The City and the City and the Church and the Church

Today I sat through Fast & Furious 6 for someone else, and now I am posting her photos from our trip into East central London as if they were mine, because I demand compensation for not falling asleep at any point while experiencing a selection of clichés stapled together with car chases.

Yesterday we walked around the London Museum, the Guildhall Art Gallery, and the Barbican Centre, but in between absorbing so much culture that my feet started to bleed (that’s how education works, right?) we also popped into a variety of churches: St Mary le Bow, for example, where there is currently a small exhibition of paintings, and – because the sky decided to piss water onto us – St Lawrence on Jewry, just by the Guildhall Buildings. It was entirely deserted when we went in, and we were only disturbed briefly by a cleaning lady in inspecting a certain amount of bling and passing our judgement on the saints.

This was our favourite:

 

St Mary Magdalene

We reserved our opprobrium for St Paul (“bit heavy on the homophobia”) and the Arch-Angel Michael (“boring hero dude”), and our praise for Mary Magdalene, who featured for some reason in a dream I had recently: where an imprisoned woman was giving someone a stern lecture about how Jesus loved and protected lepers and sex workers and that anyone who said prostitutes “deserved it” (the context was, unsurprisingly considering I’ve gone shitnuts for Hannibal on NBC at the moment, a serial killer who focussed as many do, on women who provide sexual relief in exchange for money) had no business calling themselves a Christian. Not a bad little lecture from my subconscious!

St Lawrence on Jewry

The church is in terms of architecture quite a modest little building, neither the gothic splendour of the cathedrals I love nor the sturdy little stone boxes I had to sing hymns in as a kid, but there are some lovely stained glass windows and some nice wood carvings and the organ pipes are BLINGY AS FUCK.

Stay tuned for further adventures in a city I have been living in for eleven years, in which I reduce centuries of art and culture and technological progress to phrases like “blingy as fuck”.

Filed under: content: real life, churches, city of london, culture, london, st lawrence on jewry, tourism

Sight, the least reliable of the senses.

I have no idea what evidence the statement in the title of this post actually has, but it was proudly included in the introduction to the Light Show at the Hayward Gallery. To be honest, given the bright sun outside (in which my friends and I had been lounging, sprawled on a small astroturf island on the sea of the South Bank Centre in the peculiarly British habit of sunbathing violently the moment there is a single clear day), it might have been more sensible to call this the Artificial Light Which Isn’t As Alluring As Outside Is Right Now show, but we had tickets and the Hayward is often good for the weird and the interactive. It is also probably a car park with delusions of being an art gallery, and I refuse to rescind my belief that it and the rest of the South Bank Shambles are some of the ugliest buildings ever created, but that’s not relevant to the content.

Leo Villareal’s Cylinder II kept us entertained for a while, resembling both a cloud of glittering abyssal beasts with their bioluminescence winking in the water, and in shadows a kind of “phase-shifting sea urchin”; Ceal Floyer’s Throw, while uninteresting as an installation, did at least keep the theatre lighting student/practitioner among us happy identifying the gobo in use. The first piece – but not the last – to induce the kind of hypnotic rapture that art which changes must bring about was Cerith Wyn Evans S=U=P=E=R=S=T=R=U=C=T=U=R=E. In this, three columns, floor to ceiling, of perfectly clear glass tubes containing tiny filaments lit up and darkened again in slow “breaths”, at their brightest radiating a lot of heat as well as light. The three columns light up entirely, but do so in different orders. We might have taken in the pattern of their fading and dimming but instead we hung over the wire separating us from hot light bulbs and discussed in four-year-old terms the effects of light and heat on the emotions.

The exhibition is classically Hayward in the sense that a lot of the pieces require going into a small room and looking at something, or interacting in another way with it: the first one that did so in a fun way was Anthony McCall’s You and I, Horizontal, which in having patterns of smoke swirling through what the exhibition guide calls a “solid-light” installation, led to the three of us lying on the floor underneath the beams of light and watching the patterns move as if “we’re lying at the bottom of a pond”, (as Maud explained to the stranger who joined us: soon several people were lying on the floor). After a while we discovered if we stuck our legs up into the beams, they looked as if they were being pulled apart by a cold and penetrating blackness. Possibly not “art” in any real sense of making us think about ~society~ or ~death~ or ~big questions~, but it was fun.

A lot of the works also required the viewer to be in a specific place in relation to them in order to understand them: Jim Campbell’s Exploded View (Commuters), for example, looks like an endearing forest of randomly off-or-on berry-like bulbs of light hanging from the ceiling, until you stand behind it and realise the patterns of extinguished light are not random but outline the shadowy forms of passing humanoid shapes, some near, some far, moving fast. This is deeply unsettling, and gives the room a sense of being inhabited by unseen presences. Other works in this vein like that by Brigitte Kowanz, whose dangling fluorescent tubes only elicited a scoff of “Stairway to Heaven again”, were less successful.

An unintentionally fine performance addition to James Turrell’s ambiguous and not especially impressive installation Wedgework V occurred while we were viewing it. The three of us sat and discussed, quietly, how the lines of the room caused shifts in perception, and then what would make the business more interesting (“giant black reflectionless tentacles rounding the corner”, “a viscous dark fluid dripping from the ceiling”); the small baby behind us expressed his dissatisfaction with the weird colour scheme in a more voluable and, I suspect, honest fashion. And then someone along the row from us uttered the immortal phrase How am I supposed to experience the art with that going on, which kept us all going for some time: we made fun of him until he left, and for a little while afterwards. After all, the experience of others in a group viewing is a factor in the overall understanding of an installation piece.

Sometimes, the reactions of the audience to a piece lead to expectations which cannot be met: Conrad Shawcross’s Slow Arc inside a Cube is a fascinating piece both in the mechanism of how it works, the end result of geometric patterns moving and “changing shape” across the walls of the small room, and in the artist’s source of inspiration (for once), Dorothy Hodgkin’s description of examining diffraction pattern of X-rays bounced off insulin atoms as “decoding the shape of a tree from the shadows cast by its leaves”, which actually makes sense as an inspiration for this work. Unfortunately while queuing for the disappointing Turrell installation I overheard one of the people in front of me claiming he’d been unable to remain in the room for long because it made him feel nauseous, and was subsequently so scornful of his queasiness that I wasn’t able to appreciate the work in isolation of that.

The remaining work on the ground floor of the exhibition which ignited any emotion was Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromosaturation: we enjoyed examining the effects of the different colours of light (blue, red, green) on each other’s faces and hands, comparing notes on which made us look more mottled and which more smooth, and on our minds (blue bored me, red energised me, and green made me feel content). The way the light seemed to “pile up” and become more intensely coloured when we’d left it and looked back on it was also impressive.

Upstairs contained works that were both a good deal less interesting and one which was the highlight of the entire exhibition. The greatest confusion was probably caused by Ivan Navarro’s Reality Show (Silver), where none of us could work out what the point was supposed to be, and even inside found the effects described by the notes weren’t as clearly-defined as expected. Personally I mostly found that I didn’t like standing over a yawning abyss, even illusory, and got out again very quickly.

I shall pass with reasonable grace over my intense dislike of Jenny Holzer, as we had to pass through a room containing her work to get to (and back to, for a second visit) the high water mark of the exhibition, Olafur Eliasson’s Model for a timeless garden.

A brief description of it to a friend on my return home: a black room with a black foam bench at roughly chest height, several metres long, full of a variety of sprinklers throwing out water in different patterns*, light by strobe lights.  * Some of the flow of these interfered with each other, but I didn’t include that in my description. The effect of the strobe light on the falling water was utterly mesmerising, because it turned what is usually a continuous motion into a series of still images, ever-changing, often slightly-repeating, but never truly-identical. That these images were three-dimensional and clear but highly-reflective gave the impression of a garden of beautiful abstract sculptures in ice or brilliant crystal (some like flowers, some like impossible hanging diamond rain, some like huge glass spiders whose bodies disintegrate on a loop) somehow animated by Harryhausen-esque stop-motion. It felt a little as if Swarovski had been commissioned to create a horror movie, or Yves Tanguy to advertise an ice-maker. We cast around for a while, trying to work out what about it was so soothing, considering how otherworldly and alien and profoundly unnatural-but-organic it all felt. I’ve had to fall back on saying that it was beautiful, but it wasn’t beautiful in the manner of a glacier so much as beautiful in the manner of highly cultivated orchids or bizarre and delicate hanging sculptures knocked by the breeze: utterly without function, and only there to dazzle.

On a side-note, the strobe lighting completely threw off my depth perception so I’m sorry to the several people I bumped into!

Filed under: content: review, Anthony McCall, art, Cerith Wyn Evans, exhibition, gallery, hayward gallery, Jim Campbell, light show, london, modern art, olafur eliasson, review, reviews

Small Winter Delights

Gainful employment will in future lead to sparser posts (or perhaps to more, depending on how data entry inspires the dormant parts of the brain). Sometimes I want to try to say something intelligent about art, sometimes I just need to tell the internet that I FED A SQUIRREL OUT OF MY FINGERS TODAY.

I don’t mean I charmed a shy and nervous woodland creature, either, I mean a grey squirrel in Russell Square launched itself down the side of a tree and zig-zagged over to where I was sitting (already being eyed up by hungry opportunistic pigeons) and more or less perched on my boot in a very entitled fashion, demanding to know why I wasn’t sharing my lunch. So I broke a piece off and held it out and the squirrel balanced him or herself on my fingers with his or her claws (do rodents have a sense of gender?) and snatched it off to eat. We repeated this a few times, and then I held out my empty hand to see what would happen. Happily the nippy bugger didn’t bite me (I sustained a brilliantly bloody finger wound from a hedgehog as a child, and the list of animals which have bitten me is lengthy as I am either very tasty or deeply objectionable or – in the case of the Shetland pony, probably just possessed of unfortunately convex palms) , but our squirrel friend did leave an accidental scratch on my wrist by way of a souvenir.

It was an oddly enchanting encounter, for all that the sky was nearly black at three in the afternoon and I’d been planning to eat in the British Museum, put off by the lack of appetising food choices (“left-over chop suey and cheap satay” is apparently appetising to me and goat’s cheese and rocket salad is not, which is no doubt a damning indicator of social class) and the seething mass of people. It was chilly, and there were lumps of pigeons adhering to the branches of the naked trees like weird feathery tumours, when they weren’t belching into the sky in a tidal wave of stupid birds every time a parks vehicle came past.

The other thing I learned from my lunchbreak was that a surprising number and variety of people in London have Staffordshire bull terriers as pets, a development I find entirely wonderful (anything to stem the endless unwaning enthusiasm for Labradors, which I can’t stand). There’s nothing like the determined, barrel-chested trot of a Staffie who is Going Places, especially one wearing a baby pink harness with incongruous rhinestones on it. Sort of like seeing a broad-bodied gruff construction-stereotype called Dave donning his best tutu and heels and striding purposefully to the pub. Magical.

Filed under: content: real life, animals, dogs, london, people watching, squirrel, staffordshire bull terrier

Ordinary Heroes: The Watts Memorial

Yesterday I took a day out with a friend and went to the Museum of London for the Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men exhibition, which I’ll post about later. I also spent five hours in the Centre Page again, down by St Paul’s, drinking Aspall and putting the world to rights in a vague and noisy way around a burger and some diversions relating to Kindle books. Which I won’t be posting about later.

Somewhere between these two points I ducked into Postman’s Park, since it’s on the way from the London Museum to St Paul’s (if you’re in the area sightseeing that’s worth knowing, I think), and since I’d read about it in a guide called Secret London: An Unusual Guide, which I recommend just as reading material: the copy is surprisingly humorous. The reason Postman’s Park features in the guide is what is variously called the Wall of Heroes, The Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice, and The Watts Memorial.

The Wall of Heroes, Postman’s Park, Little Britain, City of London

The memorial consists of a series of tile plaques painted in a distinctive style and colour, commemorating the efforts of “ordinary people who perished in the attempt of saving others”, shielded from the elements by a sloped roof. It is not impressive, nor is it the display of stark and dignified solemnity that most war memorials are. At its core it is little more than the kind of tabloid or local press headline displayed outside shops, recording “Mum of 2 died saving baby’s life” or the opening of a magazine article in a publication called “Natter” or “Relax” which is 50% horrifying stories of mutilation and 50% advice on how to be thinner and more neurotic.

I’m not usually a fan of the use of the word “hero”, either, usually because it is applied with such ubiquity that it has almost no meaning any more. Men who can kick a ball in the direction they want to kick it in are heroes; children who are slightly more stubborn about the political convictions they’ve inherited from their parents are heroes; being fortunate enough to survive cancer with good medical care makes you a hero. It levels the playing field to the point at which it becomes insulting to refer to someone’s behaviour as an act of heroism because it’s belittling what they’ve done to put it alongside someone who remembered to take their medication, and now we’re left in need of new terms (or of letting facts speak for themselves, something most news sources have been loath to do almost since their birth).

The nature of those stories in those publications and even the idea of voluntary self-sacrifice have rarely been of much interest to me – I’m more drawn to narratives of involuntary sacrifice, which is why I spend such an inordinate amount of time crying over books about WW1 and generally making an overemotional nuisance of myself in the Imperial War Museum – but the Watts Memorial was oddly moving. Partly because it is in a quiet, secluded space which has been carved out of an area of very busy city, a transformed garden raised above the street by the bodies of the dead, and partly because of the odd permanent/impermanent impression of the plaques: they seem as if they could be weathered away by a strong shower of rain, with their translucent blue paint. And yet some of them have remained under their awning, proclaiming their bald facts, for over a century: they are the eternal versions of the daily headline on the street, somewhere between gravestones and billboards.

John Cranmer Cambridge, drowned near Ostend whilst saving the life of “a stranger and a foreigner”

The precise and yet florid nature  of the wording, quintessentially Edwardian in most cases, is another blow to the sensibilities: people were “engulfed” or “scorched”. Evocative descriptions of terrible ends as the souls commemorated struggled (sometimes in vain, which adds another layer of pathos) to rescue friends, relatives, coworkers, and sometimes complete strangers from canals, burning buildings, sewers, oncoming trains and so on: the salutatory lesson is largely “children stop swimming in canals please” and “fire alarms are a really good thing”. On a quiet day, away from the hullabaloo of children rampaging through the Museum of London, it’s possible to find a moment’s contemplation amid the suicidally brave. Questions for your consideration, in that environment: confronted with a burning building, would I run back inside to save an elderly widow at the cost of my own life? What characteristic makes people dive in front of a train to shove a coworker out of the way? Is it gallantry to rescue an attempted suicide (as a couple of the men commemorated here did) or is it unjust interference with their acts as a free agent?

Cynical visitors will note that almost all of these events might have been averted by a good coast guard or people not arsing about in the first place, better communication, better housing, and stricter safety laws: in the absence of such, however, it’s perhaps just a little bit touching how many people are motivated not only by the ties of kinship but by basic human instinct to save our fellow hominids from unnecessary death. And stilted and formal though the language is, it’s quite hard not to be moved by the quoted words of the excellently-named and youthfully-expired Soloman Galaman, whose plaque I photographed and texted to Miranda because everyone needs a bit of turn-of-the-century sadness at work now and then:

not the photo I took, that’s still in my phone.

“Mother I saved him but I could not save myself.”

Filed under: content: essay, content: real life, ceramic tiles, city of london, death and mourning, edwardian art, heroism, london, memorial, monuments, places of interest, postman's park, sight-seeing, tourism, watts memorial

Kindle Books Summary

Kindle Direct Publishing have done a thing with their payment systems that conceivably leads to me actually getting the money I’ve earned from them, so I thought now might be as good a time as any to talk everyone through the works of mine that are available via the Kindle store (most of the publications, in fact).

As Delilah Des Anges

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The Other Daughter is a revenge tragedy with comedic elements. It’s set in a fictional Midwest town in the United States and begins with a female soldier returning from a (fictional) second US war against Korea – in this case North Korea. It involves magic, bloodshed, and a heroine whose motivation is highly questionable and whose moral compass has been somewhat distorted both my the events she’s come to avenge herself over and by the events which have led her back home. I wrote the mainstay of this book in 2006 and I think it’s probably the darkest of my novels. And it’s $1.99 on the Kindle Store. [Price given in dollars because that's the constant: the link goes to the UK store, but the US store has it too, as do the German, French, Italian, etc.]. I made a more fulsome post about this one when I launched it.

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Protect Me From What I Want, written in 2010, uses the 2008 Haut de la Garenne case on Jersey as a jumping-off point for a first-person reported narrative which is less about police work than it is about the detective in question failing to notice that he’s having a breakdown. I’d wanted to write this story for a while, in part because there are thorny questions of morality involved: what makes something unacceptable and something else acceptable? Since writing this there has been the catastrofuck that is the unfolding Jimmy Savile case (if you’re not from the UK and haven’t heard about this I don’t advise Googling as it was pretty grim), the central questions of consent and morality have become retroactively even more complicated. It’s also $1.99 on the Kindle Store, and despite the subject matter is probably a little less dark than The Other Daughter.

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How Not To Write By Someone Who Doesn’t is the most popular thing I have put on the Kindle Store under my own name. I’d like to say that it’s because it’s a vital and accessible work dealing with the realities of writing but I’m pretty sure the fact that it’s cheap and reasonably no-nonsense probably has more to do with it. It’s a selection of essays and exercises filtering everything I was taught at university while studying creative writing and everything I’ve learnt since into some bossy directions on, mostly, sitting the fuck down and writing. If that’s the kind of writing advice you think you or someone in your life needs, do get it, because I’m fantastic at motivating people to work by, uh, yelling at them until they do. Also it’s cheap: $0.99 USD on the Kindle Store, and the Kindle version has a couple of pieces which aren’t in the print version so you’re getting more bang for less buck.

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Year of the Ghost: Collect Poems 2011 is as it says on the cover, a year’s worth of poetry. It covers a lot of topics, and a lot of death, because 2011 was a year of prominent deaths and upheavals, which means it’s less something you’d want to read for light and uplifting amusement (although there are some uplifting poems within), and more something for expressing bigger emotions. I posted at greater length about this when it was launched last year. It’s available only for eReaders (as an ePub and for the Kindle), and on the Kindle Store cost the princely sum of $1.55 USD.

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Hannah Matchmaker’s New Skates, a short fable on on the importance of achieving things under your own steam without taking any shortcuts, is also about rollerderby, which means it is at least nine times more awesome than it would otherwise be. More here. This little tidbit of fiction is also a Kindle exclusive, which means if you’re an Amazon prime member and don’t fancy paying $0.99 like everyone else, you can borrow it for free.

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Pass the Parcel, set in alternate London and dealing with a complex and interlocking selection of lives linked by the passage of a small blue statue, took about eight years from first idea to final draft, maybe slightly longer. It’s a labour of love and of tendinitis, filled with enough different and striking characters that you’re almost certain to find one you like, and failing that if you don’t fall in love with this version of London I have failed in my mission. Print costs for something this long are exorbitant, so by buying it for the Kindle at $1.99 you are saving a lot of money.

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Tiny Fictions 2011 is the combined might of four miniature books of short stories, which despite the title have come from across the reaches of writerly time and not just 2011 (the original instalments were all published in 2011, hence the title). There is an infinite of variety of genres, characters, endings, and matter in these stories, from romance to crime to horror to fairytales to fantasy to lurid dreamscapes: some of the stories are so short you can devour them in a minute or two, and some are long enough to last a whole train journey. This galaxy of variable stars costs $1.99 on the Kindle Store and enriches your life.

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Know Your Words, the first book I published, is an anthology of poetry by three writers. Myself, House to Astonish‘s very own Al Kennedy, and Bostonian burlesque queen and performance poet Amy. We have different, complementary styles: Al’s is conversational, friendly, and often upbeat, riven with good humour; Amy’s is incisive, personal, and cutting, drawing comparisons with Denise Duhamel; mine is rambling and broad, taking in a number of styles and subjects, including SCIENCE. This sweet collection is also only $1.99 on the Kindle Store.

As Melissa Snowdon

Why a separate name for these books? Branding, pure and simple. Don’t screw your face up in disgust: it’s just a convenient way of putting the fluffy romance/erotica books in a different category to the more serious work. If you see Melissa Snowdon on the cover you know you’re getting something different to what you’re getting if you pick up a Delilah Des Anges book. They’re generally a lot less heavy on the plot and a lot more heavy on the gentlemen having sexy funtimes with other gentlemen, for one, and can usually be relied upon for a happy ending.

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The Breaking of M is a first-person meandering erotica/romance novel set in the 1600s and spanning the world from Venice to Mexico in the age of colonialism. It follows some of the fortunes of inveterate liar, former pirate and current spy, dandy, and hedonistic bisexual Matimeo Calvisia: Matimeo meets his match in arrogant, bossy and youthful Padre Vito Alessandro Bonifatigo, and finds himself at the mercy of an altogether more frightening prospect in the New World. This story contains lashings of BDSM and ridiculous happenstance, and is best suited for scratching very specific itches. A Kindle exclusive, it’s $1.99 or free if you’re an Amazon Prime member: there’s a slightly longer post about it here.

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The Curious Case of the Firecrotch: This is why we don’t write our memoirs while drunk, Wil is a cheesy, tongue-in cheek tribute to and pastiche of both the traditional noir detective and 70s trash pulp gay erotica. It’s also my first collaboration with a deeply irreverent friend, who is writing under the name Dionysia Hill because she doesn’t take this “writing” business very seriously (a salutatory lesson for us all). It’s the story of perpetually broke and perpetually drunk private eye Wil Kemp and his reluctantly-taken caseload, trying to pay his rent, avoid being shot for poking his nose in where it doesn’t belong, and find the missing boyfriend of a cute redhead that he’d rather be sleeping with himself. Ms Hill’s contribution to this work is that it’s snappy, sharp, and has a genuinely heart-warming ending. Also, at a wallet-bendingly low price of $0.99 USD it’s probably a worthwhile investment: more details on the launch post.

If you don’t have a Kindle

Never fear: the majority of these are available in print too. In fact there are a few titles (For the Love of a City, Kissing Carrion #1, and Shots in the Dark) which are only available in print/PDF format.

Filed under: book covers, content: artwork, content: publishing, bargains, books, channel islands, ebooks, ereader, essays, fiction, haut de la garenne, historical fiction, history, horror, jersey, kindle, london, midwest, murder, mystery, parody, pastiche, poems, poetry, publishing, shakespeare adaptation, stories, venice, writing, writing guide

October Links Post

Things friends & acquaintances have done

• I wrote a poem in response to a prompt some time ago: the artist who prompted me has responded with a set of truly astounding illustrations. I wish to draw everyone’s attention both to the beautiful detail in the inkwork, and to the light on the crown and the face of the beast. Top-notch.
• Likewise in the arts arena, acquaintance and fellow-writer Anna J Roberts has popped out another book, and this one has my cover design on it.
• It was my birthday yesterday, and to celebrate my friend F wrote me a poem to my requirements: about fish.
• And then my friend Kevin drew me a dude being eaten by a tentacle monster, because my friends know me.

Things strangers have done

• Written a thought-provoking and to my mind/experience at least very accurate article about classism and academic jargon turning working-class women off feminism.
• Created very funny and eerily accurate fake announcements on the London Underground.
• Provided a concise and very helpful guide on content-editing your own work, which I think I will be referring back to regularly myself.
• Created a thing, or possibly a whatsit, which scans Twitter for tweets in iambic pentameter, and then arranges them into poems.
• Offered some handy hints for getting ahead with NaNoWriMo.
• Made a Fibonacci cabinet, which is beautiful nerdery, or possibly a demonstration of why the Golden Ratio is so important in everything.

Filed under: content: links, academia, apps, art, cabinet, classism, content edit, culture, design, editing, fakes, feminism, fibonacci number, fibonacci sequence, fish, furniture, gifs, iambic pentameter, illustrations, lived experience, london, london underground, math, mathematics, maths, monster, nanowrimo, nepotism, poetry, presents, street art, tentacle, theory, transport for london, writing, writing hints

Slightly Embarrassing Change Of Plan, Now With Added Shakespeare

When you’ve already made a grand proclamation about your very ambitious NaNoWriMo project in public it’s a bit humiliating to have to admit that while you can write with a full-time job you cannot do the copious research necessary (in hindsight “read every single book about London history and mythology ever” might take a little more than two months) with one.

But that is what I’m doing: the requirements of The Ideal London, which is only about two-thirds plotted still and has a very mushy middle (always my problem with plotting, the second act is so frequently like the middle of a badly-baked cake), far exceed the time I’ve allotted myself for my usual NaNo outbursts, and something else has been nagging at me demanding to be written.

Now generally speaking if you’re trying to write something and it’s being an obstructive ass that you have to slog through, it’s probably not the right time to be trying to write it: if you’re constantly being distracted by another idea and no one has commissioned you for idea number one, then it makes perfectly good sense to write the one that’s demanding to be written.

This is the advice I would automatically give to other people, which is probably why I was failing to take it myself. It took an observation from my friend Lin (who has within the last couple of years gone from “I should write that” to “I’m writing that” and as a consequence hiccupped out a trilogy of fantasy novels as if it were nothing) that 2012 is my designated year of “Write Whatever The Fuck You Want” (which is how The Breaking of M came to be) to make me decide. Of course, the ever-delightful Lizzie also pointed out that every year should ideally be the Year Of Write Whatever The Fuck You Want, and that’s definitely worth taking into consideration. Regardless of whether the actual business of physical output is hard, if one’s brain is continually shying away from writing something it’s not worth forcing it.

In light of that, I’ve now exchanged a London-based metafictional fantasy with added world-saving and commentary about the nature of fiction for a less research-heavy London-based organised crime story involving blood magic and bisexual love triangles, for which the research amounts to “watch Shakespeare adaptations and Guy Ritchie movies”, which I think I can handle in the time I’ve got left a little better than my meaty, weighty, literary-fiction project. The Ideal London has plenty of material for it, though, and I will definitely be writing it… when I have a little more time!

Filed under: content: real life, editorial decisions, literature, london, research, whoops, writing

Write What You Know: An Introduction To This Autumn’s Book.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has been a boon to me in terms of productivity in the six years I’ve been doing it. Prior to that point it took me a year or more to finish writing a first draft, on the occasions that I finished it at all; the last two years, I’ve been able to complete a first draft in 30 to 32 days, and even Pass The Parcel (which is something of a behemoth) was mostly written over the course of two consecutive NaNo bouts. It turned out that for me, intensive day-after-day writing was necessary to maintain my interest in a project, and that the more I had it mapped out and planned in advance, the easier it was to complete the initial draft and the less of an insurmountable task editing it felt like. Other people, of course, work differently, but “knuckle down and throw everything else to the wind” appears to be my style.

There are several projects I want to write which have been laid aside gathering dust because they involve research in order for me to feel confident that they’re going to work when written, and as previously discussed my feelings towards research are not enormously dissimilar to the average six-year-old’s (and mine) feelings about tidying their room. I don’t want to do it, I will only do it if forced to, I would far rather someone else did it, and even if someone else does do it I resent that I’m going to have to deal with the aftermath.

This November I’m trying to sidestep my usual objections to research by writing something which draws on non-fact, and on non-fact in an area I enjoy reading about regardless. Less write what you know and more write what you’re interested in. In this instance, I will be returning to the same stamping grounds as Pass the Parcel, my home and major inspiration source: London.

In Pass the Parcel I envisioned a London of comparable time period, but peopled with an extended variety of sentient beings, some of which weren’t human, some of which weren’t even biological. But London itself remained recognisible to the modern dweller, and indeed I’m told that unless you’re familiar with particular “scenes” in the city a few of the references don’t quite hit home.

This time I’m planning on taking a closer look at how people think about London, and the expectations and beliefs people have about the place, whether it’s non-visitors who nourish rumours that it’s a crime-ridden hell-hole where a mugging takes place every two seconds, or dreamers who think that moving to the metropolis will be the answer to their prayers. I’m also trying to incorporate a lot more of people’s beliefs from throughout history, drawing on the urban legends and the folklore of the city which imbue The London Stone with a variety of mystical powers and see all kinds of horrors prowling the streets at night.

As with any book, this is only a starting point. The world-building will develop the nature of the place away from a base of legend and expectation to give it a sense of structure: in this case the London of the majority of the story is a non-place, a construction built on myth and lying parallel to the physical and real London we’re familiar with. It lives out of time and is all times. Knowledge really is power, and ignorance too. It is manifestly unstable, washed this way and that by tides of opinion and sudden bursts of public fear (this London, the “Ideal”, is subject to the Four Minute Warning far more frequently than the real London ever was); residency is usually a result of permanent comatose state or having been bred from the city back in the early Roman days, when the borders between “reality” and unreality were thinner.

Humankind has a continual and recurring need to control or feel that it can control its environment through its own actions. The more chaotic the environment, the more superstitious the community and the more elaborate the forms of religion or attempted environmental control through ritual. Misattribution of cause and effect are rife, and while those rituals which have grown up within the Ideal are as hit and miss as real-world ritual, real-world superstition is functional within the Ideal because it is believed in.

One theoretical alchemist mind predicted the existence of such a place, described its nature in the form of an equation, and promptly forgot about it in the pursuit of better things.

Some few hundred years later an alleged descendant of the thinker’s research partner digs up the equation again while researching a book on his supposed ancestor, and in the course of trying to explain the thing finally comes to understand what it means, leaving them stranded in this alien and theoretical world as physical entities.

The Ideal London [Working title, but I am keen to preserve it] shall hopefully be not only a weird journey through the lore of London but also an investigation of the value of stories, the hopes people put into figureheads, and the degree to which “truth” matters in people’s personal histories.

I will be trying to scared up some ephemera to help root the world and characters more firmly in my head before I start writing and to finalise the plot: I hope a few of you are interested enough by this to come along with me on the shouty and tantrum-filled process of burdening the world with the first draft in November (there will be a lot of swearing).

Filed under: content: essay, content: publishing, books, london, nanowrimo, national novel writing month, planning, plotting, research, synopsis, writing

William Morris and Ideological Convictions

Hello chums (oh good lord never let me say that again), I have just returned from a jaunt to Walthamstow, better known to fans of early 90s pop music as E17. My purpose in that neck of the woods was to investigate the William Morris Gallery, which has recently reopened after an extended period of renovation. Much to my annoyance I’d apparently failed to discover that Michael Rosen was doing a reading there, and therefore to buy tickets before they sold out.

This isn’t a museum review, so I shall say little except that it was rather lovely and that the chance to have a go at weaving was hugely appreciated. William Morris seems to have been largely what I expected him to be, but with an unexpected sense of humour:

Which made him all the more palatable, as did his later-life commentary on his earlier antics, deeming himself “arrogant” but clearly amused by them. He put a lifetime of work into pursuing his passions and making them profitable enough to raise his family on (which of course he would have been unable to do without the background he had etc.), and had a keen and long-lasting obsession with beauty which I find is mirrored in my current object of obsession and admirer of Morris, Lawrence. Other similarities stand out, and it’s them I was moved to talk about.

1. They are both men of conviction, and I envy them wildly for this. No doubt it was a combination of the era and their position in life, tempered with the fact that both were very intelligent polymaths inspired by the same period of history to invent their own personal notions of chivalry. But beyond Morris’s youthful ideals he continued to believe in his old convictions: beautiful things were important, the world could be changed, consigning people to the hell-hole of industrialised London was wrong, and the old skills of medieval craftsmanship could be brought into his modern era. He remained faithful to and energetic about his ideals and his visions without, as one of the VTs in the museum said, “being ugly and preachy”. He combined beautiful artefacts with his politics and allowed his rigorous belief in the worth of the aesthetic to breed with his later-life rigorous belief in the value of socialism. This made the trip to learn about him a little sad for me, as I’ve long since given up the majority of my ideals and while my beliefs remain my convictions and optimism do not. Morris’s fierce later-life optimism is untenable to me, as it was untenable to the Lawrence broken by the peace talks of Paris and subsequent media nonsense. What caused Morris not to succumb to the cynicism of later adulthood?
2. In an odd way the exhibition demonstrated how despite both being inspired by the past – the age of chivalry and the legends of Arthur – Lawrence and Morris were each very much men created by their time. Just as Blake would not have been inspired to visions of a glittering and utopian London had the London he dwelt in not been so abhorrent and grim, so Morris and his philosophy of beautiful things and the need for pastoral skills and the later-life embrace of socialism could not have come to pass without the repellent working conditions of Victorian London and the changes to society and technology that lead to his reactive position. Lawrence, likewise, would have no grounding for his passionate beliefs about assisting the united Arab peoples out from imperial rule by the Turks if he did not live in a culture in which the Imperial was so favoured and his hunger for the freedom of empty places and the comparative classlessness of Bedouin society must surely have been fuelled to a degree by the very restrictive moral codes and class practices of the society in which he had grown up, especially as his family specifically suffered from it (cross-class relationship and absence of legal marriage).

For an exhibition chronicling the life and work of a craftsman and political agitator it did a great deal of service in providing me with something to chew over in terms of introspection (how does one refrain from becoming excessively cynical and losing all hope/sense of worth in one’s own convictions?) and also to once more create a sense of historical context not only to the past but to present events as well: what I believe and what other people around me believe are also products of our time, and we can only be as good or as bad as the era we are in will permit. We can’t know what is going to happen next, we can only guess at it.

Filed under: content: essay, e17, english history, history, ideals, lawrence of arabia, london, medievalist, museums, pre-raphaelite, socialism, t e lawrence, victorian, walthamstow, william morris

August Links Post

Things my friends have done

• bottle_of_smoke has blogged again about things she enjoys: this time, the romantic lives of urban pigeons.

Things strangers have done

• Someone has discovered – how, I don’t know – that there is a squid that can break off its arms and throw them at enemies. The world can always, always get weirder.
• Made a note, at a fiction magazine, on why writing what you know isn’t always the best advice.
• Some kind soul has uploaded a selection of public domain films, including The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, to Youtube.
• Created an amusing little toy which will generate chunks of “Fifty Shades of Grey”-esque prose at the press of a button.
• Made a tool which allows you to find that word that’s right on the tip of your tongue.
• Posted a wide variety of documentaries, with a slant towards British history (the tumblr page is something of a clusterfuck of add-ons and annoying cursor-follows).
• Made an easy-to-follow tutorial on how to make custom lipsticks using wax crayons!
  
• Reported that science populariser and neurologist Oliver Sacks struggles with prosopagnosia, or “face blindness”, a neurological disorder which prevents him from recognising faces. The article itself is being used in part to promote Sacks’ new book, The Mind’s Eye. 
• Compiled a list of the “6 Most Certifiably Insane Acts of Writing“, although it is from Cracked.com so you may wish to take it with an entire cellar of salt.
• Posted a tutorial on how to turn a t-shirt into a “tank top” which I think is Americanese for “strappy top”.
• Laurie Penny wrote a post using her personal experience to talk about definitions of rape in the media; as you might expect from that description it is not a comfortable read.
• Created a handy website that will transform handwriting into a font.
• Made an interactive map of surname frequency in London.

Filed under: content: links, advice, beauty, biology, birdwatching, british history, cabinet of dr caligari, cephalopods, cognitive neuroscience, cosmetics, cracked, craft, D I Y, DIY, documentaries, european history, face blindness, fashion, feminism, fiction, fifty shades of grey, free films, frequency, generator, history of film, humour, insane behaviour, language, lexicography, lipstick, list, london, magazine, media, medicine, names, neurology, Oliver Sacks, pigeons, politics, prosopnagosia, publisher, rape, reference, research, resources, science, sexual assault, silent movies, squid, statistics, t shirts, time-killer, tools, toys, typography, useful, world history, writing