Category: creative writing M.A. (Page 3 of 5)

Keeping the Aspidistra Flying – Self Promotion

October 21, 2014 / / 0 Comments

aspidistra

Will Self paraded his verbal skills with a reading at NTU on Saturday which proved that there is some content behind the bravado, solipism, debauchery and sheer profligacy. Looking at SELF’s career it hard to find an entry point such is the sheer weight of verbiage trundled ad nauseum across every promotional page available. The key to SELF is he a metropolitan journalist’s nark…forever providing copy whether the journos need it or not ( indeed his wife is a celebrated journalist which rather apt) although even she must tire of the SELF promotion.

The evening was a success and interviewer Georgina Lock who an able inquisitor stood up to the verbal battering-ram. SELF proved that his latest novel ‘Shark’ is an entertaining if rambling tale of drowning shark-food and the big theme of psychological trauma being associated with BIG events i.e. wars. A entertaining if not completely proven thesis based on what looked like a fair amount of internet-trawling and digging deep into R.D. Laing’s historical record. In case we missed these allusions Mr Self flagged them up for us and we mostly swallowed it apart from one punter doing an impression of Groucho era SELF who declared it all ‘horse manure’ which a little out of date surely shit would have done. I will definitely pick up a copy when it remaindered and top marks to the designers for wrapping it in a parody of a SELF cover from 1998. Lest we forget this is the second part of a very important trilogy which redefining modernism/postmodernism and the kitchen sink before the death of the novel in 2019 (SELF). As SELF said it the only trade he has banging out the old tome and full marks for keeping going young man..sorry middle aged man.

Now where this all gets truly unctuous is in his recent attack on Orwell….now I don’t give a shit for his arguments but I do disapprove of such obvious crap profile-raising being launched via the BBC which was the location of some of Mr Blair’s finest work. That and the weaselly way the tirade launched just in time for Xmas oh sorry just in time for the book launch tour before Xmas….it stinks like some of the dialogue did on Saturday but that another matter.

SELF isn’t the best novelist in Great Britain let alone Ireland but he is a master of SELF-seeking attention grabbing in that he a clear master. I came to Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying by chance through some separate research and remembered reading it fondly..

 

let Eric Blair have the last word…note to SELF…could do better….

Keep the Aspidistra Flying 1936 page 2.

But it was the snooty ‘cultured’ kind of books that he hated the worst. Books of criticism and belles-lettres. The kind of thing that those moneyed young beasts from Cambridge write almost in their sleep–and that Gordon himself might have written if he had had a little more money. Money and culture! In a country like England you can no more be cultured without money than you can join the Cavalry Club.

Coda: SELF grew up in Hampstead…did PPE at Oxford smashed out of his tree and got a third.. sailed back to fame in the environs of Greek Street and Fleet Street yup you got it..spoilt rich kid now lives in oppulant surroundings of Stockwell not Vauxhall as ‘downmarkedly’ claims but then as he said he lies a lot.

 

Daily Short: Mark Strand – Dog life.

October 21, 2014 / / 0 Comments

babystrandsudeen

A strange one this and no mistake. Mark Strand who had arisen as poet in Sarah Jackson’s lecture is now discovered lurking in Shapard and Thomas’s 1986 anthology of the then recently termed,’Sudden fiction’ which now typically   called ‘Flash Fiction’.

The anthology I picked up in 1989 when fairly obsessed with post BASS* 1986 American Literature and many of the same individuals such as Carver, Barthelme, Coover, Wolff, Paley are present here

Dog Life is a slight, amusing yet somehow ephemeral take on male fidelity (I presume unless one meant to read the protagonist’s confessions as surreal realism and he actually was a dog). The male in bed (echoes of David Belbin’s Games in Bed here!) confesses that he formally a dog with dog-like instincts ….it hard not to read the list of conquests as anything other than male boasting and the female’s reaction of going back to sleep and forgetting about it just about sums up the tale.

Strand in this period up to 1985 had stopped writing poetry for ten years and the collection evidences a talent somewhat at sea by this example. Amusing but hardly on a par with his deep and melancholic poetry. He didn’t produce another volume of short stories nor a novel but did complete some children’s fiction and art criticism before returning to poetry in 1990. His comment in a interesting group of afterwords by the authors is oblique and not entirely convincing. He speaks of sudden fiction as ‘runtish’ which maybe sums up his feelings for it. I was no more convinced by his afterword than his story.

Far more significant is the development post 1986 (with the undoubted extra boost of the internet) of Sudden Fiction into Flash Fiction and the ensuing ‘movement’. A quick web search on ‘flash fiction’ shows that what was a curiosity in 1986 has bloomed into a veritable sea of algae with ‘Flash Fiction Day’, Competitions and even its own Wikipedia definition.

For what it’s worth it really isn’t anything more than very short pieces…rather than normal short stories. In my opinion it isn’t really a container for prose-poems that separate but can overlap if a poet feels it fits the term.

For me I come back to runtish….do I want to be a runt?

*Also the BASS (Best American Short Stories) 1986 edition edited by Carver probably a better place to look for where the entire short story was at this point.

Daily Short: Joy Williams – Dimmer

October 20, 2014 / / 3 Comments

Joy Williams – Dimmer introduced by Daniel Alarcon

from Object Lessons: The Paris Review presents the short story (Heinemann 2012)

joyw

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6303/the-art-of-fiction-no-223-joy-williams

This is the hardest Daily Short story so far. Not only have I never read Joy Williams before I also had no idea of her background so the interview above, which is excellent, has filled in the gaps. I started this Daily Shorts idea confidently expecting to read and comment on a short story a day. That seems unobtainable now. Maybe one every two days maximum is a better target. ‘Dimmer’ is a challenge from the get go. Long, maybe closer to a novella, and stylistically wonderful but breaking most creative writing workshop rules from the start. Thirty-eight pages (roughly) of galloping, imagistic and totally riveting prose in which the main P.O.V. character ‘Mal Vester’, as Daniel Alcorn says in his introduction above, never speaks.

It is a virtuoso performance by a skilled narrator at top of her game. A product of Iowa MFA, who was in the same year as Carver and Andre Dubus (she actually worked with Carver’s first wife Maryann as a waitress) it was for me a revelation. I instinctively, perhaps the Australian setting, thought of Nick Cave ( son of a teacher man to paraphrase Dusty Springfield ) or rather I thought of Cave reading Williams which makes sense.

There is a luminosity to the writing. It is packed with images that haunt like the father’s boots ‘hanging’ way before we find out he hangs himself in prose which scrupulously accurate yet not sensationalist but conveys the ‘meat’ of the action. The mother’s death in a shark attack is conveyed in one line about a pool of blood, big as a paper plate, floating shore-ward nothing more perfectly capturing the moment.

It slowly builds a picture of a ‘simple’ boy growing into adulthood who too ‘feral’ for the small Australian town he orphaned in. He is an instinctive, animalistic individual, almost an ‘Enfant Sauvage’. In a blisteringly dry piece of writing he is shipped to America and encounters another female ‘Wild Child’ driving for a living before the story disappears along with the beach-side dwelling they occupy in a cloud of questions. The lack of resolution is well handled clouding our knowledge of who responsible for the child-man and perhaps suggesting that nobody ever was.

Online forums suggest many readers regard her story as ‘experimental’ and difficult which I didn’t really see although maybe the length as mentioned above is beyond short story maybe a ‘Long Short’. As the story was published by George Plimpton in 1969 it very early for Williams and I have yet to encounter her later collections of short stories or novels. It may be stylistically different for that reason. It certainly feels more modern than 1969 and, but for some of the flight cabin details, could have been written yesterday.

In the interview she is wonderfully dismissive and grumpy…

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensi- bility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes which is Wallace Stevens, I think. As a form, the short story is hardly divine, though all excel- lent art has its mystery, its spiritual rhythm. I think one should be able to do a lot in less than twenty pages. I read a story recently about a woman who’d been on the lam and her husband dies and she ends up getting in her pickup and driving away at the end, and it was all about fracking, damage, dust to the communities, people selling out for fifty thousand dollars. It was so boring.

She recommends DeLillo as truly ‘avant-garde’ and two Russian contemporary (I presume) authors as follows…

DeLillo is first among them. A writer of tremendous integrity and presence. Mao II is an American classic. So, too, is White Noise, though it’s been taught to splinters. His later works are fierce, demanding. His work can be a little cold perhaps. And what’s wrong with that? The cold can teach us many things. Coetzee I admire very much. On a lighter note, the Russians. Vladimir Sorokin and his crazy Ice trilogy. The short-story writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

ill nature

I find her tone one I can trust and her involvement in Eco Politics and her ‘Earth First’ comments striking a chord. Ultimately she believes in a  certain ‘transcendentalism’ but not one bound by a particular religion. She is beautifully wary of formula and ends thus…

Yes, yes. Freedom is most desirable. Of course none of us are free. Our flaws enslave us, the things we love. And through technology we’re becoming more known to everyone but ourselves. What’s that phrase about certain writers being what the culture needs? Most writers just write about what the culture recognizes.

She is also interviewed for Bookslut here: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_11_013681.php

Overheard: The Anthology – Oral Literature?

October 19, 2014 / / 0 Comments

9781907773266frcvr.indd

http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=9781907773266

Yesterday we were treated to a fine reading from selected authors in Jonathan Taylor’s 2013 anthology ‘Overheard’ as part of the Nottingham Festival of Words.

David Belbin, Claire Baldwin and editor Jonathan taylor himself read their stories and there was a brief discussion afterwards where Jonathan’s comments tallied nicely with neglected English Short Story master A.E.Coppard’s foreward to his Collected Stories from 1951. I have scanned the introduction and images below.

coppard1coppard2

 

Daily Short: John Romano – King of the Wild Frontier

October 15, 2014 / / 0 Comments 
wristwatch

Available online here:
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/king-of-the-wild-frontier-0000346-v21n6

I recently picked up the Fiction issue of Vice magazine. http://www.vice.com/magazine/21/6

v21n6-cover-72

Recommend these annual issues all of which are available online.

They have a tendency to lean toward the Lad/Ladette market but contain some interesting works. Especially from the film/fiction crossover area. This year’s issue also contains Nabokov’s unpublished Lolita screenplay and an essential Robert McKee interview…interesting stuff.

Amongst the more than interesting is this short story with photographs by Martin Parr ( allegedly… I cannot see the Pigs Head being in his style maybe more a late editorial decision to ‘Horse’s Head the story which unnecessary).

John Romano is a scriptwriter for TV (Hill Street Blues to his credit) and film and has a resume that includes Lincoln Lawyer (with Michael Connolly) and is an ex English Professor (Columbia)  with one academic tome on Charles Dickens and Realism to his name. So no slouch and boy can he write…

Originally from Newark N.J. he lives and breathes the classic New Jersey Crime Family story and the wealth of detail is such in this short that it hard to tell if memoir or fiction or a rich mixture of both. Nothing is forced in the telling it glides as smoothly as the battered lime-green Buick Riviera which literally delivers the body-punch of the story and then its knock-out blow. I can say no more without giving the game away but please read this story. I cannot find reference to any more fiction online or otherwise and I suspect J.R. has a novel up his sleeve somewhere. This is brilliant writing in anybody’s book and would be a more worthy winner of the BBC short prize than the whole shortlist. He is presently working on a film for TV on the American Taliban about John Walker LIndh that Steve Earle sung about on Jerusalem…should be some film.

This is classic american writing at its best. There is not a word out of place and small working-class folk tales assume a menacing import only to be turned literally upside down. If I ever write something worthwhile it would have to go some to equal this.

Romano’s daughter is also a novelist/painter…..so it’s a family affair.

This is how ya do it.

For a fascinating insight into the literary qualities at work in American TV go here:  http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/forums/art_of_prime_time.html

http://videolectures.net/mitworld_romano_ptt/

Poetry: A bad day in the comfort zone?

October 14, 2014 / / 0 Comments

comfort

 

There have been three Monday lectures on the course and two of them have been by poets and in addition a first Poetry tutorial session with Rory Waterman ( I have since requested changing to part-time so that will be last Poetry session until next year). I have had a hefty poetic boot up the arse so to speak which just as well as rest of this first year will be dedicated mostly to short stories in David Belbin’s fiction class:-)

Sarah Jackson’s session was interesting although it did seem to focus on the psychological aspect of writing with Freud mentioned several times. I enjoyed reading Mark Strand again and have realised that as well as the volume ‘Darker’ I have a ‘Selected Poems’ by him.

strand

 

Rory Waterman’s first session was interesting with a focus on a 12 line poem. Mine so old it was virtually redundant to workshop but an interesting experience.

For my influential single volume of poetry I selected Raymond Carver’s Fires and Carver will probably be my selected writer to focus on in the Theory and Practice assignment due 1st December unless some new revelation occurs.

fires

 

Finally Andrew Taylor gave this week’s lecture on ‘Literary Influence’ which was very interesting even if he did insist on attacking us with J.H.Prynne’s  obscurantisms 🙂

I hadn’t read Prynne..I’d purchased and shelved in the ‘outside my comfort zone’ section alongside Reading, Olsen, Zukovsky, Harwood, McDiarmid and White…i.e. read at a later date…in my case very much later. But I am perservering so that at least if I reject the Cambridge School a second time it with some insight rather than just blind prejudice. On first read through I can see the debt to McDiarmid (archaic glacial verbiage) and the Objectivists clarity of language and layout BUT…and it is a big BUT…I still do not warm to it. Never have…something academic and stoney at its (mostly white middle class male ) heart. I always felt it was poetry like trainspotting. The plethora of footnotes and referencing ( I almost include Geoffrey Hill here too) I find too self-referential ..too clubby and knowing in a way. As if it designed to be obscure to preserve its integrity which a concept I simply do not buy into. Like Cobbing and the Concrete poets I suspect that half of it good half of it nonsense obscured by clouds. Prepared to persevere though.

Daily Short: Lionel Shriver – Kilifi Creek

October 3, 2014 / / 0 Comments

killifi

This review has been revised. I felt it was too easy to criticise a writer on one piece of work with no ‘back-story’. I have done that and for me it didn’t get any better in fact….

Lionel Shriver – Killifi Creek

I have now re-read the original short story and I have flicked through a copy of ‘We need to talk about Kevin’. All I can say is I even uneasier and less impressed with the short story than before and the Kevin book..I read the last chapter to see what the tiresome hype on cover would reveal and…..well nothing. Sensationalist kid uses bow and arrows instead of a gun ending. Why god knows as if a kid in emotional distress would be organised and calm enough to fire a bow accurately in such a situation let alone massacre a group. The device of the kid deliberately setting a trap when the majority of these student shootings spur of the moment left me totally cold. No I will not read the book. It well written as in reporter turns writer well. We are however not talking Charles Dickens here.

Having read the few online interviews and Shriver’s ungracious arrogant acceptance speech for the Orange Prize which apparently is doing it for women everywhere by being as obnoxious as any man I can honestly say I actually dislike this writer and will not be reading her again.

The list of subjects she mentions in one gloriously ingratiating ‘interview’ with a ‘friend’ suggested that the author was retreading news stories as sensationalist fiction…Kevin was the only one that took. Take another minor news story (admitted to in interview) about a faulty bannister rail and a premeditated riffing on every wholesome middle class parents worst nightmare, the gap year fatality, and we have Killifi Creek (don’t you just love the way Kill in Killifi echoes the theme).

In purely writing terms the short story not bad I just read better and probably Shriver has written better. The cardboard cut-out Henleys don’t do it for me. They read like a typical ex-pat Yank who so British now but actually isn’t (tax reasons for spending half a year abroad?) with ‘ponytail’ man being just one of many false notes. The story is not factually accurate ..it derives ‘probably’ from a student drowning on the real Killifi BEACH..which totally sand as is ‘probably’ most of the nearby creek that nobody would swim in (let alone ‘Africans’as the story rather arrogantly and subtly racistly suggests) as the current too strong. All this I gleaned in ten minutes on the internet as did the author I am presuming. Way after the actual period she spent in Nairobi and yes I believe she may have visited the area but it doesn’t heighten the realism which Jilly Cooperish at times especially in the simpering sexuality misfires.

The panel chose a former Orange prize winner who high profile and bolshy..over the rest of a strong list thus rewarding arrogance over craft and ignoring better home-grown writers for the ‘British National’ award. Jon MacGregor didn’t make the shortlist which suggests that the judges listened to the radio abridgements rather than reading the actual story which has a marshmallow soft middle section which awful….drowning woman muses on mathematical equations yeah just like insane murderous teenagers choose Robin Hood as a role model…it just ain’t real to me. The abridgement is better which suggest the BBC back room better judges.

No matter the author well versed in publicity and PR rolls out for the BBC and all stakeholders including one presumes a heavyweight American publisher so everybody happy. It just the art of the short story that the loser…left high and dry up a creek without a paddle here unless you like your profundity ‘lite’.

For anybody seeking inspiration like Shriver’s at short notice when a competition deadline looming try looking at previous book covers by first-time novelists who you puffed in a previous Guardian book of the year special..never know it could help….better still ignore Shriver and read Pochada.

pochada

Daily Short: Bernard MacLaverty – A Foreign Dignitary

October 3, 2014 / / 0 Comments 
friendship
In 'Friendship: 12 masterpieces of short fiction' for John McCarthy, Ryan Publishing Co. Ltd; First Edition edition (1990)
Also collected in:
"A Foreign Dignitary,in Best Short Stories 1989, edited by GilesGordon and David Hughes. 1989; as The Best English Short Stories 1989, 1989.

maclaverty
Walking the Dog and Other Stories. 1994.

A tricky one this. I have read quite a few of MacLaverty’s stories but not this one and was unprepared for this particular tale. A lot of his shorts revolve around Northern Irish themes so the sudden departure to ‘Non-Place’ as one reviewer terms it a jolt. The tale was spun in 1988 and first published in The New Statesman which is significant. It was later anthologised in a best of and the collection ‘Walking the Dog’ from 1994. In 2002 MacLaverty submitted a radio script of the story to BBC Radio Scotland. I do not know if it was aired.

1988 was two years into John McCarthy’s captivity. It was also the year Bush elder started to run for presidency, the Soviets started to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran stopped fighting. If any of these turbulent events affected the author is unknown but the fact that it selected for the ‘Friendship’ anthology and first published in New Statesman suggests it an advowedly ‘political’ fable.

I say fable because it a strange story. A ‘foreign dignitary’ of the title, whose manners suggest British rather than European background or from any ‘Western’ power, arrives in a ‘foreign’ city. He is welcomed and entertained by his male counterparts and two events take place. He is offered a ‘virgin’ as a gift for his personal pleasure and he is shown a barbaric means of imprisoning political dissenters (including children) whilst all other crimes are dealt with by reason and discussion.

A Voltaire like political fable? The offering of the child is sickeningly simplistic and believable but the incarceration of political prisoners in steel coffins that repeatedly smashed with a hammer when they disobey is a little blunt to say the least. It like a written version of a Polish animation of a boot stamping on a head ad infinitum. The message clear. Maybe it was written with the hostage situation in Lebanon in mind but MacLaverty has enough political demons closer to his actual home to fuel the tale too. The title story of ‘Walking the Dog’ concerns a man abducted in Northern Ireland.

The story is unforgettable and striking and probably a one-off in his overall career. It skilfully sets up the reader through the mild-mannered Manadarin’s charming habit of writing a letter to his wife. This gentle introduction sets up the blunt horrors to come. As for the ‘other’. The sense of a slightly all-encompassing’heathen’ nature of the barbarians is just this side of racist suggesting a kind of people ‘not like us’ …i.e. Eastern,or Islamic. Nowhere is this stated but the contrast is clear. I think if the tale had not crashed to the rapid and circling conclusion as he quietly writes a letter home as the child is tortured it would have become to complex to succeed.

A short parable that leaves the reader puzzled, sickened and possibly relieved it not longer. I felt bemused after reading.

Daily Short: Ron Hansen- Playland – 1989

October 3, 2014 / / 0 Comments

hansen

I had the idea of reading at least one short story a day. It sort of working and I have managed three so far this week. The first on Tuesday was Ron Hansen’s ‘Funland’ from ‘Nebraska’ a collection of short stories published in 1989. I purchased it at the time because of the cover which I later found out was a photograph by Wim Wenders. No apparent connection between the two artists just a lucky graphic design intervention I guess although film does connect to this story.

The collection contains a series of historical re-inventions or ‘factions’ that whilst starting from historical certainties and research lift off into unknown territories.  The collection was published after several more ‘historically’ accurate novels including the ‘Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford’ now a movie with Brad Pitt. Hansen went on to write several novels on historical themes. He is now the  Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. Professor at Santa Clara University – San Francisco. Teaching fiction and screen-writing.

http://www.scu.edu/cas/english/faculty/hansen.cfm

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Source: http://www.playlandspeedway.com/history.html 

‘Playland’ is a classic case in point. When first read in 1990 with no internet there was no chance of quickly and easily searching out images (see above) from the ‘real’ Playland or reading anything about its existence. Now I can,and whilst not spoiling the story (which I read first), it does provide an intriguing backdrop and filter on the writer’s intentions. The theme park started life as a dog track run by gangsters after the second world war and this adds a sheen to the tale which revolves around an  ‘innocent’ post-war couple. The story is seemingly set post or during WW2 as the cast mention various ‘Talkie’ stars like Peter Lorre and Betty Grable .

The introductory pages however create a ‘paradisical’ indeed a veritable Eden from the Depression created some time after  1918. This rather strange as the story suggests it long established as  the story unfolds in a vaguely 1920s to 1950s neverworld, perhaps deliberately. The real Playland was a more humdrum affair built in the 1940s and probably a place Hansen visited as a child.

The exotic and unreal nature of the tale is heightened by the landing of a  seaplane (just after a pelican!) carrying the ‘evil’ and rich protagonist. It is like something straight out of The Great Gatsby. He is the female ‘lead’s’ cousin (I say lead because the whole story so ‘filmic’) who is a sexual predator and  the essential ingredient in the plot’s progression and the final denouement. The atmosphere suggests Hansen playing with the dreams rather than the reality of Nebraskan lives.The imagery and lighting throughout is so dreamlike the whole story could be read as existing on a film set.

The structure is straightforward. The ending slightly open-ended and bristling with perverse sexuality. A very good short story not quite as draw-dropping as the tour-de-force ‘Wickedness’ that opens the collection and was featured in Tobias Wolf’s Picador anthology of Contemporary American Stories in 1993 but still very good.

This short is a  good read and suggests that ‘reality’ can be manipulated and used as suits even if twenty years later your reader can pick apart the reality from the imagined which affects all ‘faction’. Indeed where do we draw the line on historical authenticity and fiction these days when even historians questioning such notions? Is the image above any more real because sourced from the internet. it looks real but even that could  have been created by an ingenious graphic designer..maybe that is the entrance to another theme park..or hell.

A review at the time is interesting noting the precision of the writing at its best and its sloppiness at worst…but marks Playland as one of the ‘bests’

What makes the violence in these stories so powerful and disturbing is Mr. Hansen's meticulous control of his prose. The action of his tales is always carefully grounded in a welter of precise description (hens sitting on their nests ''like a dress shop's hats''; ''goldfish with tails like orange scarves''; a man who ''chews gum instead of brushing his teeth''), and the language constantly engages us by moving back and forth between the colloquial and the poetic, between the understated and the brutal.
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: February 7, 1989
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/07/books/books-of-the-times-stories-that-call-an-evil-by-its-name.html
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