Steve Evans's Blog: The written world , page 5
March 23, 2014
Snowflakes of the mind = dandruff
This blog is about writing, and this is the fifty-second post. I think. There have been more false starts for this one than any previous post, and I was beginning to think that writer’s block had descended with a gigantic crash on my poor head, scattering my wits in a shower of inconsequence.
What’s been happening since the last one that I’ve managed to get up on the net is that I have been been reading a lot of background stuff and doing a lot of thinking for my new book, which is slowly coming together in my mind. At the same time I’ve been trying to finish a post on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida I promised you, dear reader, and myself, after finishing my previous book, Kaos.
The two are related. Kaos prompted me to look further into one of the key themes of that book, carrying over from earlier ones. But rather than opening terrific vistas for my serene gaze, I’ve kept tying myself into knots. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It means thinking something difficult through to the point that it is no longer difficult, even if the solution is Alexandrian, perhaps especially!
It feels quite strange to have Troilus and Cressida exercising such a profound influence on me as a writer and as a person. Many people do not even know this play exists, but for me it’s right up there with Shakespeare’s other major works, and if I’d like to do some sort of homage to the bard by dealing with it in a non-fiction format, every re-reading* sends me reeling. Ha.
The play first really grabbed me when I was testing a book on Shakespeare by poet Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the goddess of complete being. This is a wild book, lauded to the skies and dismissed in equal measure. Since there are so many unknowables about Shakespeare down to the sequence of writing of the plays** I decided to read them in the order Hughes reckoned, and hit on Troilus.
Hughes’ idea was that in a sequence of his plays Shakespeare explored a “tragic equation” about men specifically, who adopted or rejected the feminine in their natures with explosive results, finally to resolve this dilemma in The Tempest.
Well, I’m not sure about any of that, but this idea is definitely provocative, and if Hughes nor anyone else could really prove the authorship sequence, he made a plausible case, and reading them in his order buttressed many of the points in his larger argument.
Hughes was careful to say that whatever the merits of his vision of Shakespeare’s exploration of this tragic equation, it did not and could not exhaust the merits of Shakespeare’s work. Just so with Troilus and Cressida. Every time I have seen it, and read it, there has been more and different in it than I’d previously realised. Nothing I or anyone else can say will explain all that matters of this “amazing” play.*** That’s part of what greatness means – the wells of genius never run dry.
What spurred me to write of the play in Kaos, then, has been given more fuel for an even bigger bonfire of this particular vanity. As I have been frustrated and irritated by my failings in working up this post new material throws itself across the path of my imagination. A lot of this is new/old material, reaching back to the ancients, but there is plenty of the modern too.^ The new book is going to be a new book in a range of ways, and if it takes time to digest all that I need to do to make it work, well, fine.
Meanwhile that post on the play still glows incandescent in more than one draft on this site. It needs to come out. It will.
Thanks for reading.
*I’ve also seen it three times: once in Stratford in the mid-1980s, when I did not understand it, and twice in Scotland in the early years of this century.
**And more – the sonnets were published in 1609 but there are many views about when they were each written, and rewritten to come into the corpus as they were published. Meanwhile there is a great deal in Hughes’ book not even glanced at in this post. Anyone interested should give it a go.
***As judged not just by me but by the editor of by far the best edition, David Bevington.
^To me modern is post-1900 or thereabouts. You choose your own date; I don’t mind.
What’s been happening since the last one that I’ve managed to get up on the net is that I have been been reading a lot of background stuff and doing a lot of thinking for my new book, which is slowly coming together in my mind. At the same time I’ve been trying to finish a post on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida I promised you, dear reader, and myself, after finishing my previous book, Kaos.
The two are related. Kaos prompted me to look further into one of the key themes of that book, carrying over from earlier ones. But rather than opening terrific vistas for my serene gaze, I’ve kept tying myself into knots. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It means thinking something difficult through to the point that it is no longer difficult, even if the solution is Alexandrian, perhaps especially!
It feels quite strange to have Troilus and Cressida exercising such a profound influence on me as a writer and as a person. Many people do not even know this play exists, but for me it’s right up there with Shakespeare’s other major works, and if I’d like to do some sort of homage to the bard by dealing with it in a non-fiction format, every re-reading* sends me reeling. Ha.
The play first really grabbed me when I was testing a book on Shakespeare by poet Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the goddess of complete being. This is a wild book, lauded to the skies and dismissed in equal measure. Since there are so many unknowables about Shakespeare down to the sequence of writing of the plays** I decided to read them in the order Hughes reckoned, and hit on Troilus.
Hughes’ idea was that in a sequence of his plays Shakespeare explored a “tragic equation” about men specifically, who adopted or rejected the feminine in their natures with explosive results, finally to resolve this dilemma in The Tempest.
Well, I’m not sure about any of that, but this idea is definitely provocative, and if Hughes nor anyone else could really prove the authorship sequence, he made a plausible case, and reading them in his order buttressed many of the points in his larger argument.
Hughes was careful to say that whatever the merits of his vision of Shakespeare’s exploration of this tragic equation, it did not and could not exhaust the merits of Shakespeare’s work. Just so with Troilus and Cressida. Every time I have seen it, and read it, there has been more and different in it than I’d previously realised. Nothing I or anyone else can say will explain all that matters of this “amazing” play.*** That’s part of what greatness means – the wells of genius never run dry.
What spurred me to write of the play in Kaos, then, has been given more fuel for an even bigger bonfire of this particular vanity. As I have been frustrated and irritated by my failings in working up this post new material throws itself across the path of my imagination. A lot of this is new/old material, reaching back to the ancients, but there is plenty of the modern too.^ The new book is going to be a new book in a range of ways, and if it takes time to digest all that I need to do to make it work, well, fine.
Meanwhile that post on the play still glows incandescent in more than one draft on this site. It needs to come out. It will.
Thanks for reading.
*I’ve also seen it three times: once in Stratford in the mid-1980s, when I did not understand it, and twice in Scotland in the early years of this century.
**And more – the sonnets were published in 1609 but there are many views about when they were each written, and rewritten to come into the corpus as they were published. Meanwhile there is a great deal in Hughes’ book not even glanced at in this post. Anyone interested should give it a go.
***As judged not just by me but by the editor of by far the best edition, David Bevington.
^To me modern is post-1900 or thereabouts. You choose your own date; I don’t mind.
February 13, 2014
Eros of logos
…or agape of lexus…ok, I am having a bit of fun. Followers of this blog will know that I have been reading – and reading, and reading and reading – Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This is an ambitious project (not nearly so ambitious as the writing of it) as it consists of six volumes adding up to somewhere between three and four thousand pages.
Gibbon originally planned to write “just” four volumes, but once he got through those, which finished off the western empire, he decided to carry on through the demise of the eastern, which took him another two fat books. At the moment I am about ten per cent of the way through the fourth, using my e-reader, and while in one way I am eager to finish, to make good what has been an appalling gap in my education, in another I am not really in a hurry: Decline and Fall is so beautifully written, I am treasuring the pleasure of the experience. It’s not just about the “facts”, not just the information, or the interpretation, it’s all of those plus the expression, the wonderful way Gibbon, labouring in 18th century’s English Christian culture, put the boot in through a refined irony so delicious only a gourmet word chef could produce it. “Savouring the words” is more than a turn of phrase – reading Gibbon is a physical pleasure, and when my lips curl into a grin, I know I mean it literally. Pedants can curl up their own lips as I fudge the distinction between “eros” and “agape”. I don’t care.
Reading Gibbon has been made possible for me by the internet and the huge catalogue of downloadable books through the Gutenberg project and other sources. The slim little device that is an e-reader holds so many volumes and is so easy to carry around, it makes it easy – and affordable, as free is pretty cheap. But more than that – living as I do a reasonable distance from a major public library, much of the material on my e-reader is available only via the internet. This week, I’ve downloaded Boethius’ Consolation of philosophy and Jordanes’ history of the Goths. These represent to me different levels and/or kinds of reading pleasure, but it is pleasure nonetheless, and I feel blessed to be able to consult these minds at a distance of 1500 years. Nay more – not just consult, but engage with them. That is what reading allows, and is, say I, reading’s special strength, on top of all its other strengths.
Reading Gibbon put me in mind of another huge series – J G Frazer’s Golden Bough, subtitled variously but to me most interestingly as an essay on magic and religion. Frazer’s encyclopaedic account of prehistoric culture was initially published in two volumes around the turn of the 20th century, but he later expanded it to twelve volumes, and I once had all of them. They disappeared from my library sometime and I can’t say I’m really sorry about it as they were a drag to shift around and from my perspective the additional material didn’t add what Frazer seems to have thought, later the series was abridged to a “mere” two volumes.
But what made the Golden Bough for me was the truly amazing introduction, the occasion that prompted him to spend thirty or more years researching and writing his book. It is, as Gibbon, beautifully written and as Gibbon again, astonishing.
Great writing prompts great reading, it seems to me. But great reading only comes swirling out of a pool of non-great reading, just as great writing is just the best of a bigger pool of writing. People wiser and better qualified than I will ever be think about this, and I am not at all sure what they think, but what I think is that we are living through a time when reading is becoming progressively devalued. The same technology that enables me to read Edward Gibbon cover to cover is handmaiden to a decline in interest and even ability to do it. I have spent many years in the “writing game”, as a journalist, editor, and sub-editor. My colleagues should relish a “good read”, and in bite-sized and for the most part contemporary chunks, they do. But Shakespeare? “Too hard”. No amount of patient exposition of the joy of reading the bard, can persuade them. They will go to a play, and enjoy it. But Shakespeare is meant to be read as well as seen – in his own lifetime editions of his work were on sale, and not for other theatre companies to produce, but to be read, savoured, digested, delicious morsel by delicious morsel. And as the title of this post suggests, it is possible to go well beyond food in seeking a way to describe an activity that is as intimate as a reader’s love affair with a great writer.
So for Shakespeare read also the many other writing greats of the distant past – Greeks like Euripides and Plato, Romans like Virgil, renaissance marvels like Machiavelli, even the not so-old writers like Gibbon and Frazer – just too hard! Not enough time! Yes people will continue to read these and other great writers, specialists in them, and there will be enthusiasts for other writers, especially 19th century greats like Jane Austen, Dostoevsky,and Dickens whose works translate easily to film and television. But this more buttresses my point than disproves it. The idea that reading as an activity offers engagement with sensibilities across the ages is a progressively harder sell.
Celine wrote in the preface to Guignol’s Band, that in future “you’ll write in ‘telegraphic’ or you won’t write at all”.He went on to say that “excitement’s everything in life” Regrets for lost refinements fill his pages, but he didn’t flinch at the future.
In my own way, I’ve tried to draw attention to my favouites. My novels typically refer to, and often focus on, the writers and thinkers I admire, especially but far from only Shakespeare. Part of my dream of success as a writer is to send readers to them, to make my .greats their greats. Celine is one of those, and he appears often in this blog and is central to one of my books, Evilheart. Unlike that dour Frenchman, I’m far from ready to concede defeat.
My next book will sweep this theme up into the whirlwind of its composition…at least a llittle bit.
Thanks for reading.
Gibbon originally planned to write “just” four volumes, but once he got through those, which finished off the western empire, he decided to carry on through the demise of the eastern, which took him another two fat books. At the moment I am about ten per cent of the way through the fourth, using my e-reader, and while in one way I am eager to finish, to make good what has been an appalling gap in my education, in another I am not really in a hurry: Decline and Fall is so beautifully written, I am treasuring the pleasure of the experience. It’s not just about the “facts”, not just the information, or the interpretation, it’s all of those plus the expression, the wonderful way Gibbon, labouring in 18th century’s English Christian culture, put the boot in through a refined irony so delicious only a gourmet word chef could produce it. “Savouring the words” is more than a turn of phrase – reading Gibbon is a physical pleasure, and when my lips curl into a grin, I know I mean it literally. Pedants can curl up their own lips as I fudge the distinction between “eros” and “agape”. I don’t care.
Reading Gibbon has been made possible for me by the internet and the huge catalogue of downloadable books through the Gutenberg project and other sources. The slim little device that is an e-reader holds so many volumes and is so easy to carry around, it makes it easy – and affordable, as free is pretty cheap. But more than that – living as I do a reasonable distance from a major public library, much of the material on my e-reader is available only via the internet. This week, I’ve downloaded Boethius’ Consolation of philosophy and Jordanes’ history of the Goths. These represent to me different levels and/or kinds of reading pleasure, but it is pleasure nonetheless, and I feel blessed to be able to consult these minds at a distance of 1500 years. Nay more – not just consult, but engage with them. That is what reading allows, and is, say I, reading’s special strength, on top of all its other strengths.
Reading Gibbon put me in mind of another huge series – J G Frazer’s Golden Bough, subtitled variously but to me most interestingly as an essay on magic and religion. Frazer’s encyclopaedic account of prehistoric culture was initially published in two volumes around the turn of the 20th century, but he later expanded it to twelve volumes, and I once had all of them. They disappeared from my library sometime and I can’t say I’m really sorry about it as they were a drag to shift around and from my perspective the additional material didn’t add what Frazer seems to have thought, later the series was abridged to a “mere” two volumes.
But what made the Golden Bough for me was the truly amazing introduction, the occasion that prompted him to spend thirty or more years researching and writing his book. It is, as Gibbon, beautifully written and as Gibbon again, astonishing.
Great writing prompts great reading, it seems to me. But great reading only comes swirling out of a pool of non-great reading, just as great writing is just the best of a bigger pool of writing. People wiser and better qualified than I will ever be think about this, and I am not at all sure what they think, but what I think is that we are living through a time when reading is becoming progressively devalued. The same technology that enables me to read Edward Gibbon cover to cover is handmaiden to a decline in interest and even ability to do it. I have spent many years in the “writing game”, as a journalist, editor, and sub-editor. My colleagues should relish a “good read”, and in bite-sized and for the most part contemporary chunks, they do. But Shakespeare? “Too hard”. No amount of patient exposition of the joy of reading the bard, can persuade them. They will go to a play, and enjoy it. But Shakespeare is meant to be read as well as seen – in his own lifetime editions of his work were on sale, and not for other theatre companies to produce, but to be read, savoured, digested, delicious morsel by delicious morsel. And as the title of this post suggests, it is possible to go well beyond food in seeking a way to describe an activity that is as intimate as a reader’s love affair with a great writer.
So for Shakespeare read also the many other writing greats of the distant past – Greeks like Euripides and Plato, Romans like Virgil, renaissance marvels like Machiavelli, even the not so-old writers like Gibbon and Frazer – just too hard! Not enough time! Yes people will continue to read these and other great writers, specialists in them, and there will be enthusiasts for other writers, especially 19th century greats like Jane Austen, Dostoevsky,and Dickens whose works translate easily to film and television. But this more buttresses my point than disproves it. The idea that reading as an activity offers engagement with sensibilities across the ages is a progressively harder sell.
Celine wrote in the preface to Guignol’s Band, that in future “you’ll write in ‘telegraphic’ or you won’t write at all”.He went on to say that “excitement’s everything in life” Regrets for lost refinements fill his pages, but he didn’t flinch at the future.
In my own way, I’ve tried to draw attention to my favouites. My novels typically refer to, and often focus on, the writers and thinkers I admire, especially but far from only Shakespeare. Part of my dream of success as a writer is to send readers to them, to make my .greats their greats. Celine is one of those, and he appears often in this blog and is central to one of my books, Evilheart. Unlike that dour Frenchman, I’m far from ready to concede defeat.
My next book will sweep this theme up into the whirlwind of its composition…at least a llittle bit.
Thanks for reading.
January 25, 2014
Bloody hell!
Niall Ferguson has written an absorbing and disturbing account of warfare in the first half of the 20th century and beyond, War of the world. The title’s self-conscious take on H G Wells’ story of a Martian invasion of our planet suggests all too painfully that the alien element that threatens to destroy us is inside us, not outside, another way of saying we are our own worst enemies.
Whatever the merits of Ferguson’s specific arguments – for example that this period was the most violent in history, that this was caused by instability, with ethnic dimensions brought on by integration and assimilation – the sheer awfulness of the events he describes is breath-taking as it is sobering. Is this our lot, really? “Nasty, brutish and short” taken to a general conclusion? Are we just inherently violent, ready whenever it suits to drop the thin veneer of decency for the snarling monster of real humanity?
It seems to me, as a writer and a human, that as in so much of our natures, the answer is double sided. Yes, that monster is there, though it is not always the horrible fellow we say. But no, it is not necessarily the rule; it just can be. Indeed, it can be argued that peacefulness is the rule, that if the desire to have a peaceful life is not a wellspring of society, it has been a powerful byproduct of the “march of civilisation”. Midway through the mammoth series that is Edward Gibbon’s History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (I am now three-quarters through the third of six volumes) the repeated failures of the Romans to provide security for their citizens – some of them Romans but many and even most incorporated from other cultures – makes for painful reading. Those who were conquered and then “assimilated” into the Roman state were often willing new subjects, refugees from the instability and horrors of life in the regions outside the empire – they sought a peaceful life. For centuries, they got it. But when things went awry, the former empire sank into chaos. It is no surprise that feudalism rose from the rubble – peasants and others seeking protection from random violence via a local lord and his knights, and willing to shoulder arms to help.
Today most people live quite unviolent lives. It is our norm, and it is because it is our norm that violence so terrifies and outrages and also fascinates us. Those who in our communities step outside the norm and practice routine violence threaten us at least implicitly. When whole societies fall into a violent mode, where normal life is impossible – as in Mexican and other Latin American towns during the drug cartel wars for example – we shiver inside. Well, if you don’t, I do. Breaking this cycle seems to invite the fighting fire with fire response that not surprisingly prompts the spectre of further descent into the maelstrom.
This reality – or perhaps “these realities” – also spawn and justify the attention to violence in our arts and media, but raise troubling issues when they are explicit. It is fair to ask whether graphic violence promotes real violence in the same way that chaotic social violence makes peaceful life so difficult. Even I, as a writer who puts violence in his books that is a focus of the storyline and central to the moral dimensions of my work, find this troubling.
It seems to me that deliberate exploitation of violence in the arts – such as some of Luc Besson’s violent thriller films like Leon the professional or La femme Nikita – is morally indefensible, though that does not mean this work should be banned. It is possible to depict and explore the realities of the most gruesome violence in all their moral dimensions without implying for a moment that because it is real, it is ok to do it. Besson no doubt carefully choreographed the moral dimensions of his graphic depictions in these films just as much as the staging of them, to be able to justify them to critics. The very care he has taken suggests to me that he knows what he is doing is wrong, and cynically goes on doing it. For example, in Leon, a young woman who says she is 18 but who looks much younger, played by Natalie Portman, teams up with a professional killer after her family is horrifically murdered by a drug-crazed corrupt cop. When she kills someone, it is less gruesome than when Leon does, even though both are shown graphically enough, and Leon’s murders are correspondingly less awful than the villains’. I couldn’t bring myself to watch this film to the end, so perhaps Natalie “lifts her game” in the denouement when she confronts the corrupt and nutty cop, and goes from making little specks of blood appear on her victims’ abdomens to blasting away as organs fly around the room, but her first few shootings and killings are deliberately depicted as somehow less terrible than Leon’s, or the villains’.
Besson can also point to the “context” of these killings in that innocent people are the villains’ victims (Portman’s family) and thus qualify for the most gruesome violence while Leon and she kill criminals of one sort or another, where instant death is part of the deal. As crims, they are not fully human…
Yet what seems to me to be the point of Besson’s technique is to desensitise his audience towards violence and its consequences. Portman’s character is as methodlical and businesslike in killing as her mentor; it’s just what one does when one is a “clearner” as Leon describes himself, right?
Critics defend him. One who says he is among the greats calls this approach to violence “a conscientious resistance to human degradation”. That just doesn’t seem right to me; this resistance seems to deliberately wallow in human degradation. And with Leon, a film whose premise is staggeringly ridiculous, there seem to be underlying motives outside the film itself.*
I was watching these films because I had earlier seen another, Angel-A, that I liked a great deal for other reasons, in which violence played a secondary and far less graphic role. So Besson is not uniform in his treatment. He can be funny, and in Angel-A, he raises interesting issues about personality and our ability to change and improve as people.
Whatever Besson’s effect on others – Nikita is apparently considered a classic of the genre – his effect on me has been to make me rethink my attitude towards violence in my own writing. Some of my books** suggest that there are situations where violence is justified and I feel certain that in the real, as opposed to the make-believe moral universe we would all like to inhabit but don’t, that this is so. But when considered as on a slippery slope, maybe this sledge is one a writer only thinks she or he is piloting as it heads towards the abyss.
* It has been suggested (see Wiki) that with Leon, Besson was making a film about a young woman while having a relationship with a 15 year-old, smearing a personal statement all over the screen and into viewers’ faces.
** This may be true of all of them, but The Kleiber Monster, Tobi’s Game, Demented and Kaos all examine this moral dilemma in some way.
Whatever the merits of Ferguson’s specific arguments – for example that this period was the most violent in history, that this was caused by instability, with ethnic dimensions brought on by integration and assimilation – the sheer awfulness of the events he describes is breath-taking as it is sobering. Is this our lot, really? “Nasty, brutish and short” taken to a general conclusion? Are we just inherently violent, ready whenever it suits to drop the thin veneer of decency for the snarling monster of real humanity?
It seems to me, as a writer and a human, that as in so much of our natures, the answer is double sided. Yes, that monster is there, though it is not always the horrible fellow we say. But no, it is not necessarily the rule; it just can be. Indeed, it can be argued that peacefulness is the rule, that if the desire to have a peaceful life is not a wellspring of society, it has been a powerful byproduct of the “march of civilisation”. Midway through the mammoth series that is Edward Gibbon’s History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (I am now three-quarters through the third of six volumes) the repeated failures of the Romans to provide security for their citizens – some of them Romans but many and even most incorporated from other cultures – makes for painful reading. Those who were conquered and then “assimilated” into the Roman state were often willing new subjects, refugees from the instability and horrors of life in the regions outside the empire – they sought a peaceful life. For centuries, they got it. But when things went awry, the former empire sank into chaos. It is no surprise that feudalism rose from the rubble – peasants and others seeking protection from random violence via a local lord and his knights, and willing to shoulder arms to help.
Today most people live quite unviolent lives. It is our norm, and it is because it is our norm that violence so terrifies and outrages and also fascinates us. Those who in our communities step outside the norm and practice routine violence threaten us at least implicitly. When whole societies fall into a violent mode, where normal life is impossible – as in Mexican and other Latin American towns during the drug cartel wars for example – we shiver inside. Well, if you don’t, I do. Breaking this cycle seems to invite the fighting fire with fire response that not surprisingly prompts the spectre of further descent into the maelstrom.
This reality – or perhaps “these realities” – also spawn and justify the attention to violence in our arts and media, but raise troubling issues when they are explicit. It is fair to ask whether graphic violence promotes real violence in the same way that chaotic social violence makes peaceful life so difficult. Even I, as a writer who puts violence in his books that is a focus of the storyline and central to the moral dimensions of my work, find this troubling.
It seems to me that deliberate exploitation of violence in the arts – such as some of Luc Besson’s violent thriller films like Leon the professional or La femme Nikita – is morally indefensible, though that does not mean this work should be banned. It is possible to depict and explore the realities of the most gruesome violence in all their moral dimensions without implying for a moment that because it is real, it is ok to do it. Besson no doubt carefully choreographed the moral dimensions of his graphic depictions in these films just as much as the staging of them, to be able to justify them to critics. The very care he has taken suggests to me that he knows what he is doing is wrong, and cynically goes on doing it. For example, in Leon, a young woman who says she is 18 but who looks much younger, played by Natalie Portman, teams up with a professional killer after her family is horrifically murdered by a drug-crazed corrupt cop. When she kills someone, it is less gruesome than when Leon does, even though both are shown graphically enough, and Leon’s murders are correspondingly less awful than the villains’. I couldn’t bring myself to watch this film to the end, so perhaps Natalie “lifts her game” in the denouement when she confronts the corrupt and nutty cop, and goes from making little specks of blood appear on her victims’ abdomens to blasting away as organs fly around the room, but her first few shootings and killings are deliberately depicted as somehow less terrible than Leon’s, or the villains’.
Besson can also point to the “context” of these killings in that innocent people are the villains’ victims (Portman’s family) and thus qualify for the most gruesome violence while Leon and she kill criminals of one sort or another, where instant death is part of the deal. As crims, they are not fully human…
Yet what seems to me to be the point of Besson’s technique is to desensitise his audience towards violence and its consequences. Portman’s character is as methodlical and businesslike in killing as her mentor; it’s just what one does when one is a “clearner” as Leon describes himself, right?
Critics defend him. One who says he is among the greats calls this approach to violence “a conscientious resistance to human degradation”. That just doesn’t seem right to me; this resistance seems to deliberately wallow in human degradation. And with Leon, a film whose premise is staggeringly ridiculous, there seem to be underlying motives outside the film itself.*
I was watching these films because I had earlier seen another, Angel-A, that I liked a great deal for other reasons, in which violence played a secondary and far less graphic role. So Besson is not uniform in his treatment. He can be funny, and in Angel-A, he raises interesting issues about personality and our ability to change and improve as people.
Whatever Besson’s effect on others – Nikita is apparently considered a classic of the genre – his effect on me has been to make me rethink my attitude towards violence in my own writing. Some of my books** suggest that there are situations where violence is justified and I feel certain that in the real, as opposed to the make-believe moral universe we would all like to inhabit but don’t, that this is so. But when considered as on a slippery slope, maybe this sledge is one a writer only thinks she or he is piloting as it heads towards the abyss.
* It has been suggested (see Wiki) that with Leon, Besson was making a film about a young woman while having a relationship with a 15 year-old, smearing a personal statement all over the screen and into viewers’ faces.
** This may be true of all of them, but The Kleiber Monster, Tobi’s Game, Demented and Kaos all examine this moral dilemma in some way.
January 17, 2014
Pardon me, but is that my genre stuck up your nose?
A writer I admire who among other interesting things writes historical fiction has got hot about what she regards as rubbishing of the genre in the New Yorker while science fiction was given a thumbs up. It seems there is a sci-fi writer the New Yorker author concerned admires for his political commentary, while at the same time he seems to dismiss historical fiction as unworthy, implicitly unable to shoulder the burden of contemporary political or social analysis or comment.
The New Yorker is not, sadly, what it once was. The air of superiority cloyed for me sometime in the 1990s, and I seldom read it. Yet even when the magazine was roaring along in the 1930s, art critic Clement Greenberg dismissed it as "kitsch"* and if the mag had to wait nearly sixty years to get its own back, it relished the moment. The "Critic At Large" feature in 1998 begins, "When Clement Greenberg was five years old, he beat a goose to death with a shovel" before going on to describe the "power critic" as "repellent". That's a long cultural memory.
Anyway what someone says in the New Yorker about anything seldom interests me these days**. That doesn't mean that what is talked about is not interesting, but in this case it's not really. Dismissing any form of "genre fiction" (or for that matter any non-fiction genre) as intrinsically low-grade is not just wrong, but ignorant. Every genre without exception, however poor its standard fare, can be a vehicle for great art, and it is amazing to think that anyone would think otherwise.
For starters, William Shakespeare was a genre writer, as the organisation of the first folio of his works makes clear: history plays! Are these not "historical fiction"? They are indeed. Tragedies! Comedies! and the odd one out, Troilus and Cressida, sandwiched in between two categories as if no one could decide which it was/is. Anyone who imagines that Shakespeare did not use these dramatic forms to analyse and comment on the society and politics of his day needs help.
And as far as modern writing goes, Arthur Miller's The Crucible was an attack on McCarthyism, set in the Salem of the witch trials in the late 17th century.
Now, I write thrillers and I was attracted to this genre partly as a holdover from early days when they fascinated an adolescent mind, but also because some aspects of the better thriller writers showed that they could be a vehicle for "big ideas". The best of the genre when I was reading deeply in it, in my opinion, was Dashiell Hammett, followed by Raymond Chandler. Hammett was very unusual in that he had been a real detective, and even more unusual in that he was a Marxist/Communist. It wasn't that his politics were good or bad, but that they were explicitly counter to the ethos of the society he lived in, where his heroes lived and worked. The moral dilemmas confronting someone cynical about society are quite real, and Hammett explored these in ways that were, er, novel. Critics at the time - especially in Britain - picked up on Hammett's social criticism, with one saying after reading his first, Red Harvest, that if it was an accurate reflection of reality, and it seemed to be, "there ought to be an investigation"! Those were the days..
But it was not just exposing abuse that Hammett was on about. He explored sticking to the rules, obeying and enforcing the law, even though he regarded that law as an instrument of oppression of one group in society by another. The cynical manipulations by detective Sam Spade in his most famous book, The Maltese Falcon, went hand in hand with an analysis of Spade's moral compass, how he kept a sense of self-worth in a festering cesspit of corruption, how his own apparent corruption was a means of navigating these treacherous shoals.*** This or may not be great art but it is far removed from typical detective story, or more broadly, thriller fare.
Not being Dashiell Hammett - and not wanting to be - my own approach to thrillers has been my own. With any genre, there are rules, and if a writer can bend and even distort them almost out of recognition, they have to be acknowledged and worked in somehow.^ My plots for example contain labyrinthine "puzzles" owing a debt of gratitude as emulation to a number of crime writers, from Agatha Christie onward, But however bad my books might be in comparison to theirs as stories, they definitely presume to attack "big issues" ranging from the holocaust to euthanasia. If I couldn't have dealt with issues like these in the genre, I wouldn't have written in it.
For me, however, the real problem for our time is that "literary" reading, what I would call reading for the pleasure of engaging with an author's mind, is itself under threat. Sure there are plenty of people who read now, but it seems to me that the trend is toward being formally literate but only for more mundane purposes than pursuing "big ideas". The magic of wrestling with a mind that dwelt hundreds or even thousands of years ago (Shakespeare and Euripides for example) is increasingly lost on today's readers, as people turn to films, to Playstation-style games, and the like. Novels today often appear to me to be written for the inevitable film (I've seen a few "thank you notes" stuck at the end of novels including the person marketing the film rights), and if it is not actually a new phenomenon^^, it is as if novels today should be aimed at the small circle of those people who turn them into vehicles for celluloid. Naturally I wouldn't mind at all if this happened to my books, and it would also be true that this would send readers back to the source. But over time I think reading for pleasure could be a social dinosaur.
Thanks for taking the time to get through this.
* In his famous essay "The avant-garde and kitsch."
** I don't feel as arrogant as this reads, but the rag has really gone downhill. See an earlier post in this blog "Something completely different", and there is more where that came from.
*** Spade enters into an affair with "Miss Wonderly" knowing she has killed his partner, and patiently explains to her why he is tossing her to the law just before the cops arrive.
^ Genres can be and often are mixed. Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five are both nominally science fiction, but the latter is also historical fiction. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is another form of historical fiction that mixes in a healthy dollop of sci-fi.
^^ One critic saw that The Maltese Falcon was a film script, and Hammett wrote for film and the stage. But it is a trend much more prominent today.
The New Yorker is not, sadly, what it once was. The air of superiority cloyed for me sometime in the 1990s, and I seldom read it. Yet even when the magazine was roaring along in the 1930s, art critic Clement Greenberg dismissed it as "kitsch"* and if the mag had to wait nearly sixty years to get its own back, it relished the moment. The "Critic At Large" feature in 1998 begins, "When Clement Greenberg was five years old, he beat a goose to death with a shovel" before going on to describe the "power critic" as "repellent". That's a long cultural memory.
Anyway what someone says in the New Yorker about anything seldom interests me these days**. That doesn't mean that what is talked about is not interesting, but in this case it's not really. Dismissing any form of "genre fiction" (or for that matter any non-fiction genre) as intrinsically low-grade is not just wrong, but ignorant. Every genre without exception, however poor its standard fare, can be a vehicle for great art, and it is amazing to think that anyone would think otherwise.
For starters, William Shakespeare was a genre writer, as the organisation of the first folio of his works makes clear: history plays! Are these not "historical fiction"? They are indeed. Tragedies! Comedies! and the odd one out, Troilus and Cressida, sandwiched in between two categories as if no one could decide which it was/is. Anyone who imagines that Shakespeare did not use these dramatic forms to analyse and comment on the society and politics of his day needs help.
And as far as modern writing goes, Arthur Miller's The Crucible was an attack on McCarthyism, set in the Salem of the witch trials in the late 17th century.
Now, I write thrillers and I was attracted to this genre partly as a holdover from early days when they fascinated an adolescent mind, but also because some aspects of the better thriller writers showed that they could be a vehicle for "big ideas". The best of the genre when I was reading deeply in it, in my opinion, was Dashiell Hammett, followed by Raymond Chandler. Hammett was very unusual in that he had been a real detective, and even more unusual in that he was a Marxist/Communist. It wasn't that his politics were good or bad, but that they were explicitly counter to the ethos of the society he lived in, where his heroes lived and worked. The moral dilemmas confronting someone cynical about society are quite real, and Hammett explored these in ways that were, er, novel. Critics at the time - especially in Britain - picked up on Hammett's social criticism, with one saying after reading his first, Red Harvest, that if it was an accurate reflection of reality, and it seemed to be, "there ought to be an investigation"! Those were the days..
But it was not just exposing abuse that Hammett was on about. He explored sticking to the rules, obeying and enforcing the law, even though he regarded that law as an instrument of oppression of one group in society by another. The cynical manipulations by detective Sam Spade in his most famous book, The Maltese Falcon, went hand in hand with an analysis of Spade's moral compass, how he kept a sense of self-worth in a festering cesspit of corruption, how his own apparent corruption was a means of navigating these treacherous shoals.*** This or may not be great art but it is far removed from typical detective story, or more broadly, thriller fare.
Not being Dashiell Hammett - and not wanting to be - my own approach to thrillers has been my own. With any genre, there are rules, and if a writer can bend and even distort them almost out of recognition, they have to be acknowledged and worked in somehow.^ My plots for example contain labyrinthine "puzzles" owing a debt of gratitude as emulation to a number of crime writers, from Agatha Christie onward, But however bad my books might be in comparison to theirs as stories, they definitely presume to attack "big issues" ranging from the holocaust to euthanasia. If I couldn't have dealt with issues like these in the genre, I wouldn't have written in it.
For me, however, the real problem for our time is that "literary" reading, what I would call reading for the pleasure of engaging with an author's mind, is itself under threat. Sure there are plenty of people who read now, but it seems to me that the trend is toward being formally literate but only for more mundane purposes than pursuing "big ideas". The magic of wrestling with a mind that dwelt hundreds or even thousands of years ago (Shakespeare and Euripides for example) is increasingly lost on today's readers, as people turn to films, to Playstation-style games, and the like. Novels today often appear to me to be written for the inevitable film (I've seen a few "thank you notes" stuck at the end of novels including the person marketing the film rights), and if it is not actually a new phenomenon^^, it is as if novels today should be aimed at the small circle of those people who turn them into vehicles for celluloid. Naturally I wouldn't mind at all if this happened to my books, and it would also be true that this would send readers back to the source. But over time I think reading for pleasure could be a social dinosaur.
Thanks for taking the time to get through this.
* In his famous essay "The avant-garde and kitsch."
** I don't feel as arrogant as this reads, but the rag has really gone downhill. See an earlier post in this blog "Something completely different", and there is more where that came from.
*** Spade enters into an affair with "Miss Wonderly" knowing she has killed his partner, and patiently explains to her why he is tossing her to the law just before the cops arrive.
^ Genres can be and often are mixed. Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five are both nominally science fiction, but the latter is also historical fiction. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is another form of historical fiction that mixes in a healthy dollop of sci-fi.
^^ One critic saw that The Maltese Falcon was a film script, and Hammett wrote for film and the stage. But it is a trend much more prominent today.
December 28, 2013
Confessions of a counter-intuitive e-jit
A few months back I ran into someone on a bus in Glasgow I’d known long before, Duncan MacGillivray. Duncan is an artist, a real one. He has a degree in ceramics from a university in Dundee, but has since got keen on printmaking, specifically lithography. He etches steel plates and then hand-colours them to produce mostly one-off prints. They are pretty good, I reckon, so if you ever happen to be in Glasgow - or indeed happen to be in Glasgow right now - you can stop by the Glasgow Print Studio near the Trongate and ask to see some of his stuff, which is kept in the collection and is for sale.
The thing that most fascinated me with Duncan’s approach is that he is using a technology designed to produce many copies of something, but usually he makes just one. When he concedes a point to the technology, he might make five or six of a basic image, but each is a one-off nonetheless.
To me, that’s counter-intuitive – doing something not only not the norm, but implicitly critical of it – contradicting the obvious, or as an online dictionary I just checked says, common sense.
Going against the grain in this way can lead to path-breaking art and to commercial success. Duncan’s unique and interesting voice hits the high notes for me, and I hope he makes it. It would be nice to see.
Looking at Duncan’s prints sent me scurrying to the net to find a copy of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, Work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin was one of the most creative members of the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophy, a refugee from the Nazis who fled to Paris and after the fall of France tried to escape to Spain. Halted at the border, he committed suicide.
Work of art is easily Benjamin’s best-known work, but I was surprised at how bad it was/is, bursting with an arrogance it never justified. Arrogance is all very well when it comes from people who have earned it, but it is hard to see now what the excitement was when Benjamin was alive. His essay is mainly about photography and film, and he pours scorn on other thinkers about these new art forms, without really having much to say that is very interesting himself.
Benjamin made a great deal of the fact that film-making is typically* a kind of pastiche, in which scenes are filmed out of sequence and put together later as they are to be screened. It is true this is a form of assembly line production, but while the assembly line was taken to be a hallmark of the industrial age, this division of labour has been known about intellectually for a long time – see Adam Smith – and practised even longer. In art, renaissance studios produced paintings using many hands – Leonardo first came to prominence painting the backdrops in the studio where he was an apprentice. What film-making involves is an extension of approaches already long practised. What is different is the huge audience technology allows, and on that, Benjamin is tedious.
Benjamin aside, the role of technology in art is important. What Duncan does, undermining the premise of infinitely reproducible technology by producing unique prints, is just one counter-intuitive approach. As a writer, I’ve used the internet and online publishing to skirt around the former gatekeepers of literature, who are now definitely up against it and in doing that have saved a few trees from the ignominy of pulp for fiction. The net, the PC and the many programmes enabling its use, and more have quickly transformed literature in more ways than we might know or indeed desire.
When I first published on the net, like many other writers** I was confident that it wouldn't be long before my reputation grew, that by some magic I would go from being a legend in if not just my own lunch hour, the lunch hour of my friends, acquaintances and personal enemies, to something wider and more exalted.
The way this was going to happen was on a pebble in a pond basis, aka the ripple effect. One person would read, tell another, who would read and tell another…and shazam! if not fame or notoriety or something like that, a greater readership than, in fact, I actually have several years later.
This is all my fellow e-authors’ fault, just as their lack of success is partly my doing. The internet has democratised writing – anyone who can string a few words together can be a “published author” willy-nilly, and not just thousands but it seems millions of people have done just that.
That’s terrific in itself. But whereas in the past the gatekeepers of literature lived in publishing houses, the gatekeeper today is the thicket of titles crowding the net. Any writer writes – or at least should write – to be read, but getting read when there are millions of others jostling for attention is definitely a problem.
Even when I put the first novels onto the net getting on to four years ago – four, including early ones and what was then the most recent, Demented – the crowd was already doing what crowds do best – crowding out. And to counter this, writers and their friends have tried any number of wrinkles well beyond the ripple effect.
That’s not all. The crowd has created opportunities for people who promise to help, for a fee. “Vanity” publishers will edit, publish, and promote any writer’s work, and there are marketers and editors and formatters and who knows what all occupying niches in the vast netscape, all designed in one way or another to give a writer a purchase into prominence. There is a vast and indeed burgeoning industry out there.
But beyond that is self-help, what the impecunious writer has for a resource: her or his own efforts. There are how to guides that are both free and cost to help do this, and the various strategies and tactics for jumping out from the crowd to be viewed and hopefully read include a blog such as this one.
I have tried a few of these apart from this blog, holding my nose as I’ve done it. It’s not that I look down on the people who are professional marketers, but that I have an instinctive dislike at having to do it as an amateur. As to the blog, as a marketing tool it doesn't seem to work – there are plenty of readers but they don’t pop along to my books. I keep writing it because people seem to get something from it, and it is fun, writing about writing.
So I am not at all sure of the usefulness of the many things people are urged to do to get their work recognised and read. It may be that it’s just the way it is. If there are millions of wannabe best-selling writers, there are probably hundreds of thousands trying the things suggested. Yet so far as I know only one, Fifty shades of grey, has “gone viral” and been published in hard cover by an established publisher.
And more! Fifty shades earned its spurs from its content, not a marketing ploy, or that is how I see it.
So I’m back to my original premise – the micro-pebbles thrown into the vast e-universe, into space where there is no ether wind, and no ripples, so far anyway. Seizing the opportunities new technology offers has not revealed the praxis, as Antonio Gramsci used to say, to overcome the barriers the opportunities have created.
Duncan’s approach seems to use a technology to undermine it. My counter-intuitive tactic so far seems only a reflection of a curmudgeonly nature. But it’s the only one I know today. I write and hope. That’s it.
* Yet Luis Bunuel, one of the greats of cinema, made his films sequentially, starting from the first scene and working through to the end, and what was in the can was what was screened more or less. But he was the exception to prove the rule.
** Norman Mailer wrote that when he was drafted into the Army in WWII, the big question in his mind was whether the classic novel of that war would be about the European or Pacific theatre.
The thing that most fascinated me with Duncan’s approach is that he is using a technology designed to produce many copies of something, but usually he makes just one. When he concedes a point to the technology, he might make five or six of a basic image, but each is a one-off nonetheless.
To me, that’s counter-intuitive – doing something not only not the norm, but implicitly critical of it – contradicting the obvious, or as an online dictionary I just checked says, common sense.
Going against the grain in this way can lead to path-breaking art and to commercial success. Duncan’s unique and interesting voice hits the high notes for me, and I hope he makes it. It would be nice to see.
Looking at Duncan’s prints sent me scurrying to the net to find a copy of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, Work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin was one of the most creative members of the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophy, a refugee from the Nazis who fled to Paris and after the fall of France tried to escape to Spain. Halted at the border, he committed suicide.
Work of art is easily Benjamin’s best-known work, but I was surprised at how bad it was/is, bursting with an arrogance it never justified. Arrogance is all very well when it comes from people who have earned it, but it is hard to see now what the excitement was when Benjamin was alive. His essay is mainly about photography and film, and he pours scorn on other thinkers about these new art forms, without really having much to say that is very interesting himself.
Benjamin made a great deal of the fact that film-making is typically* a kind of pastiche, in which scenes are filmed out of sequence and put together later as they are to be screened. It is true this is a form of assembly line production, but while the assembly line was taken to be a hallmark of the industrial age, this division of labour has been known about intellectually for a long time – see Adam Smith – and practised even longer. In art, renaissance studios produced paintings using many hands – Leonardo first came to prominence painting the backdrops in the studio where he was an apprentice. What film-making involves is an extension of approaches already long practised. What is different is the huge audience technology allows, and on that, Benjamin is tedious.
Benjamin aside, the role of technology in art is important. What Duncan does, undermining the premise of infinitely reproducible technology by producing unique prints, is just one counter-intuitive approach. As a writer, I’ve used the internet and online publishing to skirt around the former gatekeepers of literature, who are now definitely up against it and in doing that have saved a few trees from the ignominy of pulp for fiction. The net, the PC and the many programmes enabling its use, and more have quickly transformed literature in more ways than we might know or indeed desire.
When I first published on the net, like many other writers** I was confident that it wouldn't be long before my reputation grew, that by some magic I would go from being a legend in if not just my own lunch hour, the lunch hour of my friends, acquaintances and personal enemies, to something wider and more exalted.
The way this was going to happen was on a pebble in a pond basis, aka the ripple effect. One person would read, tell another, who would read and tell another…and shazam! if not fame or notoriety or something like that, a greater readership than, in fact, I actually have several years later.
This is all my fellow e-authors’ fault, just as their lack of success is partly my doing. The internet has democratised writing – anyone who can string a few words together can be a “published author” willy-nilly, and not just thousands but it seems millions of people have done just that.
That’s terrific in itself. But whereas in the past the gatekeepers of literature lived in publishing houses, the gatekeeper today is the thicket of titles crowding the net. Any writer writes – or at least should write – to be read, but getting read when there are millions of others jostling for attention is definitely a problem.
Even when I put the first novels onto the net getting on to four years ago – four, including early ones and what was then the most recent, Demented – the crowd was already doing what crowds do best – crowding out. And to counter this, writers and their friends have tried any number of wrinkles well beyond the ripple effect.
That’s not all. The crowd has created opportunities for people who promise to help, for a fee. “Vanity” publishers will edit, publish, and promote any writer’s work, and there are marketers and editors and formatters and who knows what all occupying niches in the vast netscape, all designed in one way or another to give a writer a purchase into prominence. There is a vast and indeed burgeoning industry out there.
But beyond that is self-help, what the impecunious writer has for a resource: her or his own efforts. There are how to guides that are both free and cost to help do this, and the various strategies and tactics for jumping out from the crowd to be viewed and hopefully read include a blog such as this one.
I have tried a few of these apart from this blog, holding my nose as I’ve done it. It’s not that I look down on the people who are professional marketers, but that I have an instinctive dislike at having to do it as an amateur. As to the blog, as a marketing tool it doesn't seem to work – there are plenty of readers but they don’t pop along to my books. I keep writing it because people seem to get something from it, and it is fun, writing about writing.
So I am not at all sure of the usefulness of the many things people are urged to do to get their work recognised and read. It may be that it’s just the way it is. If there are millions of wannabe best-selling writers, there are probably hundreds of thousands trying the things suggested. Yet so far as I know only one, Fifty shades of grey, has “gone viral” and been published in hard cover by an established publisher.
And more! Fifty shades earned its spurs from its content, not a marketing ploy, or that is how I see it.
So I’m back to my original premise – the micro-pebbles thrown into the vast e-universe, into space where there is no ether wind, and no ripples, so far anyway. Seizing the opportunities new technology offers has not revealed the praxis, as Antonio Gramsci used to say, to overcome the barriers the opportunities have created.
Duncan’s approach seems to use a technology to undermine it. My counter-intuitive tactic so far seems only a reflection of a curmudgeonly nature. But it’s the only one I know today. I write and hope. That’s it.
* Yet Luis Bunuel, one of the greats of cinema, made his films sequentially, starting from the first scene and working through to the end, and what was in the can was what was screened more or less. But he was the exception to prove the rule.
** Norman Mailer wrote that when he was drafted into the Army in WWII, the big question in his mind was whether the classic novel of that war would be about the European or Pacific theatre.
December 26, 2013
Lifestyle
A long time ago, I was approached by a writer who asked if it would be ok if she based a character in her young adult novel on me. Of course I said yes, though I had no idea how “I” would be portrayed. She didn’t do me wrong; as it worked out the character was only superficially about “me” anyway but even if she had made “me” out to be a villain, I would not have complained.
The thing is, she asked.
I also have a fat book that identifies who the characters in famous novels “really are”*. And I am sure that in many, even most, cases, the authors didn’t ask. This can be risky actually – the proviso in the front of most novels that they are works of fiction and that similarity to any persons, living or dead, is coincidental, is no defence in itself. Australian novelist Frank Hardy was prosecuted for criminal libel over his novel Power without glory, though he was acquitted.
When I started writing fiction, I decided that I would never base a single character on a single person, not so much for legal reasons as for personal ones: it just didn’t (and doesn’t) seem fair, even if the character is portrayed favourably. Yet I haven’t just made them up from thin air. My characters have emerged into fictional life courtesy of a number of people, even different aspects – physical, temperamental, interests etc – are often amalgams from people I know or have seen. This has not been easy to do, and critics might complain that it makes the characters inevitably artificial. As I write in a ”sub-literary” genre this is inevitable to some degree anyway: it is part of the definition of the genre, or of any genre
Just lately, however, I have been thinking about writing a novel that is perhaps outside my usual “thriller” genre, and could even qualify as so-called “serious” literature. This is shameful on my part really – in my opinion the trouble with modern fiction, the thing that sets it outside the reading habits of most people, is precisely that it is “serious”. There is a literature in control of “serious” people whose elitist notions of what is good can squeeze out what is really good storytelling. Successful writers “don’t count” because they write “genre”. Well, I write genre and am not successful, so don’t count twice! But I would rather be read and enjoyed by many people than critically acclaimed and read only by a few. Anyone reading this blog should know that my aim has always been to square the circle of popularity and “serious intent” and one of my sayings about my writing, dreamed up for this, is that I have a serious purpose in a frivolous genre. But that too is unfair as it is only frivolous to those who sneer at it.
Anyway the central character of this novel would be drawn much more from life than any of my other previous characters: I am thinking about this, both as a moral issue (is this ok?) and an artistic one (can I do it successfully?). Of course I can write it, and if it doesn’t work, just shelve it as I have one of my other books.
One of the things I’m interested in with this particular idea is that it breaks the boundary between life and death. The initial flash of inspiration was of a person talking to another person across this boundary, only to see it dissolve in a very direct and surprising way. That’s the first page taken care of (joke). As I have written earlier in this blog this isn’t entirely new even among so-called serious writers. Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo dies in the middle of his novel yet continues to play a part in the action. B Traven’s "The night visitor", a story the German wrote in Spanish, also features a dead person coming to life. I am sure there are many others, The lovely bones being a famous one I’ve never read.
To wander outside one’s genre can be both thrilling and scary. Before beginning to write thrillers I read hundreds of them, to get “how they work” into my unconscious so as to be able to make my own work. But to be honest, if there i a “dead as live” genre that is not about vampires, and I would not be surprised at all if there is, I’m not really all that interested in it. I’m just interested in this one idea, that I would like to write.
But maybe it’s time to shake some dust from my heels and head out yonder, where grizzlies roam and coyotes howl…
*This is The Originals – Who’s really Who in Fiction by William Amos. My paperback (Sphere) is dated 1985.
The thing is, she asked.
I also have a fat book that identifies who the characters in famous novels “really are”*. And I am sure that in many, even most, cases, the authors didn’t ask. This can be risky actually – the proviso in the front of most novels that they are works of fiction and that similarity to any persons, living or dead, is coincidental, is no defence in itself. Australian novelist Frank Hardy was prosecuted for criminal libel over his novel Power without glory, though he was acquitted.
When I started writing fiction, I decided that I would never base a single character on a single person, not so much for legal reasons as for personal ones: it just didn’t (and doesn’t) seem fair, even if the character is portrayed favourably. Yet I haven’t just made them up from thin air. My characters have emerged into fictional life courtesy of a number of people, even different aspects – physical, temperamental, interests etc – are often amalgams from people I know or have seen. This has not been easy to do, and critics might complain that it makes the characters inevitably artificial. As I write in a ”sub-literary” genre this is inevitable to some degree anyway: it is part of the definition of the genre, or of any genre
Just lately, however, I have been thinking about writing a novel that is perhaps outside my usual “thriller” genre, and could even qualify as so-called “serious” literature. This is shameful on my part really – in my opinion the trouble with modern fiction, the thing that sets it outside the reading habits of most people, is precisely that it is “serious”. There is a literature in control of “serious” people whose elitist notions of what is good can squeeze out what is really good storytelling. Successful writers “don’t count” because they write “genre”. Well, I write genre and am not successful, so don’t count twice! But I would rather be read and enjoyed by many people than critically acclaimed and read only by a few. Anyone reading this blog should know that my aim has always been to square the circle of popularity and “serious intent” and one of my sayings about my writing, dreamed up for this, is that I have a serious purpose in a frivolous genre. But that too is unfair as it is only frivolous to those who sneer at it.
Anyway the central character of this novel would be drawn much more from life than any of my other previous characters: I am thinking about this, both as a moral issue (is this ok?) and an artistic one (can I do it successfully?). Of course I can write it, and if it doesn’t work, just shelve it as I have one of my other books.
One of the things I’m interested in with this particular idea is that it breaks the boundary between life and death. The initial flash of inspiration was of a person talking to another person across this boundary, only to see it dissolve in a very direct and surprising way. That’s the first page taken care of (joke). As I have written earlier in this blog this isn’t entirely new even among so-called serious writers. Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo dies in the middle of his novel yet continues to play a part in the action. B Traven’s "The night visitor", a story the German wrote in Spanish, also features a dead person coming to life. I am sure there are many others, The lovely bones being a famous one I’ve never read.
To wander outside one’s genre can be both thrilling and scary. Before beginning to write thrillers I read hundreds of them, to get “how they work” into my unconscious so as to be able to make my own work. But to be honest, if there i a “dead as live” genre that is not about vampires, and I would not be surprised at all if there is, I’m not really all that interested in it. I’m just interested in this one idea, that I would like to write.
But maybe it’s time to shake some dust from my heels and head out yonder, where grizzlies roam and coyotes howl…
*This is The Originals – Who’s really Who in Fiction by William Amos. My paperback (Sphere) is dated 1985.
December 5, 2013
Not the "Confused Blues" again!
Hello everybody.* It’s been a long time since my last post. I’m back now, full of ideas, ready for almost anything apart from writing them down in a coherent manner. Yes, it is the “Confused Blues”, a lengthy and rather jangly kind of tune with a guitar break after every verse that is really, really boring. The words aren’t much either.
But here is something to be going on with while I try to hone my wits to explore the new territory revealed to me while I’ve been away.
This week I read a book about an allegedly famous confrontation between two of my favourite thinkers, Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s poker.** This took place at a philosophy club meeting in 1946 in Cambridge, England and lasted ten minutes, yet somehow the authors teased more than 200 pages out of their PCs, not counting source notes, index and photos.
Popper didn’t like Wittgenstein or his ideas, even a little bit. You might think that the two, both from Vienna and its feisty Jewish intellectual climate, would have bonded once out in the wider world with its hostile, indeed menacing attitudes, but no. Popper spent WWII in Christchurch, New Zealand writing his second masterpiece, The Open Society and Its Enemies, and it was scarcely off the presses at the war’s end when he had the chance to throw darts in person at Wittgenstein and his ideas as set out in a 1921 work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Popper really trashes the Tractatus in Open Society, and in my opinion he was right to do so. As it happens, that was Ludwig’s opinion too – at least Wittgenstein had renounced the Tractatus. By 1946 his thinking had gone well past what is in that slim revolutionary er tract. It is unclear how much Popper knew this at the time, and Poker doesn’t really clear this up.
What Popper didn’t like was that Wittgenstein seemed to say that philosophy was just confused thinking about grammar and that once people thought about grammar in the right way, about the way problems were posed, they would discover that the problems would disappear. This might have been true of the Tractatus, but if so Wittgenstein’s later thinking was far more sophisticated and subtle, and Popper didn’t seem to get this, ever.
What Poker does best is set out the grounds for their disagreement and suggest without saying so that they were talking past each other, in particular Popper. It also seems to suggest that both are no longer important, or so important, as they once were. We seem to be in post-Popperian and post-Wittgensteinian times now. I’m not so sure, but read it for yourself if you wish.
There is something else the book shows without coming right out and saying it: both of these great minds were concealed inside a cocoon of unpleasantness. Despite having a coterie of admirers that is at times jaw-dropping – Wittgenstein’s clique at Cambridge dressed as he did – each could be quite nasty, arrogantly nasty.
Does this diminish their stature? Well, not to me. It is a shame that Popper felt the need to engage with Wittgenstein in the way he did at the time he did. To me, he was wrong about what Wittgenstein was on about, and probably knew it, which drove him to attack instead of retract. But Open Society (and his earlier masterpiece, The Logic of Scientific Discovery) are landmarks to me, today. We need more than ever to hoist the standards of tolerance and freedom espoused in Open Society and to see off the looming perversities of their opposites. They are looming, and they are perverse.
Wittgenstein by contrast did not feel the need to combat Popper. He was so up himself, or if you like, so certain of his rightness, Popper’s broadside(s) scarcely registered. His dismissal of Popper was hardly atypical – he frequently left the philosophy club meetings after a short time – and he wrote in his diary about other things. His was an intolerance that did him no favours, and that he probably could not have cared less doesn’t change anything.
*American poet Hart Crane’s last words as he jumped off a ship in 1932 were “Goodbye, everybody”.
**Wittgenstein’s poker by David Edmonds and John Eidenow is published by Faber & Faber. The poker in question is a fire-tending device and not a card game. Wittgenstein, who was chairman of the philosophy club, used to shake it for emphasis and on this occasion in a seemingly threatening manner.
But here is something to be going on with while I try to hone my wits to explore the new territory revealed to me while I’ve been away.
This week I read a book about an allegedly famous confrontation between two of my favourite thinkers, Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s poker.** This took place at a philosophy club meeting in 1946 in Cambridge, England and lasted ten minutes, yet somehow the authors teased more than 200 pages out of their PCs, not counting source notes, index and photos.
Popper didn’t like Wittgenstein or his ideas, even a little bit. You might think that the two, both from Vienna and its feisty Jewish intellectual climate, would have bonded once out in the wider world with its hostile, indeed menacing attitudes, but no. Popper spent WWII in Christchurch, New Zealand writing his second masterpiece, The Open Society and Its Enemies, and it was scarcely off the presses at the war’s end when he had the chance to throw darts in person at Wittgenstein and his ideas as set out in a 1921 work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Popper really trashes the Tractatus in Open Society, and in my opinion he was right to do so. As it happens, that was Ludwig’s opinion too – at least Wittgenstein had renounced the Tractatus. By 1946 his thinking had gone well past what is in that slim revolutionary er tract. It is unclear how much Popper knew this at the time, and Poker doesn’t really clear this up.
What Popper didn’t like was that Wittgenstein seemed to say that philosophy was just confused thinking about grammar and that once people thought about grammar in the right way, about the way problems were posed, they would discover that the problems would disappear. This might have been true of the Tractatus, but if so Wittgenstein’s later thinking was far more sophisticated and subtle, and Popper didn’t seem to get this, ever.
What Poker does best is set out the grounds for their disagreement and suggest without saying so that they were talking past each other, in particular Popper. It also seems to suggest that both are no longer important, or so important, as they once were. We seem to be in post-Popperian and post-Wittgensteinian times now. I’m not so sure, but read it for yourself if you wish.
There is something else the book shows without coming right out and saying it: both of these great minds were concealed inside a cocoon of unpleasantness. Despite having a coterie of admirers that is at times jaw-dropping – Wittgenstein’s clique at Cambridge dressed as he did – each could be quite nasty, arrogantly nasty.
Does this diminish their stature? Well, not to me. It is a shame that Popper felt the need to engage with Wittgenstein in the way he did at the time he did. To me, he was wrong about what Wittgenstein was on about, and probably knew it, which drove him to attack instead of retract. But Open Society (and his earlier masterpiece, The Logic of Scientific Discovery) are landmarks to me, today. We need more than ever to hoist the standards of tolerance and freedom espoused in Open Society and to see off the looming perversities of their opposites. They are looming, and they are perverse.
Wittgenstein by contrast did not feel the need to combat Popper. He was so up himself, or if you like, so certain of his rightness, Popper’s broadside(s) scarcely registered. His dismissal of Popper was hardly atypical – he frequently left the philosophy club meetings after a short time – and he wrote in his diary about other things. His was an intolerance that did him no favours, and that he probably could not have cared less doesn’t change anything.
*American poet Hart Crane’s last words as he jumped off a ship in 1932 were “Goodbye, everybody”.
**Wittgenstein’s poker by David Edmonds and John Eidenow is published by Faber & Faber. The poker in question is a fire-tending device and not a card game. Wittgenstein, who was chairman of the philosophy club, used to shake it for emphasis and on this occasion in a seemingly threatening manner.
August 18, 2013
Sigh...
Dear reader -
An illness of someone very dear to me has called me away and as Captain Oates famously said, “I may be some time”. I don’t plan to be quite so long as he was but there is a lot of sadness around just now.
Something that continues to disturb me is the alleged debate going on over at Interesting Literature about Shakespeare and his work. I have done two posts on this, one serious and one a too-childish send-up. At least I thought it was too childish till I read one of the recent contributions from the “de Vere-ian persuasion”. No childishness, and no silliness, can plumb the depths explored by this all too serious and all too aggressive contribution. Arrogance and ignorance, especially wilful ignorance, do not sit well together, and the offensiveness deployed is bizarre. This is true even taking into account that this “debate” has seen vigorous contributions from both positions.
That too is very sad.
Anyway I’ll be back when I get back. If you are pining for something from me, you can scroll through my older posts! Some of them are ok I reckon…or you could buy one of my additions to the lower orders of literature, and read it! Ha!
Of course writing by the greats – Euripides, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Celine – is the real deal.
All the best.
An illness of someone very dear to me has called me away and as Captain Oates famously said, “I may be some time”. I don’t plan to be quite so long as he was but there is a lot of sadness around just now.
Something that continues to disturb me is the alleged debate going on over at Interesting Literature about Shakespeare and his work. I have done two posts on this, one serious and one a too-childish send-up. At least I thought it was too childish till I read one of the recent contributions from the “de Vere-ian persuasion”. No childishness, and no silliness, can plumb the depths explored by this all too serious and all too aggressive contribution. Arrogance and ignorance, especially wilful ignorance, do not sit well together, and the offensiveness deployed is bizarre. This is true even taking into account that this “debate” has seen vigorous contributions from both positions.
That too is very sad.
Anyway I’ll be back when I get back. If you are pining for something from me, you can scroll through my older posts! Some of them are ok I reckon…or you could buy one of my additions to the lower orders of literature, and read it! Ha!
Of course writing by the greats – Euripides, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Celine – is the real deal.
All the best.
August 13, 2013
Charles' secret spell on the throne
It will doubtless astonish a great many people to learn that the Prince of Wales is the real author of the novels I have published on the net, along with those suppressed and those yet to come.
Of course it is not true today. I wrote my books and have to own up to them. Prince Charles, whatever other faults he may have, is innocent. But truth is a slave of time, and it could become true later on, say three or four hundred years from now, when the meagre facts of my biography have been frittered away and the Prince's life distorted beyond current recognition by the warping pressures of the ages and the willingness of some members of our species to believe anything, and once believing it, to cling grimly to their illusions despite a tsunami of contradiction.
Well, I don't mind - really, I don't. It's ok. Charles! I want you to know that now! It's all right! Meditations on one's life after death, of the fame that people who write often hope to acquire if not in their own lifetimes, after they've gone, are beside the point.
This thought - or random collection of absurdities - came to me following the alleged controversy* over the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare I wrote very badly about in my last post. The theory that an Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, is the real author of Shakespeare's work took around three hundred years to surface, courtesy of a man named Looney. De Vere wasn't the first, and he's not the last as would-be literary detectives discover cluelettes in any scrap of disembodied reality pointing to whatever they have already decided is the truth.
Of course there have to be some connections, however tenuous, to make it work. De Vere, for example, lived at roughly the same time as Shakespeare. His unfortunate death in 1604 needed a bit of explanation given that Shakespeare continued to live and write well past then. But hey - if de Vere's your man, you'll have a plan. Once decided, nearly anything can be explained.
The reason the de Vere-ians (or "Oxfordians" as they prefer to style themselves) don't like the idea that Shakespeare wrote his stuff is implicitly elitist. They complain that WS was quasi-literate and worse, while de Vere, a nobleman (we are not talking morals here but descent) and a ward of the "virgin queen" herself, carried the right cachet to pen such wonderful prose and poetry.
De Vere did write poems and plays, but what survives stands no comparison with the quality of Shakespeare, and he is not at all a good fit for the perspectives of the plays and poems, as people who really do know what they are talking about have tried to explain. Looney got his idea from the discovery of certain common phrases and sayings in the work of the two - a bit too common actually: they have been dismissed by investigators as "commonplaces".
The reality is that Shakespeare was known by his contemporaries for who he was - an actor, theatre impresario, poet and playwright. There was no mystery at the time because there was nothing to be mystified about. His colleagues praised not only the product of his genius, but the means of achieving it, and while his friend and rival Ben Jonson disputed the technique, he too raved about the work. There is, as I said in my last post, a wealth of internal and external evidence that makes William Shakespeare not only a good fit to be the author, but the only fit.
Everyone was satisfied till the 19th century. Why wouldn't they be? Then a woman who eventually went mad decided it was really Francis Bacon wot done it, and Will Shakespeare's corpus was on the barbie, even if Bacon didn't taste right.
Looney's sizzling approach brought de Vere to the table about 1920. His literary spice has since been joined by at least a hundred thousand garnishes of coincidence and "otherwise inexplicable" culinary puzzles to serve up a banquet for the Looneys.
They can make anything at all about de Vere worthy of the finest restaurant, and anything about the Bard vomit-inducing.
Put another way, it's not a serious scholarly case. It's a social pathology.
Sailing ahead a few insignificant centuries, how will it turn out that Prince Charles may be the pole of attraction for this strange phenomenon to become the author of such sub-literary erotic thrillers as Kaos, The Russian Idea, Demented, Tobi's Game, The Kleiber Monster, Evilheart and Savonarola's Bones?
It starts in a public toilet in Scotland.
The Prince of Wales is not just the Prince of Wales. Among his many royal titles is that of the Duke of Rothesay. Rothesay is a village on the Isle of Bute a short ferry ride off the west coast of Scotland.
On this island and in this village is a public toilet built around 1900. It is a masterpiece of its kind, and when it was restored not too many years ago, it was patronised by the prince and duke. He went in alone, and came out alone...and signed the visitors' book.
On the same page as Charles' signature, surrounded by other signatures, is the hugely significant signature of myself.
Sooner or later - say, round about 2316 - someone is going to notice this, and draw the only, the logical, and truly amazing conclusion.
Wow-ee! How did Charles use the occasion of his unaccompanied visit to the loo to secrete in some pre-arranged spot a memory stick containing prose far, far too hot to go out under his name? How did Evans, the shadowy nobody who was always on the scrounge for a few extra coppers, and who went in alone, pick up that memory stick, take it away, and...and...and...
To find out you'll have wait a few centuries. By 2316 it could be a slew of memory sticks, and the dates of the signatures could have been altered...or forged...the same page! The very same page...
But that's not all! Oh my goodness no!
In 2012 the prince and his wife visited New Zealand, the home turf of the mysterious Evans, whose biography will prove so elusive. Evans at the time was living 40 km or so from the wee village of Feilding. Charles and his wife visited Feilding. Evans was known to prowl the township and environs.
Did Charles take the opportunity to top up the corpus? Did Evans steal over in the dead of night to uplift the concealed flash drive/memory stick?
Why not? Why indeed not?
But what, diligent readers may ask, about the "Why"? Why would Charles wish to write these tawdry tales laden with the purplest of prose...sex, sex and more sex occasionally broken by the odd spot of violence and - this is true and I can't help saying it - philosophy?
The philosophy, if it can be dignified with the term, is easily dismissed today as jejeune ravings of a depleted mind, and still will be around the year 2300, give or take a few centuries and a new owner. What about the rest?
It will be "pointed out" that Charles was highly sexed, and the proof will be not slow in hitting whatever medium there is for communication by that time: the Squidgy tapes, for instance...the public pinch on Diana's bottom...and the behaviour of one of his sons...wow! This is a family given to playing billiards in the nude in Las Vegas!**
Alert readers will have noticed a key difference between de Vere and Charles, and Evans and Shakespeare: the charactisations are reversed. In Shakespeare's case, "Looneys" want to bring the author up a few pegs by making him de Vere, with Evans "Loovies" will wish to plunge poor Windsor steeply down to end in a mighty thump on a loo seat in Rothesay. Times have changed and will go on changing and lowering the royal tone...hard to resist.
And "true facts" are true! Photos on the net exist taken by me of 1) the Rothesay public toilet (I went in alone too, to pick up the memory stick of course, but I'm not saying where I found it), and 2) interesting notices in the rail station of "friendly Feilding".
Most people - well, me anyway - would like to live forever, even if we know we can't. It would be great to be alive in 2300 to watch the fun, to slyly bat away the probing questions of Rupert Murdoch's minions, including "how is it that you and Rupert can live so long?" but more importantly, "How did Charles pass you the manuscripts? What did he say about his influences? What about the blog? Did he write that too?" Of course I won't be around actually - yet another tragedy of my life. But how delicious, and what a way to while the time in the old folks' paradise!
In 2316, as the revelations unfold, Charles may well be glad to be dead. It's ok, man. I understand that too.
*Google for Interesting Literature, search for "Shakespeare beyond doubt".
** I shouldn't really, but it turns out that Las Vegas is not all that far from Roswell, New Mexico. Look it up! I didn't create geography. The map is the map, you know?
Of course it is not true today. I wrote my books and have to own up to them. Prince Charles, whatever other faults he may have, is innocent. But truth is a slave of time, and it could become true later on, say three or four hundred years from now, when the meagre facts of my biography have been frittered away and the Prince's life distorted beyond current recognition by the warping pressures of the ages and the willingness of some members of our species to believe anything, and once believing it, to cling grimly to their illusions despite a tsunami of contradiction.
Well, I don't mind - really, I don't. It's ok. Charles! I want you to know that now! It's all right! Meditations on one's life after death, of the fame that people who write often hope to acquire if not in their own lifetimes, after they've gone, are beside the point.
This thought - or random collection of absurdities - came to me following the alleged controversy* over the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare I wrote very badly about in my last post. The theory that an Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, is the real author of Shakespeare's work took around three hundred years to surface, courtesy of a man named Looney. De Vere wasn't the first, and he's not the last as would-be literary detectives discover cluelettes in any scrap of disembodied reality pointing to whatever they have already decided is the truth.
Of course there have to be some connections, however tenuous, to make it work. De Vere, for example, lived at roughly the same time as Shakespeare. His unfortunate death in 1604 needed a bit of explanation given that Shakespeare continued to live and write well past then. But hey - if de Vere's your man, you'll have a plan. Once decided, nearly anything can be explained.
The reason the de Vere-ians (or "Oxfordians" as they prefer to style themselves) don't like the idea that Shakespeare wrote his stuff is implicitly elitist. They complain that WS was quasi-literate and worse, while de Vere, a nobleman (we are not talking morals here but descent) and a ward of the "virgin queen" herself, carried the right cachet to pen such wonderful prose and poetry.
De Vere did write poems and plays, but what survives stands no comparison with the quality of Shakespeare, and he is not at all a good fit for the perspectives of the plays and poems, as people who really do know what they are talking about have tried to explain. Looney got his idea from the discovery of certain common phrases and sayings in the work of the two - a bit too common actually: they have been dismissed by investigators as "commonplaces".
The reality is that Shakespeare was known by his contemporaries for who he was - an actor, theatre impresario, poet and playwright. There was no mystery at the time because there was nothing to be mystified about. His colleagues praised not only the product of his genius, but the means of achieving it, and while his friend and rival Ben Jonson disputed the technique, he too raved about the work. There is, as I said in my last post, a wealth of internal and external evidence that makes William Shakespeare not only a good fit to be the author, but the only fit.
Everyone was satisfied till the 19th century. Why wouldn't they be? Then a woman who eventually went mad decided it was really Francis Bacon wot done it, and Will Shakespeare's corpus was on the barbie, even if Bacon didn't taste right.
Looney's sizzling approach brought de Vere to the table about 1920. His literary spice has since been joined by at least a hundred thousand garnishes of coincidence and "otherwise inexplicable" culinary puzzles to serve up a banquet for the Looneys.
They can make anything at all about de Vere worthy of the finest restaurant, and anything about the Bard vomit-inducing.
Put another way, it's not a serious scholarly case. It's a social pathology.
Sailing ahead a few insignificant centuries, how will it turn out that Prince Charles may be the pole of attraction for this strange phenomenon to become the author of such sub-literary erotic thrillers as Kaos, The Russian Idea, Demented, Tobi's Game, The Kleiber Monster, Evilheart and Savonarola's Bones?
It starts in a public toilet in Scotland.
The Prince of Wales is not just the Prince of Wales. Among his many royal titles is that of the Duke of Rothesay. Rothesay is a village on the Isle of Bute a short ferry ride off the west coast of Scotland.
On this island and in this village is a public toilet built around 1900. It is a masterpiece of its kind, and when it was restored not too many years ago, it was patronised by the prince and duke. He went in alone, and came out alone...and signed the visitors' book.
On the same page as Charles' signature, surrounded by other signatures, is the hugely significant signature of myself.
Sooner or later - say, round about 2316 - someone is going to notice this, and draw the only, the logical, and truly amazing conclusion.
Wow-ee! How did Charles use the occasion of his unaccompanied visit to the loo to secrete in some pre-arranged spot a memory stick containing prose far, far too hot to go out under his name? How did Evans, the shadowy nobody who was always on the scrounge for a few extra coppers, and who went in alone, pick up that memory stick, take it away, and...and...and...
To find out you'll have wait a few centuries. By 2316 it could be a slew of memory sticks, and the dates of the signatures could have been altered...or forged...the same page! The very same page...
But that's not all! Oh my goodness no!
In 2012 the prince and his wife visited New Zealand, the home turf of the mysterious Evans, whose biography will prove so elusive. Evans at the time was living 40 km or so from the wee village of Feilding. Charles and his wife visited Feilding. Evans was known to prowl the township and environs.
Did Charles take the opportunity to top up the corpus? Did Evans steal over in the dead of night to uplift the concealed flash drive/memory stick?
Why not? Why indeed not?
But what, diligent readers may ask, about the "Why"? Why would Charles wish to write these tawdry tales laden with the purplest of prose...sex, sex and more sex occasionally broken by the odd spot of violence and - this is true and I can't help saying it - philosophy?
The philosophy, if it can be dignified with the term, is easily dismissed today as jejeune ravings of a depleted mind, and still will be around the year 2300, give or take a few centuries and a new owner. What about the rest?
It will be "pointed out" that Charles was highly sexed, and the proof will be not slow in hitting whatever medium there is for communication by that time: the Squidgy tapes, for instance...the public pinch on Diana's bottom...and the behaviour of one of his sons...wow! This is a family given to playing billiards in the nude in Las Vegas!**
Alert readers will have noticed a key difference between de Vere and Charles, and Evans and Shakespeare: the charactisations are reversed. In Shakespeare's case, "Looneys" want to bring the author up a few pegs by making him de Vere, with Evans "Loovies" will wish to plunge poor Windsor steeply down to end in a mighty thump on a loo seat in Rothesay. Times have changed and will go on changing and lowering the royal tone...hard to resist.
And "true facts" are true! Photos on the net exist taken by me of 1) the Rothesay public toilet (I went in alone too, to pick up the memory stick of course, but I'm not saying where I found it), and 2) interesting notices in the rail station of "friendly Feilding".
Most people - well, me anyway - would like to live forever, even if we know we can't. It would be great to be alive in 2300 to watch the fun, to slyly bat away the probing questions of Rupert Murdoch's minions, including "how is it that you and Rupert can live so long?" but more importantly, "How did Charles pass you the manuscripts? What did he say about his influences? What about the blog? Did he write that too?" Of course I won't be around actually - yet another tragedy of my life. But how delicious, and what a way to while the time in the old folks' paradise!
In 2316, as the revelations unfold, Charles may well be glad to be dead. It's ok, man. I understand that too.
*Google for Interesting Literature, search for "Shakespeare beyond doubt".
** I shouldn't really, but it turns out that Las Vegas is not all that far from Roswell, New Mexico. Look it up! I didn't create geography. The map is the map, you know?
Postscript as preface*
Anonymous is a film about the non-question “who wrote Shakespeare?” that has generated nuclear catastrophes of heat but very little if any light. Readers interested may pop over to the blog Interesting Literature and search for "Shakespeare Beyond Doubt". I have been following the Interesting Literature blog for a while and the number of comments on the post far outnumbers any other in my experience. It shows how much interest there is in Shakespeare, I guess, but also how excited people can get about anything, especially if they are conspiracy theorists.
I took a small part in this pseudo-controversy and then opted out: the “Oxfordians” who think Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere really wrote Shakespeare’s work are so pugnacious and so willfully ignorant it is not worth trying to engage with them. I’m not a Shakespeare scholar but a Shakespeare lover, but no Shakespeare lover needs to be a scholar to know through a wealth of external and internal evidence that any theory that says that Will didn’t write his plays and poems is (as Sir Peter Hall says) “bonkers”.
To me this non-question is frustrating partly because loony-tune ideas like this work against any Shakespeare lover contributing to the understanding of Shakespeare’s work that enlarges our understanding of life, which is why we read and watch, and yes, play. Yet I am surely not alone in thinking that Shakespeare lovers have a great deal to offer in this way. Each of us has her or his own understanding; it is part of Shakespeare’s greatness that our response has the potential to add to the understanding of others.
So when Shakespeare scholars encounter rubbish like the de Vere “theory” and patronise its adherents, it’s understandable but painful too. The “Oxfordians” as they like to style themselves are missing out on what it really means to love Shakespeare** so it’s hardly surprising that those who know who wrote the plays and poems turn up their noses at them.
The scholars being human will find it hard to resist the temptation of tarring all Shakespeare lovers with the same brush, however, and that makes me uneasy, especially as I prepare, little by little, my post on Troilus and Cressida. Yes, I know I have been promising this for a long time, and it hasn’t surfaced…but I’ve started! The loose ends are slowly but surely tying me into knots, but my plan, to transform The Struggler into Houdini, is on course. Kind of.
There are, and probably always will be, unknowables about Shakespeare. For example: Prospero of The Tempest is usually taken to be modelled on Englishman John Dee and that is certainly possible. But I reckon that he is (at least partly) modelled on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and I wrote that theory into my novel Savonarola’s Bones***. But failing the discovery of some nice little notebook of Shakespeare’s that says, “Prospero: Pico” that’s actually never going to be known, any more than it is actually known that Prospero: Dee. The Dee hypothesis has logical force as Dee was a contemporary of Shakespeare, while Pico was not.
To me this question is a completely different one from the non-question of “who wrote the plays” because it raises issues about Shakespeare the man, about his religion (if any), the philosophical schools he may have been involved in, and more, and thus ultimately of what he was on about. It is part of the fascination of this great man that four centuries after he wrote we can continue to be intrigued – but by him, not a rude interloper from the upper echelons of Elizabethan society.
* With apologies to the spirit of Harley Granville-Barker
** Does this mean that the “Shakespeare lover” in her or his turn is also patronising those who think de Vere the author? Well, in my case it does: as some of those engaged in the culture war on the Interesting Literature blog have pointed out in many ways, to insist on de Vere fundamentally misses the point of too much of the “canon”. My post on Troilus and Cressida, when and if it arrives, will deal with that in more detail. If you are an “Oxfordian” please just regard me as incurable and turn your attention to the jousters on the Interesting Literature blog. Thank you.
*** So buy it and find out! Selling not telling!
I took a small part in this pseudo-controversy and then opted out: the “Oxfordians” who think Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere really wrote Shakespeare’s work are so pugnacious and so willfully ignorant it is not worth trying to engage with them. I’m not a Shakespeare scholar but a Shakespeare lover, but no Shakespeare lover needs to be a scholar to know through a wealth of external and internal evidence that any theory that says that Will didn’t write his plays and poems is (as Sir Peter Hall says) “bonkers”.
To me this non-question is frustrating partly because loony-tune ideas like this work against any Shakespeare lover contributing to the understanding of Shakespeare’s work that enlarges our understanding of life, which is why we read and watch, and yes, play. Yet I am surely not alone in thinking that Shakespeare lovers have a great deal to offer in this way. Each of us has her or his own understanding; it is part of Shakespeare’s greatness that our response has the potential to add to the understanding of others.
So when Shakespeare scholars encounter rubbish like the de Vere “theory” and patronise its adherents, it’s understandable but painful too. The “Oxfordians” as they like to style themselves are missing out on what it really means to love Shakespeare** so it’s hardly surprising that those who know who wrote the plays and poems turn up their noses at them.
The scholars being human will find it hard to resist the temptation of tarring all Shakespeare lovers with the same brush, however, and that makes me uneasy, especially as I prepare, little by little, my post on Troilus and Cressida. Yes, I know I have been promising this for a long time, and it hasn’t surfaced…but I’ve started! The loose ends are slowly but surely tying me into knots, but my plan, to transform The Struggler into Houdini, is on course. Kind of.
There are, and probably always will be, unknowables about Shakespeare. For example: Prospero of The Tempest is usually taken to be modelled on Englishman John Dee and that is certainly possible. But I reckon that he is (at least partly) modelled on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and I wrote that theory into my novel Savonarola’s Bones***. But failing the discovery of some nice little notebook of Shakespeare’s that says, “Prospero: Pico” that’s actually never going to be known, any more than it is actually known that Prospero: Dee. The Dee hypothesis has logical force as Dee was a contemporary of Shakespeare, while Pico was not.
To me this question is a completely different one from the non-question of “who wrote the plays” because it raises issues about Shakespeare the man, about his religion (if any), the philosophical schools he may have been involved in, and more, and thus ultimately of what he was on about. It is part of the fascination of this great man that four centuries after he wrote we can continue to be intrigued – but by him, not a rude interloper from the upper echelons of Elizabethan society.
* With apologies to the spirit of Harley Granville-Barker
** Does this mean that the “Shakespeare lover” in her or his turn is also patronising those who think de Vere the author? Well, in my case it does: as some of those engaged in the culture war on the Interesting Literature blog have pointed out in many ways, to insist on de Vere fundamentally misses the point of too much of the “canon”. My post on Troilus and Cressida, when and if it arrives, will deal with that in more detail. If you are an “Oxfordian” please just regard me as incurable and turn your attention to the jousters on the Interesting Literature blog. Thank you.
*** So buy it and find out! Selling not telling!
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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