Steve Evans's Blog: The written world , page 3
March 28, 2015
Why hello there!
This blog is mainly about writing, though I stray from time to time to account for my unaccountable interests – as Douglas Adams so famously wrote, in life, the universe and everything! It is never entirely clear to me, whose life it is I am living, why I get interested in the things that I do, or how they transform themselves into fiction or indeed any kind of writing, and I am perhaps being self-centred in thinking that other people might enjoy reading about the process as mystery, as it always partly is to me. But I do think that.
Just now I am putting together the elements of a new novel, tentatively called Lemmings though I have some other possible titles in my head. It is the kind of book that is easy to spoil by talking about in advance, and I definitely don’t want to do that. If I can write it properly, it will be the kind of book my heroes wrote. I am not sure I can.
Writing for publication is hard. Joan Didion called it the loneliest profession or something like that, and I think I understand what she meant. There you are, all by yourself, tip-tapping or scribbling away with only yourself for company, necessarily, yet what you are doing is aimed, in principle, at the whole wide world. If no one out there reads it, that changes absolutely nothing. All this is just as true in a newsroom, where I spent many years, as it is in total isolation, where I have spent long periods working out novels. You are there alone with your thoughts as you create, but your words, once put “out there” into the world, are never alone to you as author. They are incapable of being erased, even if you go to a great deal of trouble to erase them as writers ashamed of some efforts devoutly wish they could do.
Yet writing is easy too – too easy you might say. Electronic keyboards and the internet make it so simple to go from brain to the outer reaches of our solar system and even beyond! Somewhere far far from Earth some intelligent but indescribably bizarre being may read these words as soon as they are published, and say to itself in whatever way it is able, “???? Hey this dude is weird. Not only that, he’s ridiculous too.”
Before typewriters, when writers typically made do with pens made from bird feathers and ink that smeared, writing was a lot harder than it is now. It seems amazing to me that so many writers in the 19th century could write really fat books, just immense really, hundreds of thousands of words…and in more than one draft. Even after the invention of the pencil and the steel-nibbed pen this was still a problem. Celine, the French novelist, used to string his manuscript pages up in his lounge with clothes pegs so he could read them in flow as it were. He claimed late in his life that he wrote significantly fat books – like eight hundred thousand words fat – and then cut them back to a few hundred thousand or even fewer, pruning and pruning as well as rewriting.
Today writers are gifted with PCs and easy to use editing tools, and extra fat books are in vogue again, but it’s not the same as when Dickens wrote them, or Thackeray, or indeed Celine, whose books were not noticeably short and were handwritten. The typewriter – which featured prominently shall we say in his second novel, Mort a credit* – had been invented in the 19th century and Mark Twain, a fan of new technology to the point of bankruptcy**, wrote Life on the Mississippi on one, the first author apparently to script a book with the wonderful new device.
Where was I? Ah, right here, in front of the laptop, watching the letters cascade, one after another, onto the screen. Dear reader – I am embarked on this adventure, a lemming in my own right mysteriously determined to jump over the cliff of literature to land on the choppy seas of indifferent readership.
Yeah sure. Onward. If you’ve got this far, dear reader, thanks for your perseverance.
*The first person narrator attacks his father with one in a gesture of contemptuous modernity at his conspicuous inability to learn to type.
**Twain invested huge sums into a linotype machine that was pipped by the real deal. Visitors to Twain’s home in Hartford, Connecticut, can see the version he sought to develop, a monstrosity compared to the successful competitor. Twain had to embark on an extended tour of the world, lecturing and writing. Following the Equator, far from his most successful work, is nonetheless worth a read.
Just now I am putting together the elements of a new novel, tentatively called Lemmings though I have some other possible titles in my head. It is the kind of book that is easy to spoil by talking about in advance, and I definitely don’t want to do that. If I can write it properly, it will be the kind of book my heroes wrote. I am not sure I can.
Writing for publication is hard. Joan Didion called it the loneliest profession or something like that, and I think I understand what she meant. There you are, all by yourself, tip-tapping or scribbling away with only yourself for company, necessarily, yet what you are doing is aimed, in principle, at the whole wide world. If no one out there reads it, that changes absolutely nothing. All this is just as true in a newsroom, where I spent many years, as it is in total isolation, where I have spent long periods working out novels. You are there alone with your thoughts as you create, but your words, once put “out there” into the world, are never alone to you as author. They are incapable of being erased, even if you go to a great deal of trouble to erase them as writers ashamed of some efforts devoutly wish they could do.
Yet writing is easy too – too easy you might say. Electronic keyboards and the internet make it so simple to go from brain to the outer reaches of our solar system and even beyond! Somewhere far far from Earth some intelligent but indescribably bizarre being may read these words as soon as they are published, and say to itself in whatever way it is able, “???? Hey this dude is weird. Not only that, he’s ridiculous too.”
Before typewriters, when writers typically made do with pens made from bird feathers and ink that smeared, writing was a lot harder than it is now. It seems amazing to me that so many writers in the 19th century could write really fat books, just immense really, hundreds of thousands of words…and in more than one draft. Even after the invention of the pencil and the steel-nibbed pen this was still a problem. Celine, the French novelist, used to string his manuscript pages up in his lounge with clothes pegs so he could read them in flow as it were. He claimed late in his life that he wrote significantly fat books – like eight hundred thousand words fat – and then cut them back to a few hundred thousand or even fewer, pruning and pruning as well as rewriting.
Today writers are gifted with PCs and easy to use editing tools, and extra fat books are in vogue again, but it’s not the same as when Dickens wrote them, or Thackeray, or indeed Celine, whose books were not noticeably short and were handwritten. The typewriter – which featured prominently shall we say in his second novel, Mort a credit* – had been invented in the 19th century and Mark Twain, a fan of new technology to the point of bankruptcy**, wrote Life on the Mississippi on one, the first author apparently to script a book with the wonderful new device.
Where was I? Ah, right here, in front of the laptop, watching the letters cascade, one after another, onto the screen. Dear reader – I am embarked on this adventure, a lemming in my own right mysteriously determined to jump over the cliff of literature to land on the choppy seas of indifferent readership.
Yeah sure. Onward. If you’ve got this far, dear reader, thanks for your perseverance.
*The first person narrator attacks his father with one in a gesture of contemptuous modernity at his conspicuous inability to learn to type.
**Twain invested huge sums into a linotype machine that was pipped by the real deal. Visitors to Twain’s home in Hartford, Connecticut, can see the version he sought to develop, a monstrosity compared to the successful competitor. Twain had to embark on an extended tour of the world, lecturing and writing. Following the Equator, far from his most successful work, is nonetheless worth a read.
March 5, 2015
Amazing man
Ever-helpful Google put a nice design over its home page recently- it was Wassily Kandinsky’s birthday. If he was still with us, he would be 148.
Mostly this blog is about writing, and while Kandinsky did write, and beautifully in his way, it is his painting that we love. I first saw a real Kandinsky, as opposed to a print or a picture in a book, in the Zurich art gallery in 1984, and it floored me. It was from his last period, when he made squiggles and blots and interesting shapes and somehow managed to fit them into a harmonious whole – he saw much of his art as a visual representation of music – and I loved it. They’d squashed it into a wee alcove as part of a section on the anarchist (or so-called anarchist) Dada movement. I don’t know if Kandinsky was ever a part of this protest movement that flourished in Zurich during the First World War (he was in Russia at the time); he later taught at the Bauhaus in Berlin, the progressive German art/architecture school shut down by the Nazis, along with his mate from the pre-war Munich period, the Swiss wunderkind Paul Klee.
That trip to Europe from New Zealand where I live, which began in Zurich in 1984, changed my ideas about art a lot – looking in galleries and museums I resolved on returning to New Zealand to concentrate on displaying original art works in future in my home and move away from prints of the greats. Kandinsky’s single abstract in the Zurich kunsthaus sent me in that direction, and it is a good direction to go in. Today my home throbs with the living work of many artists – “originals”. They may not be perfect and indeed aren’t. So far nothing has happened in my life to enable me to buy a Picasso, a Braque, a Klee or a Kandinsky. But there is something about engaging with an original artwork, whether it be a painting, sculpture, original print, weaving, photo, or lithograph, that sets it apart from a mass-produced copy, even when the copy is of an acknowledged masterpiece and the reproduction high-quality. My relationship with these original works is individual, as unique and unrepeatable as the works themselves, and the sense of harmony and love that I draw from having these in my home in place of reproductions is something I wish for you, dear reader. There is nothing like it. I promise.
There is however more where Kandinsky is concerned. I didn’t see any other of his works on that trip; it was not until I cycled the Danube in 2000 that I ran into a super collection of his breakthrough paintings in Munich. These are from his so-called “Blaue Reiter” (Blue Rider) period and they are as unlike his later work as his earlier. These were in a special gallery called Lenbachhaus, essentially created around the collection itself, as the former home of a lover of Kandinsky’s who had bequeathed her collection to the public, including works by her and Klee.
Some of Kandinsky’s pre-Blaue Reiter work was there too, and it also did change my life. It was terrible. Kandinsky’s attempts to paint quasi realist and impressionist art were pretty hopeless; in the “typical” sense of how we appreciate art, in terms of drawing and representing figures and so on, Kandinsky couldn’t paint, at least then. Suddenly he threw all that aside, and began producing a stunning range of almost non-representational canvases of terrific power, not yet abstract as they would later be, and far from his most famous squiggles, but well past anything the impressionists ever did. Whatever the truth about his technique, what changed for Kandinsky changed in his mind, and the entire human race, including all those who will never see anything by him, original or reproduction, is in his debt.
Of course we can’t all be like Kandinsky, and suddenly metamorphose from Sunday painter to genius with colour and abstract compositions. But we can learn a great deal from his example. He freed himself in his head and kept going…
As a writer, I am only too conscious of my own limitations. Some of my stuff is ok; I get a frisson of pleasure when I turn out a well-crafted phrase, or dialogue, or paragraph of description, and when somehow this fits into a coherent whole, it is even better. But so far anyway I have not had the genius breathed into me that would allow me to suddenly go from hack thriller author to amazo-wildman of literature that Kandinsky seems to have had as an artist in Munich in the years before 1914.
I would definitely like to. The so-called experimental writers don’t appeal to me much, unless we count Celine, who was not really experimental but expressive in a new way. Lately, reading Thomas Bernhard, a Celinist with his own voice, I can see how perhaps this is possible for me. Writing is not painting. It has its own rules and they are extremely complex: language as speech and then written expression is the most complicated thing we humans do, or so I say. The infinite variety of expression that is the result shows this. But we can obey the rules by flouting them, as Celine and Bernhard show and as Kandinsky in art proved.
There is more to this that may locate a decisive break in human culture in Munich via Kandinsky, Klee and – Adolf Hitler. Like Kandinsky, Hitler had some talent as a painter, but not much. I have seen a number of Hitler’s watercolours, in Florence in 1984. They were not bad – just not very good. Perhaps they were even better than Kandinsky’s from the same rough period apart from a very suggestive inability to render people. The future mad dictator just couldn’t do it: his very nicely turned out opera house featured awkward stick figures in the foreground. But while Hitler fired his resentment at being rejected by art school into a passion for mass murder, Kandinsky headed in a completely new way.
Hitler washed up in Munich before the war, apparently to avoid the Austro-Hungarian draft, but keen as to help shed an ocean of blood. There is a photo of him in the crowd in the city on the announcement of war in 1914, his face eager, delighted, euphoric…he went on to get an Iron Cross. Kandinsky had to flee via Switzerland to avoid internment, leaving his canvases behind.
After the war and the Bolshevik Revolution, Kandinsky returned to Germany and ended up in France after the Nazis came to power, dying in Paris in 1944. He left more canvases behind in Moscow, seized by a bemused revolutionary government that willingly traded his work for favours with western capitalists. Klee joined Kandinsky at the Bauhaus and also died during the war, in his native Switzerland after a protracted illness.
Apart from his terrific art – apparently to be subject of a show in Britain soon, and how I would like to go! – is Kandinsky’s focus and desire. He just loved to paint, and brought pleasure to millions. Thanks, Wassily.
Mostly this blog is about writing, and while Kandinsky did write, and beautifully in his way, it is his painting that we love. I first saw a real Kandinsky, as opposed to a print or a picture in a book, in the Zurich art gallery in 1984, and it floored me. It was from his last period, when he made squiggles and blots and interesting shapes and somehow managed to fit them into a harmonious whole – he saw much of his art as a visual representation of music – and I loved it. They’d squashed it into a wee alcove as part of a section on the anarchist (or so-called anarchist) Dada movement. I don’t know if Kandinsky was ever a part of this protest movement that flourished in Zurich during the First World War (he was in Russia at the time); he later taught at the Bauhaus in Berlin, the progressive German art/architecture school shut down by the Nazis, along with his mate from the pre-war Munich period, the Swiss wunderkind Paul Klee.
That trip to Europe from New Zealand where I live, which began in Zurich in 1984, changed my ideas about art a lot – looking in galleries and museums I resolved on returning to New Zealand to concentrate on displaying original art works in future in my home and move away from prints of the greats. Kandinsky’s single abstract in the Zurich kunsthaus sent me in that direction, and it is a good direction to go in. Today my home throbs with the living work of many artists – “originals”. They may not be perfect and indeed aren’t. So far nothing has happened in my life to enable me to buy a Picasso, a Braque, a Klee or a Kandinsky. But there is something about engaging with an original artwork, whether it be a painting, sculpture, original print, weaving, photo, or lithograph, that sets it apart from a mass-produced copy, even when the copy is of an acknowledged masterpiece and the reproduction high-quality. My relationship with these original works is individual, as unique and unrepeatable as the works themselves, and the sense of harmony and love that I draw from having these in my home in place of reproductions is something I wish for you, dear reader. There is nothing like it. I promise.
There is however more where Kandinsky is concerned. I didn’t see any other of his works on that trip; it was not until I cycled the Danube in 2000 that I ran into a super collection of his breakthrough paintings in Munich. These are from his so-called “Blaue Reiter” (Blue Rider) period and they are as unlike his later work as his earlier. These were in a special gallery called Lenbachhaus, essentially created around the collection itself, as the former home of a lover of Kandinsky’s who had bequeathed her collection to the public, including works by her and Klee.
Some of Kandinsky’s pre-Blaue Reiter work was there too, and it also did change my life. It was terrible. Kandinsky’s attempts to paint quasi realist and impressionist art were pretty hopeless; in the “typical” sense of how we appreciate art, in terms of drawing and representing figures and so on, Kandinsky couldn’t paint, at least then. Suddenly he threw all that aside, and began producing a stunning range of almost non-representational canvases of terrific power, not yet abstract as they would later be, and far from his most famous squiggles, but well past anything the impressionists ever did. Whatever the truth about his technique, what changed for Kandinsky changed in his mind, and the entire human race, including all those who will never see anything by him, original or reproduction, is in his debt.
Of course we can’t all be like Kandinsky, and suddenly metamorphose from Sunday painter to genius with colour and abstract compositions. But we can learn a great deal from his example. He freed himself in his head and kept going…
As a writer, I am only too conscious of my own limitations. Some of my stuff is ok; I get a frisson of pleasure when I turn out a well-crafted phrase, or dialogue, or paragraph of description, and when somehow this fits into a coherent whole, it is even better. But so far anyway I have not had the genius breathed into me that would allow me to suddenly go from hack thriller author to amazo-wildman of literature that Kandinsky seems to have had as an artist in Munich in the years before 1914.
I would definitely like to. The so-called experimental writers don’t appeal to me much, unless we count Celine, who was not really experimental but expressive in a new way. Lately, reading Thomas Bernhard, a Celinist with his own voice, I can see how perhaps this is possible for me. Writing is not painting. It has its own rules and they are extremely complex: language as speech and then written expression is the most complicated thing we humans do, or so I say. The infinite variety of expression that is the result shows this. But we can obey the rules by flouting them, as Celine and Bernhard show and as Kandinsky in art proved.
There is more to this that may locate a decisive break in human culture in Munich via Kandinsky, Klee and – Adolf Hitler. Like Kandinsky, Hitler had some talent as a painter, but not much. I have seen a number of Hitler’s watercolours, in Florence in 1984. They were not bad – just not very good. Perhaps they were even better than Kandinsky’s from the same rough period apart from a very suggestive inability to render people. The future mad dictator just couldn’t do it: his very nicely turned out opera house featured awkward stick figures in the foreground. But while Hitler fired his resentment at being rejected by art school into a passion for mass murder, Kandinsky headed in a completely new way.
Hitler washed up in Munich before the war, apparently to avoid the Austro-Hungarian draft, but keen as to help shed an ocean of blood. There is a photo of him in the crowd in the city on the announcement of war in 1914, his face eager, delighted, euphoric…he went on to get an Iron Cross. Kandinsky had to flee via Switzerland to avoid internment, leaving his canvases behind.
After the war and the Bolshevik Revolution, Kandinsky returned to Germany and ended up in France after the Nazis came to power, dying in Paris in 1944. He left more canvases behind in Moscow, seized by a bemused revolutionary government that willingly traded his work for favours with western capitalists. Klee joined Kandinsky at the Bauhaus and also died during the war, in his native Switzerland after a protracted illness.
Apart from his terrific art – apparently to be subject of a show in Britain soon, and how I would like to go! – is Kandinsky’s focus and desire. He just loved to paint, and brought pleasure to millions. Thanks, Wassily.
January 23, 2015
Fifty years with and without Frank Sinatra
Recently I watched all of a film whose opening scenes I first saw in late summer 1965. Von Ryan’s Express was a Frank Sinatra knock-off of the much more successful and better Great Escape, based on a David Westheimer adventure novel I had read as a teenager. When the film was released I was still immature enough to want to check it out.
Things got in the way. That summer was momentous for the American South, and I’d spent part of it travelling in the region, heading from San Francisco back to my family’s then home near Boston Mass, via civil rights projects before heading to a big rally in Washington. My companions were two Canadian brothers and a young American woman.
We meandered through Texas before heading to Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia to fetch up in a small town in South Carolina, at a voting registration project – voting legislation had been passed that would change the face of Southern electoral politics. That was fun, if also a bit scary: there were plenty of people not on the roll and getting them onto it at the courthouse to register was the kind of practical politics I admired, that looked to ricochet down the years.
The four of us stayed with a middle-class black family, a bricklayer, his wife and two young sons. The bricklayer had grit; he wasn’t put off by attempts to cow him, and had negotiated an end to segregation of the local cinema. As guests we were offered the opportunity to go to the first integrated screening with the two boys; it was as you will have figured out, the Sinatra epic.
It didn’t go as planned. The theatre management had agreed to the move, and the police notified – they promptly disappeared. But no one had told the crowd, many of them young white men whose attitude was not exactly progressive, and as we took our seats in a row to one side of the theatre the buzz around the hall was ominous.
I had led our group into the row, but this was a bad move on my part as the seat next to the aisle was taken by the younger Canadian. The film was not five minutes in before a burly white youth marched up to him and threatened violence if we didn’t leave. The Canadian got up and we had no choice but to follow – the two boys, not yet teenagers, were exposed. As we filed out of the theatre a group of young white men raged around the hapless manager in the lobby, shouting and gesticulating.
I was ashamed – of them, of our own lack of preparedness, and more.
The boys’ father was undeterred, calmly making plans to force the issue with a police presence next time. We moved on, to make the big rally in Washington, but he was and is a hero in my eyes.
Whether they got to see the rest of the film or not, I didn’t. The film had just introduced Sinatra when we’d been threatened, and it was many years before I caught the last 20 minutes or so on TV in New Zealand where I now live. But I had never seen the whole shebang,till I found a DVD in an op-shop.
Now I’ve seen it – nay more, I own a copy and can watch it as many times as I like.
Was it worth the wait? Half a century of delayed adolescent adventure?
No.
It was, however, worth seeing as a prompt. There is a lot that can be said about the nature of film using Von Ryan’s Express as an exemplar – about the star system, about Hollywood decision-making, about film technique, even about film stock colour palette. Things could be said about Frank Sinatra too – he made at least a few films at the time that could be called left-wing, that were edgy in terms of the formula for a star. In this one, though he is heroic in the “star system” mode, he makes mistakes, and his tragic death is kind of pathetic, a crumpled wee corpse on a rail line in Italy – not a sacrifice but just one of those things that happens in war, grand in one way, trivial in another.
As I have been writing this a link to an interview with Bob Dylan* popped into my email in-box on the occasion of his new album, “covers” of material Dylan admires and, as it turns out, songs Sinatra also recorded. Dylan has inspiring and intelligent things to say about “Frank” as he calls him – as a singer, he sang to us rather than at us, Dylan says, and there is certainly something to that. Sinatra was and evidently remains a complex figure in American culture, with a role going even beyond film and music, and it is interesting to see Dylan reaching across a gap between himself and another “Ol’ Blue Eyes”** to find common ground.
Far more could be said about what fifty years have meant to America, to the South, to South Carolina. I don’t imagine there is much heat in going to an integrated screening of a film there nowadays – if there is a theatre in small towns given the impact TV and DVDs have had on the industry. The formalities of voting will be well-entrenched too – from a big deal in 1965 to routine today.
But what the years will have done, in the changes they have wrought to the fabric of American life, must have been much more profound than I can infer from my far-off vantage point. Then, the American South was incredibly poor given that the United States was the wealthiest country in the world. The poor weren’t just black – driving through rural South Carolina past one-room unpainted shacks perched on stilts, dogs, chickens, perhaps pigs sweltering in the humid shade beneath, it was impossible to tell whether a black or white face would push open the tattered screen door to move the flies around. Part of the complexity of racism in the South was the grinding poverty affecting both races that rather than uniting them, kept them apart.
Before I left the US for New Zealand in 1972 I spent more time in the South – mostly in Florida but also in South Carolina. Even a few years showed a sea-change in the way things were done. What was clear, as a black labourer in Florida once told me, was that for many blacks, living there was preferable to the ghettos of the North. He spoke of a man he knew who’d gone North to improve his lot: “He came back South, shut his mouth.” Seeing The Wire, a TV series depicting ghetto life in Baltimore today, suggests he had a point.
Thanks for reading.
*Try Google
** Yes, both of them
Things got in the way. That summer was momentous for the American South, and I’d spent part of it travelling in the region, heading from San Francisco back to my family’s then home near Boston Mass, via civil rights projects before heading to a big rally in Washington. My companions were two Canadian brothers and a young American woman.
We meandered through Texas before heading to Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia to fetch up in a small town in South Carolina, at a voting registration project – voting legislation had been passed that would change the face of Southern electoral politics. That was fun, if also a bit scary: there were plenty of people not on the roll and getting them onto it at the courthouse to register was the kind of practical politics I admired, that looked to ricochet down the years.
The four of us stayed with a middle-class black family, a bricklayer, his wife and two young sons. The bricklayer had grit; he wasn’t put off by attempts to cow him, and had negotiated an end to segregation of the local cinema. As guests we were offered the opportunity to go to the first integrated screening with the two boys; it was as you will have figured out, the Sinatra epic.
It didn’t go as planned. The theatre management had agreed to the move, and the police notified – they promptly disappeared. But no one had told the crowd, many of them young white men whose attitude was not exactly progressive, and as we took our seats in a row to one side of the theatre the buzz around the hall was ominous.
I had led our group into the row, but this was a bad move on my part as the seat next to the aisle was taken by the younger Canadian. The film was not five minutes in before a burly white youth marched up to him and threatened violence if we didn’t leave. The Canadian got up and we had no choice but to follow – the two boys, not yet teenagers, were exposed. As we filed out of the theatre a group of young white men raged around the hapless manager in the lobby, shouting and gesticulating.
I was ashamed – of them, of our own lack of preparedness, and more.
The boys’ father was undeterred, calmly making plans to force the issue with a police presence next time. We moved on, to make the big rally in Washington, but he was and is a hero in my eyes.
Whether they got to see the rest of the film or not, I didn’t. The film had just introduced Sinatra when we’d been threatened, and it was many years before I caught the last 20 minutes or so on TV in New Zealand where I now live. But I had never seen the whole shebang,till I found a DVD in an op-shop.
Now I’ve seen it – nay more, I own a copy and can watch it as many times as I like.
Was it worth the wait? Half a century of delayed adolescent adventure?
No.
It was, however, worth seeing as a prompt. There is a lot that can be said about the nature of film using Von Ryan’s Express as an exemplar – about the star system, about Hollywood decision-making, about film technique, even about film stock colour palette. Things could be said about Frank Sinatra too – he made at least a few films at the time that could be called left-wing, that were edgy in terms of the formula for a star. In this one, though he is heroic in the “star system” mode, he makes mistakes, and his tragic death is kind of pathetic, a crumpled wee corpse on a rail line in Italy – not a sacrifice but just one of those things that happens in war, grand in one way, trivial in another.
As I have been writing this a link to an interview with Bob Dylan* popped into my email in-box on the occasion of his new album, “covers” of material Dylan admires and, as it turns out, songs Sinatra also recorded. Dylan has inspiring and intelligent things to say about “Frank” as he calls him – as a singer, he sang to us rather than at us, Dylan says, and there is certainly something to that. Sinatra was and evidently remains a complex figure in American culture, with a role going even beyond film and music, and it is interesting to see Dylan reaching across a gap between himself and another “Ol’ Blue Eyes”** to find common ground.
Far more could be said about what fifty years have meant to America, to the South, to South Carolina. I don’t imagine there is much heat in going to an integrated screening of a film there nowadays – if there is a theatre in small towns given the impact TV and DVDs have had on the industry. The formalities of voting will be well-entrenched too – from a big deal in 1965 to routine today.
But what the years will have done, in the changes they have wrought to the fabric of American life, must have been much more profound than I can infer from my far-off vantage point. Then, the American South was incredibly poor given that the United States was the wealthiest country in the world. The poor weren’t just black – driving through rural South Carolina past one-room unpainted shacks perched on stilts, dogs, chickens, perhaps pigs sweltering in the humid shade beneath, it was impossible to tell whether a black or white face would push open the tattered screen door to move the flies around. Part of the complexity of racism in the South was the grinding poverty affecting both races that rather than uniting them, kept them apart.
Before I left the US for New Zealand in 1972 I spent more time in the South – mostly in Florida but also in South Carolina. Even a few years showed a sea-change in the way things were done. What was clear, as a black labourer in Florida once told me, was that for many blacks, living there was preferable to the ghettos of the North. He spoke of a man he knew who’d gone North to improve his lot: “He came back South, shut his mouth.” Seeing The Wire, a TV series depicting ghetto life in Baltimore today, suggests he had a point.
Thanks for reading.
*Try Google
** Yes, both of them
December 31, 2014
Wittgenstein's Nephew
Readers of The Written World will know that I am a great fan of Ludwig Wittgenstein. So, it seems, was Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, whose work is apparently peppered with references to the philosopher whose work so changed philosophical practice in the 20th century – according to me, not only our understanding of the world but our understanding of how we go about understanding it.
Of the three books by Bernhard I’ve read, all contain some references to Ludwig, and it is said that other of his books deal heavily with him and his thought.
One of these, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, is a short – 100 pages with big type – account of Bernhard’s relationship with the man in the title, whose name was Paul and who was not the full quid.*
Ludwig also had a brother named Paul who was famous in his own right. A pianist, he lost an arm in the First World War, yet continued to play. Among other pieces, he commissioned and performed a one-handed work by Maurice Ravel, and according to Wikipedia, developed one-hand techniques in er concert with his footpedals to allow music previously thought to be impossible to play one-handed. Readers can find performances on YouTube, at least one heavily criticised by commentators.
According to a biography of Ludwig, the Wittgenstein family didn’t scrimp their criticism either.
Bernhard, who was also a pianist and a graduate of the Salzburg “Mozarteum”, doesn’t mention the pianist. His account of his friendship with the nephew is variously described as a memoir and a novel. It is hard to know from this just how much of what he has to say is true. It has been common in the last generation, if not before, to rewrite history – in literature and in film and no doubt in other ways – to incorporate fiction. I’ve done it myself, in Tobi’s Game, putting a character through not just the Holocaust but also the final days in the Nazi leadership’s bunker in Berlin. Things happen in this book that really happened, but not necessarily as I described, and certainly not with a character I invented.
Bernhard is however something different. The echoes of Wittgenstein’s Nephew ricochet off the walls of Austrian society and for Austrians the clatter must be alarming. Despite spending most of his life in his native country, he doesn’t have much that is nice to say about it, and what he does have that is nice to say is compromised by confessions of his failing to dislike it. But underneath is something much more compelling and disturbing about life in any so-called developed society, a critique so savage and honest that few if any can emerge unscathed from a reading of a Bernhard book.
What Bernhard finds objectionable about life is life itself, especially as it is lived by us – we poor humans, who preen and prance and pretend in the face of certain decay and death. Much of what he says in Wittgenstein’s Nephew about how we behave does not actually accord with my thinking or my experience, but his attacks are often deceptive, their truths arriving from some other angle than they seem at first.
Like Nikolai Berdyaev, the Russian religious thinker, Bernhard is a very profound dialectician. He doesn’t mind working out the dialectics in plain view either. Was Ludwig mad as Paul? Was Paul as much of a philosopher as Ludwig? The Austrian explores these possibilities positively, and while he is about it, tears strips off mental health professionals.nonetheless describing Paul’s illness definitely as an illness. What he objected to was not that Paul needed some kind of intervention, but the intervention that was prescribed. He is thus outraged – as we should be – by the psychiatric practice of the time (late 1960s, before and after): “Of all medical practitioners, psychiatrists are the most incompetent, having a closer affinity to the sex killer than to their science…the real demons of our age, going about their business with impunity and constrained by neither law nor conscience.”
Well!
Bernhard was hardly alone in his views at the time.The Austrian located the beginning of his book in 1967, when he and Paul were in different wings of a hospital in Vienna – he for thoracic surgery, Paul for electro-shock “therapy”. By then Thomas Szasz’s Myth of Mental Illness had been in print for six years and R D Laing’s Divided Self, and The Politics of Experience would have been available to Bernhard as he wrote.
Bernhard attacks the cherished values of settled existence in favour of the life of risk and growth,and his works – the four I have read or am reading – could be described as rants against his targets and in support of his ideas. They contain narratives, like Celine typically in the first person, and in Bernhard’s case without bothering to start a second paragraph, but we read them for their views on life and death, put so often in ways that are at the same time appalling and hilarious. Celine was a master at the humorous sketch; Bernhard less so: the Austrian shared Celine’s wit, however, with asides skewering his targets as weakly flailing moths before the collector sticks them forever in his specimen tray.
No one would suppose that these two miscreant misanthropes were in every respect admirable – as writers, as thinkers, as people. Some would say that there was nothing admirable about Celine, and an afterward to The Loser suggests Bernhard’s disappearance would have been greeted with cheers by many Austrians. Yet Celine freed me when I encountered in him in the 1970s as he freed others before and since, to nod, smiling or chuckling or guffawing, in understanding agreement of the rank hypocrisy that both surrounds and invests us, and that surely is worth something. Kurt Vonngegut once wrote that Celine lacked “blinders” that most of us have to prevent us from seeing “the unbelievability of life as it really is” and Bernhard is no different in that sense. His hapless victims deserve their fates because they will not live a life worth living by their own standards as well as his.
It is hard to believe that Bernhard was as disagreeable in person as he makes himself out to be, reviled not only for his views but his manners but there is some evidence that it is true. Celine by contrast had a strong coterie of defenders and friends, even if some of these fell away when he used them as thinly disguised and thoroughly unpleasant characters in his novels.
The fourth of Bernhard’s book s I am now enjoying is his last, aptly titled Extinction. Naturally this can mean a lot of things on a lot of levels. He adopts a device favoured by Dostoevsky I’ve highligthed in Written World in the past – an observer observing the narrator.** This can make for great literature though I am not so sure Dostoevsky really needed it, and not sure either if Bernhard does. Celine was really only happy in the first person in a mad autobiography: “first you have to pay for it. Then you can use it.”
Like Celine – indeed, like Dostoevsky too – Bernhard makes me want to lift my sights in my writing. I care less for the experimental aspects of these giants of the written word than I do for the white heat of their commitment. Even if we are not really sure what they meant in their books, we are really sure that they really meant it.
So – Bernhard comes as a time in my writing life when I have written what I think is a pretty passable thriller and ghost story, with the aims that I have always set myself: to have a serious purpose in this frivolous genre, now genres. But I think now, maybe, it is time to go further and harder at what I want to do as a writer.
“First you’ve got to pay for it, then you can use it.” In my writing I’ve chosen never to base any character on a single living person, and even those who have passed through I’ve taken things away from personalities and added them too. My own life – I’m not on the bottom of the barrel watching greedy sadists shooting fish from up above, trying to dodge the bullets. But I’ve had a life that falls within Celine’s rubric all the same***. I can always write more in the lines I’ve done so far, but I can do better if I focus hard enough, and risk enough. Time to choose.
*”Full quid” = English/Australian/New Zealand and perhaps elsewhere for not all there, mad.
**In Karamazov, Demons, Notes from Underground, and elsewhere.
***Celine could have had a cushy life, and indeed seemed to be heading for it before he veered into the Parisian demimonde to write his first blockbuster, Journey to the end of the night. Even later he often played it straight.
Of the three books by Bernhard I’ve read, all contain some references to Ludwig, and it is said that other of his books deal heavily with him and his thought.
One of these, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, is a short – 100 pages with big type – account of Bernhard’s relationship with the man in the title, whose name was Paul and who was not the full quid.*
Ludwig also had a brother named Paul who was famous in his own right. A pianist, he lost an arm in the First World War, yet continued to play. Among other pieces, he commissioned and performed a one-handed work by Maurice Ravel, and according to Wikipedia, developed one-hand techniques in er concert with his footpedals to allow music previously thought to be impossible to play one-handed. Readers can find performances on YouTube, at least one heavily criticised by commentators.
According to a biography of Ludwig, the Wittgenstein family didn’t scrimp their criticism either.
Bernhard, who was also a pianist and a graduate of the Salzburg “Mozarteum”, doesn’t mention the pianist. His account of his friendship with the nephew is variously described as a memoir and a novel. It is hard to know from this just how much of what he has to say is true. It has been common in the last generation, if not before, to rewrite history – in literature and in film and no doubt in other ways – to incorporate fiction. I’ve done it myself, in Tobi’s Game, putting a character through not just the Holocaust but also the final days in the Nazi leadership’s bunker in Berlin. Things happen in this book that really happened, but not necessarily as I described, and certainly not with a character I invented.
Bernhard is however something different. The echoes of Wittgenstein’s Nephew ricochet off the walls of Austrian society and for Austrians the clatter must be alarming. Despite spending most of his life in his native country, he doesn’t have much that is nice to say about it, and what he does have that is nice to say is compromised by confessions of his failing to dislike it. But underneath is something much more compelling and disturbing about life in any so-called developed society, a critique so savage and honest that few if any can emerge unscathed from a reading of a Bernhard book.
What Bernhard finds objectionable about life is life itself, especially as it is lived by us – we poor humans, who preen and prance and pretend in the face of certain decay and death. Much of what he says in Wittgenstein’s Nephew about how we behave does not actually accord with my thinking or my experience, but his attacks are often deceptive, their truths arriving from some other angle than they seem at first.
Like Nikolai Berdyaev, the Russian religious thinker, Bernhard is a very profound dialectician. He doesn’t mind working out the dialectics in plain view either. Was Ludwig mad as Paul? Was Paul as much of a philosopher as Ludwig? The Austrian explores these possibilities positively, and while he is about it, tears strips off mental health professionals.nonetheless describing Paul’s illness definitely as an illness. What he objected to was not that Paul needed some kind of intervention, but the intervention that was prescribed. He is thus outraged – as we should be – by the psychiatric practice of the time (late 1960s, before and after): “Of all medical practitioners, psychiatrists are the most incompetent, having a closer affinity to the sex killer than to their science…the real demons of our age, going about their business with impunity and constrained by neither law nor conscience.”
Well!
Bernhard was hardly alone in his views at the time.The Austrian located the beginning of his book in 1967, when he and Paul were in different wings of a hospital in Vienna – he for thoracic surgery, Paul for electro-shock “therapy”. By then Thomas Szasz’s Myth of Mental Illness had been in print for six years and R D Laing’s Divided Self, and The Politics of Experience would have been available to Bernhard as he wrote.
Bernhard attacks the cherished values of settled existence in favour of the life of risk and growth,and his works – the four I have read or am reading – could be described as rants against his targets and in support of his ideas. They contain narratives, like Celine typically in the first person, and in Bernhard’s case without bothering to start a second paragraph, but we read them for their views on life and death, put so often in ways that are at the same time appalling and hilarious. Celine was a master at the humorous sketch; Bernhard less so: the Austrian shared Celine’s wit, however, with asides skewering his targets as weakly flailing moths before the collector sticks them forever in his specimen tray.
No one would suppose that these two miscreant misanthropes were in every respect admirable – as writers, as thinkers, as people. Some would say that there was nothing admirable about Celine, and an afterward to The Loser suggests Bernhard’s disappearance would have been greeted with cheers by many Austrians. Yet Celine freed me when I encountered in him in the 1970s as he freed others before and since, to nod, smiling or chuckling or guffawing, in understanding agreement of the rank hypocrisy that both surrounds and invests us, and that surely is worth something. Kurt Vonngegut once wrote that Celine lacked “blinders” that most of us have to prevent us from seeing “the unbelievability of life as it really is” and Bernhard is no different in that sense. His hapless victims deserve their fates because they will not live a life worth living by their own standards as well as his.
It is hard to believe that Bernhard was as disagreeable in person as he makes himself out to be, reviled not only for his views but his manners but there is some evidence that it is true. Celine by contrast had a strong coterie of defenders and friends, even if some of these fell away when he used them as thinly disguised and thoroughly unpleasant characters in his novels.
The fourth of Bernhard’s book s I am now enjoying is his last, aptly titled Extinction. Naturally this can mean a lot of things on a lot of levels. He adopts a device favoured by Dostoevsky I’ve highligthed in Written World in the past – an observer observing the narrator.** This can make for great literature though I am not so sure Dostoevsky really needed it, and not sure either if Bernhard does. Celine was really only happy in the first person in a mad autobiography: “first you have to pay for it. Then you can use it.”
Like Celine – indeed, like Dostoevsky too – Bernhard makes me want to lift my sights in my writing. I care less for the experimental aspects of these giants of the written word than I do for the white heat of their commitment. Even if we are not really sure what they meant in their books, we are really sure that they really meant it.
So – Bernhard comes as a time in my writing life when I have written what I think is a pretty passable thriller and ghost story, with the aims that I have always set myself: to have a serious purpose in this frivolous genre, now genres. But I think now, maybe, it is time to go further and harder at what I want to do as a writer.
“First you’ve got to pay for it, then you can use it.” In my writing I’ve chosen never to base any character on a single living person, and even those who have passed through I’ve taken things away from personalities and added them too. My own life – I’m not on the bottom of the barrel watching greedy sadists shooting fish from up above, trying to dodge the bullets. But I’ve had a life that falls within Celine’s rubric all the same***. I can always write more in the lines I’ve done so far, but I can do better if I focus hard enough, and risk enough. Time to choose.
*”Full quid” = English/Australian/New Zealand and perhaps elsewhere for not all there, mad.
**In Karamazov, Demons, Notes from Underground, and elsewhere.
***Celine could have had a cushy life, and indeed seemed to be heading for it before he veered into the Parisian demimonde to write his first blockbuster, Journey to the end of the night. Even later he often played it straight.
December 12, 2014
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!
Sigmaringen sensations
Well, don’t I wish…
Sigmaringen is a small town in the southwestern German state or land of Baden-Wurttemberg. It’s a quiet and quaint wee spot that I first visited in 1984, returning a decade later, and then three years after that and several more times thereafter. Anyone who wishes can check it out on Wikipedia, only don’t believe any of the stuff about the Vichy regime there, or Celine’s book Castle to Castle*. The photo is nice.
Originally I went to Sigmaringen because of Celine. This writer’s hallucinatory style made me want to see the real deal. As the town was not bombed during the war much of what the writer saw and in his way described is still there, if not exactly the same. For a while I toyed with the idea of writing a comic novel about the place but in the end used it as an ironic site for my second novel, Evilheart, wherein there were two castles too, just like Celine’s book. In my case the second was the castle in Edinburgh that dominates the Scottish capital.
I like that book and you, dear reader, are welcome to like it too. After I finished I decided that I would set a number of my books there, wholly or partly, and these now make up a reasonable number: as well as Evilheart, The Kleiber Monster, Tobi’s Game, Savonarola’s Bones, Kaos, and now, Attila’s Angels. Demented doesn’t manage to find a spot there and neither does The Russian Idea.
What I like about Sigmaringen for writing is that it isn’t much of a tourist town, especially for English speakers. The first few times I was there only a French tourist brochure was available. Yet it is pretty nice. It’s got romance by definition. Not only that, the countryside surrounding it is very pretty. And not only THAT, Beuron, a hamlet in the Danube valley upriver from Sigmaringen, is bizarre as well as nice, a home for “Beuroner kunst”, a religious art school contemporary with but apparently unconnected to, pre-Raphaelism. For English speakers this too is unknown.
So the place(s) give my locales a fun history/mystery basis and also something for a wee town that has been mostly nice to me. I think if my books one day take off, readers will walk the streets seeking the same sites I sought…Yo! I’d like that.
*Celine’s book did not chart the fall of the Vichy regime but the time leading up to it. He did not flee there but to Berlin seeking a visa to Denmark, and was sent there by the German authorities to be the Vichy doctor. Later, he managed to make it to Copenhagen. His book is not a history. Wikipedia is great but not always on the money.
Sigmaringen is a small town in the southwestern German state or land of Baden-Wurttemberg. It’s a quiet and quaint wee spot that I first visited in 1984, returning a decade later, and then three years after that and several more times thereafter. Anyone who wishes can check it out on Wikipedia, only don’t believe any of the stuff about the Vichy regime there, or Celine’s book Castle to Castle*. The photo is nice.
Originally I went to Sigmaringen because of Celine. This writer’s hallucinatory style made me want to see the real deal. As the town was not bombed during the war much of what the writer saw and in his way described is still there, if not exactly the same. For a while I toyed with the idea of writing a comic novel about the place but in the end used it as an ironic site for my second novel, Evilheart, wherein there were two castles too, just like Celine’s book. In my case the second was the castle in Edinburgh that dominates the Scottish capital.
I like that book and you, dear reader, are welcome to like it too. After I finished I decided that I would set a number of my books there, wholly or partly, and these now make up a reasonable number: as well as Evilheart, The Kleiber Monster, Tobi’s Game, Savonarola’s Bones, Kaos, and now, Attila’s Angels. Demented doesn’t manage to find a spot there and neither does The Russian Idea.
What I like about Sigmaringen for writing is that it isn’t much of a tourist town, especially for English speakers. The first few times I was there only a French tourist brochure was available. Yet it is pretty nice. It’s got romance by definition. Not only that, the countryside surrounding it is very pretty. And not only THAT, Beuron, a hamlet in the Danube valley upriver from Sigmaringen, is bizarre as well as nice, a home for “Beuroner kunst”, a religious art school contemporary with but apparently unconnected to, pre-Raphaelism. For English speakers this too is unknown.
So the place(s) give my locales a fun history/mystery basis and also something for a wee town that has been mostly nice to me. I think if my books one day take off, readers will walk the streets seeking the same sites I sought…Yo! I’d like that.
*Celine’s book did not chart the fall of the Vichy regime but the time leading up to it. He did not flee there but to Berlin seeking a visa to Denmark, and was sent there by the German authorities to be the Vichy doctor. Later, he managed to make it to Copenhagen. His book is not a history. Wikipedia is great but not always on the money.
Scandinoirvian days and nights
When I was a lot younger than I am today, I was a fan of a detective series written by a Swedish couple, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. They have pretty much faded from memory now apart from one particularly chilling story, The Man on the Balcony, and a passage on child-rearing from that or another of the ten novels in the series.
The series they wrote was within the genre “police procedural”, which may more appropriately be thought of as a sub-genre within the detective story, which may be thought of as a sub-genre within the mystery genre, which may be considered a sub-genre of the thriller, which may be considered a sub-genre of sub-literature, a sub-genre of literature! which -
Enough. My point, insofar as I have one, is that these are shifting categories that can exist in their own rights or within larger “theoretical” constructs. They can overlap and never fit perfectly.
Between these two writers’ work and today Swedish fiction and film adaptations of it have till recently pretty much passed me by. I’ve had other concerns, and once I started writing my own thrillers, I left off reading them almost totally.
Stieg Larsson brought Swedish crime fiction back into focus for the rest of the world; I picked up on his trilogy only through word of mouth and then the films made from them – see my earlier post “Grand Larssony”. By then I had run into some other products of the criminal creative genius of what I have decided to call (and claim the credit for, deserved or not*) Scandinoirvian.
There’s a lot of it about. I haven’t seen much of it that has gone on TV as I don’t watch TV very often, and as I haven’t been reading them, the novels they are based on have also been foreign to me.. A Danish series that is raved over has completely missed me, for example, and only lately have I seen the series based on the Swedish novelist Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander character.
These are pretty good**, and I’ve now seen the lot – around 35 episodes that have had a beginning, middle and end, as a novel might. Living within the rules and realities of TV means individual episodes that are self-contained, while allowing for “development” in the lives of the characters. The characters have turned out to intersect with the lives of some of the actors portraying them, in one case tragically.
What most makes for the popularity of Wallander is Wallander, an all too human detective whose failings are acknowledged by the man himself and whose professional life ends in a bittersweet denouement it hurt me as a human to watch. The “police procedural” aspect is there, but it is there for Wallander to ignore…his “hunches” lead to solving the cases.
The cases usually involve awful crimes – abduction and enslavement of young girls, sexual predators and murderers of young boys, cults, and the like. They are frequently more bizarre than would ordinarily allow viewers or readers to suspend disbelief, but work because of the human focus rather than the procedural.
The series as film is also for the most part extremely well done, and a credit to the producers, who were also responsible for the Millennium trilogy. Acting is of high quality and the more technical aspects of filming – location, shot composition, sound and so on, are often stunning. Many of the actors through the second of three seasons featured in the Millennium trilogy, but by the end the producers had run out of them and were using newbies for the most part. In media as elsewhere, success breeds success and the worldwide bonanza of the trilogy seems to have brought new blood into the industry.
Despite all this, Wallander is still television, substandard compared to film, though well beyond the quality of what one has come to expect from TV. It was one of the striking features of the Millennium trilogy that the second and third were made for TV yet worked as film – largely, it seems to me, because they were edited down in time and gained a tightness and intensity that would have been missing otherwise. The full versions have been released but I can’t be bothered watching them for precisely that reason
Sweden has not got a monopoly on Scandinoirvian even if it dominates it. I recently saw a not bad Danish film that appeared as a pilot for a series on TV, but the real deal for me is from Iceland, where Jar City is set. It is a terrific police procedural that turns out to be a genetic sensation. While the author of the novel has written a number using the same detective, so far as I can tell there has been no other film.
But there is another, in a league of its own: Noi the Albino. It is a thriller and not a police procedural, and its astonishing climax is among the most eye-opening and jaw-dropping of the century. Like Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s take on the Trojan War, it is arguable whether the blackness of this film is comic, or not. This simply-made but genuinely shocking film points a way forward for thriller writers and film-makers. That means it could take a generation for anyone to notice.
Thanks for reading.
*No hits on Google, unless this one makes it. As the mad scientist raves in Help! it is mine! Mine, do you hear? Except that it’s not – found it after a different order of search…sigh…
** The British series, starring Kenneth Branagh, has got rave reviews but I watched only one episode and dropped it. Too far-fetched and Wallander, despite Branagh’s acting talents and all the kudos, did not seem anything like fully realised.
The series they wrote was within the genre “police procedural”, which may more appropriately be thought of as a sub-genre within the detective story, which may be thought of as a sub-genre within the mystery genre, which may be considered a sub-genre of the thriller, which may be considered a sub-genre of sub-literature, a sub-genre of literature! which -
Enough. My point, insofar as I have one, is that these are shifting categories that can exist in their own rights or within larger “theoretical” constructs. They can overlap and never fit perfectly.
Between these two writers’ work and today Swedish fiction and film adaptations of it have till recently pretty much passed me by. I’ve had other concerns, and once I started writing my own thrillers, I left off reading them almost totally.
Stieg Larsson brought Swedish crime fiction back into focus for the rest of the world; I picked up on his trilogy only through word of mouth and then the films made from them – see my earlier post “Grand Larssony”. By then I had run into some other products of the criminal creative genius of what I have decided to call (and claim the credit for, deserved or not*) Scandinoirvian.
There’s a lot of it about. I haven’t seen much of it that has gone on TV as I don’t watch TV very often, and as I haven’t been reading them, the novels they are based on have also been foreign to me.. A Danish series that is raved over has completely missed me, for example, and only lately have I seen the series based on the Swedish novelist Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander character.
These are pretty good**, and I’ve now seen the lot – around 35 episodes that have had a beginning, middle and end, as a novel might. Living within the rules and realities of TV means individual episodes that are self-contained, while allowing for “development” in the lives of the characters. The characters have turned out to intersect with the lives of some of the actors portraying them, in one case tragically.
What most makes for the popularity of Wallander is Wallander, an all too human detective whose failings are acknowledged by the man himself and whose professional life ends in a bittersweet denouement it hurt me as a human to watch. The “police procedural” aspect is there, but it is there for Wallander to ignore…his “hunches” lead to solving the cases.
The cases usually involve awful crimes – abduction and enslavement of young girls, sexual predators and murderers of young boys, cults, and the like. They are frequently more bizarre than would ordinarily allow viewers or readers to suspend disbelief, but work because of the human focus rather than the procedural.
The series as film is also for the most part extremely well done, and a credit to the producers, who were also responsible for the Millennium trilogy. Acting is of high quality and the more technical aspects of filming – location, shot composition, sound and so on, are often stunning. Many of the actors through the second of three seasons featured in the Millennium trilogy, but by the end the producers had run out of them and were using newbies for the most part. In media as elsewhere, success breeds success and the worldwide bonanza of the trilogy seems to have brought new blood into the industry.
Despite all this, Wallander is still television, substandard compared to film, though well beyond the quality of what one has come to expect from TV. It was one of the striking features of the Millennium trilogy that the second and third were made for TV yet worked as film – largely, it seems to me, because they were edited down in time and gained a tightness and intensity that would have been missing otherwise. The full versions have been released but I can’t be bothered watching them for precisely that reason
Sweden has not got a monopoly on Scandinoirvian even if it dominates it. I recently saw a not bad Danish film that appeared as a pilot for a series on TV, but the real deal for me is from Iceland, where Jar City is set. It is a terrific police procedural that turns out to be a genetic sensation. While the author of the novel has written a number using the same detective, so far as I can tell there has been no other film.
But there is another, in a league of its own: Noi the Albino. It is a thriller and not a police procedural, and its astonishing climax is among the most eye-opening and jaw-dropping of the century. Like Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s take on the Trojan War, it is arguable whether the blackness of this film is comic, or not. This simply-made but genuinely shocking film points a way forward for thriller writers and film-makers. That means it could take a generation for anyone to notice.
Thanks for reading.
*No hits on Google, unless this one makes it. As the mad scientist raves in Help! it is mine! Mine, do you hear? Except that it’s not – found it after a different order of search…sigh…
** The British series, starring Kenneth Branagh, has got rave reviews but I watched only one episode and dropped it. Too far-fetched and Wallander, despite Branagh’s acting talents and all the kudos, did not seem anything like fully realised.
Blagh!
Blagh! Not only that, blagh-plus! I am not sure about this feeling. On 8 December at around 10 in the morning I finished my new book, Attila’s Angels. For someone who writes weird books he thinks are pretty normal really, this one seems quite weird to me.
This may be a good thing. However, it really really really may not!
It is a departure for me in that it is a ghost story. I enjoyed thinking about, researching and writing these aspects. But there were other aspects I either did not enjoy or felt that I was perhaps treading water despite my desire to move into new territory. Well, such is life. Apparently.
Just now I am reading a serious novelist named Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian of, as Celine put it, the pessimist school. The influence of Celine on his work is obvious, and a Google trawl shows that other readers see this as easily as I do. What is strange is that “serious critics” do not. They compare Bernhard to others, sometimes stretching a very long bow to reach the target but leaving the Frenchman out.
Bernhard has stylistic mannerisms that I find irritating. In the first novel of his I read, Woodcutters, mostly set in a dinner party in Vienna, the narrator – like Celine it seems Bernhard likes first person narrators – keeps remarking that he thought such and such “sitting in the wing chair”. He said this enough times – hundreds – to make me want to go to Vienna, find this piece of furniture, and remove it from reality. In the one I am reading now, The Loser, he says frequently that he thought such and such as in “He should not be so depressed, she said, I thought”. This may be clever but it wears. Really, Thomas, up there in writer heaven, it does!
All the same Bernhard had both writerly and personal courage that evoke Celine in me though the two were on opposite ends when it came to some things if we accept at least a great deal of what their narrators say as their own views. Events in their lives also chime to me.
Both are very shrewd and ferocious to their targets, and can be extremely funny. Woodcutters apparently was banned in Austria when it was first published for the hate crime of making fun of Austrian cultural pretensions.
When I began writing fiction I chose a “sub-literary” form deliberately, not being a great fan of the so-called “bourgeois novel”. People like the literary conceit of the “bourgeois novel”, but I don’t. Writers like Celine and Bernhard didn’t either. That is part of their attraction to me, though other features of their writing also make me drool and when I think I can get away with it, emulate.
“Sub-literature” is nonetheless literature and the best exponents move easily into the realm of the truly great. Shakespeare for example. What! Sub-literary? I can hear the bleats all the way from the green and pleasant land, and elsewhere, but at the time, it was so. Ben Jonson gently mocked his literary merit. But Will also happened to be a genius who could turn his bums-on-seats skills into turns of phrase that echo down the centuries.
Even if you, dear reader, don’t agree with that you might think of detective story writers like Dashiell Hammett (especially) or Raymond Chandler, or even Dame Agatha, all good writers, espionage masters like Len Deighton and John Le Carre, adventure writers like B Traven, another special case. Traven may be the one 20th century great to have escaped notice in that century, despite uneven work. Even so, The Bridge in the Jungle, while flawed, is a masterpiece. The cleverness of the so-called Jungle Novels and Treasure of the Sierra Madre are a treat. .
Where was I? Oh, sub-literature and me, where I have tried to sit for 15 years or so with my “serious purpose in a frivolous genre”. Bernhard and Celine give any would-be writer a glimpse of what is possible, even if we accept that their misanthrophy was real and their cynicism even worse. Bernhard, for example, was so enraged at establishment attempts to capture culture for shall we say inartistic purposes that when he gave an acceptance speech tor a state=sponsored prize he had won, the Minister of Culture and a large section of the audience left the room as his barbs found their targets.
Celine would have applauded.He was extremely mischievous and at one stage during WWII assured a high ranking Nazi that Hitler had been replaced by a Jew.
In his last novel, Celine confidently predicted that “in 200 years I’ll be helping the kids through high school”. He may not have to wait that long. About fifty of those years have passed and parallel text (French on one page, English on the facing page) editions of his work have started to appear. What Bernhard shows is that Celine can continue to inspire.
Meawhile Attila’s Angels has appeared on the e-bookshelves ready to be read. More anon.
Thanks for reading.
This may be a good thing. However, it really really really may not!
It is a departure for me in that it is a ghost story. I enjoyed thinking about, researching and writing these aspects. But there were other aspects I either did not enjoy or felt that I was perhaps treading water despite my desire to move into new territory. Well, such is life. Apparently.
Just now I am reading a serious novelist named Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian of, as Celine put it, the pessimist school. The influence of Celine on his work is obvious, and a Google trawl shows that other readers see this as easily as I do. What is strange is that “serious critics” do not. They compare Bernhard to others, sometimes stretching a very long bow to reach the target but leaving the Frenchman out.
Bernhard has stylistic mannerisms that I find irritating. In the first novel of his I read, Woodcutters, mostly set in a dinner party in Vienna, the narrator – like Celine it seems Bernhard likes first person narrators – keeps remarking that he thought such and such “sitting in the wing chair”. He said this enough times – hundreds – to make me want to go to Vienna, find this piece of furniture, and remove it from reality. In the one I am reading now, The Loser, he says frequently that he thought such and such as in “He should not be so depressed, she said, I thought”. This may be clever but it wears. Really, Thomas, up there in writer heaven, it does!
All the same Bernhard had both writerly and personal courage that evoke Celine in me though the two were on opposite ends when it came to some things if we accept at least a great deal of what their narrators say as their own views. Events in their lives also chime to me.
Both are very shrewd and ferocious to their targets, and can be extremely funny. Woodcutters apparently was banned in Austria when it was first published for the hate crime of making fun of Austrian cultural pretensions.
When I began writing fiction I chose a “sub-literary” form deliberately, not being a great fan of the so-called “bourgeois novel”. People like the literary conceit of the “bourgeois novel”, but I don’t. Writers like Celine and Bernhard didn’t either. That is part of their attraction to me, though other features of their writing also make me drool and when I think I can get away with it, emulate.
“Sub-literature” is nonetheless literature and the best exponents move easily into the realm of the truly great. Shakespeare for example. What! Sub-literary? I can hear the bleats all the way from the green and pleasant land, and elsewhere, but at the time, it was so. Ben Jonson gently mocked his literary merit. But Will also happened to be a genius who could turn his bums-on-seats skills into turns of phrase that echo down the centuries.
Even if you, dear reader, don’t agree with that you might think of detective story writers like Dashiell Hammett (especially) or Raymond Chandler, or even Dame Agatha, all good writers, espionage masters like Len Deighton and John Le Carre, adventure writers like B Traven, another special case. Traven may be the one 20th century great to have escaped notice in that century, despite uneven work. Even so, The Bridge in the Jungle, while flawed, is a masterpiece. The cleverness of the so-called Jungle Novels and Treasure of the Sierra Madre are a treat. .
Where was I? Oh, sub-literature and me, where I have tried to sit for 15 years or so with my “serious purpose in a frivolous genre”. Bernhard and Celine give any would-be writer a glimpse of what is possible, even if we accept that their misanthrophy was real and their cynicism even worse. Bernhard, for example, was so enraged at establishment attempts to capture culture for shall we say inartistic purposes that when he gave an acceptance speech tor a state=sponsored prize he had won, the Minister of Culture and a large section of the audience left the room as his barbs found their targets.
Celine would have applauded.He was extremely mischievous and at one stage during WWII assured a high ranking Nazi that Hitler had been replaced by a Jew.
In his last novel, Celine confidently predicted that “in 200 years I’ll be helping the kids through high school”. He may not have to wait that long. About fifty of those years have passed and parallel text (French on one page, English on the facing page) editions of his work have started to appear. What Bernhard shows is that Celine can continue to inspire.
Meawhile Attila’s Angels has appeared on the e-bookshelves ready to be read. More anon.
Thanks for reading.
November 9, 2014
Suddenly. . .
…yes you wait ages for a post and then another pops in just as you had moved on to something really exciting. OK, I know you weren’t waiting and am just making myself feel a bit better.
This book I have maybe almost finished, or almost got ready to bin – did not have a title when I wrote the first draft of this post. It does now. The ones supplied by my intrepid readers somehow didn’t fit, or not fit in the right, Trainspotting, kind of way and I had to wait till one popped into my head. From there it needed to work its way onto the tip of my tongue, and then – shazam! This is my post, and I’ll say this if I want to say it – it is sure to be greeted by wild cheering throngs mounting tickertape parades as an astonished planet reels from…OK, enough.
Someone I have a high regard for read one of my earlier books and termed it “weird”. Well, it is. My books are both like and unlike the thriller genre they have till now flitted around in and as they buzz near the edges of definition and desirability, they reveal that they are, truly, a bit strange – unlike their peers while (still my post, OK?) meeting the requirements of the genre. That is part of my “schtick”, to be the same and not the same. So far, it hasn’t worked for me, even a little bit. I don’t write that way – it is how things turn out as I work them out, and write them. This writing lark is a mystery to its practitioners, or it is to me. But even if by design, the crowds in the earlier paragraph have turned up only to turn up their noses and buzz off home.
This one however while moseying along contentedly in thriller country, somehow roamed a bit farther into very dark forests of the imagination to come out in new territory for me, and the crowds might turn up to take a second sniff. It is – depending on how you like to define things – a ghost story, paranormal, and/or ridiculous. It really is weird, even to me. I thought so as I was working it out, thought it while I was writing it, and I think so now. All the same, I think its weirdness is not at all bad.
The idea of writing a ghost story came from something almost unrelated that happened to me in Scotland last year. Then before I ever thought of a plot, I read a number of books and stories featuring ghosts, including one by Thorne Smith (his first Topper book; I had already read the second, and Night Life of the Gods, my fave), and a Douglas Adams special with a ghost who had something of the quality I think is natural. I watched films with aliens and ghosts. I read and/or reread stuff about metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls, and reincarnation…and the religions and philosophies surrounding these fascinating ideas. And while I was thinking about these things, I was also reading and thinking about the Romans, the Huns, the Goths, Edward Gibbon, Attila for it was he, the Holocaust and the “war in the East”, and my favourite writers – Euripides! Yes! Alcestis*…if you haven’t read the Ted Hughes version of this you really should…but also Medea…! And Shakespeare…Hamlet! Ghost dad tells the kid he’s not making it…and finally, and really importantly, Dostoevsky. As I have written, “Bobok”, a short story, was in my head…but along with that the appearance of the Devil in Brothers Karamazov. Wow!
Wait! There’s more! Celine’s last trilogy gets its impetus from a whole boatload of ghosts, in the first part, Castle to Castle! Charon’s boat, the one who ferries the dead across to their place…the passengers have to go get money before they are allowed to board** but when they do, that Charon whacks them with an oar, splits their heads in two when he doesn’t just mash them up into gruesome glop! Celine knows some of the crew…and has a chat…it’s all fine…kind of…
So you see, even if I go into the serious literature part of the universe, where I actually fear to tread as a writer at least until now***, ghosts abound…evil creatures with them too…deceptive Devil in old clothes and no teeth…and my ghosts? Are they informed by this pantheon of greatness and frivolity? Yes, they are. Do they measure up? Aw…so far, I don’t think so. But I haven’t finished, quite yet.
And the title? Here it is! Attila’s angels…it worked its way from my brain, jumped onto my tongue, and then flew out onto the page! No need to write! Ghosts!
Must get out on the balcony to watch the parade^…have to fix a bit of the book but the title works for me, so I hope it works for you…
Thanks for reading.
*Hughes’ version of this is amazing and when you consider his life, it is even more amazing.
**The old Greeks put a coin, known as an obol on the tongue of the departed to pay for their passage…Celine was riffing on this.
*** Next time, I’m thinking…
^Don’t have a balcony, but there is a deck…
This book I have maybe almost finished, or almost got ready to bin – did not have a title when I wrote the first draft of this post. It does now. The ones supplied by my intrepid readers somehow didn’t fit, or not fit in the right, Trainspotting, kind of way and I had to wait till one popped into my head. From there it needed to work its way onto the tip of my tongue, and then – shazam! This is my post, and I’ll say this if I want to say it – it is sure to be greeted by wild cheering throngs mounting tickertape parades as an astonished planet reels from…OK, enough.
Someone I have a high regard for read one of my earlier books and termed it “weird”. Well, it is. My books are both like and unlike the thriller genre they have till now flitted around in and as they buzz near the edges of definition and desirability, they reveal that they are, truly, a bit strange – unlike their peers while (still my post, OK?) meeting the requirements of the genre. That is part of my “schtick”, to be the same and not the same. So far, it hasn’t worked for me, even a little bit. I don’t write that way – it is how things turn out as I work them out, and write them. This writing lark is a mystery to its practitioners, or it is to me. But even if by design, the crowds in the earlier paragraph have turned up only to turn up their noses and buzz off home.
This one however while moseying along contentedly in thriller country, somehow roamed a bit farther into very dark forests of the imagination to come out in new territory for me, and the crowds might turn up to take a second sniff. It is – depending on how you like to define things – a ghost story, paranormal, and/or ridiculous. It really is weird, even to me. I thought so as I was working it out, thought it while I was writing it, and I think so now. All the same, I think its weirdness is not at all bad.
The idea of writing a ghost story came from something almost unrelated that happened to me in Scotland last year. Then before I ever thought of a plot, I read a number of books and stories featuring ghosts, including one by Thorne Smith (his first Topper book; I had already read the second, and Night Life of the Gods, my fave), and a Douglas Adams special with a ghost who had something of the quality I think is natural. I watched films with aliens and ghosts. I read and/or reread stuff about metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls, and reincarnation…and the religions and philosophies surrounding these fascinating ideas. And while I was thinking about these things, I was also reading and thinking about the Romans, the Huns, the Goths, Edward Gibbon, Attila for it was he, the Holocaust and the “war in the East”, and my favourite writers – Euripides! Yes! Alcestis*…if you haven’t read the Ted Hughes version of this you really should…but also Medea…! And Shakespeare…Hamlet! Ghost dad tells the kid he’s not making it…and finally, and really importantly, Dostoevsky. As I have written, “Bobok”, a short story, was in my head…but along with that the appearance of the Devil in Brothers Karamazov. Wow!
Wait! There’s more! Celine’s last trilogy gets its impetus from a whole boatload of ghosts, in the first part, Castle to Castle! Charon’s boat, the one who ferries the dead across to their place…the passengers have to go get money before they are allowed to board** but when they do, that Charon whacks them with an oar, splits their heads in two when he doesn’t just mash them up into gruesome glop! Celine knows some of the crew…and has a chat…it’s all fine…kind of…
So you see, even if I go into the serious literature part of the universe, where I actually fear to tread as a writer at least until now***, ghosts abound…evil creatures with them too…deceptive Devil in old clothes and no teeth…and my ghosts? Are they informed by this pantheon of greatness and frivolity? Yes, they are. Do they measure up? Aw…so far, I don’t think so. But I haven’t finished, quite yet.
And the title? Here it is! Attila’s angels…it worked its way from my brain, jumped onto my tongue, and then flew out onto the page! No need to write! Ghosts!
Must get out on the balcony to watch the parade^…have to fix a bit of the book but the title works for me, so I hope it works for you…
Thanks for reading.
*Hughes’ version of this is amazing and when you consider his life, it is even more amazing.
**The old Greeks put a coin, known as an obol on the tongue of the departed to pay for their passage…Celine was riffing on this.
*** Next time, I’m thinking…
^Don’t have a balcony, but there is a deck…
November 6, 2014
Chewing on my y-fronts, and other thrills
Hello dear reader – hopefully this finds you well and happy and enjoying life in every aspect. If only I could say the same! Well, maybe I will one day. Living in hope is great.
Yesterday I sent the manuscript of the novel I’ve been working on to my reader critics, who will tell me whether it is any good or not, and if it is, how to make it better. They are busy people with plenty of other things on their minds as well as plates, so I don’t think I’ll be hearing much from them for a while.
Cue tiny violins playing horrible out of tune dirges to go with an anxious mood. It’s the way things are, Steve. Get over it! Yes, ok…
Naturally in the interim there are things I can do – go through the thing again and try to improve it before hearing the good/bad news. I will too.
What is true is that any writer is lucky to have a reader who is worthy, who will say, “Yes, this is a very interesting book. Put it in your bottom drawer and think how much fun it is going to have there.” If they won’t say that there is no point in worrying. The writer will find out later and in a much less pleasant way that s/he has written a novel that is complete rubbish. I am lucky in my readers.
A good reader will do more than that of course. If it’s worth carrying on with it, the reader will point out ways to improve the manuscript. This may involve word choices, or the order of things, or a lack of clarity, not enough here or there, or rather too much there and here, or a great deal too much practically everywhere. There are lots of ways a reader, with fresh eyes, can add to a novel including through the miracle of subtraction. Less really can be more!
This particular book is more problematic for me than previous ones and that makes me more anxious than usual. It is in a genre – or perhaps genrelette – that is new for me as a writer, so I am more anxious than I might otherwise be about it. Being me, I haven’t wanted to write a book that fit a formula – you won’t find another like this one, or I don’t think you will. This is intentional and has its good as well as its bad aspects.
Meanwhile, it doesn’t have a title. Most novels do*, and I have been trying unsuccessfully to think of one that will suit. Salman Rushdie wrote an essay some years ago about novels with titles that had nothing to do with the story; he was not happy about this, and singled out Trainspotting as an example. So while I am keeping the story under wraps for the time being, any suggestions for a good title might work out just fine. Fergle for example doesn’t mean anything at all anyway – I just made this up – so might do. Nasal gazing has a quality of sparking some interest, means something though nothing to do with the book, is a little bit funny and refers very, very obliquely to a story by Gogol I loved as a pimply yoof. Derek the Dickhead eats his Y-fronts is mildly relevant but doesn’t really express the content of the book either. It turns out to suggest a not bad title for this post though, so it is worth something. So many choices! So little time!
Thanks for reading.
* This is so weak a joke I feel obliged to point out that it is one.
Yesterday I sent the manuscript of the novel I’ve been working on to my reader critics, who will tell me whether it is any good or not, and if it is, how to make it better. They are busy people with plenty of other things on their minds as well as plates, so I don’t think I’ll be hearing much from them for a while.
Cue tiny violins playing horrible out of tune dirges to go with an anxious mood. It’s the way things are, Steve. Get over it! Yes, ok…
Naturally in the interim there are things I can do – go through the thing again and try to improve it before hearing the good/bad news. I will too.
What is true is that any writer is lucky to have a reader who is worthy, who will say, “Yes, this is a very interesting book. Put it in your bottom drawer and think how much fun it is going to have there.” If they won’t say that there is no point in worrying. The writer will find out later and in a much less pleasant way that s/he has written a novel that is complete rubbish. I am lucky in my readers.
A good reader will do more than that of course. If it’s worth carrying on with it, the reader will point out ways to improve the manuscript. This may involve word choices, or the order of things, or a lack of clarity, not enough here or there, or rather too much there and here, or a great deal too much practically everywhere. There are lots of ways a reader, with fresh eyes, can add to a novel including through the miracle of subtraction. Less really can be more!
This particular book is more problematic for me than previous ones and that makes me more anxious than usual. It is in a genre – or perhaps genrelette – that is new for me as a writer, so I am more anxious than I might otherwise be about it. Being me, I haven’t wanted to write a book that fit a formula – you won’t find another like this one, or I don’t think you will. This is intentional and has its good as well as its bad aspects.
Meanwhile, it doesn’t have a title. Most novels do*, and I have been trying unsuccessfully to think of one that will suit. Salman Rushdie wrote an essay some years ago about novels with titles that had nothing to do with the story; he was not happy about this, and singled out Trainspotting as an example. So while I am keeping the story under wraps for the time being, any suggestions for a good title might work out just fine. Fergle for example doesn’t mean anything at all anyway – I just made this up – so might do. Nasal gazing has a quality of sparking some interest, means something though nothing to do with the book, is a little bit funny and refers very, very obliquely to a story by Gogol I loved as a pimply yoof. Derek the Dickhead eats his Y-fronts is mildly relevant but doesn’t really express the content of the book either. It turns out to suggest a not bad title for this post though, so it is worth something. So many choices! So little time!
Thanks for reading.
* This is so weak a joke I feel obliged to point out that it is one.
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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