The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.
It’s a nifty idea. At the moment he’s mooching around a sanatorium, and apparently he’s going to start Getting Political on the 7th of September. Exciting stuff.
[Found on languagehat]
Neil Gaiman links to a long, long interview with Alan Moore in which Das Beard talks about the craft of writing. It’s pure gold - he’s not at all shy about going into detail. Plus he comes across as a charmingly down-to-earth sort:
DW: I feel quite awkward doing this ‘cos I’ve never really interviewed anyone before…
AM: Well I’m a doddle for interviewing ‘cos I’m completely infatuated with the sound of me own voice…you just have to say a few basic words and I’ll talk for the next hour or two.
I especially love his description of how the plot and premise for Lost Girls came together. I don’t know how any writer could read that and not want to run off and start maniacally filling notebooks.
Speaking of which…
His prose fiction contains zero emotional content, by design, and doesn’t attempt to be journalistic in the George Orwell mode. And yet, the last page of Factotum leaves you feeling like you’ve just sailed off the edge of a cliff, looked down and seen something terrible.
I’d previously read Post Office and loved it. The writing is superbly minimal. That’s probably why it’s such a gut punch; Henry Chinaski actively resists and repels any feelings of pity by just getting on with things, by being a shiftless, incurable drifter, and and by enjoying various dodgy pursuits a little too much. So when the tiniest, merest hint of an implication of vulnerability sneaks in, it becomes a very big deal. And then it ends.
I am very much looking forward to reading Women.
I’ve been meaning to wax evangelistic about Achewood for some time now. It is, by an urban kilometre, my favourite webcomic, and probably in my top 10 of favourite anything. Drawn and wrote by a feller named Chris Onstad, it concerns the life and times of a group of cats, stuffed toys, robots and an otter in a fictional Californian suburb.
There’s far more depth to the characters and the storylines than in most webcomics (so much so that Time magazine named Achewood their number one graphic novel of 2007). The writing throughout is livelier than a sack of eels at a ska concert, being a weird mix of white boy hip-hop, tortured poetics and old school English gentleman, and the plots are twisted genius. Witness: Ray Sells His Soul/Ray + Beef Road Trip, The Great Outdoor Fight and, most recently, Roast Beef’s greeting card business.
A+, and so on.
It appears that Maybury has tagged me with some class of book meme, which explains why I was feeling under the weather yesterday. The common wisdom is that you have to starve these things if you want to get better, but I’m going to indulge it this time because the results make me look sinister and dangerous.
The challenge: pick up nearest book, open to page 123, write down sixth, seventh and eighth sentences.
It is war. It is “our nation” against the US Government… If 10 teenage Jews and liberals had blown up a Nuremberg beer hall with Hitler and a thousand storm troopers inside, they would have been applauded.
From I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary by John Higgs. (I should point out that the ellipsis is in the original text. Well, not the original text. But it’s in the book.) I’m mildly disappointed that I have this in my pocket, because the next closest book is a thousand-page guide to current VAT legislation, and that would have garnered me mad economic cred.
I’m supposed to pass this on to five people. Nads to that. In fact, I am anti-tagging you: if anyone reading this post gets tagged by someone else, you don’t have to do it. You may thank me in the comments.
Over the past while I’ve soldiered through the majority of Andrew Meier’s Black Earth: Russia After the Fall, a book I bought on a whim while wandering through the History section of Hughes & Hughes. It’s interesting and all, but relentlessly bleak is only entertaining for so long. I rather stupidly decided to take a break from it to read At Swim-Two-Birds and naturally I haven’t yet managed to get back to it, despite being less than a hundred pages from the end. In my defence the writing is pretty small and he does that thing where a new chapter starts right after the old one ends. (Authors: we need that bit of white space at the end of a chapter. It gives us a sense of accomplishment.)
Speaking of Flann O’Brien: as soon as I finished At Swim I went straight out and bought The Third Policeman, and it was a struggle not to just swipe an armful of him off the shelf. He is magnificent. I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with Irish writing, but this I can get behind.
Most recently I’ve finished The Dice Man. It’s a very good read with some nice stylistic choices and inventive use of language. It also has that snazzy something I love in countercultural lit from the 70s - after the idealism burned off, but before it started blowing itself.
Finally, on similar lines, a biography of Tim Leary is currently residing in my coat pocket. Unfortunately the writing is determinedly uninteresting, which is practically heretical given the subject matter. Take Hunter S. Thompson’s quote on the jacket: “Tim was a Chieftain. He stomped on the terra, and he left his elegant hoof-prints on all our lives.” That’s more like it. Why couldn’t someone like him have written it?
Maybury posted yesterday about Harper Collin’s free book experiment, in which they allowed everyone to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free online. (Not, strictly speaking, a new idea, but still.)
How did it go? Gaiman reports:
68,000 unique visitors to the book pages of American Gods
3,000,000 book pages viewed in aggregate
And that the weekly book sales of American Gods have apparently gone up by 300%
A pretty impressive result. Wu Ming (authors of Q and the brilliant 54) have been advocates of this sort of thing for a long time now, and it’s interesting to see a major publisher dipping its toes in the pool.
I think books are the medium most likely to succeed with this kind of model - apart from the whole “owning the artifact” thing that applies to all media, I find that reading from a computer is much more tiring than reading from a book. Certainly, I never got past the first five pages of 54 until I bought it. (I may be out of the loop on this, feel free to contradict me.) If it becomes common practice it’ll be a step closer to treating people, as Jeff Tweedy put it, as patrons rather than consumers, and that’s something I find utterly delightful.
Rome is surrounded by mountains. This means that your ears pop on the train in. Which is odd.
Arriving in Rome is a shock after spending time in Venice. The noise from traffic (remember cars?) is loud and constant. Speaking of which: an awful lot of pedestrian crossings don’t have traffic lights at them, because that’s not how Italians roll. You’re expected to just face forward and step out into the stream of cars and mopeds, which will stop only if they can’t see a way to swerve around you. It’s actually a great feeling once you get over the initial misgivings.
Continue reading ‘Rome’
Elmore Leonard writes the most unobtrusive prose ever. It’s like you’re not even reading a book! It’s like there are suddenly words in your head and you don’t know how they got there.
I just finished Get Shorty, and I gotta tell you, it’s impressive stuff. The plot is fine and good but the real thrill is watching the characters interact - they all have their well-defined perspectives and areas of expertise that affect how they relate to each other and their environment in a believable way. The plot, and this is a hell of an achievement, seems to proceed naturally from the way the characters behave rather than from the author mapping it out.
Leonard reminds me somewhat of JD Salinger, in that they both manage to drop fully-rounded characters in your lap without breaking a sweat, using nothing but tiny quirks and distinctions of voice. (Salinger’s short stories are devilishly impressive in this respect.) Truly, men worth being jealous of. (Or… men of whom it is worth being jealous? Shit, Elmore Leonard wouldn’t have this problem.)
In “When Film Gets Good…” Terry Southern maintained that it was “wasteful, pointless, and indeed in terms of art, inexcusable, to write a novel which could, or indeed should have been a film.” There were subtleties to his argument that I won’t go into - his point was that film, being more of a direct appeal to the senses, can run rings around novels when it comes to portraying straightforward dialogue and narrative. Now, being a writer himself he naturally didn’t leave it there, but insisted that prose writers needed to pull their socks up in terms of originality and offer something that films could not.
I mention this because I’ve just finished Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-Two in the Shade, which is one of those novels that’s infatuated with written language. Continue reading ‘Fun with words’
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