I spent today arguing about MFA programs, over on the New York Times' Papercuts blog. You can tell I'm dodging some serious writing, huh? A typical contribution from me went something like this...
"Literature is, among other things, a long cascade of mentorings. Fitzgerald helped Hemingway. Beckett sat at the foot of blind Joyce, taking dictation for Finnegans Wake.
But Fitzgerald didn’t invoice Hemingway. And Beckett didn’t have to pay Joyce $100,000 to sit there.
(In fact, Joyce paid Beckett - in cast-off clothes, neither of them being commercially glorious).
It is remarkably cheeky of the universities to try to put mentoring - something which has to be extraordinarily personal, intimate, and freely given, if it is to have any meaning - on a sound commercial footing. Buying the mentoring of better writers is an extraordinary form of prostitution, which degrades both parties. (You should hear what creative writing teachers say to each other about their students after a workshop. Very reminiscent of what prostitutes say to each other after the johns have left.)
Perhaps, occasionally, a good writer will discover a potentially good writer, and real mentoring will take place. But what is the moral condition of the vast mass of relationships which have been forced into existence? Bad faith, bad faith.
And there is a more fundamental philosophical problem.
The novel is against authority, or it is nothing.
The university is authority, or it is nothing.
The two are uniquely unsuited to a close embrace.
Universities (given the way society is currently organised), have to expand. Sometimes they expand into territory to which they are wildly unsuited. The novel is one place they should never have ventured. Claiming to “teach” creative writing for money is morally dubious. But for the universities to employ such large numbers of potentially good writers as teachers, forcing them to daily read the worst prose ever written… well, it’s the kind of hellish torture Dante would have found a bit much. What sin could have earned such punishment?
Betraying your muse, perhaps.
The MFA in creative writing is a very successful industry. But its main product is embittered teachers of creative writing, (who nightly stifle the thought of what they might have written had they not had to read, grade and workshop student dreck for 20 years).
Not writers."
I, of course, totally overstate my case, and repeatedly break my only rule, that a writer should have no opinions.
The whole thing, may God have mercy on us all, is here.
A bunch of people have been asking me what's happening with Jude Online. (Hi Iarla! Hi Liz!). Or rather, what's not happening, as there hasn't been a new episode posted since October 2007.
Well, it's all my fault. Back in October, I had an idea for Jude: Level 2. I thought it would improve the book, and I asked Ben Yarde-Buller, my publisher at Old Street, to hold off putting up new episodes of Level 2 while I took off my clothes, oiled my muscular torso, and wrestled with the manuscript in front of an open fire.
I didn't say anything earlier because I wanted to be sure the rewrite would work. Months later, it does. But rewriting Level 2 has had interesting consequences, and I now feel it makes a very interesting book in its own right, with its own unique flavour. So Old Street are going to publish Jude: Level 2 as a book, sometime in 2009. (Level 3 will follow in 2010, and THEN a handsome omnibus will collect all three.)
I know, I know, publishing is the slowest business in the world. Blame the retailers. Chains like Waterstones say they need to see the finished book, cover and all, at least six months in advance of publication, or they won't look at it and they won't order it. And you need even longer to organise proper media coverage. (Why, I don't know. A plane falls out of the sky, there's no problem getting radio, TV, newspaper and internet coverage immediately. A novel falls out of the sky, and it takes nine months. Go figure.)
We're still figuring out what the heck to do about the online version. I don't have a finished version of the new Level 2, so I don't want to show it online yet. I'm extremely happy with how the rewrite is turning out but, having already written one big new section, I've realised I now need - for aesthetic reasons with which I shall not bore you - a new opening for the book. Which I've just begun writing. (Given that I like to put my stuff through an absolutely ferocious number of drafts and polishes before I publish it, and given that, like most authors, I spend the vast majority of my time idling beneath a coconut tree eating barbecued hummingbirds when I should be writing, it's going to be quite a while before it's ready.)
Also, publishing Jude: Level 2 as a physical book has loads of implications which we haven't worked through yet. (For example, if Jude: Level 2 is to win the Booker Prize it so richly deserves, the online edition would need to be published the same year the physical book is published...) So we're going to keep Jude Online on hold till we've worked all that out. Anyway, best guess is that we'll eventually get back to putting Jude: Level 2 up on the Jude Online site, but closer to the publication of the physical book.
If you've any questions about any of this, ask away. All questions and comments welcome, either here or in the forum. If it's a private remark or question, feel free to email me directly (there's a Mail Me button lurking down there somewhere on the navigation bar.)
And if you'd like me to tell you when Jude: Level 2 is coming out, email me and say so. I'll put you on my mailing list, when I finally put my mailing list together. (Been meaning to do that for a year... hi all you old Toasted Heretic fans who asked to be put on my mailing list, I'll get it together soon! Soon!)
Thanks for your patience. I know I'm being infuriatingly Artistic, but it took seven years to write the entire saga, and another couple of years to get Level 1 published, so an extra year or two won't make much difference. And I think it will be worth it.
I hope you, or your descendents, will, eventually, agree...
Philip K. Dick is the North American Borges (and if that doesn’t mean anything to you Ariel, don’t worry, Jorge Luis Borges is coming up soon…) Philip K. Dick (like Borges) is obsessed with the nature of reality. Dick tries to look behind the surface of things (behind the cars and jobs and furniture, behind politics and status, jokes and gravity, faces and skin) - behind the assumptions we make without even noticing we’re making them. Dick thinks that when we think we’re looking at the world, we’re merely looking into a mirror that reflects our own beliefs and prejudices. Dick, like Borges, believed there was a world behind that mirror, hidden from us, that was infinite and strange. That contained patterns which connected the points of chaos we perceive as life.
And their main vices are, appropriately, mirror images of each other. Borges wrote too little (his collected fiction makes a single fat book). Dick wrote too much (over seventy titles).
Philip K. Dick couldn’t get his early attempts at “normal” novels published, so he ended up, almost accidentally, writing science fiction. (To fail at being normal is to succeed at being weird.) Science fiction was the only publishing genre that saw the deep peculiarity of his worldview as a virtue rather than a vice, but SF didn’t pay well. (Its word-rates assumed you were pumping out disposable industrial product, as many SF writers were.) And so Philip K. Dick wrote fast, on speed, for money. At his speediest, he wrote eleven books in two years. As a result, many of his books have wonderful philosophical ideas, undermined by clunky, first-draft prose.
The Man In The High Castle is one of the few books he had time to rewrite and polish, so it reads better than most of his work. (And it won him his only award, a Hugo). It’s an alternate-history novel, where the Allies have lost World War Two. It’s set in a Japanese-occupied America. There are rumours that a reclusive novelist has written a book which describes the real universe, in which the Allies won the war… The hero tries to track down the writer, and the book. You slowly realise that perhaps neither of these universes is our own…
His other best book, from later in his career, is A Scanner Darkly, but you’d want to be in the whole of your health to read it. A book about paranoia that’s so powerful it can induce paranoia, it stars a man who goes so far undercover to investigate a drugs ring that he ends up ordered to spy on himself. It may be the best book about drugs ever written.
I just made one of the world's shortest movies. Fourteen seconds, one shot. It's called Flesh Frame, and it's a brief and oblique tribute to J. G. Ballard. Filmed on one of the earliest camera-phones, if it were any lower-fi, it would be a single blinking pixel.
I won't tell you anything else about the movie, because its only function is to evoke a mood (or, in English, give you a feeling). And nothing wrecks a mood-film like an explanation of what you tried to do and exactly how you did it.
I'll tell you a little about Ballard, though. (Some of you will know all this already: fair play to you. Go get an icecream and I'll see you later.)
J. G. Ballard is one of the few great British writers of the past century.
You could also call him one of the most original and radical British visual artists of the past century. His "novels" are often a series of astonishing images, hypnotically encoded in words.
He spent much of his childhood interned (along with his parents) by the Imperial Japanese Army, in a Shanghai prisoner camp.
After Ballard's wife died (very suddenly and very young), he wrote much of his most extreme fiction in short bursts at the kitchen table, between sandwich-making and soccer practice, while bringing up three children.
The resulting classic of modern headwrecker fiction, The Atrocity Exhibition, was pulped a week before publication by his American publisher, Doubleday, after the head of the firm finally read it. (Doubleday were also my American publisher, for Juno & Juliet, which they loved. When Doubleday rejected my follow-up, Jude, with horror - they particularly hated Level 3 - I knew I'd finally achieved something really exceptional.)
Three years later he wrote Crash, a novel about sex and car crashes that is still sending ripples through the culture. (The shudders of orgasm? Or death?) Finally published in 1973, in print ever since, and about as influential as a novel can be, the initial reader's report to his UK publisher was "This author is beyond psychiatric help. DO NOT PUBLISH."
He is now seventy seven, and his prostate cancer has spread to his ribs and spine. He will be dead soon, and I would recommend that you read some of his work immediately, so that you can thank him by postcard while he is still alive. (He doesn't really do email or computers.) J.G. Ballard, Shepperton, England would probably get through to him at this stage. (Or just write care of his publisher: J. G. Ballard, c/o Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Publishers, 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB, England).
If you don't know where to begin (I don't blame you, he's written a lot of stuff), I'll give you a quick guided tour of my favourites...
Feck it, I'll include links to Amazon while I'm at it, and if you buy one they'll slip me a shiny thruppenny bit. (Well, thirty or forty pence probably.)
A warning: Don't start with Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, unless you're feeling well hard. They will do serious damage to your head. (Either you will throw the book across the room, or the book will throw you across the room.) Work up to them.(Yes, I know some of you ARE well hard. Fair enough, OK, go for it.)
A lovely place to start, if you're feeling at all delicate, would be with the short story collection Vermilion Sands, set in a desert resort full of cloud-sculptors and singing orchids. (One of his gentlest books, it is one of his own favourites.)
His most accessible and successful book was the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun, the story of an English boy's childhood in a Japanese prison camp. (Filmed later by Spielberg, yes. And, as with all Spielberg films, it would be a pretty good movie if you could remove the final 25 minutes of slush, in which Spielberg keeps trying to end it happily, against the grain of the story. Spielberg's strangely desperate attempts to end, to leave Ballard's dream without being changed by it, grow ever more conventional and sentimental, with each botched ending damaging the film more and more... it's fascinating to watch. As with Saving Private Ryan years later, Spielberg starts by telling us something true, and hard to bear, and then spends the rest of the film denying and rejecting that truth ever more hysterically, walling it off behind comforting clichés. Oooh, I could write a book...)
The followup to Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, is a dreamy, wildly sensual classic.
The Crystal World is one of his early disaster trilogy, full of Max Ernst imagery. Crocodiles and jungle plants slowly turn to crystal. The world is dying beautifully. A man sails upriver, upriver, into the heart of lightness.
From his urban collapse period, Concrete Island is Robinson Crusoe on a huge traffic island, surrounded by lane after lane after lane of roaring cars. A man crashes there, and can't get off the island. Or doesn't want to. And then he finds a footprint... (I pay comic tribute to this in Jude: Level 2, when Jude spends weeks walking to London up the middle of a motorway's central reservation.)
The Unlimited Dream Company brings a dreamlike, William Blake, visionary end-of-the-world to the English suburbs. Banyan trees burst up through the pavement in front of the supermarket. People, after a difficult day at work, learn to fly, and are soon copulating with birds, high over Shepperton. Nobody seems to mind. (Anthony Burgess picked this as one of his Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939.)
And if you'd prefer something a little closer to a thriller, or detective fiction, there's Cocaine Nights. A death in a gated community. When all darkness and danger have been pushed outside the gates... is life still liveable, inside, as the sunshine bounces off the white concrete?
Those are my pick of the novels, but his short stories are among the best ever written. There's the Complete Short Stories (too heavy to hold in hardback, but sensible broken up into two volumes in the paperback.) The original collections... well they're all good (and mostly out of print), but I remember The Terminal Beach, in this edition, very fondly.
They'll hold you for now.
Seriously, pick one. Buy it. Read it. If you love it, tell him. He won't live forever.
A last warning: the reason J. G. Ballard doesn't sell like John Grisham is that Ballard's books knock you off balance and disturb you, annoy you. The language can be eerily flat. You can start to feel strange. Go with it. Get past it. It's worth it.
I'm reading at Bookslam, in London, on Thursday, February 28th, this year of our lord 2008. (That is, later this week). Please do come if you can. Or tell any of your London friends you think might enjoy it. I will not only read from, but also sign, copies of Jude: Level 1, while flirting with your disapproving partner. And I fully intend to end the night by disgracing myself thoroughly in a new and entertaining fashion.
I am operating on 2 hours sleep, so if this ends abruptly, it's because I've fallen asleep and my forehead, as it sinks gently to the keyboard, has posted an unfinished message.
I will awake in a few hours, with much of the alphabet embossed in small squares on my forehead, like a man punished by the Puritans for writing fiction.
(That's three paragraphs in a row that start with "I". A sin I wouldn't commit, even in a blog, were I sufficiently rested.)
Bookslam, for those of you too lazy to click on the hyper-link, is a kick-ass literary night out in London, with live music, a DJ, a poet and, on this particularly marvellous Thursday, me.
It's on in the west-end club now known as Neighbourhood, at No. 12 Acklam Road, London, W10 5QZ.
On Thursday, the culture will be provided by NOT ONLY Julian Gough BUT ALSO:
Zubz (known to his mum as Ndabaningi Mabuye), the Zambian-born, Zimbabwe-raised, South Africa-based MC, flying in, fresh as a daisy, from Johannesberg, with a feather in his flat but sexy cap.
Anyone who can adapt The Unnameable (fondly known even by many Beckett fans as The Unreadable) into totally gripping theatre can do anything.
We spend all day underground, in a cave cut into the chalk hillside. Looking up at the chalk-and-flint arches above us, as a heater slowly warms the dark space, I feel rather as early Christians must have in the catacombs, if they ever put on theatre. ("Waiting for God", now in its two thousandth triumphant year!)
Conor and Judy think the cave was probably built by the German army during World War II, perhaps as a bomb shelter, perhaps to store ammunition. (The Germans also placed a rather large gun on the nearby hill, a couple of hundred yards away, overlooking the Seine. Didn't work, the Allies made their first successful crossing of the Seine about two miles upriver from here.)
We've invited some people out to see Conor as Jude tonight, in the cave. It'll be a short (55 minute) demo version, read rather than acted. Then we'll ask the audience for their responses, and suggestions.
Then we all go for dinner together. Theatre rocks! It's all talking and eating! Beats the shite out of sitting on your own, writing novels.
I'll copy over one of my contributions to give you a flavour...
(From the Guardian Books blog:)
A lot of those who don't like SF, and who seem not to have read much of it (and fair enough) are speaking about SF on this thread as if it were naive and unaware of its failings. But SF is one of the most intensely self-aware and reflexive genres. SF writers think and argue about SF, its vices and its virtues, all the time, always have.
Frederik Pohl wrote one of the best defences of SF in his autobiographical essay "Ragged Claws", collected in Hell's Cartographers (edited by Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison, and a book I recommend highly to anyone interested in either writing or science fiction.)
I'm going to quote, at length, his defence of an almost indefensibly bad writer, E. E. "Doc" Smith, the inventor of space opera (and yes, I read a ton of Smith's stuff between the ages of twelve and sixteen. I even read the unreadable Spacehounds of IPC, under my desk in Irish class...)
Pohl first takes apart E E "Doc" Smith's awful failings, which are many. Then he writes:
"And yet-
None of this greatly matters. It turns many readers off, and that is a pity; but there are few novels that don't turn a good many readers off for one reason or another, and to close one's mind to Doc Smith because of his conspicuous flaws is to miss his conspicuous virtues. One might as well reject Moby Dick because of Melville's really pathetic inability to write the sounds of Chinese dialect, or because of his gross mis-statements of the natural history of cetaceans.
What Smith set out to do he did, and he did it superlatively well, and he taught a hundred other writers how to do it.
(...)
All of the things Doc Smith did badly fade in comparison with the one thing he did well. He taught a whole generation how to dream on a cosmic scale.
In the bestiary of science fiction, Doc Smith was a fiddler crab. The male fiddler has one huge claw. It is so big and clumsy that he can't use it to fight, defend or eat, he can only use it to brandish in a sexy, provocative way, impressing the hell out of the dewy-eyed female fiddler crabs.
Smith is not sf's only fiddler crab, they run rampant over the pages of the early Amazings and they are with us today: Harlan Ellison is one, so is A E van Vogt, so is Ray Bradbury. They are characterized by such extreme hypertrophy of one aspect of their writing that we forgive them conspicuous lacks in others.
What Doc Smith, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and a dozen others gave us was a new way of looking at the world, at all the worlds. In the grimy, chill early thirties the vision was revelatory. It is revelatory today."
And let me second Readgrin's post, way up the thread, recommending Frederik Pohl's Gateway. A beautiful, thoughtful novel which takes the legacy of Smith and Burroughs and adds bleaker, modern layers of doubt, of despair in the face of the enormity and unknowability of the universe. (I also second, or third, McLeodP's plug for Roadside Picnic, a great piece of Russian SF by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. Those two books, cold-war era US and Russian, read very well together.)
A winter storm has thatched the east shore of Lough Derg In the traditional manner, by breaking All last year’s dead reeds across the knee of the wind, Then waves – chop-chop – chivvy ten thousand tons of them Across the lake and into position Interlocked along seventy miles of shore.
Today, the obsessive-compulsive waves have Calmed down a bit, but Still fiddle with it every few seconds Like Christo adjusting the silk hem of an island, Unable to drag himself away. Like a writer at Christmas, poking a poem Trying to enjoy the break Unable to enjoy the break Trying to enjoy the break From writing.
II
The sun makes a grudging appearance For one minute, to two shivering fans Who’ve been standing on the concrete jetty in the rain. “That’ll have ta do ye.” It ducks back behind the zinc clouds And sinks fast below the black hills.
“Fuck this, I’m off back to Australia,” Mumbles one of the fans, or the sun.
It’s hard to tell over the Splash of the lake waves, the Crash of the lakeside Property prices, the Crying of developers and birds.
I should stop saying I hate poetry. It's not true. My position is far more nuanced and subtle than that. I just think 98% of all poetry is shite.
And who, citizen, subject or slave, could disagree with that grave judgement, pondered long?
I didn't read much good poetry this year, and the good poetry I read was mostly old stuff. But as the knackered year gasped its last, its liver packing in as it fell over the finish line, I read a poem that I loved (well, wanted to shag... what do you think this is, the Age of Chivalry?)
It's a Christmas poem (God help us) and it's in the Guardian (may Marx preserve us), so it should be shit squared. But Christmas is a time of miracles.
So, as I was unfit for real writing, I hung out on the Guardian Books Blog all day. Very enjoyable. At one point I was asked "Julian, are you on SSRIs?" so I may have been a bit too sick to be posting, but feckit. Mostly I argued about people's right to email poems to their friends without written legal permission from the poet's publishers (Wendy Cope is, bizarrely, against this right. I am for it... OK, it's a bit more complicated than that, but you'll have to read it, I'm not summarizing an all-day argument.) The discussion starts with a fine article by Oliver Burkeman, well worth reading.
And I helped slag off the Guardian's decision to publish their review team's Book of the Year recommendations as a 41-minute podcast instead of a list.
These lists are always ridiculous, because no matter how much you read, you've only read the thinnest sliver of all that's been published in the year. (And what freak only reads books that came out that year? As though books went off, like cartons of milk?) Back when I was utterly broke, I could quite easily read a couple of hundred books annually, not one of which was published that year. Even now, I spent far more of this year re-reading 1960s and ‘70s science fiction (by Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, Frederick Pohland Thomas M. Disch), than I did reading new stuff. (I have my reasons...)
Also, I still tend to read things a year or two after they've come out. That's partly because they're cheaper in paperback, but partly because I like to let history sort them out a bit for me, or I'd waste too much of my precious reading life on each year's most-hyped books. A couple of years after publication, the word-of-mouth is still doing its wonderful job. As a result, the few books that made a real impact on people are still hanging in there on the shelves, while the hyped and empty have long been remaindered. (This year I finally bought Mobius Dickby Andrew Crumey, after thinking about doing so for ages, because people I like kept mentioning it. And I’m halfway through it, and it’s great…)
But I did read some freshly delivered books this year, still with the umbilicus attached and throbbing, and some of them were very good. So here are my favourites, and why. (Recycling is good and wholesome and approved of by society, so a version of these may well pop up in the Irish edition of the Mail on Sunday soon, and also on Mark Farley’s excellent and bolshy blog, The Bookseller to the Stars):
A smart, funny, painfully accurate book about office life (and death). And he’s written it from the collective point of view of all the workers (“How we hated our coffee mugs!”) Technically amazing, and FABULOUSLY difficult, he makes it look so easy you forget about it after sixty seconds. A Great American Novel. Serious respect is due.
Vinnie Browne, in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop in Galway, forced me to buy this. Ignoring my anguished protests that modern Irish short stories are shite and I hate them. Well, I don’t hate these ones. Vinnie was right. This is the best Irish short story collection since Mike McCormack’s Getting It In The Head, which was the best since Frank O’Connor’s My Oedipus Complex. Small-town Ireland, given a good, loving, seeing-to, from behind.
The Queen joins a library, late in life, and, lost in literature, starts to neglect her duties. Her courtiers, concerned, take ever more drastic action… An utter, utter delight. I’m giving my mum a copy.
Writers from Isaac Bashevis Singer through Alice Monro to Stephen King discuss everything from their philosophy of life to their choice of pencil eraser. If you’re addicted to this sort of thing, as I am, then this is a lucky bag full of fecking huge rocks of crack.
OK that’s the official list I sent out. But writing it up, I totally forgot that Milan Kundera'sThe Curtain had been published earlier this year. I'd read it so thoroughly (several times), and it had sunk in so deep, that I'd vaguely assumed I'd had my bent, trashed copy for a couple of years. (And of course it overlaps a little with his earlier book, The Art Of The Novel - ie he nicks bits and reuses them – so I had read some of it years ago). But The Curtain pretty much replaces The Art of the Novel. There’s a few extra years thinking and reading gone into it.
So add that to my list. Milan Kundera is one of the great thinkers about the novel, what it has done and what it can do. (And, as a gifted novelist, he's a lot easier to read than the most brilliantly original 20th century theorist of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin, whose genius is muffled by godawfully impenetrable Russian Formalist prose).
Kundera's key image is of the novel as a great forest, which writers have only just begun to explore. The Curtain is enlightening, entertaining, intriguing, and reassuring. Especially if, machete in one hand and pen in the other, you happen to be trying to cut your own path through that forest.
It might be the funniest book ever written about war, and it might be the best book ever written about war, and the two are connected. It’s mostly set on an island off Italy, during World War 2. Does it avoid the dark heart of war? Hell no. You’ll get there, eventually. Just hang on tight, because Heller (who was a bombardier in World War Two, flying over and back across Europe, dropping bombs on people’s heads from several miles up), flies backwards and forwards in time, closing in on the truth and the darkness. Events are described again and again, from different characters’ points of view, until you get a horrible, hilarious, multiple, God’s-eye view of what really happened. The book (like life, like death, like war), is packed with paradoxes, the most famous of which is the one in the title, a catch, which may or may not exist, and which rules and ruins men’s lives:
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
"That's some catch, that Catch-22," [Yossarian] observed.
Back in Ireland, the Sunday Tribune just picked its books of the year.
I was INTENSELY pleased to see Jude: Level 1 among the (eight) Irish fiction titles. Especially when they called my darling little book "the picaresque bastard lovechild of Flann O'Brien and Matt Groening".
Gough's novel is like the picaresque bastard lovechild of Flann O'Brien and Matt Groening, and yet is all Julian Gough. Possibly the finest comic novel to come out of Ireland since At Swim Two Birds, it recounts the story of Jude, an orphan, as he wanders through Ireland in a quest to find his true love and uncover the secret behind his parentage. Along the way he gains an erectile nose, and a startling resemblance to Leonardo Di Caprio. Each absurd episode is constructed meticulously, and is delivered with the kind of momentum which should collapse in on itself, and amazingly manages to ascend even greater heights of hilarity. Gough makes it look deceptively easy, with an instinctive sense of timing, and a razor-sharp and subversive intellect."
OK, the great Norman Mailer, who died earlier this month: his best book, if you are a teenage boy, is Why Are We In Vietnam? (I would have put it on the list anyway, even if he hadn't just died.)
I had my notebook with me over the weekend (I was away from my computer), and I wrote so many notes on Why Are We In Vietnam? that it would take me another week to type them up and turn them into something that made sense. It was more a long essay than a blog entry.
But Ariel is waiting for his next book, and I can't make him wait another week. So here goes... Inna blog styleeee, fukktup, no gramma...
Norman Mailer wrote Why Are We In Vietnam? around the time I was still in the womb. It came out in 1967 and it was red-hot relevant to the big American dilemma: why the fuck are we in Vietnam?
What is it about? Well in some ways it's a shaggy dog story, or a shaggy bear story, or a shaggy war story... And that story is pretty simple: DJ and his friend, two Texan teenage boys, go on a hunting trip to Alaska with their rich fathers. They shoot animals, and they walk in the forests. DJ tells the tale in a supercharged Texas-turboblast of language.
But it's about what it's not about. And it's not about what it's about.
The title does half the work of the book, because it changes the meaning of every sentence that follows. Vietnam is hardly mentioned. But DJ and his friend have been drafted, and are going to Vietnam after this last trip with their fathers.
Mailer has knowledge of war (he fought in the Pacific in World War Two): DJ has not. But DJ will soon have Mailer's knowledge and the gap between character and author, so soon to be closed, crackles with literary electricity. The knowledge wants to discharge.: DJ wants to know, and Mailer wants him to know. Soon the trees, the animals, the guns are trying to tell him... The book contains some of the best ever descriptions of animals, plants, trees and soil (of the world without man in it). And then man comes into it...
The book is full of sex, shit and death, and of words invoking sex shit and death even when the subject is something else. Sex shit and death are the three-in-one God of this book, and it is best to hear these words as the (almost religious) speaking-in-tongues of a possessed young man, rather than as casual and meaningless obscenities. They are not casual and they are not meaningless (though they are often obscene, if the Latin root of obscene is ob caenum, "from filth").
A book in which rich Americans shoot animals from helicopters is obviously about 1960s Vietnam in a fairly direct way. But that is not the most important aspect of the book.
This book is not a history book. This book is prophecy, and thus timeless. You could slot it into the Bible as the Book of DJ, and it would fit in fine. To give the book its original force, and to totally refresh it, just scratch or paint out the word "Vietnam" on the cover, and scrawl in the word "Iraq", if you're American or British, "Chechnya" if you're Russian, "Tibet" if you're Chinese, "Palestine" if you're Israeli, "Congo" if you're from practically any of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's neighbours, "Darfur" if you're from Sudan, "Somalia" if you're from Ethiopia...
No really, do it. Make a physical mark. Damage the book. Make it yours.
It is not a clean and tidy book. It is not a nice, easy book. It is not a post-feminist book. It is not a left-liberal book. It's not even a "good" book, in a lot of ways (though it might be a great book). It doesn't give a shit whether you like it or not. A lot of recent readers have problems with that, as they do with Norman Mailer generally. But you cannot apply health and safety legislation to a shaman. The chicken has to really die (because you're going to really die). The blood has to splatter everywhere (because your atoms, too, will be scattered, and your pattern lost). Norman Mailer's art is messy because life is messy because death is messy.
OK that's it. That's all I can think of right now. Over to you.
That quote is from (as many of you will know, and many more won't) the 1984 hit single "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken", by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. (Lloyd Cole, back when he found it impossibly easy, before he realised it's impossibly hard.) It was good advice. As a very young man, I read Norman Mailer. I even, years later, got a new tailor. (Chris, of Favourbrook, Jermyn Street.)
Well, Norman Mailer, Great American Novelist, died last week, and a generation of pop lyricists who were as influenced by novels as songs are looking even more thoughtful than usual. There's a lot to think about. Norman Mailer cannot be solved. Norman Mailer cannot be neatly summed up. His vices were his virtues and his virtues were his vices and his bark was worse than his bite but his bite was worse than his bark and his love was hateful and his hate was lovely, and oh didn't you just want to punch him and kiss him, Lloyd?
He was incredibly famous for a very long time, but he isn't really, now. (He will be again, after the traditional post-death, decade-long dip. And when he is famous again, it will be for radically different things, dug out of his most forgotten books.)
I saw him read in Amsterdam a few years ago, at the Crossing Border Festival, where I was also reading. He was great. Frail, slightly deaf, tiny, walking slowly with two sticks, white hair standing up all over his electric head. He read a self-deprecating piece from Advertisements For Myself, and answered questions with wit and charm.
When goaded to (verbally) attack Tom Wolfe (who'd recently (verbally) savaged him), Mailer refused. "I think I'm the greatest writer in America. And there's maybe twenty more think the same. Novelists are an endangered species now, and when there's only twenty elk left in the world, they mustn't start trying to knock off each other's horns." (That quote is half from memory, and half from a Guardian interview of around the same time where he said almost the same thing in almost the same words... you can't do as much promotional work as Mailer did and not recycle some of the best lines.)
I wanted to go up to him onstage afterwards, and tell him something. But he was immediately surrounded by dozens of admirers from the audience, his tiny figure vanishing behind the seven-foot tall Dutch, and the seven-foot wide Americans. And I thought, he's got enough to deal with. And I'd be doing it mainly for me, not for him. Doing it to have my Mailer story. And he must have heard all this stuff so often... No, just because it's important to me doesn't mean I've the right to inflict it on him. So I didn't go up.
But if I had gone up I would have said something like...
When I was fourteen, maybe fifteen, I was reading The Naked and the Dead, in Tipperary. And I got to a scene where one of the American soldiers on patrol finds the corpse of a Japanese soldier lying in the sun, and stares at the body. And as I read the scene, and reread it, I realised that I was going to die. That my death was inevitable, and unavoidable. The knowledge was immense, direct, entirely untheoretical. It wasn't intellectual knowledge, it was physical. (I'd known before, obviously, that I would one day die, but I hadn't felt it, it wasn't real knowledge.)
And I put the book down. And for the next couple of weeks I thought about nothing else, I hardly spoke. I examined this new knowledge from every angle, I thought about the implications, I tried to work out how I should live, now that I knew that I was going to die. I was very depressed for most of that couple of weeks. And then I came to terms with it, and worked my way past it, and incorporated the knowledge into my life, and decided how I would try to live. And how I lived was better than how I'd lived before. More satisfying. More my own. And I was pretty happy, pretty much permanently, ever after.
Something like that.
So, Norman Mailer gave me death. And I will always be grateful.
Well, this time, although I'm still saying it mainly for me, at least I'm not bothering him...
I've been in France for the past couple of days, working on a really interesting potential stage version of Jude: Level 1. More on that, er, next year probably. It's far, far too early to talk about it now. (But shag it, I'm all excited...)
And after touching down briefly in Berlin, I'll be off to sunny Plymouth, where I read on Tuesday, November 13th (2007), as part of the launch of Short Fiction, a handsome new book/magazine/thing published by Plymouth University Press, and edited by Anthony Caleshu. I've a couple of very, very short pieces in it, one called "Latin Lover" that comes in at a brisk 100 words exactly, and another called "Three Monkeys", which sprawls over an expansive three hundred words. More on that launch and reading here...
If you're in the area (that's Plymouth, England, down the left-hand edge of Europe...), it's free, and I gather I'll be reading with Kevin Barry, author of the splendid There Are Little Kingdoms, which just carried off the Rooney Prize. (I hope he reads the one set in the amusement arcade.) Come one, come all.
So I'll try and tell more tales of Berlin porn, answer questions about the Irish language, recommend great books for teenaged boys, and catch up on all the other things I need to do around the website late next week... Enjoy your weekend...
OK, Ariel, here goes. I've been agonising over this ever since you asked me to recommend you some books to read while the teachers' strike is on. (Novelists shouldn't blog, we think too much and it nearly kills us. Then we come up with these constipated, over-written postings, about one every six months. Ridiculous! I could have, I should have, banged out a list in twenty seconds. It's a week later, and I'm still agonising...)
Anyway, I've given up on trying to do the list, and why they're good, in one go. I'll just try and do a book a day, roughly, for the next week or two, roughly.
Bear in mind, this isn't a list of the Greatest Books of All Time (though it overlaps such a list, a lot). It's a list of books that I'm glad I read as a teenaged boy, or that I wish I'd read as a teenaged boy, and that I think you might like too, maybe. I'd make a slightly different list for a teenaged girl, different again for a man in his twenties, a woman in her twenties...
They aren't in any particular order...
Number 1: Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth. An incredibly rude, incredibly funny book about growing up Jewish and horny in Newark. One warning: Portnoy's attitude to women is very 1969, when the book came out. And I wouldn't recommend it as a guide to behaviour. (Portnoy doesn't really believe that women are human beings, and a lot of his problems are made worse by this blind spot.). But boy is it honest and funny. Philip Roth is ruthlessly, brutally honest about what it feels like to be a boy, and then a man.
(OK, this one is going to be as short and snappy as a stepped-on daschund...)
I finally finished editing my porn film at seven o'clock this morning, having worked on it all night without a break. Which was great, except the deadline for delivery of the finished edit had been midnight...
But hey, this is a Berlin porn festival! Transgression is where it is at. BREAK that rule. SPANK that buttock. OK, DON'T spank that buttock...Deadline? What deadline? It turned out several other film-makers had missed it too. A couple of phonecalls, and a drop had been arranged. All was well. Then, just trying to output a finished edit took all day (looooong technical story), and I missed two more deadlines. A new record! I am the champion! I finally handed the tape over to Gaia outside Kotbusser Tor U-Bahn station, near midnight, in a scene gloriously reminiscent of any spy film you've ever seen set in Berlin. There had been a lot of urgent phonecalls, changing trains, running up steps, searching the darkness for someone in a specific outfit... then the hurried handover, and away she rushed to put tomorrow's programme together...
So my little film will be shown tomorrow (well, later today...), Friday 26th of October, around 6.15pm, in the Kant Kino 1, on Kant Strasse, as part of Cum2Cut's Kurtzfilmprogramm. It's called The Last Porn Film, it's five minutes long, and I'll tell you more later. All part of the big Berlin Porn Film Festival.
I am stunned and gutted that I'll miss the screening, but it coincides with my reading in Loughrea at the Baffle festival. I console myself with the thought that missing the Berlin festival screening of my porn debut because I'm in Ireland reading from Jude: Level 1 at a distinguished and eccentric literary festival at least shows that I'm wasting my days in interesting ways.
I wrote a piece in today's Guardian about the increasingly pervy relationship between the short story and the novel. Feel free to read it, comment on it, ignore it, as you wish.
Why was I writing about the short story, you ask, given that I know bugger all about it?
Allow me to plug it shamelessly, because it is run by good people, and the Guardian forgot to print the festival dates or website address at the bottom of my article... Small Wonder is the only festival devoted entirely to short stories, and it runs from 19-23 September, at Charleston near Firle, East Sussex (in England, which is part of Europe...)
Lots of interesting writers will be there: Monica Ali, Lucy Ellmann, Esther Freud, Etgar Keret, James Lasdun, Yiyun Li, Jon Snow, Colm Tóibín, Fay Weldon...
My hot tip for Small Wonder (apart from me and James Lasdun) is Lucy Ellmann and Etgar Keret, 7.30pm on Thursday. Should kick literary ass.
Julian Gough
The website of Julian Gough, author of Connect, Juno & Juliet, the Jude novels, and the ending to Minecraft. He is also the author of the Rabbit & Bear children’s books (illustrated beautifully by Jim Field).
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