Marc Nash's Blog, page 18
February 9, 2017
Advice For Reading Live
For me the best thing about being an author is reading to a live audience. But I know a lot of authors are nervous about reading publicly so I thought I'd offer my advice to nail a live reading.
There are two main aspects to consider, the first is what you read and the second is how best to prepare.
Dealing with the latter first, the simple advice is rehearse. If I'm doing a piece I've performed before, I'll practice it twice every day for the week ahead of the reading. If it's a new piece, then I will do that for at least a fortnight ahead. The length of the reading slot can also effect these timings.
Why rehearse? Well there are three advantages I can think of:
1) Familiarising yourself so that when you come to read live there are no surprises in your own text that catch you out. This may sound a bit odd, after all it's your own text. But you'd be surprised, you may have written it quite a while ago because the publishing process can take a long time. Or just as significantly, when you were writing it, you weren't likely to be writing it with reading it out aloud and there are things that translate differently from page to voice. For example, I wrote a pun on 'greased lightning', with 'greased' written as the country Greece'd. Rehearsing I realised there was no possible way that this would come over to the audience and had to factor that in. Rehearsing and you may come across tongue twisters, difficult words to pronounce or alliteration that ties you up in knots, so practice and you can conquer them.
2) Which brings us to timing. Apart from a rehearsal allowing you to time the length of your reading if you have been given a time limit (which you always will in any open mic, but even often when you are on the bill as a named performer), rehearsing is vital to help you pace yourself. With the adrenaline running once you get up on stage to stand by the mic, it's the most natural thing to speed up and belt through your reading. Rehearsing maximises your chances for keeping the reading speed under control. The more measured the pace, the more chance the audience have of taking in your words. The more comfortable you feel up there, the more rehearsed, the less the tendency to tear through your piece.
3) Bringing the work alive. There is nothing worse than a reading which takes the audience back to listening to a dreary schoolteacher just reading to them from a textbook and making no eye contact. While you probably won't be making eye contact with individuals in the audience if the lights are low, it's still advisable to look up from the text and look out at the audience. It helps establish a genuine two way relationship and a rapport. I wrote the opening to a short story that went
"What is the ideal length for a suicide note? Asking for a friend".
When I read this story, I always look up from the text when I deliver the line 'asking for a friend'. It not only establishes a connection, it actually puts me and the audience together in a complicity - they realise that the character is not really asking on behalf of someone else, but trying to disguise the fact he's talking about himself. So the simple action of looking up actually helps establish the parameters of this story within its opening two lines. Again, I had no idea of any of that when I was writing the story, but through rehearsal its importance emerged.
It's not just about looking and connecting with the audience by sight. If you're feeling confident, you can enhance the story with gesture or an expression thrown out to them. You are to some extent acting out the story, albeit with one hand since the other is occupied holding the book. Rehearsal does not mean you have to learnt the text by heart to free both hands - poets can learn their poems because they have compression & specialist rhythm to help them master their work. It's not the same for prose writing, even though rhythm is important for us as well, it's not necessarily designed for projecting through voice, more structuring the reader's journey through the sentences. If you don't feel confident enough to do gestures and expression when you're starting out that's fine, but in time you're very likely to reach such a level.
Finally rehearsal allows you to accent certain words or phrases that again may enhance the meaning of the piece. I don't have much variety in my voice and can't do other accents, but you might have this ability which may contribute to your work aloud. It's because I don't have a terribly interesting voice that I adopt a lot of gesture and performance in my readings to compensate.
How to choose what to read. This is a harder one to be definitive about. First it depends what options you have. In all likelihood you are talking about your debut book, so you're restricted to that. Especially if the reading is mainly aimed at promoting that book. I'm going to assume it's a novel, since short stories and flash fiction are much easier to do live in that unlike an extract from a novel, with these the audience are getting the whole piece and therefore require less contextualising. For the past 4 years I have mainly been reading my flash fiction, but with a new novel coming out this summer, I'm going to be switching back to reading extracts and so what follows applies to me as I make my selections in the next few months.
Firstly what type of book have you written? Action thriller, literary fiction, romance, horror? This will inform your thinking as behind what you choose to read. What are you hoping to convey with what you read? Are you after conveying the style of the book? Or give a taste of the main characters and their relationship? Do you want to convey the atmosphere of the book (such as in Horror or Supernatural)? Do you want to read something that ramps up the tension in the room, then leave the audience on a cliffhanger? Maybe you want to make the audience laugh, or perhaps present yourself as a storyteller par excellence. All of these are valid but always derive from the book you have written. If you have a long reading slot of course you might be able to present a couple of different ones of these impressions. So these are the thoughts you ought to consider when choosing your piece. A descriptive piece may convey the atmosphere and the style of writing, but the downside is it may be hard for the audience to picture in their minds coming to it cold. Dialogue heavy extract may best convey the relationships and characters, but can you carry off the different voices to make them distinctive enough to the ear no matter how distinctive they are on the page.
If you can read the opening of your novel it is always useful as it is doing the job of providing context, rather than if your first extract is somewhere further inside the novel when you will almost certainly have to offer a preamble of how the plot got to that point. A general rule is less explanatory preamble and more reading of the actual text if you can possibly manage it. The preamble, or bits in between the extracts are your chance to talk about the book as a whole and do a selling job on it, sort of pitching it subtly and the extracts will hopefully show that off to the best manner. In the bits between the extracts you can talk about all manner of things associated with the novel, such as where you got the idea from, or which writers inspired you, these are nearly always more engaging for an audience than them trying to grasp your novel summed up in a few sentences. When I come to selecting my pieces (and I won't be selecting the opening of the novel), I may stick with my flash fiction approach and give minimal 1-line preamble and trust to the extract itself doing all the work and conveying to the audience what it's supposed to convey. The novel's structure has the advantage that it is episodic and those episodes occur out of sequence within the book itself, so they are fairly self-contained chapters. Having said that, one of the three main voices I can't read aloud at all, since there are visual cues and ideograms in the book that I just couldn't reproduce in a reading.
So there you have it. I wish you all luck with your live readings and please feel free to ask me any questions in the comments and I'll answer them.
February 8, 2017
Fight Back - The Threat Of Donald J Trump
So not three weeks into trump's Presidency and a lot of people on social media and artists are proclaiming the need to not only resist, but to #fightback. I blogged my advice for strategic & targeted resistance last week. But this week represents my #fightback contribution with some cartoons I devised and which I moved quickly to get them illustrated and out there. An artistic response can be quick. Obviously sitting down to write a political novel would take too long, events at the rate they're proceeding currently would have moved on so far by the time it was published, the novel would be out of date. So artists may need to be adaptable and find other mediums. The wonderful art was provided by Wilbur Dawbarn
February 1, 2017
Migration - Flash Fiction
The author was dry. His word flow silted up. He needed to dredge through the sediment of his mind. He went back to the port of his writing embarkation. Opened up the containers that stored his past literary consignments. Rich with word ladings and ideational haul.
He was reacquainted with the foreign folkloric fable he had towed into one of his own yarns. He was confronted with the exotic loan word he had imported and set to work in a poem. He recalled the overseas foundation myth that he had plundered. He recollected the archetype that recognised no borders but seemed to reside in every culture and which he had displaced front and central in his most successful drama. He revisited the etymological formation and word family reunion he repatriated for use as a motif throughout a novel. The brokerage he’d had to navigate with those autochthonal customs to make them pass muster in his narrative. The stowaway idioms, the refugee colloquialisms, the peregrine phraseology, all of which had sought asylum in his output and which he’d formerly welcomed with open arms and avid pen nib.
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But now in his infirmity he recanted these itinerant emigres. Eschewed and and all continental cargo in his cahiers. Berated and chastised them for their colonial impurities, where he was after a majestic, imperial linguistics. Thwarted by the bonded excise scheme that he conceived had been levied on his mother tongue. His language was dead, washed up ashore from the shipwreck of his writing style. Close-fisted and minded, he had become holed beneath the load-line, a ink vessel up in dry dock.
He was reacquainted with the foreign folkloric fable he had towed into one of his own yarns. He was confronted with the exotic loan word he had imported and set to work in a poem. He recalled the overseas foundation myth that he had plundered. He recollected the archetype that recognised no borders but seemed to reside in every culture and which he had displaced front and central in his most successful drama. He revisited the etymological formation and word family reunion he repatriated for use as a motif throughout a novel. The brokerage he’d had to navigate with those autochthonal customs to make them pass muster in his narrative. The stowaway idioms, the refugee colloquialisms, the peregrine phraseology, all of which had sought asylum in his output and which he’d formerly welcomed with open arms and avid pen nib.
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But now in his infirmity he recanted these itinerant emigres. Eschewed and and all continental cargo in his cahiers. Berated and chastised them for their colonial impurities, where he was after a majestic, imperial linguistics. Thwarted by the bonded excise scheme that he conceived had been levied on his mother tongue. His language was dead, washed up ashore from the shipwreck of his writing style. Close-fisted and minded, he had become holed beneath the load-line, a ink vessel up in dry dock.
January 30, 2017
Letter To America - How To Take On Trump
I do not want to come over preaching to Americans from this far away vantage point. I make no claim for greater knowledge of American law or politics than the citizens who live with both. But after just a week of despicable actions by the new President and the furore it has unsurprisingly provoked, I just want to make a plea that such broad-brush outrage is not the best method of opposing him. That is not to say that joining protests and pointing up abuses through social media #resistance are not useful - they are, they show solidarity with those persecuted under the regime so that indicates the persecuted are not alone. But the more clinical tactics to disarm him have to be given space among the sound and fury to work their effect.
Trump has been branded an egomaniac, sociopath, dictator, racist, fascist, liar, sexist, abuser, tyrant, despot, puppet of Bannon, puppet of Putin and probably some others I've missed. Now most of these may well be true, but hurling these epithets at him achieves precisely nothing. He will just shrug and jab a finger behind him in a "Get that lot" gesture; get that lot in both senses of the term, since he has a propensity for going after his critics and opponents and he will go to war with the media and then with Hollywood mark my words. But don't forget he is playing to his supporters, the nearly 50% of your divided nation that voted for him. The more you abuse him, the more it plays to his message that he is the outsider, the new broom and that plays well in places. Demonstrations in large urban areas and airports and he can just claim that it's the political correctness/Liberal/Feminists/Civil Rights 'mob' which he can spin to his supporters as him being on the right track if these opponents up in arms protesting. Trump has not enacted any policy he didn't tell us he was going to do when campaigning. The problem is no one thought he was serious, or that he was just rabble-rousing or talking metaphorically and of course no one thought he would win. Everything so far is playing to his constituency and they are almost certainly loving it. I don't believe that anyone who voted for him has been alienated by the first week's antics and policies. They are not in the slightest bit embarrassed by the criticism aimed at Trumps' decisions both at home and globally; like the President they just don't care about the use of torture.
So the way to get to Trump is twofold. Firstly make him look bad to his own supporters and secondly a vigorous legal defence of the Constitution to reverse as many of his enacted policies as can be defeated by other branches of government. So taking the legal side first and I am no expert, but calls to impeach him after just a week in office are never going to happen, so please stop calling for it. Only the House of Representatives can call for proceedings and the Senate hear them; both are Republican majorities, so the chances of it being successful are small. Turkeys don't vote for either Thanksgiving nor Christmas. However appalled certain Republican congressfolk are by Trump, they will not venture to destroy their own party by removing the man who won the Whitehouse under their name and on their ticket. Now, to proper business. Trump threatens the venerable Constitution like no previous President. Particularly the First amendment when it comes to media and artistic freedom as he goes after his critics. He will also look to finagle away some of the protections of the Fifth Amendment, starting with drug dealers and illegal migrants and then seeing if he can extend it to the everyday. He will wrap such attacks up under the cloak of being the Constitution's great defender, particularly by playing up the Second Amendment, a sort of under two flags approach that Putin also wields in Russia. His supporters might overlook infringement and incremental shrinking of the First Amendment in return for buttressing of the Second Amendment to their satisfaction, plus moves like overturning Roe V Wade that finally gives the religious Right what they have been craving for decades and who have VP Pence leading the charge on it. Every infraction of the constitution has to be legally challenged. We know Congress are unlikely to do it and can only hope and trust the Judiciary (no matter their personal politics) do their job and rule on matters of law and where the Constitution has been infringed. The problem is that such processes are not quick and instead of having the loggerheads between Congress & Whitehouse that you had under Obama, you risk having a strangulation of business tied up by the wranglings of Executive and Judiciary this time. It wouldn't matter quite so much, but again Trump just turns round and appeals to his supporters to say 'who's holding up business, not me, it's the Judiciary and they need their swamp clearing too'. Such an accusation has already happened here in Britain over Brexit, although it was our press and media more than the government who took it to extremes.
So that brings us to the second thread, make Trump lose face to his own supporters. As much as they delight in Liberal baiting and persecuting of certain minorities, ultimately they have voted him in to improve their lot materially. This won't happen and that has to be played for all it's worth over the next four years as the economy fails to revive itself since rust cannot suddenly de-rust itself and become mint steel again. The coal mines have gone and won't usefully be brought back into production. To really hammer this home, you need to associate the lack of economic benefit for the ordinary man with Trump's own mega-wealth and that he is not and never was the man to represent them after all. There's no point complaining that Trump never showed us his tax returns, didn't impact the election, it's old news now. You have to hammer him on anything he does while in office. Every conflict of interest, every milking of the Presidency for his own gain has to be exposed and legally challenged where relevant. And there's no point revealing these exposés in the Times & The Post, because they're not talking to his support base. I'm afraid they are a Greek chorus when you need to be using the real protagonists on the stage. You need to get them on Facebook and Fox News. And obviously it has to be 100% evidenced and explained, the links made so it's staring them square in the face. Hell, mock up a Breitbart dummy site or hack the real one and get it there as well. Go for the jugular but in order to do so, you have to stay focused and not just go for everything and anything. Only the stuff that degrades him in the eyes of his followers. No moral arguments, just clear cases of corruption and failing to deliver on growth because he can't as he's in the billionaire camp.
The only problem I foresee with this strategy is how Trump reacts to such humiliation? He strikes me as a street fighter in the Boardroom, so that it is possible that he just says to hell with it all and pulls some crazy stunt like going to war with Iran or some equivalent just to re-inflate his ego in his own mind. But let's cross that bridge when we come to it eh?
Good luck with the fight.
Trump has been branded an egomaniac, sociopath, dictator, racist, fascist, liar, sexist, abuser, tyrant, despot, puppet of Bannon, puppet of Putin and probably some others I've missed. Now most of these may well be true, but hurling these epithets at him achieves precisely nothing. He will just shrug and jab a finger behind him in a "Get that lot" gesture; get that lot in both senses of the term, since he has a propensity for going after his critics and opponents and he will go to war with the media and then with Hollywood mark my words. But don't forget he is playing to his supporters, the nearly 50% of your divided nation that voted for him. The more you abuse him, the more it plays to his message that he is the outsider, the new broom and that plays well in places. Demonstrations in large urban areas and airports and he can just claim that it's the political correctness/Liberal/Feminists/Civil Rights 'mob' which he can spin to his supporters as him being on the right track if these opponents up in arms protesting. Trump has not enacted any policy he didn't tell us he was going to do when campaigning. The problem is no one thought he was serious, or that he was just rabble-rousing or talking metaphorically and of course no one thought he would win. Everything so far is playing to his constituency and they are almost certainly loving it. I don't believe that anyone who voted for him has been alienated by the first week's antics and policies. They are not in the slightest bit embarrassed by the criticism aimed at Trumps' decisions both at home and globally; like the President they just don't care about the use of torture.
So the way to get to Trump is twofold. Firstly make him look bad to his own supporters and secondly a vigorous legal defence of the Constitution to reverse as many of his enacted policies as can be defeated by other branches of government. So taking the legal side first and I am no expert, but calls to impeach him after just a week in office are never going to happen, so please stop calling for it. Only the House of Representatives can call for proceedings and the Senate hear them; both are Republican majorities, so the chances of it being successful are small. Turkeys don't vote for either Thanksgiving nor Christmas. However appalled certain Republican congressfolk are by Trump, they will not venture to destroy their own party by removing the man who won the Whitehouse under their name and on their ticket. Now, to proper business. Trump threatens the venerable Constitution like no previous President. Particularly the First amendment when it comes to media and artistic freedom as he goes after his critics. He will also look to finagle away some of the protections of the Fifth Amendment, starting with drug dealers and illegal migrants and then seeing if he can extend it to the everyday. He will wrap such attacks up under the cloak of being the Constitution's great defender, particularly by playing up the Second Amendment, a sort of under two flags approach that Putin also wields in Russia. His supporters might overlook infringement and incremental shrinking of the First Amendment in return for buttressing of the Second Amendment to their satisfaction, plus moves like overturning Roe V Wade that finally gives the religious Right what they have been craving for decades and who have VP Pence leading the charge on it. Every infraction of the constitution has to be legally challenged. We know Congress are unlikely to do it and can only hope and trust the Judiciary (no matter their personal politics) do their job and rule on matters of law and where the Constitution has been infringed. The problem is that such processes are not quick and instead of having the loggerheads between Congress & Whitehouse that you had under Obama, you risk having a strangulation of business tied up by the wranglings of Executive and Judiciary this time. It wouldn't matter quite so much, but again Trump just turns round and appeals to his supporters to say 'who's holding up business, not me, it's the Judiciary and they need their swamp clearing too'. Such an accusation has already happened here in Britain over Brexit, although it was our press and media more than the government who took it to extremes.
So that brings us to the second thread, make Trump lose face to his own supporters. As much as they delight in Liberal baiting and persecuting of certain minorities, ultimately they have voted him in to improve their lot materially. This won't happen and that has to be played for all it's worth over the next four years as the economy fails to revive itself since rust cannot suddenly de-rust itself and become mint steel again. The coal mines have gone and won't usefully be brought back into production. To really hammer this home, you need to associate the lack of economic benefit for the ordinary man with Trump's own mega-wealth and that he is not and never was the man to represent them after all. There's no point complaining that Trump never showed us his tax returns, didn't impact the election, it's old news now. You have to hammer him on anything he does while in office. Every conflict of interest, every milking of the Presidency for his own gain has to be exposed and legally challenged where relevant. And there's no point revealing these exposés in the Times & The Post, because they're not talking to his support base. I'm afraid they are a Greek chorus when you need to be using the real protagonists on the stage. You need to get them on Facebook and Fox News. And obviously it has to be 100% evidenced and explained, the links made so it's staring them square in the face. Hell, mock up a Breitbart dummy site or hack the real one and get it there as well. Go for the jugular but in order to do so, you have to stay focused and not just go for everything and anything. Only the stuff that degrades him in the eyes of his followers. No moral arguments, just clear cases of corruption and failing to deliver on growth because he can't as he's in the billionaire camp.
The only problem I foresee with this strategy is how Trump reacts to such humiliation? He strikes me as a street fighter in the Boardroom, so that it is possible that he just says to hell with it all and pulls some crazy stunt like going to war with Iran or some equivalent just to re-inflate his ego in his own mind. But let's cross that bridge when we come to it eh?
Good luck with the fight.
January 28, 2017
And For The Last Time Of Asking - Flash Fiction
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January 22, 2017
All The Clocks Are Broken
I am sundial. My body blocks out the sun and projects an imago of me in shadow against the wall. As a child my clump absorbed the light and grew. But now it is only the relationship of light’s angle to my mass that can alter my amplitude. I have become fixed in dimension even as time creeps on.
I am horology. Marker of time. As much as I inhabit space and move through it in dragging hope of making it somehow bloom, I am just counting off the hours, minutes, seconds. My cells age. My muscles turn to fat. My sinews seize up. My tendons lose their elasticity. My skin wrinkles. All this change on the landscape of me. Spatial changes in the lone visual dimension of the three normally accorded to life. While time proceeds apace. The wrist watch of me is losing time. There is no mechanism for winding me back up or changing the battery to restore me to factory settings. So in fact I don’t inhabit space at all. My corpus is the space across which time marches. My body the clock face.
I can sire progeny, cheat time that way. Except that they too serve as dials. Integral and separate, despite the inherited mitochondrial quartz from which we share frequency but not periodicy. For when my pendulum finally stops swaying, apart from perhaps a slight wobble on their faces, my clock is stopped and theirs runs on. For a few more decades at least. But generational chronometry cannot buy us any more time. No persistence. No immortality. Time of death. Death of time.
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We are sundials. Horological markers of time. Across the space of our bodies. Exactly what we are counting out time for remains hazy.
I am horology. Marker of time. As much as I inhabit space and move through it in dragging hope of making it somehow bloom, I am just counting off the hours, minutes, seconds. My cells age. My muscles turn to fat. My sinews seize up. My tendons lose their elasticity. My skin wrinkles. All this change on the landscape of me. Spatial changes in the lone visual dimension of the three normally accorded to life. While time proceeds apace. The wrist watch of me is losing time. There is no mechanism for winding me back up or changing the battery to restore me to factory settings. So in fact I don’t inhabit space at all. My corpus is the space across which time marches. My body the clock face.
I can sire progeny, cheat time that way. Except that they too serve as dials. Integral and separate, despite the inherited mitochondrial quartz from which we share frequency but not periodicy. For when my pendulum finally stops swaying, apart from perhaps a slight wobble on their faces, my clock is stopped and theirs runs on. For a few more decades at least. But generational chronometry cannot buy us any more time. No persistence. No immortality. Time of death. Death of time.
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We are sundials. Horological markers of time. Across the space of our bodies. Exactly what we are counting out time for remains hazy.
January 19, 2017
What The Blazes? - Flash Fiction
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A funeral pyre on which an Indian widow throws herself to honour her dead husband, while preserving that of her own. Firewalking across hot ashes. The burning tip of a cigarette cinching a corona, in the mouth of the man facing a firing squad or the electric chair as his last sensuous earthly act. An effigy burned to commemorate the resonance of past and present protest. The balefire beacons lit on the cliffs to warn of foreign invasions. Nomadic burning of the savannah to renew the soil and make it bloom. Kafka ordering his books to be burned on his death, the Nazis obliging with the works of all other Jewish authors in their cleansing Sauberung. The djinn that resides in the fire and the arsonist whose face lights up having summoned similar power with his gas can and matches. Prometheus who is punished for conferring the gift of fire on man to raise us up from the animals. Swords annealed in fire, decorative glass also forged in the flame. The murderer who trusts in the power of the flame to remove all forensic evidence, but who is worshipping a false god. The salamander that cannot burn and the witch who can, whatever she recants at the stake. The homosexuals who were used as Counter-Reformation kindling, from which the word faggot derived. Gypsies, Jews and Queers up in smoke in Nazi ovens. Holocaust, a complete consumption by fire, neither burnt offering nor offering pyromancy. The KKK careful to try and distinguish a light for Christ rather than burning the cross into cinders, basted in Negro blood. Punitive hell fires without the faintest suggestion of purgation and redemption. Icarus’ wings on fire and the burning oil fires in the upper stories of the Twin Towers. Incontestably we cannot live without the elements of air, earth and water. The element of fire is far more double-edged. We live and die by it.
A funeral pyre on which an Indian widow throws herself to honour her dead husband, while preserving that of her own. Firewalking across hot ashes. The burning tip of a cigarette cinching a corona, in the mouth of the man facing a firing squad or the electric chair as his last sensuous earthly act. An effigy burned to commemorate the resonance of past and present protest. The balefire beacons lit on the cliffs to warn of foreign invasions. Nomadic burning of the savannah to renew the soil and make it bloom. Kafka ordering his books to be burned on his death, the Nazis obliging with the works of all other Jewish authors in their cleansing Sauberung. The djinn that resides in the fire and the arsonist whose face lights up having summoned similar power with his gas can and matches. Prometheus who is punished for conferring the gift of fire on man to raise us up from the animals. Swords annealed in fire, decorative glass also forged in the flame. The murderer who trusts in the power of the flame to remove all forensic evidence, but who is worshipping a false god. The salamander that cannot burn and the witch who can, whatever she recants at the stake. The homosexuals who were used as Counter-Reformation kindling, from which the word faggot derived. Gypsies, Jews and Queers up in smoke in Nazi ovens. Holocaust, a complete consumption by fire, neither burnt offering nor offering pyromancy. The KKK careful to try and distinguish a light for Christ rather than burning the cross into cinders, basted in Negro blood. Punitive hell fires without the faintest suggestion of purgation and redemption. Icarus’ wings on fire and the burning oil fires in the upper stories of the Twin Towers. Incontestably we cannot live without the elements of air, earth and water. The element of fire is far more double-edged. We live and die by it.
January 15, 2017
Writers Resist London - Only 30 Years Too Late
Today, Sunday 15th January 2017, writers and authors in London finally raised their heads above the parapet. They joined the 'Writers Resist' movement based in America but taking in many cities outside the US in holding an event to protest the imminent presidency of Donald Trump as a threat to democracy, rights and civilised values. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the event, having a previous reading commitment in London, notwithstanding that I only found out about the event yesterday via Twitter and some detective work on my part (what writers call 'research'). Humble writers like myself aren't on the BCC lists, we didn't get the memo because it wasn't sent out to us.
But that is not the source of my frustration. Without coming over like some sort of contradiction in terms as some sort of putative member of the UKIP Metropolitan Elite, what about the threat to democracy in the UK? After the election result and Cameron being returned, a small group of us writers commiserated on twitter and all pledged to write political fiction - something I have always done, from Khmer Rouge Cambodia to beheading videos, Syrian migrants to Latin American death squads - but nada. After Brexit there was the same level of wailing and gnashing of teeth and calls for some sort of protest fiction - again I have penned an 11,000 word short story, but not too aware of similar works. This is hardly surprising to me as there has been a dearth of political fiction in this country because politics is seen as a dirty word when allied to the term 'literature'.
Of course it wasn't ever thus, go back to "Gulliver's Travels" for when Brits did write politically and satirically. Where poets get put in a revolutionary Sandanista government and author André Malraux was minister for culture in France, we get chicklit write Louise Mensch as an MP and bored MPs like Douglas Hurd and now Nadine Dorries permeating their own boredom in the service of state by penning works of fiction. Where Camus, Sartre & De Beauvoir led every march going in 1968 Paris, with the honourable exception of Harold Pinter, where are our authors marching under banners? Nowhere that's where.
Is our democracy indeed under the same threat as Trump represents to that of America? Well where have you been for the last 30 years if you have to ask that? Ever since the 1980s there has been a systematic ideological assault on the rights and values held dear in the UK, under the guise of Britain needs to get its economic housekeeping in good order. Social spaces of social and public subsidised art, local government being cut back to the bone, trade unions, council housing being sold off without being replaced, clampdowns on public marches and protest, all meant a reduction in the public's ability to gather together and discourse. The arts had to demonstrate a profit line ahead of artistic ideas and exploration. Ever since then there is a distinct lack of public discourse within Britain. The British sense of justice and fair play has been undermined by the rigorous assault on the Welfare State, targeting the poor and needy (ATOS, bedroom tax), rather than bringing bad employers to book over working conditions/low pay and an unrepresentative level of corporation tax. The divide between rich and poor has got wider and these fault lines were revealed by the Brexit referendum, which should have come to no surprise to keen-eyed watchers, which is why it seems to have come as such a seismic shock to most. Where was the artistic protest on any of this? In the 1970s the British theatre stage was dominated by Marxist and Left-Wing playwrights like Hare, Brenton, Edgar, but they were unable to counter the 1980s ideology of Thatcherism and that seemed to signal a retreat in political art. Our rights have since been further stripped by the anti-terrorism legislation and our decency threatened by the increase of Hate crime in the wake of the Brexit vote.
I understand that the current Writers Resist movement is keen on being seen as non-aligned politically. Labour in the 1990s did nothing to underpin any of our depleted rights and values from and are just as culpable. But the current UK government will seek to push through radical policies that 1980's Thatcherism only dreamed of, not least the assault on out most precious value that of the National Health Service and social care for the elderly which feeds into the current crisis. As heinous as I regarded Ronald Reagan's presidency, America has one protection we in the UK do not; the First Amendment enshrining the right to free expression, therefore not even Reagan was able to dismantle the arts community as happened in the UK. However, even that protection is now under threat as Trump will start with press freedom as he looks to hobble his opponents there and after that artistic expression would be vulnerable starting with liberal Hollywood - I suspect that the realisation of this is part what has sparked the Writers Resist movement to spring up in the US. Of course other fears are the roll back of civil rights either by law, or de facto as racism is more overt and less clamped down on by the forces of law and order. But the fact remains that the USA may be facing what we experienced in the UK in the 1980s and which we've never recovered from.
So Writers Resist London, first you need to open up your invite lists because there are some grass roots writers who have consistently been producing political work of resistance. At present you risk just talking to yourselves ( I see the same network of writer names as all work together anyway) and we had all that nonsense with UK Occupy, a talking shop which fizzled out quick enough once the housing and jobs market perked up. Believe me, I may have a modicum of the readers you have, but with all due respect you ain't at the level of Harold Pinter and so the people you need to be reaching are no more likely to be aware of you and your voice than they are of mine and the likes of me. If we're going to do this thing let's do it properly. There are so many challenges not just politically, but in terms of language and fake versus truth versus fiction.
But that is not the source of my frustration. Without coming over like some sort of contradiction in terms as some sort of putative member of the UKIP Metropolitan Elite, what about the threat to democracy in the UK? After the election result and Cameron being returned, a small group of us writers commiserated on twitter and all pledged to write political fiction - something I have always done, from Khmer Rouge Cambodia to beheading videos, Syrian migrants to Latin American death squads - but nada. After Brexit there was the same level of wailing and gnashing of teeth and calls for some sort of protest fiction - again I have penned an 11,000 word short story, but not too aware of similar works. This is hardly surprising to me as there has been a dearth of political fiction in this country because politics is seen as a dirty word when allied to the term 'literature'.
Of course it wasn't ever thus, go back to "Gulliver's Travels" for when Brits did write politically and satirically. Where poets get put in a revolutionary Sandanista government and author André Malraux was minister for culture in France, we get chicklit write Louise Mensch as an MP and bored MPs like Douglas Hurd and now Nadine Dorries permeating their own boredom in the service of state by penning works of fiction. Where Camus, Sartre & De Beauvoir led every march going in 1968 Paris, with the honourable exception of Harold Pinter, where are our authors marching under banners? Nowhere that's where.
Is our democracy indeed under the same threat as Trump represents to that of America? Well where have you been for the last 30 years if you have to ask that? Ever since the 1980s there has been a systematic ideological assault on the rights and values held dear in the UK, under the guise of Britain needs to get its economic housekeeping in good order. Social spaces of social and public subsidised art, local government being cut back to the bone, trade unions, council housing being sold off without being replaced, clampdowns on public marches and protest, all meant a reduction in the public's ability to gather together and discourse. The arts had to demonstrate a profit line ahead of artistic ideas and exploration. Ever since then there is a distinct lack of public discourse within Britain. The British sense of justice and fair play has been undermined by the rigorous assault on the Welfare State, targeting the poor and needy (ATOS, bedroom tax), rather than bringing bad employers to book over working conditions/low pay and an unrepresentative level of corporation tax. The divide between rich and poor has got wider and these fault lines were revealed by the Brexit referendum, which should have come to no surprise to keen-eyed watchers, which is why it seems to have come as such a seismic shock to most. Where was the artistic protest on any of this? In the 1970s the British theatre stage was dominated by Marxist and Left-Wing playwrights like Hare, Brenton, Edgar, but they were unable to counter the 1980s ideology of Thatcherism and that seemed to signal a retreat in political art. Our rights have since been further stripped by the anti-terrorism legislation and our decency threatened by the increase of Hate crime in the wake of the Brexit vote.
I understand that the current Writers Resist movement is keen on being seen as non-aligned politically. Labour in the 1990s did nothing to underpin any of our depleted rights and values from and are just as culpable. But the current UK government will seek to push through radical policies that 1980's Thatcherism only dreamed of, not least the assault on out most precious value that of the National Health Service and social care for the elderly which feeds into the current crisis. As heinous as I regarded Ronald Reagan's presidency, America has one protection we in the UK do not; the First Amendment enshrining the right to free expression, therefore not even Reagan was able to dismantle the arts community as happened in the UK. However, even that protection is now under threat as Trump will start with press freedom as he looks to hobble his opponents there and after that artistic expression would be vulnerable starting with liberal Hollywood - I suspect that the realisation of this is part what has sparked the Writers Resist movement to spring up in the US. Of course other fears are the roll back of civil rights either by law, or de facto as racism is more overt and less clamped down on by the forces of law and order. But the fact remains that the USA may be facing what we experienced in the UK in the 1980s and which we've never recovered from.
So Writers Resist London, first you need to open up your invite lists because there are some grass roots writers who have consistently been producing political work of resistance. At present you risk just talking to yourselves ( I see the same network of writer names as all work together anyway) and we had all that nonsense with UK Occupy, a talking shop which fizzled out quick enough once the housing and jobs market perked up. Believe me, I may have a modicum of the readers you have, but with all due respect you ain't at the level of Harold Pinter and so the people you need to be reaching are no more likely to be aware of you and your voice than they are of mine and the likes of me. If we're going to do this thing let's do it properly. There are so many challenges not just politically, but in terms of language and fake versus truth versus fiction.
Today, Sunday 15th January 2017, writers and authors in L...
Today, Sunday 15th January 2017, writers and authors in London finally raised their heads above the parapet. They joined the 'Writers Resist' movement based in America but taking in many cities outside the US in holding an event to protest the imminent presidency of Donald Trump as a threat to democracy, rights and civilised values. Unfortunately I couldn't attend the event, having a previous reading commitment in London, notwithstanding that I only found out about the event yesterday via Twitter and some detective work on my part (what writers call 'research'). Humble writers like myself aren't on the BCC lists, we didn't get the memo because it wasn't sent out to us.
But that is not the source of my frustration. Without coming over like some sort of contradiction in terms as some sort of putative member of the UKIP Metropolitan Elite, what about the threat to democracy in the UK? After the election result and Cameron being returned, a small group of us writers commiserated on twitter and all pledged to write political fiction - something I have always done, from Khmer Rouge Cambodia to beheading videos, Syrian migrants to Latin American death squads - but nada. After Brexit there was the same level of wailing and gnashing of teeth and calls for some sort of protest fiction - again I have penned an 11,000 word short story, but not too aware of similar works. This is hardly surprising to me as there has been a dearth of political fiction in this country because politics is seen as a dirty word when allied to the term 'literature'.
Of course it wasn't ever thus, go back to "Gulliver's Travels" for when Brits did write politically and satirically. Where poets get put in a revolutionary Sandanista government and author André Malraux was minister for culture in France, we get chicklit write Louise Mensch as an MP and bored MPs like Douglas Hurd and now Nadine Dorries permeating their own boredom in the service of state by penning works of fiction. Where Camus, Sartre & De Beauvoir led every march going in 1968 Paris, with the honourable exception of Harold Pinter, where are our authors marching under banners? Nowhere that's where.
Is our democracy indeed under the same threat as Trump represents to that of America? Well where have you been for the last 30 years if you have to ask that? Ever since the 1980s there has been a systematic ideological assault on the rights and values held dear in the UK, under the guise of Britain needs to get its economic housekeeping in good order. Social spaces of social and public subsidised art, local government being cut back to the bone, trade unions, council housing being sold off without being replaced, clampdowns on public marches and protest, all meant a reduction in the public's ability to gather together and discourse. The arts had to demonstrate a profit line ahead of artistic ideas and exploration. Ever since then there is a distinct lack of public discourse within Britain. The British sense of justice and fair play has been undermined by the rigorous assault on the Welfare State, targeting the poor and needy (ATOS, bedroom tax), rather than bringing bad employers to book over working conditions/low pay and an unrepresentative level of corporation tax. The divide between rich and poor has got wider and these fault lines were revealed by the Brexit referendum, which should have come to no surprise to keen-eyed watchers, which is why it seems to have come as such a seismic shock to most. Where was the artistic protest on any of this? In the 1970s the British theatre stage was dominated by Marxist and Left-Wing playwrights like Hare, Brenton, Edgar, but they were unable to counter the 1980s ideology of Thatcherism and that seemed to signal a retreat in political art. Our rights have since been further stripped by the anti-terrorism legislation and our decency threatened by the increase of Hate crime in the wake of the Brexit vote.
I understand that the current Writers Resist movement is keen on being seen as non-aligned politically. Labour in the 1990s did nothing to underpin any of our depleted rights and values from and are just as culpable. But the current UK government will seek to push through radical policies that 1980's Thatcherism only dreamed of, not least the assault on out most precious value that of the National Health Service and social care for the elderly which feeds into the current crisis. As heinous as I regarded Ronald Reagan's presidency, America has one protection we in the UK do not; the First Amendment enshrining the right to free expression, therefore not even Reagan was able to dismantle the arts community as happened in the UK. However, even that protection is now under threat as Trump will start with press freedom as he looks to hobble his opponents there and after that artistic expression would be vulnerable - I suspect that the realisation of this is part what has sparked the Writers Resist movement to spring up in the US. Of course other fears are the roll back of civil rights either by law, or de facto as racism is more overt and less clamped down on by the forces of law and order. But the fact remains that the USA may be facing what we experienced in the UK in the 1980s and which we've never recovered from.
So Writers Resist London, first you need to open up your invite lists because there are some grass roots writers who have consistently been producing political work of resistance. At present you risk just talking to yourselves ( I see the same network of writer names as all work together anyway) and we had all that nonsense with UK Occupy, a talking shop which fizzled out quick enough once the housing and jobs market perked up. Believe me, I may have a modicum of the readers you have, but with all due respect you ain't at the level of Harold Pinter and so the people you need to be reaching are no more likely to be aware of you and your voice than they are of mine and the likes of me. If we're going to do this thing let's do it properly. There are so many challenges not just politically, but in terms of language and fake versus truth versus fiction.
But that is not the source of my frustration. Without coming over like some sort of contradiction in terms as some sort of putative member of the UKIP Metropolitan Elite, what about the threat to democracy in the UK? After the election result and Cameron being returned, a small group of us writers commiserated on twitter and all pledged to write political fiction - something I have always done, from Khmer Rouge Cambodia to beheading videos, Syrian migrants to Latin American death squads - but nada. After Brexit there was the same level of wailing and gnashing of teeth and calls for some sort of protest fiction - again I have penned an 11,000 word short story, but not too aware of similar works. This is hardly surprising to me as there has been a dearth of political fiction in this country because politics is seen as a dirty word when allied to the term 'literature'.
Of course it wasn't ever thus, go back to "Gulliver's Travels" for when Brits did write politically and satirically. Where poets get put in a revolutionary Sandanista government and author André Malraux was minister for culture in France, we get chicklit write Louise Mensch as an MP and bored MPs like Douglas Hurd and now Nadine Dorries permeating their own boredom in the service of state by penning works of fiction. Where Camus, Sartre & De Beauvoir led every march going in 1968 Paris, with the honourable exception of Harold Pinter, where are our authors marching under banners? Nowhere that's where.
Is our democracy indeed under the same threat as Trump represents to that of America? Well where have you been for the last 30 years if you have to ask that? Ever since the 1980s there has been a systematic ideological assault on the rights and values held dear in the UK, under the guise of Britain needs to get its economic housekeeping in good order. Social spaces of social and public subsidised art, local government being cut back to the bone, trade unions, council housing being sold off without being replaced, clampdowns on public marches and protest, all meant a reduction in the public's ability to gather together and discourse. The arts had to demonstrate a profit line ahead of artistic ideas and exploration. Ever since then there is a distinct lack of public discourse within Britain. The British sense of justice and fair play has been undermined by the rigorous assault on the Welfare State, targeting the poor and needy (ATOS, bedroom tax), rather than bringing bad employers to book over working conditions/low pay and an unrepresentative level of corporation tax. The divide between rich and poor has got wider and these fault lines were revealed by the Brexit referendum, which should have come to no surprise to keen-eyed watchers, which is why it seems to have come as such a seismic shock to most. Where was the artistic protest on any of this? In the 1970s the British theatre stage was dominated by Marxist and Left-Wing playwrights like Hare, Brenton, Edgar, but they were unable to counter the 1980s ideology of Thatcherism and that seemed to signal a retreat in political art. Our rights have since been further stripped by the anti-terrorism legislation and our decency threatened by the increase of Hate crime in the wake of the Brexit vote.
I understand that the current Writers Resist movement is keen on being seen as non-aligned politically. Labour in the 1990s did nothing to underpin any of our depleted rights and values from and are just as culpable. But the current UK government will seek to push through radical policies that 1980's Thatcherism only dreamed of, not least the assault on out most precious value that of the National Health Service and social care for the elderly which feeds into the current crisis. As heinous as I regarded Ronald Reagan's presidency, America has one protection we in the UK do not; the First Amendment enshrining the right to free expression, therefore not even Reagan was able to dismantle the arts community as happened in the UK. However, even that protection is now under threat as Trump will start with press freedom as he looks to hobble his opponents there and after that artistic expression would be vulnerable - I suspect that the realisation of this is part what has sparked the Writers Resist movement to spring up in the US. Of course other fears are the roll back of civil rights either by law, or de facto as racism is more overt and less clamped down on by the forces of law and order. But the fact remains that the USA may be facing what we experienced in the UK in the 1980s and which we've never recovered from.
So Writers Resist London, first you need to open up your invite lists because there are some grass roots writers who have consistently been producing political work of resistance. At present you risk just talking to yourselves ( I see the same network of writer names as all work together anyway) and we had all that nonsense with UK Occupy, a talking shop which fizzled out quick enough once the housing and jobs market perked up. Believe me, I may have a modicum of the readers you have, but with all due respect you ain't at the level of Harold Pinter and so the people you need to be reaching are no more likely to be aware of you and your voice than they are of mine and the likes of me. If we're going to do this thing let's do it properly. There are so many challenges not just politically, but in terms of language and fake versus truth versus fiction.
January 11, 2017
Flesh Wound - Flash Fiction
Lonely heartCold shoulderedChin upToe in waterShoulder to wheelGive eye teethStick neck outCaught eyeThumbs upShot in armMouth wateringSee eye to eyeMind blowingFeel in bonesShivers down spineJoined at hipBody and soulBelly laughsHead over heelsFevered browLove muscleLeg overBees kneesLeglessWandering eyeAchilles heelBack footFace the musicAll earsLips sealedCat got tongue?Two facedBlood boilingClean breastFlesh woundCut own throatSkinned aliveGiven elbowGuttedShoulder to cry on?Lonely heartSlit wrists
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