Retire the future archaeologist

Some good advice for writers who would like to get better and a comprehensive demolition of clichés by bad writers in William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well. As I point out every single damn time I do a post about good writing, forty years on from this book’s original publication, people are still making all the mistakes Zinsser pointed out as ancient and trite even at the time. Many a supposedly professional author or journalist is still allowing themselves to be “a writer lives in blissful ignorance that clichés are the kiss of death, if in the final analysis he leaves no stone unturned to use them, we can infer that he lacks an instinct for what gives language its freshness. Faced with a choice between the novel and the banal, he goes unerringly for the banal. His voice is the voice of a hack.”

Old never meets old

“There are many categories I’d be glad never to see again. One is the future archaeologist: “When some future archaeologist stumbles on the remains of our civilization, what will he make of the jukebox?” I’m tired of him already and he’s not even here. I’m also tired of the visitor from Mars: “If a creature from Mars landed on our planet he would be amazed to see hordes of scantily clad earthlings lying on the sand barbecuing their skins.” I’m tired of the cute event that just happened to happen “one day not long ago” or on a conveniently recent Saturday afternoon: “One day not long ago a small button-nosed boy was walking with his dog, Terry, in a field outside Paramus, N.J., when he saw something that looked strangely like a balloon rising out of the ground.” And I’m very tired of the have-in-common lead: “What did Joseph Stalin, Douglas MacArthur, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sherwood Anderson, Jorge Luis Borges and Akira Kurosawa have in common? They all loved Westerns.” Let’s retire the future archaeologist and the man from Mars and the button-nosed boy. Try to give your lead a freshness of perception or detail…

Towns situated in hills (or foothills) are nestled— I hardly ever read about an unnestled town in the hills— and the countryside is dotted with byways, preferably half forgotten. This is a world where old meets new— old never meets old.”

Ego and egotism

“A thin line separates ego from egotism. Ego is healthy; no writer can go far without it. Egotism, however, is a drag, and this chapter is not intended as a license to prattle just for therapy. Again, the rule I suggest is: Make sure every component in your memoir is doing useful work. Write about yourself, by all means, with confidence and with pleasure. But see that all the details—people, places, events, anecdotes, ideas, emotions—are moving your story steadily along… Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about anything at all.”

Style

“The common assumption is that the style is effortless. In fact the opposite is true: the effortless style is achieved by strenuous effort and constant refining. The nails of grammar and syntax are in place and the English is as good as the writer can make it… writing is the expression of every person’s individuality, and we know what we like when it comes along. Again, however, much can be gained by knowing what to omit. Clichés, for instance.”

Some advice for writers, from Satan

Photograph by Alistair Gentry

From Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895), about a failed writer who makes a deal with the devil in fin de siècle London. It’s actually a terrible, repetitive and badly structured book. Nor has Corelli’s prose style aged well. She was very popular at the time, but like many popular writers then and now she hardly bothered writing anything but complete shit once she’d found her audience, with more concern for quantity than quality. She also wrote a (likewise popular at the time) book inspired by Jack the Ripper but the only thing she succeeds at in The Lodger is making the Whitechapel murders seem like a total bore as well. Her not very fictionalised, undigested chunks of rant about the publishing industry are enjoyable, though, perhaps precisely because she was so looked down upon as a writer and took the opportunity to vent her spleen.

The only other slightly interesting thing about this novel is that Corelli invented the name “Mavis” for one of the book’s characters. Thanks to Corelli, “Mavis” was popular for a while before becoming indelibly associated with the kind of frumpy, prematurely aged, parochial, suburban English housewives who were mocked mercilessly by Monty Python and other satirists in the 1960s and 70s, and then by drag queens in the 80s.

“Whoever seeks to live by brain and pen alone is, at the beginning of such a career, treated as a sort of social pariah. Nobody wants him,—everybody despises him. His efforts are derided, his manuscripts are flung back to him unread, and he is less cared for than the condemned murderer in gaol. The murderer is at least fed and clothed,—a worthy clergyman visits him, and his gaoler will occasionally condescend to play cards with him. But a man gifted with original thoughts and the power of expressing them, appears to be regarded by everyone in authority as much worse than the worst criminal.”

“I had also tried, unsuccessfully, to dispose of a manuscript of my own,—a work of fiction which I knew had some merit, but which all the ‘readers’ in the publishing offices appeared to find exceptionally worthless. These ‘readers’, I learned, were most of them novelists themselves, who read other people’s productions in their spare moments and passed judgment on them. I have always failed to see the justice of this arrangement; to me it seems merely the way to foster mediocrities and suppress originality. Common sense points out the fact that the novelist ‘reader’ who has a place to maintain for himself in literature would naturally rather encourage work that is likely to prove ephemeral, than that which might possibly take a higher footing than his own.”

“Revenge is sweet!” he quoted sententiously—” I should recommend your starting a high-class half-crown magazine.” “Why?” “Can you ask? Just think of the ferocious satisfaction it would give you to receive the manuscripts of your literary enemies, and reject them! To throw their letters into the waste-paper basket, and send back their poems, stories, political articles and what not, with ‘Returned with thanks’ or ‘Not up to our mark’ type-written on the backs thereof! To dig knives into your rivals through the medium of anonymous criticism! The howling joy of a savage with twenty scalps at his belt would be tame in comparison to it! I was an editor once myself, and I know !” I laughed at his whimsical earnestness. “I daresay you are right”—I said—” I can grasp the vengeful position thoroughly! But the management of a magazine would be too much trouble to me,—too much of a tie.” “Don’t manage it! Follow the example of all the big editors, and live out of the business altogether,—but take the profits! You never see the real editor of a leading daily newspaper you know,—you can only interview the sub. The real man is, according to the seasons of the year, at Ascot, in Scotland, at Newmarket, or wintering in Egypt,—he is supposed to be responsible for everything in his journal, but he is generally the last person who knows anything about it. He relies on his ‘staff—a very bad crutch at times,—and when his ‘staff are in a difficulty, they get out of it by saying they are unable to decide without the editor. Meanwhile the editor is miles away, comfortably free from worry. You could bamboozle the public in that way if you liked.”

???est posts of 2014

Otherwise known as the now traditional lazy retrospective listicle

We all know by now don’t we my little blackguards my pretty roadside fartflowers of the friggingfields my dearest filthy fuckbirds yes we know yes yes yes oh yes that the top pages on the site are invariably James Joyce’s paeans to using the tradesman’s entrance and the translation of Hokusai’s tentacle hentai. Tens of thousands of you, constantly, from all over the world, day and night. You must have massive right arms by now (if you’re right handed).

But there is so much more to explore, and some of it doesn’t even involve sexual fetishes. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.

JANUARY

“What a shocking bad hat”, and other stupid 19th century memes.

The last word on Gamergate

… or at least the last word that isn’t from a “slopebrowed weaseldick”

The shrill conspiracy mongering and toxic threats of Gamergate [sic] are the side effects of Western culture, and US culture in particular, finally getting around to saying out loud to a certain type of obsolete man that the rest of us have come to a consensus in which degrading women and denying the rights of sexual or ethnic minorities to equal treatment is not acceptable. Nor should anybody have to endure constant insults and discrimination because of what they are or how they choose to live, or have to see constant, unrelenting and unapologetic images of people like themselves being treated as subhuman. Anyone who thinks that “social justice”– to use the Gamergoatfuckers favourite insult apart from saying they’ll rape or kill you– is a bad thing needs to sit down and shut the fuck up. It’s over, you lost, your time is coming to an end. You just don’t know it yet.

(Incidentally, this article by Arthur Chu intelligently traces back from the current debacle to one of recent history’s other big moments of raging, irrational masculine backlash against uppity minorities seen as threatening to the belief of certain straight white males that they have inalienable rights to the entirety of culture and society revolving around them and their interests; the disco backlash of the late 70s.)

All that said, it is with great pleasure that I present a link to a magnificent diatribe against this rabble of imbeciles/nacent terrorist group by former (American) footballer Chris Kluwe. I know! Not only is it a great piece of prose in its own right, being well structured and cogently argued despite his apparently incandescent anger, it also contains some beautifully vivid insults aimed at anybody who thinks a petty spat about reviews on a gaming site or merely pointing out examples of misogyny in a game you like justifies women (or anyone) being threatened with rape and death, or having to leave their home in fear for their safety. Read the article for context, obviously, but I couldn’t resist making a little shrine to such a delightful explosion of invective. I know nothing else about him but I love this man.

A tabulation of the insults in ‘Why #Gamergaters Piss Me The F*** Off‘

• “A blithering collection of wannabe Wikipedia philosophers, drunk on your own buzzwords, incapable of forming an original thought.”
• “… makes me wonder if lead paint is a key component of your diet”
• “Angry neckbeards”
• “Little Anne Franks, hiding in their basements from the PC Nazis and Social Justice Warrior brigades, desperately protecting the last shreds of “core gaming” in their unironically horrible Liveblog journals filled with patently obvious white privilege and poorly disguised misogyny.”
• “Paint-huffing shitgoblins”
• “Slopebrowed weaseldicks”
• “Basement-dwelling, cheetos-huffing, poopsock-sniffing douchepistol”
• “Slackjawed pickletits”
• “Hemorrhoidal gunt stains”
• “It makes me want to pick you all up collectively and shake you until your rectum leaks out what little brains you possess because YOU’RE SO FUCKING DUMB.”
• “For some reason you think sharing your toys with others is going to make the world explode.”
• “Social ineptitude and too much time spent picturing yourself as the only creature that matters in the universe.”
• “… the mouthvomits you like to pretend are logical trains of thought.”
• “… some script-kiddie /b/tards and conspiracy-nut celebrities gleefully using you as a smokescreen for misogynistic hate.”
• “… apparently you pestilent little toads can’t imagine the concept of friendship.”
• “You don’t even see the complete idiocy of this idea because you’re too busy wargleblargling your face into your keyboard.”
• “Feel free to direct some of that naivete at the actual media, whose job is to cover things that actually matter.”
• “Misogynistic mouthbreathers who get off on making rape threats”
• “Misogynistic creeps”
• “Misogynistic cretins in all their mouthbreathing glory.”
• “Basement-dwelling sweatbeast”
• “I hope you all, every #Gamergater, picks up a debilitating case of genital warts.”

“MUST I write?”

Writers on writing

Some good advice for aspiring writers from successful writers, who are usually far better sources of such guidance than all the writing gurus who write nothing but books about how to write. These are all extracted from Shaun Usher’s splendid and beautiful Letters of Note book, based upon the always interesting and inspiring site of the same name in which the famous are humanised and the unknown are honoured.

Ernest Hemingway: “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit.”

Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934:

“You can study Clausewitz in the field and economics and psychology and nothing else will do you any bloody good once you are writing. We are like lousy damned acrobats but we make some mighty fine jumps, bo, and they have all these other acrobats that won’t jump.

For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live. All write [sic] but if you write enough and as well as you can there will be the same amount of masterpiece material (as we say at Yale). You can’t think well enough to sit down and write a deliberate masterpiece and if you could get rid of Seldes and those guys that nearly ruined you and turn them out as well as you can and let the spectators yell when it is good and hoot when it is not you would be all right.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.”

Flannery O’Connor, responding in 1961 to a professor of English. O’Connor felt that the professor was over-analyzing:

“If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.”

Raymond Chandler, taking exception to an overzealous copy editor in 1947:

“By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have. I think your proofreader is kindly attempting to steady me on my feet, but much as I appreciate the solicitude, I am really able to steer a fairly clear course, provided I get both sidewalks and the street between.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, responding to an aspiring poet in 1903:

“You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you ) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple, “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.”

Flaubert… where you from and what you on?

“Paris will become a winter garden; espaliered fruit trees on the boulevard. The Seine filtered and warm – an abundance of fake gemstones – a profusion of gilding – the houses lit up – the light will be stored, for there are bodies that have this property, such as sugar, the flesh of certain molluscs and Bologna phosphorus. The fronts of the houses will be made to be daubed with this phosphorescent substance, and their radiance will light the streets.”

Visions of a lovely biotech future Paris from Gustave Flaubert’s unfinished draft of Bouvard and Pécuchet, the novel he was working on when he died in 1880. I suspect he may have had more than one sip of the laudanum on the night he wrote this. If it was the 1980s instead of the 1880s I’d say Ecstasy. It has that kind of E’d up I LOVE YOU SO MUCH MAN demented glowstick exuberance.

Photo by Alistair Gentry.

At home nowhere

Nostalgic (and false) alternative*:

To put down roots, to rediscover or fashion your roots, to carve the place that will be yours out of space, and build, plant, appropriate, millimetre by millimetre, your ‘home’: to belong completely in your village, knowing you’re a true inhabitant of the Cévennes, or of Poitou.

Or else to own only the clothes you stand up in, to keep nothing, to live in hotels and change them frequently, and change towns, and change countries; to speak and read any one of four or five languages; to feel at home nowhere, but at ease almost everywhere.

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces (1974)

* To a previous section about the supposed utopian, idyllic lifestyle of living in a French village.

I’ve noted before that this blog now has so much content it’s able to keep on rolling along without me, and more or less regardless of whether I post anything or not. I’m always conscious, though, of when I’ve left a considerable gap. Throughout September and October I’ve been working and travelling, travelling to work, doing what I’ll call for lack of a better term my day job, which is being an artist, performer and writer. Some bloggers would turn this into a huge quantity of filler for their site, but personally I prefer to be present and really live it instead of always seeing and doing everything with “I’m blogging this” glasses on.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that this quote from the book I had with me during this peripatetic period will suffice as an explanation of where I’ve been. It serendipitously summed up what my life has been like over the past ten years, and especially this autumn. Far from being nostalgic or false, the second paragraph quoted here is me, absolutely. Even the four or five languages part, I’m afraid. It’s not as cool as it might sound– in fact it can take a huge toll on your relationships and your health, but it’s true nonetheless. My book Career Suicide covers this kind of stuff in much more detail, if you’re at all interested.

Say yes I will yes to Bloomsday

Even his lapels are filthy.

Today, the 16th of June, is Bloomsday: the annual celebration of the life and work of James Joyce in general, and of his landmark Modernist novel Ulysses in particular. It’s a landmark in the literary sense and also in the geographical sense, a dauntingly huge and dense wodge of cellulose. If ever a book was better read weightlessly as an e-book, Ulysses is it. June 16th 1904 is the Dublin day described in hyperreal detail by the book’s protagonist Leopold Bloom, and re-enacted by Joyce fanatics every year since 1954.

The 16th of June was also significant as the date of Joyce’s first outing with the woman who would become his beloved wife, Nora Barnacle. So why don’t you celebrate Bloomsday by starting on Ulysses if you haven’t already? To be honest you might regret it and give up in frustration as many have done before, but you definitely won’t regret trying. But first, how about this:

IT’S ONLY THE BEST COMPLETEST MOST BROWNSEXFUL PAGE OF SHEER FILTH WRITTEN BY JAMES JOYCE TO HIS WIFE ON THE WHOLE BLOODY INTERNET.

https://adoxoblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/fμckbird-and-jim-james-joyces-letters-to-nora-barnacle

It’s been linked from Tumblr, Reddit and even by those depraved little naughty farties at The Telegraph. The readership counts for the page are already predictably massive, as they are every year on this day.

And of course there’s also Kate Bush’s magnificent and typically loopy-sexy tribute to Ulysses: The Sensual World. A few years ago she finally released the song as originally intended, with quotes from Joyce. These had been forbidden by the Joyce estate in the late 80s. But I still prefer this version, if only because I don’t think there are enough pastiches of Joycean prose in the world. I think it’s more fun and more in the spirit of Joyce to make it up– as Bush was forced to– than to just quote it.

Look! Kate’s raided the costume box at the local amateur dramatic society again, now she’s sashaying through a forest fire and hopping around like a scary crow and being all sexy and whatnot. Not pictured: police search team and duty psychiatrist.

Happy Bloomsday my hot little boys and girls, you brownarsed blackguards, you whores of the hedge.

Update: Here’s a reading of the original Molly Bloom soliloquy from Ulysses, to which Kate Bush was referring.

Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s AD 99

In 1973 archaeologists digging at Vindolanda– the former site of a Roman fort, about halfway along Hadrian’s Wall in the North of England– uncovered a store of letters and files on wooden tablets. Between about AD 85 and 122 the wall was being built to mark the farthest extent of the Roman empire. Boudicca and the Iceni had kicked off and destroyed several Roman cities only a few decades previously, and the tribal people of Britain were still far from pacified or assimilated, but Hadrian made the strategic decision to physically isolate the Picts who lived in what is now called Scotland because they were even more troublesome. Most of the tablets seem to date from roughly this frontier period. Ironically the documents may have been preserved because they were dumped out periodically with the rubbish, which led to them being buried instead of taken away or lost.

Remarkable as their survival is, what’s really amazing about them is the way they connect us so intimately to people who’ve been dead for about two thousand years. They weren’t concerned with Imperial policy except in a pragmatic way, and for the most part they weren’t philosophising about huge historical issues. They weren’t Ciceros or Caesars. They were exactly like us. Soldiers wrote racist assessments of the spear-chucking natives. They invited their sister for a birthday piss up. They complained. Their mums sent them underpants and socks to keep them warm in Britain’s horrible climate.

These translations and images are from Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier: Vindolanda and its People, by Alan K. Bowman, published by the British Museum Press.

The Britons

… the Britons are unprotected by armour. There are very many cavalry. The cavalry do not use swords, nor do the wretched Britons mount in order to throw javelins.

(The writer calls the natives Brittunculi, which is a contemptuous diminutive form of the more proper Brittones.)

Memorandum on the Britons.

Hyaku-monogatari

Edo horror stories

The hyaku-monogatari (“one hundred stories”) were told in Edo-era Japan when people came together to exchange kaidan, stories of ghosts, monsters, mysterious (fushigi) happenings, and frightening (osoroshiki) characters. This gatherings, hyaku-monogatari kaidan kai, can be conceived of as a kind of market for exchanging stories. These might be real (or claimed) personal experiences, stories people knew from elsewhere, or a story of their own devising. There may not always have been exactly one hundred stories; as in English, saying there are “a hundred” or “hundreds” of something can be deliberate hyperbole, just a way of saying there are more than you can easily count. Stories of mysterious and frightening things (mononoke) were and are indeed endless in number.

Kami-kiri (“Hair-cutter”) yōkai from ‘Hyakkai Zukan’ by Sawaki Suushi, 1737.

Wakan kaidan hyōrin, 1718:

“First light one hundred wicks with blue paper around them, and hide all weapons. Now, for each frightening tale, extinguish one wick… when all one hundred flames have been extinguished, a monster (bakemono) will most definitely appear.”

Hide all weapons! The theatricality of the slowly gathering darkness as the tellers vie with each other to tell the scariest story speaks for itself, I think.  The ritualistic repetition also plays a part in creating an immersive experience in which we allow ourselves to be scared. Try it! In fact I already used the techniques of the hyaku-monogatari kaidan kai directly in my own live show about occult stories and supernatural folk beliefs in Tudor England, Magickal Realism.

The popularity of the (by definition ephemeral and oral) hyaku-monogatari also contributed to a publishing boom as the best stories began to be collected and made available in print, making an enthusiasm for monsters and supernatural beings (妖怪 yōkai) the national Japanese pastime that it remains today. As for the yōkai themselves, it’s a huge subject with no shortage of English-language resources available online.

Source: Pandemonium and Parade– Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai by Michael Dylan Foster.

PS Semi-related, daft and entertaining, Denki Groove– モノノケダンス (Mononoke Dance):