Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "steve-evans"
Blog-a-delphic
Yes, I am a bad blogger. Hopeless. Grade Zed - no, even worse than that, grade unter-Zed. Somewhere else I started a blog, did an entry, and then half-pie another one, and then quit. So I kind of think this one is likely to be similar, but who knows? Maybe I will be so energised by the high-quality responses from people who read this, that it will run and run. That would be nice.
What I'd like to write is about writing - to me, I think writers may enjoy writing, and may earn money and thrills and fun and fame from it, but that ultimately, in their heart of hearts, they write because they have to. At any rate, that is why I write. Yes, I do get pleasure from it. Sometimes I have got goosebumps as I've written especially thrilling passages; tears have come to my eyes, even on repeated readings, of other bits, and on the few occasions I've written something meant to be funny, I've smiled again, and again. All those things are true, and good, and help make writing worthwhile.
Ultimately though, I write because I feel compelled to write - a compulsion. It's been in me since I was reasonably young, a teenager, and while I've been in the writing game professionally for more than twenty-five years, before that I kept starting things and trying other things...and I don't imagine my experience is at all strange.
Naturally I would like it if my compulsion ah compelled readers to read my stuff. Like any writer, I want to be read. I think I have things to say that are worth saying, worth reading and worth thinking about. All my books are in some sense intellectual thrillers, even if they are all different: they are "novels of ideas", and the ideas that underlie and inform them are what I would like readers to find most interesting about them.
That's not for everybody. Nor is the sex and violence that percolate through the prose. I enjoy writing that stuff, and would like every reader to enjoy reading it too, along with everything in my books. But I know that as with the ideas, some people just don't want to know.
For example, Demented, which is largely set in a dementia unit in an old people's home, offended some readers because the reality of the setting involved people who were incontinent. I thought that feature an important part of the novel: the reality of what it is like to suffer from dementia and what it is like to care for people who suffer from it. One reader said, "Give me a break!" Another said, "Too much of poohs." But a third, who had worked in such a place, said, "You got what it's like perfectly." So while I "lost" in this count two to one, to me, I won: "perfectly" from one who knows.
The thing that gets me down the most, however, is not resistance to things like this - after all no one has to like what I write - but missing the point altogether. My novel The Kleiber Monster is partly about the truth that most old people are women, typically widowed, and suggests, admittedly obliquely, that they should not moulder alone in their houses once their husbands die, but should buddy up with other women, not just as flatmates either. The idea was to raise this idea without beating people over the head with it, and while some readers got it immediately (one professional reader said, "Yes. Octogenerian lesbian sex") others just saw another aspect of this relationship, and missed the underlying point. Bad writing, Steve, is my conclusion. But maybe I am being unfair to myself.
However I am hardly setting the world on fire at the mo.
Meanwhile I am writing another one. I just can't help it. It's my ninth novel though I have put only five on the net as e-books. I'm enjoying writing it. It's different from the others, but the same too. Maybe it'll be the one that cracks it for me, and people will go back to the others and find all the richness presently hidden from them!
Well, that's me. If you have got this far, five stars! You don't care about the stars, do you? Not to worry.
What I'd like to write is about writing - to me, I think writers may enjoy writing, and may earn money and thrills and fun and fame from it, but that ultimately, in their heart of hearts, they write because they have to. At any rate, that is why I write. Yes, I do get pleasure from it. Sometimes I have got goosebumps as I've written especially thrilling passages; tears have come to my eyes, even on repeated readings, of other bits, and on the few occasions I've written something meant to be funny, I've smiled again, and again. All those things are true, and good, and help make writing worthwhile.
Ultimately though, I write because I feel compelled to write - a compulsion. It's been in me since I was reasonably young, a teenager, and while I've been in the writing game professionally for more than twenty-five years, before that I kept starting things and trying other things...and I don't imagine my experience is at all strange.
Naturally I would like it if my compulsion ah compelled readers to read my stuff. Like any writer, I want to be read. I think I have things to say that are worth saying, worth reading and worth thinking about. All my books are in some sense intellectual thrillers, even if they are all different: they are "novels of ideas", and the ideas that underlie and inform them are what I would like readers to find most interesting about them.
That's not for everybody. Nor is the sex and violence that percolate through the prose. I enjoy writing that stuff, and would like every reader to enjoy reading it too, along with everything in my books. But I know that as with the ideas, some people just don't want to know.
For example, Demented, which is largely set in a dementia unit in an old people's home, offended some readers because the reality of the setting involved people who were incontinent. I thought that feature an important part of the novel: the reality of what it is like to suffer from dementia and what it is like to care for people who suffer from it. One reader said, "Give me a break!" Another said, "Too much of poohs." But a third, who had worked in such a place, said, "You got what it's like perfectly." So while I "lost" in this count two to one, to me, I won: "perfectly" from one who knows.
The thing that gets me down the most, however, is not resistance to things like this - after all no one has to like what I write - but missing the point altogether. My novel The Kleiber Monster is partly about the truth that most old people are women, typically widowed, and suggests, admittedly obliquely, that they should not moulder alone in their houses once their husbands die, but should buddy up with other women, not just as flatmates either. The idea was to raise this idea without beating people over the head with it, and while some readers got it immediately (one professional reader said, "Yes. Octogenerian lesbian sex") others just saw another aspect of this relationship, and missed the underlying point. Bad writing, Steve, is my conclusion. But maybe I am being unfair to myself.
However I am hardly setting the world on fire at the mo.
Meanwhile I am writing another one. I just can't help it. It's my ninth novel though I have put only five on the net as e-books. I'm enjoying writing it. It's different from the others, but the same too. Maybe it'll be the one that cracks it for me, and people will go back to the others and find all the richness presently hidden from them!
Well, that's me. If you have got this far, five stars! You don't care about the stars, do you? Not to worry.
Something even more completely different
This blog is about writing, and for the most part it's been about the writers and thinkers who have influenced me as I've gone along. There are more of these than I've written about so far, but rehashing the past, while interesting to me and I would hope to those who drop in to read these slim offerings, is not going forward really.
And my thinking has been zapping along in different directions lately prompted by all these posts about the past.
My new book, which is just shy of 50,000 words, has the working title of Kaos. Its theme came to me while I was working on my previous book, The Russian Idea, which dealt a lot with Russian religious philosophy, in particular the thinking and beliefs of Dostoevsky and Nikolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev wrote a book with the same title as my novel.
Over about a year before and while writing The Russian Idea I read a lot of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I had not read for a long time, or had never read: Berdyaev was a very prolific writer and I read or reread at least ten of his books, and many of his articles, while reintroducing myself to Dostoevsky through several of his masterpieces and newly through his journalism, and some biographical accounts. Sinking into a writer or thinker in this way can give the feeling for the mind of the person in a way that reading a single book, or reading a book now and again, can not do. My immersion therapies in writers and thinkers tell me that you can come to feel you really do understand what was going on in the mind of the person...and when you don't, when you are troubled, prompts you to keep going. There is a nagging feeling that something eludes me about Shakespeare, and that adds to the mystery of the man, and encourages me to keep reading him, and about him, and his time, and the intellectual movements associated with him, or even alleged to be associated with him. Ditto "secretive" writers like B Traven and Celine.
There is a lot to this: questions of language, its "grammar" and history, of translation, of attitude, of cultural nuance and perceptions, and the more you go into it, the deeper you go, the more amazing it turns out to be. Take one example of this: "a" v "he":
In the Arden edition of Hamlet edited by Harold Jenkins, there are numerous examples of "a" when "he" or "it" is meant. In a note, Jenkins says the "a" is a colloquial rendering of "ha" for "he" that was common in Elizabethan drama. To get this, both the "a" and the "ha", to bring it into oneself, to live with it, so that one reads or hears it spoken in performance as natural and "correct" (because it is), is to bring the Elizabethan age, in this intimate if tiny aspect, into one's heart through imaginative understanding. As I have written in an earlier post, it means not only that Shakespeare reaches out across the centuries to communicate with us, but that through this kind of understanding, we are able to "talk back", to respond creatively. It's teriffic! It's thrilling! We are taken out of our time, delving deeply in another, only to find, when we surface, that we are in our own place but with an enriched understanding that spans the centuries while telling us something about "now" and about ourselves. That's what being "universal" - "for all time" as Jonson had it about Shakespeare - means, sez me.
This is a long way around to get into the aura of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I was living in while writing The Russian Idea but may help explain how while writing that book, I was prompted to want to write another one by my feeling for the moral universe of this pair, in particular Dostoevsky, and to want to write a book something like he might want to write today (so say I) - not in terms of his genius, which of course I do not share, but in terms of his concerns, which I do, even if I find some of his urges unpalatable.
This is not the first time one of my books has been prompted by a previous one. The Kleiber Monster led me to write another book, Tobi's Gift (unpublished) because I felt I had not dealt with something frontally enough. And that led me into new places that prompted Savonarola's Bones.
Demented, however, the book that followed Savonarola's Bones, was not prompted by its predecessor, but sprang out of another set of concerns and experiences. What this says to me is that each successive novel is not, or not necessarily, the "sum" of an author's life to that point - in style, in theme or focus or what have you, it may not only not be an advance, but may even be worse than earlier work, and often a "sideways shift" into something new and different, but not necessarily better. Second novels are said to be the most difficult books for fiction writers, as the first one may all but leap from the mind to the page, and many second efforts are disappointing to the public as well as to the writer. Evilheart, my second novel (the first is unpublished), was very hard to write, and despite many revisions over a decade, is far from perfect. Though I think in some aspects it is an excellent book, in others it remains very disappointing to me.
But even later works can be poor. Raymond Chandler's last book for example must have been an embarrassment to him, and is certainly so to his memory. Any writer would - or at least should - find that worrying. Certainly Kaos is worrying me in that sense: much of the first draft seems quite shockingly written, and I know that later drafts are going to be pretty hard work if the thing is going to be worth reading, and hence worth bringing into public view.
So I am not sure about this one. The premise is good, and as with my other books, has something to say about the world around us and how we might navigate our way through the sometimes tortuous moral maze that can be any individual's life: the choices that confront us, the temptations we are asked to avoid, or invited to sink ourselves into, never to emerge...as I write, I am not sure if the anti-hero becomes a hero, or if he is a hero who becomes an anti-hero: this delicate balance is something that ultimately is going to define the book, and understanding how to express both of these elements of the human personality warring within an individual, so that one emerges at the end to vanquish the other, is the greatest challenge in writing I have ever faced: words that, as it were, "face both ways". Is that Dostoevsky peering over my shoulder, shaking his head in vigorous disapproval, wagging his finger at my poor offerings? Perhaps. I am trying my best, Fyodor! What's that you say?
If you are reading this, you can award as many stars to yourself as you wish, provided that none of them is purple.
And my thinking has been zapping along in different directions lately prompted by all these posts about the past.
My new book, which is just shy of 50,000 words, has the working title of Kaos. Its theme came to me while I was working on my previous book, The Russian Idea, which dealt a lot with Russian religious philosophy, in particular the thinking and beliefs of Dostoevsky and Nikolai Berdyaev. Berdyaev wrote a book with the same title as my novel.
Over about a year before and while writing The Russian Idea I read a lot of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I had not read for a long time, or had never read: Berdyaev was a very prolific writer and I read or reread at least ten of his books, and many of his articles, while reintroducing myself to Dostoevsky through several of his masterpieces and newly through his journalism, and some biographical accounts. Sinking into a writer or thinker in this way can give the feeling for the mind of the person in a way that reading a single book, or reading a book now and again, can not do. My immersion therapies in writers and thinkers tell me that you can come to feel you really do understand what was going on in the mind of the person...and when you don't, when you are troubled, prompts you to keep going. There is a nagging feeling that something eludes me about Shakespeare, and that adds to the mystery of the man, and encourages me to keep reading him, and about him, and his time, and the intellectual movements associated with him, or even alleged to be associated with him. Ditto "secretive" writers like B Traven and Celine.
There is a lot to this: questions of language, its "grammar" and history, of translation, of attitude, of cultural nuance and perceptions, and the more you go into it, the deeper you go, the more amazing it turns out to be. Take one example of this: "a" v "he":
In the Arden edition of Hamlet edited by Harold Jenkins, there are numerous examples of "a" when "he" or "it" is meant. In a note, Jenkins says the "a" is a colloquial rendering of "ha" for "he" that was common in Elizabethan drama. To get this, both the "a" and the "ha", to bring it into oneself, to live with it, so that one reads or hears it spoken in performance as natural and "correct" (because it is), is to bring the Elizabethan age, in this intimate if tiny aspect, into one's heart through imaginative understanding. As I have written in an earlier post, it means not only that Shakespeare reaches out across the centuries to communicate with us, but that through this kind of understanding, we are able to "talk back", to respond creatively. It's teriffic! It's thrilling! We are taken out of our time, delving deeply in another, only to find, when we surface, that we are in our own place but with an enriched understanding that spans the centuries while telling us something about "now" and about ourselves. That's what being "universal" - "for all time" as Jonson had it about Shakespeare - means, sez me.
This is a long way around to get into the aura of Dostoevsky and Berdyaev that I was living in while writing The Russian Idea but may help explain how while writing that book, I was prompted to want to write another one by my feeling for the moral universe of this pair, in particular Dostoevsky, and to want to write a book something like he might want to write today (so say I) - not in terms of his genius, which of course I do not share, but in terms of his concerns, which I do, even if I find some of his urges unpalatable.
This is not the first time one of my books has been prompted by a previous one. The Kleiber Monster led me to write another book, Tobi's Gift (unpublished) because I felt I had not dealt with something frontally enough. And that led me into new places that prompted Savonarola's Bones.
Demented, however, the book that followed Savonarola's Bones, was not prompted by its predecessor, but sprang out of another set of concerns and experiences. What this says to me is that each successive novel is not, or not necessarily, the "sum" of an author's life to that point - in style, in theme or focus or what have you, it may not only not be an advance, but may even be worse than earlier work, and often a "sideways shift" into something new and different, but not necessarily better. Second novels are said to be the most difficult books for fiction writers, as the first one may all but leap from the mind to the page, and many second efforts are disappointing to the public as well as to the writer. Evilheart, my second novel (the first is unpublished), was very hard to write, and despite many revisions over a decade, is far from perfect. Though I think in some aspects it is an excellent book, in others it remains very disappointing to me.
But even later works can be poor. Raymond Chandler's last book for example must have been an embarrassment to him, and is certainly so to his memory. Any writer would - or at least should - find that worrying. Certainly Kaos is worrying me in that sense: much of the first draft seems quite shockingly written, and I know that later drafts are going to be pretty hard work if the thing is going to be worth reading, and hence worth bringing into public view.
So I am not sure about this one. The premise is good, and as with my other books, has something to say about the world around us and how we might navigate our way through the sometimes tortuous moral maze that can be any individual's life: the choices that confront us, the temptations we are asked to avoid, or invited to sink ourselves into, never to emerge...as I write, I am not sure if the anti-hero becomes a hero, or if he is a hero who becomes an anti-hero: this delicate balance is something that ultimately is going to define the book, and understanding how to express both of these elements of the human personality warring within an individual, so that one emerges at the end to vanquish the other, is the greatest challenge in writing I have ever faced: words that, as it were, "face both ways". Is that Dostoevsky peering over my shoulder, shaking his head in vigorous disapproval, wagging his finger at my poor offerings? Perhaps. I am trying my best, Fyodor! What's that you say?
If you are reading this, you can award as many stars to yourself as you wish, provided that none of them is purple.
Meet "The Struggler"!
After celebrating having a blog that lasted an entire year, producing the next post has turned out to be a struggle, so much so that I think I could be a comic book character with a lycra suit I could never quite get into or take off, yet as I pull and twist, hop from one foot to another, wriggle and writhe, somehow save civilisation, only to be landed with a lawsuit for trampling someone’s flower bed…Yes, things are grim.
The troubles I am having! There are several reasons. One is that I somehow have got bogged down in my “reading programme” and that is interfering with my writing. My plan has been for quite some time to write a post about Troilus and Cressida and how I reckon that it just may be that the Shakespeare industry has got this play wrong. Since that is an ambitious undertaking I want to reread the play first, but while doing that I started reading Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my e-reader and it has suddenly taken over.
Reading is not what it used to be. The internet allows us to be provoked by what we are reading, sit down at the PC, and check something out. Gibbon’s masterwork has sent me scurrying to the keyboard time and again to find out things. And my goodness me! The things there are to find out! Just the great man’s biography is amazing – try it on Wikipedia. Wow!
Moreover, this is not just some tiny wee book that prompts my queries. It is a monster, and a landmark in historiography and literature…six volumes, and none of them, so far as I can tell on my e-reader, is small. I have just moved into volume two, wherein Gibbon is trying to explain why it was that the Romans persecuted the Christians, when they started to do it, and what came after…and in doing this, he casts doubt on much of the received “wisdom” and knowledge of shall we say Christian lore. And of course since Gibbon was writing in the 18th century, that means more roaming the net to see what scholarship since has turned up.
Gibbon’s work was banned in several places, largely it seems because of the chapter I am presently reading – the edition I’ve got from “Project Gutenburg” is a 19th century one done by a minister who can’t help putting in outraged notes of his own and other editors*, so I don’t really want to put it down just yet. But it is obvious that if I want to do the other things I want to do, I should have a break at some stage soon.
But for those who might be interested, it is more than worth the time and effort to get through what has turned out to be one of the great reading experiences of my life. As well as the scholarship involved, it is very well written, the kind of writing that is genuinely a pleasure, yes a physical pleasure, to read. Gibbon’s refined irony is wonderful.
Now, the post I want to write on Troilus and Cressida is a sort of addendum to the novel I have just published, Kaos. In it the play has a role of its own, and the post I would like to write justifies that role for anyone curious enough to want to know about it.
But that’s not all. Kaos is the 7th novel I’ve put up on the net, and I’d like to see it sell a few more copies – say, a quarter of a million or so more, just plucking a number out of the air. While I have been contemplating how to do this, blogs I follow have leapt obligingly into the breach to tell wannabes like myself how to market our stuff. Some have even, for reasons I do not entirely understand, also tried to teach us how to write.
And those blogs have prompted more reflection, on what I reckon are fundamental issues of life and art. I’ve wrestled with a few posts on these issues before deciding to park them and write this one.
There is more too…about writing, the focus of this blog. I’d like to go into some of the things that have occurred to me while I was writing Kaos that if “personal” are also generic, I think, to the craft and art of writing.
So there is a fair swack of posts stored up waiting…to be thought through, researched as and when necessary, and then written and posted.
And while that is happening I just know there will be more things popping into my fevered mind; the queue will lengthen. And yes, outside of this is life! At the mo I am clearing up a large pile of apple tree prunings that need to be chopped up and sawn so they can be stacked and when dry fed lovingly into my wood burner. The trees that were pruned had not been cared for, at all, for many years – one, I think, for more than a century – and some of the branches are huge.
And and and! These are trivial personal concerns. Life is more important than that. The Struggler…he’s got his teeth on the sleeve of the suit and thinks just maybe he’ll be able to make it fit right so he can go out there and save…save…save…save a vulnerable maiden from the clutches of a rank intruder whose many bad qualities begin with his body odour before moving sublimely on to his breath…but wait a minute, Struggler! That’s me you’re wrestling with…get your teeth off my suit!…
*Principally Francois Guizot. We shall meet M Guizot in one of those coming posts.
The troubles I am having! There are several reasons. One is that I somehow have got bogged down in my “reading programme” and that is interfering with my writing. My plan has been for quite some time to write a post about Troilus and Cressida and how I reckon that it just may be that the Shakespeare industry has got this play wrong. Since that is an ambitious undertaking I want to reread the play first, but while doing that I started reading Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on my e-reader and it has suddenly taken over.
Reading is not what it used to be. The internet allows us to be provoked by what we are reading, sit down at the PC, and check something out. Gibbon’s masterwork has sent me scurrying to the keyboard time and again to find out things. And my goodness me! The things there are to find out! Just the great man’s biography is amazing – try it on Wikipedia. Wow!
Moreover, this is not just some tiny wee book that prompts my queries. It is a monster, and a landmark in historiography and literature…six volumes, and none of them, so far as I can tell on my e-reader, is small. I have just moved into volume two, wherein Gibbon is trying to explain why it was that the Romans persecuted the Christians, when they started to do it, and what came after…and in doing this, he casts doubt on much of the received “wisdom” and knowledge of shall we say Christian lore. And of course since Gibbon was writing in the 18th century, that means more roaming the net to see what scholarship since has turned up.
Gibbon’s work was banned in several places, largely it seems because of the chapter I am presently reading – the edition I’ve got from “Project Gutenburg” is a 19th century one done by a minister who can’t help putting in outraged notes of his own and other editors*, so I don’t really want to put it down just yet. But it is obvious that if I want to do the other things I want to do, I should have a break at some stage soon.
But for those who might be interested, it is more than worth the time and effort to get through what has turned out to be one of the great reading experiences of my life. As well as the scholarship involved, it is very well written, the kind of writing that is genuinely a pleasure, yes a physical pleasure, to read. Gibbon’s refined irony is wonderful.
Now, the post I want to write on Troilus and Cressida is a sort of addendum to the novel I have just published, Kaos. In it the play has a role of its own, and the post I would like to write justifies that role for anyone curious enough to want to know about it.
But that’s not all. Kaos is the 7th novel I’ve put up on the net, and I’d like to see it sell a few more copies – say, a quarter of a million or so more, just plucking a number out of the air. While I have been contemplating how to do this, blogs I follow have leapt obligingly into the breach to tell wannabes like myself how to market our stuff. Some have even, for reasons I do not entirely understand, also tried to teach us how to write.
And those blogs have prompted more reflection, on what I reckon are fundamental issues of life and art. I’ve wrestled with a few posts on these issues before deciding to park them and write this one.
There is more too…about writing, the focus of this blog. I’d like to go into some of the things that have occurred to me while I was writing Kaos that if “personal” are also generic, I think, to the craft and art of writing.
So there is a fair swack of posts stored up waiting…to be thought through, researched as and when necessary, and then written and posted.
And while that is happening I just know there will be more things popping into my fevered mind; the queue will lengthen. And yes, outside of this is life! At the mo I am clearing up a large pile of apple tree prunings that need to be chopped up and sawn so they can be stacked and when dry fed lovingly into my wood burner. The trees that were pruned had not been cared for, at all, for many years – one, I think, for more than a century – and some of the branches are huge.
And and and! These are trivial personal concerns. Life is more important than that. The Struggler…he’s got his teeth on the sleeve of the suit and thinks just maybe he’ll be able to make it fit right so he can go out there and save…save…save…save a vulnerable maiden from the clutches of a rank intruder whose many bad qualities begin with his body odour before moving sublimely on to his breath…but wait a minute, Struggler! That’s me you’re wrestling with…get your teeth off my suit!…
*Principally Francois Guizot. We shall meet M Guizot in one of those coming posts.
Writing Kaos
Kaos is the ninth novel I’ve written and the seventh I’ve “e-published”. Two others remain in the bottom drawer so to speak. As I wrote, it kept occurring to me that other writers, and those curious about writing, might be interested in the process as one writer has done it. It’s not really my idea that people will go on to read the book though of course more readers are always welcome. There will not be any “spoilers” but this is about writing, not marketing – “telling not selling”.
The novel I wrote before Kaos was The Russian Idea. It had been in my mind for a long time to do a novel revolving around the thinking of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev*, and circumstances allowed me the time and ideas to work up a plot and write it.
The Russian Idea is not nearly so good a novel as I would have liked it to be. For one thing, it is too “intellectual” or more woundingly, “pseudo-intellectual”. All my novels from the first have been so-called novels of ideas cloaked in the garb of thrillers, but this one had too many ideas not well-clothed enough – or perhaps, given the genre, not ill-clothed enough. To me it is still not a bad book, but it is not my best by any means.
Even so it had something in its structure and in its basic theme that I rather liked. Moreover, Berdyaev was heavily influenced. as I am, by the 19th century Russian novelist and wild man Fyodor Dostoevsky, and in the course of research on Berdyaev, I ended up rereading a lot of Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev’s book on him.
Something like a revolution has gone on in Dostoevsky studies since I first read his great novels longer ago than I really want to admit. New translations** have piled onto each other as new generations bid to make the Russian accessible as he meant to be in his own time. His strange “feuilleton” A Writer’s Diary*** has been half-translated with claims that if true make it far in advance of its time. As I reread the great novels, read a volume of a five part biography, some specialised religious material**** and read the Diary my appreciation of Dostoevsky was more than renewed; it was broadened and deepened. Much better translations revealed aspects to Dostoevsky’s writing that had previously been poorly shown, if at all. Berdyaev became – as he himself said – a follower of the novelist, in a prophetic Christian tradition few non-Russians would have imagined him to inhabit.
The Russian Idea turned into a homage to Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev.
One of the things I admire about Dostoevsky was that he wrote thrillers. Like Shakespeare he explored great themes with great writing in a popular genre. As Shakespeare took the popular forms of writing in his time and made them something more than his peers, Dostoevsky took a popular form of fiction and made it more than his contemporaries.
The Idiot, Brothers Karamazov, Demons…three of his last four novels are enduring masterpieces all the more compelling for their dark themes. While I was writing The Russian Idea I had them in the back of my mind.
Unsatisfied with The Russian Idea, I nonetheless kept the basic approach of that book for Kaos, with Demons my guide. I wanted to write a book that began one way, and turned inside out, as Demons does: the first section of Demons is often hilarious, with a gentle mockery that makes it seem a comedy of manners. By the end, as one of the editors writes in the Penguin edition, “this is a scary book”.
Well, I have my own things to say. I’m not Dostoevsky either in outlook or talent, but as I was writing Kaos I kept that transitional approach in mind, that things should turn “inside out”. They do, if in a different way, and I am much happier with the result.
Yet the impulse for writing Kaos lay as much in Shakespeare as in Doestoevsky, in the Bard’s strange play Troilus and Cressida^. In one sense “T & C” has a walk-on part in Kaos, but in another its underlying theme is the larger theme of Kaos, which is – ahem! Pay attention now! – a study in gender politics whose multiple foci shift as the novel shifts. Oh, dear!
Of course the stuff of writing – plot, characterisation, dialogue, description, and so on, the meat if you like, may look far removed from this. There are heaps of “how-to” writing guides that will sell you the hows and tos, and lately a number of blogs I follow have patiently explained various aspects of the technical facets of writing. Each is worthy in its own right, but all are and can be no more than elaborations of Raymond Chandler’s three word short course: “Analyse, and emulate”. My aim, of having a serious purpose in a frivolous genre, comes from reading on both levels. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Len Deighton, Ross Macdonald^^, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie…and the greats, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Euripides etc as you can find in the earlier posts of this blog. There are others, and I’ll perhaps approach them in time.
The idea has always been to offer a “good read” with some food for thought for anyone who wants it, and for me Kaos manages that. The more successful I am, the less the reader will notice.
Well, there you go. Hopefully you found this interesting, dear reader. If you didn’t – my apologies, with thanks for getting through it.
* Most of this unusual man’s works are in print in hard copy and his shorter works are on the net. A book about the Catholic Worker movement, which he strongly influenced, was published in the 1970s: William D Miller’s A harsh and dreadful love.
** Every Dostoevsky lover is likely to have her or his favourite. My preference has been the Penguins – for Demons, the Maguire translation put out by Penguin.
*** The editor of the English translation keeps calling the diary a “project”. See an online dictionary for a definition of feuilleton.
**** The rare book by Nicholas Zernov, Three Russian prophets, is still in print. Dostoevsky is the middle prophet, sandwiched in between Khomiakov and Soloviev. The chapter on Dostoevsky is extremely good.
^ As in an earlier post, my plan is to treat Troilus and Cressida separately.
^^ These are the so-called hard boiled school. Hammett is the master, Chandler his pupil who added some qualities of dialogue. Len Deighton’s early novels took these and made them a part of espionage fiction; Macdonald added nothing but was a success. Allingham and Christie worked in the earlier “puzzle” style for the most part but added something for me.
The novel I wrote before Kaos was The Russian Idea. It had been in my mind for a long time to do a novel revolving around the thinking of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev*, and circumstances allowed me the time and ideas to work up a plot and write it.
The Russian Idea is not nearly so good a novel as I would have liked it to be. For one thing, it is too “intellectual” or more woundingly, “pseudo-intellectual”. All my novels from the first have been so-called novels of ideas cloaked in the garb of thrillers, but this one had too many ideas not well-clothed enough – or perhaps, given the genre, not ill-clothed enough. To me it is still not a bad book, but it is not my best by any means.
Even so it had something in its structure and in its basic theme that I rather liked. Moreover, Berdyaev was heavily influenced. as I am, by the 19th century Russian novelist and wild man Fyodor Dostoevsky, and in the course of research on Berdyaev, I ended up rereading a lot of Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev’s book on him.
Something like a revolution has gone on in Dostoevsky studies since I first read his great novels longer ago than I really want to admit. New translations** have piled onto each other as new generations bid to make the Russian accessible as he meant to be in his own time. His strange “feuilleton” A Writer’s Diary*** has been half-translated with claims that if true make it far in advance of its time. As I reread the great novels, read a volume of a five part biography, some specialised religious material**** and read the Diary my appreciation of Dostoevsky was more than renewed; it was broadened and deepened. Much better translations revealed aspects to Dostoevsky’s writing that had previously been poorly shown, if at all. Berdyaev became – as he himself said – a follower of the novelist, in a prophetic Christian tradition few non-Russians would have imagined him to inhabit.
The Russian Idea turned into a homage to Dostoevsky as well as Berdyaev.
One of the things I admire about Dostoevsky was that he wrote thrillers. Like Shakespeare he explored great themes with great writing in a popular genre. As Shakespeare took the popular forms of writing in his time and made them something more than his peers, Dostoevsky took a popular form of fiction and made it more than his contemporaries.
The Idiot, Brothers Karamazov, Demons…three of his last four novels are enduring masterpieces all the more compelling for their dark themes. While I was writing The Russian Idea I had them in the back of my mind.
Unsatisfied with The Russian Idea, I nonetheless kept the basic approach of that book for Kaos, with Demons my guide. I wanted to write a book that began one way, and turned inside out, as Demons does: the first section of Demons is often hilarious, with a gentle mockery that makes it seem a comedy of manners. By the end, as one of the editors writes in the Penguin edition, “this is a scary book”.
Well, I have my own things to say. I’m not Dostoevsky either in outlook or talent, but as I was writing Kaos I kept that transitional approach in mind, that things should turn “inside out”. They do, if in a different way, and I am much happier with the result.
Yet the impulse for writing Kaos lay as much in Shakespeare as in Doestoevsky, in the Bard’s strange play Troilus and Cressida^. In one sense “T & C” has a walk-on part in Kaos, but in another its underlying theme is the larger theme of Kaos, which is – ahem! Pay attention now! – a study in gender politics whose multiple foci shift as the novel shifts. Oh, dear!
Of course the stuff of writing – plot, characterisation, dialogue, description, and so on, the meat if you like, may look far removed from this. There are heaps of “how-to” writing guides that will sell you the hows and tos, and lately a number of blogs I follow have patiently explained various aspects of the technical facets of writing. Each is worthy in its own right, but all are and can be no more than elaborations of Raymond Chandler’s three word short course: “Analyse, and emulate”. My aim, of having a serious purpose in a frivolous genre, comes from reading on both levels. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Len Deighton, Ross Macdonald^^, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie…and the greats, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Euripides etc as you can find in the earlier posts of this blog. There are others, and I’ll perhaps approach them in time.
The idea has always been to offer a “good read” with some food for thought for anyone who wants it, and for me Kaos manages that. The more successful I am, the less the reader will notice.
Well, there you go. Hopefully you found this interesting, dear reader. If you didn’t – my apologies, with thanks for getting through it.
* Most of this unusual man’s works are in print in hard copy and his shorter works are on the net. A book about the Catholic Worker movement, which he strongly influenced, was published in the 1970s: William D Miller’s A harsh and dreadful love.
** Every Dostoevsky lover is likely to have her or his favourite. My preference has been the Penguins – for Demons, the Maguire translation put out by Penguin.
*** The editor of the English translation keeps calling the diary a “project”. See an online dictionary for a definition of feuilleton.
**** The rare book by Nicholas Zernov, Three Russian prophets, is still in print. Dostoevsky is the middle prophet, sandwiched in between Khomiakov and Soloviev. The chapter on Dostoevsky is extremely good.
^ As in an earlier post, my plan is to treat Troilus and Cressida separately.
^^ These are the so-called hard boiled school. Hammett is the master, Chandler his pupil who added some qualities of dialogue. Len Deighton’s early novels took these and made them a part of espionage fiction; Macdonald added nothing but was a success. Allingham and Christie worked in the earlier “puzzle” style for the most part but added something for me.
Charles' secret spell on the throne
It will doubtless astonish a great many people to learn that the Prince of Wales is the real author of the novels I have published on the net, along with those suppressed and those yet to come.
Of course it is not true today. I wrote my books and have to own up to them. Prince Charles, whatever other faults he may have, is innocent. But truth is a slave of time, and it could become true later on, say three or four hundred years from now, when the meagre facts of my biography have been frittered away and the Prince's life distorted beyond current recognition by the warping pressures of the ages and the willingness of some members of our species to believe anything, and once believing it, to cling grimly to their illusions despite a tsunami of contradiction.
Well, I don't mind - really, I don't. It's ok. Charles! I want you to know that now! It's all right! Meditations on one's life after death, of the fame that people who write often hope to acquire if not in their own lifetimes, after they've gone, are beside the point.
This thought - or random collection of absurdities - came to me following the alleged controversy* over the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare I wrote very badly about in my last post. The theory that an Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, is the real author of Shakespeare's work took around three hundred years to surface, courtesy of a man named Looney. De Vere wasn't the first, and he's not the last as would-be literary detectives discover cluelettes in any scrap of disembodied reality pointing to whatever they have already decided is the truth.
Of course there have to be some connections, however tenuous, to make it work. De Vere, for example, lived at roughly the same time as Shakespeare. His unfortunate death in 1604 needed a bit of explanation given that Shakespeare continued to live and write well past then. But hey - if de Vere's your man, you'll have a plan. Once decided, nearly anything can be explained.
The reason the de Vere-ians (or "Oxfordians" as they prefer to style themselves) don't like the idea that Shakespeare wrote his stuff is implicitly elitist. They complain that WS was quasi-literate and worse, while de Vere, a nobleman (we are not talking morals here but descent) and a ward of the "virgin queen" herself, carried the right cachet to pen such wonderful prose and poetry.
De Vere did write poems and plays, but what survives stands no comparison with the quality of Shakespeare, and he is not at all a good fit for the perspectives of the plays and poems, as people who really do know what they are talking about have tried to explain. Looney got his idea from the discovery of certain common phrases and sayings in the work of the two - a bit too common actually: they have been dismissed by investigators as "commonplaces".
The reality is that Shakespeare was known by his contemporaries for who he was - an actor, theatre impresario, poet and playwright. There was no mystery at the time because there was nothing to be mystified about. His colleagues praised not only the product of his genius, but the means of achieving it, and while his friend and rival Ben Jonson disputed the technique, he too raved about the work. There is, as I said in my last post, a wealth of internal and external evidence that makes William Shakespeare not only a good fit to be the author, but the only fit.
Everyone was satisfied till the 19th century. Why wouldn't they be? Then a woman who eventually went mad decided it was really Francis Bacon wot done it, and Will Shakespeare's corpus was on the barbie, even if Bacon didn't taste right.
Looney's sizzling approach brought de Vere to the table about 1920. His literary spice has since been joined by at least a hundred thousand garnishes of coincidence and "otherwise inexplicable" culinary puzzles to serve up a banquet for the Looneys.
They can make anything at all about de Vere worthy of the finest restaurant, and anything about the Bard vomit-inducing.
Put another way, it's not a serious scholarly case. It's a social pathology.
Sailing ahead a few insignificant centuries, how will it turn out that Prince Charles may be the pole of attraction for this strange phenomenon to become the author of such sub-literary erotic thrillers as Kaos, The Russian Idea, Demented, Tobi's Game, The Kleiber Monster, Evilheart and Savonarola's Bones?
It starts in a public toilet in Scotland.
The Prince of Wales is not just the Prince of Wales. Among his many royal titles is that of the Duke of Rothesay. Rothesay is a village on the Isle of Bute a short ferry ride off the west coast of Scotland.
On this island and in this village is a public toilet built around 1900. It is a masterpiece of its kind, and when it was restored not too many years ago, it was patronised by the prince and duke. He went in alone, and came out alone...and signed the visitors' book.
On the same page as Charles' signature, surrounded by other signatures, is the hugely significant signature of myself.
Sooner or later - say, round about 2316 - someone is going to notice this, and draw the only, the logical, and truly amazing conclusion.
Wow-ee! How did Charles use the occasion of his unaccompanied visit to the loo to secrete in some pre-arranged spot a memory stick containing prose far, far too hot to go out under his name? How did Evans, the shadowy nobody who was always on the scrounge for a few extra coppers, and who went in alone, pick up that memory stick, take it away, and...and...and...
To find out you'll have wait a few centuries. By 2316 it could be a slew of memory sticks, and the dates of the signatures could have been altered...or forged...the same page! The very same page...
But that's not all! Oh my goodness no!
In 2012 the prince and his wife visited New Zealand, the home turf of the mysterious Evans, whose biography will prove so elusive. Evans at the time was living 40 km or so from the wee village of Feilding. Charles and his wife visited Feilding. Evans was known to prowl the township and environs.
Did Charles take the opportunity to top up the corpus? Did Evans steal over in the dead of night to uplift the concealed flash drive/memory stick?
Why not? Why indeed not?
But what, diligent readers may ask, about the "Why"? Why would Charles wish to write these tawdry tales laden with the purplest of prose...sex, sex and more sex occasionally broken by the odd spot of violence and - this is true and I can't help saying it - philosophy?
The philosophy, if it can be dignified with the term, is easily dismissed today as jejeune ravings of a depleted mind, and still will be around the year 2300, give or take a few centuries and a new owner. What about the rest?
It will be "pointed out" that Charles was highly sexed, and the proof will be not slow in hitting whatever medium there is for communication by that time: the Squidgy tapes, for instance...the public pinch on Diana's bottom...and the behaviour of one of his sons...wow! This is a family given to playing billiards in the nude in Las Vegas!**
Alert readers will have noticed a key difference between de Vere and Charles, and Evans and Shakespeare: the charactisations are reversed. In Shakespeare's case, "Looneys" want to bring the author up a few pegs by making him de Vere, with Evans "Loovies" will wish to plunge poor Windsor steeply down to end in a mighty thump on a loo seat in Rothesay. Times have changed and will go on changing and lowering the royal tone...hard to resist.
And "true facts" are true! Photos on the net exist taken by me of 1) the Rothesay public toilet (I went in alone too, to pick up the memory stick of course, but I'm not saying where I found it), and 2) interesting notices in the rail station of "friendly Feilding".
Most people - well, me anyway - would like to live forever, even if we know we can't. It would be great to be alive in 2300 to watch the fun, to slyly bat away the probing questions of Rupert Murdoch's minions, including "how is it that you and Rupert can live so long?" but more importantly, "How did Charles pass you the manuscripts? What did he say about his influences? What about the blog? Did he write that too?" Of course I won't be around actually - yet another tragedy of my life. But how delicious, and what a way to while the time in the old folks' paradise!
In 2316, as the revelations unfold, Charles may well be glad to be dead. It's ok, man. I understand that too.
*Google for Interesting Literature, search for "Shakespeare beyond doubt".
** I shouldn't really, but it turns out that Las Vegas is not all that far from Roswell, New Mexico. Look it up! I didn't create geography. The map is the map, you know?
Of course it is not true today. I wrote my books and have to own up to them. Prince Charles, whatever other faults he may have, is innocent. But truth is a slave of time, and it could become true later on, say three or four hundred years from now, when the meagre facts of my biography have been frittered away and the Prince's life distorted beyond current recognition by the warping pressures of the ages and the willingness of some members of our species to believe anything, and once believing it, to cling grimly to their illusions despite a tsunami of contradiction.
Well, I don't mind - really, I don't. It's ok. Charles! I want you to know that now! It's all right! Meditations on one's life after death, of the fame that people who write often hope to acquire if not in their own lifetimes, after they've gone, are beside the point.
This thought - or random collection of absurdities - came to me following the alleged controversy* over the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare I wrote very badly about in my last post. The theory that an Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, is the real author of Shakespeare's work took around three hundred years to surface, courtesy of a man named Looney. De Vere wasn't the first, and he's not the last as would-be literary detectives discover cluelettes in any scrap of disembodied reality pointing to whatever they have already decided is the truth.
Of course there have to be some connections, however tenuous, to make it work. De Vere, for example, lived at roughly the same time as Shakespeare. His unfortunate death in 1604 needed a bit of explanation given that Shakespeare continued to live and write well past then. But hey - if de Vere's your man, you'll have a plan. Once decided, nearly anything can be explained.
The reason the de Vere-ians (or "Oxfordians" as they prefer to style themselves) don't like the idea that Shakespeare wrote his stuff is implicitly elitist. They complain that WS was quasi-literate and worse, while de Vere, a nobleman (we are not talking morals here but descent) and a ward of the "virgin queen" herself, carried the right cachet to pen such wonderful prose and poetry.
De Vere did write poems and plays, but what survives stands no comparison with the quality of Shakespeare, and he is not at all a good fit for the perspectives of the plays and poems, as people who really do know what they are talking about have tried to explain. Looney got his idea from the discovery of certain common phrases and sayings in the work of the two - a bit too common actually: they have been dismissed by investigators as "commonplaces".
The reality is that Shakespeare was known by his contemporaries for who he was - an actor, theatre impresario, poet and playwright. There was no mystery at the time because there was nothing to be mystified about. His colleagues praised not only the product of his genius, but the means of achieving it, and while his friend and rival Ben Jonson disputed the technique, he too raved about the work. There is, as I said in my last post, a wealth of internal and external evidence that makes William Shakespeare not only a good fit to be the author, but the only fit.
Everyone was satisfied till the 19th century. Why wouldn't they be? Then a woman who eventually went mad decided it was really Francis Bacon wot done it, and Will Shakespeare's corpus was on the barbie, even if Bacon didn't taste right.
Looney's sizzling approach brought de Vere to the table about 1920. His literary spice has since been joined by at least a hundred thousand garnishes of coincidence and "otherwise inexplicable" culinary puzzles to serve up a banquet for the Looneys.
They can make anything at all about de Vere worthy of the finest restaurant, and anything about the Bard vomit-inducing.
Put another way, it's not a serious scholarly case. It's a social pathology.
Sailing ahead a few insignificant centuries, how will it turn out that Prince Charles may be the pole of attraction for this strange phenomenon to become the author of such sub-literary erotic thrillers as Kaos, The Russian Idea, Demented, Tobi's Game, The Kleiber Monster, Evilheart and Savonarola's Bones?
It starts in a public toilet in Scotland.
The Prince of Wales is not just the Prince of Wales. Among his many royal titles is that of the Duke of Rothesay. Rothesay is a village on the Isle of Bute a short ferry ride off the west coast of Scotland.
On this island and in this village is a public toilet built around 1900. It is a masterpiece of its kind, and when it was restored not too many years ago, it was patronised by the prince and duke. He went in alone, and came out alone...and signed the visitors' book.
On the same page as Charles' signature, surrounded by other signatures, is the hugely significant signature of myself.
Sooner or later - say, round about 2316 - someone is going to notice this, and draw the only, the logical, and truly amazing conclusion.
Wow-ee! How did Charles use the occasion of his unaccompanied visit to the loo to secrete in some pre-arranged spot a memory stick containing prose far, far too hot to go out under his name? How did Evans, the shadowy nobody who was always on the scrounge for a few extra coppers, and who went in alone, pick up that memory stick, take it away, and...and...and...
To find out you'll have wait a few centuries. By 2316 it could be a slew of memory sticks, and the dates of the signatures could have been altered...or forged...the same page! The very same page...
But that's not all! Oh my goodness no!
In 2012 the prince and his wife visited New Zealand, the home turf of the mysterious Evans, whose biography will prove so elusive. Evans at the time was living 40 km or so from the wee village of Feilding. Charles and his wife visited Feilding. Evans was known to prowl the township and environs.
Did Charles take the opportunity to top up the corpus? Did Evans steal over in the dead of night to uplift the concealed flash drive/memory stick?
Why not? Why indeed not?
But what, diligent readers may ask, about the "Why"? Why would Charles wish to write these tawdry tales laden with the purplest of prose...sex, sex and more sex occasionally broken by the odd spot of violence and - this is true and I can't help saying it - philosophy?
The philosophy, if it can be dignified with the term, is easily dismissed today as jejeune ravings of a depleted mind, and still will be around the year 2300, give or take a few centuries and a new owner. What about the rest?
It will be "pointed out" that Charles was highly sexed, and the proof will be not slow in hitting whatever medium there is for communication by that time: the Squidgy tapes, for instance...the public pinch on Diana's bottom...and the behaviour of one of his sons...wow! This is a family given to playing billiards in the nude in Las Vegas!**
Alert readers will have noticed a key difference between de Vere and Charles, and Evans and Shakespeare: the charactisations are reversed. In Shakespeare's case, "Looneys" want to bring the author up a few pegs by making him de Vere, with Evans "Loovies" will wish to plunge poor Windsor steeply down to end in a mighty thump on a loo seat in Rothesay. Times have changed and will go on changing and lowering the royal tone...hard to resist.
And "true facts" are true! Photos on the net exist taken by me of 1) the Rothesay public toilet (I went in alone too, to pick up the memory stick of course, but I'm not saying where I found it), and 2) interesting notices in the rail station of "friendly Feilding".
Most people - well, me anyway - would like to live forever, even if we know we can't. It would be great to be alive in 2300 to watch the fun, to slyly bat away the probing questions of Rupert Murdoch's minions, including "how is it that you and Rupert can live so long?" but more importantly, "How did Charles pass you the manuscripts? What did he say about his influences? What about the blog? Did he write that too?" Of course I won't be around actually - yet another tragedy of my life. But how delicious, and what a way to while the time in the old folks' paradise!
In 2316, as the revelations unfold, Charles may well be glad to be dead. It's ok, man. I understand that too.
*Google for Interesting Literature, search for "Shakespeare beyond doubt".
** I shouldn't really, but it turns out that Las Vegas is not all that far from Roswell, New Mexico. Look it up! I didn't create geography. The map is the map, you know?
Confessions of a counter-intuitive e-jit
A few months back I ran into someone on a bus in Glasgow I’d known long before, Duncan MacGillivray. Duncan is an artist, a real one. He has a degree in ceramics from a university in Dundee, but has since got keen on printmaking, specifically lithography. He etches steel plates and then hand-colours them to produce mostly one-off prints. They are pretty good, I reckon, so if you ever happen to be in Glasgow - or indeed happen to be in Glasgow right now - you can stop by the Glasgow Print Studio near the Trongate and ask to see some of his stuff, which is kept in the collection and is for sale.
The thing that most fascinated me with Duncan’s approach is that he is using a technology designed to produce many copies of something, but usually he makes just one. When he concedes a point to the technology, he might make five or six of a basic image, but each is a one-off nonetheless.
To me, that’s counter-intuitive – doing something not only not the norm, but implicitly critical of it – contradicting the obvious, or as an online dictionary I just checked says, common sense.
Going against the grain in this way can lead to path-breaking art and to commercial success. Duncan’s unique and interesting voice hits the high notes for me, and I hope he makes it. It would be nice to see.
Looking at Duncan’s prints sent me scurrying to the net to find a copy of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, Work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin was one of the most creative members of the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophy, a refugee from the Nazis who fled to Paris and after the fall of France tried to escape to Spain. Halted at the border, he committed suicide.
Work of art is easily Benjamin’s best-known work, but I was surprised at how bad it was/is, bursting with an arrogance it never justified. Arrogance is all very well when it comes from people who have earned it, but it is hard to see now what the excitement was when Benjamin was alive. His essay is mainly about photography and film, and he pours scorn on other thinkers about these new art forms, without really having much to say that is very interesting himself.
Benjamin made a great deal of the fact that film-making is typically* a kind of pastiche, in which scenes are filmed out of sequence and put together later as they are to be screened. It is true this is a form of assembly line production, but while the assembly line was taken to be a hallmark of the industrial age, this division of labour has been known about intellectually for a long time – see Adam Smith – and practised even longer. In art, renaissance studios produced paintings using many hands – Leonardo first came to prominence painting the backdrops in the studio where he was an apprentice. What film-making involves is an extension of approaches already long practised. What is different is the huge audience technology allows, and on that, Benjamin is tedious.
Benjamin aside, the role of technology in art is important. What Duncan does, undermining the premise of infinitely reproducible technology by producing unique prints, is just one counter-intuitive approach. As a writer, I’ve used the internet and online publishing to skirt around the former gatekeepers of literature, who are now definitely up against it and in doing that have saved a few trees from the ignominy of pulp for fiction. The net, the PC and the many programmes enabling its use, and more have quickly transformed literature in more ways than we might know or indeed desire.
When I first published on the net, like many other writers** I was confident that it wouldn't be long before my reputation grew, that by some magic I would go from being a legend in if not just my own lunch hour, the lunch hour of my friends, acquaintances and personal enemies, to something wider and more exalted.
The way this was going to happen was on a pebble in a pond basis, aka the ripple effect. One person would read, tell another, who would read and tell another…and shazam! if not fame or notoriety or something like that, a greater readership than, in fact, I actually have several years later.
This is all my fellow e-authors’ fault, just as their lack of success is partly my doing. The internet has democratised writing – anyone who can string a few words together can be a “published author” willy-nilly, and not just thousands but it seems millions of people have done just that.
That’s terrific in itself. But whereas in the past the gatekeepers of literature lived in publishing houses, the gatekeeper today is the thicket of titles crowding the net. Any writer writes – or at least should write – to be read, but getting read when there are millions of others jostling for attention is definitely a problem.
Even when I put the first novels onto the net getting on to four years ago – four, including early ones and what was then the most recent, Demented – the crowd was already doing what crowds do best – crowding out. And to counter this, writers and their friends have tried any number of wrinkles well beyond the ripple effect.
That’s not all. The crowd has created opportunities for people who promise to help, for a fee. “Vanity” publishers will edit, publish, and promote any writer’s work, and there are marketers and editors and formatters and who knows what all occupying niches in the vast netscape, all designed in one way or another to give a writer a purchase into prominence. There is a vast and indeed burgeoning industry out there.
But beyond that is self-help, what the impecunious writer has for a resource: her or his own efforts. There are how to guides that are both free and cost to help do this, and the various strategies and tactics for jumping out from the crowd to be viewed and hopefully read include a blog such as this one.
I have tried a few of these apart from this blog, holding my nose as I’ve done it. It’s not that I look down on the people who are professional marketers, but that I have an instinctive dislike at having to do it as an amateur. As to the blog, as a marketing tool it doesn't seem to work – there are plenty of readers but they don’t pop along to my books. I keep writing it because people seem to get something from it, and it is fun, writing about writing.
So I am not at all sure of the usefulness of the many things people are urged to do to get their work recognised and read. It may be that it’s just the way it is. If there are millions of wannabe best-selling writers, there are probably hundreds of thousands trying the things suggested. Yet so far as I know only one, Fifty shades of grey, has “gone viral” and been published in hard cover by an established publisher.
And more! Fifty shades earned its spurs from its content, not a marketing ploy, or that is how I see it.
So I’m back to my original premise – the micro-pebbles thrown into the vast e-universe, into space where there is no ether wind, and no ripples, so far anyway. Seizing the opportunities new technology offers has not revealed the praxis, as Antonio Gramsci used to say, to overcome the barriers the opportunities have created.
Duncan’s approach seems to use a technology to undermine it. My counter-intuitive tactic so far seems only a reflection of a curmudgeonly nature. But it’s the only one I know today. I write and hope. That’s it.
* Yet Luis Bunuel, one of the greats of cinema, made his films sequentially, starting from the first scene and working through to the end, and what was in the can was what was screened more or less. But he was the exception to prove the rule.
** Norman Mailer wrote that when he was drafted into the Army in WWII, the big question in his mind was whether the classic novel of that war would be about the European or Pacific theatre.
The thing that most fascinated me with Duncan’s approach is that he is using a technology designed to produce many copies of something, but usually he makes just one. When he concedes a point to the technology, he might make five or six of a basic image, but each is a one-off nonetheless.
To me, that’s counter-intuitive – doing something not only not the norm, but implicitly critical of it – contradicting the obvious, or as an online dictionary I just checked says, common sense.
Going against the grain in this way can lead to path-breaking art and to commercial success. Duncan’s unique and interesting voice hits the high notes for me, and I hope he makes it. It would be nice to see.
Looking at Duncan’s prints sent me scurrying to the net to find a copy of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, Work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin was one of the most creative members of the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophy, a refugee from the Nazis who fled to Paris and after the fall of France tried to escape to Spain. Halted at the border, he committed suicide.
Work of art is easily Benjamin’s best-known work, but I was surprised at how bad it was/is, bursting with an arrogance it never justified. Arrogance is all very well when it comes from people who have earned it, but it is hard to see now what the excitement was when Benjamin was alive. His essay is mainly about photography and film, and he pours scorn on other thinkers about these new art forms, without really having much to say that is very interesting himself.
Benjamin made a great deal of the fact that film-making is typically* a kind of pastiche, in which scenes are filmed out of sequence and put together later as they are to be screened. It is true this is a form of assembly line production, but while the assembly line was taken to be a hallmark of the industrial age, this division of labour has been known about intellectually for a long time – see Adam Smith – and practised even longer. In art, renaissance studios produced paintings using many hands – Leonardo first came to prominence painting the backdrops in the studio where he was an apprentice. What film-making involves is an extension of approaches already long practised. What is different is the huge audience technology allows, and on that, Benjamin is tedious.
Benjamin aside, the role of technology in art is important. What Duncan does, undermining the premise of infinitely reproducible technology by producing unique prints, is just one counter-intuitive approach. As a writer, I’ve used the internet and online publishing to skirt around the former gatekeepers of literature, who are now definitely up against it and in doing that have saved a few trees from the ignominy of pulp for fiction. The net, the PC and the many programmes enabling its use, and more have quickly transformed literature in more ways than we might know or indeed desire.
When I first published on the net, like many other writers** I was confident that it wouldn't be long before my reputation grew, that by some magic I would go from being a legend in if not just my own lunch hour, the lunch hour of my friends, acquaintances and personal enemies, to something wider and more exalted.
The way this was going to happen was on a pebble in a pond basis, aka the ripple effect. One person would read, tell another, who would read and tell another…and shazam! if not fame or notoriety or something like that, a greater readership than, in fact, I actually have several years later.
This is all my fellow e-authors’ fault, just as their lack of success is partly my doing. The internet has democratised writing – anyone who can string a few words together can be a “published author” willy-nilly, and not just thousands but it seems millions of people have done just that.
That’s terrific in itself. But whereas in the past the gatekeepers of literature lived in publishing houses, the gatekeeper today is the thicket of titles crowding the net. Any writer writes – or at least should write – to be read, but getting read when there are millions of others jostling for attention is definitely a problem.
Even when I put the first novels onto the net getting on to four years ago – four, including early ones and what was then the most recent, Demented – the crowd was already doing what crowds do best – crowding out. And to counter this, writers and their friends have tried any number of wrinkles well beyond the ripple effect.
That’s not all. The crowd has created opportunities for people who promise to help, for a fee. “Vanity” publishers will edit, publish, and promote any writer’s work, and there are marketers and editors and formatters and who knows what all occupying niches in the vast netscape, all designed in one way or another to give a writer a purchase into prominence. There is a vast and indeed burgeoning industry out there.
But beyond that is self-help, what the impecunious writer has for a resource: her or his own efforts. There are how to guides that are both free and cost to help do this, and the various strategies and tactics for jumping out from the crowd to be viewed and hopefully read include a blog such as this one.
I have tried a few of these apart from this blog, holding my nose as I’ve done it. It’s not that I look down on the people who are professional marketers, but that I have an instinctive dislike at having to do it as an amateur. As to the blog, as a marketing tool it doesn't seem to work – there are plenty of readers but they don’t pop along to my books. I keep writing it because people seem to get something from it, and it is fun, writing about writing.
So I am not at all sure of the usefulness of the many things people are urged to do to get their work recognised and read. It may be that it’s just the way it is. If there are millions of wannabe best-selling writers, there are probably hundreds of thousands trying the things suggested. Yet so far as I know only one, Fifty shades of grey, has “gone viral” and been published in hard cover by an established publisher.
And more! Fifty shades earned its spurs from its content, not a marketing ploy, or that is how I see it.
So I’m back to my original premise – the micro-pebbles thrown into the vast e-universe, into space where there is no ether wind, and no ripples, so far anyway. Seizing the opportunities new technology offers has not revealed the praxis, as Antonio Gramsci used to say, to overcome the barriers the opportunities have created.
Duncan’s approach seems to use a technology to undermine it. My counter-intuitive tactic so far seems only a reflection of a curmudgeonly nature. But it’s the only one I know today. I write and hope. That’s it.
* Yet Luis Bunuel, one of the greats of cinema, made his films sequentially, starting from the first scene and working through to the end, and what was in the can was what was screened more or less. But he was the exception to prove the rule.
** Norman Mailer wrote that when he was drafted into the Army in WWII, the big question in his mind was whether the classic novel of that war would be about the European or Pacific theatre.
Join the pre-Christmas rush
Yes, do. It would be a shame if you were injured or maimed or even worse jostling for position in the e-queue trying to buy the latest from my strange brain if pretty ordinary laptop and fingers. But it would be great if you stumbled, however awkwardly, up to the e-till with your hard-earned cash, handed it over and took the thing home on your e-reader of choice and got stuck into it.
Attila’s Angels is the title. There will be no spoilers in this post so feel free to read it right to the end. It would be great if you would buy this book; this is known as “blatant marketing”. It would be even better however if you bought it and read it, better still if you bought it, read it, and liked it and amazingly cool beyond all that if you thought highly enough of it to send me a comment on the bottom of a post for example this one. It’s nice to hear.
Horrible comments will get deleted probably though I’ve never had any so far so can’t be sure about that.
It is the first time I have ever done something vaguely like marketing – get something out for the Christmas season. I don’t suppose it will matter much – the e-lit market is not really like that.
Attila’s Angels has a great cover. It was hard to write, to get to cover choosing stage. I spent a great deal of time figuring out how to write a ghost story, which I had decided to do before doing anything else. And I read bunches – not just about ghosts, but about Attila the Hun who really suited my purposes for various reasons, and extra stuff in an area pretty familiar to me: the Nazi period of German/European history and some of the people active in it.
That’s only a beginning when it comes to a coherent story, to a narrative that has something to say beyond the story too…I hope I have succeeded in what I set out to do in this line. It is hard to say if I have.
So you can find the book on smashwords, in the adult section…take a look. Have a read…
Thanks for reading this!
Attila’s Angels is the title. There will be no spoilers in this post so feel free to read it right to the end. It would be great if you would buy this book; this is known as “blatant marketing”. It would be even better however if you bought it and read it, better still if you bought it, read it, and liked it and amazingly cool beyond all that if you thought highly enough of it to send me a comment on the bottom of a post for example this one. It’s nice to hear.
Horrible comments will get deleted probably though I’ve never had any so far so can’t be sure about that.
It is the first time I have ever done something vaguely like marketing – get something out for the Christmas season. I don’t suppose it will matter much – the e-lit market is not really like that.
Attila’s Angels has a great cover. It was hard to write, to get to cover choosing stage. I spent a great deal of time figuring out how to write a ghost story, which I had decided to do before doing anything else. And I read bunches – not just about ghosts, but about Attila the Hun who really suited my purposes for various reasons, and extra stuff in an area pretty familiar to me: the Nazi period of German/European history and some of the people active in it.
That’s only a beginning when it comes to a coherent story, to a narrative that has something to say beyond the story too…I hope I have succeeded in what I set out to do in this line. It is hard to say if I have.
So you can find the book on smashwords, in the adult section…take a look. Have a read…
Thanks for reading this!
The Idiot 1: Lost and found in translation
The mirror to ourselves that is Dostoevsky’s great novel The Idiot was held up by me to me recently. It had been a long time since I’d read it and I’d thrown it onto my e-reader casually some time before. An eye operation sent me to the device as I could read larger type and I scrolled through the many offerings and hit on it. Why not?
Like so much with Dostoevsky, there is a challenge to any writer in reading him, and for English-language writers that starts with the translation. Russian is a strange language for those not familiar with Cyrillic alphabets, and even for those who are, it has problems not found even with German, a language with some characteristics similar to Russian.
Perhaps this is the reason why there have been so many translations of Dostoevsky’s works. No one is ever quite satisfied. There are no less than ten of The Idiot.
There is more to it now, courtesy of a Yank and his Russian wife, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. P & V, as they are often termed, seemed to have ushered in a new era of fine translations if you believe their press and some of the laudatory features and reviews written about them.
As someone far from fluent in Russian, I can hardly comment on the adequacy or lack of it of P & V from a translator’s perspective. One comment on the net suggests that the best thing to do with any book in translation where more than version is available is to dip into all of them, and take the one that “feels” the best. This is good advice.
P & V don’t get such an easy out. Gary Saul Morson ripped into them in a famous article in Commentary. Morson, who translated Dostoevsky’s magazine Writer’s Notebook in a judicious and scrupulous edition, said he was approached by professional writers seeking guidance about the pair’s work, as they found Dostoevsky and other Russians as rendered by them puzzling: how could a great writer be so unreadable? Morson took the translators to task for their method, which amounts to a literal translation by V then rendered into “better” English by her husband, who is not by any stretch a fluent Russian speaker. Their method has been praised in the past, but even before Morson’s critique it seemed to me on reading their claims to superiority because of their working method to be on the contrary a recipe for disaster.
My unease was confirmed for me while researching my novel The Russian Idea, I read background material that included excerpts from The Adolescent, earlier published as A Raw Youth translated by the author of a book of criticism. The only complete edition I could find was P & V’s. The extracts had made me keen to read it; P & V’s translation made me keen to finish it, as if Dostoevsky did not write it – they did.
This partly comes to mind now because the translation of The Idiot I have just read is by someone who seems never to figure in these translation wars, Eva Martin (1883-1940). Online research suggests this is the only translation she did. What information I’ve been able to get about her is that she was born in India to British parents and brought up in England. Her translation was published in 1915, when she was 32.
Eva Martin’s translation is available online free as it is out of copyright, and is cheap in print, so it is both ubiquitous and “e-ubiquitous”. It would be nice to know something about her and to know what people like Morson think of her version.
As it is I can say is that I howled with laughter at much of this book. People think Dostoevsky is a pessimist, and depressing, but this view is a travesty of a very complex mind, and there is no question that he is among the funniest writers ever. One particular section is an extended farce that had me holding my sides and gasping for breath.
There is a lot more to be said about this amazing novel, so I’ll put it in a further post.
Thanks for reading this one.
Like so much with Dostoevsky, there is a challenge to any writer in reading him, and for English-language writers that starts with the translation. Russian is a strange language for those not familiar with Cyrillic alphabets, and even for those who are, it has problems not found even with German, a language with some characteristics similar to Russian.
Perhaps this is the reason why there have been so many translations of Dostoevsky’s works. No one is ever quite satisfied. There are no less than ten of The Idiot.
There is more to it now, courtesy of a Yank and his Russian wife, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. P & V, as they are often termed, seemed to have ushered in a new era of fine translations if you believe their press and some of the laudatory features and reviews written about them.
As someone far from fluent in Russian, I can hardly comment on the adequacy or lack of it of P & V from a translator’s perspective. One comment on the net suggests that the best thing to do with any book in translation where more than version is available is to dip into all of them, and take the one that “feels” the best. This is good advice.
P & V don’t get such an easy out. Gary Saul Morson ripped into them in a famous article in Commentary. Morson, who translated Dostoevsky’s magazine Writer’s Notebook in a judicious and scrupulous edition, said he was approached by professional writers seeking guidance about the pair’s work, as they found Dostoevsky and other Russians as rendered by them puzzling: how could a great writer be so unreadable? Morson took the translators to task for their method, which amounts to a literal translation by V then rendered into “better” English by her husband, who is not by any stretch a fluent Russian speaker. Their method has been praised in the past, but even before Morson’s critique it seemed to me on reading their claims to superiority because of their working method to be on the contrary a recipe for disaster.
My unease was confirmed for me while researching my novel The Russian Idea, I read background material that included excerpts from The Adolescent, earlier published as A Raw Youth translated by the author of a book of criticism. The only complete edition I could find was P & V’s. The extracts had made me keen to read it; P & V’s translation made me keen to finish it, as if Dostoevsky did not write it – they did.
This partly comes to mind now because the translation of The Idiot I have just read is by someone who seems never to figure in these translation wars, Eva Martin (1883-1940). Online research suggests this is the only translation she did. What information I’ve been able to get about her is that she was born in India to British parents and brought up in England. Her translation was published in 1915, when she was 32.
Eva Martin’s translation is available online free as it is out of copyright, and is cheap in print, so it is both ubiquitous and “e-ubiquitous”. It would be nice to know something about her and to know what people like Morson think of her version.
As it is I can say is that I howled with laughter at much of this book. People think Dostoevsky is a pessimist, and depressing, but this view is a travesty of a very complex mind, and there is no question that he is among the funniest writers ever. One particular section is an extended farce that had me holding my sides and gasping for breath.
There is a lot more to be said about this amazing novel, so I’ll put it in a further post.
Thanks for reading this one.
The Idiot 2: Convincing lies
Dostoevsky had his own way of doing things. No writer before or since has really followed his method, insofar as he had one. Other writers kept notebooks but it is hard to imagine anyone today at least filling hundreds if not thousands of very messy pages before getting down to business.
When it came to "point of view" the great man also had his quirks. He had a fondness for a narrator or editor, typically anonymous, who told the story, or made someone else's manuscript ready. Version 2 (editor) was his approach in House of the Dead and Notes from Underground and Version 1 in Demons and Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky may have been attracted to these styles of writing because they allowed him to portray events as they may not have happened, but it could get him in writerly trouble. For example, Demons, narrated by an observer of the events described, has a scene between two characters whose content the narrator could not possibly have known. Before he could have found out one hanged himself while the other slipped out of the country. Obviously, Dostoevsky expected readers to drop the fiction of a narrator and allow the real novelist authorial omnipotence, the more usual way writers go about things.
Does this kind of contradiction weaken the impact or enjoyment of Demons? Well, I was glued to the scene described above and a modern editor's remark that "this is a scary book" remained true for me well beyond the last page: the terror of this novel sticks, even through repeat readings.
The Idiot by contrast is mostly a straight narrative account using conventional authorial omnipotence. Occasionally the writer adopts another, almost experimental approach and addresses the reader directly, offering some lessons in how writers write while - miraculously! - simultaneously both drawing readers' attention to the fact that The Idiot is a made up story and maintaining an illusion of reality.* It's done very well and helps him keep the comic air breezy.
There is however another element of this great writer's intent and style. Unlike most writers, who if anything underscore the points they are trying to make, "laying it on with a trowel", Dostoevsky wanted to convince despite everything. He gave those who opposed his views the very best arguments possible in his novels, and he often put his own views in the mouths of the most absurd and comic characters. A devout Christian, his account of the Grand Inquisitor in Karamazov, perhaps his most famous fictional episode, is a compelling attack on Catholicism - Dostoevsky was a vigorous anti-Catholic - but from an atheist. So persuasive was it that when the book was first serialised Dostoevsky's admirers urged him to demolish the argument quickly, and the writer promised just the thing later on. When it came, it was hardly noticed.
The Idiot's fulcrum scene is cut from this cloth; Prince Myshkin, "introduced" to society as the preferred suitor of the daughter of a well to do family, gets overly excited at conversation, makes a fool of himself, smashes the matron's favourite vase, and has an epileptic fit. The prince, not long returned to Russia from years in a Swiss sanatorium, displays total naivte yet expresses Dostoevsky's often prescient views as well as his virulent hatred of Catholicism, not merely to a skeptical but a disbelieving audience. The implication that the chattering classes were chattering their way to oblivion courtesy of a tsunami of revolution washing toward their summer dachas could hardly have been overlooked even at the time. Couched in the remarks of an apparent fool, the insensible was made sensible. Modern readers know what they are reading in another and genuinely tragic way: a prophet dismissed.
Dostoevsky's desire to persuade despite everything is not completely unheard of otherwise. Pierre Maurin, co-founder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, sought to persuade in a similar manner, consciously presenting himself in what might be politely termed an off-putting manner: he wanted, he explained to a well-wisher, to reach doubters over their prejudices.
Maurin was spreading the views of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, a man who termed himself a "sprout" of Dostoevsky and who wrote a book about him.
In four of my books I have tried Dostoevsky's way more seriously than with others - Tobi's Game, The Russian Idea, Kaos and my most recent, Attila's Angels. I can't say I really managed. It certainly has been a very stern discipline to give unpalatable people ideas I share, or unpalatable ideas the best case possible. Yet Dostoevsky did these if not with ease definitely with panache. He has carried an undeserved reputation of being difficult and worse into our time; on the contrary, for writer and reader, these "quirks" make him as a writer and as a human being humbling and inspiring.
*The only other notable example I am aware of is John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman. Fowles was a clever and talented writer but his arrogance got in the way.
When it came to "point of view" the great man also had his quirks. He had a fondness for a narrator or editor, typically anonymous, who told the story, or made someone else's manuscript ready. Version 2 (editor) was his approach in House of the Dead and Notes from Underground and Version 1 in Demons and Brothers Karamazov.
Dostoevsky may have been attracted to these styles of writing because they allowed him to portray events as they may not have happened, but it could get him in writerly trouble. For example, Demons, narrated by an observer of the events described, has a scene between two characters whose content the narrator could not possibly have known. Before he could have found out one hanged himself while the other slipped out of the country. Obviously, Dostoevsky expected readers to drop the fiction of a narrator and allow the real novelist authorial omnipotence, the more usual way writers go about things.
Does this kind of contradiction weaken the impact or enjoyment of Demons? Well, I was glued to the scene described above and a modern editor's remark that "this is a scary book" remained true for me well beyond the last page: the terror of this novel sticks, even through repeat readings.
The Idiot by contrast is mostly a straight narrative account using conventional authorial omnipotence. Occasionally the writer adopts another, almost experimental approach and addresses the reader directly, offering some lessons in how writers write while - miraculously! - simultaneously both drawing readers' attention to the fact that The Idiot is a made up story and maintaining an illusion of reality.* It's done very well and helps him keep the comic air breezy.
There is however another element of this great writer's intent and style. Unlike most writers, who if anything underscore the points they are trying to make, "laying it on with a trowel", Dostoevsky wanted to convince despite everything. He gave those who opposed his views the very best arguments possible in his novels, and he often put his own views in the mouths of the most absurd and comic characters. A devout Christian, his account of the Grand Inquisitor in Karamazov, perhaps his most famous fictional episode, is a compelling attack on Catholicism - Dostoevsky was a vigorous anti-Catholic - but from an atheist. So persuasive was it that when the book was first serialised Dostoevsky's admirers urged him to demolish the argument quickly, and the writer promised just the thing later on. When it came, it was hardly noticed.
The Idiot's fulcrum scene is cut from this cloth; Prince Myshkin, "introduced" to society as the preferred suitor of the daughter of a well to do family, gets overly excited at conversation, makes a fool of himself, smashes the matron's favourite vase, and has an epileptic fit. The prince, not long returned to Russia from years in a Swiss sanatorium, displays total naivte yet expresses Dostoevsky's often prescient views as well as his virulent hatred of Catholicism, not merely to a skeptical but a disbelieving audience. The implication that the chattering classes were chattering their way to oblivion courtesy of a tsunami of revolution washing toward their summer dachas could hardly have been overlooked even at the time. Couched in the remarks of an apparent fool, the insensible was made sensible. Modern readers know what they are reading in another and genuinely tragic way: a prophet dismissed.
Dostoevsky's desire to persuade despite everything is not completely unheard of otherwise. Pierre Maurin, co-founder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, sought to persuade in a similar manner, consciously presenting himself in what might be politely termed an off-putting manner: he wanted, he explained to a well-wisher, to reach doubters over their prejudices.
Maurin was spreading the views of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, a man who termed himself a "sprout" of Dostoevsky and who wrote a book about him.
In four of my books I have tried Dostoevsky's way more seriously than with others - Tobi's Game, The Russian Idea, Kaos and my most recent, Attila's Angels. I can't say I really managed. It certainly has been a very stern discipline to give unpalatable people ideas I share, or unpalatable ideas the best case possible. Yet Dostoevsky did these if not with ease definitely with panache. He has carried an undeserved reputation of being difficult and worse into our time; on the contrary, for writer and reader, these "quirks" make him as a writer and as a human being humbling and inspiring.
*The only other notable example I am aware of is John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman. Fowles was a clever and talented writer but his arrogance got in the way.
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.
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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