I quite enjoy being lax about my sense of the word 'fiction' in these articles (as you, er, may have noticed). Because fiction is not, of course, restricted to prose novels and short stories. Fiction is the unreal; the unreal that - as I like to think, in the case of literature - informs and casts light on the real, but that can also be used to manipulate it and, in some cases, to engulf the real entirely.
One of my odd little obsessions, whenever something is happening in the wider world that excites or distresses me, is to go over in my head, again and again, a speech I'd quite like a public figure to make. It could be any public figure, really. Someone with a voice; someone who will be heard. In this case, as you can probably guess, I wanted someone to talk about Egypt. Not a journalist, or a blogger, or any one of us people who don't really matter - but I wanted them at least to admit the great gulf between ideals and practicalities; admit that our countries have been complicit in several cases in doing the unethical thing for the purposes of realpolitik, admit that the West is paralysed by a patronising fear that instability will instantly lead to dangerous fundamentalism and that this is considered a valid reason not to stand up for democracy - and admit that it is no longer ethical or practical to do anything other than demand that Mubarak be removed from office. I wanted the fiction of diplomatic language, with all of its fucking ambiguities and hedge-bets and pathetic insinuations, the use of ambivalence to obfuscate, to disappear just for once, because it's not helping at all. Why are the only people giving direct answers the ones who are lying directly, like Khamenei, hatefully and very deliberately, misappraising the situation as an Islamic revolution in Egypt? (And, of course, there's no point getting started on Berlusconi, who has to be trolling. He just has to be.)
I got what I wanted, sort-of, when Nick Clegg came onto Daybreak and said that he found the Egyptian protests "incredibly exciting" - which reminded me firstly of the trouble he got into when he referred to the illegal war in Iraq as an illegal war in Iraq in Parliament, and secondly of the belief that I do still hold; that he isn't a bad man so much as he is a weak man. Naive, perhaps, but I'm not sure I believe that anyone who's been touched by Beckett can be bad. Complicated, definitely, but not bad. (That does sound naive - even elitist and stupid - but I think I'm going to leave it in). But it troubles me that he was able to show instinctive sympathy and joy for a protest that he was dealing with in a detached, almost abstract sense - but that the same sympathy failed to break through in his spiels about tuition fees. When faced with the pressures of local reality, where was that sympathy for another sort of protest of the economically disillusioned youth against the government?
The saddening thought is the flipside of the Romantic dream; it's all too easy to be good when you're alone - when your actions are detached from personal costs that society will always bring. And goodness within society can never be truly good, because it's too complex; it's measured by one's possibly unconscious motives. It's easy to be good instinctively, like stamping out fires spread by a molotov cocktail as more missiles rain down upon you, or by blurting out how you really feel about a situation you're supposed to be toeing the company line upon. It's near-impossible to be good in a considered way. A hermit who steps away from the world is good in the meannest of ways, because he removes all opportunities to be bad.
A position I've always tried to take is to be good, while wearing life lightly - which I'm aware I'm falling away from with all of this hand-wringing about morality. Irritating earnestness is really uncomfortably close to attempts at sincerity. But, as they're saying Mubarak may go today - as they have, admittedly, said before - I find myself considering that uncomfortable fact that I don't want to be in a country where David Cameron's in charge. But I don't care for Ed Miliband either. All of the smaller parties are, in their own, often horrible way, hopelessly naive. And, more than any of these people, I'm concerned - ethically speaking - with the political system in place and - practically speaking - with any of the alternative possibilities. So, kids...where do we go from here?
Glenn Beck, who's nothing if not direct in his explanations of a given political situation, seeks to connect the economic protests in Greece and the tuition fee protests in London with the situations in Tunisia and Egypt by simply not bothering to give any details, shouting instead that "the fires are spreading". In one sense, he's an imbecile. In another, perhaps he has a point. The Internet is showing signs of a...universality beyond the machinery of politics. The possibility - if I may again be naive - of the goodness of individuals.
P.S. Fans of either actual fiction or sincerity gone wrong should check out Michael Rosen's caustic and slightly pointless comments on the Guardian live feed. He begins very well, with a sarcastic assertion that the women in hijabs protesting clearly can't stand up for themselves, and then goes downhill fast until he ends up making Hitler comparisons for comic effect.
Showing posts with label Jon Ware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jon Ware. Show all posts
Friday, February 4, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Advert | Fiction | Frankie Boyle Transmorphs Into The Black Swan, Nation Mourns
I often have nightmares about films I haven't seen.
Usually it'll happen like this; I'll see an intriguing advert, obsessively read up on the film's plot details on Wikipedia, then fall asleep and suffer a dream which is, essentially, my imagined plot of the movie, in which I am forced to engage as a participant rather than as a spectator. Then I'll get round to seeing the film, find - somewhat to my disappointment - that it isn't nearly as primally unsettling as the depths of my nightmare, and I'll never be troubled by that dream again. And my most recent haunting concerned the film Black Swan, being more specifically sparked-off by the uncanny moment in the trailer at which Natalie Portman spins suddenly towards the camera, revealing wide, mad, orange, swan-like eyes.
My dream ended at the film's climax - though my version was rather less triumphal than Arononfsky's. In the movie (turn back now, spoiler warnings, and so on and so forth) Portman's character, dying, exults in the fact that she has killed off her 'good' side in order to more fully become her 'bad' side and thus won the audience's applause. In my dream, dying, she addressed the Cenotaph - which was not, however, the Cenotaph, but rather an obelisk displaying Egyptian hieroglyphs - and mourned the fact that she'd deliberately destroyed her own individuality in order to become an abstraction.
As it turned out, my dream-interpretation was partly right - Portman's feverish repetition of her desire to be 'perfect' is evidence enough of that. But it was off - because her character, Nina, starts out as an abstraction as well, a childish, submissive 'little girl/little princess', created and nurtured by her domineering mother; an "angel in the house" in waiting, as Virginia Woolf might (probably not) put it. It's actually an interesting little take on the angel/'evil woman' myth, because it's born not just of domestic loyalty to a husband, restraint in opposition to Dionysian wildness, but also of infantile asexuality...to the child, adult sexuality can seem not only repugnant, but also evil. Odile (the Black Swan's real name) is not explicitly monstrous in Swan Lake itself, nor to Vincent Cassel's controlling maestro, who is a creature of Dionysus himself.
I remain ambiguous about Cassel's character, who is as unpleasantly controlling in his own way as Nina's mother, but whose unconscious aims are towards Nina's psychological unity - he does not want her to transform from the White Swan 'angel' into the sexual 'Black Swan' - he wants her to reach a stage of individuation where there is enough of her to tap successfully into both without being overcome by them. He's only doing it for the sake of his ballet, of course, but the fact that Nina slips past this opportunity for self-improvement is actually the hidden crux of the film. She cannot be a 'whole person' because she has been raised as an abstraction - and her only method of rebellion is to turn into another abstraction.
Jung fans (I know you're out there) will note the manner in which Nina and Lily - Mila Kunis' character - meet in moments when Lily is not Lily but Nina's psychological other (they might also note the little linguistic mirror-game Aronofsky plays with those two names). The first time they encounter one another, it's a union of sorts, in a sex scene which will no doubt thrill teenagers of all ages for years to come. But the very fact that it's a sexual union and not some other kind of symbolic meeting suggests that the Black Swan is gaining strength. The second time they meet, Lily dies and the Black Swan takes over. Jung frequently spoke about the importance of the 'meeting-place' in dreams - in Psychology and Alchemy, he goes into detail about a patient of his encountering an 'ape' representing his wild unconscious - and stressed the danger of one opposite consuming the other, rather than reaching a state of unity.
Those who read or watched Aronofsky explaining his motivations behind the film - an enduring interest in doppelgangers - will be entertained by Dostoyevsky's The Double, in which the timid, rule-obeying clerk Nikolai Mikhailovsky is haunted by a bacchanalian, riotous twin causing chaos all around him; in the end, he enters a feast held by his doppelganger and withers away into oblivion. It's the very same Jungian pattern, with the caveat that Mihailovsky is a symbol to begin with because of society's laws, rather than an individual's...and so he cannot bring himself to ever consciously become his opposite in the way that Nina does.
I'm also reminded of our old friend Stavrogin - some day, I promise you, I'll be able to stop shoehorning Dostoyevsky into my articles - from Devils, who stretches his behaviour so far to extremes that he can only be viewed by those around him as a symbol; he is seen, variously, as a noble prince towering over men, a great Satan, a charismatic figurehead of the revolution, a buffoonish Fool, and an ur-man and ultimate object of desire and affection by his lovers (in spite of his suggested impotence). The reality is more mundane - Stavrogin behaves like all of these superlative creatures because he is bored, apathetic and lukewarm about his life and life around him, and wishes to experience everything that's possible as a result - but it is very telling that the final symbol Stavrogin attempts to take on before his careless, self-consciously un-symbolic suicide is one of infantilism. He asks Dunya, one of his lovers, if she'll be his nursemaid. As a child, he'll be not simply innocent, but innocently amoral - he'll be able to come to terms with his own apathy without it being a burden upon him; he will have no responsibility to have the moral or the immoral path foisted onto him. Perhaps sadly, this never comes to pass.
I'm reminded, too, of the ceaseless, zero-individuality thumping rhythm of perfume adverts that we were forced to sit through over Christmas. In all of these commercials, a celebrity will embody a Dionysian ideal of perfect beauty and perfect sensuality, with extravagant wealth, nudity, and sex, often with a kind of self-conscious rebellion against the established order thrown in as well (Yeah, Charlize Theron, "diamonds are dead", "a limo's a car, don't pretend". You smash the frippery of false indulgence-consumerism! The only thing that's real, as it turns out, that's really down-to-earth and important, is your brand of perfume. I hate you, Charlize Theron. I hate you more than Matthew McConnaughey, from whom I expect nothing less than simultaneously shilling and flexing his absurd abdominal muscles). They're almost always in black-and-white, as well - would it be a little too Vigilant Citizen of me to suggest that this isn't just because some idiot from marketing thinks black-and-white is classier, but also because, unconsciously, the adverts suggest an opposition of glorious light - the celebrities themselves - and dull, clinging, darkness - the world around them, and specifically the paparazzi who inevitably scurry forwards out of the blackness, trying to get close to the Dionysian hero or heroine?
And - yes - I'm reminded of Frankie Boyle, that very witty comedian and comedy-writer, who's embraced the reaction towards his most extreme jokes by turning into a comedian who is only able to make extreme jokes as an all-purpose pervert and misanthropist, and who's ended up with an easily identifiable, rather boring quip-structure as a result. His last DVD of stand-up and his sketch show might all just as well have been titled, 'This Famous Person Looks Like A Fucking Disabled Child With A Dead Foetus Glued To Their Cunt. Fuck. Rape.' Which is a real shame for those of us who actually admired his surreal turn of phrase and the interesting places his mind wandered into more than his ability to push buttons with a cheeky grin on his face. Come back and be an individual again, Frankie. We miss you.
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Quotes | Fiction | "Only Assholes Use Quotes"
“As well as the opening to Moby Dick, which I believe I referenced recently, Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines is notable in having a middle section which is made up of quotations supporting or exploring his central thesis, along with a couple of personal anecdotes which are formatted in exactly the same way as the quotations; i.e., they appear to be themselves quotations, they appear to carry all of the moral, celebrity and aphoristic weight that is borne in a quotation.”
Jon Ware
“It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.”
Anatole France
“Both Chatwin and Melville indulge the habit of interweaving fiction (or lies, if you prefer) with truth in order to better conceal the fiction. We are aware that some of Melville’s facts about whales are true, so we believe the rest implicitly. We know that a quotation cannot be a lie – because, surely, we tell ourselves, nobody would dare to invent a quotation. And so Chatwin’s camouflaged anecdotes are more palatable than larger, stand-alone lies; compare this to the very fictional elements of Van Der Post’s travel book The Lost World Of The Kalahari.”
Phil Brown
“You cannot travel on the path before you have become the Path itself.”
Gautama Buddha
“Indeed, is the epigraphical method itself not a form of Zen? We see the famous quotation and the text that accompanies it, and no matter how meaningless or unconnected the two may be, we will instinctively assume there must be a connection and a meaning, and seek both of them out.”
James J Harringman
“The quotation is by nature aphoristic. It attempts to imprison the truth within a pair of speech marks.”
Sam Kinchin-Smith.
“The only quotation that contains meaning is the quotation that belongs to somebody you’re certain you should have heard of. And, since every quotation includes its owner’s name at the very end, like a very impressive and climactic full stop, this means that every quotation contains meaning.”
John F. Arnold
“The implication is that the truth comes from without – that the truth is contained nearly as much in the words that are spoken as in the name of a great philosopher. A great name. How do fans of modern literary theory feel about this? That the truth, in fact, is in us and our interpretation of the words, but that we can only access it through deceiving ourselves into thinking that the truth comes from outside, that some words are more equal than others?”
Jon Ware
“In post-modern thought, everything is a quotation; there is no reality, only echoes of the previous originality.”
Giles Coren
“The idea that ‘found poems’- poems stitched together, collage-style, from existing sources, can be just as meaningful as poems created by the poet themselves, is intriguing. But is the opposite true as well? Are they more real, because they’re quoted?”
Ted Kennedy
“The entire nature of the quotation reminds me above all of the attitudes shown by some US citizens (particularly recently in several widely publicised news stories) who believe that to say something is “unconstitutional” is the same as to say that it’s “evil.” The regarding of words as holy and irrefutable not for their inherent worth but by association.”
Barack Obama (via email)
“Our actions are like set rhymes: anyone can fit them in to mean what he likes.”
La Rochefoucauld
“The quotation itself being an act of transference, the summoning of a higher being – by citing Shakespeare, our work is assumed to have the depth of Shakespeare. It is only when a work is so patently unworthy of that association (although a great deal of this depend on the snobbishness of the reader – some, for example, might believe that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows explores the theme of death with fully enough insight to deserve its opening quotations from Aeschylus and William Penn) that the spell is broken, and the effect lost.”
“Go away from me and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he has deceived you...one repays a teacher badly if one remains a pupil...you had not yet sought yourselves when you found me.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“The gaps in a quotation are...the most important parts. They enable us to tell...what the quoter wishes us to...ignore...and how he will take a whole...tear it to pieces...constructing his own...whole out of it to make it his meaning...and not the original.”
Jon Ware
“The obvious truth is that quotations are only used by an insecure writer who doesn’t trust what he is writing enough to let it stand alone – quotations are his way of shoring up his truth with the ‘greater’ truths of others. The more intriguing, paradoxical truth is that perhaps a work made up entirely of quotations may succeed in being more ‘real’, more truthful, than any of them. Such a collage work contains three intents – the author’s, the ‘first’ author’s, and the reader’s. There’s a sort of purity to that; a clearing of the classic exchange. The reader is no longer being lectured by a single mind who uses quotations as star witnesses; he’s engaging in an act of meditation with an infinite number of opinions and interpretations. A narrative that explores because it has a thousand heads, rather than a narrative that ‘explores’ with a few straw-men subplots contrasting with its main drive.”
Eric Prydz
“We like to open our books with a quotation – but how much more final is a quotation, how much more ultimate, how much more deserving of being at the end rather than at the beginning!”
Bruce Chatwin
Jon Ware
“It is good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.”
Anatole France
“Both Chatwin and Melville indulge the habit of interweaving fiction (or lies, if you prefer) with truth in order to better conceal the fiction. We are aware that some of Melville’s facts about whales are true, so we believe the rest implicitly. We know that a quotation cannot be a lie – because, surely, we tell ourselves, nobody would dare to invent a quotation. And so Chatwin’s camouflaged anecdotes are more palatable than larger, stand-alone lies; compare this to the very fictional elements of Van Der Post’s travel book The Lost World Of The Kalahari.”
Phil Brown
“You cannot travel on the path before you have become the Path itself.”
Gautama Buddha
“Indeed, is the epigraphical method itself not a form of Zen? We see the famous quotation and the text that accompanies it, and no matter how meaningless or unconnected the two may be, we will instinctively assume there must be a connection and a meaning, and seek both of them out.”
James J Harringman
“The quotation is by nature aphoristic. It attempts to imprison the truth within a pair of speech marks.”
Sam Kinchin-Smith.
“The only quotation that contains meaning is the quotation that belongs to somebody you’re certain you should have heard of. And, since every quotation includes its owner’s name at the very end, like a very impressive and climactic full stop, this means that every quotation contains meaning.”
John F. Arnold
“The implication is that the truth comes from without – that the truth is contained nearly as much in the words that are spoken as in the name of a great philosopher. A great name. How do fans of modern literary theory feel about this? That the truth, in fact, is in us and our interpretation of the words, but that we can only access it through deceiving ourselves into thinking that the truth comes from outside, that some words are more equal than others?”
Jon Ware
“In post-modern thought, everything is a quotation; there is no reality, only echoes of the previous originality.”
Giles Coren
“The idea that ‘found poems’- poems stitched together, collage-style, from existing sources, can be just as meaningful as poems created by the poet themselves, is intriguing. But is the opposite true as well? Are they more real, because they’re quoted?”
Ted Kennedy
“The entire nature of the quotation reminds me above all of the attitudes shown by some US citizens (particularly recently in several widely publicised news stories) who believe that to say something is “unconstitutional” is the same as to say that it’s “evil.” The regarding of words as holy and irrefutable not for their inherent worth but by association.”
Barack Obama (via email)
“Our actions are like set rhymes: anyone can fit them in to mean what he likes.”
La Rochefoucauld
“The quotation itself being an act of transference, the summoning of a higher being – by citing Shakespeare, our work is assumed to have the depth of Shakespeare. It is only when a work is so patently unworthy of that association (although a great deal of this depend on the snobbishness of the reader – some, for example, might believe that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows explores the theme of death with fully enough insight to deserve its opening quotations from Aeschylus and William Penn) that the spell is broken, and the effect lost.”
“Go away from me and guard yourselves against Zarathustra! And better still: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he has deceived you...one repays a teacher badly if one remains a pupil...you had not yet sought yourselves when you found me.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“The gaps in a quotation are...the most important parts. They enable us to tell...what the quoter wishes us to...ignore...and how he will take a whole...tear it to pieces...constructing his own...whole out of it to make it his meaning...and not the original.”
Jon Ware
“The obvious truth is that quotations are only used by an insecure writer who doesn’t trust what he is writing enough to let it stand alone – quotations are his way of shoring up his truth with the ‘greater’ truths of others. The more intriguing, paradoxical truth is that perhaps a work made up entirely of quotations may succeed in being more ‘real’, more truthful, than any of them. Such a collage work contains three intents – the author’s, the ‘first’ author’s, and the reader’s. There’s a sort of purity to that; a clearing of the classic exchange. The reader is no longer being lectured by a single mind who uses quotations as star witnesses; he’s engaging in an act of meditation with an infinite number of opinions and interpretations. A narrative that explores because it has a thousand heads, rather than a narrative that ‘explores’ with a few straw-men subplots contrasting with its main drive.”
Eric Prydz
“We like to open our books with a quotation – but how much more final is a quotation, how much more ultimate, how much more deserving of being at the end rather than at the beginning!”
Bruce Chatwin
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Leviathan | Fiction | An Exclusive Story By Jonathan Franzen, 'The Intonement'
Editor’s Note: This arrived on my desk this morning, delivered by first-class post. The signature and accompanying letter claim that it is the God’s-truth confession of the celebrated author and wearer of glasses, Jonathan Franzen. As to its veracity, I dare not pass judgement, for it may well be a prank by some mischievous ex-student, most likely of little literary worth themselves and arrogant enough to believe their hoax will not be uncovered – but its contents, and its serious theme, lead me to speculate that this may well be another work of classic fiction written by a novelist who has delivered no less than two ‘Great American Novels’ (if I may be so bold as to use Mr Franzen’s own words) according to our most hallowed arbiter of such things; that is, Wikipedia. And so, without further ado, I present An Intonement, (and this very Franzenian title goes some way towards convincing me that this story is no forgery.) Enjoy; and be certain to remember this moment so that, in centuries to come, you may tell your astrograndchildren where you were when you first read it.
*
“If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great whales.”
Goldsmith to Johnson.
...according to ‘Moby Dick’.
Call me Franzen. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely - having a serious-looking pair of spectacles, and nothing in particular to interest me in reality, I thought would write about a bit and, perhaps, catch, kill and consume the Great American Novel. Whenever I find myself bemoaning the state of literature, whenever I find myself wishing to take a circle-saw to every bookshop table holding the latest Dan Brown novel, I feel a certain instinctual urge to hunt and trap the Great American Novel. Every male novelist, some time or other, cherishes very nearly that same feeling.
Our captain’s name was Roth; a bitter, stern, aging man who I felt must surely be past his prime, for he would stand at the prow of our little coracle and write out novel after novel in which a facsimile of the author has a lot of sex with frumpy young women. And yet in sailors’ circles, these were hailed as great literature, so I was not sure how much I should believe in my own inclination. The first mate, a dour man by the name of Updike, I found in closer spirits to myself, forever mumbling about the American family and wishing to cast a ‘wry’ eye over the idiosyncracies of the act of love-making. There were others, too – as many as there are novels in the sea.
“Avast, ye dogs,” Roth snapped, getting to his feet. “Bellow, sit up straight! Pynchon, get that gum out of yer hair! I’ve set our course; the white whale awaits.”
Grim, decided expressions, all around our ship of fools.
“What’s the catch, cap’n?” someone shouted. “Huck Finn? Catcher in the Rye? To Kill a Mockingbird?”
“Nay,” Roth replied. “They be novels for schoolchildren. Adolescent; pregnant with possibility, but not a full-grown, behemoth of a novel.”
There was a thoughtful silence.
“I hear fishin’s been good in Latin America recently,” Bellow suggested. “Still counts as America, technically speaking. What say we harpoon us a big fat Garcia Marquez? Or a Bolano, if we’re not feeling too picky.”
“Nay, thou belly-acher!” Roth shouted, clouting him over the head with one of his extremely slim recent publications. “Thou knowest that it is not the same thing.”
I suggested my own book, Freedom, as a Great American Novel. The bottle-nosed critics that liked to follow our coracle about instantly popped their heads out of the water and began to bray applause; the other novelists, however, ignored it.
“Our prize is Moby Dick,” Roth told us.
Silence.
“You know,” Updike said, scratching his nose, “It is interesting that so many of the Great American Novels are adolescent in nature; how many of them deal in some way with desire and with the urge to push oneself further and further that could be said to embody the founding principle of the USA. Some of them embrace this spirit wholeheartedly, but many more are directly concerned with the consequences of that desire. Great Gatsby, The Old Man and The Sea, Moby Dick itself, Death of a Salesman, Citizen Kane-”
“They’re not novels.”
“Sssh.”
“In fact,” Updike continued, “doesn’t Moby Dick take itself with such light-heartedness that to pursue it in such a serious, state-of-the-nation manner (little matter that only a small section of the narrative actually takes place on American soil) does it an injustice, and mistakes the nature of the Great American Novel, which cannot desire to be a Great American Novel and hope to become one, without at least examining the nature of its own desire.”
“That’s some Jedi shit right there,” said Saul Bellow.
We ruminated on this for some time.
“Truly,” I said, speaking for the first time, “Moby Dick is the only Great American Novel. Some of our most treasured books deal with social issues; some are tragic, some whimsical. Some of them, over perhaps the last fifty years, have clearly had no potential legacy, but have been worked up anyway by a critical consensus desperate for this peculiar thing, this Great American Novel, which only ever came about from a colonial identity crisis and a desire to replicate the literary successes of Great Britain. But great literature is not duplication. Moby Dick is only so memorable because it cannot be so clearly defined. Moby Dick is not a novel; it is everything.”
And the enormous whale burst up through the water, its jaws surrounding us on all sides, hurling us up into the air, scattering we damned fools, we novelists, in all directions.
I was lucky; bouncing off the slick final chapters of Moby Dick, I fell into the ocean at one side of the carnage. Many of my shipmates simply dropped back into the creature’s gargantuan mouth. I caught a glimpse of Captain Roth, stabbing ferociously at the whale’s hide with a harpoon, his legs pinioned against it, roaring,
“Give me that Nobel Prize, you sons of bitches!”
And then he, too, was dragged below the surface.
On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the Beat poets, who’d been hoping for a bite or two out of a Great American Novel themselves, though mostly this was related to a severe case of the munchies.
*
As told to Jon Ware.
*
“If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great whales.”
Goldsmith to Johnson.
...according to ‘Moby Dick’.
Call me Franzen. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely - having a serious-looking pair of spectacles, and nothing in particular to interest me in reality, I thought would write about a bit and, perhaps, catch, kill and consume the Great American Novel. Whenever I find myself bemoaning the state of literature, whenever I find myself wishing to take a circle-saw to every bookshop table holding the latest Dan Brown novel, I feel a certain instinctual urge to hunt and trap the Great American Novel. Every male novelist, some time or other, cherishes very nearly that same feeling.
Our captain’s name was Roth; a bitter, stern, aging man who I felt must surely be past his prime, for he would stand at the prow of our little coracle and write out novel after novel in which a facsimile of the author has a lot of sex with frumpy young women. And yet in sailors’ circles, these were hailed as great literature, so I was not sure how much I should believe in my own inclination. The first mate, a dour man by the name of Updike, I found in closer spirits to myself, forever mumbling about the American family and wishing to cast a ‘wry’ eye over the idiosyncracies of the act of love-making. There were others, too – as many as there are novels in the sea.
Artist's impression.
“Avast, ye dogs,” Roth snapped, getting to his feet. “Bellow, sit up straight! Pynchon, get that gum out of yer hair! I’ve set our course; the white whale awaits.”
Grim, decided expressions, all around our ship of fools.
“What’s the catch, cap’n?” someone shouted. “Huck Finn? Catcher in the Rye? To Kill a Mockingbird?”
“Nay,” Roth replied. “They be novels for schoolchildren. Adolescent; pregnant with possibility, but not a full-grown, behemoth of a novel.”
There was a thoughtful silence.
“I hear fishin’s been good in Latin America recently,” Bellow suggested. “Still counts as America, technically speaking. What say we harpoon us a big fat Garcia Marquez? Or a Bolano, if we’re not feeling too picky.”
“Nay, thou belly-acher!” Roth shouted, clouting him over the head with one of his extremely slim recent publications. “Thou knowest that it is not the same thing.”
I suggested my own book, Freedom, as a Great American Novel. The bottle-nosed critics that liked to follow our coracle about instantly popped their heads out of the water and began to bray applause; the other novelists, however, ignored it.
“Our prize is Moby Dick,” Roth told us.
Silence.
“You know,” Updike said, scratching his nose, “It is interesting that so many of the Great American Novels are adolescent in nature; how many of them deal in some way with desire and with the urge to push oneself further and further that could be said to embody the founding principle of the USA. Some of them embrace this spirit wholeheartedly, but many more are directly concerned with the consequences of that desire. Great Gatsby, The Old Man and The Sea, Moby Dick itself, Death of a Salesman, Citizen Kane-”
“They’re not novels.”
“Sssh.”
“In fact,” Updike continued, “doesn’t Moby Dick take itself with such light-heartedness that to pursue it in such a serious, state-of-the-nation manner (little matter that only a small section of the narrative actually takes place on American soil) does it an injustice, and mistakes the nature of the Great American Novel, which cannot desire to be a Great American Novel and hope to become one, without at least examining the nature of its own desire.”
“That’s some Jedi shit right there,” said Saul Bellow.
Literary experts speculate that the naked man may be Ernest Hemingway.
We ruminated on this for some time.
“Truly,” I said, speaking for the first time, “Moby Dick is the only Great American Novel. Some of our most treasured books deal with social issues; some are tragic, some whimsical. Some of them, over perhaps the last fifty years, have clearly had no potential legacy, but have been worked up anyway by a critical consensus desperate for this peculiar thing, this Great American Novel, which only ever came about from a colonial identity crisis and a desire to replicate the literary successes of Great Britain. But great literature is not duplication. Moby Dick is only so memorable because it cannot be so clearly defined. Moby Dick is not a novel; it is everything.”
And the enormous whale burst up through the water, its jaws surrounding us on all sides, hurling us up into the air, scattering we damned fools, we novelists, in all directions.
I was lucky; bouncing off the slick final chapters of Moby Dick, I fell into the ocean at one side of the carnage. Many of my shipmates simply dropped back into the creature’s gargantuan mouth. I caught a glimpse of Captain Roth, stabbing ferociously at the whale’s hide with a harpoon, his legs pinioned against it, roaring,
“Give me that Nobel Prize, you sons of bitches!”
And then he, too, was dragged below the surface.
On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the Beat poets, who’d been hoping for a bite or two out of a Great American Novel themselves, though mostly this was related to a severe case of the munchies.
*
As told to Jon Ware.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Comics | Fiction | Crimes and Misdemeanours Really Aren't That Different
A month or two ago, after a couple of drinks, I got into a discussion with an esteemed member of the poetry world and started to try and tell him that the definition of black comedy was ‘a situation which ought to be tragic, delivered without emotion, often to the point of absurdity’. He argued that this was, instead, the definition of sociopathy.
He may well be right, but I think it’s also black comedy. And you can split that into two categories. Empathic black comedy, in which the character and characters involved treat the situation with some degree of cynicism or awareness, telegraphing the absurdity to the audience. The characters in Endgame, let’s say, the hero of Kafka’s The Castle. Or, incidentally, Rupert Everett’s hero in the fantastic Italian film Dellamore Dellamorte (Cemetery Man, as it was released in the US).
Then there’s unempathic black comedy, or, if you like, true sociopathic comedy, in which the characters treat the tragic situation as thoroughly tragic, but we’re encouraged to laugh at them all the same. Often, to make the process easier, the characters’ reactions (and, often, distress) are exaggerated to make them seem more comical. The example I used in my discussion was that of the scene in Korean movie The Host, in which an entire family sobs over the supposed death of the youngest member. This probably didn’t help my case re sociopathy, but it’s an interesting example. All of the family members are in their own way, sympathetic, but it’s the crying that’s pushed, and pushed, for over a minute, becoming more and more frantic – until it tips.
What I find curious is how often in literature the butt of this unempathic black comedy is paired with a genuinely tragic ‘double’. Let’s call this butt ‘the Milhouse’, after its ur-example; the bespectacled dweeb in The Simpsons who is constantly made a mockery of, to the point of utter cruelty, for having an unrequited crush on Lisa. The show constantly lets us know that it’s okay to make fun of Milhouse. It shifts this around, too, with other characters; there was a long period in which it was constantly intimated that Moe wanted to commit suicide. This was always played for gags. Compare that to the tragically played scene early on in the series when Homer ties a rock around his waist and attempts to jump off a bridge.
I pick up on Milhouse because it’s remarkable how frequently ‘the Milhouse’ is unlucky in love. Compare to Gunter from the sitcom Friends, who has an undying passion for Rachel, played by Jennifer Aniston. I’ve never been certain exactly what’s supposed to be so absurd about Gunter, who’s given silly bleached hair and a daft tie but who isn’t even as cloying as the House himself. At some points during the series, he’s probably less irritating than Ross, the ‘hero’ whose love for Rachel is treated with the utmost seriousness. And yet I don’t ever recall Gunter getting as much as a sympathetic ‘Aaah’ from the show’s monstrous, shrieking studio audience, who are a handy divining rod for our purposes here.
The same goes for Roderigo, hapless suitor of Desdemona in Othello, who is near-habitually played as a fool. Like Othello, he is easily tricked by Iago; like Othello, he is scorned by Brabantio, and like Othello, he is willing to kill with remarkable readiness. There’s very little, in these respects, between the two of them. So why are we willing to laugh at Iago tricking Roderigo, but Iago tricking Othello fills us with horror?
Oddly enough (perhaps scarily enough) it seems to be a manliness thing. Milhouse, with his enormous nose and thick glasses – cough – is considered too pathetic a specimen to mate with Lisa. Gunter is weasellish, rather than “handsome in a ugly sort of way,” like Ross, and Roderigo is pitiable not because he attempts to murder someone, but because he’s afraid to do it. With female characters, it isn’t quite the inverse. The hero still pursues the heroine, but he himself will be pursued by a female butt or ‘femme-Milhouse’ who will be characteristically unladylike in some way. Often, she’ll be overweight. Maybe, like Friends’ Janice, she’ll have an irritating voice. Either way, we’ll be expected to laugh at her.
There’s no remedy for it; we’re bound by the rules of tragic-comedy to laugh at someone. If we try to make our Milhouses into tragic heroes, we’ll be forced to turn someone else into a buffoon. Moe, probably.
And I don’t want to laugh at Moe, readers. I like Moe.
Jon Ware
Friction Creditor
He may well be right, but I think it’s also black comedy. And you can split that into two categories. Empathic black comedy, in which the character and characters involved treat the situation with some degree of cynicism or awareness, telegraphing the absurdity to the audience. The characters in Endgame, let’s say, the hero of Kafka’s The Castle. Or, incidentally, Rupert Everett’s hero in the fantastic Italian film Dellamore Dellamorte (Cemetery Man, as it was released in the US).
We just don't get zombies like they do.
Then there’s unempathic black comedy, or, if you like, true sociopathic comedy, in which the characters treat the tragic situation as thoroughly tragic, but we’re encouraged to laugh at them all the same. Often, to make the process easier, the characters’ reactions (and, often, distress) are exaggerated to make them seem more comical. The example I used in my discussion was that of the scene in Korean movie The Host, in which an entire family sobs over the supposed death of the youngest member. This probably didn’t help my case re sociopathy, but it’s an interesting example. All of the family members are in their own way, sympathetic, but it’s the crying that’s pushed, and pushed, for over a minute, becoming more and more frantic – until it tips.
What I find curious is how often in literature the butt of this unempathic black comedy is paired with a genuinely tragic ‘double’. Let’s call this butt ‘the Milhouse’, after its ur-example; the bespectacled dweeb in The Simpsons who is constantly made a mockery of, to the point of utter cruelty, for having an unrequited crush on Lisa. The show constantly lets us know that it’s okay to make fun of Milhouse. It shifts this around, too, with other characters; there was a long period in which it was constantly intimated that Moe wanted to commit suicide. This was always played for gags. Compare that to the tragically played scene early on in the series when Homer ties a rock around his waist and attempts to jump off a bridge.
I pick up on Milhouse because it’s remarkable how frequently ‘the Milhouse’ is unlucky in love. Compare to Gunter from the sitcom Friends, who has an undying passion for Rachel, played by Jennifer Aniston. I’ve never been certain exactly what’s supposed to be so absurd about Gunter, who’s given silly bleached hair and a daft tie but who isn’t even as cloying as the House himself. At some points during the series, he’s probably less irritating than Ross, the ‘hero’ whose love for Rachel is treated with the utmost seriousness. And yet I don’t ever recall Gunter getting as much as a sympathetic ‘Aaah’ from the show’s monstrous, shrieking studio audience, who are a handy divining rod for our purposes here.
Yes, go on. Laugh at his pain. Laugh, you bastard.
The same goes for Roderigo, hapless suitor of Desdemona in Othello, who is near-habitually played as a fool. Like Othello, he is easily tricked by Iago; like Othello, he is scorned by Brabantio, and like Othello, he is willing to kill with remarkable readiness. There’s very little, in these respects, between the two of them. So why are we willing to laugh at Iago tricking Roderigo, but Iago tricking Othello fills us with horror?
Oddly enough (perhaps scarily enough) it seems to be a manliness thing. Milhouse, with his enormous nose and thick glasses – cough – is considered too pathetic a specimen to mate with Lisa. Gunter is weasellish, rather than “handsome in a ugly sort of way,” like Ross, and Roderigo is pitiable not because he attempts to murder someone, but because he’s afraid to do it. With female characters, it isn’t quite the inverse. The hero still pursues the heroine, but he himself will be pursued by a female butt or ‘femme-Milhouse’ who will be characteristically unladylike in some way. Often, she’ll be overweight. Maybe, like Friends’ Janice, she’ll have an irritating voice. Either way, we’ll be expected to laugh at her.
There’s no remedy for it; we’re bound by the rules of tragic-comedy to laugh at someone. If we try to make our Milhouses into tragic heroes, we’ll be forced to turn someone else into a buffoon. Moe, probably.
And I don’t want to laugh at Moe, readers. I like Moe.
Jon Ware
Friction Creditor
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Type | Fiction | They Call Him Doctor Turnips
Did you know that Benjamin Franklin had the exceptionally cool-looking typeset Franklin Gothic named after him? No, me neither. Do you feel the great mushroom cloud of Ignorance being dispersed by the zephyrs of Illumination, Dear Reader? No, me neither.
Benjamin, of course, was celebrated by printers due to his own prominence in the printing industry, running, editing and writing his own paper in Philadelphia, publishing pamphlets, almanacs, and scientific essays about his own irritating achievements in the field of electricity. Now, Benji (if I may call Mr Franklin Benji) had a little puckish habit that we’ve used ourselves here at Silkworms from time to time, and one that I most embarrassingly used myself on occasion in order to fill up an empty page or two back when I was running the Books section for the Warwick University paper. He filled up his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, with his own work, published under different names, in each case altering the style to match. On occasion he’d even write in pseudonymous letters attacking himself, following up by a defensive rebuttal by a ‘third party’.
In his best and perhaps most famous piece of meta-buffoonery, Franklin wrote a yearly almanac under the name of ‘Poor Richard’, and took on his biggest and nearest competitor, the magnificently-named Titan Leeds, with a brilliant directness; he predicted, and publicised the man’s imminent death in the almanac itself. In Leeds’ next almanac, published after the date in question, he published a humourless response pointing out that he was, in fact, still alive. In turn, Poor Richard’s next almanac reported on the tragic death of Titan Leeds and railed against the scurrilous imposter who continued to publish almanacs in his name. A few issues later, Poor Richard even included a very respectful letter from Leeds’ ghost who confirmed that he had, in fact, died on the predicted date.
There’s a little of Franklin in Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet and writer who wrote through multiple personalities that were frequently in dialogue with one another. I say a little, because what’s fascinating about Pessoa is the fact that all of his heteronyms, from Dr. Gaudencio Turnips, through to Adolf Moscow and Vadooisf, feel less like part of a self-indulgent game and more like a genuine psychological compulsion. He himself in his poem Autopsychography, under his own name, noted the innate duplicitousness of the writer;
The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
And those who read his words
Will feel in what he wrote
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they don’t.
And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.
I can see a modern writer trying the same trick as Pessoa. One of our stylists. A few years ago, perhaps the late Roberto Bolano. And it would be full of little ironical sneers and deliberate nudges. Like Poor Richard, but without the charm. One of the voices would no doubt be a fusty professor whose views are diametrically opposed to those of the writer. The writer’s voice, in fact, would not make itself invisible successfully.
Frida Kahlo poo-pooed her fellow Surrealists by claiming that they painted dreams, while she painted reality. Insisting that you’re ‘real’ while others around you are ‘fake’ didn’t start with gangsta rap. Neither did inventing your own ‘realness’; it’s an odd sentiment coming from a woman who pencilled her own iconic monobrow and moustache in to make them seem thicker.
Not that I’d ever wish Pessoa’s mental quirks on anyone – but aren’t we really in need of less stylists and more madmen? More writers who live their work, and don’t need to ‘act’ insane as a consequence. Sorry, Benji; but Gaudencio Turnips just feels more sincere than you.
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor
Benjamin, of course, was celebrated by printers due to his own prominence in the printing industry, running, editing and writing his own paper in Philadelphia, publishing pamphlets, almanacs, and scientific essays about his own irritating achievements in the field of electricity. Now, Benji (if I may call Mr Franklin Benji) had a little puckish habit that we’ve used ourselves here at Silkworms from time to time, and one that I most embarrassingly used myself on occasion in order to fill up an empty page or two back when I was running the Books section for the Warwick University paper. He filled up his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, with his own work, published under different names, in each case altering the style to match. On occasion he’d even write in pseudonymous letters attacking himself, following up by a defensive rebuttal by a ‘third party’.
In his best and perhaps most famous piece of meta-buffoonery, Franklin wrote a yearly almanac under the name of ‘Poor Richard’, and took on his biggest and nearest competitor, the magnificently-named Titan Leeds, with a brilliant directness; he predicted, and publicised the man’s imminent death in the almanac itself. In Leeds’ next almanac, published after the date in question, he published a humourless response pointing out that he was, in fact, still alive. In turn, Poor Richard’s next almanac reported on the tragic death of Titan Leeds and railed against the scurrilous imposter who continued to publish almanacs in his name. A few issues later, Poor Richard even included a very respectful letter from Leeds’ ghost who confirmed that he had, in fact, died on the predicted date.
There’s a little of Franklin in Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet and writer who wrote through multiple personalities that were frequently in dialogue with one another. I say a little, because what’s fascinating about Pessoa is the fact that all of his heteronyms, from Dr. Gaudencio Turnips, through to Adolf Moscow and Vadooisf, feel less like part of a self-indulgent game and more like a genuine psychological compulsion. He himself in his poem Autopsychography, under his own name, noted the innate duplicitousness of the writer;
The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
And those who read his words
Will feel in what he wrote
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they don’t.
And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.
I can see a modern writer trying the same trick as Pessoa. One of our stylists. A few years ago, perhaps the late Roberto Bolano. And it would be full of little ironical sneers and deliberate nudges. Like Poor Richard, but without the charm. One of the voices would no doubt be a fusty professor whose views are diametrically opposed to those of the writer. The writer’s voice, in fact, would not make itself invisible successfully.
Frida Kahlo poo-pooed her fellow Surrealists by claiming that they painted dreams, while she painted reality. Insisting that you’re ‘real’ while others around you are ‘fake’ didn’t start with gangsta rap. Neither did inventing your own ‘realness’; it’s an odd sentiment coming from a woman who pencilled her own iconic monobrow and moustache in to make them seem thicker.
Not that I’d ever wish Pessoa’s mental quirks on anyone – but aren’t we really in need of less stylists and more madmen? More writers who live their work, and don’t need to ‘act’ insane as a consequence. Sorry, Benji; but Gaudencio Turnips just feels more sincere than you.
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Generation | Film | For No Reason, Let's Compile Some Lists
What an interesting article from Totalfilm. ‘Horror Icons on their Favourite Horror Movies!’ Admittedly towards the final third, the top ten lists are no longer by horror icons so much as by journalists who make a living out of things like compiling lists of their top ten horror movies. But still.
The list delighted me specifically because the icons’ stated preferences confirmed ingrained snobberies I already hold. Smart and ironic filmmakers like Joe Dante and Edgar Wright enjoy smart and ironic films like Don’t Look Now and Night of the Demon. Eli Roth plumps for dim-witted gorefests that are cool because nobody’s heard of them except him, Quentin Tarantino, and losers who actually ask themselves, “Hey, I wonder what’s on the Horror Channel tonight,” like me. Kane Hodder picks an upcoming movie of his as his second favourite, and consequently comes across as a self-publicising boor, whereas Robert Englund speaks passionately about the sound and cinematography of Turn of the Screw adaptation The Innocents. In terms of overall votes, John Carpenter goes all-out with a two-by-four on the craven Wes Craven. Nobody voted for Saw. (Oh, hang on – oh, no. They did. And for Hostel. Damn you, Kane Hodder!)
I probably couldn’t have predicted that the writer of Slumber Party Massacre 2 would admire the cinema veritie style of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In fact, in spite of their names, I might not have considered that the two films had a great deal in common. But still.
Pictured: horror.
What was more interesting was the preponderance of films from the late Seventies up to 1980 – I guessed the final punch-up must have been between Turner Classic Movies Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Alien and The Exorcist. A golden age for the genre, certainly, but so very dominant? Note the lack of love for films that were only, relatively speaking, very slightly earlier – 1963’s The Haunting is only mentioned once or twice. And films that came later – Blair Witch Project, for example. And, thinking about it, I don’t think this is simply a question of the era these film-makers and film-stars were informed by. It’s also an issue of generational cool in a genre that prides itself on being outsider-ish. Blair Witch/The Descent/Let The Right One In are too new to be considered classics, and certainly too new and too mainstream to be considered cool for real horror connoisseurs. The Exorcist, in its own way, was an exceptionally mainstream movie, but it gets far, far more votes than Poltergeist, which is still tainted with the mark of the mainstream period of Steven Spielberg. Jaws gets a pass because it was his breakthrough film. Freaks is old enough and cultish enough to be cool. Carnival of Souls is maybe too cultish for its own good. The Thing, to my surprise, gets more votes than Halloween – because it’s still an outsider’s movie, perhaps? Because it remains under-acknowledged by that mainstream, passed aside, un-remade? At least until that prequel comes out, that is. But still.
So I decided to generate an enormous, utterly meaningless flow-chart, to document the various peaks-and-troughs of horror opinion, making use of this vast new repository of information.
As with all statistics, I made some fairly arbitrary distinctions; I would only include the lists that were being made by someone chosen for actually working in the business, rather than commenting on it, no matter how knowledgeable they may be. So the guy who did make-up on Scream is in. Nigel Floyd is out. If someone didn’t bother to put their votes in order, only their first vote counts (sorry, John Landis. But for God’s sake, play the game! I don’t care how restricting and pointless it is!). And, to make the generated chart even more meaningless, all of Rob Zombie’s votes count as minuses. Not really. But to add a further note of randomness to the equation, I’m not particularly good at maths.
Each film gets a score out of ten depending on where it stood in the top ten list. First place gets ten points, tenth place gets one point. Bon? Bon.
Most Popular Horror Movie
1) The Exorcist; 182. The run-away victor. 22 appearances on the lists, almost always in the uppermost regions.
2) Alien; 119. Less-often picked than TCM – fifteen times - but more highly-rated.
3) Texas Chainsaw Massacre; 110. Sixteen votes.
4) A tricky tie at 101 between Jaws and The Thing. Thing gets more votes (eighteen), but Jaws is more highly rated amongst those who’ve picked it.
Lone Defender: Highest Rated Horror Movie picked by only one participant who wasn’t being hipsterish and ironic, or trying to promote his forthcoming sequel Hatchet 2
With a 10 from George Romero, the original Thing From Another World clinches it, beating Wes Craven’s lone 10 for Nosferatu because I don’t care for the films of Wes Craven. Soon after come the Twin Peaks movie, with a 9, and Inferno, also with a 9 (curiously, Steven Shiel, who voted for it, didn’t include Suspiria on his list; I’d like to hear his argument.)
Best Overall Average
Peeping Tom; two nines.
Least Favourite Most Favourite: Lowest Rated Horror Movie Overall
Cult of the Cobra (Romero again), Who Can Kill A Child?, The Other, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Seventh Victim, Duel, Braindead, Fright Night, Son of Frankenstein, Martyrs, 10 Rillington Place, Friday 13th Part VII (HODDER!), and Day of the Beast all manage a lowly one.
Most Questionably An Actual Member of the Genre
Scanners, at one vote of four. Exploding heads don’t make it a horror film. Points go to those who correctly identified Picnic at Hanging Rock as a horror film.
Most Likely to Get Bullied By The Other Participants
Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, score of two? Not Dracula, not Nosferatu?Get out of here, Larry Fessenden, director of Wendigo, you prissy Twilight lover.
Most Intriguingly Overlooked
Silence of the Lambs and Blair Witch scrape a couple of votes each, but Hellraiser and Les Diaboliques are the winners here, managing only four and three respectively, with a single vote. Hm. Intriguing.
My point is, we’re obsessed with this sort of thing. On the Internet in particular. You could actually speculate about how the mechanical processes of the online world are turning us into obsessive-compulsive automatons, forever making lists and comparing statistics and telling ourselves that this stuff actually means something objective. I’d do it myself, but I’m far too busy. As an addendum to this article I’m planning to make a new flowchart that only compares the preferences of the people whose opinions I happen to personally agree with. Kane Hodder will be nowhere in sight.
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor Strolling Briefly And Recklessly Out Of His Remit
p.s. The full 121-film flowchart is available to anyone who wishes to see it, providing they first put their signature to some documents I happen to have lying around.
The list delighted me specifically because the icons’ stated preferences confirmed ingrained snobberies I already hold. Smart and ironic filmmakers like Joe Dante and Edgar Wright enjoy smart and ironic films like Don’t Look Now and Night of the Demon. Eli Roth plumps for dim-witted gorefests that are cool because nobody’s heard of them except him, Quentin Tarantino, and losers who actually ask themselves, “Hey, I wonder what’s on the Horror Channel tonight,” like me. Kane Hodder picks an upcoming movie of his as his second favourite, and consequently comes across as a self-publicising boor, whereas Robert Englund speaks passionately about the sound and cinematography of Turn of the Screw adaptation The Innocents. In terms of overall votes, John Carpenter goes all-out with a two-by-four on the craven Wes Craven. Nobody voted for Saw. (Oh, hang on – oh, no. They did. And for Hostel. Damn you, Kane Hodder!)
I probably couldn’t have predicted that the writer of Slumber Party Massacre 2 would admire the cinema veritie style of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In fact, in spite of their names, I might not have considered that the two films had a great deal in common. But still.
What was more interesting was the preponderance of films from the late Seventies up to 1980 – I guessed the final punch-up must have been between Turner Classic Movies Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Alien and The Exorcist. A golden age for the genre, certainly, but so very dominant? Note the lack of love for films that were only, relatively speaking, very slightly earlier – 1963’s The Haunting is only mentioned once or twice. And films that came later – Blair Witch Project, for example. And, thinking about it, I don’t think this is simply a question of the era these film-makers and film-stars were informed by. It’s also an issue of generational cool in a genre that prides itself on being outsider-ish. Blair Witch/The Descent/Let The Right One In are too new to be considered classics, and certainly too new and too mainstream to be considered cool for real horror connoisseurs. The Exorcist, in its own way, was an exceptionally mainstream movie, but it gets far, far more votes than Poltergeist, which is still tainted with the mark of the mainstream period of Steven Spielberg. Jaws gets a pass because it was his breakthrough film. Freaks is old enough and cultish enough to be cool. Carnival of Souls is maybe too cultish for its own good. The Thing, to my surprise, gets more votes than Halloween – because it’s still an outsider’s movie, perhaps? Because it remains under-acknowledged by that mainstream, passed aside, un-remade? At least until that prequel comes out, that is. But still.
So I decided to generate an enormous, utterly meaningless flow-chart, to document the various peaks-and-troughs of horror opinion, making use of this vast new repository of information.
As with all statistics, I made some fairly arbitrary distinctions; I would only include the lists that were being made by someone chosen for actually working in the business, rather than commenting on it, no matter how knowledgeable they may be. So the guy who did make-up on Scream is in. Nigel Floyd is out. If someone didn’t bother to put their votes in order, only their first vote counts (sorry, John Landis. But for God’s sake, play the game! I don’t care how restricting and pointless it is!). And, to make the generated chart even more meaningless, all of Rob Zombie’s votes count as minuses. Not really. But to add a further note of randomness to the equation, I’m not particularly good at maths.
Each film gets a score out of ten depending on where it stood in the top ten list. First place gets ten points, tenth place gets one point. Bon? Bon.
Most Popular Horror Movie
1) The Exorcist; 182. The run-away victor. 22 appearances on the lists, almost always in the uppermost regions.
2) Alien; 119. Less-often picked than TCM – fifteen times - but more highly-rated.
3) Texas Chainsaw Massacre; 110. Sixteen votes.
4) A tricky tie at 101 between Jaws and The Thing. Thing gets more votes (eighteen), but Jaws is more highly rated amongst those who’ve picked it.
Lone Defender: Highest Rated Horror Movie picked by only one participant who wasn’t being hipsterish and ironic, or trying to promote his forthcoming sequel Hatchet 2
With a 10 from George Romero, the original Thing From Another World clinches it, beating Wes Craven’s lone 10 for Nosferatu because I don’t care for the films of Wes Craven. Soon after come the Twin Peaks movie, with a 9, and Inferno, also with a 9 (curiously, Steven Shiel, who voted for it, didn’t include Suspiria on his list; I’d like to hear his argument.)
Best Overall Average
Peeping Tom; two nines.
Least Favourite Most Favourite: Lowest Rated Horror Movie Overall
Cult of the Cobra (Romero again), Who Can Kill A Child?, The Other, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Seventh Victim, Duel, Braindead, Fright Night, Son of Frankenstein, Martyrs, 10 Rillington Place, Friday 13th Part VII (HODDER!), and Day of the Beast all manage a lowly one.
Most Questionably An Actual Member of the Genre
Scanners, at one vote of four. Exploding heads don’t make it a horror film. Points go to those who correctly identified Picnic at Hanging Rock as a horror film.
Most Likely to Get Bullied By The Other Participants
Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, score of two? Not Dracula, not Nosferatu?Get out of here, Larry Fessenden, director of Wendigo, you prissy Twilight lover.
Most Intriguingly Overlooked
Silence of the Lambs and Blair Witch scrape a couple of votes each, but Hellraiser and Les Diaboliques are the winners here, managing only four and three respectively, with a single vote. Hm. Intriguing.
Pictured: horror.
My point is, we’re obsessed with this sort of thing. On the Internet in particular. You could actually speculate about how the mechanical processes of the online world are turning us into obsessive-compulsive automatons, forever making lists and comparing statistics and telling ourselves that this stuff actually means something objective. I’d do it myself, but I’m far too busy. As an addendum to this article I’m planning to make a new flowchart that only compares the preferences of the people whose opinions I happen to personally agree with. Kane Hodder will be nowhere in sight.
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor Strolling Briefly And Recklessly Out Of His Remit
p.s. The full 121-film flowchart is available to anyone who wishes to see it, providing they first put their signature to some documents I happen to have lying around.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Post | Fiction | Where Have All The Postmodernists Gone?
Thank you, Nick Clegg, for finally providing me with something I could possibly write about on the theme of ‘post’, which for the past week has seemed to me so utterly impenetrable that I’d started to try and rearrange the letters in an attempt to get an article, any kind of article, out before the end of the week. (‘Stop’ and ‘pots’ were my favourites.) And thanks also for reminding us that there may actually be a thoughtful and even well-read person behind the mask of the politician. Possibly a speech-writer. But still.
It seems in his speech to the UN – which apparently some delegates idly chatted over, the poor bastard – Clegg stated the following;
“The work of international institutions must continue to be guided by the values on which those institutions were founded: the rule of law – both domestic and international; the right to freedom of expression and belief; democracy; and equality before the law.”
"These values are sometimes described as 'western' values – but only by people who do not know their history. Four centuries ago, the great Mughal emperor Akbar was legislating for religious freedom and equality in what is now India, while in parts of Europe 'heretics' were being burned at the stake.
"The truth is that these liberal ideals of equality, law and self-determination cannot be claimed by any nation, or hemisphere.
"They are global values with global force. They are also the values at the heart of the UN charter."
Pissy nasal historical reference aside, this is a pretty forthright kick in the face towards cultural relativism, isn’t it? A reminder of the insidious rhetoric of rulers worldwide who like to equate religious freedom, sexual equality, et al. with corporate greed and cultural decadence by labelling them all as ‘Western’, and of various cliques who justify their questionable practices by telling outsiders they have no right to judge them.
Hell, I thought, sitting back in my chair, was cultural relativism the most lasting and widespread effect of post-modernism? I mean, I don’t know that many people – one or two, perhaps – who would try and use Derrida in an ordinary conversation. But all too often, if you start a debate about any important subject with someone who disagrees with you, you’ll hear those horrifying words,
“Well, I’ve got my opinion, and you’ve got yours...”
“No!” I want to scream, grabbing them by the lapels. “No! Don’t put up these barriers of the equal value of opinion between us! Let me into your opinion, where I can dissect it for you, lovingly and near-erotically, and you can do the same to mine, and let our combined research bring us closer to objective truth.”
What, in short, the hell happened to post-modernism?
When I first started reading Seamus Heaney, I was struck by one of Faber’s blurbs (I can’t now remember where it was from) that lauded the great poet for – and I paraphrase – “avoiding the abyss of post-modernism.” A strange place to be in, you might think, that (what is presumably still) the major cultural movement of our day should be noted only as a pitfall that our best writers manage to dodge. And, when you think about it, when was the last time an author who described themselves emphatically as post-modern was accepted by the literary establishment? Caryl Churchill?
If I was being optimistic, I’d suggest that perhaps this was the final, noble, unacknowledged sacrifice of the post-modern; by attempting to show the relativity of all cultural movements it rendered itself, and all movements to come after it, meaningless. That from now on, there will simply be authors, and their surges will be individual, not as part of a larger wave. Fractism, we can call it (ironically), and it will contain every sort of opinion and every sort of movement.
This is probably balls. But, my God, I’d like to imagine it’s not. And anyway, who the hell are you to tell me I’m wrong?
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor
It seems in his speech to the UN – which apparently some delegates idly chatted over, the poor bastard – Clegg stated the following;
“The work of international institutions must continue to be guided by the values on which those institutions were founded: the rule of law – both domestic and international; the right to freedom of expression and belief; democracy; and equality before the law.”
Little Nicky: "The US was not responsible for 9/11."
"These values are sometimes described as 'western' values – but only by people who do not know their history. Four centuries ago, the great Mughal emperor Akbar was legislating for religious freedom and equality in what is now India, while in parts of Europe 'heretics' were being burned at the stake.
"The truth is that these liberal ideals of equality, law and self-determination cannot be claimed by any nation, or hemisphere.
"They are global values with global force. They are also the values at the heart of the UN charter."
Pissy nasal historical reference aside, this is a pretty forthright kick in the face towards cultural relativism, isn’t it? A reminder of the insidious rhetoric of rulers worldwide who like to equate religious freedom, sexual equality, et al. with corporate greed and cultural decadence by labelling them all as ‘Western’, and of various cliques who justify their questionable practices by telling outsiders they have no right to judge them.
Hell, I thought, sitting back in my chair, was cultural relativism the most lasting and widespread effect of post-modernism? I mean, I don’t know that many people – one or two, perhaps – who would try and use Derrida in an ordinary conversation. But all too often, if you start a debate about any important subject with someone who disagrees with you, you’ll hear those horrifying words,
“Well, I’ve got my opinion, and you’ve got yours...”
"Who are you to tell me what the truth is?"
“No!” I want to scream, grabbing them by the lapels. “No! Don’t put up these barriers of the equal value of opinion between us! Let me into your opinion, where I can dissect it for you, lovingly and near-erotically, and you can do the same to mine, and let our combined research bring us closer to objective truth.”
What, in short, the hell happened to post-modernism?
When I first started reading Seamus Heaney, I was struck by one of Faber’s blurbs (I can’t now remember where it was from) that lauded the great poet for – and I paraphrase – “avoiding the abyss of post-modernism.” A strange place to be in, you might think, that (what is presumably still) the major cultural movement of our day should be noted only as a pitfall that our best writers manage to dodge. And, when you think about it, when was the last time an author who described themselves emphatically as post-modern was accepted by the literary establishment? Caryl Churchill?
If I was being optimistic, I’d suggest that perhaps this was the final, noble, unacknowledged sacrifice of the post-modern; by attempting to show the relativity of all cultural movements it rendered itself, and all movements to come after it, meaningless. That from now on, there will simply be authors, and their surges will be individual, not as part of a larger wave. Fractism, we can call it (ironically), and it will contain every sort of opinion and every sort of movement.
This is probably balls. But, my God, I’d like to imagine it’s not. And anyway, who the hell are you to tell me I’m wrong?
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor
Monday, September 20, 2010
The Present Tense and Jam Tortillas: Phillip Pullman in Discussion With A Straw Man
PP: Nowadays, it seems to me that every young writer is writing about marmalade sandwiches. How I loathe this monstrous, heathen trend! Sandwiches are, at heart, flawed because they are layered. There is no depth to a sandwich – only endless layers. I pray heartily that we may go back to writing about jam tortillas instead. All of our noblest authors – Henry James, Chekhov, Colin Forbes – wrote about jam tortillas. And that was because only jam tortillas can explore the true nature of reality.
Of course, to suggest that marmalade sandwiches are currently popular because writers are attempting to reflect our more immersive, more heat-of-the-moment culture, with varying degrees of success, is nonsense. No, it’s all the fault of creative writing courses. As usual! Damn them to hell! It’s all because they want their students to write more ‘vividly’ without fear of the consequences! What’s that you’re mumbling, straw man?
What’s that, straw man? You’re going to drop the satirical facade and talk candidly about the present tense?
Let these words be written on the mountaintop.
“Literary techniques, like technology or a text that attempts to sum up the meaning of life, are morally neutral. Each one will have flaws that a bad writer will succumb to, and that a good writer will overcome; and, likewise, it will have possibilities that a bad writer will ignore, and that a good writer can use. Dismiss no technique, and praise no technique. Their worth is not in themselves, but in their application.”
As eavesdropped upon by Jon Ware
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Gonzo | Fiction | The Professor and I
So I get an e-mail in my inbox, telling me this week’s article will be about ‘gonzo’.
“Shit,” I murmur, lighting up a Stogie. “You just know everybody’s going to be writing about Hunter S. Thompson.”
The Professor looks at me askance. His fingers are fumbling for the bottle of Tesco Value whiskey.
“You could write about Tom Wolfe,” he says. “Or the Muppets.”
I coil up into a shivering foetal ball and mumble incoherently, the Stogie between my teeth,
“I can’t think about Tom Wolfe without thinking about Bruce Willis in the appalling movie adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities. And now I can’t think about the Muppets without making that horrifying mental connection either. Damn your eyes, Professor.”
The prostitutes are getting impatient. They don’t see why they have to be here.
“Quiet!” I snap. “If I’m writing an article about gonzo I’m going to have to have prostitutes around. Don’t you ladies read?”
Apparently one of them has a Master’s in English Literature from Oxford. They spend some time shouting me down.
“Gonzo,” I ruminate, much later, on the bonnet of the Professor’s car. “Extremity. Invention. A winking joke and a shaggy dog story which the reader is complicit in, but which does have a rambling, explorative purpose to it.”
The Professor sticks his head out of the side-view window as he’s turning a corner.
“Could we consider I’m Still Here a piece of gonzo film-making?” he shouts.
“Yes, I think so,” I reply. “Because it’s a joke that spills out into reality, even threatens it, by insisting on being true while all the time giggling insanely at us. How much Hunter S. came to believe in his own persona and how much madness was in him all along is up for debate.”
“You know, Professor,” I say, patting my pockets for another Stogie, “if I’m going to discover the true nature of gonzo, we’re going to have to live our lives like a gonzo article.”
“Great idea!” he yells, and mounts the pavement, hitting a small cat. Blood goes in my mouth.
“Jesus Christ,” I weep. “You made me hit a cat! You turned me into a cannibal, you bastard. How could you? How could you?”
“So if gonzo journalism thrives on extremity,” he yells, back at me, unhearing, “does it find a line between extremity and gratuitousness, or ignore it?”
I spit out a small chunk of cat intestine.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “I mean, you could argue that extremity played for a laugh is less gratuitous than extremity that's pompous enough to believe it’s making an important point by trying to shock you. Take Funny Games, for example. Michael Haneke is far more gratuitous than Quentin Tarantino. And his remaking of that film suggests he was always more concerned with getting a new reaction, shocking new people, than exploring the ideas within in any detail.”
Something’s caught between my teeth. I chew thoughtfully on it for a moment.
Tapping on the bonnet. The Professor is trying to pass me the vermouth bottle.
“So what you’re saying is,” he yells, slipping near-effortlessly over the central reservation and onto the other side of the street, “we can only discover the true nature of gonzo by holding Michael Haneke’s family hostage in their house by the lake.”
I consider this for a moment, but decide against it. It’d be playing into his hands, really.
“Alternatively,” he suggests, “we could set Damien Hirst’s cow on fire.”
“But isn’t it meant to have a political element as well as a cultural one?” I ask him. “Capturing the zeitgeist of modern times and all that? Nixon, yadda yadda?”
He asks me how much I’ve really researched the history of gonzo.
“Not much,” I tell him. “It’s sort of a gonzo thing. Speaking of which, to be truly gonzo, this article should be handed in late, strictly speaking. It’s the rules, I guess.”
“But gonzo’s meant to be about breaking the rules,” the Professor says. “And it could be argued that, in a sense, it’s never been able to truly get over Hunter S., because it’s just tried to imitate him. You can see his echoes in Borat. But it all makes the joke too obvious, especially because cinema, which has become the main bearer of the flame, doesn't lend itself so easily to half-truths. An author personally describes an experience, but a film needs an entire army of helpers. That’s why, in the end, we cannot believe that Joaquin Phoenix vomited in a bush while twenty people stood watching him. Even if it’s true.”
“And extremity itself kills its own fertility and its own subtlety,” I murmur, “because once you’ve marketed yourself on being extreme you’ll be expected to be more and more extreme with every subsequent creation.”
“Quite,” he shouts.
So I lean forward, on the car bonnet, raising my Heckler & Koch PSG1 sniper rifle, and shoot Sarah Palin in the face.
Instead, I lie back, kicking my heel to the rhythm of Tom Waits, and smoke another Stogie.
“Shit,” I murmur, lighting up a Stogie. “You just know everybody’s going to be writing about Hunter S. Thompson.”
The Professor looks at me askance. His fingers are fumbling for the bottle of Tesco Value whiskey.
“You could write about Tom Wolfe,” he says. “Or the Muppets.”
I coil up into a shivering foetal ball and mumble incoherently, the Stogie between my teeth,
“I can’t think about Tom Wolfe without thinking about Bruce Willis in the appalling movie adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities. And now I can’t think about the Muppets without making that horrifying mental connection either. Damn your eyes, Professor.”
The prostitutes are getting impatient. They don’t see why they have to be here.
“Quiet!” I snap. “If I’m writing an article about gonzo I’m going to have to have prostitutes around. Don’t you ladies read?”
Apparently one of them has a Master’s in English Literature from Oxford. They spend some time shouting me down.
“Gonzo,” I ruminate, much later, on the bonnet of the Professor’s car. “Extremity. Invention. A winking joke and a shaggy dog story which the reader is complicit in, but which does have a rambling, explorative purpose to it.”
The Professor sticks his head out of the side-view window as he’s turning a corner.
“Could we consider I’m Still Here a piece of gonzo film-making?” he shouts.
“Yes, I think so,” I reply. “Because it’s a joke that spills out into reality, even threatens it, by insisting on being true while all the time giggling insanely at us. How much Hunter S. came to believe in his own persona and how much madness was in him all along is up for debate.”
“You know, Professor,” I say, patting my pockets for another Stogie, “if I’m going to discover the true nature of gonzo, we’re going to have to live our lives like a gonzo article.”
“Great idea!” he yells, and mounts the pavement, hitting a small cat. Blood goes in my mouth.
“Jesus Christ,” I weep. “You made me hit a cat! You turned me into a cannibal, you bastard. How could you? How could you?”
“So if gonzo journalism thrives on extremity,” he yells, back at me, unhearing, “does it find a line between extremity and gratuitousness, or ignore it?”
I spit out a small chunk of cat intestine.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “I mean, you could argue that extremity played for a laugh is less gratuitous than extremity that's pompous enough to believe it’s making an important point by trying to shock you. Take Funny Games, for example. Michael Haneke is far more gratuitous than Quentin Tarantino. And his remaking of that film suggests he was always more concerned with getting a new reaction, shocking new people, than exploring the ideas within in any detail.”
Something’s caught between my teeth. I chew thoughtfully on it for a moment.
Tapping on the bonnet. The Professor is trying to pass me the vermouth bottle.
“So what you’re saying is,” he yells, slipping near-effortlessly over the central reservation and onto the other side of the street, “we can only discover the true nature of gonzo by holding Michael Haneke’s family hostage in their house by the lake.”
I consider this for a moment, but decide against it. It’d be playing into his hands, really.
“Alternatively,” he suggests, “we could set Damien Hirst’s cow on fire.”
“But isn’t it meant to have a political element as well as a cultural one?” I ask him. “Capturing the zeitgeist of modern times and all that? Nixon, yadda yadda?”
He asks me how much I’ve really researched the history of gonzo.
“Not much,” I tell him. “It’s sort of a gonzo thing. Speaking of which, to be truly gonzo, this article should be handed in late, strictly speaking. It’s the rules, I guess.”
“But gonzo’s meant to be about breaking the rules,” the Professor says. “And it could be argued that, in a sense, it’s never been able to truly get over Hunter S., because it’s just tried to imitate him. You can see his echoes in Borat. But it all makes the joke too obvious, especially because cinema, which has become the main bearer of the flame, doesn't lend itself so easily to half-truths. An author personally describes an experience, but a film needs an entire army of helpers. That’s why, in the end, we cannot believe that Joaquin Phoenix vomited in a bush while twenty people stood watching him. Even if it’s true.”
“And extremity itself kills its own fertility and its own subtlety,” I murmur, “because once you’ve marketed yourself on being extreme you’ll be expected to be more and more extreme with every subsequent creation.”
“Quite,” he shouts.
So I lean forward, on the car bonnet, raising my Heckler & Koch PSG1 sniper rifle, and shoot Sarah Palin in the face.
“And guns, too,” I yell back to the Professor. “There have to be guns. Perhaps gonzo is so popular amongst young men because, at heart, it’s little more than an adolescent bacchanalic fantasy.”
He disagrees with me, and presents some compelling arguments that I refuse to listen to.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Jazz | Fiction | Is That Jazz?
Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. We’ve got a wonderful show planned for you tonight.
Mr Gil Scott-Heron, who knows a lot about jazz and a certain something about fiction, defines jazz as ‘miscellaneous’ – that is, he refuses to define it. He talks about ‘real’ jazz music as the stuff you can never find in the record store, because you’re not sure exactly which section it should be found under. The essence of the undefinable; that which can survive Bruce Willis.
(Scattered laughter; one man, a cigar in his mouth, brays and claps his hands together, too loudly. A couple of people at the bar turn away, as if to make a point.)
Sweet, sad, irreverent rebellion of jazz. Playing all the wrong notes; playing all the right notes at the wrong times; singing the sorrow of a nation through the sorrow of an individual; wordless or wordful; the cataclysm of Rhapsody in Blue has it right, because it must be a rhapsody if it is to be anything; saying complex things using simple terms; is it right to say that it no longer belongs to any one race, or is that as sly and as self-serving as to claim that Martin Luther King does not belong to any one race?
Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, our first performer of the night, a very famous writer and a very fine singer, performing from one of his best-known works, Mr James Joyce.
The mything smile of me, my wholesole assumption, shes nowt me-without as weam twin herewithin, that I love like myselfish, like smithereens robinsongs, like juneses nutslost, like the blue of the sky if I stoop for to spy's between my whiteyoumightcallimbs.
(Scattered, unenthusiastic applause.)
He’s a joker, isn’t he? Big hand, ladies and gentlemen! Big hand! (Growing serious; this new facial expression seems forced and unnatural).
Now, is that jazz? The connection between the white European modernists and jazz as a natural part of the American civil rights movement, most notably the Harlem Renaissance or so-called ‘Black Modernism’ of the post-First-World-War period, has been made.
But take, say, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man;
In this respect the Negro is much in the position of a great comedian who gives up the lighter rôles to play tragedy. No matter how well he may portray the deeper passions, the public is loth to give him up in his old character; they even conspire to make him a failure in serious work, in order to force him back into comedy. In the same respect, the public is not too much to be blamed, for great comedians are far more scarce than mediocre tragedians; every amateur actor is a tragedian. However, this very fact constitutes the opportunity of the future Negro novelist and poet to give the country something new and unknown, in depicting the life, the ambitions, the struggles and the passions of those of their race who are striving to break the narrow limits of traditions. A beginning has already been made in that remarkable book by Dr. Du Bois, "The Souls of Black Folk."
Is that jazz? It’s an articulate piece of social commentary; and it’s intellectual, and dispassionate. But on some level, is there a disconnect between social realism and social commentary and the undefinability of jazz? Is jazz anti-intellectual? Were many of the authors brought into the limelight by the movement, most famously Langston Hughes, too focused on the real, upon accurately portraying the complexities of the lives of black men and women at the time, to write about the unreal?
And then, which is the greater responsibility? Is an author better off by transporting his readers to another place, and through tricks and subtleties, getting them to think, Mr Joyce? Or should an author force the reader down, make them see the full tragedy and the full reality of the life they’re trying so hard to ignore, Mr Johnson? One has had the mileage, and another hasn’t, but which form of modernism, at the time, did more for black men and women in America – the transportations of jazz, or novels portraying social realism? Is quiet, irreverent humour the correct response to injustice, or does humour, as Mr Johnson's narrator claims, make man a clown?
(Many people have left. The cigar-smoker, at the back, starts a slow clap.)
Isn’t this too many questions? Do these questions lead us anywhere? But modernism is a constant questioning – isn’t it? And isn’t jazz, Mr Scott-Heron, a question too?
(The bar empties. Half an hour later, drunken London revellers stumble in, hoping for a drink.)
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor
Mr Gil Scott-Heron, who knows a lot about jazz and a certain something about fiction, defines jazz as ‘miscellaneous’ – that is, he refuses to define it. He talks about ‘real’ jazz music as the stuff you can never find in the record store, because you’re not sure exactly which section it should be found under. The essence of the undefinable; that which can survive Bruce Willis.
(Scattered laughter; one man, a cigar in his mouth, brays and claps his hands together, too loudly. A couple of people at the bar turn away, as if to make a point.)
Sweet, sad, irreverent rebellion of jazz. Playing all the wrong notes; playing all the right notes at the wrong times; singing the sorrow of a nation through the sorrow of an individual; wordless or wordful; the cataclysm of Rhapsody in Blue has it right, because it must be a rhapsody if it is to be anything; saying complex things using simple terms; is it right to say that it no longer belongs to any one race, or is that as sly and as self-serving as to claim that Martin Luther King does not belong to any one race?
Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, our first performer of the night, a very famous writer and a very fine singer, performing from one of his best-known works, Mr James Joyce.
The mything smile of me, my wholesole assumption, shes nowt me-without as weam twin herewithin, that I love like myselfish, like smithereens robinsongs, like juneses nutslost, like the blue of the sky if I stoop for to spy's between my whiteyoumightcallimbs.
(Scattered, unenthusiastic applause.)
He’s a joker, isn’t he? Big hand, ladies and gentlemen! Big hand! (Growing serious; this new facial expression seems forced and unnatural).
Now, is that jazz? The connection between the white European modernists and jazz as a natural part of the American civil rights movement, most notably the Harlem Renaissance or so-called ‘Black Modernism’ of the post-First-World-War period, has been made.
But take, say, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man;
In this respect the Negro is much in the position of a great comedian who gives up the lighter rôles to play tragedy. No matter how well he may portray the deeper passions, the public is loth to give him up in his old character; they even conspire to make him a failure in serious work, in order to force him back into comedy. In the same respect, the public is not too much to be blamed, for great comedians are far more scarce than mediocre tragedians; every amateur actor is a tragedian. However, this very fact constitutes the opportunity of the future Negro novelist and poet to give the country something new and unknown, in depicting the life, the ambitions, the struggles and the passions of those of their race who are striving to break the narrow limits of traditions. A beginning has already been made in that remarkable book by Dr. Du Bois, "The Souls of Black Folk."
Is that jazz? It’s an articulate piece of social commentary; and it’s intellectual, and dispassionate. But on some level, is there a disconnect between social realism and social commentary and the undefinability of jazz? Is jazz anti-intellectual? Were many of the authors brought into the limelight by the movement, most famously Langston Hughes, too focused on the real, upon accurately portraying the complexities of the lives of black men and women at the time, to write about the unreal?
And then, which is the greater responsibility? Is an author better off by transporting his readers to another place, and through tricks and subtleties, getting them to think, Mr Joyce? Or should an author force the reader down, make them see the full tragedy and the full reality of the life they’re trying so hard to ignore, Mr Johnson? One has had the mileage, and another hasn’t, but which form of modernism, at the time, did more for black men and women in America – the transportations of jazz, or novels portraying social realism? Is quiet, irreverent humour the correct response to injustice, or does humour, as Mr Johnson's narrator claims, make man a clown?
(Many people have left. The cigar-smoker, at the back, starts a slow clap.)
Isn’t this too many questions? Do these questions lead us anywhere? But modernism is a constant questioning – isn’t it? And isn’t jazz, Mr Scott-Heron, a question too?
(The bar empties. Half an hour later, drunken London revellers stumble in, hoping for a drink.)
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Freaks | Fiction | One of Us! One of Us!
Everyone; I’ve fallen in love with a freak. And by freak, of course, I mean ‘one in a million’, ‘utterly unique’. What? I’m shifting the cultural emphasis of the word! Shakespeare did it all the time! Refudiate that!
For a couple of months now, I’ve been wondering if there would ever come along a video-game that would, er, refudiate (damn it, it’s addictive) the now-famous Roger Ebert claim that the medium can never be art. Not, you know, wondering that hard. I have fiction-related stuff to be getting on with. That narrative form can presumably take care of itself.
But, still, it matters to me, so I was delighted to find the game that proves him wrong. It’s called Deadly Premonition, and it was made by a small Japanese studio, and then hawked over here a few months ago as a budget game. It got a couple of awful reviews for its dreadful appearance, unnecessary combat, odd design decisions, etc. Then some irritating hipsters began to declare that it was so bad it was good. Then some more irritating hipsters insisted that, actually, in spite of everything it was good in its own right. Now I’m planning to be the most irritating hipster of all.
Let me explain. Deadly Premonition is maybe fifty-percent ripping-off Twin Peaks – a coffee-sipping FBI agent travels to a surreal, pine-filled American town to investigate the death of a young girl – and fifty-percent ripping-off the quirkily-gory Japanese horror games of yesteryear, in particular one of the best (I’ll give you a clue. Deadly Premonition invokes it with mysterious rituals, a deranged killer who tends to pop out and force the hero to hide in nearby cupboards, and a clocktower. A Clocktower.). There’s actually also a little Japanese-style surrealism in there too; the gas-mask-wearing “mysterious capitalist” Harry Stewart, who whizzes about in a wheelchair and speaks only in benevolent proverbs through his rhyming butler, Michael, is pretty Murakami. Actually, has anyone ever taken the time to compare Murakami and Twin Peaks? Might be interesting.
What Deadly Premonition does have is a protagonist who’s pretty unique, and who actually gets to explore the problems and fascinations of the gaming medium without ever truly breaking the fourth wall. Y’see, ‘Agent Francis York Morgan’ is no ordinary FBI agent. In fact, judging from the way he shoves his badge into the face of every new person he meets and announces his full title, staccato, and the fact that he never contacts his agency, ever, we might be inclined to believe that he is no FBI agent, period. ‘York’, as everybody calls him, is a twitchy type with a habit of constantly raising his hand to his ear, as if there’s an earpiece there (there isn’t) and talking to his good buddy Zach, who nobody else can see.
Now Zach is an odd one; part imaginary friend, part spiritual guide, he sees what York sees and to some extent controls him. In the most intense moments, York asks him what he should do, in idleness, York chats to him about 80s movies, and often when he’s having a conversation with one of the townsfolk, York will mock them, in asides, to Zach. Nobody ever seems to notice this. York is obviously a nutter, a freak, though a well-intentioned one – but at the same time, Zach is us, the player; so we laugh at his jokes and warm to his position. The ‘normal’ people very quickly become the outsiders.
I should also mention that, in-game, York has to go around town questioning suspects, calling meetings, holding autopsies, and so on. But everyone in the town has their own daily routine set out for them (they genuinely do follow an intricate pattern around the map), and the game plays out in near-real time. So York, the outsider with nothing to occupy him, is often left with time on his hands and nothing to do, as the town plays itself out all around him?
So what does he do? He smokes endless cigarettes, for one, which do actually cause time to speed up. But he also plays games, sad, lonely games. You can take York down to the lake and fish, in the torrential rain, a happy little smile on his face. You can partake in solo races around the parking lots of the town, which he seems to have invented on the spot, as he never breaks the speed limit. You can even send out for fresh laundry, predict the future in your coffee, shave, and, most poignantly of all, walk up to residents’ houses, which you cannot enter, and ‘peek’ at them going about their daily lives. His freedom is beautiful, but also oppressive. There’s a genuine world, all around him, that he can participate in, but never fully enter. Sooner or later he’ll have to leave the little town and venture back into reality – we can only hope – an improved man. (There’s actually a great deal more of this in the game’s often bizarre and laughable plot. But I spoil not.)
This is the difference, in the end, between the majority of fiction and video games, or cinema and video games. Not this illusionary 'freedom' thing, but the fact that the two 'established' art forms allow us to remain apart, an observer to the last (in most cases - see my Second Person article). Video games take us further in; we become complicit in the action, and more fully immersed. It's far closer to 'pure' escapism. I'm often reminded of the danger implicit in the character of Jonathan in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, who daydreams so thoroughly that he drifts out of the narrative and vanishes entirely. If games are to take us further into the illusionary other-world, my point is, they'll have to work far harder to make sure we come out with a heightened sense of ourselves, not a lessened one. But it can be done. There's no reason it can't be done.
What’s that, Zach? Freaks? I don’t remember being asked to write anything about freaks.
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor
For a couple of months now, I’ve been wondering if there would ever come along a video-game that would, er, refudiate (damn it, it’s addictive) the now-famous Roger Ebert claim that the medium can never be art. Not, you know, wondering that hard. I have fiction-related stuff to be getting on with. That narrative form can presumably take care of itself.
Pictured: art. And ambiguous directorial motives.
But, still, it matters to me, so I was delighted to find the game that proves him wrong. It’s called Deadly Premonition, and it was made by a small Japanese studio, and then hawked over here a few months ago as a budget game. It got a couple of awful reviews for its dreadful appearance, unnecessary combat, odd design decisions, etc. Then some irritating hipsters began to declare that it was so bad it was good. Then some more irritating hipsters insisted that, actually, in spite of everything it was good in its own right. Now I’m planning to be the most irritating hipster of all.
Let me explain. Deadly Premonition is maybe fifty-percent ripping-off Twin Peaks – a coffee-sipping FBI agent travels to a surreal, pine-filled American town to investigate the death of a young girl – and fifty-percent ripping-off the quirkily-gory Japanese horror games of yesteryear, in particular one of the best (I’ll give you a clue. Deadly Premonition invokes it with mysterious rituals, a deranged killer who tends to pop out and force the hero to hide in nearby cupboards, and a clocktower. A Clocktower.). There’s actually also a little Japanese-style surrealism in there too; the gas-mask-wearing “mysterious capitalist” Harry Stewart, who whizzes about in a wheelchair and speaks only in benevolent proverbs through his rhyming butler, Michael, is pretty Murakami. Actually, has anyone ever taken the time to compare Murakami and Twin Peaks? Might be interesting.
What Deadly Premonition does have is a protagonist who’s pretty unique, and who actually gets to explore the problems and fascinations of the gaming medium without ever truly breaking the fourth wall. Y’see, ‘Agent Francis York Morgan’ is no ordinary FBI agent. In fact, judging from the way he shoves his badge into the face of every new person he meets and announces his full title, staccato, and the fact that he never contacts his agency, ever, we might be inclined to believe that he is no FBI agent, period. ‘York’, as everybody calls him, is a twitchy type with a habit of constantly raising his hand to his ear, as if there’s an earpiece there (there isn’t) and talking to his good buddy Zach, who nobody else can see.
Now Zach is an odd one; part imaginary friend, part spiritual guide, he sees what York sees and to some extent controls him. In the most intense moments, York asks him what he should do, in idleness, York chats to him about 80s movies, and often when he’s having a conversation with one of the townsfolk, York will mock them, in asides, to Zach. Nobody ever seems to notice this. York is obviously a nutter, a freak, though a well-intentioned one – but at the same time, Zach is us, the player; so we laugh at his jokes and warm to his position. The ‘normal’ people very quickly become the outsiders.
Pictured: also art.
I should also mention that, in-game, York has to go around town questioning suspects, calling meetings, holding autopsies, and so on. But everyone in the town has their own daily routine set out for them (they genuinely do follow an intricate pattern around the map), and the game plays out in near-real time. So York, the outsider with nothing to occupy him, is often left with time on his hands and nothing to do, as the town plays itself out all around him?
So what does he do? He smokes endless cigarettes, for one, which do actually cause time to speed up. But he also plays games, sad, lonely games. You can take York down to the lake and fish, in the torrential rain, a happy little smile on his face. You can partake in solo races around the parking lots of the town, which he seems to have invented on the spot, as he never breaks the speed limit. You can even send out for fresh laundry, predict the future in your coffee, shave, and, most poignantly of all, walk up to residents’ houses, which you cannot enter, and ‘peek’ at them going about their daily lives. His freedom is beautiful, but also oppressive. There’s a genuine world, all around him, that he can participate in, but never fully enter. Sooner or later he’ll have to leave the little town and venture back into reality – we can only hope – an improved man. (There’s actually a great deal more of this in the game’s often bizarre and laughable plot. But I spoil not.)
Pictured...actually, okay, this one's debatable.
This is the difference, in the end, between the majority of fiction and video games, or cinema and video games. Not this illusionary 'freedom' thing, but the fact that the two 'established' art forms allow us to remain apart, an observer to the last (in most cases - see my Second Person article). Video games take us further in; we become complicit in the action, and more fully immersed. It's far closer to 'pure' escapism. I'm often reminded of the danger implicit in the character of Jonathan in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, who daydreams so thoroughly that he drifts out of the narrative and vanishes entirely. If games are to take us further into the illusionary other-world, my point is, they'll have to work far harder to make sure we come out with a heightened sense of ourselves, not a lessened one. But it can be done. There's no reason it can't be done.
What’s that, Zach? Freaks? I don’t remember being asked to write anything about freaks.
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Live Performance | Fiction | Good Times With Weapons
Just a quick one today – and this is going to be closer to a rant than the high-quality literary journalism you’ve come to expect from this publication.
(Pause for laughter.)
Poets, I always think – with a glum touch of envy – come to live reading events equipped like a soldier in the SAS. Not even that. Better than that. Equipped like an eight-year-old child acting out the fantasy of what it must be like to be a soldier in the SAS. Crowd are sullen? Rattle out the short poems like an assault rifle! Hit them with the grenade of the haiku! Get in close for some hand-to-hand audience participation, then slug away with the slow, intensely personal shotgun-poem! Maybe even the lightsaber of the love-sonnet, for good measure. An armament for every occasion.
Fiction writers (and I’m talking about writers of short stories all the way up to novels, not the cunning flash-fiction and prose-poem guerrillas) come to live reading events holding one of those enormous, immensely heavy medieval weapons that was essentially a cow-sized length of metal with a handle. It only really does one thing, and its impact depends on your being able to use it as quickly as you possibly can, which is not very.
Many poets, like fiction writers, are bad at giving live readings. But poets get a chance to slink away faster if necessary, picking and choosing their poems, getting through their set with the speed and precision of a Black Hawk helicopter while fiction writers are forced to clunk their way through page after page of solid prose as elegantly as Henry VIII in his later-life suit of full plate armour.
It’s a serious problem. You may think your three-page short story with the killer twist is perfect for live readings, only to discover that the previous reader has bored the audience silly and they’re now beginning to shift in their seats as soon as you’ve cleared your breath. Suddenly, you don’t have nearly enough flexibility.
This is a problem which has, in the past, resulted in me ‘panic editing’ – skipping out the more descriptive sentences and even paragraphs because I’m afraid my audience is getting bored. In part, I do feel bad about that, almost as if I should hold my ground against my listeners - maybe even annunciate every word as clearly and slowly as I possibly can. But, hell, shouldn’t there be some way of giving live readings of fiction which is flexible and exciting, instead of feeling like a written medium awkwardly transposed into an oral form?
Part of the issue, I’m sure, is the nature of literary readings themselves. When Virgil gave a reading, he’d have had his audience cheering for their heroes, booing for the villains, and hurling dormice at him where they felt the story was getting a little far-fetched. Today’s culture of sitting politely and occasionally grunting appreciatively can kill the energy fast. Damn it, the whole thing’s far too civilised, too sedate; and, as Bruce Chatwin might argue, it begins to stagnate as a result.
What fiction writers need, more than ever, to put a spark back in their readings, is a crowd supplied with some rotten tomatoes, and a drunken heckler at the front who thinks he deserves to be listened too by everybody. Far, far better than a crowd supplied with a dull stupor, and an elderly gentleman at the front who’s going to raise his hand at the end and tell you exactly how your story relates to his time as an Angolan silk-trader.
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor
(Pause for laughter.)
Poets, I always think – with a glum touch of envy – come to live reading events equipped like a soldier in the SAS. Not even that. Better than that. Equipped like an eight-year-old child acting out the fantasy of what it must be like to be a soldier in the SAS. Crowd are sullen? Rattle out the short poems like an assault rifle! Hit them with the grenade of the haiku! Get in close for some hand-to-hand audience participation, then slug away with the slow, intensely personal shotgun-poem! Maybe even the lightsaber of the love-sonnet, for good measure. An armament for every occasion.
Pictured: a poet.
Fiction writers (and I’m talking about writers of short stories all the way up to novels, not the cunning flash-fiction and prose-poem guerrillas) come to live reading events holding one of those enormous, immensely heavy medieval weapons that was essentially a cow-sized length of metal with a handle. It only really does one thing, and its impact depends on your being able to use it as quickly as you possibly can, which is not very.
Many poets, like fiction writers, are bad at giving live readings. But poets get a chance to slink away faster if necessary, picking and choosing their poems, getting through their set with the speed and precision of a Black Hawk helicopter while fiction writers are forced to clunk their way through page after page of solid prose as elegantly as Henry VIII in his later-life suit of full plate armour.
What's that? All these military references are making you sort of queasy? All right, we'll stop.
It’s a serious problem. You may think your three-page short story with the killer twist is perfect for live readings, only to discover that the previous reader has bored the audience silly and they’re now beginning to shift in their seats as soon as you’ve cleared your breath. Suddenly, you don’t have nearly enough flexibility.
This is a problem which has, in the past, resulted in me ‘panic editing’ – skipping out the more descriptive sentences and even paragraphs because I’m afraid my audience is getting bored. In part, I do feel bad about that, almost as if I should hold my ground against my listeners - maybe even annunciate every word as clearly and slowly as I possibly can. But, hell, shouldn’t there be some way of giving live readings of fiction which is flexible and exciting, instead of feeling like a written medium awkwardly transposed into an oral form?
Part of the issue, I’m sure, is the nature of literary readings themselves. When Virgil gave a reading, he’d have had his audience cheering for their heroes, booing for the villains, and hurling dormice at him where they felt the story was getting a little far-fetched. Today’s culture of sitting politely and occasionally grunting appreciatively can kill the energy fast. Damn it, the whole thing’s far too civilised, too sedate; and, as Bruce Chatwin might argue, it begins to stagnate as a result.
What fiction writers need, more than ever, to put a spark back in their readings, is a crowd supplied with some rotten tomatoes, and a drunken heckler at the front who thinks he deserves to be listened too by everybody. Far, far better than a crowd supplied with a dull stupor, and an elderly gentleman at the front who’s going to raise his hand at the end and tell you exactly how your story relates to his time as an Angolan silk-trader.
Jon Ware
Fiction Editor
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