What Has It Got In Its Notebookeses?

As you will no doubt have gathered from my unceasing whining about it, I moved house recently. Having fused somewhat with the previous accommodation as a result of inhabiting it in typically carefree (and slovenly) style for seven solid years, I have been finding all sorts of gems amid the detritus that act as unintentional time capsules.

Obviously we also have the internet for that, but there is something rather fascinating about what I felt it necessary to note down and what I thought I was still going to understand later.

Following excerpts come from a green spiral-bound notebook purchased in Paris around Christmas 2005, and filled up in spurts as I found and lost it again.

Ceci c’est mon sang, ceci c’est mon corps.

Some men seek what other men have never had to find; some men search while others exist in a state of blissful now.

you’re naked said digory rather unnecessarily yes replied the boy and you’re wearing awful clothes

Ou est les enfants? NYOM NYOM I ATES THE BABIES! Tu manger les enfants? Mal Grandmere!

He lacks ennui
His penis functions

J’ne parle pas Angelaise mais je suis madamoiselle pleasante!

BELT OF RAW MEAT

Santa’s stomach strains with the naughty children that he has devoured [this was written across the belly of the single most sinister and carnivorous-looking Santa Claus I have ever seen]

Andy Warhol is perturbed and enraged by reality television

“I’m eating Jaffa cakes in an ossuary. Is that normal?”

David (Jacques-Louis) 1748-1825
Leonidan aux Thermopyles

Look at some ‘cartoons’ of Orpheous & Eurydice: Orpheous kind of minging.

– “If I throw up now, I can eat some more!”

I am up to the bit just before the poet gives them his poem — Before sunrise.

7. sewing is tessellation – pattern-solving

NB: If you want to write like Pat Barker – shorter sentences. Less florid language. Less poeticism.

–> Essence of meaning — the poetic equation/proof — elegance in brevity.

Matteo di Giovanni (died 1495)
Saint Sebastian 1480-5

Masculinity & Brotherhood in WW1 & WWII
Cross-dressing/transgenderism in ancient cultures

Always looking for the sociology or meta meaning/reason BEHIND things. Worried that life is one big ALLEGORY

“The fencer’s weapon is picked up & put down again. The boxer’s is part of him.” .2.9 [I think this is from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, judging by the context it's in]

Only at the personal level can something be “against your beliefs”.

Anatomical unravelling in progress (y)

Purity is not something to be brought about by bleach.

“One would like evil people to be lazy and stupid ones to keep their mouths shut.”

“Petty souls are more susceptible to ambition than great ones, just as straw or thatched cottages burn more easily than palaces.”

[several drunken pages of scribbling as I tried to work out a better plot than the Da Vinci Code in a pub, shortly after seeing the film]

Vassilly, huh? Holst feels usurped by Blake. Blake asks S. for any further contacts and S says no very firmly, so Blake, out of nowhere, smacks S into a wall quite casually. Even Holst is appalled.

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

When spoken of the disassociative personality diminishes his or her sense of aloofness and disconnect but momentarily [in a speech bubble, spoken by a reclining stick figure]

The Republic of Ireland was invented by Oliver Cromwell and the Jews after they realised that it was going to be many hundreds of years before ‘wipe the potato-chewing drunken bastards off the globe’ could truly be put into effect. [definitely recall writing this in the pub to annoy someone specific]

more black eyelet tape.

LARGE CODPIECE! Gumbo: Rabbit? Liver?

Letter from Julie to Peter Cross

[random Greek which I have no memory of and no idea what it says]

MIMI WONG

[Drawing of an owl wearing a hoodie]

R.M.S. = 0.707 x peak

Waves add and either cancel (out of phase) or amplify (in phase) a standing wave is when reflections from parallel surfaces [sentence not finished]

1) Use a room with no parallel walls

But no, I will laugh. It is fine insulation, even the bitter kind. Keep forcing laughter until it becomes real.

“Every labyrinth twist another dead end.”

Filed under: content: snippets, notebook, quotes, the things i find in my house, what

Extract From a Letter 2

Life continues chaotic, busy, and wearing, meaning that all writing or planning outside of another long letter is simply not happening. This blog will see a little more action in a day or two when April starts and the infernal nuisance of National Poetry Month begins, but until then have another extract from the never-ending letter:

An odd question occurs to me: what is the earth like where you are? Is it hard or soft? Is there topsoil? Is it the acidic stuff of where I grew up, or the chalky alkaline that turns out blue flowers and spindly trees? The landscape of my childhood was a split between windswept moors with the odd bent tree – the stuff of Brontë novels (I know you love Wuthering Heights) – where the grass is sheep-cropped short and the bracken comes up to your shoulder and every time you fall over you don’t land on the springy heather but on a vicious gorse bush. It is a landscape of rain and continual up and down, with granite bursting out of the thin soil, and bogs you could (and have) lose a horse in.

These vast windswept mountain ranges were interspersed with deep valleys of the sort that end up in Lord of the Rings – shallow, fast-flowing rivers and moss-covered boulders, streams full of slippery round rocks, and mossy, old oak trees. An old landscape and according to some documentary or other it is a totally unique habitat, globally.

The rest of the time I lived in a land of chalk downs and long grass, but both were largely treeless landscapes characterised by butterflies of rarity: Dartmoor had the Common Fritillary (a misnomer, it is very rare), which is orange-brown, and Somerset had the Chalk Blues. These places are so close together by Australian standards, but geographically so different.

What you may take from my letter excerpts is that I spent a lot of time rambling about West Country landscapes in the vaguely nostalgic manner of someone who has absolutely no intention of ever leaving London again.

Filed under: content: real life, content: snippets, butterflies, dartmoor, devon, epistolary, letter, letters, quotes, somerset, west country, writing

Extract from a letter.

Our landlady has very kindly decided that since our house is, not to put too fine a point on it, falling down, we have to move out. She’s not given us the hugest of windows to get on with this, there aren’t many places I really want to live, and we own a lot of things (this is primarily my fault because I am to books what magpies are to tin foil). As a result of this I’m even less able to get my head around writing anything intelligent at the moment, so here’s an extract from a letter I started writing during my lunch break today.

Almost anything can be an act of devotion if you want it to be one.

We have beautiful churches here. What makes them ‘holy’, or gives them a sense of the divine, is the shape. It produces echoes that move upwards, and keeps the place cool and strangely silent: there is self-imposed order in these buildings designed to make you feel small but in touch with something bigger: Leonard Cohen captures it sometimes in his songs of adulation, sacrifice, and self-abasement. His passion is masochistic, religious – whether sanctified or decidedly profane, he understands that there is pleasure to be found in kneeling before something.

One of the beaches we used to drive to in the evenings was a long narrow scar cutting inland between a huge high cliff and a lower one made of sandwiches of dark rock run through with wide quartz seams. It was a terrible place for swimming – I nearly drowned myself on a number of occasions – but on our way in and out of the deep valley there was a graveyard up on the cliff top.

It was small, full, and completely surrounded by a stone wall that came up to my chest – filled with plants and birds’ nests – and with a roofed-over gateway of the sort that is common in churchyards in Southern England. But if there was a church it had gone. The graves lay in a sort of order, but the rows had grown higgledy-piggledy and everywhere long pale grass was taking over the land of the dead, just as the branches scaled the walls. I have always loved cemeteries of the old English sort because they are quiet, empty, and home to exciting wildlife, but this one, with its view to endless blue skies and nodding ox-eye daisies, with the wind bringing the sea into my hair at sunset, was always my favourite.

It was unusual for an English graveyard for its lack of trees, specifically the heavy yew that haunts most. Somehow the bright and breezy loneliness of it seemed more appropriate than the stifling mourning-scent of yew, a bit like the Chinese preference for white for mourning being somehow more sensible than the European predilection for black.

It is a very long and meandering letter of the sort I haven’t written in a good long time, and I’m fairly pleased to find myself in the right frame of mind for writing to people at all. It places the sci-fi short out of commission for the time being, perhaps, but there was no deadline on that.

Currently reading: The Charioteer by Mary Renault (a reread and a comfort read, which I’d already found I needed before the eviction notice), and Where Angels Fear To Tread by E M Forster, with occasional digressions into David Cronenberg by John Costello as I have returned to my old, bad habit of reading several books at once.

Currently listening to: A return to obsessive re-listenings of Virtue by Emmy the Great, although I have promised a friend I would give her my thoughts on England Keep My Bones by Frank Turner.

Currently watching: No television, although I intend to catch up with The 10 O’Clock Show to mitigate the poisonous seepings of the newspapers I can’t help seeing on the way to work, and a kind of fervent fascination with cut scenes from the 1987 film adaptation of Maurice.

And a small favour: If you have been eyeballing anything in my shop, between now and early May would be a lovely time for you to buy it, as I need to get stock out of my house before I move.

Filed under: content: real life, content: snippets, beach, books, cemeteries, churches, cornwall, e.m. forster, friends, graveyards, jewellery, letters, mary renault, personal, real life, religious architecture, shopping, the charioteer, the west country, where angels fear to tread

Writing Post: A Parable

On his way to the big city for the first time, a farmer stopped by the side of the road for a drink of water from his pouch. He wiped his mouth and turned to spit, when he saw a glint of something colourful shining in the bushes.

Mindful that it might be a snake, he proceeded with caution. There he found, to his surprise, a pile of of rubies the size of hen’s eggs, and amid them a human skull, the jaw still hanging beneath it.

“Help yourself,” said the skull, before the farmer could so much exclaim in surprise, “there’s not much I can do with them now.”

“Good grief, a talking skull,” said the farmer, who was noted for his observational prowess. “How on earth did you get there?”

“I got here by talking, my friend,” said the skull.

Taking the skull at its word, the farmer began to scoop the rubies into his pockets with great excitement, for with them he could buy many cows, and land, and his farm was sure to flourish.

On his way into the city the guards stopped and searched him as they had stopped and searched each man entering the city (it took a very long time); when they came upon the rubies they called for the Captain of the guard.

“How did you come by these rubies?” asked the Captain, angry and shaking his spear. “These are the rubies of the prince. They were stolen last year. How have you these rubies and what do you mean by walking so brazenly back into the city with them?”

“Oh my,” said the farmer, who had been brought up to be an honest man, “I only found them by the side of the road a mile back, under a talking skull. It said I should take them.”

“A talking skull?” said the Captain of the guard. “This is either lying, or witchcraft. For the lie you shall be put to death, for the witchcraft you shall be imprisoned and exorcised. Where is this skull, liar-witch?”

“I can take you to it!” cried the farmer. “I am not a liar, and I am not a witch.”

When the Captain of the guard came to the skull with the farmer, he said, “This is just an old skull.”

“I tell you it talked,” said the farmer, quite distressed. He picked up the skull, crying, “Talk! Talk I say! Tell them I am not a liar!”

But the skull did not speak.

“Perhaps you have no authority,” said the Captain of the guard with a smirk. “Here, you. Skull. Say something, else your accomplice will lose his head.”

“Hey, I am not his accomplice,” the farmer said, “I am just a farmer.”

But the skull did not speak, and dangled as dead as any skull from the hand of the Captain of the guard.

“It seems your fate is sealed, thief,” said the Captain of the guard. “You steal the prince’s rubies and then you lie to the Captain of the city guard! You shall lose your head for this.”

As he said so the guard-of-the-axe knocked the farmer to his knees, and pressed his face to the dirt. He placed the edge of his axe along the farmer’s neck, and lifted up his axe.

“One last time,” said the Captain of the guard. “SKull, in the name of the prince, I command you to speak.”

But the skull did not speak.

The guard-of-the-axe brought his axe down THUNK, and the farmer’s head rolled into the bushes. With a shrug the Captain of the guard tossed aside the skull, and he went back to the city with the prince’s rubies, to a fine reward.

Presently, the skull, upside-down in the bushes, said, “Well hello, how on earth did you get there?”

And the severed head of the unfortunate farmer replied, “I got here by talking, my friend.”

---

If memory serves, I first learnt a version of this story when I was six or so, at one of the many festivals and workshops my mother used to take me along to because she couldn’t afford childcare. I’ve heard, read, and told many variations but the central theme and the refrain “I got here by talking, my friend” is always the same. I am not sure where the story originally hails from – the person who told it to me first said “Africa”, which is unnecessarily nebulous, and I have had no further advances on this beyond “West Africa, possibly”. At any rate, it is a fine parable, and one which deserves retelling.

Filed under: content: snippets, african folklore, fiction, folk tales, folklore, moral, parable, short stories, skull, stories, story-telling, tales, the price of talking, writing

Snippet post: The Advent Chronicles

I’m still wrestling with refining the plot of Advent Chronicles down into chunks that can actually be written (using a loose variation on the Snowflake Method), and still repeatedly badgering my dear friends/walking reference libraries Shoi and G. for more information, and still compulsively buying books about crime in 1920s New York and then somewhat undermining my stringent research attempts by not reading them.

I’m very nervous about the prospect of writing serial fiction, because I’ve never really done it before; or at least, certainly not to a set schedule, or with an overarching plot rather than a series of afterthoughts tacked on with increasing clumsiness. I’ve already harangued Lee Barnett (Week Ending for the BBC) and Kieron Gillen (Phonogram, Journey Into Mystery) about how best to divide up the plot and maintain a level of appropriate tension and release, and just about restrained myself from filling up the ask box on Neil Gaiman’s Tumblr with whiny entreaties for some kind of explanation as to how the hell one writes serially.

Possibly as an antidote to this, and because it’s the one part of the story that doesn’t require as much research, I’ve written the introduction. I may well rewrite it – in fact, I will almost certainly rewrite it – but in the interests of Showing My Workings like we’re all still in school, here’s the opening to The Advent Chronicles:

The aliens came to America at the change of the century. It was a hot night in late May, and as a portent of doom they were early and kinda not what anyone was expecting.

No one knew what they wanted, but it turned out they wanted what every other schmoe washing up on the land of liberty wanted: the chance to make something for themselves. Well, we couldn’t deny ‘em that. Back then we didn’t have the quotas in place.

And at first they didn’t cause no trouble, so we let ‘em go. Just making a living, like all of us. It wasn’t ’til 1910 that it started leaking out of the ghettos and the ditches and the railway bridges – y’know, all the places where people people who ain’t got no one like to hang out – that there were something to be afraid of.

Now we know the word “ovipositor”, even the working girls know it, though they can’t spell it. Dr Hamidullah Lal of the NYPD tells me he’s seen it writ down any way you care to think. He’s a goddamn expert in deciphering the “talisman of violation” from the shaky handwriting of some impoverished sonofabitch’s worried buddy.

My neighbour Raymond, he lost his son that way. Not to the egg, but to the river. Too afraid to think straight, Raymond Junior didn’t go to his pa or Dr Hamidullah Lal. He went to the river and he jumped. Sergeant Gilgun’s men pulled him out bloated and discoloured. Raymond Senior thanks God Almighty he’s been blind these thirty years.

There’s all sortsa shadows that spell the end for girls in this city, but I guess when Fleur du Mal came to us up in the office and said something terrible had happened to Tiny Baby Anastasia, our minds went right to that word: ovipositor. The worst thing that can happen.

We weren’t expecting her to be dead.

It’s out of keeping with my usual, much more florid writing style, and it’s in first person, which I hardly ever write. With any luck Advent Chronicles will continue to be a challenge enough to keep me interested, but not so much of a challenge that I get completely put off! It’s a fine line to walk.

Filed under: content: snippets, advent chronicles, creative, creative writing, fiction, first person, pulp fiction, serial fiction, snippets, the advent chronicles, work in progress, writing, writing woes

Art Post: Fleur du Mal

Another character from the still-in-research-and-planning stage pulp serial The Advent Chronicles, Fleur du Mal is a good-time girl who kind of charges for her good times. She knows a lot of people and one day she wants to be Clara Bow. Or Louise Brooks. The sad truth is, Fleur (who has been “19″ ever since she moved to New York some years ago) is never going to make it out of the speakeasies and onto the stage, never mind all the way to California to be on the big screen.

For this picture, and for Fleur in general, I’ve used Anastasia Reilly as a model. I wasn’t intending to use hatching to shade her, but was in the process of drawing her hair when I realised I just could not be arsed with more colour work, more fake sepia after the fact, and more extrapolation from a black and white photograph. Ordinarily I don’t use lines for shading because I have a despicable wobble in my hands (and I never draw free-hand because my hand-eye coordination leaves something to be desired. Like some hand-eye coordination), but this seems to have worked out well enough just by working at an obnoxiously high degree of zoom and size (the original was about 2000 pixels wide, at 300 dpi).

Of course this led to wondering where Fleur would have a pen drawing of herself, and the idea of knock-off cigarette cards as business cards came to me:

Click image for prints & cards

Filed under: content: artwork, content: snippets, 1920s, 1927, advent chronicles, art, art deco, background, characters, digital art, drawing, flapper, fleur du mal, hatching, lightboxing, pulp, serial, serial fiction

Addendum: Fish!

Oh, goodness, where was this picture when I was renaming the fish?

I'm calling this one the "faith-destroyer"

Sadly despite the caption I can’t bring myself to rename this one, as it’s already got the best name ever bestowed upon one of the earth’s creatures: this beauty,  which labours under the Linnean name Neoclinus blanchardi, has the privilege of the common name the “Sarcastic Fringehead”. This is not a name that can be beaten. Marine biologists, my hat his very firmly off to you.

Filed under: content: snippets, fish, follow-up, names, Neoclinus blanchardi, ocean, photo, sarcastic fringehead, sea, sea life, taxonomy, wildlife