Marc Nash's Blog, page 45
July 11, 2013
The Quality Of Writing Is Strained - Friday Flash
I typed a log entry into/on to my tablet. Then I deleted it and watch it seemingly become snaffled by the roiling plasma. Apposite word that 'tablet'. Harks back to the origins of writing, pieces of flint gouging out marks on stone beneath their sharpened tips. Matter grinding away at matter. Energy transference, heat sparks engendered through the friction. The intaglio letters cupped within the stone. Any natural cleft in the petrous grain, easily confused with a character whose shape it coincidentally approximates. Who can say where the boundary of a character ends and the natural stratum of the stone resumes? The letters utterly interacting with the flow of the grain around them, since one is hewn from the tissue of the other. Letters as impressions in negative space. That stone which was formerly there, now hacked away to leave the fossilised shapes of an alphabet.
Progress to mankind writing on parchment or papyrus with quill or stylus. Two materially different substances, pigment and canvas. The ink licked on to the surface of the fabric, filling its empty plane with characters. Colonising it. Again at the stiff pointed tip, although scribes also used the reedier kalamos to brush the ink on, like drummers who have both drum sticks and brushes for that more jazz vibe. Just as well really, or we'd have to doff our caps at the Freudian imagery of a shaft spilling its liquid seed on to a receptive membrane. The mark of the scribe, being the accidental transference of ink into the whorls of the pads of his fingers.
And it's not just fleshy fingertips. For unlike the carved incisions in stone tablets, here the ink rests upon the host surface, albeit some of the ink will seep and spread into the fibres beneath. In the main the two substances coexist in a space that is not as blended as those characters cut into stone. The inked boundaries of the letters delineate them from a differently coloured paper textile. They sit flush on a plane that is itself flat. The ink does not really have any texture of its own. No raised surfaces. The two do not interact, in the sense that where the ink lies the paper beneath is effaced and where the ink is not, the paper bears sole possession untouched. Once the ink has dried and settled, the two are inert from each other. Of course with illuminated manuscripts, where gold leaf was being applied to the pages, then such calligraphy would have a texture. And while such manuscripts provided an interesting approach to representing the divine light in halos and the illuminated script itself, let's just say the legerdemain of gold leaf doesn't actually represent how light operates. Rather, it more approximates the reflective properties of the moon's light actually originating from the sun. Reflected glories as second-hand light. A paucity of illumination.
Then on to moveable typesetting of the printing press and its personalised version in the form of the typewriter. An embossed letter block, whether placed in a composing stick, or at the end of a typebar, which then punches an impression filled in with ink. An inverted return to carving letters in stone through incision. Directly with hammer rather than chisel. The paper surface is indelibly altered, distorted, beneath the inroad of the press. The letters sit on a plane, but not flush. They are slightly sunken into its weft, a fact you can plainly see were you to view the underside of the paper, with its Braille-like displacements projecting through towards your eye. There is something almost animated by the process of smashing force upon force. Each typebar a metal monolith, with a homunculus letter clinging on for dear life to its surface, being smashed and pounded by the press of a lever launching the typebar like a ballista. Particularly if you used the red half of the ribbon, pressed in blood. Off key and off centre, the type was idiosyncratic. Personal. Die cast stamped with the metallic grain of the writer's force brought down on the keys.
Of course in time, electronic typewriters and superior printing technologies ironed out these concavities and restored the smooth, unbroken plane of the canvas that houses the letters ranged there in regular blocks of text. The white of the paper merely acting as spacers between words, lines and paragraphs. Typescript orderly ranged across the paper, but more concerned with proportion to itself, so that the paper fades into the background. Print and paper barely having any relationship one to the other.
And now we are come to the present state of affairs. The plasma screen, a curvy sea in which the letters hang seemingly unmoored. Movable to anywhere on the display. The dancing characters which can pirouette and spin across the turbid screen as they are formatted. It is hard to determine which is more vaporous, screen or letters mounted there. The plasma remains indifferent to what it plays host to, yet it utterly determines its nature. In the ineffable coding that remains hidden and unknowable. Somehow, like planets in spacetime, these characters too interact with the curved plasma and the two shape one another. No longer is the screen an inert host. Yet neither letters nor plasma ocean possess significant mass. This is not like the heft of a planet curving proximate space around it. This is more akin to particle physics. Letters like elemental particles, brushed from the keystroke perhaps to become manifest in the plasmatic field. Colliding hard up against their neighbour, expressing their valency. The nature of their charge.
And thus do our letters evanesce and die. Oh they persist in some ghostly form, as hypertext, but they are quickly interred by the next rolling mass of text which too will be overwhelmed and underwritten, or should that be underwhelmed and overwritten? The letters, our letters, have become cast asunder from our fingers. Left to drift and do battle with CEO algorithms in the plasmatic main. The quality of writing has been strained through being shorn of material paper through which to filter it.
July 3, 2013
Nocebo - Friday Flash
It’s not like I’ve never swallowed a pill before. Tablets to numb the pain, troches to shrink my swollen nodes, dragees to banish the skin rashes, doses to get me to sleep, pep me ups to get me out of bed and back to the battlefield maps. I’ve imbibed every possible functional type of medicament there is to be had. If pill-popping was an art, I’ve certainly put in the hours at the easel as the military tide has turned blood red against our nation.
The capsule that is a timed release and which you are enjoined to swallow whole and allow the gastric juices to scale the walls to free the chemical trove. But what they fail to calibrate is the involuntary non-swallow reflex that refluxes the capsule back out of the throat. Wash it down with liquid mouthwash is the advice. Yet too big a swig of chaperoning Scotch, and the gullet is inroaded by the rush of fluid and the pill washes up and is marooned in the trench between gum and cheek. Too little lubricant and the pill remains becalmed on the tongue, as the tide is too weak to propel it langryeally. Why do our chemists, reputedly the greatest on the planet, fail to create a uniform size of capsule? So hang the calibrated release, now I just snap open the capsule and pour either powder or syrup so that it grazes neither tonsillar Scylla nor glottal Charybdis as it plummets down into my bloodstream.
Then there is the crucible of the lozenge that sits in place on the tongue and dissolves. The mouth as tomb, reverentially receiving the casket until full decomposition. The tongue thrust into full overload, constantly spiting itself. Teeth forbidden to grind or chew. Further prohibited from sucking in one’s cheeks to channel saliva to lap at it in the absence of any lingual motion. Mounted there on the throne right in the navel of my mouth. The lore ought to be that as the compound dissipates, its balm is disseminated per corpuscular internuncios throughout the body politic. Yet my fulcrum remains resolutely focused at the centre. For despite the physick’s insignificant mass supposedly dwindling all the time, the gad actually inundates the local receptors through the constancy of contact and they feel an outsized encumbrance. Autosuggestive tumescence, as the tablet cuckoos physical memory. For even when long gone, the taut afferents take a while to regain their equipoise. So like a phantom amputated limb, apparently it still weighs grievous upon them. The cure just out of reach. Of comprehension. Thrust way beyond the tip of my tongue. Such boluses are usually endowed with relieving stress and pressure headaches, when they only succeed in ratcheting up the anxiety.
Next is the chalky sediment as a pill’s integrity breaks up. Granular and gritty, it coats the membrane of the mouth, cocking its leg up to mark its colonisation. Yet, even when the powdery scree has been swabbed clear from all surfaces and swallowed, one senses it is still present in the oral nooks and crannies. Filling cavities or forming protruding excrescences. The serpentine tongue continuously exhuming traces. For it has muscled deep into contiguous neural folklore. A haunting of spectral aftertaste.
Such a litany of prescribed analgesics have bled me dry. Now I require capsules to hydrate my body, since my internal sea levels have dropped. But I have also developed ulcers, so that the ingesting of medicines only further inflames the gastric agonies. The acid reflux has stripped the membrane in my gullet, so that I can no longer swallow pills and pellets. I am doubled over with the gallstones of my barraging bile, the sole part of the whole damn nation that has stepped up its productivity to match being on a war footing. I am surrounded and besieged by pain on all sides. It raps on the raised drawbridge so insistently, that it is always granted an audience deep within my Keep. Just like the enemy armies beating at our gates.
Yet this capsule is different from all the rest. The teeth that are usually so rapacious to clamp down on any and all medical interventionists, have receded deep into the gums. This is not meant to be swallowed whole, nor will it dissolve. It will maintain its intactness for all time if I weren’t to compromise it. This is not about the integrity of the tablet. It’s about my own.
My tongue plays over its crystalline hardness. Its rubber coating tastes unpleasant, but it is an odd sensation for it is only a contact astringency, since the rubber will never be consumed. The brain knows this, yet cannot ameliorate the gustation’s repulsion. Like the snake’s tongue that assesses the air as every molecule palpates against it, scanning for prey and predators both. Mine has given up the ghost, as it shrinks from its confirmatory inspection. It can no longer tell the difference, since my own pain sirens far outblast any other onslaught. This pill is the medicine of last resort. The magic bullet to put all my afflictions beyond time. Yet in order for the brain to concede, first it has to gird itself for this one last, momentous act of will.Our chemists won’t make any mistakes. This will be no dud batch. The dosage will yield exactly the remedy it was calibrated for. It is far from time-specific, rather it represents the apotheosis of self-prescription and self-medication. I determine when to release the contents to wreak their chemical conviction. Simply by biting down through the protective rubber and into the ampoule’s glass walls. A glass so fine yet it cannot cut. This is to be a bloodless coup. Forestalling a bloodletting. We are to count ourselves most fortunate. We have inexorably lost the war, so for us the peace does not bear thinking about. This capsule an inoculation against ourselves. Against failure. A vampiric ampoule of my own being, my very own truth serum as I look into its glass body and realise there is no other course of action. For my own depleted body, this is the final concentration of energies to heal its sickness.
The capsule that is a timed release and which you are enjoined to swallow whole and allow the gastric juices to scale the walls to free the chemical trove. But what they fail to calibrate is the involuntary non-swallow reflex that refluxes the capsule back out of the throat. Wash it down with liquid mouthwash is the advice. Yet too big a swig of chaperoning Scotch, and the gullet is inroaded by the rush of fluid and the pill washes up and is marooned in the trench between gum and cheek. Too little lubricant and the pill remains becalmed on the tongue, as the tide is too weak to propel it langryeally. Why do our chemists, reputedly the greatest on the planet, fail to create a uniform size of capsule? So hang the calibrated release, now I just snap open the capsule and pour either powder or syrup so that it grazes neither tonsillar Scylla nor glottal Charybdis as it plummets down into my bloodstream.
Then there is the crucible of the lozenge that sits in place on the tongue and dissolves. The mouth as tomb, reverentially receiving the casket until full decomposition. The tongue thrust into full overload, constantly spiting itself. Teeth forbidden to grind or chew. Further prohibited from sucking in one’s cheeks to channel saliva to lap at it in the absence of any lingual motion. Mounted there on the throne right in the navel of my mouth. The lore ought to be that as the compound dissipates, its balm is disseminated per corpuscular internuncios throughout the body politic. Yet my fulcrum remains resolutely focused at the centre. For despite the physick’s insignificant mass supposedly dwindling all the time, the gad actually inundates the local receptors through the constancy of contact and they feel an outsized encumbrance. Autosuggestive tumescence, as the tablet cuckoos physical memory. For even when long gone, the taut afferents take a while to regain their equipoise. So like a phantom amputated limb, apparently it still weighs grievous upon them. The cure just out of reach. Of comprehension. Thrust way beyond the tip of my tongue. Such boluses are usually endowed with relieving stress and pressure headaches, when they only succeed in ratcheting up the anxiety.
Next is the chalky sediment as a pill’s integrity breaks up. Granular and gritty, it coats the membrane of the mouth, cocking its leg up to mark its colonisation. Yet, even when the powdery scree has been swabbed clear from all surfaces and swallowed, one senses it is still present in the oral nooks and crannies. Filling cavities or forming protruding excrescences. The serpentine tongue continuously exhuming traces. For it has muscled deep into contiguous neural folklore. A haunting of spectral aftertaste.
Such a litany of prescribed analgesics have bled me dry. Now I require capsules to hydrate my body, since my internal sea levels have dropped. But I have also developed ulcers, so that the ingesting of medicines only further inflames the gastric agonies. The acid reflux has stripped the membrane in my gullet, so that I can no longer swallow pills and pellets. I am doubled over with the gallstones of my barraging bile, the sole part of the whole damn nation that has stepped up its productivity to match being on a war footing. I am surrounded and besieged by pain on all sides. It raps on the raised drawbridge so insistently, that it is always granted an audience deep within my Keep. Just like the enemy armies beating at our gates.
Yet this capsule is different from all the rest. The teeth that are usually so rapacious to clamp down on any and all medical interventionists, have receded deep into the gums. This is not meant to be swallowed whole, nor will it dissolve. It will maintain its intactness for all time if I weren’t to compromise it. This is not about the integrity of the tablet. It’s about my own.
My tongue plays over its crystalline hardness. Its rubber coating tastes unpleasant, but it is an odd sensation for it is only a contact astringency, since the rubber will never be consumed. The brain knows this, yet cannot ameliorate the gustation’s repulsion. Like the snake’s tongue that assesses the air as every molecule palpates against it, scanning for prey and predators both. Mine has given up the ghost, as it shrinks from its confirmatory inspection. It can no longer tell the difference, since my own pain sirens far outblast any other onslaught. This pill is the medicine of last resort. The magic bullet to put all my afflictions beyond time. Yet in order for the brain to concede, first it has to gird itself for this one last, momentous act of will.Our chemists won’t make any mistakes. This will be no dud batch. The dosage will yield exactly the remedy it was calibrated for. It is far from time-specific, rather it represents the apotheosis of self-prescription and self-medication. I determine when to release the contents to wreak their chemical conviction. Simply by biting down through the protective rubber and into the ampoule’s glass walls. A glass so fine yet it cannot cut. This is to be a bloodless coup. Forestalling a bloodletting. We are to count ourselves most fortunate. We have inexorably lost the war, so for us the peace does not bear thinking about. This capsule an inoculation against ourselves. Against failure. A vampiric ampoule of my own being, my very own truth serum as I look into its glass body and realise there is no other course of action. For my own depleted body, this is the final concentration of energies to heal its sickness.
July 1, 2013
Summer Hating - 15 summer songs for the English Rain
Summer, balmy weather, holidays abroad and the concept of the Summer Read for lazing around on deckchairs and not having to engage your brain. All concepts which are pretty anathema to me. I don't holiday anymore, I write, but even when I did I took those books that demanded my full concentration which i could never give them during the daily hurly burley of normal life.
So with that Mr Scrooge in mind, here are some songs not celebrating summer in an overly optimistic way like the Travolta/Newton John song from the film "Grease".
1) "School's Out" - Alice Cooper
Remember when you couldn't wait for your schooldays to end? That last summer before the plunge either into University and overwrought romantic drama after drama and essay crises after essay crisis, or the full lunge into the workaday world. Either way that's why the carefree, responsibility-free days of school don't seem quite so bad in hindsight "school was the happiest days of my life" etc. And all the time that last extended summer holiday punctuated by the anxiety of waiting for your exam results to determine your fate... I dunno, maybe Alice Cooper wasn't too bothered whether he passed woodwork or business studies exams or not, cos he knew he was headed foe the top anyway.
2) "Summer Wine" - Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood
Summer wine? More like copious narcotics to judge by the lyrical content. But you gotta love it anyway! Not to be confused with the awful cover version by Lana Del Ray and her *Boyfriend In The Band* scenario. He ain't no Lee Hazelwood that's for sure.
3) "Long Hot Summer Night" - Jimi Hendrix
Now Jimi may have been as high as a kite, but his guitar and almost spoken word delivery conjured up a vision of cities in the summer that are totally inhabitable ("Crosstown Traffic" anyone?) Of course the Hippie Summers of the late 60s of festivals and flower children messed things up for all progressive politics and culture ever since, but you can't fault them for trying.
4) "Summer babe" - Pavement
When Pavement came around, everyone was hot about how different and trailblazing they would be. But to me they were the logical extension of West Coast bands from Creedence Clearwater Revival through The Tubes to American Music Club (and today's BlackRebel Motorcycle Club). Maybe it's the vocal delivery. They are to rock what MacSweeneys is to literature. I still like them though! Just think head honcho Stephen Malkamus' solo stuff is way more interesting.
5) "Here Comes The Summer" - The Undertones
Short, stripped down & to the point. The rush of the delivery as you change out of your scholl uniform and into a t-shirt and shorts and pelt out into the garden to the paddling pool. But as with most undertones' songs, you just know that holiday romance is going to end badly. Most of The Undertones' songs invoke the summer somehow, probably because of their indefatigable upbeat optimism in the delivery of the songs.
6) "Hot Fun In The Summertime" - Sly And The Family Stone
This song almost, almost breaks me out of my curmudgeonly carapace and doff the peak of my sun hat in the direction of the bright star in the azure sky. What a fabulous arrangement of the band on stage too. They don't make them like this anymore. Thanks Britain's got talent...
7) "Celebrated Summer" - Husker Du
Husker Du's songs were always a world of pain,so even when singing about the summer their faces were fully grimaced, attacking their guitars with the full fury of those spurned at the beach cos they're in Speedos when everyone else is in Nike.
8) "Indian Summer" - Beat Happening
We'll be lucky to even get an Indian Summer in this rain-soaked season we've had so far (though as I type this today is sunny and warm). Calvin's vocals were always suffused in the it's too hot to really go for it vein, even though I believe they came from Washington State which has very cold winters. REM covered this song, so it must be cool. Beat happening the best band you probably never heard of.
9) "Holiday in Cambodia" - Dead Kennedys
From summer listlessness to its complete obverse. All the rage fuelled punk of the Dead Kennedys singing about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge when at the time most of us struggled to locate Cambodia on a globe, let alone understand what was happening there in the isolationist state.
10) "Long Summer Days" - EMF
This band got lots of stick because they were part of the Madchester dance/rave scene, even though they came from the country bumpkin land of Gloucestershire. I don't care what anyone says, "Unbelievable" was a great song, but yeah it's probably true, to judge by the evidence of this, they took every recognisable element of the scene and stitched it together to form an identikit band. Oh well. They're unbelievable!
11) "Holiday"- Happy Mondays
And so to the real thing! For their latter career, all year round was one long holiday and let's not forget the multi-car-crashing, drug binge stay in Barbados the band had which probably brought their record label Factory to its financial knees. This song just drips holiday from its first notes. But then it turns...
12) "Sunshine" - Mos Def
Over its classic summer sample Def lays his bleak litany of disappointment and cynicism. Wonderful juxtaposition.
13) "Holidays In the Sun" - Sex Pistols
"Cheap holiday in other people's misery" and there we have misery tourism in a nutshell. Do they still offer holidays to drug-fuelled ghettos and active warzones? I find this troubling.
14) "The Holiday song" - Pixies
Kim Deal just left the Pixies recently. Hasn't Black Francis ballooned up? The last band I ever saw live before I retired from moshing.
15) "Summer Jam" - The Cool Kids
See in the US you can probably get away with an outdoor jam, but here in soggy old Britain you've no chance! (Yes I know the band are rehearsing indoors here, but feel that vibe!)
So with that Mr Scrooge in mind, here are some songs not celebrating summer in an overly optimistic way like the Travolta/Newton John song from the film "Grease".
1) "School's Out" - Alice Cooper
Remember when you couldn't wait for your schooldays to end? That last summer before the plunge either into University and overwrought romantic drama after drama and essay crises after essay crisis, or the full lunge into the workaday world. Either way that's why the carefree, responsibility-free days of school don't seem quite so bad in hindsight "school was the happiest days of my life" etc. And all the time that last extended summer holiday punctuated by the anxiety of waiting for your exam results to determine your fate... I dunno, maybe Alice Cooper wasn't too bothered whether he passed woodwork or business studies exams or not, cos he knew he was headed foe the top anyway.
2) "Summer Wine" - Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood
Summer wine? More like copious narcotics to judge by the lyrical content. But you gotta love it anyway! Not to be confused with the awful cover version by Lana Del Ray and her *Boyfriend In The Band* scenario. He ain't no Lee Hazelwood that's for sure.
3) "Long Hot Summer Night" - Jimi Hendrix
Now Jimi may have been as high as a kite, but his guitar and almost spoken word delivery conjured up a vision of cities in the summer that are totally inhabitable ("Crosstown Traffic" anyone?) Of course the Hippie Summers of the late 60s of festivals and flower children messed things up for all progressive politics and culture ever since, but you can't fault them for trying.
4) "Summer babe" - Pavement
When Pavement came around, everyone was hot about how different and trailblazing they would be. But to me they were the logical extension of West Coast bands from Creedence Clearwater Revival through The Tubes to American Music Club (and today's BlackRebel Motorcycle Club). Maybe it's the vocal delivery. They are to rock what MacSweeneys is to literature. I still like them though! Just think head honcho Stephen Malkamus' solo stuff is way more interesting.
5) "Here Comes The Summer" - The Undertones
Short, stripped down & to the point. The rush of the delivery as you change out of your scholl uniform and into a t-shirt and shorts and pelt out into the garden to the paddling pool. But as with most undertones' songs, you just know that holiday romance is going to end badly. Most of The Undertones' songs invoke the summer somehow, probably because of their indefatigable upbeat optimism in the delivery of the songs.
6) "Hot Fun In The Summertime" - Sly And The Family Stone
This song almost, almost breaks me out of my curmudgeonly carapace and doff the peak of my sun hat in the direction of the bright star in the azure sky. What a fabulous arrangement of the band on stage too. They don't make them like this anymore. Thanks Britain's got talent...
7) "Celebrated Summer" - Husker Du
Husker Du's songs were always a world of pain,so even when singing about the summer their faces were fully grimaced, attacking their guitars with the full fury of those spurned at the beach cos they're in Speedos when everyone else is in Nike.
8) "Indian Summer" - Beat Happening
We'll be lucky to even get an Indian Summer in this rain-soaked season we've had so far (though as I type this today is sunny and warm). Calvin's vocals were always suffused in the it's too hot to really go for it vein, even though I believe they came from Washington State which has very cold winters. REM covered this song, so it must be cool. Beat happening the best band you probably never heard of.
9) "Holiday in Cambodia" - Dead Kennedys
From summer listlessness to its complete obverse. All the rage fuelled punk of the Dead Kennedys singing about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge when at the time most of us struggled to locate Cambodia on a globe, let alone understand what was happening there in the isolationist state.
10) "Long Summer Days" - EMF
This band got lots of stick because they were part of the Madchester dance/rave scene, even though they came from the country bumpkin land of Gloucestershire. I don't care what anyone says, "Unbelievable" was a great song, but yeah it's probably true, to judge by the evidence of this, they took every recognisable element of the scene and stitched it together to form an identikit band. Oh well. They're unbelievable!
11) "Holiday"- Happy Mondays
And so to the real thing! For their latter career, all year round was one long holiday and let's not forget the multi-car-crashing, drug binge stay in Barbados the band had which probably brought their record label Factory to its financial knees. This song just drips holiday from its first notes. But then it turns...
12) "Sunshine" - Mos Def
Over its classic summer sample Def lays his bleak litany of disappointment and cynicism. Wonderful juxtaposition.
13) "Holidays In the Sun" - Sex Pistols
"Cheap holiday in other people's misery" and there we have misery tourism in a nutshell. Do they still offer holidays to drug-fuelled ghettos and active warzones? I find this troubling.
14) "The Holiday song" - Pixies
Kim Deal just left the Pixies recently. Hasn't Black Francis ballooned up? The last band I ever saw live before I retired from moshing.
15) "Summer Jam" - The Cool Kids
See in the US you can probably get away with an outdoor jam, but here in soggy old Britain you've no chance! (Yes I know the band are rehearsing indoors here, but feel that vibe!)
June 26, 2013
Still Ill Man - Friday Flash
Mimes? Screw ‘em! I break down motion into way smaller segments than they ever do. Muscular control? Don’t make me laugh. I control my very cells.
Yogis? They’re the true con artists and public nuisances. How is using their so called spiritual gifts to make a mint, any different or more elevated than what I do? And you want supple? I’m as limber as the most gnarled and wrinkled bloke with a beard down to his toes covering his nakedness. And I control my breath as completely as they do, kundalini or no kundalini energy.
Athletes? All that explosive burst of power and they’re spent. I’m in it for the long-haul. My stamina and staying power outblasts theirs any day. The tensions never build up seeking explosive release in me. I earn the laurel wreath that breasts my head. A sniff of smelling salts, or worse, and they jump right back up into the fray. Me, that first waxy whiff of the silvered cake and my body starts winding itself down to the lowest energy state.
That theatre lot? All those Method actors, heavens preserve us. With their warm-up exercises to get their energies pulsing which they then proceed to spray around the auditorium. What a waste! They think they understand and possess their bodies? Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s perennially out on loan to whichever character currently inhabits it. They flee from their own corporeality and seek shelter in a fictional other. Not me, I’m out there absolutely exposed with no disguise. I move among my audience. Well, noit move as such...
However I do honour the costumiers and the make-up artistes. They truly understand the creases and wrinkles of the human form and the investment we cloak it in. They help me hone my performance. Without the garb they cast me in, the metallic silver greasepaint (gold being far to gauche), or the grained marmoreal suggestion to the clothes I wear, no matter how still I remained, pedestrians would never take me for a carved statue.
But they do. I fool each and every one of them. Until a wink or a sly arch of an eyebrow makes them do a double-take, ‘did that statue just move?” At which point I reveal my humanity behind silvered or petrous flesh to them. And the delight in their faces, we have such an open interaction from that point on. It’s as if I have emerged from a chrysalis, that my humanity has broken free right under their gaze. A conspiracy we share together, as if without their inspection, I might never have gained my release. They are my redeemers, that’s the gift I confer upon them.
All this I can still recall with crystal clarity. My glittering career, sculpted in sterling silver. A facade of course. Plated, spray-on, a veneer. For there was something in the paint that slowly corroded my neurons, detached the from control of my cells. Prevented them communicating with the muscles they operated. Now it’s as though my body really were made of metal, without any give in the joints. That I am hewn from inert and unyielding rock. I can’t impel that sinew I formerly controlled every fibre of. I have become a statue encased in flesh, utterly immobile. No one can redeem me now. No one is able to break me out of my prison. All they can do is feed me with tubes and vacate me via other ducts.
Right now I would give my right arm just to be able to bat an eyelid. But I already gave my right arm and a whole lot more in my daily questing to be utterly still. I surrendered my whole life and being to construct my flesh carapace, with obtected limbs that will never flex and take wing again.
My brain still functions, behind my unmoving eyes it grinds away at nothing. What the hell was I thinking about all those hours stood motionless on those plinths? My mind focused in on emptying itself, devoted to harnessing the body to its strict oversight. And yet behind my paralysed husk, my mind is free to roam. Else it ought to be, but seemingly with no movement to monitor, no stasis to superintend, it has stopped on the spot. Rather than a Zen state of emptying, it always returns to this same obsession. Nothing else introjects upon its loop of how I come to be in this limbo and now that I have attained perfect stillness, it is anything but serene. Rather it agonises over the bitter irony of achieving the ultimate stasis. A tableau barely vivant.
June 25, 2013
Poll - What's The Best Time Travel Movie?
It's often a source of speculation, when you ask or are asked, if you could go back in history, who would you most like to meet? Or even, if you could go back in time and change events, would you? Would you assassinate Hitler before he came to power? It's an endless source of fascination to us humans as we try and project ourselves out of our own timelines.
But there's a logical paradox at the heart of such speculation. If you did indeed travel back and kill Hitler thus averting World War 2, then there would be no future in which World War 2 had happened and therefore no need for you to travel back from any such future to kill Hitler.
My novel "Time After Time" tries to deal with theses paradoxes of time travel in a humorous way. And the inspiration behind it? The "Terminator" movie, in which Arnie Schwarzenegger's Cyborg travels back to the past to prevent the future leader of the resistance against the machines from being born...
So in honour of my veneration of all time travel movies, I'd love to find out which are your favourites of all time. Please vote in the poll in the sidebar to the right and let's see if we can see which is the most popular. If your favourite isn't in the list, please leave it in the comments box.
If you're interested in my thoughts on each of the movies listed in the poll, here they are:
For me the Daddy of them all, although the time travel aspect isn't always the first thing that comes to people's mind when they talk about it. I love this movie, logical flaws and all. Brilliantly plotted, slyly about our own times rather than anything futuristic, although it's clear that were we to stay on our current course, we would end up in the dystopia shown at the start of the film. Arnie is of course perfect as the emotionless machine.
The first of the real historical figures travelling out of time movies in this list, instead of someone in the present travelling back to meet real historical people, this projects that sci-fi author HG Wells actually built his time machine, but Jack the Ripper uses it to escape the forces of law and order and lands up in the future - our present - which he finds most conducive to his murderous predilections. Wells travels forward in time to bring him back to justice. a good little film which I saw on its release as a teen and just remember how gory it was. I bet if I saw it now it would seem really tame, a mixture of my being older and our own thresholds having been pushed into accepting more.
This was an unexpected little gem of a movie I had no expectations of but turned out to be really rather good. A man is projected back for a very limited time to try and discover who planted a catastrophic bomb on a commuter train in order to get him back in time one final occasion to prevent it. Each time he eliminates another suspect, only partly diverted by his attraction to a woman, who like everyone else will die if he doesn't find the bomber.
One of those films about returning to the same moment each time and trying to alter its outcome, of which there are several
Terry Gilliam has possibly the best visual imagination of any film-maker, but he lacks the restraint always to harness it completely. This film being early in his career meant he was reasonably reined in and it's a cracking film, visually beautiful, funny and endearing as a schoolboy travels back to various historical eras and meets denizens like Napoleon, Agamemnon and Robin Hood (John Cleese playing himself playing Robin Hood, very funny). Utterly charming. I haven't seen it in an age, I need to watch it again methinks.
Early on in the movie, a character tells us not to even try and work out the logical paradoxes of time travel and the film accordingly makes no effort to justify its own internal logic. Thus it becomes an empty exercise in style to my mind. It does look great, but is completely unsatisfying and forgettable the moment your cinema seat tips upright and you stand up on the spilled popcorn.
Do you know I've never seen any of the films in the BTTF franchise? Must be the only person in the Western World. No particular reason, just never sat down to watch them even on TV. Don't know, may be a bit too Oedipal for me!
This is one great movie, (oh look it's Terry Gilliam again) splitting between two epochs, as Bruce Willis' character from a dystopian future is sent back to try and secure a sample of the deadly virus that forces mankind underground in his own time. But then I saw the original French short film "La Jetée" on which "12 Monkeys" is based and it just blew me away. it has more profound things to say about time travel and meeting yourself in the past and future than most films. And it's a silent film largely told in stills. Amazing.
On first viewing, a clever film about being utterly stuck in time, forced to repeat the same day over and over again. But on second watching it didn't stand up quite so well. I guess it only worked when you didn't know what was coming next, but once seen through, wasn't worth a return visit. Bit like a Ghost Train ride, or "Being John Malcovich"
Woody Allen hadn't made a decent film in years (in this humble critic's opinion). But this evidenced a return to form as Owen Wilson's character travels back temporally but not spatially to the Paris of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cocteau, Toklas and the giants of Modernism who inhabited Paris in the 1920s. One of those speculative films about what it might be like meeting great historical figures, this time artists rather than politicians in power. It was so engaging, one could even forgive the unfortunate self-indulgences of the self-involved middling writing that Wilson's character was made to be by Allen.
I hadn't read the book of this, so when I finally saw it recently on TV for the first time, I don't know how far it sticks or deviates from the novel. But I thought the film at least was terrible. The logic of him appearing and disappearing and turning up in different times seemed completely unanchored, while its build up was merely to a great big (little) fizzle of an ending.
How can you not love a film that takes liberties with everything it touches, plus has Joss Ackland as the baddie? Not a serious contender for one of the great time travelling movies, but good fun all the same. Whatever happened to Alex Winter?
But there's a logical paradox at the heart of such speculation. If you did indeed travel back and kill Hitler thus averting World War 2, then there would be no future in which World War 2 had happened and therefore no need for you to travel back from any such future to kill Hitler.
My novel "Time After Time" tries to deal with theses paradoxes of time travel in a humorous way. And the inspiration behind it? The "Terminator" movie, in which Arnie Schwarzenegger's Cyborg travels back to the past to prevent the future leader of the resistance against the machines from being born...
So in honour of my veneration of all time travel movies, I'd love to find out which are your favourites of all time. Please vote in the poll in the sidebar to the right and let's see if we can see which is the most popular. If your favourite isn't in the list, please leave it in the comments box.
If you're interested in my thoughts on each of the movies listed in the poll, here they are:
For me the Daddy of them all, although the time travel aspect isn't always the first thing that comes to people's mind when they talk about it. I love this movie, logical flaws and all. Brilliantly plotted, slyly about our own times rather than anything futuristic, although it's clear that were we to stay on our current course, we would end up in the dystopia shown at the start of the film. Arnie is of course perfect as the emotionless machine.
The first of the real historical figures travelling out of time movies in this list, instead of someone in the present travelling back to meet real historical people, this projects that sci-fi author HG Wells actually built his time machine, but Jack the Ripper uses it to escape the forces of law and order and lands up in the future - our present - which he finds most conducive to his murderous predilections. Wells travels forward in time to bring him back to justice. a good little film which I saw on its release as a teen and just remember how gory it was. I bet if I saw it now it would seem really tame, a mixture of my being older and our own thresholds having been pushed into accepting more.
This was an unexpected little gem of a movie I had no expectations of but turned out to be really rather good. A man is projected back for a very limited time to try and discover who planted a catastrophic bomb on a commuter train in order to get him back in time one final occasion to prevent it. Each time he eliminates another suspect, only partly diverted by his attraction to a woman, who like everyone else will die if he doesn't find the bomber.One of those films about returning to the same moment each time and trying to alter its outcome, of which there are several
Terry Gilliam has possibly the best visual imagination of any film-maker, but he lacks the restraint always to harness it completely. This film being early in his career meant he was reasonably reined in and it's a cracking film, visually beautiful, funny and endearing as a schoolboy travels back to various historical eras and meets denizens like Napoleon, Agamemnon and Robin Hood (John Cleese playing himself playing Robin Hood, very funny). Utterly charming. I haven't seen it in an age, I need to watch it again methinks.
Early on in the movie, a character tells us not to even try and work out the logical paradoxes of time travel and the film accordingly makes no effort to justify its own internal logic. Thus it becomes an empty exercise in style to my mind. It does look great, but is completely unsatisfying and forgettable the moment your cinema seat tips upright and you stand up on the spilled popcorn.
Do you know I've never seen any of the films in the BTTF franchise? Must be the only person in the Western World. No particular reason, just never sat down to watch them even on TV. Don't know, may be a bit too Oedipal for me!
This is one great movie, (oh look it's Terry Gilliam again) splitting between two epochs, as Bruce Willis' character from a dystopian future is sent back to try and secure a sample of the deadly virus that forces mankind underground in his own time. But then I saw the original French short film "La Jetée" on which "12 Monkeys" is based and it just blew me away. it has more profound things to say about time travel and meeting yourself in the past and future than most films. And it's a silent film largely told in stills. Amazing.
On first viewing, a clever film about being utterly stuck in time, forced to repeat the same day over and over again. But on second watching it didn't stand up quite so well. I guess it only worked when you didn't know what was coming next, but once seen through, wasn't worth a return visit. Bit like a Ghost Train ride, or "Being John Malcovich"
Woody Allen hadn't made a decent film in years (in this humble critic's opinion). But this evidenced a return to form as Owen Wilson's character travels back temporally but not spatially to the Paris of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cocteau, Toklas and the giants of Modernism who inhabited Paris in the 1920s. One of those speculative films about what it might be like meeting great historical figures, this time artists rather than politicians in power. It was so engaging, one could even forgive the unfortunate self-indulgences of the self-involved middling writing that Wilson's character was made to be by Allen.
I hadn't read the book of this, so when I finally saw it recently on TV for the first time, I don't know how far it sticks or deviates from the novel. But I thought the film at least was terrible. The logic of him appearing and disappearing and turning up in different times seemed completely unanchored, while its build up was merely to a great big (little) fizzle of an ending.
How can you not love a film that takes liberties with everything it touches, plus has Joss Ackland as the baddie? Not a serious contender for one of the great time travelling movies, but good fun all the same. Whatever happened to Alex Winter?
June 19, 2013
No Laughing Gas Matter - Friday Flash
It was never established whether the aliens, (or Nangs as they came to be called), had pre-formulated their attack plan based on intelligence gathered from our species. Since every human who had claimed to have been snatched, probed and even more improbably returned home intact save for their memories, was discounted as a raving lunatic. When the sidereal siege began, their faces displayed neither the weary recognition, nor the self-righteous “I told you so” expressions one might have anticipated. Like the vast majority of mankind, their faces revealed only fear. Or they would have done, were it not for the fiendish method of attack employed by the space boonies.
For they merely had their rockets duck down through the ozone layer, (facilitated by handy manmade ‘after-you Claude’ gouges) and proceeded to hover above the continents. The nitrous oxide waste product from burning their fuel laid down its pleasantly noxious cloak over mankind. Thus was the human race disarmed by the happy gas, even those for whom it triggered unpleasant neural memories of trips to the dentist to have teeth extracted. They more than anyone brought the palm of their hand up against their jaw, in an euphoric disbelief.
All started pointing up at the unfamiliar and the peregrine, yet rather than finding it threatening, they took the upmost dissociated delight in its very uncanniness. Not to put too fine a point on it, to a man and woman they burst out laughing. Giggling their way into subjugation. There was only ever a record of this process, since the news cameras kept rolling and broadcasting, even after their operators had abandoned them in their deracinated delight.
Save for one cohort who failed to see any funny side about being inroaded. It was only the caries of the race who were resistant to the effects of the happy fumes. Those dope heads of cocaine and heroin addiction. Either the nitrous oxide simply had no effect on them because of a built up immunity through opiate conjoined brain receptors. Or worse, the nitrous oxide shoved the opioids aside from their docking stations with the brain, yet still the laughing gas’ molecules were unable to wreak any characteristic change in the brain chemistry, due to its effects being overridden, nay trampled, under the addicts’ fury at not being able to get high on their drugs of choice. Their street dealers too were so scandalised by this extra-terrestrial muscling in on their territory, that they too batted the leavening effects of the nitrous oxide away in their cold fury.
In their customary paranoia, the sub-cohort of Rap and Jungle music stars immune to the N20 conjured a theory that the aliens were spreading the anaesthetic in order to extract all the gold in human being’s teeth. Their mouths of course being the greatest treasury of the precious metal. They armed themselves with their semi-automatic rifles and strode out in their 4X4s to protect their buccal riches.
Many of the drug addicts had been, or were still serving in the military. The very self-medication that had enabled them to endure their various conflicts in a stuporous haze, now helped fire their focused engagement in this most radical of battles. And fortunately being militarily trained, they simply manned the heavy ordnance neglected by the non- drug-addled servicemen and directed the payloads at the ships in the skies. No bunch of astral dental hygienists were going to conquer their big blue marble. They snorted and rubbed the residue of the cocaine on their fingertips into their gums and set off to kick these interplanetary dealers out of their home turf of earth.
For they merely had their rockets duck down through the ozone layer, (facilitated by handy manmade ‘after-you Claude’ gouges) and proceeded to hover above the continents. The nitrous oxide waste product from burning their fuel laid down its pleasantly noxious cloak over mankind. Thus was the human race disarmed by the happy gas, even those for whom it triggered unpleasant neural memories of trips to the dentist to have teeth extracted. They more than anyone brought the palm of their hand up against their jaw, in an euphoric disbelief.
All started pointing up at the unfamiliar and the peregrine, yet rather than finding it threatening, they took the upmost dissociated delight in its very uncanniness. Not to put too fine a point on it, to a man and woman they burst out laughing. Giggling their way into subjugation. There was only ever a record of this process, since the news cameras kept rolling and broadcasting, even after their operators had abandoned them in their deracinated delight.
Save for one cohort who failed to see any funny side about being inroaded. It was only the caries of the race who were resistant to the effects of the happy fumes. Those dope heads of cocaine and heroin addiction. Either the nitrous oxide simply had no effect on them because of a built up immunity through opiate conjoined brain receptors. Or worse, the nitrous oxide shoved the opioids aside from their docking stations with the brain, yet still the laughing gas’ molecules were unable to wreak any characteristic change in the brain chemistry, due to its effects being overridden, nay trampled, under the addicts’ fury at not being able to get high on their drugs of choice. Their street dealers too were so scandalised by this extra-terrestrial muscling in on their territory, that they too batted the leavening effects of the nitrous oxide away in their cold fury.
In their customary paranoia, the sub-cohort of Rap and Jungle music stars immune to the N20 conjured a theory that the aliens were spreading the anaesthetic in order to extract all the gold in human being’s teeth. Their mouths of course being the greatest treasury of the precious metal. They armed themselves with their semi-automatic rifles and strode out in their 4X4s to protect their buccal riches.
Many of the drug addicts had been, or were still serving in the military. The very self-medication that had enabled them to endure their various conflicts in a stuporous haze, now helped fire their focused engagement in this most radical of battles. And fortunately being militarily trained, they simply manned the heavy ordnance neglected by the non- drug-addled servicemen and directed the payloads at the ships in the skies. No bunch of astral dental hygienists were going to conquer their big blue marble. They snorted and rubbed the residue of the cocaine on their fingertips into their gums and set off to kick these interplanetary dealers out of their home turf of earth.
June 15, 2013
The Art Of Marketing
When I published my debut novel, I was labouring under the notion that "I'm a writer, an artiste darling, I don't grubby myself with selling and promotion". Well any self-published author knows that attitude has to go tout suite and once I'd quickly realised that if I dropped the marketing ball, no one else was going to pick it up for me.
So I threw myself, albeit somewhat blindly, into the task of trying to raise my voice "me, me, look at me, my book is worth reading" above the cacophony of every other independent artists seeking to do the same thing.
So you have to try and do something a little bit different to stand out from the crowd. And while I'm far from definitively saying that the things I did have been successful in promoting sales or increasing my visibility in the throng, I did learn three things.
1) Marketing is actually quite fun, not least the interactions on social media and with bloggers prepared to review or interview you
2) It is also creative, using different muscles to fiction writing, but still definitely a creative process in itself
3) It actually started feeding back and informing the type of writing I was doing, as I discovered new techniques and platforms through engaging with the world of design.
One of the things I came up with to promote that debut novel, was to commission 3 graphic representations of snatches of the novel. All were thematically linked in terms of them involving 'primordial soups' of letters yet to be formed into recognisable words, passing through mechanisms whereby they emerged into words and sentences from the novel. This way of breaking words down into their constituent letters was something I had been playing around with to little effect. But under the impetus of trying to think in marketing terms, it suddenly came together. I commissioned my book cover designer to produce the following three designs:
Another creative offshoot stemmed from me thinking about how to boost my forlorn little blog once I'd launched my debut. I'd never considered myself a blogger, still don't really. But through Twitter I discovered this online community of writers penning very short or flash fiction (stories of 1000 words or less). The community was called Friday Flash and every Friday its members would tweet out links to a new piece of flash fiction for others to read and comment while they read others in turn. I'd never even heard of flash fiction let alone written one, but I dipped my toe in the water and found that the restriction of 1000 words made me think about all aspects of the writing craft. At the beginning of this video, I talk for about 3 minutes on the art of writing the shortest of short fiction.
I set myself the target of writing a flash piece every week for a year and found I carried on beyond that. Then one day I looked back through these stories and was struck by the fact that I now had enough material for my follow up book to the debut novel - a collection of 52 of the best of these stories. I never planned it this way, but now I have three collections published of something I had only embarked on as a way of showcasing my work to promote my novel!
I'm not sure exactly when I discovered kinetic typography. But it was the natural extension of my interest in typography and trying to make work that wasn't monolithic blocks of printed text. What I call non-linear fiction to match the non-linear thought processes of our minds. (It's only the written word that proceeds in orderly, syntactical fashion of words, sentences, paragraphs and pages. The thinking and speaking mind is a lot less regularly structured). I'd given much though to the shaping of the text on a page contributing to the narrative, feeding into the meaning. Think Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves".for an example. But why restrict myself to the printed page for such things, especially when I could never realistically afford the bespoke printing costs, while Kindle formatting wouldn't allow it within its limited functionality.
Examples of kinetic typography videos abound, where the animation of the text adds nothing other than to echo the voice over. I wanted to produce a video where the very animation of the letters was crucial to the meaning of the narrative itself; that without it, the text would be much more the poorer. The animated letters weren't there as mere garnish, but informed the very meaning of the words they spelled out. In this case, the words were mutating and morphing into words that were close in the make up of the letters spelling them out, but with radically different meaning. So 'months' becomes 'mumps' and 'apposite' becomes 'opposite'.
Whenever I make videos around my writing, I always try to keep in mind that the video should have the same relationship to the writing work that videos do to the pop song; that is it's there ostensibly to promote the song, but it is an art work in its own right, because the visual medium is different to the aural one and a slavish reproduction of the song just wouldn't work. The same thing holds between the visual medium and the written one. But it goes further than that, digital literature can become a literary medium in its own right; such as I hope I demonstrate with the kinetic typography video and the graphics above. And yet all of these things were propelled initially through marketing conventionally written books made up of blocks of text. The distinction between marketing and creative writing and fiction is breaking down in the digital age.
June 14, 2013
All literature is fan fiction...
Writers of genre or commercial fiction can often be heard complaining about snobbery towards their work from writers of literary fiction and bemoaning that they are never recognised for literary prizes. For their part literary fiction writers can be heard bemoaning the huge sales figures of certain genre writers.
Yet both cohorts will unite in their scorn towards writers of Fan Fiction. Yet fan fiction is a well-established and successful (in terms of garnering significant numbers of readers) literary phenomenon. Other authors have no right to criticise it. As I said it is successful in its own terms, provides material that readers want to read and poses no competitive threat to writers of genre or literary fiction, as indeed neither of them pose a threat to each other. Readers will find and read what they choose to read, so writers (and marketers) cannot be tribal about these things and try and close off options for readers). If authors don't care to read fan fiction themselves, then simply don't read it. There is no need to rag on the literary form. I don't read fan fiction because I don't watch any of the shows or films that are usually the inspiration for them and if I have seen the odd movie, I don't tend to have the undying devotion to the characters or the actors in it. But I would still fight to my dying breath for the right of other writers to draw on those characters and scenarios in their own fictional output.
But the snobbery is not only misguided from an etiquette or self-interested point of view, it's also hypocritical. All writing is a form of fan fiction. Any author might (or perhaps should) ask themselves what made them want to be a novelist? Chances are it was either some books or particular authors which inspired them. Read an interview with them and they'll offer up their favourite books. There are very few authors who come to writing without having first read formative works of literature, whatever their canon. We are all dwarves squatting on the shoulders of giants, for the novel has not changed significantly in its form since the first novels started appearing.
So when literary prize short-listed author Lloyd Jones calls his book "Mister Pip" which draws on both the character and plot of Dickens' "Great Expectations" we are asked to applaud its literariness not decry it as posh fan fiction. Or when Jasper Fforde writes his novels playing games with classic texts, we are asked to play spot the literary reference, not moan how derivative the characters feel. How many versions of William Burroughs or Charles Bukowski's works have you read in the fiction that followed them? Not intended as homages or pastiches, but as the outpourings of writers under their sway for their own literary education.
I have always felt that musicians are much more up front about their creative influences and how they draw on them in their work. It seems that the literary writers draw just as heavily, but far more furtively on their literary heroes, because rare is it that they openly acknowledge their sources, preferring instead to embed them and leave for literary detectives to discover. At least Fforde and Jones are explicit in acknowledging their source texts.
So next time a writer is sat at their keyboard, poised to slam the practitioners of fan fiction, take a breath and have a think about which writers you have drawn on in your own work and honour your fandom of your predecessors.
Yet both cohorts will unite in their scorn towards writers of Fan Fiction. Yet fan fiction is a well-established and successful (in terms of garnering significant numbers of readers) literary phenomenon. Other authors have no right to criticise it. As I said it is successful in its own terms, provides material that readers want to read and poses no competitive threat to writers of genre or literary fiction, as indeed neither of them pose a threat to each other. Readers will find and read what they choose to read, so writers (and marketers) cannot be tribal about these things and try and close off options for readers). If authors don't care to read fan fiction themselves, then simply don't read it. There is no need to rag on the literary form. I don't read fan fiction because I don't watch any of the shows or films that are usually the inspiration for them and if I have seen the odd movie, I don't tend to have the undying devotion to the characters or the actors in it. But I would still fight to my dying breath for the right of other writers to draw on those characters and scenarios in their own fictional output.
But the snobbery is not only misguided from an etiquette or self-interested point of view, it's also hypocritical. All writing is a form of fan fiction. Any author might (or perhaps should) ask themselves what made them want to be a novelist? Chances are it was either some books or particular authors which inspired them. Read an interview with them and they'll offer up their favourite books. There are very few authors who come to writing without having first read formative works of literature, whatever their canon. We are all dwarves squatting on the shoulders of giants, for the novel has not changed significantly in its form since the first novels started appearing.
So when literary prize short-listed author Lloyd Jones calls his book "Mister Pip" which draws on both the character and plot of Dickens' "Great Expectations" we are asked to applaud its literariness not decry it as posh fan fiction. Or when Jasper Fforde writes his novels playing games with classic texts, we are asked to play spot the literary reference, not moan how derivative the characters feel. How many versions of William Burroughs or Charles Bukowski's works have you read in the fiction that followed them? Not intended as homages or pastiches, but as the outpourings of writers under their sway for their own literary education.
I have always felt that musicians are much more up front about their creative influences and how they draw on them in their work. It seems that the literary writers draw just as heavily, but far more furtively on their literary heroes, because rare is it that they openly acknowledge their sources, preferring instead to embed them and leave for literary detectives to discover. At least Fforde and Jones are explicit in acknowledging their source texts.
So next time a writer is sat at their keyboard, poised to slam the practitioners of fan fiction, take a breath and have a think about which writers you have drawn on in your own work and honour your fandom of your predecessors.
June 13, 2013
Type-O Negative - Friday Flash
I wax exposed to a nuclear weak and irradiated. Jet I sack tor any superpowers.
That is not to sly I cave suppered no ilk effects. Strange tyings hyphen to my speech.
Thy wards chat come oft my youth mute hate with calf-lice decry. Problem id, I fever knot whether ant cord I react fir decoys or nit. Which kill star uncharged add chose phat altar.
On by mint I dear emery lord raid property. I pant sell whet ores ore uddered prong.
O bring middle, contusion, chaos in my cake, end there's pimply dada I man do about if. Isotope Gird mould be my superzero nave. Schrodinger's Cut, is the cot alike or lead unseem in the licked box?
I do bind it old slat tie pecan protest stall weaves seal fords in plate, gust diffident owes. Ifs fandom, wangles leaning, bit whale bards kelp infant.
It's setting horse, the sepoy ie spending us. She fate or delay accepting mire betters.
Hell my sleaze. Cleave I bug yob
I was exposed to a nuclear leak and irradiated. Yet I lack for any superpowers.
That is not to say I have suffered no ill effects. Strange things happen to my speech.
The words that come out my mouth mutate with half-life decay. Problem is, I never know whether any word I reach for decays or not. Which will stay unchanged and those that alter.
In my mind I hear every word said properly. I can't tell what ones are uttered wrong.
I bring muddle, confusion, chaos in my wake, and there's simply nada I can do about it. Isotope Girl would be my superhero name. Schrodinger's Cat, is the cat alive or dead unseen in the locked box?
I do find it odd that the decay process still leaves real words in place, just different ones. It's random, mangles meaning, but whole words keep intact.
It's getting worse, the decay is speeding up. The rate of decay effecting more letters.
Help me please. Please I beg you.
That is not to sly I cave suppered no ilk effects. Strange tyings hyphen to my speech.
Thy wards chat come oft my youth mute hate with calf-lice decry. Problem id, I fever knot whether ant cord I react fir decoys or nit. Which kill star uncharged add chose phat altar.
On by mint I dear emery lord raid property. I pant sell whet ores ore uddered prong.
O bring middle, contusion, chaos in my cake, end there's pimply dada I man do about if. Isotope Gird mould be my superzero nave. Schrodinger's Cut, is the cot alike or lead unseem in the licked box?
I do bind it old slat tie pecan protest stall weaves seal fords in plate, gust diffident owes. Ifs fandom, wangles leaning, bit whale bards kelp infant.
It's setting horse, the sepoy ie spending us. She fate or delay accepting mire betters.
Hell my sleaze. Cleave I bug yob
I was exposed to a nuclear leak and irradiated. Yet I lack for any superpowers.
That is not to say I have suffered no ill effects. Strange things happen to my speech.
The words that come out my mouth mutate with half-life decay. Problem is, I never know whether any word I reach for decays or not. Which will stay unchanged and those that alter.
In my mind I hear every word said properly. I can't tell what ones are uttered wrong.
I bring muddle, confusion, chaos in my wake, and there's simply nada I can do about it. Isotope Girl would be my superhero name. Schrodinger's Cat, is the cat alive or dead unseen in the locked box?
I do find it odd that the decay process still leaves real words in place, just different ones. It's random, mangles meaning, but whole words keep intact.
It's getting worse, the decay is speeding up. The rate of decay effecting more letters.
Help me please. Please I beg you.
June 7, 2013
Quickie Divorce
Quickie Divorce
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