George R.R. Martin, Fevre Dream, 1982
Forget the Twilight Saga. Forget The Vampire Diaries. Forget the mediocre books by Charlaine Harris and the TV series, True Blood, spawned from them. What you really need is a trip back in time to 1857 with the help of George R.R. Martin; sail down the Mississippi in the legendary steamship Fevre Dream and feast your eyes on the world that briefly grew on the river’s banks. The Fevre Dream’s captain (and our hero) is a three-hundred pound man covered in hair and warts, famously known as the ugliest man alive. If you can overlook that, you might earn a loyal friend who will fight for you against any trouble along the way – especially if the trouble involves pale creatures that only come out at night and feast on human blood. Exactly those creatures you’ve found so lacking in modern vampire series.
Sure, there will be one or two bumps along the way – those rapids that jolt the reader and leave him queasy (in particular, a certain banquet scene on the Fevre Dream with a nasty surprise at its end). But as with any other sure-handed thriller or horror story, you know your destination will soon be in view and as you step on firm land you’ll carry the journey in your heart – for better or worse – as you walk away. And when you reach home, you’ll make sure the doors and windows are locked before you say a prayer and fall asleep on your pillow covering a double-barreled shotgun.
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, 1937
This book nearly blew my head off so I can only imagine what readers felt when they first encountered it in 1937. Enthralled? Ecstatic? Spellbound? If I were Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes and I found a copy of this book underneath the fallen Statue of Liberty, I’d create a religion around it. It is, after all, a beautiful example of how science fiction can touch theology and make the reader believe momentarily that there is meaning to life.
On a silent, starry night, the narrator of the novel finds himself abandoning his corporal form on a hillside in exchange for a trip around the galaxy – and then the universe(s) – that will bring him close to the truths about creation. Stapledon does a great job of capturing the sense of wonder, adventure and discovery that the narrator goes through as his consciousness expands with each new civilization and scientific discovery he encounters. As the history of our universe becomes clear to the narrator, a path opens up to the “Star Maker” – the being behind the creation of everything.
There are two men kissing: one is Jason Voorhees; the other is an usher I recognise from Roxy’s. That’s the place that sells alcohol despite it being illegal. I was in there the other night and the usher gave me a dark koal look. He led me to a table beside the artist Kienholz then forgot to take my order. The lights in the place were as red as the alleys in Amsterdam.
The two men stopped kissing and I noticed a small bite mark on the usher’s lower lip. A thin line of blood pooled on his chin; got smudged by Jason’s fat thumbs.
There was a rumour going round that Kienholz wanted to paint Jason’s face. He’d warp it into some semblance of beauty with the help of his surgical paint brushes. He craved a challenge, and nothing was more challenging than Jason’s hellish face.
At Roxy’s, we listened to a solo saxophone while sipping our solitary drinks. We disappeared in our thoughts for hours.
One of my favourite writers, Margaret Atwood, has posted in her blog a list of suggestions for overcoming writer’s block. Like all writers, I’ve also experienced my fair share of obstacles – usually manifesting itself in a disconnection from writing in general until one thing or another brings me back to it.
Everyone has their own strategies for dealing with writer’s block; mine involves games which pit my creativity against pre-decided “random” factors. I always hope that synchronicity or serendipity will rise out of these games and leave me with a piece of fiction. Two years ago, I used one exercise involving Flickr to get me through the National Novel Writing Month competition. Atwood got me thinking of sharing these games with readers in regular posts here. All feedback on these games are welcome as well as your own suggestions for overcoming writer’s block.
Flickr Exercise
- Go to Flickr’s search page.
- Click on the arrow beside the “Explore” button. Choose “Most Recent Uploads“.
- Click on a photo that you like, or not, and study it for a minute or two.
- If there are people in the photo, who are they? What are they doing? If it’s a place, imagine its smells, sounds, history, time, and so forth.
- Start writing your impressions of the photo, or simply describe what you see.
This is a simple exercise which has helped me in the past when I was stuck. It will hopefully lead you into a longer piece you are happy to explore in more detail or perhaps add to other material you were already working on.
When I was participating in NaNoWriMo, I used one image a day and tried my best to tie it to what I had written the day before. This caused my novel to be divided into four sections, each with a distinct narrator, because if a particular image didn’t fit easily with the previous day’s chapter I could always slot it into one of the other three narratives. The exercise culminated in a 50,000 novel called The Blue Mountains which is now sitting in my hard drive, waiting for the day I’ll have the patience to edit it.
Good luck and enjoy! I’ll post more creative exercises soon.
I’ve come up with a game that involves history books. The rules are as follows:
1) Pick a non-fiction book to read, preferably about a person or period centuries ago. (If you want a real challenge, start with the Egyptians.) In my case, I picked Bill Bryson’s brilliant biography on Shakespeare.
2) After you’ve read it, find a way to move chronologically forward in world history through a subject raised somewhere in the book. I chose King James of Scotland since he came into power halfway through Shakespeare’s life.
3) Keep doing this until you reach present day.
After King James I, I was re-directed to the Americas, the colony of Jamestown, John Smith and Pocahontas (the first modern celebrity, in my opinion). My next book will be on the first African slaves brought to the east coast colonies.
The Guardian’s most recent books podcast is on the future of Science Fiction. They mentioned how Ursula K. Le Guin had a problem reviewing Margaret Atwood’s most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, because Atwood refuses to label her distopian fiction “science fiction” (she calls it instead “speculative fiction”.) Something to do, it seems, with Atwood’s fear of being shoved into the sci-fi ghetto. I love both Le Guin and Atwood and hope they don’t get into any Dynasty-style cat fights that might lead to a balcony fall.
One of the podcast’s speakers predicted that 2010 will be the year Paranormal Romance novels like Twilight lose their popularity to Epic Fantasy (thank god.) HBO is currently filming a series based on George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels, which made me think Avatar’s style and success truly is the face of what’s to come. The Guardian’s Saturday Review also had a small article on Avatar and a recent accusation of plagiarism aimed at it from Russian sci-fi writers. But, the article said, the person with the biggest claim against Cameron is Ursula K. Le Guin (there she is again), whose novel The Word for World Is Forest is uncannily similar to the film. I hear an echo from the time reviewers said Le Guin should take J.K. Rowling to the courts for lifting so much stuff from her Earthsea novels.
Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age, 2009
Broadcast continue to follow their unique music career, skewing current trends in favour of their own vision. To me, this easily makes them one of the best bands recording at the moment, always coming out with something worth checking out. Case in point is this psychedelic soundtrack made in collaboration with The Focus Group, which delves deeper into Broadcast’s interest with alternative sounds from the 50s and 60s. Influences include Os Mutantes and the film The Wicker Man.
For Warp Records 20th anniversary at The Coronet, Broadcast played many of these tracks, as well as old classics, alongside mind-bending psychedelic videos projected onto a screen. I was very grateful for not having taken any drugs!
The album or individual MP3s can be purchased here.
Mari Akasaka, Vibrator, 1999
Upon publication in 1999, Vibrator earned Mari Akasaka Japan’s Noma Prize for best new writer. A few years later, with the novel turned into a successful film, Vibrator’s place in Japan’s modern literature was cemented. Rei Hayakawa is the heroine of this short stream of consciousness novel, a bulimic and alcoholic young journalist fighting a losing battle with madness. One winter night, on a trip to a Tokyo convenience store for some gin and white wine, Rei meets Okabe, a truck driver who deliberately touches her as her mobile phone, nestled against her heart, begins to vibrate. To her fractured mind, this is a sign she must follow him outside and join him in his truck.
Rei is offered a sort of salvation from the alienated life she has led up until that point as she travels the roads of Japan and learns about Okabe’s past with the Yakusa, Japan’s most organised and traditional crime organisation. But what actually seduces Rei into staying with Okabe is the intense sexual connection she finds with him inside the cocoon-like truck. While Rei’s mind pushes and pulls her in all directions, leaving her unable to find her feet in reality, Okabe’s truck vibrates human-like, connected to the world by a CB radio that receives the voices of other truck drivers across Japan. It is the vibration of the truck, with its engine that warms the pilot cabin like a pulsing heart, that the title of the novel alludes to; but Rei’s mind is also a vibrator, thanks to its many schizophrenic voices that drive her to bulimia and alcoholism. The combination of these elements makes for a simple narrative that slips back and forth between Rei’s internal musings and the relationship with Okabe.
The novel never really lets the reader forget the theme of vibration, however. Its obvious and repetitive symbolism is distracting. Vibrations of all sorts are a key element to Rei’s narration, but it somehow doesn’t work to make Rei the fascinating character that Mari Akasaka meant her to be. There is nowhere to escape from the intimacy that Rei’s stream of consciousness generates; but this intimacy is not exactly enlightening or remarkable. There is something cold to her voice that keeps the reader at bay and, consequently, fails to move. Rei can’t be bothered at times with the telling of her own story, describing an event as “something”, a place as “somewhere”; and it’s this alienated tone that paradoxically makes this novel on alienation a failure. Just like Rei feels that the voices in her head make her incapable of adhering to reality, the narrative’s own jumping back and forth push the reader away.
Rei and Okabe’s Japan is a modern country that offers its own particular destructive and inescapable seductions. Rei knows this and one of the more interesting passages in Vibrator deals with her memories and insights into the vibrant fashion world she has written about, the advertisements that cause neuroses in women and drive consumerism. It’s clear where she lays the blame for her bulimia and alcoholism. Sadly, this thread gets dropped very kickly by Akasaka and never re-appears in the story. Instead, Okabe’s CB radio, for example, which serves to draw the connection with the novel’s vibration theme, is given an unnecessarily large space that doesn’t fulfil any greater purpose.
Perhaps Mari Akasaka’s first novel was a success in Japan because its explicit description of sex and alienation was new and reflective of its youth’s angst, but, as a work facing the test of time, it doesn’t live up to its reputation and ultimately flounders under its own pulsing ambitions.
Originally published in the Los Angeles Review No. 5
David Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown, 2003
Apart from being the first Native American to be converted to Christianity in English America, Pocahontas, this book seems to imply, was also a proto-feminist and celebrity. As a young girl, and the Powhatan Chief’s favourite daughter, she saved John Smith’s life by interceding with her father when he was captured during one of his many expeditions to trade for the founding colony Jamestown. Unlike other women from her tribe, she chose her destiny and went, sometimes, against her own people if it meant keeping her conscience clear. This meant putting her own life at risk by saving Smith’s life a second time (this book implies she had a fascination with him, perhaps because he epitomised the type of self-made man Powhatan women were raised to find attractive) as well as warning Jamestown of a planned attack. She eventually embraced the English way, marrying a colonist then traveling to the Old World to be paraded in fashionable salons like a distinguished princess.
This award-winning book is a great introduction to the roots of America’s birth and the reasons why the initial peace between colonisers and natives couldn’t last. It shows how the American ideal of a man creating his own destiny with disregard to elites was cemented before the founding fathers, but also how miscommunication and greed has poisoned this spirit/myth from the start and laid down the foundations for most of the country’s current problems. I found the echoes with today’s War on Terror particularly interesting: when Jamestown and the surrounding plantations were massacred by the Natives, the shock in Britain and the retaliation afterwards was very much like 9/11. It’s a terrible irony that the first major act of terror in America was perpetrated by the Natives against people they (rightly) perceived as invaders of their lands.
My novel for this year’s National Novel Writing Month is called Jason Voorhees Is Dead. I wrote just under 20.000 words before I had to give up due to repetitive strain injury (an ongoing problem since then.) However, Jason is not dead. I plan on taking up with him again sometime in the holidays, when my fingers are relax’a'licking good.
By the way, next time you slag off Jason because he’s ugly or he killed scores of horny youngsters, just remember that he was a victim first of all. Of bullying, of his wacky mom. Have some compassion.
Some weekends ago, at Warp Records 20th Anniversary, I was sitting in The Coronet’s bleachers resting my feet when my friend Natallica asked if I had a mild form of OCD. Yes, I replied. I think I do. Because when iTunes’ Genius and Amazon’s Recommendations tell me to listen to something, I make a Spotify playlist out of it. Because what’s random to others is synchronicity to me. Because, like I said, I haven’t given up on Jason yet and will make those 50.000 words squeal by the finishing line.
A mild, mild form of OCD.
I’ve been posting my NaNoWriMo ramblings over here because WordPress has this neat system that tells you what people type in Google to find you. From those searches I create new posts – a type of spiral that feeds back into Google and pulls closer ever more people interested in those topics.
I also have Google Alerts for anything to do with succès de scandale. Over a week ago, a story came up about the American artist Ed Kienholz and how an exhibition of his in the 60s was particularly scandalous. I was suffering from insomnia that night so I took the opportunity to write a short piece about it. As I was finishing, my brasilian friend B woke up and found me in the living room. The piece wasn’t discussed between us.
Later in the day, when I got back from work, I found B sitting in our living room checking his e-mail. He was coming down from a LSD trip. He told me he’d been downtown and visited the National Gallery, but an art piece by Ed Kienholz freaked him out so much that he had to find refuge with Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Do you see the beauty in this synchronicity? Now, I have to of course visit the National Gallery and see this piece before it leaves. I’m hoping that new doors will open from the visit.
A new Ed Kienholz installation has opened in London, at the National Gallery. And one of his tableaus from the 70s has been brought out of storage and restored for a tour of America and Europe.
Who is Ed Kienholz? Another enfant terrible?
A mid-career Kienholz retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1966 was a succès de scandale. The installation Backseat Dodge ’38, which features a skeleton-like couple embracing in the rear of a beaten-up old car caused a moral panic, along with the tableau Roxy’s, 1961, which evoked a Nevada brothel. Visitors flocked to the see what the newspapers reported was a “sex show”. In 2008, the museum bought Kienholz’s The Illegal Operation, 1962, for around $1m.
