Gleaned Genius (Pt 7)

Last week Janice Galloway (contemporary Scottish literary legend) arrived to give a rousing inspirational ramble about writing and her anti-memoir This is Not About Me.

I scribbled some notes under the vague heading ‘writing advice,’ although Janice’s approach to writing is quite straightforward compared to those pros with rituals and regimented weirdness.

She says (paraphrasing – not exact quotes):

1. No ventriloquising. The writer’s voice shouldn’t be ignored, concealed, or festooned with artificial baubles. You might not like your natural writing voice, but it’s self-deception to ignore it.

2. Writing should, under no circumstances, be forced. If your manuscript requires a decade of tinkering and perfection, there’s no point straining to write when the Muses aren’t there.

3. Never overdescribe a scene. There should always be a space for the reader to insert themselves into a scene, to let their own imagination fill in that which goes unsaid.

4. There comes a point when the writer should stop editing and let their manuscript go. There’s no such thing as a perfect manuscript, only a work polished to as good as humanly possible a standard.

5. Let your narrative breathe, get out of its way. A variation on the ‘showing vs. telling’ adage, basically – selective and precise detail when required.

6. You should have very little regard for who you include in your book from real life. It’s the writer’s job to write from life, and that includes putting family, friends or others noteworthy into your text (if necessary), and not disguising them for fear of offending those close to you.

7. The physicality of writing – what rituals do you use to feel your way into your characters? Try acting or thinking like your characters, getting into their skin (adopting their mannerisms as you write etc.)

8. Read Liars in Love, a short story collection by Richard Yates. Just do it.

9. Writing can be an endurance, and even those who struggle and hate the actual process of writing should keep hammering away at their novel. The writer’s task is to write, regardless how tired and disgusted they become with a manuscript!

Those are my (unintelligible and hastily scribbled) notes from her brief talk. She was fabulous, darlings, and expressed the above with lashings more wit and articulacy. For those unfamiliar with her works, add The Trick is to Keep Breathing to your neverending ‘to-read’ lists. I’ll be micro-reviewing her memoir when I get the chance.

Toodle-pop.

The Staggeringly Concise Book Review Series [#3]

I’ve recently finished Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew and the verdict is this: masterpiece.

The novel centres around arrogant avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont and chronicles his gradual descent into writerly oblivion. Antony considers his first published work, Three Deuces – a standard potboiler crime novel – to be among the great works of American literature. His follow-up novel he labels a Sur-Neofictional mystery – a dreadful piece of indulgent, ponderous hack work – the progress of which we get to read throughout the novel.

This is Sorrentino’s first stroke of genius: his ability to parody bad writing. No writer has exhaustively lampooned the stylistic tics of the hopeless hack with such brutal and hilarious attention to detail. Example (p232):

Suddenly, I adjudged that Daisy had flown swiftly to the ladies’ room. Had I been wrong, after all, about her? Fool! Fool! Blind stupid fool. How I had hurried on, a frail canoe with the current, rushing from the past! And now it was all too clear what a mistake I had made. I bit my knuckles until they hurt me like coals of fire. I mean like if coals of fire had been applied to them. Thus were the sharpness of my teeth. Then she was back, eyeing me narrowly and with a curious stare as if realizing that it was I that she had earlier looked at as if seeing for the first time and not someone that she had indeed seen for the first time.

The novel contains fourteen chapters of this pin-sharp satire – a satire which is so effective, I felt smothered by the sheer awfulness of this manuscript, as though I was being chased by Sorrentino from the book. Which brings me to postmodern pranks at play in the book. The characters in Antony’s novel are desperate to escape the prose and find a home elsewhere in a far less arduous manuscript. We gradually watch Antony’s personnel slipping away from him as he loses complete control of his novel (and mind). Hilarious.

This notion of characters ‘on loan’ from other writers is a crucial seam of the book. Sorrentino has taken characters from James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Dashiell Hammett and employed them in his novel. Understandably then, the style very much mirrors the comic whimsy, relentless invention, and original spirit of these influences, making Mulligan Stew the embodiment of the intertextual novel, as well as a literary critic’s wet dream.

The novel is partly epistolary, comprising of letters Antony writes to his sister Sheila, ranting about his difficulty and loathing for his more successful contemporary Dermot Trellis. There are bizarre parodies of academic mathematical papers, sophomoric erotic poems and SPAM letters – each target exhausted to the height of overindulgence (the masque parody becomes unbearable), but nonetheless comprehensively savaged.

Mulligan Stew is effectively a novel against cliché, bad writing and writer egos. Sorrentino spent his career napalming cliché in his poems, criticism and handful of novels, and this masterpiece demonstrates his spellbinding comic imagination and passion for the unpretentious in books.

Recently reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press in an unflattering cover (it looks like a lit textbook), the novel is a Promethean undertaking but is a crucial work for the writer concerned with the faults in their own work – it is instructional as well as inspirational.

Yes. Own it.

Dream Sequences

OK, it’s time to oil up and grapple with the three-backed beast: the Dream Sequence.

Q: How do people really dream?

A: We dream in hazy subconscious images, surreal tapestries of fear and memory, or in cryptic, meaningless bilge. If we’re suppressing deep trauma, our dreams will be unpleasant lakes of fire and smouldering flesh. If we’re dead-brained optimists in white corsets who like candyfloss, our dreams will be about white corsets and candyfloss. Simple, sayeth Dr. Freud.

Q: How do people dream in books?

A: They dream in important facts that are crucial to the plot. They dream in vivid and detailed scenes. They dream in very implausible frightening things – gigantic snakes strangling their mothers or impregnating their unborn children with bearded frothing acids. They dream in imagery consistent with that in the text so far. They dream in profound-sounding images that relate to Greek mythology or that makes us stroke our chins and say, ‘Hmm, how very interesting and reminiscent of Rimbaud.’

Q: How do we put a stop to this ludicrous dream sequence nonsense?

A: Stop our characters from dreaming. Make them dream about normal things: hunks ‘n’ babes, corsets ‘n’ candyfloss, squiggly lines ‘n’ weird green fogs, and crap imitation Hieronymus Bosch paintings.

Here endeth the blog. (Yes, it was all a dream).

Swearing in Fiction

When I was a small child with pert thighs and a carefree attitude to most things, I was afraid of swear words. Often co-pupils would goad me into uttering the occasional fuck or the offhand shit, but – being of strong moral fibre – I refused to utter an impure word.

This continued throughout my adolescence. When the veils of life began to peel away, and I opened my eyes to the gaping black emptiness at the heart of all human endeavour, it became clearer to me that these fucks and shits served a purpose. They were words we uttered when the riptide of meaninglessness toppled us sideways into a hectare of profoundly unpalatable piss – your time to be singled out for a cosmological rape.

At university, my rebellion arrived at an awkward stage, meaning the whirlwinds of cuss and bluster I summoned up were often mistaken for immaturity and a bad attitude (which was probably true), but the liberation I felt when diagnosing the human condition a bubbling horrorcoat of fucking shit-flan and double-dick cakes was BRILLIANT.

However, I’ve also dragged the cussing habit into my writing. My question is: how lazy is the humble swear? Is it inevitable to include these words in our work given they're so firmly ensconced in our daily parlance? Or should we aspire to purer, cuss-free forms of literary endeavour? And who gives a fuck either way?

I find the swear word entertaining in texts, provided the prose is of substantial artistic merit to get away with using them. Lazy novels about street gangs where cuss words are used every few pages are boredom fests for me. Forty pages of Nabovkian eloquence followed by eight sentences of shit and wank is hilarious and the writer should be knighted.

And I have a new swear: hegghi. It means to be badly attired or badly presented.

[What a hegghi!]

The Staggeringly Concise Book Review Series [#2]

The follow-up to Lucy Ellmann’s universally underappreciated masterstroke Dot in the Universe (see below) is another acerbic chunk of life-affirming misery and black comedy.

Doctors & Nurses is, like Dot, marketed in the manner of a chick-lit romp (shame on you, Bloomsbury) but contains a distinctively despicable and disgusted heroine, far removed from the moral cosiness of this genre. Jen (three-letter protagonists seem to be Ellmann’s dish) is an obese self-loathing hump of woman: a nurse, rampant fornicator, and admirer of the disappointingly named Dr. Roger Lewis – “a name full of anticlimax, a name full of COLLAPSE.”

She occupies a small room in the doctor’s surgery, pining for the slothful Dr. Lewis – a man more preoccupied with football than saving the lives of his patients. In fact, he has a penchant for medical malpractice – poking and prodding his patients into their graves while delighting in the squalor of his attic dwellings (a cluttered bunk of decrepitude which contains his irrelevant and mad wife). Jen, it turns out, is equally disinterested in healing the sick.

Jen and the doctor soon lock organs in an awkward sexual grapple, united in their disregard for the human body. As their relationship veers toward marriage, Jen encounters a series of setbacks – her spouse’s mad wife, some cadavers to whom she might be related, and policemen determined to convict her due to her plumpness. In a mad dash, she runs into the woods, sleeps naked, and gets back in touch with her universally loathed body.

What is the novel about, I hear you cry? Pfft. Jen is a caricature of the self-loathing Ellmann sees in modern women. She suggests, in explicit terms, women should appreciate their genitals more, and shows us a modest sample of the vagina on p29. (Hate to ruin the surprise). It also seems to be about the indifference of the NHS – how doctors are more interested in lunch than curing lung cancer. Controversial (and mad).

For the theorists, Ellmann sticks her snout into notions of what a modern novel should contain, throwing in (irrelevant) murders to please her readers and scolding us for our love of blood and death. In Ellmann’s world, blood and death are everywhere – why are we so preoccupied with gruesomeness and gore?

Also, the novel is eminently postmodern, although casually so – apart from the persistent CAPITALS and intertextual asides, the novel runs on sheer contempt. (The GOOD kind!) There is also an overwhelming list of malaises that runs for some six pages: the various ways we can DIE or SUFFER in this miserable life. Though somehow Ellmann makes this spot-your-illness activity FUN!

The most important aspect of the book is the sizzling speed, bile and guts with which Ellmann writes. Her novels appear sporadically (two in this decade so far – two in the 1990s) which suggests a great period of bile-simmering. Imagine someone bottling their spleen for half a decade and releasing it upon their beloved manuscript to cause HAVOC.

When Ellmann releases the hellhounds, it’s so devilishly entertaining.

P.S. The Independent also informs me this novel is an academic masterpiece, but I’ll leave that for the chattering classes (or Michael Bywater) to decide.

The Staggeringly Concise Book Review Series [#1]

Lucy Ellmann’s 2003 novel Dot in the Universe is a blistering tour de force of splenetic human insight, knee-bending satire, relentless stylistic abuse, and profound intelligence.

The novel centres around Dot – a semi-human shell devoid of any discernible life. Dot is a speck of nothingness aware of her basic insignificance in the cosmos and her status as merely another ‘dot’ in the universe. She ekes out a depressive bourgeois existence in the suburb of Jaywick Sands (which is routinely savaged for its suicidal dullness), having unfulfilling sex and bumping off old ladies. She then decides, upon fleeing her philandering husband, to take her life by leaping off the Forth Road Bridge.

Fair enough. Throughout the remaining 150 pages, she enters the bureaucratic nightmare of the underworld, haunts her former lover to retrieve proof of her ID, and wins the most exciting death contest. Her prize (after a brief and unsuccessful stint as a possum) is reincarnation in an equally depressive American suburb. Dot is, it seems, unsuited for this unfathomable world. She finds love, at last, through an incestuous union with her brother, but he – alas – goes on to kill himself despite being a scientific genius. So it goes.

Ellmann punctuates this bleak-sounding tale with shards of LOUD and CAPITALISED humour. The NY Times compares this style to a friend who writes ranting letters which seem to have their own insane logic, and I find this accurate – Lucy wallops the reader with her blunt vitriol, which is wildly entertaining and witty, but which BEGS to be taken seriously.

There is such FURY (I can’t help it – it’s addictive) behind Ellmann’s wit that makes this novel highly re-readable for almost any occasion, but which forces us to confront what despicable, sagging lumps we are. She directs her spite towards scientists (there’s a rant in here that will outrage devout realists) and tears impetuously through the innumerable inane quirks of existence – exposing the fundamental fraud of human endeavour. Often within the same paragraph.

Ellmann’s work is a strange cross between vicious stand-up comedy (Alexei Sayle or Bill Hicks springs to mind), Wodehousian whimsy, and the shrugging misanthropy of Kurt Vonnegut. Quite a cocktail! The packaging of her books suggests postmodern chick-lit, but the scope of this work is too broad, and Dot is too inscrutable a heroine to attract that audience. Plus, the central theme of this novel is DEATH (that old favourite), and the challenge this hurdle presents to people attempting to fill the LIFE portion they are allotted.

Dot in the Universe is almost certainly a modern classic. An infectious and cantankerous romp through quite profound territory, handled with humility, moral outrage and cheeky slabs of misanthropy. Any novel dealing with grand themes that leaves me feeling ELATED when I should be feeling MISERABLE is pulling the right strings. As Ellmann indicates, there is a great deal of mirth to be mined in self-loathing.

So I recommended this book to every mortal. If you’re even remotely human, you’ll take enormous pleasure in this dark, deranged and sublime comédie humaine. Ellmann has the closing WORDS! (From p13):

“Dot in the universe. Dot was insignificant, but who isn’t? So much EFFORT we put into life, all the feeding, clothing, educating, medicating, fornicating, masturbating, cleansing and conversing. All the ANXIETY. When it doesn’t really matter if a single person gets happy. The universe DOESN’T GIVE A DAMN.”

Sounds of the Slush Pile

I would like to cast the clout of doubt upon books written about albums, namely the 33⅓ series from Continuum Books.

Before I begin, I would like to utter a statement of sweeping banality: music and literature has always had a strange relationship. There. That’s done. Phew. We can hop forwards.

Legions of novels have been inspired by songs or albums, and usually the novels themselves bear little resemblance (topic-wise) to the music. Or vice-versa in songs inspired by novels. There’s no reason the two art forms shouldn’t converge in interesting and creative ways, but I often wonder where music fits into the novel? It seems to me that the two should be kept separate, strumming the same planes of the human psyche, but tingling different receptors.

Writing about music can be dazzling and profound. Pioneering rock critics from the ‘60s and ‘70s such as Greil Marcus or Lester Bangs wrote humble music reviews, but were literary visionaries in their own right. Music hacks in those days had their own artistic vision – to emulate the genius they heard in the music and to turn their own pieces into free-flowing experimental tapestries of progressive art. As opposed to complaining about the bassline in Under Pressure or laughing at the fifth drummer in AC/DC's middle name (I’m speaking to you, NME!) That art has been lost, sadly, and clear dividers exist these days between MUSICIAN and HACK.

So what about the novelist seeking to turn that golden album they adore into a work of transcendent fiction? It is this upon which I cast the clout of doubt. It’s irrelevant how well a writer describes the music in a novel, as no words can compare to hearing the music in situ. This is a Latin phrase meaning ‘on an ipod’.

And so, we have the 33⅓ series. Now, these books don’t attempt to turn the albums they discuss into brilliant tracts of original fiction. Ho-ho-no! They are books written by people involved in making classic records, insiders willing to shed light on the mythology behind an album, or by hacks eager to heap bursts of gratuitous praise upon their beloved choones.

I’ll admit that it’s interesting to hear how my favourite bands recorded such startling music, but in the case of several albums – these stories are well-documented. Do we need another book about the bizarre inception of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica? Plus, do we want the myths to be shattered? The power of myth cannot be underestimated in making an album a classic. Parts of Trout Mask Replica are inexcusably hideous to the ear, but because the record sits upon this impenetrable throne of monumental weirdness, it is somehow less arduous to sit through (in its own fishfaced way).

Likewise, some albums were recorded in unextraordinary circumstances, leaving the anecdotal fodder somewhat thin. Some records are far too incredible to even merit 200 pages of blah-chat. Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs is a whopping pop classic – it was designed, executed and written as such by Stephin Merritt – and the incredible range of music on the record needs no real discussion. The songs are direct, memorable and smashing. Listen to them! Also, they were written by a craftsman from a cosseted New York background. Ergo, no drugs or madness or sex or kicking drummers into swimming pools.

Even worse, some of the books involve writers detailing their own profound experiences with the music, i.e. indulgent rambling that belongs on a blog or in a newspaper. This is true in the book about Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘religious’ acid-indie smash In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (which I’ve read sections from – eep!) The surreal acid-inspired dream-lyrics of singer Jeff Magnum opens up the pretentious gate for all manner of Barthesian meta-analyses – the sons of the Dylan critics finding their own latter-day Bob to enshrine.

What I do admire about this series are the albums. A huge number of these books are about albums I love and play constantly! Hurrah! Somehow though, I feel reading about some other bastard loving the record I adore, or having the minutiae of its creation explained to me in ENDLESS detail, would ruin the sheer pleasure of listening to the album. So, although I respect rock criticism when it took itself seriously as a proper literary force, these days I’m inclined to avoid books about music entirely. I leave this stuff to the obsessives, megafans and general rock-celeb snoops.

Forget who made the music, or how it was made. Just enjoy it as the artist intended. After all, the artists themselves won’t be reading this stuff. Spin that old 45 again and get boogieing! Or, em... use an ipod.