The Glamourous Life

The blog is, and will remain, quiet for a bit, as I am currently in Montenegro, writing a film script. This sounds far, far more glamourous than it is - I spent yesterday standing on a toilet seat, gingerly using a long-handled dustpan to scoop raw sewage off the flooded floor. Montenegran plumbers are fierce, hardy men, who know that life is brutal and meaningless. Their plumbing reflects their philosophy of life.

The nearest internet connection is in Herceg Novi, some considerable distance from the small village in which I pace, drink coffee, and scribble.

We shall speak on my return...

Toodle-pip...

Do Not Approach This Man. He Has Just Finished Writing A Novel, And May Be Dangerous.

I have finished writing Jude: Level 2. Thus the depraved and hideous face you see above, exhausted from months of writing and rewriting. (Twenty drafts of the toughest sections... though of course by the last few drafts you're just tweaking, or - to use the more accurate technical term favoured by the serious novelist - disappearing up your own hole). Exhausted, in particular, from the final weeks of staying up till 5am every night, with no days off or weekends. By the end I wasn't entirely sure what year it was. (1987, by the look of the shirt and stubble.) I look like a released prisoner, bewildered by his freedom. Which is appropriate, because I am.

With three days to go, I developed stigmata. The skin on the backs of my hands began to break down as I wrote. I was quite pleased when I noticed. Oh you know you've given it everything, by God, when you develop stigmata in the final furlong. You haven't cheated the book by selfishly holding anything in reserve, for yourself, or those you love, or the future.

In fact I finished on Oscar night, but I've been too knackered to post until now. When I finally, finally, finally finished, at 5.30am, and hit send, and it vanished from my screen in a swirling stream of zeros and ones down the phonelines to my agent and my publisher, I ran out into the street and danced and sang and sprinted through the melting slush.

If New York is the city that never sleeps, then Berlin is the city that doesn't have to get up in the morning (because it doesn't have a job), so there's always something on. And so I ran, singing, around the corner to the Babylon Kino, where they were still screening the Oscars, live from LA - nine timezones away - on the big screen. I arrived in the middle of Kate Winslet's acceptance speech, stayed till the end, and talked to friends afterwards. There was a great buzz in the cinema, as the crew for Spielzeugland / Toyland were there, and it had won an Oscar for Best Short Film earlier in the evening, to mighty cheers and screams. So, between them snaffling an Oscar and me finishing my book, there was a bunch of very happy people jumping up and down on the pavement on Rosa-Luxemberg Strasse at 6.30am, as the birds on the roof of the People's Theatre across the road cleared their throats and thought about singing.

Spent the last few days recovering, and dealing with the backlog of a life that has been on hold for months. Visited the doctor with my stigmata (they are beginning to heal). Today was the best day yet, I had a brilliant plan and I carried it out: I stayed in bed all day, dozing, reading, drinking coffee, and eating chocolate.

So, now, back to work. Radio play. Screenplay. Poetry. Life.

Happy New Year

Back home in Berlin, and sick as a dog. My gang came down with a selection-box of diseases over the Christmas in Ireland. Returning half-conscious to Berlin - coughing and hawking our way through airports, train stations, cafés and public toilets - we spread our plagues in a mighty swathe across Europe. So if civilisation is consequently snuffed out, sorry about that.

(The Plain People of the Internet: Ah! Is that a rare reference there to the five wives and forty children he is rumoured to  have stashed away in Berlin? Make a note...)

So on a human level, I and all I love start 2009 utterly banjaxed. But as a writer (far more important, natch), my year has got off to a nice start. The New York Times has just printed a piece by me. The piece is probably funnier if you have read all of US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's official bailout statements over the past six months. (But, you know, don't. It's too high a price to pay to get a gag.)

I'll put it up on the site here, once the New York Times has had a fair run at it. But meanwhile here's their version. They even commissioned a cartoon from R. O. Blechman, which is a heck of an honour. (Blechman is seventy-eight now, and won an Emmy for his animated film of Stravinsky and Ramuz's theatre thingy, The Soldier's Tale.)

Oh, and a happy, happy, HAPPY, HAPPY New Year to you all.

(The eloquent photo above is borrowed from PawsAroundChicago.com. They give pets lifts. Oh you laugh and call it decadence, but it is only through such - not entirely necessary, yet welcome - innovations that civilization advances. I don't know the name of the photographer. A haunting picture, suffused with empathy and a deep understanding of suffering, it is possible it is a self portrait.)

I'm in London this weekend, for the Battle of Ideas

Almost forgot to mention... I'll be chatting about writers and cities at the Battle of Ideas in London on Saturday.

There's going to be a short film, Kolkata City of Literature, directed by Soumyak Kanti De Biswas and Tanaji Dasgupta, followed by a discussion with Professor Swapan Chakravorty, Gerry Feehily, and me.

The chat (or battle)  is called Text and the City: what is a city of literature?, and will be chaired by Tiffany Jenkins. For more on exactly what it is, where it is, and when we kick off, click here.

Listowel Writers' Week

I'm going to be reading at Listowel Writers' Week, on Friday 30th of May 2008, at 2pm, in the Arms Hotel. It's a programme packed with some pretty heavy Irish names - Seamus Heaney, Anne Enright, John Banville, and my favourite Irish economist, David McWilliams - as well as the occasional top-quality foreigner, such as Lloyd Jones (author of Mister Pip).

There's also some good films showing in their Film Club. May I most heartily recommend Todd Haynes' astonishing, poetic, jittery, thrilling dream life of Bob Dylan, I'm Not There. In particular, Cate Blanchett's performance is as good as acting can get. It is more alive and true than most of our own lived moments. See it.

If you see me wandering down Church Street, don't be afraid to give me a shout.

Listowel rocks.

My Enormous Gherkin

As I passed through Orly airport on Saturday (about to fly home to Berlin), the woman running the x-ray machine frowned. She signaled to the man beside her. He frowned, and  signaled to the second woman, further along the conveyer belt.

The second woman grabbed my rucksack as it came out of the X-ray machine.

"Is this your bag?" she said in French.

Oui, I said.

She frowned, perhaps at my pronunciation, and began to pull on her black gloves. I tried to think what the heck I was carrying, that could look so suspicious on an X-ray. The woman plunged her gloved hands deep into my rucksack, and rummaged. I remembered what she was going to find just before she found it...

 Let us pause a moment, while I give you a little backstory.

I had spent the previous few days just outside Paris, working on the stage version of Jude: Level 1. I had wished to bring my noble co-workers a gift from Berlin, to give them strength for the coming ordeal, but there is no point bringing wine to France, chocolate is a problematic present, and what else is there? In duty-free I had almost despaired when I saw the discreet pile of cans marked in big letters Get One!, and in little letters, 1 große echte Spreewälder Gewürzgurke.

The perfect gift from Berlin! A huge local gherkin, in a can. "The gherkin snack from the homelandplace for gherkinfans" as the can said. ("Der Gurken-Snack vom Heimathof für Gurkenfans.")

 So I loaded up with enormous gherkins, one to a can, and brought them to France. We had one each. However, I was so busy I forgot to eat mine, and thus it was that on my way back through Orly airport this refined French lady now found herself holding my enormous gherkin, canned, in her black-gloved hand. "What," she said in elegant French, "is THIS?"

I was distracted from her question by the dawning realisation that I was living through a postmodern, canned version of the great moment in the rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, when bass player Derek Smalls sets off the metal detector at an American airport by walking through it with a cucumber, wrapped in tinfoil, stuffed down his pants.

Blinded by this vision, I couldn't remember the French for gherkin. Our conversation got increasingly surreal as she tried to guess what the lurid, warty, green thing, pictured on the can, might be. "Get One!" didn't really help, and she couldn't read German. At one point you could see her thinking "Glow-in-the-dark vibrator? Dildo?" In French. ("Vibrateur phosphorescent ? Dildo?")

Seconds from disaster, we finally communicated. "Cornichon!" I cried. "Ein große, er sorry, c'est un grand cornichon."  "Ah!" she cried, enormously relieved. "Un cornichon!" All smiles, she handed it back to me, and I was able to bring meine große Essiggurke home to the banks of the Spree.

(An aside: I am shocked to discover that, according to Google, nobody in the long, rich, and well-documented history of the world has ever, before this glorious day, used the phrase "My Enormous Gherkin" on the internet. This seems to me extraordinary. Hardly a day goes by when I don't say it at least twice.)

Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke

I've spent too long lately in the mirrored underworld of the literary blogs. (Too long = more than an hour a day for more than three days.)  So, to restore myself to health, I have been reading Rob Long's Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke. Whenever the idiocy of Literatureland seems too much to bear, a quick trip to Hollywoodland reminds you that it could be infinitely worse.

 
Rob Long wrote a bunch of episodes of Cheers. Towards the end, he executive-produced some, too. And, with his writing and producing partner, Dan Staley, he went on to write and produce a bunch of other TV stuff that (like almost everything ever done by anyone ever) wasn't as ludicrously successful as Cheers.

In the post-Cheers comedown he also wrote Conversations With My Agent, a grim classic that pretty much explains itself. Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke is the followup. Both are funny, have hidden emotional depths, and will help you a lot if you ever, God forbid, find yourself writing for television or the movies in Hollywood.

Here's Rob Long on pitching versus writing. This is as good an explanation as I've ever read of what's wrong with the entire development process in Hollywood:

 

"Most writers prefer to pitch an idea before they write it, but in our experience, this leads to difficulty.

    The whole point of writing a treatment – or, better yet, writing an entire script – is that there’s very little confusion left about what, exactly, the show will be about and who, exactly, the star or stars of the show will be, and what, precisely, is or is not funny about it.

But when you pitch a show, you pitch into the wide blue sky. You pitch the general idea, the concept – whatever that means – and you naturally smooth the sharp edges and tailor the pitch to the involuntary reactive facial muscles on the face of the highest ranking decision-maker in the room. It’s almost impossible not to. A pitch is like a performance by a raggedy subway clown. He just wants you to love him and toss him some change.

    So the network hears what it wants to hear: that your show will be perfect for an actor they have a deal with; that it will concentrate on family life, snugly fitting into an open 8.30 PM slot; that its point of view will be single people, or urban dwellers, or blue collar, or married with childrens, or whomever the target audience is for that network, on that night, that week.

But you go back to your office, mysteriously forgetting the shabby desperation of your pitch. You start writing the idea that was in your head before you started talking to the impassive face of the network executive, before he or she started grinning slightly, before the first laugh, before you made the sale.

And in the ensuing weeks – and sometimes months – between the sale of the script based on the pitch (which usually takes place in October or November) and the actual writing and delivery of the finished draft (sometime in January or even early February), the difference between what they bought and what you sold becomes enormous.”