postscript of materials that Shakespeare used when writing.
And the Arden that was first off the rank for me was Frank Kermode’s edition of The Tempest. Now, I had seen this play a few times, and enjoyed it, but Kermode opened my eyes to a much bigger play than I thought I’d seen. The Tempest is a multifaceted marvel. It canvases classical (or “pagan” meaning Greek and Roman) lore and symbolism, the emerging colonial empire of Britain, voyages of discovery, the “noble savage”, racism, magic, philosophy, morals, and more, all while providing a masque for the aristocratic patrons of Shakespeare and his company, including James I (who began his royal career as James VI of Scotland). Even tiny sidelights can have an abiding significance for me, as for example the model for Prospero, the “white magician”** who is the centre of the play. See my post “Storm splashes out of teacup, washes over saucer, stains tablecloth, trousers and reputation”, which attempts to show that the magus is based not on the Englishman John Dee, a contemporary of Shakespeare, but Giovanni Pico dellla Mirandola, a Renaissance philosopher quite a long time dead. The title of my post is misleading in that I don’t have a reputation to stain, but it is my proud footnote to the play and the Bard, and so far I’m sticking to it!
That is just one play! And while it is taken to be Shakespeare’s crowning achievement by many, there are heaps more to behold in wonder. The great tragedies – Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear – comedies like Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Midsummer Night’s Dream, the “history plays”. . .one Arden argues that Shakespeare conceived an eight-parter before writing King John through Henry IV one and two, Henry V, Henry VI in three, ending in Richard III. That’s amazing to me. True, he had a ready source in Holinshed’s Chronicles, but even so. . .he didn’t find Falstaff in Holinshed, and even the historical characters in the series get a life they surely did not live through the quick quill of the man from Stratford.
Diligent followers of this blog – that’s you, isn’t it? – will know that the play that most gets me going is Troilus and Cressida (see the post “Toiling with Troilus” in case you have forgotten). It has so many mysteries attached to it – starting with the conundrum of whether it is a tragedy, or a comedy, but there is much, much more to that astonishing play. . .give it a try. . .with the David Bevington edition.
Whatever I write, there is more to Shakespeare. So many facets to behold, glittering jewels turned this way and that. When Ted Hughes wrote Shakespeare and the goddess of complete being he mounted an argument about 14 of the plays. – just over a third of his dramatic works that have come down to us – that is in itself a marvel of imaginative argument.
So what I would like is for the entire planet to get as turned on, as transfixed by Shakespeare as I am over this “festival” year. It won’t happen, but I’d still like it.
For those who do discover, or rediscover, or just keep discovering the amazing qualities of the man and through him his times, his contemporaries, the reality of living then and living today, all masks for the reality and meaning of life itself, this will be a supercharged year. Each of us will have our special Bard, the one who belongs to us and no one else, and hence – you’ve been waiting, haven’t you? and here it is! – the title of this post. Whatever your gender, your age or your interests, you will have your own personal Willie the Shake. We may learn much, have our idea of Shakespeare transformed, ah, “shaken”, but down in the part of our souls where we hold tight to our hard-won understandings and insights, this man remains ours alone.
Thanks for reading,
*There is a chapter on the authorship question in Bill Bryson’s popular biography that is worth reading.
** During the Renaissance a distinction was made between black magic – evil, evil, evil – and its opposite which was practised for good. This distinction enabled philosophers like Pico to delve into these arts, but authorities were always on the lookout for the horned one lurking behind the exalted claims.
March 2, 2016
Nike says so - what are you waiting for?
Hello again – yes, dear reader, I seem to be firing at will. There are reasons for this, not least because I am trying to convince you if you are not already convinced, to read my latest offering, The Living End, and even to go on to read others in my “writer’s stable”. There is a bunch – something for anyone! No horses though – not the right sort of course.
There is another way of looking at this, which is that having finished a book and “got it out there”, that I no longer know what to do with myself, so am resorting in desperation to blogging it up large.
In my more intimate moments, when I am reproaching myself for so many things unsuitable for family entertainment, I admit this to myself.
This time, I have a slight excuse. Next week, March 6 onward, there is a “read an e-book week” promotion. The publisher of my titles, Smashwords, is taking part in this, and as a gesture of gratitude and hope I have put some of my work on special, mostly free.
Now, I have a Kobo, and when I don’t read e-material on it, I make do mainly with my PC, which has a programme called Adobe Digital Editions that gives a book the look of a book.
However, a friend and Shakespeare scholar a while back gave me some heaps for praising e-readers like the Kobo and Kindle. He denounced them as doomed technology.
His reasoning was and is that the single application of these devices -reading – means they will be killed off by multipurpose items like iPads and their clones. I have to admit there is something in this, especially given that you can’t read an art book on a Kobo as it is black and white.
That said, I have a Kobo and do not have – nor do I want – an Apple anything. And I like it. If suddenly I became wealthier than all my tribe through the sale of say a million or two of my works, then I might “cogitate over its veritability” as a song almost goes.*
Then I will be able to report back on the inestimable advantages of the iPad or its equivalent. Try me.
Meanwhile, you can do worse than rise early on March 6, flex your mouse-tickler, put on those Nike trainers to be sure, and get a passle of free e-books. Whatever your pleasure in e-reader, or e-book, you can take advantage.
Here is a link:
https://www.smashwords.com/ebookweek
Enjoy.
Thanks for reading
*”That’s when I’ll come back to you” by Frank Biggs, as recorded by Louis Armstrong. It’s a very amusing song despite some of the implications not quoted here. This is definitely not bad: “When box cars are flying around/and blue turns to brown/then I might abandon the canyons of my mind/and soar into the air. . .over you/darling, you fake.” It also says, “you lost… a gold mine, a silver mine, a cobalt mine, when you lost me.”
Well, Louis could say that, but I can’t.
There is another way of looking at this, which is that having finished a book and “got it out there”, that I no longer know what to do with myself, so am resorting in desperation to blogging it up large.
In my more intimate moments, when I am reproaching myself for so many things unsuitable for family entertainment, I admit this to myself.
This time, I have a slight excuse. Next week, March 6 onward, there is a “read an e-book week” promotion. The publisher of my titles, Smashwords, is taking part in this, and as a gesture of gratitude and hope I have put some of my work on special, mostly free.
Now, I have a Kobo, and when I don’t read e-material on it, I make do mainly with my PC, which has a programme called Adobe Digital Editions that gives a book the look of a book.
However, a friend and Shakespeare scholar a while back gave me some heaps for praising e-readers like the Kobo and Kindle. He denounced them as doomed technology.
His reasoning was and is that the single application of these devices -reading – means they will be killed off by multipurpose items like iPads and their clones. I have to admit there is something in this, especially given that you can’t read an art book on a Kobo as it is black and white.
That said, I have a Kobo and do not have – nor do I want – an Apple anything. And I like it. If suddenly I became wealthier than all my tribe through the sale of say a million or two of my works, then I might “cogitate over its veritability” as a song almost goes.*
Then I will be able to report back on the inestimable advantages of the iPad or its equivalent. Try me.
Meanwhile, you can do worse than rise early on March 6, flex your mouse-tickler, put on those Nike trainers to be sure, and get a passle of free e-books. Whatever your pleasure in e-reader, or e-book, you can take advantage.
Here is a link:
https://www.smashwords.com/ebookweek
Enjoy.
Thanks for reading
*”That’s when I’ll come back to you” by Frank Biggs, as recorded by Louis Armstrong. It’s a very amusing song despite some of the implications not quoted here. This is definitely not bad: “When box cars are flying around/and blue turns to brown/then I might abandon the canyons of my mind/and soar into the air. . .over you/darling, you fake.” It also says, “you lost… a gold mine, a silver mine, a cobalt mine, when you lost me.”
Well, Louis could say that, but I can’t.
February 26, 2016
You don't wait ages for a post and then. . .
. .two come along in short order. Dear reader, how nice it is of you to pop along again after so brief a break.
If you have been reading my blog with the attention you surely have been paying to it, you will know that I have been slaving away on a new, apocalyptic novel, trying to beat the end of it all as threatened by practically everyone everywhere who has a grudge, and there are quite a few of those.
As I write, the Russians are bombing away in Syria hours before a ceasefire there. Whether they will stop is moot. The US Secretary of State, a man with hair that will go down in history as “muss-proof” if there is a history, says that if the Russians break their word – surely, they would never do that! – things will “get uglier”. How things can get uglier in that horrible war is hard to imagine, bu I guess they can.
Anyway I managed to complete my novel about the end of the human race before it actually self-destructed in five seconds like the tape in Mission Impossible,with Peter Graves*, and it is now available. Smashwords, the e-publisher, offers it for the generous price of US$2.99. The title is The Living End.
Reader, it would be great if you read this book. I don’t want to spoil your pleasure even a tiny bit, if pleasure is the right expression, and won’t tell you any more about it.
What I will say is that while good writing is always hard, this book was enjoyable to write. As my own worst critic, I think it is well-written too. There is more though – there are “technical aspects” that were difficult to work out but exciting in the end. My aim, apart from providing a good read, is as I set myself when I first started out – to fulfill a serious purpose in a frivolous genre.
Put another way, I’ve got some sneaky bits in there.
One of the books that has influenced my writing is Ted Hughes’ Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Among other arguments in that strange analysis of a cycle of Shakespeare’s plays, Hughes claims the great man wrote partly in a secret code, that there was a surface story that anyone could get, but that within that story were coded references to another, deeper theme, that were addressed to the members of an elect group. What’s more, this theme could even contradict the surface yarn. This idea is quite interesting and even inspirational, and with some of my books I have tried very hard to make this work, though the elect group in my case self-selects as readers who get it.
The Living End has that, or is meant to. Perhaps it’s too obvious, or so subtle no one can pick it. I wrote the thing so I can’t tell really.
Anyway give it a bur and see what you think. In your millions! It’s ok! I don’t mind – honest!
*Peter Graves was the bad guy in Stalag 17, the Oscar-winning prisoner of war drama. He was also the brother of James Arness, who starred in Gunsmoke and appeared in it over an astonishing length of time. Arness was very tall – 6’7″ in old style measurement if memory serves me right – so during the D-Day landing in WWII was given the task of jumping out of the landing craft to see how deep the water was. How Arness must have loved his commander! He was wounded and ended up back in the US having surgery, and was released from hospital in Iowa City, Iowa on the day I was born there. You read it here first!
Arness’ role as “Marshall Dillon” in Gunsmoke was mocked in another TV western, Maverick, starring James Garner. Garner went on to star in the prisoner of war film to beat them all, The Great Escape, slyly erasing Arness’ brother’s dubious claim to infamy. Conspiracy theorists – don those tinfoil hats!
If you have been reading my blog with the attention you surely have been paying to it, you will know that I have been slaving away on a new, apocalyptic novel, trying to beat the end of it all as threatened by practically everyone everywhere who has a grudge, and there are quite a few of those.
As I write, the Russians are bombing away in Syria hours before a ceasefire there. Whether they will stop is moot. The US Secretary of State, a man with hair that will go down in history as “muss-proof” if there is a history, says that if the Russians break their word – surely, they would never do that! – things will “get uglier”. How things can get uglier in that horrible war is hard to imagine, bu I guess they can.
Anyway I managed to complete my novel about the end of the human race before it actually self-destructed in five seconds like the tape in Mission Impossible,with Peter Graves*, and it is now available. Smashwords, the e-publisher, offers it for the generous price of US$2.99. The title is The Living End.
Reader, it would be great if you read this book. I don’t want to spoil your pleasure even a tiny bit, if pleasure is the right expression, and won’t tell you any more about it.
What I will say is that while good writing is always hard, this book was enjoyable to write. As my own worst critic, I think it is well-written too. There is more though – there are “technical aspects” that were difficult to work out but exciting in the end. My aim, apart from providing a good read, is as I set myself when I first started out – to fulfill a serious purpose in a frivolous genre.
Put another way, I’ve got some sneaky bits in there.
One of the books that has influenced my writing is Ted Hughes’ Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Among other arguments in that strange analysis of a cycle of Shakespeare’s plays, Hughes claims the great man wrote partly in a secret code, that there was a surface story that anyone could get, but that within that story were coded references to another, deeper theme, that were addressed to the members of an elect group. What’s more, this theme could even contradict the surface yarn. This idea is quite interesting and even inspirational, and with some of my books I have tried very hard to make this work, though the elect group in my case self-selects as readers who get it.
The Living End has that, or is meant to. Perhaps it’s too obvious, or so subtle no one can pick it. I wrote the thing so I can’t tell really.
Anyway give it a bur and see what you think. In your millions! It’s ok! I don’t mind – honest!
*Peter Graves was the bad guy in Stalag 17, the Oscar-winning prisoner of war drama. He was also the brother of James Arness, who starred in Gunsmoke and appeared in it over an astonishing length of time. Arness was very tall – 6’7″ in old style measurement if memory serves me right – so during the D-Day landing in WWII was given the task of jumping out of the landing craft to see how deep the water was. How Arness must have loved his commander! He was wounded and ended up back in the US having surgery, and was released from hospital in Iowa City, Iowa on the day I was born there. You read it here first!
Arness’ role as “Marshall Dillon” in Gunsmoke was mocked in another TV western, Maverick, starring James Garner. Garner went on to star in the prisoner of war film to beat them all, The Great Escape, slyly erasing Arness’ brother’s dubious claim to infamy. Conspiracy theorists – don those tinfoil hats!
The written world
This blog was originally started "just because" but as I've gone along I've realised how valuable it is to be able to think about writing, about the writers who matter to me, and to help clarify my th
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