Tag Archive for 'how it’s done'

Though if you ask nicely I’ll consider it

Published
by
Colm
on 10 June, 2010
in Music
. 2 Comments

The other day I went to see Rage Against the Machine1 and oh golly my me hurts. The old head-bangin’ muscles are holding up well, but at this point my calves have turned entirely solid. I could break rocks with these things.

All of which is to say: what a gig. I saw em a couple of years ago at Oxegen and they were so-so, which I now reckon was more down to the crowd than anything else (plus and also, I was pretty sober… textbook error). The crowd in the Point2  ranged from hugely enthusiastic to not-quite-as-enthusiastic-but-willing-to-stand-aside, which is a-ok in my book. Age-wise, about half the people there were thirty-year-olds pretending they were 16 (as my brother put it). The rest were wans and young f’llas who assumably listen to Rage on account of they’re a cool band from back in the day, much as my generation listen to Iron Maiden. I’m somewhere in the middle, but it pleases me that I’m on course to becoming a middle-aged rocker.

One thing, however… whenever a mosh pit formed near us, not only did the bouncers not stop it, they actively helped people who lost their footing. I’ll reiterate: the bouncers contributed to the crowd having a good time. Is this a thing that happens now? Concert security have always been, and are supposed to be, the worst people in the world. If you pull that out from under kids’ feet, what the hell are they supposed to believe in? The goodness of humankind? No fucking thank you. These people’d want to sort themselves out reet smart before we all start getting notions.

  1. Or, as I said in an IM conversation, “Tonight I’m going to Rage Against the Machine”. The ambiguity of that makes me want to start a band called Bang a Donkey. [↩]
  2. IT IS CALLED THE POINT [↩]

On imagination and, you know, whatever

Published
by
Colm
on 13 April, 2010
in Books (and the like), Films & TV and Writing
. 16 Comments

David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry McCaffery, 1993:

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

Discuss.

JD Salinger is dead

Published
by
Colm
on 29 January, 2010
in Books (and the like) and Writing
. 5 Comments

I speculate that the coverage for this is going to boil down to I Liked Catcher In The Rye/I Did Not Like Catcher In The Rye. So a few thoughts here on why a) you’re wrong not to like it and b) JD Salinger was way more important than one book.

The standard view on Catcher is that it’s some mopey teen wandering around being angsty. This polarises people: his worldview resonates with an awful lot of readers, particularly adolescents, but everyone else just wishes he’d cowboy up. The debate never seems to go deeper than that, which is a crying shame, because there’s way more going on in the novel.

Firstly, Holden’s mopiness isn’t just Gawd-no-one-understands-me angst. There’s a line near the start where he says1 “Sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen”. Holden was thirteen when his brother Allie died; his brother, whom he adored, placed at the absolute centre of his universe. Allie’s death destroys Holden and, though he never confronts it head on, the entire novel details his attempts to come to terms with it.

Secondly, despite what many people seem to think, we’re not supposed to see Holden as a role model. Arrested development is not something to aspire to. All-encompassing cynicism is not something to aspire to. If there’s a how-are-we-to-live message in Salinger’s writing, it’s that no matter how hard it might be, the best thing we can do is find a way to get outside ourselves, stop acting like everything is about us, and keep moving forward. There’s an excellent distillation of this in the second part of Franny & Zooey. Or, more conveniently, you could read this speech by David Foster Wallace, who was heavily inspired by Salinger.

At the risk of turning into a wild-eyed evangelist, I think it’s a tragedy that Holden Caulfield is the only one of Salinger’s narrative voices that most people are familiar with. He’s dour and self-absorbed and I can see why you might not like him, whereas Salinger’s writing as a whole is characterised by a genuine warmth and humour that most writers couldn’t even approach. His short stories are phenomenal (see for instance the title story in For Esme, With Love & Squalor). He can do this thing where, in about four or five words, he describes a gesture or facial expression so perfectly that a character’s entire history, state of mind and motivations are dumped directly into your brain.

Ok, wild-eyed evangelist. Breathe.

Right now I’m going to read over these two letters a few times (the latter being some of the best writing advice ever dispensed). Then I’m going to go home and read the books again. Then I’m going to wait for all the manuscripts he’s finished since he retired from publishing to surface. And then… I don’t know what I’ll do.

  1. I’ve no copy to hand, so I’m quoting from memory. [↩]

coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee

Published
by
Colm
on 2 April, 2009
in Books (and the like) and Writing
. 7 Comments

I would post but my good LORD how is it so hot in here. Faces are not supposed to sweat. That is something I firmly believe. Surely this whole scenario should make sweet delicious cups of cheap nonsense coffee less attractive but no, I want them. I want them very badly. I haven’t slept in days. I have discovered that being on edge is a prerequisite of good writing. I have been doing some very, very good writing. Everyone should read some Roberto Bolaño. Where was I? Oh, right.

Ha ha yeah

Published
by
Colm
on 21 February, 2009
in Books (and the like) and Foreign parts
. 10 Comments

Haven’t been doing much around here, have I? Lot of things going on the past week. For one I reckon I’m starting to get the most out of twitter. Like for instance the other night I found out that there were fireballs falling in Houston Texas, and the next day some guy I don’t know ate some meatballs in IKEA, and the cool thing is I knew about these events sooner than probably quite a few people. If you want to feel like a sci-fi supervillain just go to monitter.com, throw in some keywords and then imagine you’re absorbing crazy data streams out of people’s heads. It is not hard to do.

Secondly, there’s a project afoot. Uh. I’m not going to say anything about that yet.

Thirdly, I wanted to mention a nifty event I was at in Chapters on Tuesday – Neil Gaiman reading and Amanda Palmer ukelele-ing. Organisation was a bit dodgy, largely it seems because the staff were too busy shuffling awkwardly and going “Shucks, no one’s gonna turn up at our shop” to properly think it through, but it was a most enjoyable evening. Gaiman was reading from a book they worked on called Who Killed Amanda Palmer? and basically what you need to know is that his old school storytelling mixed with her gleeful sordidness makes for some top-notch material. Grimm fairytales but with hookers and crack, that kind of thing. You can see basically the whole show in five parts starting here.

And lastly, I’m off to Maastricht in… four hours. I’m typing fast here so I can stay awake. Exhilarating! There’s a carnival over there, you see, and I’ve been trawling Dublin’s various vintage shops (and River Island, and Tie Rack, which I don’t understand how they stay in business because surely cravats and cummerbunds aren’t exactly flying out the doors) so that I can bring the magic of Oscar Wilde’s Jakey Nephew to the streets of the Netherlands. On which note, either it’s bloody hard to get hold of a cane in Dublin or I’m just stupid.

Most excellent fancy

Published
by
Colm
on 28 January, 2009
in Books (and the like)
. 0 Comments

Far be it from me, in general terms, to make grand statements about a book I haven’t even finished reading yet, but listen: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is the greatest extant work of art in any medium. Every single page excites me. I have been excited a total of 758 distinct times so far, not counting endnotes, and that’s hard to argue with.

“I’m a doddle for interviewing…”

Published
by
Colm
on 31 July, 2008
in Books (and the like) and Writing
. 0 Comments

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…

Things Blade Runner does that newer films don’t

Published
by
Colm
on 2 July, 2008
in Films & TV
. 8 Comments

One of them anyway: restraint.

In particular, and by way of neatly segueing away from the film this post is supposedly about halfway through my first sentence, I was reminded of a great scene in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in which the inmates are seated at a discussion group and talking amongst themselves while the camera remains focussed on McMurphy. There’s some great acting from Nicholson as he watches each person talk and reacts to what they’re saying – you can see the cogs turning in his head as he figures out the dynamics of the relationships and as the reality of the situation becomes clear to him. It’s brilliantly done.

Of course it would be wrong to say that there’s no restraint in modern filmmaking, but this particular technique – closely following a character’s expression even while there are other, more conventionally interesting things going on – is not something you see often. The temptation, overtly or otherwise, is to pander to the audience, so it’s always nice to see someone really take hold of a narrative and do their own thing.

Sounds like a challenge

Published
by
Colm
on 18 June, 2008
in Writing
. 0 Comments

Neil Gaiman had this yesterday – from Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing:

Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They’re not good at relationships. Often they’re drunks. And writing — good writing — does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder — so eventually the writer must stall out into silence. The silence that waits for every writer and that, inevitably… the writer must fall into is angst-ridden and terrifying – and often drives us mad.

A cheerful fellow. From now on, if anyone asks me about how to be a writer I’ll just punch em in the face and be done with it.

Charles Bukowski. What’s the deal?

Published
by
Colm
on 28 May, 2008
in Books (and the like)
. 8 Comments

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.