Marc Nash's Blog, page 48

New Editors - Friday Flash

I opened my email and there it was. Exactly a month to the day that I'd hit send. I may have sweated blood to meet my deadline for delivery, but the response seemed goadingly effortless in its precision arrival.

I always hated this moment. Even though it always redounded to my benefit and I usually could find nothing to argue against, not even for the sake of form. I downloaded the attachment. My original manuscript, though after this metamorphosis at the steadfast hand of my editor, could it still even be said to be mine anymore? The truth about my fiction lay at hand, highlighted on my desktop.

I think I was probably squinting through half-closed eyes such was my trepidation. Track changes was harder on the eye than the editor's former method of red pen. For such a stickler to the pre-determined standards of grammar, she wasn't averse to adopting the new technologies. My eyes could barely take in the text. It seemed to be dancing on my plasma screen before me. I blinked my eyes to clear the fug. The letters were still spinning, melting and mutating. What's going on here? No word seemed to stay still long enough in its arrangement of letters for me to be able to read it.
Damn, seems somewhere between her computer and mine, we'd contracted one of those viruses beloved of Microsoft Word that ensconces itself in the macros exchanged like lovers’ fluids. I immediately hit my anti-virus clean up app and trashed the document and purged it forever from my computer. I picked up the phone and dialled.

"Hi Clara? It's me Gil"
"Hi Gil". Now my editor was never one of those profuse in warmth or who called all her authors "Darling", but she sounded remote even for her. The voice resonated metallically.
"Look, I think you accidentally passed me a virus when you sent my manuscript"
"You got it alright then"

"No, I don't think you-" she sounded like she was calling from a railway concourse or something. One of those big open spaces that compresses the voice and scoops up all the background noise as screams and shrieks. Only I was sure I had called her on her office landline...
"It's settled down then?" she intoned.

"What do you mean 'settled down'? Is it just some new formatting thing?"

"No, it's only about the words and letters"

"What are you talking about Clara?"
"The Guild of Editors grew weary of receiving an endless stream of poorly written and composed manuscripts, fixing them up, or rather saving them, turning them into publishable books all with receiving nothing more than a thank you in the acknowledgements-"
"But that's your job. And thanks for saying we authors can't write". Again those high pitched, distorted squeals in the background. With plenty of banging. Was she at a child's birthday tea party? Who'd ever let her near children?

"So we did something about it. We developed an app that would mend your manuscripts with the minimum of effort on our parts. It takes your texts and runs its own analytics on the words and edits them. We call it the ‘Hundred Monkeys and their Typewriters’ app"

"Is that what I can hear in the background? A monkeys’ tea party?"

"Of course not. It's a silent computer app"

"Well what is that noise around you? And why do you sound so... odd?"
"Goodbye Gil. It was nice working with you". She hung up. What did she mean by that? Whatever lay behind it might explain why she was sounding so distant. I decided to take her at her word that it wasn't a virus and once again downloaded the manuscript from her e-mail and opened it.

I stared bemusedly at the jumble on my monitor. My text so irradiated, that it was mutating. The letters possessing a half-life as they decayed into different words before my very eyes. It was impossible to catch any word before it changed. I started a series of screen grabs to try and capture the process.
prison prism like ambergris... prison prism dike ambidextrous jism
Nip tuck plastic surgery chicken neck...  Nipple clamp tuxedo spandex sugary cock nectar

Oh this was hopeless. It's just gibberish. Would it never end? I tried ringing Clara again but I couldn't get hold of her. Time to nab me a new editor it seemed. I made some calls, but none of the editors would even pick up. Maybe she wasn't kidding when she said all the editors were in it together. I spoke to a couple of my fellow writer friends, but they couldn't confirm or rebut anything since they didn't currently have manuscripts with editors.
I contacted the Writers' Guild and while they said they'd heard rumours of the Hundred Monkeys app, they sniffily remarked that if anything it had put the editors out of work and that maybe that accounted for the automated sound of my former editor's voice. That she had already been replaced by a machine. My triumphantly human correspondent from the Writers Guild assured me that there would always be a need for authors no matter the black magic practised on out texts by other interlopers in the publishing process, since we were the ones with the creative ideas and drive.

While vaguely comforted, I still needed to decide what to do with my manuscript. While the literary Turing Machine on my computer had finally finished its churning, I just shut it off without daring to peruse its final version. I resolved to self-publish my original manuscript myself, but allowed that it could probably do with one last edit on my part.

Twelve weeks later and with gratifyingly few alterations to the book, I formatted it for e-publishing. But when I tried to upload it, I was informed that a book with the same title by the same author, to wit me, was already published. Publication date some twelve weeks ago. I bought a copy and started reading it. It was pure filth to be honest. Made me blush. I was struck by an idea and searched out the finished product of my manuscript after the 100 Monkeys' treatment. And word for word it was the same. They had published my book right after this edit. Without any input from me, the writer. The gall of it. My hard boiled thriller turned into this pornography. The only thing was, I caught sight of the book's position in the sales chart. Maybe the Hundred Monkey editors knew what they were doing after all...

Staring At The Sun - Friday Flash

He pinched the bridge of his nose. When he removed his fingers, it seemed as though a flyaway strand of hair had been caught up in his pincer and now dangled irritatingly over his eye. He must have failed to dislodge the follicle, for it still caused his vision to writhe and squirm. He sent his fingers on a sortie, careful to draw his nails in like a cat with its claws when preening itself. And still the prickling sensation continued, as his brain fired barrage after barrage in protest at this trespass on its visual cortex.
It didn't feel like  piece of grit, since there was none of the usual burning sensation that usually accompanied such a thing. He bathed the eye in water and though that appeared to have shifted the interloper, soon enough back came the impression as he was drying his face with a towel. He pressed his face right up close into his mirror and lifted his reptilian lid to scour for the troublesome detached cilium. The problem was his hair was turning grey, so it was harder to isolate in contrast to his skin tone.
Still there was nothing there. He didn't like to do this much, since he didn't like to admit he was growing older, but he even put on his spectacles to try and bear down on the invisible interloper. It only made things worse, like a magnifying glass, though he still couldn't find anything trespassing across the focal plane of his lens.
He removed his specs and scanned them for fluff, dust or hair of their own. He wiped them clean on his shirt, maybe it was the little stains in the glass itself. But no amount of polishing yielded him any better vision. He inspected the goggles and was appalled at just how much gunk and grime was wedged beneath the nose pads. He cleaned it out with a pin and noted its flocculent texture. It was disgusting, especially when he considered that he donned his glasses so rarely and yet here was such an accumulation of his shed skin, pressed and layered beneath the pads' plastic.
But no amount of scouring ameliorated the hairline crack laying across his sight. If anything it had got worse, now taking on the appearance of some of the strands of a spider's web. He even convinced himself he could see part of the bloated body of the spider. Clearly his mind was running away with itself and playing tricks on him. He was so damn tired and that couldn't have been helping his overwrought brain.
As he turned his head in despair, his glass lenses seemed to catch the bathroom light in them right at the side of his vision. That was all he needed to compound his current inconvenience. He switched the light out and two tiny electrical flashes seemed to fizz across the periphery of his perception. Or just below where the glass lenses ended. This was getting ridiculous. Now his addled brain must have been overcompensating, or going into hyper-drive perhaps, as he failed to clear this agitation from its sensory apparatus. He could take a hint, he needed to go to bed and wake up fresh, when hopefully his brain would have settled and the hair itself might have been shaken free.
The next morning he awoke and while not quite a Gregor Samsa moment of imagining himself turned into a cockroach, it did appear as though an insect might have inhabited him and was busy crawling across his retina. He shook his head, partly to clear his watery vision, but also in terror. He slowly unsheathed the eyelid, but still some mote was fluttering and wafting there. It was like viewing bacteria under a microscope. That his eye had become a petri dish prison and insects were slithering over his eyeball. He felt turned utterly inside out. Tears on the inside of his peepers.
He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. Again two shooting lightning bolts seared past him. He saw them and yet knew that they weren't there, so that it was his brain which had extrapolated or maybe constructed them. So much for his rested and clear grey cells. Perhaps such corsucations were an after-image of the brain's flare of distress. Perhaps he was being afforded an insight into the brain's electrical transmissions themselves?
He got out of bed. Standing on the floor, his eyes were filled with laboriously moving flecks, like the motion of a lava lamp. They formed shadows on his vision and this freaked him out as he wondered if he was losing his vision entirely? Was there a micro-organism living inside his eyes, scuttling over his irises so that they amplified their own size like when a bug crawls over a movie projector? Either it was on the move the whole time, or there were many of them. A veritable army of invaders parasiting his brain perhaps?
Though such notions made him feel queasy, he managed to stumble over to his computer. Squinting through his compromised eye, he managed to discover that he was probably experiencing floaters. Just like the degrading ozone layer that protects the earth from the sun's rays, the protective gelatinous barrier of his own eyes was deteriorating. Thus light was being refracted in strange, debilitating ways his brain was struggling to process. Or else it was projecting shadows where none had previously existed. He flopped back against his chair with relief, that at least he wasn't playing host to some alien invasion. He knew floaters were not themselves threatening blindness or any more serious impairment.
But then he was struck with a wave of despondency. It still represented a decaying, a degeneration of his physical being. Another marker on the migration towards death. And everyday now, he would have reminders of putrefaction's flies hovering right in front of him where they could not be denied. The veil of permanent darkness was drawing in over him.

Perhaps unsurprisingly this story was prompted by me waking up a couple of weeks ago and having these strange sensations appearing in my vision in my right eye. it took me a couple of days to figure out what they were and then I had to go get checked out that there was no retinal damage causing them, which it turned out there wasn't. This was merely a feature of aging and I haven't even reched 50 yet! 

Acting Out - Friday Flash

He religiously viewed every programme he appeared in. He'd played detectives, uniforms, white-suited forensic officers, witnesses and persons of interest. (though for some reason, never the murderer, perhaps because of his good looks and the producers' executive decision that a murderer had to look evil). He could portray evil, he'd once played Iago at High School. But no dice, as with his whole acting career which had never taken off, not even second spear carrier in a local community production. Hence he'd eked out a career doing bit parts in crime reconstruction shows.
All the roles he'd played, shared the same fate as that of the corpse, (which he'd also played on occasion), you never heard their words. You heard them speak, but their actual words were muted low in order that the voice-over cut across it. He never understood why sometimes they were even given scripts, or else encouraged to improvise, if the words didn't matter a dime. The real detectives and forensic officers were the voices that demanded to be heard. They were placed central in the mix. And through their expertise, the corpse got to tell its story after all. So in the final reckoning he was always more mute even than the corpse.
But not today. Today he was dressed in a sheriff's uniform and armed with a badge. Yet he wasn't on any set, nor even on a location shoot. They may have been making shows where attention to the smallest detail was uppermost, but TV production companies were rather lax about their own security. And so he had smuggled out a uniform. Was the badge authentic? It would be good enough to gain him ingress.
The uniform he'd plucked meant that his next appearance would have to be in Texas. Inevitably, it would only be Texas or California. No point him stealing a uniform of law enforcement in Delaware or Oregon, the serious crimes there were too few and far between. No, thank god for the bloodlust of Tx and Ca.
He'd driven for three nights to get to the right county to match his assumed jurisdiction. He was proved correct when the combined authority of the uniform and badge granted him an invite across the threshold of the remote farmhouse. He withdrew the knife, (the gun that came with the borrowed uniform was only a replica) and plunged it into the belly of the man. The victim slumped to his knees, but the would-be killer knew that he had to move into overdrive. For he had to set the scene for the experts.
In the case of a home invader disturbed in the act, the tendency would be for a quick stabbing and then fleeing the scene, since the primary aim was burglary, not murder. The randomness of how the killer and the victim come to be brought together makes it hard for the police to get to the identity of the former, because there is no overt connection. But this is where his plotting kicked in. Though this was to be a stranger killing, he wanted to muddy the waters further, to throw the so-called professionals off the scent.
Hence he thrust the knife once more into his helpless victim. He tried to work up a frenzy of stabbing, but he found it tough going. (He had considered trying the act with his left-hand, but he wasn't confident that having never stabbed anyone before that he could successfully execute it wrong-handed). The knife seemed heavier and more resistant each time he tried to extract it from the man's flesh. He would have thrown up, had he not summoned up his old Stanislavski technique to offset the physical repulsion with some happier affective memories.
Finally the man toppled over fully and he listened for his death rattle as the breath ebbed away from him. Now came the time for full misdirection. The excess of sharp force trauma might suggest a psychopathic killer. He had idled with the thought of imitating an extant serial killer's MO, but he knew from the shows that copycats never quite reproduced the signature of their inspiration which always tripped them up as clumsy imitators. Besides, this was all about making his own voice heard for once, though of course no one was to know that it was his voice. He had also flirted with the notion of bringing misleading clues to drop at the scene, but his research had shown that The Manson Family's attempts to misdirect with random objects and bloody messages daubed in blood had ultimately helped guide the police to them. No extraneous props. They tripped murderers up as much as they did actors on stage.
He wanted to suggest that he and the murderee were in fact acquainted. But the bluff and counterbluff would be enhanced by pretending to cover it up as a stranger murder, like a home invasion gone wrong. Donning his gloves, he rifled through the house, careful to look as though he was searching for riches, but leaving obvious boons intact. Thus tipping off future investigators that robbery was not really the motive.
Then there was his mode of entry. While flashing his badge had allowed him unforced entry, he now had to counterfeit a burglar's entrance. He went to the French Windows and let himself out through them. You'd be surprised how many fools punch out the glass from the inside so the shards fall outside. Dead giveaway that it's been done after the event. Even those smart enough to punch out the glass from the outside, don't realise that the CSI guys can tell whether that glass has been walked on or remains pristine. If the latter, it means no robber came in through the windows. So he marched through the broken glass strewn across the carpet.
Satisfied with his own mental check-list, he peeled off his clothes and put them into a bag. He would conceal them in full-sight back at a TV studio, simply adding them to the laundry basket of soiled costumes. He wasn't sure if they were thoroughly cleaned or just thrown out as unusable. Those that had screen blood and gore caked on to them at least. And another benefit of dear old Texas, was that his wide-brimmed sheriff's hat had allowed him to secrete a hair net beneath, thus ensuring there were no stray strands of DNA-laden hair to betray him.
One final survey around the crime scene determined that his Method had been faultless. His only regret was that as the case was likely never to be solved, he had no chance of appearing in a programme reconstructing it in the future.

The Moral Responsibility of The Author - part 3

In two earlier posts, I discussed the moral responsibility of the author with regards to copycat violence and involving oneself in the real lives of those you're writing about with reference to Stephen King and Harriet Sergeant. 

I just happened to have finished reading a novel by acclaimed Crime Thriller writer Jo Nesbo. And it threw up another slant on the same question of just how much moral responsibility does an author bear?

Now crime fiction inevitably deals with the unpleasant side of humanity as we prey upon one another within the pages of such books. Murders, rapes, torture, and all manner of amoral or beastly behaviour towards our fellow man are the meat and drink of the genre. So one is already wallowing in a moral quagmire in dealing with the genre. If such subject matter repulses, the chances are you won't read it.

Now I don't read much of it, not because of moral repugnance or squeamishness, but mainly because I find it a limited genre, especially when applied to series. Nesbo has a detective character called Harry Hole who has been central to the action in nine of his books. I struggle with the fresh revelation in each book of some new character trait or personal history in Hole that somehow was never pertinent in any of the previous books. So I've only read 3 of the 9 books.

In "The Redeemer" the book opens with an under-age rape. The bulk of the action moves to take place when all concerned are adults. The victim has eschewed sex, partly from the trauma of her experiences and partly due to her Christian faith as she remains unwed (the book's action takes place in the world of the Norwegian Salvation Army). However, she is prepared to break her self-prohibition (and a tenet of her faith) when she falls for Harry Hole in the course of his investigation of a murder.

Now I find this problematic. Harry Hole can "cure" rape victims of their fear just through his sheer magnetism. Hole is quintessentially associated with Nesbo, though of course he is a fictional creation. But I cannot help but feel there is an element of Nesbo's own conscious or unconscious fantasy as to how he may see himself projected on to Hole. Even if I'm mistaken in this supposition, it's still a highly problematic concept and one I think that oversteps the moral mark. Men 'curing' women simply by their own physical allure is not a line I think ought to be casually dropped in as a plot device or some characterisation. Nesbo handles the woman's Road To Damascus conversion really unconvincingly, with some really cringeworthy sentiments expressed by her towards Hole, as she throws herself at him with a mixture of chasteness, callowness and natural sexuality bursting out.

Maybe such a point seems churlish in a book that starts off with rape and involves murder and dismemberment. Maybe it's wrong to assume the reader accepts these criminal activities as par for the course, but I just feel that this notion of curing a rape victim is not such a common or garden part of the crime world and needed picking up for debate rather than just slipping under the radar.

What do you think?

Crush - Friday Flash

He arrested his pumping thrust mid-stroke. Stout-hearted oak almost toppled over the card sharper operating on the sidewalk. Nearly induced a cardiac-attack. The man gathered up his ill-gotten gains into a sac and transplanted his procedure elsewhere. Somewhere less congested.
Heart in mouth, bated breath in suspended lungs. Could it possibly be?
His heart missed a beat as he distended his neck to search out his bypassed Miss.
That old throb started tugging at his core. His organ burning in his chest. The blood pulsing around his veins at a rate of knots, tingling agonisingly. His heartstrings tangled like a cats cradle. He shot his shirtsleeves tight over his wrists to try and venesect the pressure. But it was too late. The heart of the matter was indeed his heart. A resuscitated pang for his love. A one woman love infarction. That heart stopper and head turner had just crossed his path again. Encased in a sable stole.
And then the old ticker skipped as did his stride. There she was moving at a cracking lick. It was his heartfelt wish to see her, to talk to her again. He gathered up his pace- making. Heartily, lustily. His ticker hammering away at his ribs like a xylophone with joyous excitement. He put his hand over his chest to see that his fit-to-bursting heart was still contained within. Still in the right place.
The motor was powering his legs like pistons. Systole... as he bounced up in his stride. Diastole on the downstroke, although he felt he was being carried along on a cushion of richly oxygenated air.
She entered the revolving door of a hotel. He followed her directly in the next glass chamber behind. She contracted sight of him and missed her opening into the atrium, instead going round another circuit. Her lashes fluttered and his heart responded in kind. But hers was a double-take quickly followed by a double declutch of her expression. A look more dagger than arrow to the heart. Tricuspid valve slamming shut on him like a tomb, rather than Cupid's airy flight. Furry venous, not Venus in Furs. His heart sunk with displaced hope. Footsore and heartsick. He knew in his heart of hearts that they were never to be heart and soulmates.
Murmuring to himself, he slowed his rate and let her heart-free into the bosom of the lobby. As he re-emerged back into the arteries of the city, the smell of warming cockles from a stall rendered his sclerotic muscle into a ball of wrinkles.
Heartbroken.

Theatre Versus the Novel

Award winning author Mark Haddon ("The Curious Incident Of the Dog In the Night Time") is about to stage his own book in a London West End theatre. That's a journey I made in the opposite direction, starting out writing plays and then moving into writing prose. Of course in terms of success and status, Haddon and me are on the opposite ends of the spectrum, I'm almost exhibiting hubris mentioning myself in the same breath as him. But I'm only raising it as Haddon made some interesting and I believe wrong-headed, statements in an interview he gave to London newspaper "The Evening Standard".

He claims to have given up novel writing for stage plays, ( I seem to remember Zadie Smith making the same claim as she wanted to concentrate on essay writing, but she has returned to the novel form recently) "so much better for the immortal soul" Haddon is quoted. I don't quite understand what he means by that.

It's true historically the stage play is an older form of literature stretching back to the Ancient Greeks and maybe there is still some sort of ghostly cultural inheritance from that. But stage plays are as multifarious as genre fiction, through the physical theatre of the likes of Theatre de Complicité, musical theatre, cabaret and burlesque, comedies, farces, absurd and avant garde through to the political theatre and theories of Brecht, Artaud and the like.

He therefore goes on to claim that theatre goers are more open to a broader spectrum of taste, than novel readers where "those categories are much harder to leap out of". Well, when I was working in theatre, the audiences were no less tribal, as were the commissioning artistic directors. Physical theatre practitioners and the more conventional staging of plays never mixed. The interesting contemporary stuff was going on in the Fringe theatres (as well as a lot of terrible material there too), almost never in the established West End theatres. And Haddon's example of the variety of seeing an Ackybourn and then a Roy Williams play, only strikes me as being superficially removed from one another. The theatre in Britain remains a middle class audience, even if Williams writes urban plays in patois.

British theatre produces very little new, contemporary work (unlike in the 1960s and 1970s when it genuinely formed part of society's discourse with itself during these turbulent times). Any aspiring playwright worth their salt, now jumps ship to the better paid TV or film, so there are few long-established, developed careers writing for theatre. The West End is dominated by musicals or what I call tourist theatre - classic plays from the dramatic canon performed by big name actors. In that sense I do understand Haddon's "immortal soul". Or the occasional new play that becomes so successful it takes off for Hollywood anyway and the stage version is like some vestigial homage or museum exhibit to it, as with "Warhorse". Haddon is perfectly entitled to adapt his own novel for the stage, it's still not exactly new material. It will just be an interpretation of a novel brought to life for the stage. He may go on and pen plays that didn't start life as a novel, but we're not able to be at that point of the argument yet.

So while theatre has a proud back-catalogue that it is constantly reinventing with new productions, the notion of writing new works to join that immortal canon is I think risible. Can anyone name a play of the last 20 years that could honestly be said to have joined the pantheon of great dramatic works? And when Haddon bemoans the loneliness of the novel writer in contrast to the playwright who collaborates with actors, directors, set designers, choreographers and musicians, he is surprisingly out of touch for someone who has demonstrated such savvy with social media; prose writing today in the digital world absolutely offers the author opportunities to burst out of their bubble. Both with regard to collaborators in design, video and digital platforms, but more importantly to their readers who now are the equivalent of an audience sat in a theatre auditorium. Their feedback can be instantaneous and at any stage of the writing process, just like the actors and playwright can feed off the reaction of the audience sat in the stalls. I don't know if Haddon is aware of the multi-media, multi-collaborator project involving Will Self called Kafka's Wound. That gives a sample of the possibilities of prose in the digital age.

I really loved Haddon's book "The Curious Case..." I thought it was an uplifting triumph of prose writing. I shan't be seeing it in the theatre though. For much the same reasons I gave as to why I don't go to see film adaptations of literary novels. I'll be interested to revisit these issues when Haddon premiers a brand new play written especially for the theatre.

Threads - Friday Flash

It could go in one of two ways...

He awoke under a thatched roof as the sunlight streamed in through the straw's interstices. Shackles of light pinned him to the floor, a vestigial auspice of the convict's recent status prior to his breakout.

The forensics team built an exact replica of the shoot-out room, die stamping holes through the doors and walls where the bullets had punched into the room's interior. But it was only when they used red thread tracing the trajectories through those holes, that the room took on the appearance of a cats cradle that had raked and clawed the lives of a whole family.

He squeezed the atomiser of the spraycan, sending vapour fanning out until the fine droplets illuminated the infra-red tripwires through the filter of his night-vision goggles. He performed the action repeatedly until he had a mental map of the beams, knowing that his own sinuous movements would have to be as light and airy as that of the hairspray.

The problem with doing your own cornrows is that you can't but help pull the hair tighter away from the scalp, than when someone else was doing it for you. He missed his daughter's supple fingers that used to braid his locks for him and though his arthritic hands could still twist the braids, they were too gnarled and bent to thread the beads.

Having unpacked the six foot of DNA coiled into the cell nucleus, a gob of spit bound like Samson between two pillars, she proceeded to photograph it. Not diffraction images, of building up pictures from absences and lacunae, but actual direct light exposure, she knew would likely bring the whole damn human edifice crashing down on all their heads.

He leaned over his sink and spat blood into it, mottling the white porcelain with red until the water from the tap fretting away at its tensile strength finally overcame its resistance and swept it away towards the plughole. When finally the blood-flow had slowed so that it was just a streak of red spittle stretching down past his chin and on to the folds of his neck like a stalactite, he knew he would be avenged of this insult that same night.

It wasn't his hemophilia that did for him, seeing as the bullet had wrought destruction on too much tissue for even a fully-functioning coagulation cascade to be able to plug with platelets and clots. Lying there clutching his gut with a slow bleed, the fibrinogen chain gangs forging fibrin chains still performed their futile toil, like breaking rocks under the burning scorch of the sun.

The string ballistic trajectories emanating through slits in the surfaces, unwittingly modelled the quantum world in which the act of observation collapsed the wave function and made the bullets seemingly behave with the singularity of solid matter. Therefore the police were never able to fathom other possible behaviour patterns behind the arc of the projectiles.

Sunday Sample - The Optics View

Behold! Up behind the bar. No, the stacks. Just look at the myriad of bottles ranged there. The manifold curvatures and distinct colours of the glass. Smooth, frosted or stippled. The diversity of the labels too. Stencilled, intaglio’d, embossed, don’t you think some of them resemble miniature illuminated manuscripts?Proceed up, ever upwards, to take in the arc of a legion of necks, fluted or otherwise. Coronal bungs, corks, bulbs, twist caps, and screw threads. A fair sprinkling which echo clunky perfume atomisers. Several like delicate pillboxes, while others sinuous petals. Bee hives and mother of pearl. Russian Orthodox onion domes and shotgun cartridges. Some require waxy seals to be broken, in order to light the red touch paper. Diadems, bowler hats, pith helmets, one even simulates a pint-sized sombrero, cresting a bottle of faux tequila. All such surmountings, less akin to chivalrous doffing of their hats, more like removing the pin from a hand grenade in what they unleash.Yet when I’m in here, I’m not remotely interested in loading up on their contents. In fact, I find the house stipulation, that I must indeed temporarily desecrate the arrangement by ordering from their rank, actually sullies my pleasure. But I nurse it exclusively all evening, for I don't want to spoil my view. This is not the gaudy trompe l’oeil wrought in that dive two doors down. Where the bottles are deployed in front of mirrors to suggest a never-ending supply. For no matter what the inundation, these bottles remain singularly arrayed. If one of their rank does indeed get drained, then it is seamlessly replaced without any warp in the whole.For perched here, it's as if I'm on a hilltop, looking down at a Medieval City. With all the cathedral spires of the tall-necked bottles. The dependable stoutness of the civic bottles. The squat prosperity of the gilded bottles. The soothing blue of the main brands and so on endlessly. See how their chromatic vibrancy lifts the restraint of the bar’s dark shroud? Stained glass intensification. Saturating the light with spectral colour. This here, is my art gallery of appreciation and awe. My quiet moment of contemplative stillness. My last gasp temenos, after I profaned those of the library, the island of Corfu and the athenaeum of Greece itself. If I manage to secure a bar stool, then I get a close-up of the detailed brushwork. But I am happy to settle for a view of the whole from afar. Even with the heads of less devout pilgrims genuflecting across the panorama.I sit and I try and fathom it out. For do they not do exactly what they say on the label? 20% proof. 15% by volume. If what you see is what you get, why do they pour so much creative energy into probably what the eye normally doesn’t get to see, as the cocktail is prepared out of the line of sight? I might understand if you were in a group of friends, having a quiet night out based around conversation, then the taste of your chosen tipple might warm the cockles of your heart like a nice internal log fire. The setting of your convivial convocation might be mounted in your memory by the shape of the glass in your hand and indeed the associations of the coloured liquid it contains. Unconsciously referenced back to the bottle from which it emerged. But this is Kavos for flip sakes! Volume by volume. Proof only of insensibility. Also keeping your feet off the floor so as to avoid the runnels of piss and puke. The retrospective anecdotes will solely be about the physiological havoc wrought by the liquid propellant. The associations of rank bad behaviour attributed to the glass borne antagonist. Vapid drinking stories, long after the bubbles have gone flat. I guess you just had to be there yourself...So you see I have to ask myself. For all those gin and whisky bottles maintaining a stately and regal bearing, with classical elegance pointing to the soundness of their heritage, what then of the brash and the gaucheness of the johnny come lately brands? The bourbons and the vodkas and tequilas with sombrero lids? Why proceed to vulgarise the whole, by mixing them with all sorts of other adulterations in the form of the cocktail, in misguided pursuit of sophistication? There, it’s on the menu. Order by number and stupid compound name to conjure up what personal intimation? A Harvey Wallbanger yes, does just what it says, but Between The Sheets? A Black Russian? Ooh er Missus, saucy postcards from foreign resorts. What need for escapist figments, when you already have it all on tap here in the most trite and unvarnished manner. Alcohol, the paint stripper of civilisation’s veneer. Bottled up rage, uncorked and decanted from something so beautiful to look at. A siren luring you to a monstrous fate.

from "A,B&E" available on Amazon Kindle

Calliope, Caltrops And Cantos - Friday Flash

He reached back into his quiver and strung a fine quilled verse into the arched bow of his lips. He released the quivering tension within the shaft of his glossa and hurled the finely crafted heroic quatrain at his adversary. His aim was directly targeted between the other's eyes.
The other man raised his forearm up to his own brow, seemingly in a gesture of warding off a powerful blow. But his arm continued its motion over his hair as if peeling off a layer to directly access his own cranium beneath. His other hand flicked up over his mouth, then his nose and out toward his rival and brought in its stead a cataract of iambic pentameter projecting from his mouth like a Catherine Wheel. A furious fusillade of frenetic phonic flow. It felled his foe, who ricocheted back into the amplifiers like a skalded cat. But the conqueror did not refrain form his flow in order to don the proffered victor's laurel wreath. Instead he strode over to the crumpled casualty and brought the mic to his ear and poured a villainous villanelle of five withering tercets and a final quatrain which perforated the wretch's eardum.
He would have been imprisoned for assault, but plea bargained in stanzas from the dock and agreed to serve in his nation's army. There he found a bounded outlet for his innate aggression, but his unusual aptitude for language meant that somehow his insurgent attitude towards authority was missed by his bamboozled ranking superiors. He represented his unit in mixed martial arts and in slam poetry contests and swept the boards in both. Gradually he rose up the hierarchy with stars and stripes pinned to his jacket. His rhymes softened from those jagged shards of the street, though his brutal rhythms became utterly martial.
He was given his own troop to command. His men were utterly loyal to him, for they knew no bullet could best him, nor any inferior superior officer could outblast his versified attacks on them. Even Generals took his adept poesy as a sign that he was a deep thinker. Gradually he began to strategise for divisions of men. Working in his tent by a candle glued into a skull by magma of melted wax, he plotted the ellipses of armies in the field like the rhythms across the paper. And when he had cracked the required manoeuvres, he relaxed by penning some battlefield verses to inspire his troops.
And while the prisoners of war were being rounded up, he took a tour of the latest liberated hamlet or suburb. He composed verses as he went. Paeans to the bilious, oily smoke plumes rising like diabolic elementals. Rhapsodies over the trituration of brick, the warping and shredding of steel structures. He coupleted cabling splayed and jutting from the mangled remains like jungle tendrils. Inverted pastoralisms. Villages rendered deserts under flame, towns metamorphosised into wastelands ("Take that Thomas Stearns Eliot, you only wrote about a figurative one, whereas I have both brought it about and them composed an epic treatise on it). He staked out a unique territory of a poetics of ruin and back home his adoring public loved his metered missives from the front.
But increasingly in his tent at night, it wasn't only mosquitoes which pricked his skin. He began to agonise about how the harmony and beauty of perfectly harnessed language in the form of a poem, could sit astride such horror and destruction. And more pertinently, how the same two forces pulling in contradictory directions could both reside within him simultaneously. How could he be a great, gifted man shone down upon by the creative light of the gods and muses, if he was also this terrible inhuman monster who lay waste to everything natural and manmade he encountered? And to then make art from it? To engender suffering and then romanticise it? His work went so much farther than mere propagandist doggerel of military and patriotic glorification. Rather it was the very essence of the human soul he was touching with his words. Because his own soul was so utterly debased? That could be the only explanation. Sowing dissonance everywhere in his wake, in order to plumb a personal seam of assonance?
In the isolation of his tent afforded by his stature and rank, he took his military pistol and brought it to his head seething with rhymes. The successful warrior could not be a poet. The successful poet could not continue to fight. As he pulled the trigger, he lost his first ever battle in his life.

Film Adaptations Of Novels

I see that a film adaptation of David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" opens this weekend. Recently we had all the excited pother around Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" being committed to screen. Two seriously literary heavyweight books I've read, but have no inclination to see either on the big screen. I rarely, if ever do.

Both these novels make demands of the reader's imagination. "Pi" has three changes of tone, starting with a light, charming tale of a boy's exotic upbringing in Pondicherry, moving into the fabulist and gripping shipwreck where he has a man-eating tiger as his onboard companion in the lifeboat, to the ending that turns the whole book on its head and makes the reader question everything that has come before. "Atlas" has six completely different stories, set in different times, written in different genres and linked thematically. The work that the author is asking of the reader in order to engage with these shifts throughout the novels, occurs within the reader's personal imagination. Because film is a visual medium and the visual is, for better or for worse, mankind's dominant sense, visualising what formerly only existed in the reader's imagination does I think, diminish the artistry of what the books achieve.

The remote relationship between a reader and an absent author, takes place through the words on the page. That's why there is such latitude for the reader's own interpretation to occur. The reader only has the words and his or her own interpretation of them. A film closes off too many of the options, bringing the director's interpretation to the script. Of course it is still perfectly possible for a film to leave much to the viewer's imagination. But faithful adaptations tend not to. The director and scriptwriters have each already played the role of reader, stamped their own interpretations of the book on the shooting script, so it enshrines an additional singularity of interpretation before the cinema audience sit down to watch the movie.

There is a question of when does a film stop being an adaptation and become 'based' on a particular book. The entire spectrum from faithful adaptations, through loose adaptations to inspired by a book exists. I cannot see the point of faithful adaptions. I don't believe that a film can bring the book to life any more than the book itself has done. Loose adaptations and 'based on' or 'inspired by' can do so, as they make a genuinely new work of art from that of the original book. That is the book may serve as a launch pad for a whole new artistic work. "Apocalypse Now" I believe is an example of just this. It's not merely Joseph Conrad's "Heart Of Darkness" updated and transferred from colonial Africa to the Vietnam War. It is wholly a vibrant, creative piece of art in its own right and one that acknowledges its literary sources of Conrad and TS Eliot in what is actually rather a literary film.

This differs from when say Shakespeare plays are given modern or historical settings other than those of Shakespeare's originals. Taking Macbeth, setting it in 1920s Prohibition Chicago, or the Politburo battling for power on Lenin's death, actually limit Shakespeare's art rather than expand it. For the words remain the same, as Shakespeare wrote them, so this is not genuinely a new art work. And though there may be some resonances with the power mongering of an Al Capone or a Josef Stalin, that history is already either known or sufficiently mythical to us, that again it closes too many interpretative options for its audience than it would when set in its vaguer and less well known times of 11th Century Scotland. The supernatural and prophetic element of Macbeth makes more sense in that setting than twentieth century Chicago or Soviet Russia.

Then there are the movies of books that are supposedly "unfilmable". William Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" and Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" being two such. To me a film director's assault on these great texts smack of hubris; they've been told that they are unfilmable, but they're going to try and rise to the challenge and make their movie anyway. The film versions of both sought framing devices to try and navigate a way through these difficult texts; "Naked Lunch" had the author Burroughs himself as character in the film, which kept jolting the action of the film out of the fiction it was supposed to be portraying. "A Cock And Bull Story" used the device of actors playing a movie director and actors trying to film "Tristram Shandy" as some sort of comment about the layers of distancing the narrative that was already opaque (the book itself prefigures post modern literary techniques, of unreliable narrator- who doesn't even get born until Book 3; of insertion and rearranging another writer's text- a technique Burroughs also used; parody and literary and philosophical allusion). In my opinion, both films failed lamentably and only boosted the notion that these novels are indeed unfilmmable and accordingly ought to remain unfilmed.

While some authors may well have the film version in mind as they write, literary novels that are written qua novels ought to remain unsullied by celluloid in terms of adaptations. Firstly I think it's lazy of scriptwriters, or more likely film executives, in their relentless casting around for fresh celluloid 'meat', to settle on a novel to bump up their quota of ideas to pitch. In the same way that novels are written for the artistic medium and narrative form of literature, films really should develop their own inhouse filmic language right down to the level of an original script. Film does so many things better than novels, particularly in telling a certain type of story, that it should stick to ploughing that rich furrow. The one area of a novel they can't really replicate is its interiority. Yes an actor and some mis en scene imagery can highlight and illuminate key interior moments of a film, but a cinema audience outside of an arthouse crowd are unlikely to stand for, or rather sit through, an entire film of interiority conveyed in just such a way. The worst example of a book being mutilated by a film I experienced, was David Peace's stupendous novel "The Damned United" which is set entirely inside the tortured mind of a real life professional sports' team coach, but its sheer artistry renders it clearly as a work of fiction. The film version was a limp trotting out of the real life events that the book refers to, but was completely unable to convey the interiority of the man which made the book such a triumph of writing.

I may be a Puritan when I say literature is literature and film is film. And I'm sure I'm in a very small minority when I say this. But there is a difference between literary fiction  and commercial fiction, which mainly revolves around the latter's centre-staging of telling a story, which makes it have much in common with the art of film making and the two can be perfectly suited to one another. Equally, to base a film on a literary book as its start point, but to then proceed to make the film as a wholly different and fresh piece of art, such as "Apocalypse Now", is entirely a legitimate endeavour. I grant that sometimes the line between the two is hardly distinct, but it does seem to be the difference between an 'adaptation' and 'based on' or 'inspired by'.

So no, I won't be seeing the film version of "Life of Pi" or "Cloud Atlas" anytime soon.





My post on why "Apocalypse Now" Is My favourite film of all time and its literary roots.