Entries Tagged 'Writing' ↓

David Adam Richards’ Lost Highway (not to be confused with what I found to be one of David Lynch’s weakest films) is a masterpiece. Its sort of an upscale version of A Simple Plan. Things just go wronger. Essentially good, if misguided men, find themselves more than contemplating evil acts. In this case, it is the lost high way.

Richards is without a doubt one of Canada’s, and by extension, the world’s great novelists. His style runs that same form of realism of Charles Dickens, Robertson Davies and John Irving. And though his mastery of all the basic elements of storytelling would be enough to set him apart, what really distinguishes him is his selection of characters. He writes of a place, and thus has been often compared to Faulkner, and it is a place of rural roughness, of people poor. What also is special about his stories is that they are miserable yet enthralling, depressing page turners. It is not uncommon to find people devoted to undermining others to no personal advantage; its just what they do, and they will do it for generations.

The Lost Highway is very good, and so is Mercy Among the Children and River of the Brokenhearted.

And also in the lost files, author of Book of Lost Things, John Connolly writes on his blog of the never ending dismissal of genre writing, this time taking place at a place where it shouldn’t, which might in fact be the Harbour festival in Toronto.

A young American novelist, one whom I can only hope was drunk at the time, commences a spectacularly ignorant attack on genre fiction. Even allowing for any possible intake of alcohol, she is quite stunningly rude. Her basic argument, if I understand it correctly, is that mystery fiction works according to a basic template: in her immortal words, “something happens …”

Once I have managed to lock my jaw back into place, I try to follow her argument to its logical conclusion. If the criticism of mystery fiction is that something happens, then the defence of her particular brand of literary fiction must be that nothing happens. I try to recall the last time I enjoyed a narrative in which nothing happened, and, eventually, admit failure. Even Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (a play of which it was famously remarked that nothing happens – twice) is full of incident, and that is as close as I can get to an apparently uneventful narrative that works.

Some just stay lost it seems…and while we are on the topic of genre fiction, keep an eye out for this one:

My first real German mystery/thriller. One of my all time favourites is the Berlin Noir trilogy by Phillip Kerr but he wasn’t quite German. Christian Von Ditfurth who is a German historian has written a number of books featuring the bepained (he suffers from some sort of arthritis) Stachelmann who is one of those happenstance investigators, an academic who as an expert on Nazi history becomes a resource for his friend in the homicide department when a case comes up which may be rooted in the past. and that particular murky past.

Many mystery characters are self doubting but Stachelmann takes it to another level. Though hardly physically prepossessing, he is near fearless in the hunt, but in his everyday existence he is an academic who feels himself a terrible fraud, and believes that he will be found out soon. This book is the first, and the only one translated to date so I don’t know where that theme is taken. But if not a great book, it is a very good one, and the history is as one would suspect, very well done.

A recent NewScientist reported that contemplating art could allay pain.

The subjects rated the pain as being a third less intense while they were viewing the beautiful paintings, compared with contemplating the ugly paintings or the blank panel. (Link here).

Recently I’ve been spending more and more time taking photographs and I’ve noticed that when I am looking for shots my mind seems to move into a realm where worries do not intrude. I’ve found this with very few other things. Because I shoot for composition rather than content, there is some kind of a mathematical aesthetic processing going on; the search for balance and beauty seems to push everything else aside. This only happens when I am actually looking for the shot.

After taking pictures the common concerns come back, like the one where I realize that I am developing another skill just to the level before you can actually make any money from it.

On another note, just watched True Romance again and caught the brilliant quote:

I’ve lived in America all my life; I’d like to see what TV in other countries is like. (See here).

And finally: I’ve already mentioned the loss of David Foster Wallace but among the many accolades and remembrances perhaps the most fitting was the Onion one on the cancellation of Nascar in his honour (Link here).  Its seems rude but I suspect it really was a homage by someone who read him.  It is exactly the sort of piece he would have written.

And then damn it, James Crumley too.

Another great Aussie writer. An unbeatable first novel. Another dysfunctional family saga but one that excels at what those other strong Australians excel at: great yarns, unique characters, precise but meandering and unpredictable plots,  and gobs of humour throughout. Yes, I think that Steve Toltz joins that company of David Ireland, Peter Carey, and Murray Bail.

An excerpt:

A crowd had gathered around to watch. They chanted in their best Lord of the Flies manner. I searched the faces for allies. No luck. They all wanted to see me go down screaming. I didn’t take it personally. It was just my turn, that’s all. I tell you, it’s indescribable the joy children get from watching a fight. It’s a blinding Christmas orgasm for a child. And this is human nature undiluted by age and experience! This is mankind fresh out of the box! Whoever says it’s life that makes monsters out of people should check out the raw nature of children, a lot of pups who haven’t yet had their does of failure, regret, disappointment, and betrayal but still behave like savage dogs. I have nothing against children, I just wouldn’t trust one not to giggle if I accidentally stepped on a land mine.

or

“Terry has made it easy for me, far easier than most of my patients, not necessarily with his own self-awareness, which, to be honest, is nothing special, but with his candor and total willingness to answer without pause or detour any question I put to him. Actually, he may be the most straightforward patient I’ve ever had in my life. I would like to say at this point, you have done a tremendous job in raising a truly honest and open person.”
“So, he’s not insane?” my father asked.
“Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. He’s crazy as a coconut. But open!”
We’re not violent people,” my father said. “This whole thing is a mystery to us.”
“No man’s life is a mystery. Believe me, there is order and structure in the most ostensibly chaotic skull. There seem to be tow major events in Terry’s life that have shaped him more than any others. The first I would not have believed had I not unwavering faith in his honesty.” The doctor leaned forward and said, almost in a whisper, “Did he really spend the first four years of his life sharing a bedroom with a comatose boy?”
My parents looked at each other with a start.
“Was that wrong?” my mother asked.
“We didn’t have any room,” my father said, annoyed. “Where were we supposed to put Martin? In the shed?”

I’ve finally had a go at David Ireland’s The Chosen. I’ve read a few good books in the last year or so but this might be the only great one of the bunch.

I’d forgotten how much I admired his writing. I first encountered him with A Woman of the Future which had me read everything else he wrote for the next while. However, that was some time ago, and this book was his first novel in ten years, the last one being Bloodfather.

If you had to label it, Woman of the Future is Australian magical realism. It is in the form of the discovered diary of the child to adolescent years of a precocious girl in a strange land. The Chosen is also constructed of bits but of a different sort. In the book, a painter is hired to interview the inhabitants of a village. The novel consists of one literary portrait after another, each distinctive voices yet bound by the narrator. Rather than magically realist, it is more a poetic realism like that in Dylan Thomas‘ short stories.

I’ve often found this sort of approach to world building attractive. in most novels you have one somewhat spurious narrator or voice logically building the world as the story goes along, and in some cases, laying out much of it before you before the first stone is thrown. In this other approach, you are given many untrustworthy voices instead and the world gradually takes shape as you see the bridges among them. It is like the blind men and the elephant but they are all speaking to you though not in any particular order.

Another good example of this is 253 by Geoff Ryman presents 253 word sketches of 253 tram passengers. It sounds precious but it is anything but. The book first had life as a hyperlinked text but it works very well in hard copy. My favourite of this genre, if one can call it that, is David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten where each chapter features a different lead, and that lead often ends up as a tangential character in one or more of the other chapters. Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual is another example of this shard writing.

But back to The Chosen.

Its one of those novels with such strong writing that you forget the message at times. Lost in the beauty and power of the prose you forget about where it is actually going. So almost done the book at this point, I am going to read it again and work then puzzle this time - put the pieces together, turn the bright fragments into a world.

The magnificent story telling takes me back to early Peter Carey, the Carey of Bliss and Illywhacker. And like Carey, Ireland is obstinately and wonderfully Australian using indigenous creatures in his similes. That we have no experience of them matters little; they shout Australia and keep the stories bound to that place and all the richer for it. And just as I could barely stand to read Carey’s Theft due to the many insanely perfect sentences, after Ireland’s so many good books, here too I am caught like a deer in the headlights of the juggernaut of this, his greatest work.

Every voice in this book is distinct and true, and it seems to me impossible that one person could capture so many with such seeming accuracy. It’s a hell of a book.

As someone who spent some years in the book trade, this is the only author I was enamoured with that I never met anyone who had read them, and that compels me to laud them. This is a world class author with too little recognition outside his land.

In today’s New York Times there is a short article about Christian Bale’s assault arrest and comparisons being drawn with an earlier Russell Crowe incident.  The following passage with not one but two wonderful and far from subtle ambiguities:

Last year he played a widely acclaimed role in “3:10 to Yuma,” alongside Russell Crowe, another star who had a brush with the law. In 2007 Mr. Crowe pleaded guilty to assault by throwing a telephone at a New York hotel desk clerk. He was released on the condition that he avoid arrest during the following year.

In the real world, you usually charge someone in a courtroom and not a hotel, and the response is typically verbal. And as to avoiding arrest as a condition? What is that? He has to be furtive for the year? Avoid all policemen?

In the course of things I ran across this abstract for a paper (which ended up as part of a book I believe) by an Australian with a PhD in Anthropology. It caused my brain to hurt terribly or perhaps the more appropriate response would have been to echo my colleague’s “what the fuck??”.

I present this as an exhibit that some of the halls of higher learning are knee deep in shit and also in commiseration to her students who have had to sit through the verbal form of this. Just so they know that their frustration was not a product of them not being smart enough but more a matter of them colliding with her fractured and tortured version of reality.

I also present this as a challenge for English as a second language students. It would be so unfair but it would bring home the fact that some people do use the language for the purpose of making the simple complicated, though in this case its more likely that this native speaker should take up another tongue because this one just isn’t working out for her.

So here it is, and for the sake of those ESL students, I follow it with a translation:

This paper deals with multisensory processes of engaging and disengaging with a musical world through the body. It is based on ethnographic research with an Australian Police band. Band members make a strict distinction between rehearsal and performance. For band members, rehearsals are characterised by a multi-sensual disengagement with instrument. During rehearsals, which entail a close multi-sensory focussing in on the points at which instrument body and musician body met, the senses of touch, sight and hearing are engaged in the process of surveillance. Such surveillance is undertaken in order that the musicians can identify faulted touches to instruments that result in faulted sounds. Touch to the instrument body is ‘watched’, not only with the eye, but in and through touch and hearing senses. These sensual combinations serve to separate person and instrument. In contrast, performances are characterised by a multisensual embodiment of the instrument, to the point that band members understand themselves to be constructed of instruments, and that instruments are constructed of them. In performances, instruments and performers come to phenomenologically complete one another’s bodies. Band members discuss the sensually experienced distinction between rehearsal and performance by means of a distinction between fucking (which they understood as similar to rehearsal) and making love (which they understood to be similar to performance experience). Band members also drew on food/music metaphors, including the difference between constructing a musical dish from a recipe (the written music) and tasting the melted honey of performed sax sounds. They used this metaphor to describe the sensual difference between making sound in rehearsal, and the corporeally penetrative act of inviting a sax into the body in musical performance. Using the distinction between rehearsal and performance, and the penetrative metaphors that band members used to describe it, I draw on and extend the critiques that Michel Serres made of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology to analyse rehearsal and performance moments as, respectively, multisensory processes of surveillance and anti-surveillance.

Translation:

This paper deals with the differences between practicing and performing music. It is based on ethnographic research with an Australian Police band. Band members know the difference. For them, practicing consists of concentrating on the technique. They practice to improve. They look to make sure their hands are in the right place, tell by touch if they are on the mark, and listen to the results. In contrast, performing shifts attention from the instrument to the music as a whole. In performances, musicians identify with their instruments. Musicians say practicing is like fucking but performing is like making love. They also said that practicing was like cooking but performing was like eating. Using the distinction between practice and performance, and the comments of the musicians, I draw on and extend the critiques that Michel Serres made of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology to discuss practicing and performing as differing in how much attention is paid to the actual technique.

With apologies to Peter Leonard, I will tell you that his novel Quiver is a pedestrian effort and should be avoided. It goes against my nature to steer people away from an honest effort by a new writer but this case is special. Leonard is the son of Elmore Leonard.That is not what I hold against him.  No one chooses their parentage and some talented writers beget talented writers.

What offends me is that this book is blurbed by Michael Connelly “this is the start of something special”, Jim Harrison “amply show’s he’s the great Leonard’s son”, Thomas Perry “terrific debut”, Donald Westlake “look forward to whatever he wants to offer next”, and George Pelecanos “kept me reading into the night”. Every one of these authors are good writers, and some of them more than that. And from the nature of his books, I would have thought Harrison would sooner cut off his toes than blurb a book, at least one like this.

Perry and Westlake both forged unique paths into the mystery and thriller markets with Perry having one of the first hitman heroes as well as a good sense of humour, and Westlake rewriting the whole idea of how you tell a story in his Stark series.

But here’s the thing. I’ve know fine writers who have been tumbled over by the fact that one good writer noticed and blurbed their much-better-than-Quiver book. Quiver is filler. Perhaps Leonard will improve beyond the stage he is at and deserve praise at some point. Few really great first mysteries deserve the avalanche of accolades from above that this one got. Clearly this was a case of Elmore pulling in favours.

But the blurbers went above and beyond…could it be that they were trying to signal us surreptitiously that “hey, we had no choice”?  Because I was taken.  I picked up this book and lost a little time of my life.  I would have dropped it after the first chapter but I the praise made me think that it might have some hidden treasure down the line.

Of course there is another possibility other than the blurb whore or favour blurb, and that is that even fine writers can be very bad readers.  Doesn’t seem right but who knows.

But I have to warn you if only to balance a little with the big fiction boldly playing on the back cover.  And just to be fair, I am also going to avoid the big names who have sullied themselves on the jacket for a bit.

Thomas M. Disch, 68 years old, shot himself in his Manhattan apartment. He was apparently despondent over the recent death of Charles Naylor (his partner of 30 years), health problems, a fire in his apartment and a flooding in his home.

I recently mentioned Priest in my list of fantasy novels for those who generally don’t read fantasy. It was a book that I loved and was described by the St. James Guide to Horror (as reported in the New York Times obituary) as “the purest Gothic novel of the 20th century”.

He was a fearless, uncompromising, unconventional and brilliant writer.  Turning out short stories, novels, poetry and children’s books, he was perhaps best known for the Brave Little Toaster series. I look forward to reading his last novel Word of God in which he uses God’s voice of which device he said that thereby “he could speak nonsense and it would be true”.

His was a rare talent.

For a full bibliography and biography see the Locus obituary.

Love this British cover.

Dan Simmons is one of those authors who seems to be determined to write in every genre before he’s done. Though he first came to notice with his fantasy/horror of Song of Kali in 1985, the one that put him on the cult map was 1989’s Carrion Comfort, a screaming ride which combined the government thriller format with vampire mind control being used for both homicidal and pornographic ends. That same year he released the relatively restrained Phases of Gravity and the Hugo and Locus award winning Hyperion, half the story which finished in Fall of Hyperion, and then a decade later a follow up in Endymion and Rise of Endymion.

In between he churned out fairly high quality collections of short stories, a few historical novels, and more fantasy and horror. Nothing quite matched the two dualogies though which introduced into the scifi universe the inimitable Shrike. The Hyperion books were based on Chaucer’s tales with a group of travellers seeking an encounter with the Shrike who might kill or cure any of them. The Shrike is an enigmatic creature to the end, of unknown origin and purpose; in fact it may not even be sentient. It is much taller than any man and composed of some sort of metal with shards and spikes in all directions, and appears to travel through time and space at will.

Then came another burst of creativity with the Joe Kurtz hardboiled detective series, a bit of this and that, and then came these.

The reason I have these two novels on the list is that they perfectly combine elements that just should not work. I often find that when authors take an historical figure and place them with contemporary figures, it all rings false but Simmons manages to use Homer in the company of post-humans and it works. And that is just the mundane part of things. He brings together on one stage the characters from The Tempest, the Greek gods and heroes of The Illiad, robotic forms of life from the far future (one of them being obsessed with Proust), and amazingly it works.

Others in this series:
Literary High Wire Acts 3: James Ellroy
Literary High Wire Acts 2: Rupert Thompson, Georges Perec
Literary High Wire Acts 1: Russell Hoban

Right now at the library, this book by Deborah Eisenberg is waiting for me.

I’ve read some of her stories before and she is as good as they say. Incredible really, and I am generally much more disposed toward novels. I suspect that cover is a little misleading but I will report back on that.

Seems to be a bit of a theme in not too long ago (excerpts here) I was writing about All MY Friends are Superheroes. In the book, almost everyone has powers but the powers are enigmatic and odd, and might very well function as easily as weaknesses.

George Saunders, a bit of a strange writer who veers between brilliant and disjointed, has a beautiful short piece in the New Yorker about writing a story about people who think they have powers but don’t.

A housewife who can cause objects to levitate destroys the family aquarium. An elderly woman whose superpower is that she can speak telepathically to animals gets bit by a squirrel. When, using her mind, she asks the squirrel why, it bites her again, then dashes up a tree. A stripper whose superpower is that she can read an entire book just by picking it up goes into a bookstore and keeps picking books up and putting them down, a quizzical look on her face, wearing a crop-top and spike heels. A nun in New Mexico whose superpower is the ability to make delicious bread using any ingredients on hand, even mud, even dead bugs, makes a loaf of bread that all the other nuns decline to eat.

“I actually just ate,” one says.

“Honestly, Sister, I have an upset stomach,” protests another.

Or

On the outskirts of town, an aging balding bachelor’s superpower is: he can take a box of his mother’s precious stupid vintage glassware and hurl it down the basement stairs and not a single piece will break. Later in the day, as he waits for her to get home, his superpower is: when she comes in, he will make a Cloud of Forgetting form around her head. Or, failing that, a Cloud of Not Really Liking That Glassware Anyway, Sweetie. At this point, as her car pulls up, oh God, he would settle for the superpower of: can make his knees stop shaking under the table whenever he likes. Jesus, she’s going to absolutely smite him.

Her superpower is: can cause the front door to open using only her mind.

He hears her head slam into the closed door, as usual. Then, as usual, she swears under her breath, goes for her keys.

These plays on this particularly insinuous mythology are something I cannot get quite enough of, which is one of the reasons I find Unbreakable to be a great film.

Never did see Sixth Sense but this one was beautiful. I suspect that many did not like it because it remained open to question as to whether Willis’ character actually had powers or not. That exactly was the strength of the film. And now it appears that this director, M Night Shyamalan, is being gradually pushed further and further into ignomy by those who think he has betrayed the audience, that he is not quite Hollywood enough. The argument is usually dressed up as his films being vague but what lies under that is that some people just do not like to be left wondering.

Could this be some of that anti-intellectualism we’ve been hearing so much about? Well, to add fuel to that fire, here is an interview Shyamalan did at Scientific American called I See Doomed People.

And finally, and only on topic by being related to the visual arts, and I suppose enigmatic endings, anybody who thought more than a few minutes about the end of The Sopranos, should take a look at this incredible piece of research. This obsessed writer has created a veritable tome about those last minutes. Its insane but it is a gift; this is film scholarship at its best.