Bang Goes My Knighthood

Given the ecstatic news of Will’s and Kate’s wedding, it seem sacrilegious to write on any topic other than the nuptials. Certainly the UK papers are still full of the Royal news: Where is the honeymoon? How much is costing? Will they use the missionary position?

I can’t wait to be told. But trust Osama bin Laden to spoil everything by going and getting himself killed. I imagine the Daily Mail’s newsroom must be in turmoil over what to flag across their paper.

Present headline reads:

William to whisk Kate on £4,000-a-night tropical honeymoon... but couple face ten weeks APART as he is sent to serve in the Falklands

Future headline?

William & Kate honeymoon romp disturbed by Osama bed Linen?

Osama bin Laden comes between William and Kate?

I knew I should have been a sub-editor.

Mentors, Guides and Gandalf [Grand Elf for the illiterate]

I posted this comment on the excellent service offered to writers, and I have taken advantage of what is on offer so I speak from experience, by BubbleCow, and it seemed to me a point worthy of wider interest:

My personal gripe from my former career (advertising copywriter) is I miss the Traffic Manager, Hazel, for that was her name - we followed each other from agency to agency. She knew me, could buck me up when down, kick me when lazy, and keep me on the rails generally. A personal mentor who takes no shit but understands my moods would be my lottery prize.

Hazel was the most unflappable individual I have ever met. Her only fault was that she would insist on telling me her dreams from the previous night. As far as work was concerned, she could coax a stone out of blood. And invariably it would be a gem (I'm not blowing my own trumpet, but I was good).

Now that I foolishly throw myself on the sword of my own angst in an effort to write something trully original, I miss her. I need Hazel to tell me when I am doing good and when I am just indulging in pathetic, creative tantrums. A good slap would not go amiss, though Hazel would never slap but just recount her latest dream. It was enough.

She should have gone into publishing were it not for the fact she was not hugely motivated by literature.

I suppose there are two points arising: every writer needs a mentor; and I should get in touch with Hazel again.

I ought to add Hazel became the Production Director of a number of agencies so was no light-weight.

Whither Confidence?

Let's start, like all indifferent news articles, with a platitude: personal confidence is as wobbly as a jelly set before a gang of children at a street party to celebrate a royal wedding. [ I expect a call from one of the tabloids any minute now after such a well extended, topical metaphor. Hello? The phone's ringing.]

If you follow any sport, you will hear trainers, coaches and managers as well as the individuals concerned constantly referring to this mysterious quality described as confidence. You will watch a team of talented individuals either dominate or collapse and so celebrate or scratch your head. Certain individuals seem to be able to instil confidence in others, Sir Alex Ferguson being the exemplar. Indeed, the measure of a good manager in any sphere is one who can inspire confidence in those he or she manages.

But what is confidence?

For those who know no better and have no experience to prove otherwise, confidence frequently emerges as arrogance. Ugly but forgivable in the young. Less attractive in those who are older. But it is a fine line that exists between an overwhelming sense of self, of one's superiority, and the comfortable knowledge of what one is and what one can achieve. This is not to say confidence is the recognition of one's boundaries in the sense that one knows how far to trespass but the recognition of what binds you and how much further you must push. It is at this point that one becomes wobbly and self-belief is your only ally. You can see the circularity of the argument. Pushing further means placing yourself in a position where you have no experience, where, like the young, you must rely again on naked belief in your abilities. How easy it is for the circle to crack and for you to doubt the talent that brought you to this point.

It happens to individuals who play team sports; the multi-million pound striker you goes game after game without scoring a goal. It infects whole teams who find themselves unaccountably losing after reigning supreme. And most especially it paralyses those who rely on their wits to produce.

I have yet to define confidence, only the situation that anyone who writes will recognise. Confidence is like water. It trickles away between the synapses without you being aware until you find yourself dehydrated and depressed for no obvious reason. The situation is made no easier by the fact that the motivation for some of us who write is to assert ourselves, to express our individuality through words. I make this distinction of a writer who writes to push boundaries from those who write for more obvious commercial reasons not to say that one is better than the other but that the latter is more amenable to being motivated than the former.

Given a brief, the objective is clear so the writer who struggles can be encouraged. Given no brief but the desire to bring to the surface some ineffable idea, who can rally? It is this ambition that makes certain authors famously difficult. The struggle they face is with themselves and out of that struggle the work is created - if and when it is.

If this were a well-rounded article, I would now offer the magic solution. Bang and the dirt is gone.

I have this vague belief that a lapse in confidence for a writer is similar to a stitch for a long-distance runner. You have to persevere; run it off. But it is a rubbish metaphor. You never notice your confidence draining away. It is only when, like me, you are trying to write a letter for a part-time job that has your name all over it in embossed lettering and you cannot string an opening sentence together after three days of banging your head against the screen that you discover jellies look positively concrete compared to you.

Having said that, this is a dreadful warning for anyone with aspirations that are out of control: an interview with Tony Hancock, one of Britain's most brilliant radio comics, which took place in 1961 - though according to Wikipedia it was in 1960 - with John Freeman on Face to Face and just before his break with his writers, Simpson and Galton, and subsequent rapid decline into alcoholism and eventual suicide in 1968.

Anon: Fequently on radio and television and nine films you play artists and intellectuals…

TH: Yes

Anon: Does this mean you would like to be one?

TH: Well actually, I think I am deep down. It's never been appreciated entirely but I think it's there. I think I can safely say that. It's only a question of time.

Anon: Before what?

TH: Before it's recognised.

Correction: The quote is not from Face to Face: I've  just watched the original interview on YouTube and though fascinating the above does not feature - I got it from BBC Radio Extra Bollocks (the link will only last for a week). However, the Freeman interview is well worth thirty minutes of your time, be you a fan or not. Part I, Part II, Part III.

Emotive Language

I am sitting at my computer; I have been since 5.30 a.m., listening to BBC Radio 4, thanks to a neat widget, while scanning the papers online or staring down the road opposite that leads the eye out to sea.

So the scene is established.

To the point: I just heard a review of the papers on This Morning, Radio 4's news programme 6 - 9 a.m., where the newscaster read a piece from The Independent, to whit:

'Stray cats provide a flicker of movement as they wander in the newly emptied landscape.'

'The brooding presence of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant…' [My emphases]

Now, apart from the obvious clichéd use of brooding to describe the presence of the power plant, what role do cats have in a factual report on the real dangers of a damaged nuclear reactor whether they flicker or not across an emptied landscape?

It requires no poet to understand the desire of the author to employ such descriptions but to what extent do they detract from his intention? The truth of the horror that has engulfed Japan requires no embellishment and it is only an inflated ego that looks to add his or her paint strokes. Or, do we readers need such hyperbole to colour our jaded palettes?

Journalism has been described as the art of painting a picture (at some point these metaphors must end) but at what point does the personal image interfere with the facts as presented?  As a student of Literary Criticism, I understand that text is all; i.e. it is impossible to remove one's self from a scene, in other words,  you, all the components that make you, will interpret a situation singularly and the language you use to describe it will never fully encompass your thought or motivation. So the idea of wilful artfulness, the desire to manipulate language to a purpose is usually pursued for one's own ends rather than as an exposition of what is presented. One is far too conscious of self to be objectively involved in the other.

Of course, there are people we read precisely because we are more interested in their opinion than their reporting; however, when it comes to news, i.e. the facts of a situation, I prefer the reporter to disappear insofar as it is possible.

Three Very Different Novels

I continue to dip in and out of Perec's Life: A User's Manual as and when ordered by the doctor for my general sense of well-being. [Bang on: that Mr. Scott Pack tries to steal my thunder with this feeble attempt of a post on Perec: The art of reviewing a book that has no punctuation or capital letters.  Too late, Mr. Pack, I sneer, I was there first.]

There is no such sense of holiday dalliance with Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, a book I read last month. This involves total immersion with no snorkel. So, before I take the plunge, let me first deal with Thomas Eidson's St. Agnes' Stand.

St. Agnes' Stand 

From his prose style, it is evident Eidson is a fan of Hemingway; his prose is taut, well-muscled, and walks with a testosterone-laden swagger.

The story is best described as a contemporary western. It opens with a man on the run with his dog who comes across a group under siege from a band of Apaches. The group consists of three nuns, lead by the eponymous Sister St. Agnes, together with seven orphaned children they have recently rescued. The Apaches have already caught and horribly tortured one nun and her Mexican wagon driver who were attempting to make a run for help. Against his better judgement, Swanson, for that is the man's name, decides to assist. To the Catholic sister, Swanson is literally the answer to her prayers and she never doubts for an instant his ability to save them for, as she constantly reminds him, he was sent by God.

The story tells of the increasingly personalised battle between Swanson and Locan, the giant leader of the Apaches, who is rapidly losing face with his party of braves. In some respects St. Agnes' Stand may be regarded as a conventional western. The characters are personalities you would expect to meet. It is no surprise, for instance, to discover the good Sister St. Agnes turns out to be a whisky-drinking, poker-player, thigh-slapping (OK, I made the last up) nun-of-a-gun. What is surprising, even questionable, is the underlying theme, which is one of faith, specifically Catholic faith versus savage superstition, and I do not employ the term savage lightly, because Eidson absolutely demonises Locan and his followers in a surprising manner given the date of publication, 1994. There is an argument to be made that Eidson is thoroughly contemporary in that he is the literary equivalent of Quentin Tarantino or the Coen brothers in his exploration of violence but where the latter comment, in their different ways, on attitudes today, St. Agnes' Stand reads like a good, ol' fashioned parable of good versus bad. And the bad are still Injuns and those of that ilk.

That said, it is still a good read and worthy of your own appraisal.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. 

I think of Murakami as Marmite – you either love him or hate him, and I love him. (For those who are not Brits, Marmite is a spread*; you either love it or hate it. I hope that clarifies the analogy.)

Like with all Haruki Murakami's work, there is no simple way to summarise the plot. So I will save myself the effort and quote from the blurb on the back:

'Toru Okada's cat has disappeared and this has unsettled his wife, who is herself growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has started receiving. As the compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life – spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table – are turned inside out, and he embarks on a bizarre journey, guided (however obscurely) by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.'

Clear?

As hinted, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle explores the way life develops through circumstance, inexplicable promptings and chance events, and much of its charm, from a westerner's point of view, is the cultural difference in attitude displayed by Okada to each twist in his day. It is not that he is fatalistic but accepting, with an almost naïve curiosity, of whatever might happen next.

It is very seductive and you soon find yourself infected by his ingenuousness. To appreciate Murakami, you too, like Toru, must travel blind trusting that you will be transported safely. And you will be, trust me.

* Something you spread on bread, toast preferably, and not a large tract of land in Wyoming.

Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

On the back of reading Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black, I have just about finished her A Place of Greater Safety.

It is an historical, factually- based  work charting the rise and eventual fall of the heads of the main characters involved in the French Revolution; Camille Desmoulins, Maximilian Robespierre, Dr. Marat, etc.

Mantel has used her considerable imaginative powers to explore the domestic background, i.e. the female perspective, of these figures during those whirlwind years while sticking to the original script as laid down by historical events.

I have a strong interest in this period. I was once intending to research a doctorate on the difference in attitudes to intellectualism between the English and the French  since the Revolution to the present day and its consequences. So, my appreciation of the book is biased. I wonder how an uninterested reader will take to it. I believe anyone will admire the writing, but there is such a cast of characters, unless you have been previously introduced to them, they can prove confusing. Also, major events, like the desire of the protagonists to spread  their ideal to other countries [so current given what is happening in the Middle East], e.g. the French invasion to liberate the Belgium sansculotte, are necessarily glossed over or the book would run to twice its 871 pages.

I have not read Wolf Hall but it seems to me A Place of Greater Safety is a rehearsal for the work that is to win Mantel her Booker. From my perspective it is fascinating. From anyone's perspective it is a lesson in how to write character and dialogue. Her women, evil, manipulative or innocent,  are marvellous.

Old Farts Smell the Best

I have hit a wall. Not literally, obviously, or I would be a flattened sort of creature with fingers of rubber.

My writing has collapsed into a litter of consonants and vowels that drift across the carpet to clutter in the corners ( how I love alliteration). My novel remains buried somewhere in the recesses of my computer awaiting the final polish from my magic duster. An idea for a series of inter-related short stories remains eleven pages of an idea for a series of inter-related short stories.

Nicola Morgan has posted on the issue of hitting walls and hit a nerve. (Well, you would, wouldn't you, hitting a wall at speed?)

The particular wall I hit was erected by the masons, Expectations, I could say Great Expectations but Arrogance may be more accurate. I had assumed I would be welcomed on a very prestigious course with rose petals strewn before me by the Dean; he turned up with thorns.

Collapse of the stout party, as they used to say. But do not weep on my behalf: the point I want to address is not the one entitled 'Managing Expectations', but 'Managing Growing Old'.

There, I've said it: I am growing old. Not a problem in itself, indeed, I read somewhere that older people are more content than at any other times in their lives. To an extent this is true but, being an awkward sod, I still have ambitions, the major of which is to write a novel worthy of serious consideration.

But what happens when you reach a certain age? All the sins of your past assemble in a single spot and assault you at once. It was once possible for me to breeze through life no matter what was thrown up with no other help than a nose-peg and cunning intelligence. Now, laxity is itself the problem.

Life, it seems to me, is an accumulation of habits and behavioural patterns. What suited when young and becomes comfortable through use is not easily dislodged in later life no matter how inappropriate

F**k it. I will now behave inappropriately. Inappropriate to my age and expectations. This is not say I will suddenly become an eccentric. That was my norm, i.e. to question the status quo, but now I will conform. I will vote Conservative and wear what few strands I have in a perm. I will get heated over issues of immigration and the collapse of English identity. Shiny faced posters of David Cameron will adorn my bedroom. Nick Clegg will be the custard on my pudding.

I will join the rich. Ha! You may laugh but all my life people have told me I would be rich. Now is the time. Personally, I am not a fan of the rich - and I know a few who are mega-rich - but it is time to join their ranks, if only to mock them for their narrow-minded, greedy assumptions.

How is this to be achieved? I don't have a clue but, believe me, it is not rocket science. It is a combination of nonce, greed, exploitation, ruthlessness, and testosterone - all qualities I have in abundance. (I would invite you to view my testicles if this were not a public domain.)

Why this sudden ambition?

i want to move back to London only to discover that all I can afford is a cupboard in a garden shed. Now, woodlice I count as among the best of my friends but I am allergic to rudimentary pots (aesthetically they cause me hives). So money is necessary.

Am I joking?

No. I will, despite others' expectations of what should, could, can be achieved by an old burst of wind like myself, find a means.