Magic Eye

Until a few years ago, odd-looking photographs used to appear in the Melbourne Sunday paper we bought every weekend. They were 'Magic Eye' pictures and, if you wanted to see them properly, you had to do something with your eyes that it wasn't possible to explain - or even to do at will really. It involved relaxing in some odd way and changing your focus from its normal setting. It didn't involve thinking. It wasn't something you could follow a set of instructions to achieve.

It seems to me that writing is a bit like that - and therefore trying to teach it as a craft skill may be a bit of a waste of time. In my experience, the happiest moments of writing happen at exactly the moment when all the normal bits of your mind start letting go and functioning outside their usual parameters. It's not something you can make a decision to achieve. Rather, it's something you actually have to forget you want to do.

Which I suppose means that creative writing courses may be useful, provided they force people to write so much, so fast and so furiously that their thoughts transcend self-conscious anxieties and the usual frantic scrabbling and reach a point that is beyond dogged concentration, beyond the stage where a sense of control or order - or really almost anything conscious - remains in the students' minds.

At that point, in a shift as mystifying as the moment when the hidden world contained within a Magic Eye picture suddenly leaps out at the viewer, students may find, inexplicably, that their writing flows easily. In both processes, the trick is not mastery of oneself but the ability to lose control and let go. In both, the experience is a very odd one - a sensation that goes against almost everything we've ever been taught to do.

A Long Twelve Years

I wish I liked milk. All my life, I've watched other people go to the fridge, pour

I Was a Poet, but I Did Not Know It

When my children were little, I earned money, while staying at home, by being a transcriber. Little did I know that those women of my acquaintance who, having made the decision to not stay at home with their children but to continue instead with their glittering careers (composed mainly of long afternoons in stuffy offices trying not to fall asleep as their colleagues droned through dull meetings) and consequently looked down their immaculately made-up noses at me (no, no, it didn't rankle at all, I'm not in the slightest bit bitter, hem hem) were utterly wrong in assuming that transcribing was a menial task.

It turns out that, as a transcriber, I could have been a contender - in the poetic world at least. There is in fact, according to the 10 May 2012 (note, not 1 April, as you may assume by the time you've read the rest of this post) issue of the London Review of Books, a man called Kenneth Goldsmith who publishes poetry - or rather 'poetry' - that consists of transcriptions of radio broadcasts.

He has, for example, created a work called Traffic, which is his transcription of an entire day of traffic reports from New York. He has 'created' another called Sports which - you guessed it - is a transcription of the radio commentary of a sports event  (a baseball game, as it happens, but I imagine it could have been taken from cricket or golf or even synchronised swimming and still produced a pretty similar result). He has also 'created' Weather - by now, I need not go into details; I assume it's pretty simple to work out the content of that one.

Goldsmith, with what I have to admit is an admirable level of honesty, describes what he does as 'uncreative writing'. He also happily admits that his books are 'impossible to read straight through. In fact', he goes on, 'every time I have to proofread them before sending them off to the publisher, I fall asleep repeatedly.' He claims that 'writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance'. If he is so concerned about textual abundance, I can't help wondering, why has he chosen to add to the problem with works such as Day, a retyping of one issue of the New York Times, and Soliloquy, a transcription of every word that he, the 'poet' Goldsmith, spoke for a week.

Unfortunately, Goldsmith is not an isolated prankster. There's a whole lot of these con-artists - sorry, I mean 'neo-modernists' - out there it seems. Another prominent figure in uncreative writing circles (where being unoriginal is the most highly prized quality, I assume) is a person called Tan Lin, who reckons, 'It would be nice to create works of literature that didn't have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats' (which makes you wonder what definition of 'literature' he is working from) and states that 'Today no poem should be written to be read and the best form of poetry would make all our feelings disappear the moment we were having them.'

My response may be absurdly blinkered but I can't help it. It can be summed up in just one word and that word is 'Why?' Why would what Lin describes be the best form of poetry? Why are transcriptions of newspapers or traffic reports worth any of our attention (except when we want to know the news or to find out whether the road home is navigable)?

If you have nothing to say, don't bother. Transcribing stuff is not a substitute for creating content. No-one has an obligation to write - there are already plenty of books in the world and keen readers are diminishing in number. On the other hand, if we are going to redefine poetry then I'm going to start a new school that is not about putting things down on paper at all. My poems aren't going to be written in any way - quite the reverse. A sequence of poems will be a sequence of hours in which I sit quietly reading. From now on, each time I finish reading a book, I'm going to call the whole process of having read it 'a poem'. And when I've created a hundred 'poems' - or maybe several hundred - I'll be expecting a Queen's Medal or even, perhaps a Nobel Prize.

Creative Writing

A while ago on the wonderful Age of Uncertainty blog, Steerforth posted some pictures of a very strange document.  I'd never seen anything like it, but one of his readers suggested that it was the work of someone with autism, which seemed a bit sad to me. What made me sadder was noticing this man on the train to Vienna (he subsequently discovered he was on the wrong train and had to get off and go back to the beginning to start his journey all over again):

and what he was busying himself with (if you can't zoom in, there are pages and pages of multi-coloured meaningless semi-writing):

He didn't seem unhappy, but there was still something strange and lonely about the thing.

Another Brilliant Opportunity

Following my academic suggestion yesterday, today I present an idea for a very exciting film, should anyone reading this be looking for such a thing.

I got it from the 28 April issue of the London Review of Books, which carried a review by RW Johnson of a number of books dealing with the subject of nuclear weapons. As well as inadvertently providing a possible - if rather radical - solution to global warming, via a war between Pakistan and India:

'If they were to throw all their nuclear weapons at one another, with a total yield of around 1.5 megatonnes - less than that of many individual thermo-nuclear weapons in the American and Russian arsenals - the smoke from the fires would rise into the atmosphere and take ten years to dissipate. The earth would be returned to the conditions of the "little Ice Age" in Europe between the 16th and mid-19th centuries...'

the article also contains an account of the Allied attempts to foil the Nazis' nuclear programme, parts of which I can imagine becoming a thrilling action film (although that, I have to admit, is not actually a genre about which I know anything much at all):

'A key part of the Nazis' nuclear programme was the heavy water production facility at the Norsk Hydro fertiliser plant [yes, I know it doesn't sound very riveting just yet, but be patient] near Rjukan in the wilds of Norway. The British did their utmost to destroy it. The first recourse was to get Norwegian Resistance sympathisers at the plant to sabotage it by pouring castor oil and cod liver oil into the electrolyte. The Special Operations Executive, however, had not told the several saboteurs of one another's existence, with the result that they overdid it. The whole plant had to be shut down in April 1942 and the Germans discovered the sabotage, which made it harder to do again.

By this time Churchill and Roosevelt had designated the Norsk Hydro a top priority target. The Resistance strongly counselled against a bombing raid because it would lead to major civilian casualties. But a commando raid would be difficult: in winter it would be prohibitively cold and in summer there wouldn't be enough hours of darkness. In November 1942, two British bombers towed in a 34-strong commando force in gliders [imagine that as a cinematic image]. They were to be met by a Resistance group and would then attempt to demolish the plant. It was a complete disaster. One plane and both gliders crash-landed, with many casualties. The survivors were all caught, interrogated and executed by the Gestapo: some were shot; others were throttled with straps and had their chests crushed before being killed by having air injected into their bloodstreams [personally I would have this all happen off-screen, but I suppose it depends on your style as a director].

In February 1943 [and this is where, I think, the action of the film should really begin, if you want sheer joyous adventure] a smaller team of specially trained Norwegian commandos was parachuted onto the desolate Hardanger Plateau in temperatures of -30 degrees Centigrade. The Hydro plant had to be approached across a suspension bridge over an unclimbably steep ravine. If they attempted to storm the bridge, the shoot-out with the guards would raise the alert. The answer, it was decided, was to climb the unclimbable - down into the ravine and up the other side - then set explosives all round the plant and escape via the same impossible route. The operation worked and they all got away safely. The German commander, surveying the damage, said it was "the finest coup I have seen in this war".'

But stop, there is more. Hidden away within the same review I see the makings of a potentially interesting play or long television drama as well. It concerns Werner Heisenberg who led the Nazis' bomb programme. After the end of the war in the European theatre, 'the British put him and most of his nuclear co-workers together at Farm Hall, a country house near Godmanchester, and bugged their conversations as the news of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came through.' The threads of that could make for some quite interesting drama - the Germans in the house, possibly their encounters with the locals in Godmanchester, and the listeners and their evolving understanding of those they were listening to.

So there you are: two ideas for free. Just a small credit is all I ask, if anyone ever gets any of them up and running.

Oh, and did you know that 'Nuclear weapons require a lot of maintenance: they cost the US alone $50 billion a year'? It's quite a lot of money, when you think about it.

Have You Got the Bottle?

Should you be a student of literature casting about for a dissertation topic, may I suggest 'The Milk Bottle in the 20th Century Novel' as an idea? It came to me when I was reading A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which includes milk bottles as a recurring motif.

They are first introduced about halfway through the text:

'The kitchen smelt of decaying matter. It was difficult to trace the source. "I must get rid of all those milk bottles", thought Tallis. Some of them contained weird formations resembling human organs preserved in tubes. It was quite difficult to get these out of the bottles and the last time he tried to he stopped up the sink.'

They recur later, functioning as a measure of one character's energy:

'He did not feel strong enough to tackle the milk bottles',

and again, further on, compounding the breakdown of his marriage:

'They staggered together, knocking over a row of half empty milk bottles ... The kitchen floor was covered with broken glass and stinking yellowish milky mess ...Tallis stared at jagged glass and crumpled newspaper and milk which had already dried into thick yellowish pats and errant gleaming globes of wine-dark Baltic amber. He stared down into a world that had been utterly changed.'

Eventually, they are noticed by another, stronger character:

'Julius scrutinized the kitchen with a faint frown, noting the milk bottles.'

It is he who, by the end of the novel, manages to overcome them:

'"What did you do with all those milk bottles?" said Tallis. "I washed a few and put them outside and I put the rest in the rubbish tip across the road."'

In Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn, milk bottles play an even more prominent role. Indeed, one of the characters is so in thrall to them that she fills her shed with the things:

'Then, as the day was fine, she went into the garden and picked her way over the long uncut grass to the shed where she kept milk bottles. These needed to be checked from time to time and occasionally she even went as far as dusting them. Sometimes she would put out one for the milkman but she mustn't let the hoard get too low because, if there was a national emergency of the kind that seemed so frequent nowadays, or even another war, there could well be a shortage of milk bottles.'

This character becomes so concerned when an acquaintance inadvertently leaves an alien milk bottle in her possession that she wraps it up and seeks her out in a library to return it:

'Marcia crept up behind [Letty] as she browsed among the biographies.

"This is yours, I think, " said Marcia in an accusing tone, thrusting the wrapped milk bottle towards her.

"A milk bottle?" Of course, Letty did not remember the occasion and Marcia had to explain it, which she did, loudly, so that other people turned round and the young blond-haired library assistant seemed about to make some kind of protest.

Letty conscious of tension in the air, accepted the bottle without further question.'

If someone as ill-read as me can find two instances so easily, I'm sure there must be many more references to this quintessentially English obsession scattered through the fiction of the twentieth century. I look forward to following the glittering academic career of whichever enterprising young scholar chooses to investigate this fascinating and thus far thoroughly overlooked area of research.

Untold Stories

I don't read biographies, but I love reading letters. The collection I'm going through at the moment is Letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid, who is a wonderful poet in his own right and also an extremely nice person (I worked with him briefly many, many years ago).

In the book, I've just come across a letter from Hughes to Anne Stevenson, in response to a draft of something she wrote about Sylvia Plath. He remarks interalia:

'...the whole motive of writing finds perfect and satisfying expression in fishing. Fishing is a substitute symbolic activity that simply short-circuits the need to write.'

So, next time you are strolling along a river bank or beach and see men with buckets of bait and rods setting up for an afternoon's angling, just think how many books are being lost with each cast of that fine, almost invisible line.

Nudging Opinion

In an article on European postal services (no, really, it was actually very interesting - chiefly because it explained to me how a lot of them are being out-sourced to home-workers, who are paid badly and cannot keep up with the number of deliveries they are expected to make) in the London Review of 
Books, a rising star in the Post Office in Britain is described thus:

"Michael Fehilly, Gatwick's manager, strode around in a grey pinstripe suit, brown loafers and an open-necked pink shirt."

When I read that, I immediately thought, 'Why am I being told about what he's wearing?' The information adds nothing at all to the strength of the writer's argument that the changes in 'work practices' are not entirely positive for everyone. However, it is possible these details are meant to shape my opinion about one of the people behind the changes.

Leaving aside the fact that I'm not quite sure in what way my opinion is supposed to be shaped - should I disapprove of Mr Fehilly's decision to combine a grey suit with brown shoes (and from there should I make the leap to deciding that, if he makes bad dress choices, he is therefore going to make bad business choices?); is a pink shirt some kind of obscure code for 'irredeemably naff''?; or have I got things quite wrong, (is the description of his outfit actually supposed to indicate the man's excellent taste?) - I don't like being manipulated. The article is supposed to be about the consequences of a shift in the way business is being done across Europe, rather than about a particular individual, and I want to be presented with arguments, not ad hominem attacks through the medium of clothing.

The writer's defence for including these details would probably be that he was adding colour to his story.  However, I think he's just trying to colour the way I think.

Another example, taken from a recent edition of the New Yorker, illustrates this even more clearly. At the start of an article about a woman who has been diagnosed as mentally ill but challenges the diagnosis, readers are told:

"A tall, athletic fifty-one-year old, with blue eyes and a bachelor's degree in art history from the University of New Hampshire, Linda had been admitted to the hospital in late October, 2006, after having been found incompetent to stand trial for a series of offenses."

Readers have to wade through three more pages before they are allowed to discover what the offences were that the woman had committed, even though that information, it seems to me, is far more relevant to an understanding of what she is like than the fact that she has an art history degree, blue eyes and looks athletic. However, being told upfront that she flipped her car while drunk, threw a cup of urine at a corrections officer and struck someone with a broomstick would be unlikely to make us enormously sympathetic to her cause.

But those are the things she did, however blue her eyes may be. Eye colour has nothing to do with mental illness (I hope, since I also have blue eyes.) Shoe colour has nothing to do with moral strength. The things that are worth reporting are words and actions. They provide genuine insights. For instance, later in that LRB postal article, the chief executive of UK Mail, Royal Mail's competitor, comments on the pre-tax wages - 20,000 pounds per year for a 40-hour week - of a Royal Mail postman:

"'That's a lot of money in current terms,'" he says.

There is really no need to tell us anything extra about his physical features, his higher education or his clothing. We can already guess what his salary is - or at least that it is several multiples of the one he describes as 'a lot of money' - and we can be certain he would not enjoy trying to live on a postman's salary, let alone working that physically hard. Without reference to cravats or cuban-heeled Oxford brogues or subtle, but bright green, highlights, the writer has conveyed the man.

Shut Up, I'm Reading

A while back, I was feeling sad, because I thought I was the only person in the world who didn't want to go out to literary festivals and listen to writers talking about themselves. I was beginning to imagine that it was eccentric to prefer to stay at home, reading their work instead.

I feel a bit better since I read this remark, made by Margaret Attwood:

"Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté."

The analogy is not perfect, but the central point appeals to me.

You See Him Here, You See Him There

I came across this interesting article on the invaluable Books Inq blog. I read it just after hearing on the radio that Harper Collins is part of the Murdoch empire. While I believe Random House is the biggest of all English language publishers, I imagine Harper Collins could give it a run for its money - and it is certainly big enough, I'd have thought, to exert considerable influence on the way that publishing is run.

Which was why, when I came to the phrase 'commercially-driven literary culture' in the article, I found myself wondering if it was possible to make a connection: could it be that book publishing, like so much else in Britain, has become entangled in the Murdoch tentacles? Has this area of British life also been corrupted by Murdoch greed? Has Murdoch's drive for financial success at all costs transformed the world of British writing? It's not impossible. It might provide an explanation for the dullness of the current literary world in Britain, compared to those in, for instance, Germany and France.

Advice to Writers

I don't know who David McCullough is, but he said this very wise thing:

"To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard."

Advice for Writers

 I like this comment I read the other day, from a writer I've never heard of:
"Being a writer means having homework every evening for the rest of your life."

The one I'm less sure about is the remark by Jonathan Franzen that the one word no-one should ever use when writing is 'then'.

Is he right? Sometimes I think he is; then I change my mind.

Writing Advice from John le Carre

The cat sat on the mat is not a story - it's a statement; the cat sat on the other cat's mat - that's a story.

The Joy of Cutting

In 2007 the New Yorker published a Raymond Carver manuscript, complete with the changes his editor, Gordon Lish made to it before publication -

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/12/24/071224on_onlineonly_carver?currentPage=all

I was reminded of that document today when, after listening to Miriam Margolyes read Portrait of a Lady by Henry James on BBC 7, I went back to my copy of the book. I was curious, because the radio version struck me as clear and almost cinematic and yet my memory of the book had been that it had been dense and, although enjoyable, definitely something of a thicket of words. In the radio version the characters emerge with a sharp immediacy, their outlines drawn with precision and their interior lives only shown by their actions.
The usual criticism levelled at James is, to use a phrase that always makes me think of the scene in the film of Women in Love where Alan Bates and Oliver Reed roll about on the hearthrug (can't find a copy of that on YOUTube but here is a link to the fig eating scene from the same film: http:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wgWEhCrnoI
which doesn't seem as overblown and ridiculous as I remembered it, perhaps partly because I see it now with the knowledge that Bates and Reed are dead, although there is no reason that should alter things [this sentence is getting a bit Jamesian itself]), that 'he wrote as though he was wrestling with a dead language'. In the radio version of Portrait of a Lady, however, there is no evidence of any struggle with syntax going on. The convoluted sentences have been replaced by concision. This was, I discovered once I looked through the printed version of the novel, because the whole thing had been severely abridged.
I've always thought I didn't like abridgments, so it surprised me that the shortened version of Portrait of a Lady I heard on the radio came across as better than the original novel. Lish's cuts had an equally positive effect on Carver's work, even though for the writer himself some were very hard to make.
This is not to say that either James or Carver are not great writers. The argument put forward following the publication of the Carver manuscripts that Lish should share equal credit with Carver for the work that goes under the name of Raymond Carver is completely wrong. After all, it was Carver who took an empty page and managed to produce something to put on it - from thin air. Lish was merely the person who helped give shape to the stuff Carver conjured up. Without Carver, Lish would have had nothing to work with. The same is true of James and whoever abridged the radio version.
What is interesting though is the idea that other well-known works might benefit from some trimming. All day I've been trying to decide which writers could do with a bit of editorial slash and burn. Many people, I suspect, would cite Dickens as their first candidate, but in fact I see him as the exception that proves the rule - his virtue is his sprawling, lush torrent of characters and events and words; he is not meant to be tight and clipped. Dostoevsky's prose could not be improved either - much as I hate his miserable vision, his descriptive powers are extraordinary and should not be tampered with. In Crime and Punishment, for instance, the dream Raskolnikov has of a horse being beaten to death is magnificently horrible and there is not a word of it that could be spared. And Proust too is out of the question - his prolixity is pretty much the point.
But what about George Eliot? Or Thomas Hardy? Patrick White certainly, as far as I'm concerned (including destruction of almost all The Tree of Man - or was it just doing it at school that made it seem so terrible?) Could Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South be compressed into a Penelope Fitzgerald kind of novel? Probably not, but it might be fun to try.

Writing Advice from William Zinsser

The hard part of writing isn't the writing; it's the thinking.

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/writing-english-as-a-second-language/

Writing Advice from Will Self

Remember how much time people spend watching TV. If you're writing a novel with a contemporary setting there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching: "Later, George watched Grand Designs while eating HobNobs. Later still he watched the shopping channel for a while . . ."

Margaret Atwood's Excellent Advice to Writers

' ... there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.'

Notes on Writing 1

Writing is almost entirely about making decisions. Every sentence is the result of difficult choices. When people look for decision makers to employ, they should seek out writers. First decision what to write about. Second decision what form to write it in. Third decision what words to use. Fourth decision what to put in and what to leave out. Fifth decision what order to put it in. On and on and on it goes.

Editing

A day spent editing is not a bad kind of day. The task engages the brain without exhausting it. On the other hand, it doesn't stimulate the brain as much as drafting - but nor does it create such high levels of frustration as drafting does. But it is lazy to do only editing and no drafting. Another form of avoidance really. Along with, in my case, knitting, spinning, dressmaking, curtain making, walking and, once I'm home again, gardening. I will even go in for bouts of cooking and cleaning, if I can avoid the real hard work of a first or second draft. Shame on me.