I'm completely exhausted and must soon make myself some soup or something. Anyway, I thought - God knows why - I'd actually try to list my leisure reading for this year, to keep a track of my reading habits. I've never done it before. I'll keep this list in this particular blog entry, but I won't make it a sticky post, so if you're at all interested, you'll just have to bookmark it or something. I'll only list the books I actually finish (not those I merely dip into, which I tend to do quite a lot these days) and I won't list the books that I read in relation to my work for Chômu Press. This is strictly what I read away from the computer screen 'on my own time'. At the time of starting this blog post, I have a number of books 'on the go', including Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces by C.S. Lewis, Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren, Hadrian the Seventh by Baron Corvo aka Fr. Rolfe, which I've almost finished and which sadly I've pretty much hated, Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz, Meido by Uchida Hyakken, which I'm reading very slowly, The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich, which has been in my reading limbo for months, and a number of other volumes that I'll probably remember at some point or another.
Anyway, I'll list, below, the books I've read, as I finish them, along with any summaries I feel like making:
January
The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, by Robert Baldick. A bigraphy of J.-K. Huysmans, and the best thing I've read in a very long time. Huysmans is someone whose work I am sure I will keep returning to throughout my life, and this book has given me invaluable insight into the author, as well as into a fascinating human life.
A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. Some notebooks kept by Lewis after the death of his wife. I'm not a big fan of British literature, but Lewis, in his essays, exhibits what I think of as the particular virtues of good British writing. I suppose one word that comes to mind is 'concision' - using precisely the right word in the right place, without flab, in such a way that one's prose tends towards aphorism. Regarding the subject matter - generally with Lewis, there are some areas to which I cannot follow, sympathetically speaking, but I am fascinated to find whole passages that seem like my own thought processes dictated onto the page.
February
On the 3rd or 4th, I believe, I finished Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Although I still think everyone should read this, I'm sometimes not sure whether Bradbury is really a good writer. My impression of his writing is that he's a tightrope walker who gets to the other side by sheer speed. The results are not always convincingly elegant, but the fact is, he does get there, without falling. He seems quite regularly to create emotionally affecting scenes, too, which is an ability not to be underestimated. This work belongs to me with Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (I know the first two films, not the book) in having a possible anti-Nirvana message, which I appreciate. Books represent intellectual conflict (of which Nirvana is supposedly the end), just as emotions represent a similar conflict in Bodysnatchers (especially the 70s version). Not sure about some of the folksy wisdom contained in 451. Quite near the end of the book is a use of the word "Godamn" (very minor point, but) that represents to me some of the weaknesses of American fiction.
Wednesday the 8th. Furnace, by James Tressel. It's half past eleven as I write, so I won't write more on this tonight - later.
Just a quick note, as I should be working (always). I suppose the notice here, from a bookseller, amounts to a kind of review of All God's Angels, Beware!. Someone has taken the time, anyway, to write something original about the book rather than simply copy-and-pasting the usual publicity bumf:
Crisp’s fourth collection and a much anticipated one. Demented, slippery, surreal and generally bizarre supernatural fiction. That said, Crisp is also incredibly literate and his style harkens back to the golden age trans-real literature. This volume, like all titles emanating from Ex Occidente, limited to just a few hundred copies, in this case 350. Missing the dread and gloom and style of the masters of dark fiction? Well, I think Crisp may have the prescription for your malady.
The reason - or excuse, if you like - for my posting this is that in a recent post on my blog I said, "I generally (if I think about it) consider myself not to be well read. Sometimes though (I'm afraid this is an objectionable thing to say, but I must), I am forced to consider that I might be relatively well read." (I hate quoting myself... at least I hate other people quoting themselves, so I'm assuming I hate me doing it, too.)
I do appreciate being called "incredibly literate", but I wonder if it's really true. Where do you go from "incredibly" (which, if we refer to the almost forgotten actual meaning of the word means "unbelievably", does it not?)? There are plenty of people more literate than myself. What would we call them, to say that they're more than incredibly literate? I think I'm reasonably literate considering the fact that I had very poor primary and secondary education. But I'm certainly not like those authors who can pepper their works (rather annoyingly when there are no footnotes) with Greek and Latin phrases, and for whom history, philosophy and so on are an already established foundation that they started building on long ago. I wish I were. Most of my early reading was in areas that would be barely recognised as literature, and most of the reading in my entire life has been driven by 'the pleasure principle'. I do value education (which in my experience has mainly had to be self-education), but I've been really more preoccupied in sniffing out strange fictional perfumes than in becoming... literate, expert, erudite, etc.
There was a point I wanted to make - I think it may be only this: I hope that the application of "incredibly" here is merely generous. If what seems to me average were generally considered exceptional, I'd have to take it as further evidence that we're slipping into a world that I don't want to live in much longer.
Note: Have just had a toilet break, and it occurred to me that the above is bound to be taken in one or more of a large number of wrong ways. I'm not going to delete it now that I've taken all that time writing it when I should have been working, etc. I'm happy to have readers who think I'm incredibly literate - I just find it a bit puzzling. Also, there's another way in which the word 'literate' could be applied here that would make sense. I didn't explore that because a) no time, b) I've already gazed deeply into my navel, and sadly despite c) it would give the reviewer credit for appropriate use of the word. Ta.
One of the things I'm proud of (if you hadn't noticed), is my association with Kodagain. I love Saša's somehow-traditional, somehow-weird pop sensibility, his simple melodies, sometimes immediately catchy, sometimes as subtle as patterns in desert sands. I love his harmonies, his ability to knock out one song after another, and for each of them, small and compact, to somehow have the power to unfold over time.
To me this sounds like a classic single from the sixties or seventies - not like a copy, but like it's actually a missing piece of pop history. I wrote the lyrics for this quite quickly, inspired by a line from Joe Simpson Walker's transgressive tour-de-force, Jeanette, and although the clues in the lyrics themselves were perhaps very few, Saša managed to strike exactly the right mood here. I can't imagine the lyrics sung any other way now.
Here's another one with a great, natural melody. I'm actually not sure if this is a cover, although Saša sometimes covers lyrics and changes the melody:
Somehow or other, I've managed to collaborate with Kodagain now on over one hundred songs - I've actually lost count. Anyway, I was listening to some of our collaborations stored on my hard-drive just now and was struck by a repeated message in the lyrics. For instance, this from 'Failures':
For some years now, I've been on life support. No one visits, No one knows.
And this from 'No one Has a Song':
Why are you all so preoccupied With everything but the soul Who's starving at your side? I know even now you will evade My simple, single heartfelt question Somehow.
Hmmm. I probably shouldn't go on giving examples. At this link you can hear 'Valediction', which is quite possibly my favourite collaboration with Kodagain. It's really degrading to explain oneself, is it not? I should not do it. The story of my life, if I have written it, is 'Troubled Joe' in the collection All God's Angels, Beware!
Abstract pleasures are relatively reliable. Sometimes when the world seems unbearable, I try and forget about my own personal gain-and-loss status, and the particular pains of the present, and I think:
I can't leave behind a world in which the word 'emolument' exists - not just yet, anyway. Emolument, emolument, emolument, emolument, emolument.
I sometimes think that 'equipage' is a pretty good word, too. Example usage from some self-promotional copy in a 1711 issue of the journal Spectator:
I would therefore in a particular manner recommend these my speculations to all well-regulated families that set apart an hour every morning for tea, bread and butter; and would earnestly advise them for their good to order this paper to be punctually served up and to be looked upon as part of the tea-equipage.
As you may know, Tartarus Press re-released Morbid Tales as a paperback earlier this month. In the post I have just linked to, I mused upon that collection's place in my life from a kind of biographical point of view. I'd like to write a little more about the collection. I'm not going to 'review' it - still not going to review it - because, apart from anything else, my opinion of my own work goes up and down all the time. For instance, after being reasonably satisfied upon re-reading some of the stories, I then re-read another - one I've sometimes heard described as one of my best - and found it to be unbearably dreadful. I won't say which one. On such occasions, all I can do is think, "I'll make up for it by writing better stories in the future", and hope that other people don't view the work in question as dimly as I do.
Anyway, this time I want to look a little at the genesis of each story. I hope this will be of interest regardless of the merits of the tales themselves - it is to me.
The Mermaid
This is a very early piece. That is, early on in my development after I got to the stage where I was writing things with the old beginning-middle-end (before that I'd largely been writing things with beginnings, middles, but no end, which simply petered out, and before that, I wrote things that did end, but I was in my teens and younger and those things are beyond salvaging). Everything of mine that has been published was, I think I'm right in saying, written since 1996, when I entered Durham University. I spent the second year (1997/98) in Japan, and I must either have written this story there, or soon after my return, I think. I really don't remember much about writing it apart from the fact that it is an early one. There was 'The Legacy', and then (if I remember aright) there was 'The Psychopomps' and then there was 'The Mermaid'. I think I wrote 'The Psychopomps' in Japan, or after Japan, and 'The Mermaid' was definitely after that. Robert Smith once said, comparing himself favourably to Morrissey, "At least I have two songs, 'Faith' and 'Love Cats'." I am sure that at some point (a long time ago now), I thought, "At least I have two stories, 'The Psychopomps' and 'The Mermaid'." 'The Psychopomps', of course, represents my penchant for all that is majestically grey and bleakly Gothic; 'The Mermaid' represents more my fondness for the colourful, and what I am forced to call 'the erotic'. Even early on, I was really trying to make progress and move into different areas with each story, though this may not be apparent to the reader, I suppose. But for me, 'The Mermaid' was a very different vista to the two Gothic tales I'd just penned, and I was glad of it - glad to have opened up a new vista.
Influences? M. John Harrison, Takahashi Rumiko, various naughty Taschen books, etc.
Cousin X
I think I'm right in saying that I had not read The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (by Mishima Yukio) at the time that I wrote this, but even if I had, the whole story is based on the plot of a short narrative poem I'd written much earlier. In the poem, the narrative, as I recall, ended with the incident that is similar to a certain incident in the Mishima novel. Why Cousin X? For the life of me, I don't know. It's just something that came to me, that I had to refer to the main character as 'Cousin X' throughout. This and the preceding story both rely heavily on remembered Devon scenery.
Influences? I don't remember anything specific, but perhaps Mishima.
Far-Off Things
Now, the curious thing is, it is sometimes the lesser stories you remember most about. This, by most accounts I've heard, and by my own estimation, is a lesser story. In fact, I was surprised it made the collection when other stories I rated more highly didn't. The story is based on an actual folk tale that I was familiar with in childhood from one of those Peter Haining books, if memory (again) serves. Very early on in my writing development, I knew that I had to tackle the difficult question of plot. And this was a difficult question for me. One of the things I did, to tackle this, when I was sixteen and at A-level college, was to re-write the folk tale from the Peter Haining book with lots of flowery language. (I thought this kind of thing would give me an understanding of structure.) That first version was about two pages long, and got printed in the college magazine. I remember some girl (I'm not going to go into the background, as it's too long) telling me that if she could write like that she'd never be depressed. I used words like "eidolons" in it and stuff like that. Later I cut the story down to about fifty words and translated it into Japanese. For whatever reason, it seemed to be a story I liked playing about with. Later again, in Taiwan (at the age of 28 or 29), perhaps because I'd been asked to submit something to an anthology, I thought of re-working it yet again. And so I did. I think I was asked to cut the wordcount, and I cut it a couple of times. But it's the longest version that ended up in Morbid Tales.
Influences? Peter Haining must get some credit. Also, for the final version, Mishima.
A Lake
Almost always, this is referred to incorrectly as 'The Lake'. Before I'd read Mishima in the original, I read his collection Death in Midsummer in English. The opening words are, "A. Beach". I thought, "Why is there a full stop after 'A'? How is that rendered in Japanese?" And this was repeated throughout - the full stop after the 'A'. I thought it was some kind of deliberate play with punctuation to give a sinister, deadening effect. Much, much later, I realised it just meant that the 'A' stood for the name of the beach, which began with 'A'. Anyway, I wanted that sinister, deadening effect in something I wrote, and I was thinking of that when I began taking notes for 'A Lake'.
'A Lake' is a typical horror story, pretty much. That's what I wanted to write. I wanted to 'do Stephen King'. It's also pretty Lovecraftian, at a time when I could get into being Lovecraftian. Ligotti? Probably. William Hope Hodgson? Probably. Incidentally, there was a lake like this, just as I describe, with the dead fish on the shore, in Japan. I took notes. I also used bits and pieces I'd heard about other lakes in Japan, in which countless numbers of people had committed suicide.
Influences? I've already named them. Can't think of any others.
The Two-Timer
I do remember how this happened. I was at university and a friend of mine there (the friend who introduced me to the work of Dazai Osamu) proposed we both write a story on the same theme, which was someone with the ability to stop time. So we did. This one was my response to the challenge. The fact is, though, that I'd always wanted to write a story on that theme. I remember that years before this I'd read a sniffy review of some novel that went, "A man discovers the secret of stopping time... and uses it to put his hand up women's skirts." That sounded to me like an utterly fantastic idea for a novel. So, this was me, in a minor way, and late (as always) getting in on that idea. It's my, "I wish I'd written that... Oh, I just have now" story. I haven't read that other novel, though. You know the one I mean, though, right?
The Tattooist
And I remember this. I was in Japan. It wasn't so long after my other early stories, such as 'The Psychopomps', etc. I was wandering the campus grounds of Gunma University. I had some imagery for a story... a tattoo... a knife... a boy... How did it all fit together? In the space of one hour, the whole thing came to me. I went over it and over it in my head making sure everything was in place. That was it - I had it. I had the whole thing. I could write plots! Not only that, this story was moving away from traditional horror and even fantasy tropes like the mermaid, and into something that seemed much more simply me. I was very pleased. I had - I felt - made a breakthrough. It hardly ever happens like that.
Ageless
I'm not one hundred per cent sure, but I think I wrote this in Devon, during summer holidays, while I was still at uni... or maybe not. Maybe it came a bit later. Anyway, I do know that I wanted to write something short, because all my stories were too long, and the magazines I knew didn't accept stories of over five thousand words, which all my stories were. On top of that, everyone was - still is - always saying about how you need to cut down all the time, whittle, hack, reduce, etc. etc. So, I thought I'd better learn to write stuff that was short. I think that the image came to me of a chess game, and of wanting to lose, and I thought I could write a reasonable vignette, with something like a twist to it, and this was the result.
Autumn Colours
It's a bit scary to me how little I remember about writing some of these stories. I don't know when I wrote this except that the very earliest it could have been would be 1998. I'm guessing it was more like 2000, possibly even 2002/2003. Now I think of it, it could be one of the latest pieces in the collection. The latest, perhaps. I suppose I had the idea of doing a very Japanese thing and writing something that had a lovely quiet melancholy with something nasty and twisted at the end. And that was pretty much how I was feeling in those days, anyway, not that anyone cared or noticed. Perhaps it doesn't need saying, but the locations are modelled on Durham University. Thomas Ligotti said he liked the title.
Influences? Mishima Yukio. Higuchi Ichiyo. Dazai Osamu. Probably Ligotti, too, by this time, I think.
Basically, all the stories in this collection were written either in the nineties, or drawing so heavily on memories of my life in the twentieth century, that they really should be considered as being set in the nineties at the latest - the pre-internet world. This also holds true for the work in Rule Dementia! and for "Remember You're a One-Ball!". I think I kind of started to catch up with the 21st century in Shrike. It was always problematical to me how I could possibly write an aesthetically pleasing story with computers and stuff in it, as, to me, they had entirely ruined the world aesthetically. But I think I'm getting to grips with it now.
I'm not sure really what to think about Morbid Tales now except that, like so many other things, it has become a fact of my history. I could have made particular, from the infinite vastness of my imagination - or so I would like to think - almost anything else. But it turned out to be this. I have a notion that it's only by navigating the seas of readership (can a ship - readership - be a sea?) that I can really get a firm idea of whether I'm any good at writing... but then again, even if I'm not, I probably won't stop. But... God, I hope that I can find the time and the energy and the mental resources to make use of what I've hopefully learned so that in the next ten or twenty years, before I go senile or I'm eaten by specially trained baboons that hunt down those with 'irrational' genes, I may, in fact, write a huge shitload of work that justifies the idea that I chose to manifest specifically this out of infinite imaginative potential. Help me, if you feel like it.
Addendum: I'm beginning to get the feeling that 'The Mermaid' might have been the second thing I wrote in my post-1996 phase of finishing my stories. That is, the story straight after 'The Legacy', in which case, it may have come before Japan. If I had my manuscripts here, I could tell by the dates.
I suppose I'd usually put this in a notebook, but anyway... it seems to me that materialism is, ultimately, an attack on consciousness. I suspect that, at heart, the materialist is unable to believe in the obvious (consciousness being the obvious). And an attack on consciousness is probably also an attack on free will, since if there is any path to free will at all, then it must surely be consciousness.
But since we all experience the obvious, the materialist must find ways to undermine this. The intention to undermine is revealed when the contradictions of materialist argument are pointed out. If humans are nothing more than matter, whence consciousness? The argument, of course, is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon. It is only matter that is conscious. And yet materialists are the least likely of all people to believe that any matter other than human matter can be conscious. 'The Fall of the House of Usher'? Preposterous, they'll say. Even living animals they are dubious about. So matter can't be conscious? Which gives rise again to the question, whence consciousness? But this time we know that the agenda of the materialists is to wipe out consciousness if they possibly can (IE, the assertion that consciousness is only an arrangement of matter is not meant to elevate matter - which in other contexts they cannot believe is so elevated as to be conscious - but to denigrate consciousness to the level of the matter that they cannot believe is conscious). Presumably because it is irksome to them to have something they cannot explain and control. They will move from 'epiphenomenon' somehow to 'hallucination' (but what is hallucinating consciousness if not consciousness?), and they will move from 'hallucination' to 'nothing', if they can.
Another illustration of the contradictions of materialism can be seen in the standard argument against telepathy: nothing immaterial can possibly have an effect on the material universe. But, hang on a minute, aren't you the same people who say that there is nothing but the material universe anyway? Therefore, thoughts are material and there is no reason why they should not have an effect on the material universe. At which point they might try to reverse their argument and say there are non-material things. (Note: the reason they have to reverse the argument is that they're looking for a way to say that consciousness doesn't exist. If they admit that consciousness is material, they have to admit also that it exists. They reverse their arguments because some things have to be 'imaginary' and therefore non-material in order that they can banish them from existence.) Yes. And we're back to the question: where do those non-material things come from?
When you live alone, there's no one to say, "You should really see a doctor about that", or, "Why don't you buy yourself a new pair of shoes?", or even, "You have to prioritise your tax return at the moment, forget about the other stuff until you've done it." All you get are demands from the outside world - often conflicting demands.
This month I've been sitting down to write a tale of horror, and as I've been doing so, something has come to me: After this year, I do not want to write horror any more. If I had the time, I would write a loooong blog post about this, but I don't have the time. I'll be 40 soon, I could die at any moment. I don't want to go through the motions. There may be one or two more horror stories that I can just about squeeze out without going through the motions, but then, that's it.
It's arguable whether I ever wrote horror; I don't care either way. If someone wants to say I did, fine; if they want to say I didn't, that's also fine. And I'm not going to disown anything, either. It's all a part of me. Headbanging to Metallica as a teenager is a part of me, but I don't do it any more. It seems to me that people have strange ideas about what constitutes authenticity. A lot of people seem to think that authenticity means doing the same thing again and again and again. As far as I'm concerned, that's the opposite of authenticity, although it's true that a writer who writes the same thing all the time is more likely to sell work, as people know what to expect of him or her.
I've always been attracted to shadows, grotesque things, obscure things, the downbeat and the minor key. I doubt that will go away. I just never again - after this year - want to sit down and have it in my mind, "Right, a tale of horror!" For me, if not for other writers, if I write a tale of horror there's absolutely no point unless I mean it. As I said, one or two more, at most.
Life is short, and I yearn deeply to write more, much more, about:
Annette Funicello
Fairies
The fifties
The sixties
The seventies
Underwear
Necrophilia
Circus freaks
Hawaii
Japanese folk music
Dare Wright
The twenties
The forties
Tom Baker
Voodoo
Tap-dancing
Voodoo tap-dancing
Pin-up art
Ancient China
Languages of the future
Things too intimate to be mentioned on a blog
Etc.
I've started reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I bought it from a bookshop. Not an independent bookshop, admittedly, but a bookshop nonetheless. I have started reading it as a small, dutiful, symbolic, and I hope, actually more than symbolic act, because I care about books (I know it's a stark statement to make in a world where we're all supposed to be ironic and not care about anything, least of all books), and I want to make some mental statement of that attitude, at the very least to myself.
I've only just started reading Fahrenheit 451 and I don't know exactly the angle it will take, though I do have a broad idea. It's a book about the end of books, and a book about censorship. Today, in internet news, there has been much coverage of a story that involves censorship and which also involves the protection of books, in as much as it relates to copyright laws. Superficially, at least, in the news story in question, these concerns are on opposing sides (anti-censorship against the protection of copyright/books), which might tell us something about the confused and twisted times in which we're living. I don't believe in censorship. I do believe in the benefits to creativity of a reasonable enforcement of intellectual property rights. Why? Because people who create culture need to eat as much as people who fix cars or wait on tables. Food costs money. Shelter costs money. Clothes cost money. Books, films and music should also cost money if the people who produce them are to have the food, shelter and clothes (amongst other things) that cost money.
I don't know if I will agree with all that Bradbury states or implies in his novel. I don't even know if I agree with all that I've already read, in its attitudes and implications. But I do agree with what I see is the underlying, passionate attitude: books have value, and the world would be a much worse place without them. I therefore would like to urge people reading this blog also to go out and buy a copy of Fahrenheit 451, from a real, bricks-and-mortar bookshop, and read it, and ask yourself whether you want to live in a world without books, because I swear sometimes it looks very much like that's where we're headed. And this is from Bradbury's own Afterword to the novel:
There remains only to mention a prediction that my Fire Chief, Beatty, made in 1953, halfway through my book. It had to do with books being burned without matches or fire. Because you don't have to burn books, do you, if the world starts to fill up with non-readers, non-learners, non-knowers? If the world widescreen basketballs and footballs itself to drown in MTV, no Beattys are needed to ignite the kerosene or hunt the reader. If the primary grades suffer meltdown and vanish through the cracks and ventilators of the school room, who, after a while, will know or care?
Thank you to Ray Russell and Rosalie Parker at Tartarus, to Mark Samuels for the Foreword, and to all those who bought the hardcover first edition of the collection.
My copies of the paperback edition arrived on Saturday morning. Naturally, I leafed through it. I ended up re-reading (I don't know how long it's been since I last read them) 'Far-Off Things', most of 'Autumn Colours' and a little of 'The Mermaid'. It was not as bad as I feared. There is even a kind of rough, vigorous lyricism that I don't know if I have the sap and strength for any more. Then again, I found some lines that made me want to stab myself with shame. I won't say which they were. Anyway, it's not my job to review the book. Others have done so, and perhaps shall do so again. At this link you can find what I believe is the most recent review of it.
I was thinking that I would use this occasion as an opportunity to ruminate. It's been eight years, roughly, since Morbid Tales was first in print, and this seems like a chance to situate the work in my life, to be generally retrospective, and to bother at the frustrations and humiliations of my existence like a campanologist ringing a bell.
Well, let's see what, if anything, I have to say...
Morbid Tales came out in 2004, the year after my return from my second sojourn in Japan, where I had been studying the works of Higuchi Ichiyo at Kyoto University. It was not my debut collection. My debut, The Nightmare Exhibition, had been brought out by John B. Ford's BJM Press in 2001 while I was teaching English in Taiwan. There were three years between the first and second collections, not because I had no material, but because it took me that long to find a publisher. There had been the promise of another publisher who were going to put out a huge collection (of most, or perhap all, of the material now split between Morbid Tales and Rule Dementia!), but nothing came of this. They dragged their feet, and eventually a correspondent of mine told me that the publisher in question was actually defunct. I confronted the publisher, I gave a time limit, the time limit passed, a moment came when it became clear the collection was not going to transpire. That must have been in 2002. I remember the despair, after all the work, all the waiting and expectation and the raised hopes - I remember walking around a cemetery on the top of a hill in Ohbaku, to the south of Kyoto, thinking, "That's it - back to the wilderness again. For how long? Until I join these people in the ground?"
I kind of got used to this. And kind of getting used to the wilderness has been a recurring pattern in my life.
When I returned to Britain in early 2003 (at about the time of the invasion of Iraq), I was soon met, at a pub in Waterloo Station, by Mark Samuels. We had met before, on the eve of my Kyoto sojourn. He suggested that I try Tartarus Press and was oddly and quietly confident that they would be interested in my work. To me it still seemed very much a lottery, but perhaps his confidence was infectious, because soon I became guardedly optimistic. I sent Tartarus all the material that had been destined for that second collection that never transpired, the one that I had called, You Put the Dirty Pictures in My Head!. The title was discarded, and so was much of the material.
I remember surprisingly little about the release of that first edition. There were two book launches for it, one at the now sadly closed Fantasy Centre, on Holloway Road. (Two friends who met for the first time at that launch were later to marry.) And another launch in Twickenham, where I remember drinking lots of red wine and reading aloud very nervously to those gathered. The reviews were mainly good, though not unanimously. One reviewer did me the magnificent kindness of saying that my style was something like a cross between Morrissey and Mishima. I liked the cover picture, which (despite what I've since discovered is a resemblance to Clark Ashton-Smith), I took to be a kind of portrait of me, by way of the 'Cousin X' character of the tale of that name.
If I rooted around in boxes for manuscripts, I might be able to tell you for certain exactly what I was writing after Morbid Tales came out, as I date my manuscripts. There may have been other stories I was working on, but I'm fairly sure that the main one at that time was "Remember You're a One-Ball!". The genesis of this story now is a kind of mystery. The very first seeds for the idea came to me on the top of a bus in Taiwan, whilst talking to a friend about school days (the friend to whom 'The Tao of Petite Beige' is dedicated). It was a very silly conversation we had, and I intended to write a very silly story. At some point during the writing of the story, however, from the second or third chapter, I felt myself get 'in the zone'. I was writing as if this were a page-turner for me in the writing of it. By about halfway, I had a sense that here was an opportunity to encapsulate in one particular narrative a great many things that I had long felt very deeply about life, but had been unable to tie together or fully express before. What's more, it would be a full-on, proper novel, with a beginning, a middle and an end. I needed a novel! I needed it to get an agent. I needed an agent to get the ears of the big publishers. I needed a big publisher, well... so that I could get out of the ghetto and write full time. I wrote and phoned to one agent after another. One after another. No luck. There was also a rejection of the novel in the terms that have been quoted in the inside pages with its recent publication. Another publisher later expressed strong interest over the course of a year before ceasing entirely to answer my e-mails.
Well, these were still pre-Kindle and pre-PoD days, and things were very different... Though perhaps not that differnt. Once again I despaired. Once again, it was back to the wilderness. The wilderness, in this case, came after the release of Rule Dementia!, from John B. Ford's Rainfall Books, in 2005. Between then and my next standalone publication there would be four years. Again, not because I had no material.
In 2005, I had a job. I was teaching future teachers of Japanese how to teach Japanese to native English speakers. It was probably the best - that is, the most respectable - job that I've ever had. I had it for about a year. But I was ambitious for my writing. Towards the end of the year, I gave in my notice. I knew that would mean having no security for my future, but I had to take the chance, to have faith in my writing. I remember the conversation in the principal's office, as he offered me salted plums. He was himself, an admirer of literature. We had spoken about Hagiwara Sakutaro, and he had told me that the poet was quite an eccentric, even a disturbed individual, who had, for instance, had to touch the wall with his fingers when he descended a stair, not for balance, but in an obsessive compulsive need simply to touch the wall. The principal offered me increased hours for greater security... The situation was painful, but I declined.
In 2006, I went to America for a couple of months, kind of, but not entirely, on the spur of the moment, to see if there might be a life for me there. Things didn't work out, and when I came back there were issues that I had to deal with. I dealt with them almost immediately by writing Shrike. This seemed to me a very personal piece of writing. It was almost entirely introspective and most of the action was off-stage. It had pretty much poured out of me, but I viewed it as personally esoteric. I did not think anyone would be interested in reading it, and might never have sent it anywhere. Someone - I forget who now - urged me to try sending it. So I did. I sent it off, and within a week it was accepted for publication (by PS Publishing). I was, on this occasion, very surprised. I believe the acceptance came in 2007, but it could have been late 2006. One of the most gratifying occasions in my writing life was when I read Lisa Tuttle's introduction for the novella. It eventually came out in 2009, as I said, to very mixed, I think predominantly puzzled, reviews - unsurprisingly.
Some time in 2008 I had to move. I was by this time really more despondent than I can hope to explain. Perhaps I should have moved to somewhere in London, but I had no confidence, and that seemed actually impossible to me, something that I did not have the energy, spirit or wit to deal with. I spent the next two years in a hamlet in Wales. It was there that I wrote 'Suicide Watch'. Some of my stories, I think, are 'pivotal', or definitive. As far as I'm concerned, 'Suicide Watch' is one of these. If you want an accurate summary of my life between the first edition of Morbid Tales and... now(?), in spirit if not letter, then 'Suicide Watch' is the story to refer to.
Well, naturally, there's far more than this to tell, but I don't have the time or the energy. I moved to Devon again. And finally, somehow, I have found the confidence to get a flat in London. I don't know how, exactly.
One thing struck me when I examined the paperback edition of Morbid Tales. It was this, on the back cover blurb:
[These stories] are unified, perhaps, by a yearning for the achingly perfect, ecstatic moment.
Yes, I thought, that is very, very true, and something that I haven't been specifically conscious of for a long time. I always wanted to reach out. For other people, as well as for that perfect, ecstatic moment. It seemed that the two things go together, reaching out for people, and reaching out for that moment. Now... why have I forgotten all about that perfect, ecstatic moment? Why?
Recently, I was sent a YouTube clip about an autistic girl who can't talk. Apparently at the age of 11, when presented with a computer, she began to type, and her family discovered for the first time that there was a thinking, feeling person in there (they had, the father said, been talking in front of her as if she were absent all this time). Something you should never do is read YouTube comments, but I did, and I noticed someone saying something like, "I've got to say, I'm skeptical about this", and others saying, "I'm calling bullshit on this", etc.
People choose some peculiar things to be skeptical about. What about if you hear a cry for help from a mineshaft? "I've got to say, I'm skeptical about this." "Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on this cry for help from down this mineshaft. Where's the actual proof that anyone is there?" But it shouldn't be surprising, really, that people don't believe that there is someone there if you can't talk, because from what I can tell of the human race, most of the time they don't believe that there's someone there even if you can talk.
They don't believe there's someone there if you shout or scream, or write long, complex, angsty novels. Several characters in Morbid Tales find that it takes a killing (homicide or suicide) for other human beings to begin to suspect that there might actually be 'somebody there'.
And what do we call this soul-blindness? I call it materialism.
I mentioned the idea of 'pivotal' stories. I do think that Morbid Tales is strong on reaching out for the "achingly perfect, ecstatic moment", and perhaps that's the same as the "vigorous lyricism" I noted. I wonder if I am still reaching out. In 'Troubled Joe' we find someone whose life is already over - a ghost - who is still trying to tell his story and still failing, but no longer expecting to succeed. This seems to me one of those pivotal stories.
(Additional: 'Troubled Joe' and 'Suicide Watch', as it happens, are bookend pieces in All God's Angels, Beware!, which came out in 2009. I think it was my best collection so far, but it was ill-fated in a number of ways I'd rather not go into here. I think there have been two reviews of it, both from readers who were not sent review copies - fewer than for any of my other books. Anyway, at this moment in time it seems to me that, if Morbid Tales was a 'before', then Shrike was a turning point, and 'Troubled Joe' and 'Suicide Watch' were, perhaps, an after, in more than a chronological sense.)
There's always more to say... but I rather think that Mr. Newton has had enough.
I've just finished my dinner. While eating, I read the final chapter of Robert Baldick's The Life of J.-K. Huysmans, which I recommend unreservedly to anyone who is interested in knowing what the world of writing is really all about, as well as to those who already know.
Because I've been working quite hard today, I thought it might be a good idea to relax by writing a brief blog entry. So, here it is.
I suppose the following will be something like a review, but since I have neither the time nor the appetite to read in their entirety the two books I'm going to discuss here, first of all, I should (under the right circumstances, which would probably include me actually reading the books to the end) be prepared to stand corrected etc. etc. Secondly, I should probably make some passive aggressive caveats. So, here's the first caveat: It's possible that I am too aesthetically inclined, which, if I allow myself to riff on the metaphor implicit in my use of the word "appetite", is a bit like saying, "In matters of food, I'm too concerned with how it tastes." The second caveat? I think there was one... maybe it'll come back to me.
So, anyway, I was reading a magazine about books (newbooks magazine, in fact), and I decided to have a go at the sample chapter of Room by Emma Donoghue that was featured. I forced myself to read further than I actually had any stomach for. (That metaphor keeps repeating on me.) I generally (if I think about it) consider myself not to be well read. Sometimes though (I'm afraid this is an objectionable thing to say, but I must), I am forced to consider that I might be relatively well read. This is the kind of thing that's likely to do it:
Directory reviewer Anne Cater believes Room is possibly the best book she's ever read.
So, how much have I read? Well, I've read enough that, at some time during my almost vanished thirties(I cannot pinpoint when), a change must have come about in my reading tastes. In my twenties I am fairly sure I remained omnivorous. As there is still some residual enjoyment for me, in theory, in the mechanical act of reading any text, so in my twenties, the residual enjoyment was still fresh enough to hold the foreground somewhat, and I could read almost anything with zest. This compares, I think, to the way, in my pre-teens, for a brief period, I could record 'the charts' from the radio onto a cassette, and listen to it, and think 'the charts' was great. I was slower to move out of that stage in reading than in music, because, I suppose, reading is a slower business than listening to music.
These days, as if suddenly (though the process must surely have been gradual), whenever I pick up a book that's badly written, I just can't read it. It only takes me a paragraph usually, if that. You may think this is not long enough, and I'm not giving the texts a chance. But how long does it take? How long does it take to know that a piece of food you've put in your mouth is badly cooked? Usually you don't even have to think about it. If it's bad enough, you spit it out as an immediate reaction. Most books as popular as Room produce the equivalent of that immediate reaction in me. And, indeed, Room has been a case in point.
Room is flat out badly written. You don't believe me? How can this be? you say? I'll give a few small examples of what I mean. Here's the opening:
Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero.
The first thing I note is the blandness of this meal. Secondly, the ingredients are not used in the correct proportion. Also, some of it is underdone and some of it is overdone. Clearly, the writer wished to telegraph immediately that we're in the mind (or at least the world) of a child. Fine, we got that with the first blunt sentence. This is also meant to evoke childhood in the child's preoccupation with birthdays, growing older, etcetera. We're travelling a well-worn thoroughfare here, and there is no unfamiliar scenery. We also have the capitalised Wardrobe and Bed, which are supposed to denote the magic of childhood through a kind of infantile animism. If one wants to convey that the world is alive for a child, or wants to suggest a 'quirky' and active imagination, I'm not sure that capitalising the names of inanimate objects is enough. In this case, 'quirky' by letters feels as clunky as 'quirky' by numbers. The feeling this gives of mere contrivance is reinforced by that fatuous "abracadabra". The rhythm and positioning of that abracadabra have nothing childlike about them; they are pure 'writers' workshop'. Contrived. And please note that by 'contrived' I don't mean 'stylised'. I mean that the writing fails to be either natural or well stylised.
So, that's the first three sentences, and my criticism of these three basically holds for the rest of what I read. For instance:
"I know you're excited," she says, "but remember not to nibble your finger, germs could sneak in the hole."
"To sick me like when I was three with throw-up and diarrhea?"
"Even worse than that," says Ma, "germs could make you die."
"And go back to Heaven early?"
Do children really talk like this? Honestly? I don't actually believe it. I wouldn't mind so much if there were something else in the prose to appreciate, but there's not. This is one small change I would make (if I were not allowed to throw the whole thing in the bin); I would change the last line of dialogue to, "And go back to Heaven?" In this case, "early" is part of an adult's idiom, used to thinking of a lifetime as a road they've already travelled some way down so that there's plenty of before and after to make comparisons with. If you have children, and I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong. And even if I am wrong, here's a bit where the narrator pins a drawing his mother has made of him to the wardrobe:
Wardrobe is wood, so I have to push the pin in an extra lot. I shut her silly doors, they always squeak, even after we put corn oil on the hinges. I look through the slats but it's too dark.
Why are the doors silly? Because they squeak? That's tenuous. My impression is that the author is simply going on and on telegraphing that we're in the world of childhood, because at least it gives her a style (no matter how bad) to disguise the fact that she can't write. If you want to write an Irish character, it's no good just shoving in "Bejesus!!" and "Top o' the morning" willy nilly, the Irishness (if they really have any) has to be part of them, not superimposed. There's a rule of writing that says, referring to dialogue, that if a line only serves to characterise without having any narrative function then it's dead in the water. If you're actually a good writer, and know what you want to express, you can afford to disregard the rulebook, but I don't think that Donoghue is there yet.
Anyway, one reason I decided to write a blog post about this is that on the first page of Room, perhaps less than a minute after I started reading, I was struck by the thought, "Is this a new publishing trend? This is exactly the same style as that fragment of When God Was a Rabbit that I read." I'm sure there was also some description of the blanket on which the narrator was born in that, too, as there is in Room:
I look down at Rug with her red and brown and black all zigging around each other. There's the stain I spilled by mistake getting born.
In the bit of When God Was a Rabbit that I read, the narrator, as a little girl, was asking her mother if God loved various people and things. Ultimately, she asks, "Does God love poo?" I suppose the things that I noticed in common with this in Room are: the child's-eye point of view, the suggestion of a very close, caring and unorthodox parent, 'quirkiness', intimations of continuity with the pre-birth world, remembering the childhood world in great detail as an adult, recontextualised middle-class quirky faux-naive mentions of God and Heaven, a suggestion that there is something 'dark' behind the 'quirkiness', 'tragedy' and no doubt triumph over 'tragedy', etc.
By the way, the mother in When God Was a Rabbit replies that God does, indeed, love poo. That would explain why this kind of middle-brow pap rides high in the bestseller lists.
I've just allowed anonymous comments on this blog once more. I've never been quite happy with disallowing them, even though I find myself more troubled by trolls than I should be. However, I thought I would re-allow anonymous comments specifically in order to ask a question that, if it is to be answered honestly, some people may wish to answer anonymously.
Should Rule Dementia!, my third collection of short fiction, ever be re-printed? This is a question I am genuinely struggling with myself, and I am interested in the candid thoughts of any who have actually read it (I can't say I'm especially interested in the 'thoughts' of those who take this an an opportunity to be abusive without having read the book).
It seems unlikely that in 2012 any major new work from me will be released (as in, there might be stuff in anthologies, etc., but no standalone work). On the one hand I feel impatient to get back in print, but on the other, I feel I have always been too impatient in the past, and I'm not convinced of the quality of any of my previous work. I don't want to reprint anything just for the sake of it. It has to be good enough. But I do allow for the possibility that I'm not the best judge of my work - or else I would not be asking this question at all.
I'm still, supposedly, working on the revision of The Hideous Child, which I'm guessing will be the next major thing from me to be published, if it ever is. But it's slow and gruelling. I'm being more exacting and less forgiving with this revision than I ever have been before, and I don't think it will be finished this year, especially as I am so busy with other projects (and so the end of the world might mean THC never sees the light of day).
Beyond that I have 'entertained' - if that is the appropriate word - doubts about my writing vocation as a whole, and as to whether I should continue with it. The doubts are not new, but the ever-turning wheel seems to have sunk lower (become wider in diameter?) than ever before. This is my own doubt to answer or not, of course. I'm not an authority on or of anything, and my writing has only ever had value - if any - in an imaginative sense. Curiously, I find that we're living in times where people seem less and less able to grasp that imagining something, rather than knowing something, might have value, and for one thing, I have been infected with their dull doubts. For another thing... well, there are too many other things. I suspect I shall continue for as long as possible, feeling simultaneously impelled, and yet as if I have to drag my feet in leaden boots every unrewarded step of the way. My destination? In this world, I rather fear there is only darkness ahead, a Dark Age unlit by letters...
Let me quote G.K. Chesterton and apply the quotation:
Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims that are not true.
I thought of this when I read a particular phrase from a quote in an article at this link. The article is about an artist by the name of Sharon Moody ripping off comic artists without crediting them. It's an interesting topic in itself, but what most caught my attention is something of a tangent. This is the quote, from Moody's explanation of her own work:
Ideas I am exploring include the relatively new (in the entirety of human history) concept of childhood...
Is the concept of childhood really new, or is this just a piece of cynical dogma that people repeat without thinking? Both statements could be true, of course. (Note that the quoted phrase claims the concept is new within human history, not within the history of the universe.) I'm guessing that the above quote is referring to the idea that Victorians invented childhood, or at least sanctified concepts put forward by the likes of Rousseau.
I don't actually know whether childhood as a concept is relatively new in human history, but I would like to put forward some information that at least gives room to doubt, and reason to refrain from speaking in such an unquestioning manner on the subject. I could try and trawl through literature for quotes about childhood, such as Shakespeare's mention of the infant and the schoolboy as two of the 'Ages of Man' in As You Like It, but that would take me too long, and I want to go back much further than that, anyway. I want to go back, in fact, to some time around the origins of the human race, something in which the organisation CARTA is very interested. At this link, you'll find a page on their website about fontanelles, which are "membranous areas that have not yet ossified in the developing cranial vault of neonatal and juvenile animals". Basically, the plates in the human skull do not settle and fuse until much later in life than with other primates. This effectively creates a longer period of "altriciality", which is the need to be nurtured, or childhood. How old is this difference between humans and other primates? CARTA estimate the appearance of this difference as follows in how many years ago it might have emerged:
Possible Appearance: 2000 Thousand Years Probable Appearance: 100 Thousand Years
I'm not sure this justifies the casual assertion that childhood is simply a relatively new social construct in human history.
The following is a passage from 'The Dream Animal', an essay by Loren Eiseley from his collection of essays, The Immense Journey:
If one attempts to read the complexities of the story, one is not surprised that man is alone on the planet. Rather, one is amazed and humbled that man was achieved at all. For four things had to happen, and if they had not happened simultaneously, or at least kept pace with each other, the bones of man would lie abortive and forgotten in the sandstones of the past:
1. His brain had almost to treble in size.
2. This had to be effected, not in the womb, but rapidly, after birth.
3. Childhood had to be lengthened to allow this brain, divested of most of its precise instinctive responses, to receive, store, and learn to utilize what it received from others.
4. The family bonds had to survive seasonal mating and become permanent, if this odd new creature was to be prepared for his adult role.
Each one of these major points demanded a multitude of minor biological adjustments, yet all of this - change of growth rate, lengthened age, increased blood supply to the head, moved apparently with rapidity. It is a dizzying spectacle with which we have nothing to compare. The event is complex, it is many-sided, and what touched it off is hidden under the leaf mold of forgotten centuries.
Somewhere in the glacial mists that shroud the past, Nature found a way of speeding the proliferation of brain cells and did it by the ruthless elimination of everything not needed to that end. We lost our hairy covering, our jaws and teeth were reduced in size, our sex life was postponed, our infancy became among the most helpless of any of the animals because everything had to wait upon the development of that fast-growing mushroom which had sprung up in our heads.
Eiseley was writing in the Forties, and some of this may have dated, but this is the most vivid elaboration of the basic facts on the CARTA page about fontanelles that I know of. If Eiseley's vision here is correct, then not only is childhood as old as any animal that we can distinguish as human, but without childhood there would never have been what we now call human civilisation. Based on this evidence, I will therefore apply an adjusted version of Chesterton's quote, adjusting it so as to be a little more cautious than Moody is in her claim that childhood is a recent phenonemon in human history:
Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether, as if they were facts, on a few cynical maxims that are highly questionable.
My Opera
