For Grace
August 31st, 2010
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Habitual Reading Two
August 24th, 2010
I follow various writers’ blogs and I’m always interested to see what they are reading because they usually range over unexpected territory. In June I posted about the books I was reading or had read recently. Time to do it again.
I tried reading Elizabeth Kostova’s book The Historian but after 250 pages I had to put it down. I didn’t care enough about the characters to keep reading and I found it to be repetitious and guilty of what I was told is a major crime in novel writing – cramming in all your lovely research because you find it too interesting to leave out. leave it out, it’s a narrative traffic jam. If I was fascinated by the history and legends of Romanian vampires perhaps I would have persisted - but I’m not, so I didn’t.
I moved onto Sarah Waters’ book The Night Watch which had me right from the start. I prefer a straight narrative with no flashbacks, but I found the characters so compelling the back- to- front storytelling enhanced rather than detracted. I wanted to know more about them and finished the book with a sigh, disappointed that there was no more. I’ve bought two more of her books but have had to squirrel them away for the time being.
After the disappointment of The Historian I wanted the soothing pleasure of an old favourite so I returned to Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong and took my time with it - I’d read it before. A second, slower reading always pays off and I found myself moving deeper into the story of Steven, Isabel and the soldiers in the hell of trench warfare. A humane and riveting story.
Because I’d recently read Faulks’ The Girl at the Lion D’Or I thought I may as well go for the trifecta and picked up Charlotte Grey. I was curious about how Faulks slips secondary characters from previous books into the foreground of subsequent stories. For example, Charlotte’s father was Steven’s (Birdsong) commanding officer in World War One. Hartmann, who seduces Anne in The Girl at the Lion D’Or, finds himself on the way to a concentration camp in Charlotte Grey, along with the German Jewish doctor who rescued Steven in Birdsong.
I was also reminded of the botched film of Charlotte Grey - a disappointing translation from book to film. But aren’t they all.
I moved on to contemporary Urban Fantasy with Trent Jamieson’s Death Most Definitely. I have never been interested in fantasy, science fiction or paranormal stories. But Trent is an Australian writer, the book is set in Brisbane and he’s a stablemate of mine at Hachette Australia, so I decided I would give it a go. I loved the location and the surreal goings on in the middle of a sub tropical Australian city. The inventive and imaginative aspect of the book had me turning pages, and while I’m not a convert to the genre I have to read the next two in the series to find out what happens. If you like urban fantasy it’s a great read.
I moved onto Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise because I found a very cheap copy and had been meaning to read it for awhile and still had the taste of Vichy France in my mouth.
Paul Gray in The New York Times writes -
“”Storm in June,” the first novella of “Suite Française,” opens as German artillery thunders on the outskirts of Paris and those residents who have trouble sleeping in the unusually warm weather hear the sound of an air-raid siren: “To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn’t long before its wailing filled the sky.” … With the utmost narrative economy, sharp, scattered images coalesce into an atmosphere of dread. Parisians wake up to the realization that nothing, particularly the gallant French Army they have read and heard so much about, stands between them and the Germans, and they decide, as one, to get out fast. To depict the widespread chaos that ensues — railroads hobbled by overcrowding or bombed tracks, shortages of gasoline and food — Némirovsky concentrates on a few individuals caught up in the collective panic.”
Next I picked up a book by George Makari called Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis – a very readable account of the development of new ways of thinking about inner life, an evocation of old Middle Europe and the feuding Freudians, Jungians and Kleinians who squabbled over the intricacies of their theories while seemingly oblivious to the disastrous state Germany was sliding toward. Now I’m switching between Freud and Robert Harris’s The Ghost - about a ghost writer, a politician with a nefarious past - because I need something light to switch off with after reading about the spiteful bickering and territorial spats of theorists at play.
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Shelter
August 23rd, 2010
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Spurning The Earth
August 5th, 2010
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What Have I Become?
August 3rd, 2010
I’m a stony eyed killer.
I’m your go-to gal when you want to kill off your darlings. I kill my own without any feeling of remorse. I highlight them, they startle in the sudden shock of light, knowing what’s coming is no pleasant cut and paste to a new context. I press delete. I feel nothing except a frisson of satisfaction in the job. I take a swig of coffee and keep moving.
I wasn’t always like this. My darlings were precious and I indulged them whenever I could, but it proved to be an unhealthy attachment, a toxic dependency that could only bring me down.
I had thirty thousand of them, the start of the sequel to The Book of Love, which I wrote in 2008 as I was still under the spell of my characters and could not let them go. I had to be with them, so I started a sequel, little knowing that one day a big publishing house would say, ‘do you have a sequel?’ Of course, I chirruped, not realising the full and fatal implication of that simple affirmative.
I had started a sequel so finishing it should be easy. What foolishness, what utter inexperienced naivety, what lazy self deception. I struggled to shoehorn those thirty thousand beautiful words into a sequel. I … had … to … use … them …*panting noises*
I learned, through flagellating myself with these words day in and day out that it had been a bad creative decision. Two years before I had been in a different place as a writer and words written then, no matter how beautiful or funny, simply were not working. As I and my manuscript slowly steamed toward the iceberg, my publisher had the presence of mind to alert me. A pit was dug, the words assembled, the delete button was pressed. After that moment, killing a paragraph here a sentence there arouses nothing in me other than pride that I can be so ruthless.
As the editing of the sequel comes to a close and the sun sets on the smoking delete button, I look around for my next project and dig up a manuscript written in 2006. I start work, I get frustrated, I can’t get it to work, my mojo has not awakened, what is going on?
Done it again, haven’t you? How much pain do I have to go through before I learn to let go?
So I extracted the characters and will build them a new world. And I killed the rest.
I killed them and it was good.
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Kant Be Bothered … LOL
August 1st, 2010
I wandered along the other day thinking about whether or not I held a principle that I would die for - as you do. Something beyond self interest. I probably will never be put to the test so it’s easy for me to say, yes, there is one.
Universal education.
Education for all is a cornerstone of the Enlightenment, right? Education to banish ignorance and superstition so we can approach living in as reasonable a manner as we can, valuing reason and knowledge above our animal lusts for power, possession and shagging all who wander inadvertently into our orbit. We all agree on that?
You are nodding your head, sipping your coffee, saying yes … go on … your point, madam?
My point is this. It is only a principle, not a reality, despite all the posturing and blather of our politicians and educationalists. We have education. Just enough so we can find the remote control and switch onto Master Chef, find the car keys and make our way to Consumer Durable to buy a molten chocolate fountain, and then relax in front of some funny Youtube videos, then go to bed with our f**k buddy. And don’t ask me to read, crikey, I might over stimulate myself and goodness knows what will happen then?
I rant because I was myself perhaps overstimulated last night while attending a social event distinguished by a goodly smattering of very intelligent people, employed in the tertiary education sector in Chemistry, Languages, Nuclear Physics, IT, Engineering and, bless ‘em, Creative Writing.
I know from my own observations that tertiary education is sliding into laughable territory - user pays, buying places, overseas students, lowering the bar so that it’s practically underground – have all contributed. But when I hear anecdotes from those in the frontline – and yes they are anecdotes, but put a glass of wine in the hand of any academic in Australia and you’ll hear the same things – they produce a frisson of fear in my vitals. I’ll be dead before we see the real impact of the Great Dumbing Down, but my kids will feel it and it’s not going to be an easy ride for them. I suppose a single purpose electric donut maker will be some consolation though.
I wouldn’t die to save the Australian education system as it is, and as it will be in ten years time. But I would willingly stuff the petrol soaked rags into bottles and bay for the blood of all vocational educationalists as I storm the barricades erected around the lickspittle lackeys who design education to fit the interests of the capitalist running dogs of the corporate world rather than human beings if I thought the educational values of the enlightenment could be restored to education.
Modern History does not start in 1945. Or maybe it does for those curriculum design bots.
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Dan Holloway on (life:) razorblades included
July 2nd, 2010
Dan Holloway is a contemporary writer who I truly admire. I read and re-read his work and I’m always left hungry for more. He possesses a phenomenal energy, intelligence and generosity of spirit and his commitment to independent publishing is matched by his actions in starting the Year Zero Collective and in publishing his own works through various independent publishing outlets.
We ‘met’ in the over heated world of writers online and are both members of the ethereal Grey Havens, a small, online, raggedy crew of writers with other lives in law, PR, journalism, child rearing, academia, writing and teaching.
Dan has recently released (life:) razorblades included and kindly agreed to talk about the work on my blog.
“My writing has been called bleak, dark, and bereft of joy and hope. The first two of these I will readily concede. The latter two, never. In a world where the default setting is vanilla, acceptance, expectation, normal; in a world where the tragic few who wrestle with life full-on and fail are condemned when it is not they who are too sick for the world, but the world too sick for them; in a world where the grey, suited swamp of the billion walking dead is revered; in this world, anyone or anything that celebrates the full, damaged, despairing, fucked-up and spectacular reality of life is a shriek, a shout, a holler of joy to pierce the eardrum of death.”
From the introduction to (life:) razorblades included.
Dan, you say your work has been called dark and bereft of joy and much of the work here is what you call ‘confessional art’, that is art where the author wears their heart on their sleeve, takes us into the darkest corners of their lives, writes the painful and the personal, and lays it bare and in our faces.’
How is Skin Book ‘confessional art’ if you are writing from a fictional character’s point of view? If it is fiction, then how do you see it as confessional?
For me confessional art is simply taking what is in your head and externalising it in the way that makes the very best sense. I don’t think questions of autobiography or “veracity” need come into it at all (although of course much confessional art IS autobiographical, like Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Every Slept With 1963-1995). As writers we happily accept that the “truest” way to convey something may be a metaphor, or a myth, and that’s how I see confessional art - it’s simply choosing the vehicle that is the very most appropriate one for whatever you are trying to scrape out of your head and onto the page. What’s particularly important for me is that an author never loses fidelity to the absolute relativism of truth (paradox intended). The moment we try to convey to a reader something that is true to them we are lost in the world of the impossible, in generalisation, in things beyond our reach. It’s only the absolute specificity of what’s inside us that we can hope (possibly without real expectation of success) to convey. And, ironically, it’s in that specificity that our only real chance of reaching out to other individuals lies.
To come back to the fictional character’s point of view - I think we need to separate out point of view from circumstance. I’m not a 17 year-old lesbian growing up in Hungary, never have been, and possibly never will be. Nor am I a 30-something woman who killed her abusive twin and flayed him to make a journal from his skin. The details of their lives are not the details of mine. But their point of view is mine. As a writer it’s my job to create the details that can best house and display that point of view, that best give it the grist to play out the questions that form the incessant noise in my head. The fiction is in the detail. The truth is in how characters deal with those details. I think art probably has to have both. Art fails when the truth is in the detail and the fiction is in the point of view (which is why autobiography is no more confessional than a novel); or when there is fiction in both - not because I don’t like escapism - I do - but because there is, I think, something inherently dishonest in pretending that we can create a point of view outside of our own.
What process does your writing undergo from first impulse through to the beautiful crafting?.
It really varies a huge amount from piece to piece. My stories always start with a picture of a character. I tend to follow them around, and watch what happens, and then the story comes out pretty much fully-formed. At that stage I’ll edit and edit to cut it down.
Most of the time I edit for sound if that makes sense - as a reader I sound out what I’m reading in my head (that sounds really daft, but I used to do competitive speed reading, and apparently, we sub vocalise at up to 1500 words a minute, which is about 4 times as fast as the usual reading speed, so it really is something for writers to think about), so as a writer what really bothers me is how the sentences sound. I want the cadence to be exactly right, and the rhythms to work – even if sometimes that means my punctuation’s wonky, or I say “s/he said” too much.
For poetry, it tends to be the other way round. I start with a skeleton and work up, building sentences in. I have a very bad habit of writing lines that are hard to resolve (going back to the sound thing – it’s really old fashioned, I know, but I like my sentences to “resolve” the way a musical phrase will resolve), so I often run on and on and that needs to be edited really toughly otherwise it’s impossible to perform the poems. I do a lot of live readings, and whilst my breathing technique is OK, I don’t want to set myself an impossible task!
Simon Beckett said artist’s need to find ‘a form that accommodates the mess.’ I read on your blog that Skin Book was meant to be a Flash Novel not a poem. You were emphatic that it was not a poem and yet it reads as a verse narrative. Why was the form so important?
I was a teenager in the 80s and a student in the 90s so I grew up with Young British Art and the whole text thing, which has left a lasting mark on me in terms of how I present things
I’ve read a lot of collections of work recently for review purposes, and by and largely I’ve been hugely disappointed in them because they’ve been just that – collections. For me a collection should give you something more than you’d get by reading the pieces separately. The way they’re placed should lead you through, should make you see things in each piece you wouldn’t otherwise have seen. In the case of razorblades, I want to take people on a long dark night of the soul and out the other end.
I was emphatic it wasn’t a poem because I still somehow feel I don’t “get” poetry, and I don’t think of myself as a poet. It’s like cooking – I love cooking anything savoury, especially coming up with sauces and reductions that take weeks because there are so many layers to them. But it’s all by feel. And I get really nervous around puddings, because there’s this aura around them that they’re exact, there are rules. I feel a bit the same with poetry. Poets do all these weird things with indented lines and placing stuff on the page and I feel like I don’t understand it, so I can’t really be a poet. And SKIN BOOK has the full structure of a novel – I’ve spent years railing against classical ideas of structure (I hate rules – like I say I always feel like I don’t “get” them) in novels, and I wanted to show I could actually write one if I tried – albeit one that’s only two and a half thousand words.
I find puddings intimidating as well. I’ve had to stare down quite a few.
Life can be a living hell for some people and I firmly believe there are worse fates than death. It takes an incredible act of will to embrace the life you speak of in the introduction. an you talk about the introduction and its importance in locating the following works?.
In terms of the actual content, I think there’s a lot of glibness about life. Choose life is a phrase that’s wheeled out again and again (especially that awful ending to Trainspotting), and that’s just such a cop out. What do people mean choose life? By and large when someone tells someone to “choose life” they see them walk out the door and give a big sigh of relief that the person’s off their conscience, and that really sucks as an attitude. Life is HARD.
Telling a suicidal person to choose life has consequences, and if you’re not prepared to see them through the consequences, and explain that choosing life is more difficult and more painful than choosing the opposite you should butt the hell out. I think there’s such a simplistic attitude to suicide and death, and life, and I wanted to challenge that. I wanted people to realise what they’re doing when they talk about choosing life. I find the idea that deciding to live means you’ll be happy ever after really offensive. “To live” means a lot of things. It’s fine to tell someone “to live” but that has consequences. Consequences that in some cases may be immoral and utterly unacceptable to the majority. But if you’re not prepared for that you should shut up. That’s why I ended with SKIN BOOK. It’s about two characters who are beyond acceptability. One character is a sex criminal, and the other killed and skinned her brother as a child. Together they’re happy. There’s no comeuppance or karma. They chose to live.
reading (poem)
cinched in the waist of a wholesome window
five streets from soho
ohso proper doorways
and strangers in sunhats with san miguels
and they’ve all got drinks and kisses
and they’ve all got slickety laughs
and they’ve all got smiles and cigarillos
and just enough friends
and just enough coke
and just the right words
and just the right names
and in streamers we tattoo the streetlamp black
and in velvet our tongues streak the glass
and we’re all strung out for the smell of piss
and all the beers are someone else’s
Dan Holloway
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Habitual Reading
June 11th, 2010
I’m always curious to know what books people are reading. It’s a bit of a nosey question, like asking what they’re having for dinner that night or what brand of knickers they have on. And it also assumes that they have a book on the go, but many people who love to read don’t have the time or energy unless they are on holiday. Or they just don’t read.
I grew up in a family of readers. That’s what we did. Sport, other than walking, was something that happened on the television and made you want to turn it off. Sporty people find that bizarre. Well, maybe so, but I didn’t know any different. I didn’t go to a live sporting event until in my thirties – and then I was only shepherding a mob of little boys. I brought a book with me and sat up the back of the stand, doling out money and food on request.
This inaugural sporting event was a soccer match. I’ve stood through endless winter mornings watching schoolboys play soccer and reading a book at these matches was akin to publicly beating your child with a mallet, so in spite of my bookish ways I became fascinated with the game. So I may have to slow down my book intake once the 2010 Soccer World Cup starts, because I can’t help myself, I have to watch. Although I’ll be hunting down a copy of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch to read during half time.
But to satisfy those who ask I list below the books I’ve read over the last six weeks.
The Fatal Englishman, Sebastian Faulks
I’d be happy reading Faulk’s shopping list so when I stumbled on this in a second hand bookshop I grabbed it. “Faulk’s triple biography of three English prodigies who died young diligently sets each tragedy in its historical place and time to show how the feelings of a generation came to be projected upon their tragedy.” Brian Case, Time Out.
I enjoyed this book as I knew I would. At the front of the book snippets of reviews can be read and on the front cover David Hare of The Spectator declares the book to be “wildly exciting.” I don’t know what sort of life Mr Hare leads because although this is a fascinating read it’s not quite as exciting as he would have us believe.
The Group, Paul Solarotoff
Another fascinating non fiction book. Journalist, Paul Solotaroff writes about a New York therapist and the six people he is treating through group therapy. Sex addiction, compulsive spending, drug abuse, bullying husbands, crippling shyness – all worked through in the group, some successfully, some not. Solotaroff’s description of the group dynamics and the ultimate fate of the therapist is compelling.
Kate Atkinson, Case Histories
Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Kate Atkinson, One Good Turn
Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News?
Yes, I’ve had a Kate Atkinson binge and I feel so much better for it. Although her propensity for killing women and children in her books gets to me sometimes.
Philip Kerr, March Violets
Philip Kerr, The Pale Criminal
Philip Kerr, A German Requiem
Philip Kerr, The One from the Other
and I’m halfway through …
Philip Kerr, A Quiet Flame
These five books feature a private detective, Bernie Gunther. Gunther is a fabulous character with his hard boiled morality and hilarious, dark, tough guy humour. Kerr’s research is deep and thorough, and his recreation of the Weimar years of the German Republic, and the moral minefield of Berlin in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, provide a sense of time and place so intense I wanted to get out my ration card, nylons and a ticket to Argentina.
Kerr’s Bernie Gunther books are ‘a brilliant transfer of a Chandler novel to postwar Germany. The wise guy dialogue … and the moral man making his way in an immoral world are pure Chandler. Powerful and impressive.’ The Observer.
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Self Portraits 2
June 6th, 2010
Lucien Freud, 1981
Francis Bacon, 1969
David Siqueiros, 1969
George Tooker, 1947
Felix Nussbaum, 1942
Christian Schad, 1927
Curt Querner, 1938
Victor Brauner, 1931
Otto Muller, 1922
Petrov Vodkin, 1918
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Stab Me With A Word
June 1st, 2010
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