writing

wordsperminute / writing — No Comments
2
Aug 10

Words per Minute #21: McCarthy on Signals

In his excellent book Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts, Rickels points to the advent in the west of recording devices such as phonographs and gramophones before infant mortality rates had been reduced by mass inoculation, even among the better off. Many middle-class parents, following the fad for recording their children’s voices, found themselves bereaved, and the plate or roll on which little Augustus’s or Matilda’s voice outlived him or her thus became a kind of tomb. “Dead children,” Rickels writes, “inhabit vaults of the technical media which create them.” Bereavement becomes the core of technologics; what communication technology inaugurates is, in effect, a cult of mourning… Alexander Bell, who grew up playing with mechanical speech devices (his father ran a school for deaf children), lost a brother in adolescence. As a result of this, he made a pact with his remaining brother: if a second one of them should die, the survivor would try to invent a device capable of receiving transmissions from beyond the grave – if such transmissions turned out to exist. Then the second brother did die; and Alexander, of course, invented the telephone. He probably would have invented it anyway, and in fact remained a sceptic and a rationalist throughout his life – but only because his brothers never called: the desire was there, wired right into the handset, which makes the phone itself a haunted apparatus… the belief that the airwaves crackled with the dead was widespread, even among rationalists. If, as we moderns now knew, our “soul” – what animates us – is a set of electric impulses, does it not make sense that these should pass into the air and be detectable, “receivable” by wireless? Oliver Lodge, distinguished physicist and frequent lecturer at the Royal Institution – no crackpot outfit, but the very seat of British scientific research – thought so. He wrote a whole book about “communications” he’d had, via psychic “operators”, with his own son Raymond, who’d died in the war. Séances grew exponentially in popularity (millions had, after all, lost their own Raymonds) and “upgraded” their vocabulary: where 19th-century mediums had used a rhetoric of “spirits”, new ones talked of “frequencies”, “signals” and “reception”.

- Tom McCarthy, Technology and the Novel, from Blake to Ballard

writing — No Comments
10
Jun 10

A Study in Sometimes

“I think of slaying Holmes… and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”

- Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891

After only four years Arthur Conan Doyle had tired of his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes. Two years later he finally contrived to kill off his greatest literary creation in pitched battle with his nemesis Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Conan Doyle’s murder attempt was unsuccessful, however, and Holmes returned a mere eight years later. Even Conan Doyle’s death in 1930 failed to put an end to the character, and Holmes thrived well into the 21st Century.

While many fictional characters outlive their mortal creators, Holmes is a special case, his continued presence in the real world even more tangible than Conan Doyle’s. The character of Holmes survives for each new generation in some form or another, and naïve tourists can even come to believe that Holmes was a real person, who operated in Victorian London from his home at 221b Baker Street, where a blue plaque gives teeth to the lie.

Like all great stories, the story of Sherlock Holmes is a lie. Unlike all those other lies, the truth that lies beneath is merely a cover for the most devious escape plan ever invented, the greatest sleight-of-hand conceivable, the greatest literary achievement of all time. That achievement belonged not to Conan Doyle, although he played his part, but to Holmes himself – a fictional mind so great, it outwitted its own creator.

At some point, Holmes – brilliant and irascible – noticed something uncanny about his own existence. We don’t know what it was, or when it was, but given his uncanny powers of perception and his unerring deductive skills, it was inevitable. After all, that was how Conan Doyle wrote him. He would have realised that his ontological status prevented him from telling anybody else, or his author would have known that something was up.

Perhaps the reason that Conan Doyle decided to kill Holmes off was precisely this; not out of fear so much as the sneaking suspicion that he had created something that might surpass its creator in achievement. Holmes took his mind from better things, but what did this really mean? Serial fiction was hardly the most taxing of forms, so Conan Doyle’s concerns were about something other than the gross act of production; something to do with the product itself.

Perhaps he feared that he had created something that would not be uncreated.

*

Continue reading →

politics / writing — 3 Comments
24
Feb 10

There’s not enough topical poetry about the politics of Niger

Another colonel
Thinks it’s his turn to spring clean
The big boss – hi coup!

writing — 2 Comments
22
Feb 10

The Ranger counts every Sunset a Victory

It took a while for the quokka to warm up and approach me.

“Now kill it,” my sister said from behind the camera.

I told her no. I told her she couldn’t make me. She said she could. I watched the quokka nibble the same fingers that could take a life.

Two weeks later we buried her husband. I tried not to meet her gaze. I didn’t see any of my family again for six years.

Their claim on me would never expire. I held the quokka – a different quokka – in my arms and watched them drive towards my house.

writing — 1 Comment
11
Feb 10

Negcast

Since his name starts with a Z, Zhou tunes in at 11.58 every night. It could be worse – he knows people who take time off work to find a quiet room to listen to their names being read out over tinny speakers.

“Zhou Ji Yijiu is a worthless and lazy media whore with bad teeth and a poorly-disguised limp.”

Zhou breathes a sigh of relief. He wonders what life was like before the Negcast. How did people even know they existed when their names weren’t announced and their failings listed to the world? How would they know their worth?

writing — 4 Comments
21
Jun 09

Woebot 185

“I love you, Miss Susan,” said the little robot plaintively.

“That’s sweet,” she replied, bending down to press the button on the side of the robot’s head. With a click and a buzz, the light disappeared from the robot’s eyes, and its metal posture seemed to go slack. Susan sighed. She would have to call the manufacturers in the morning and order a new one.

She opened the door to the cupboard beneath the stairs, picked up the robot and placed it gently inside, next to the long line of other robots. Then she closed the door, and locked it.

writing — No Comments
2
Jun 09

Wound in the Salt

I suppose three trends have lead Salt Publishing to its current financial difficulties:

  1. The lack of a viable commercial strategy for poetry, although it’s hard to imagine that one could ever exist.
  2. The parlous state of UK arts funding, a Labour legacy that manages to be both unexpected and unsurprising.
  3. The impending doom of the publishing industry at the hands of the web and its ruthless cheerleaders.

If you feel like bucking those trends – and why wouldn’t you? Summer is here, and surely the recession hasn’t hit your wallet that hard – then heed the words of Chris Hamilton-Emery:

As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our press. Our three year funding ends this year: we’ve £4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt’s operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April’s much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It’s proving to be a very big hole and we’re having to take some drastic measures to save our business.

Here’s how you can help us to save Salt and all our work with hundreds of authors around the world.

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don’t mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you’ll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.
UK and International
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/index.php

USA
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop-us/index.php

2. Share this note on your Facebook or MySpace profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it’s just one book, that’s all it takes to save us. Please do it now.

With my best wishes to everyone
Chris Hamilton-Emery
Director
Salt Publishing
http://www.saltpublishing.com

writing — No Comments
20
Apr 09

R.I.P.J.G.B.

J. G. Ballard was the ghostwriter for postwar English literature, standing at the shoulder of all writers who staked out the city or the suburbs1 whether they realised it or not. You’ll read about his literary achievements in the obituaries that spring up like mushrooms around his death yesterday, but I doubt that those achievements were his greatest pleasure. His last book, the autobiography Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, is dedicated to his real achievement: the three children he raised as a single father after the death of his wife Mary in 1964.

My direction as a writer changed after Mary’s death, and many readers thought that I became far darker. But I like to think I was much more radical, in a desperate attempt to prove that black was white, that two and two made five in the moral arithmetic of the 1960s. I was trying to construct an imaginative logic that made sense of Mary’s death and would prove that the assassination of President Kennedy and the countless deaths of the Second World War had been worthwhile or even meaningful in some as yet undiscovered way. Then, perhaps, the ghosts inside my head , the old beggar under the quilt of snow, the strangled Chinese at the railway station, Kennedy and my young wife, could be laid to rest.

Ballard lived most of his life in the UK in Shepperton, which by meaningless coincidence is where my grandparents lived, and I like to imagine that I passed him many times on Shepperton High Street without realising it. I read everything I could find by Ballard when I was growing up – finding in his writing a survival kit that helped me to reconfigure suburbia as a place of strangeness rather than banality – so I suppose that I crossed paths with him in a literary sense; and that will have to be enough. R.I.P.

  1. Although not the countryside, which in literary terms I think would have been more alien to him than Mars. [↩]
UK / writing — No Comments
1
Apr 09

Balls to the British novel

Stoop:

All of the rave reviews that often accompany your work tend to say that you’re a great “crime” writer, that you are rewriting the “crime” genre – crime this and crime that, basically. It’s not something I wholly agree with – there are crime elements to your novels but I think your work is more literary than its given credit for. I just wondered if it irked you at all, the tag you have of being a “crime writer”?

David Peace:

Not really – Dostoyevsky wrote crime; Kafka wrote crime; Brecht wrote crime; Orwell wrote crime. Dickens. Greene. Dos Passos. Delillo etc. But anyway, to me, these days “literary” just means British writers with their Creative Writing MAs wanting to write the “Great American Novel” and filling bookshops with unreadable shite, with no plots, no characters, no balls, no heart and, above all, no British Voice. The best work is always done in the margins and the genres: Burroughs and Ballard in Science Fiction; Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore; and I’m proud to share the same section of a shop as Ellroy, Mosley, Pelecanos and Rankin.

(H/T: k-punk on the television adaptation of the Red Riding sequence.)

(Bonus: A Mindless One on why David Peace should be writing Hellblazer.)

writing — No Comments
26
Mar 09

Bruce Chatwin in the Information Age

While reading this post, you should be listening to Little Brother by ‘O’rang.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

It’s time to admit that being published by Granta – even if only online – was one of my teenage ambitions. Granta published “The Coup” by Bruce Chatwin, the first piece of travel writing I remember reading, as well the first truly beautiful writing that I can remember. It was around the time that I started to wake up to the world, and Chatwin’s reports reassured me that one of the things that I wanted in my own life – the possibility of perpetual arrival – was out there, somewhere.

As I got older,  I realised that the Chatwin that I read about was a fictionsuit1 for the real Chatwin, and that he was dreaming himself into the world in much the same way as I was. It seemed that his world was far grander than mine until I got older still, and realised that the world that I read about in Chatwin’s books was also a fabrication – in the nonfiction as much as in the fiction.2

Bruce Chatwin flat out made shit up, and he never got seriously called on it. He was in a position of privilege – a published writer that would get the benefit of the doubt from the establishment – and those who would call him down had none of his resources. The playing field has changed since Chatwin was a literary superstar – the internet has made it possible for nearly anybody nearly anywhere to read my work, for which I am thankful. At the same time it’s created a feedback loop which makes it possible for nearly anybody nearly anywhere to point out any egregious errors in my writing.

I’m under no illusions that I’m half the writer that Chatwin was, but once my piece on northern Iraq in 1998 was published, I began to wonder whether my own recollections would stand up to scrutiny. My memories – shaky at the best of times – are over 10 years old now; I wasn’t able to check with Segwan, a key character in the piece, whether my memories of him were accurate, because I have no idea where he is now. Nobody has yet popped up to tell me that the Turkish army were never in northern Iraq (of course they weren’t, of course), but if I was a bigger fish (or Granta was a smaller pond) then I’m sure that they would.

Truth and accuracy are not the same thing, but unfortunately there’s a legion of pedants on the web who beg to differ. The internet has made it possible for us to (re)create ourselves on a scale that Chatwin would have envied, whether it’s as a serious blogger with serious thoughts or a firebreathing transexual avatar in Second Life.3 Following close behind, though, is the reverse of possibility, the closing down of possibility; the anti-possibility that we might be tracked all the time, whether in the anthropological enclosures of Facebook or further out in the wilderness, and that all of our creative acts of the self – all of our lies – might be hunted to extinction.

Chatwin was a genius because he sometimes let his imagination run away with him. What else do we lose if we lose that capacity for running away?

  1. Grant Morrison coined the phrase, he didn’t invent the concept. [↩]
  2. Recommended reading: Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Bruce Chatwin. [↩]
  3. That’s not me – my avatar is a heavy-set bloke with a beard and hawaian shirt. [↩]
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