Adjudicating Short Stories

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ADJUDICATING SHORT STORIES

I’ve just done an adjudication of a long list of 16 short stories under a competition organised by Multi-Story (see http://www.multi-story.co.uk/). The results will be published at the end of the month on that site first, and I shall follow up with a blog which will contain the full reviews of all 16 pieces.

I have no general theory about writing short stories, which isn’t a form of which I have much recent experience, and in any case rules of writing are only more or less true and apply only to some but rarely all cases. It surprised me therefore that, when it came to final choices, I rejected some well written pieces on the ground that I did not feel they fully exploited the form. My reaction is best explained by describing what I think they were (if not short stories).

One piece was a brilliant specimen of comic dialogue: a genuinely funny idea that was extremely well executed and had a sting in the tail. I thought it would work wonderfully as a radio or review sketch, and that was my ultimate criticism: that it was only masquerading as a short story. Another piece – also well done – was more narrative in style but was at its core only a set-up for a joke.

I was very attracted to a humorous piece of social comedy that displayed the interactions of a small group of people with good dialogue and characterisation. In the end I felt it was a vignette rather than a story, i.e. it seemed too static and did not reveal its point. While it may not me mandatory, short stories often work by having a sting in the tail. It can be surprising, funny, truthful or all three. Not to have a sting in the tail is a risk.

Two of the stories took a considerable risk by founding themselves on a whimsical conceit, by inviting us to read the human condition into something non-human – an allegory, if you will. I’d caution strongly against attempting this because it adds to the writer’s problems the possibility that the reader won’t consider the allegory apposite or especially revealing or will regard it as a contrivance. One of the stories succeeded moderately well but went awry in misdescribing a key response in a way that would have been obvious if the situation had been seen with purely human actors. The other story failed because it raised issues too complex to discuss and resolve intelligently within a short story and the allegory was too contrived.

Writers want to show themselves to their best advantage and there’s a temptation to make the style overwrought. One writer had an excellent facility for vivid figurative language but fell into the vice of using it excessively, a common fault. However this tic had an interesting side effect. The story was told in the first person in which the language itself reveals the narrator’s character, and in this instance there was a contradiction between the two elements. A banal character finds himself thinking in high flown terms. Another writer couldn’t see a noun without giving it a retinue of adjectives.

Managing multiple time-frames is in any case difficult and, in the context of a short story, can be confusing. Several entries struggled with this. One was particularly affected because at heart the story arc was too ambitious, more suited to a novel.

Truthfulness is an elusive quality, but I suspect it may be more important in a short story than a novel because the brevity of the form makes its presence or absence more immediately obvious. One writer described a male fantasy, but I think he thought he was describing something else, and the result was a story that seemed to me false at its heart, though competently written. One effect of his error was a lack of internal harmony. Dialogue that should have been natural became stagey because the character had a mythic dimension, and the lesson which the Narrator claimed to have learned from his experience was at complete variance with his observed character. In contrast one of the winners came up with an excellent metaphor to describe the Narrator’s take on the world, and I thought he/she combined originality with truthfulness with using the trope to exploit the short story form to best advantage.
14.5.12

Readers’ Groups

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Here was me, thinking I’d written this yesterday. In fact I did write it yesterday but somehow failed to publish it. Incompetence, I guess.

Last week I addressed a readers’ group in Durham. It was enjoyable: I get to do my Great Author shtick and people seem to appreciate it even though I feel like a phony. I say “seem” because, truly, who knows? Fortunately I associate with folk who are kind enough to lie to me about these things. In the knockabout world of relationships, sincerity can be overrated, and I accept with unstated gratitude that my friends like to spare my feelings as I spare theirs.

If anyone else out there wants to lie to me about how good I am at addressing readers’ groups about the technique of fine writing and the gems of wisdom in my books, I’m open to offers. No charge if I get to go to attractive places and meet people I like.

NICK WEBB – UPDATE

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Nick’s funeral will take place on 30 April at St Peter’s Church, De Beauvoir Road, N.1, at 1.00 p.m. He was an atheist, but the vicar isn’t fussy about that sort of thing and Nick was never militant.

To my surprise I’ve been asked to read a poem by Clive James. It seems calculated to have the mourners weeing themselves with laughter. This is appropriate. Nick was committed to the principle that we should all have fun, and this is as good an occcasion as any other. If one doesn’t understand that, one understands nothing about him. Still, I feel touched and humbled to be asked.

The messages about Nick continue to roll in. I’ve received some. Sue has received many more. They all speak of how much he was loved.

Nick Webb 1949 – 2012

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OBITUARY
Nicholas Webb – Publisher and Author – 1949-2012
To know Nick Webb was to fall in love with his wit, intelligence, affability, generosity and self-deprecating charm (“No, no, too much, dear chap. No need to pile it on with a trowel,” I hear him say in his wonderful voice: a deep mix of fruit, honey and chocolate with an occasional distinctive stammer.) To meet him was to see a bearded gentle giant, beaming in a knowing way like the kindest of uncles, whose comforting presence made one wonder for a moment whether one’s parents had been too hasty in blowing the whistle on the old geezer and there was a Santa Claus after all.

Nicholas Webb, who died suddenly and unexpectedly on 10 April at the age of 63, was an important figure in English publishing for more than 20 years, not least because he was key to ensuring that the works of Douglas Adams were translated from radio into book form. Given that The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and its companion works look set to be classics and that their author was famously reluctant to buckle to and actually write, Nick’s service to English literature was inestimable if only for this. As it happens, however, he was an author in his own right. He was entrusted with composing Adams’s official biography, Wish You Were Here; and he also penned The Dictionary of Bullshit and The Dictionary of Political Bullshit.

His background was unconventional. On his father’s side he was descended from a raffish strain of Irish gentry, and when in the mood (which was most of the time, since he was a brilliant raconteur) he would tell tales of his paternal grandmother, a critic for the Irish Times, and her many amours. Webb-père, was Bill Webb who, under the names Auger and Solon, was a racing tipster for the Sporting Life. “My dad was very knowledgeable about horses, but addicted to impossible accumulator bets,” Nick reported without rancour. In his youth he would go with his father to the races in some style, only to return penniless. His aunt was Kaye Webb, publisher of Puffin books, who was married to Ronald Searle and by Nick’s account a racy character in her own right.

Nick’s mother, Eve, came to England from Germany on a Kindertransport and was taken in by an academic family in Oxford. Her natural family was destroyed in the Holocaust. An effect of her marriage to an Irish racing tipster was that her son had no sense of a Jewish identity, a matter about which he mused occasionally though with no particular regret. Once, in New York, a publishing colleague tried to connect him with this element of his inheritance but failed. “There was simply nothing there – and I really couldn’t get used to gefilte fisch,” he said with a wry smile. In the end the ritualistic side of Jewishness was incompatible with his rationalist, atheist beliefs, though he had a soft spot for Unitarians “because whenever you mention any actual doctrines they start to look shifty.”

Nick was brought up in Kew and educated at Tiffins School, Kingston on Thames. He studied philosophy and English at Warwick University before entering publishing. He described his career thus: “For most of my professional life I was a publisher, but not the kind of publisher in a crumpled corduroy suit and a book-lined office. No, I worked for giant corporations with their octopoid fingers up many pies. Actually I preferred it that way; the besetting sin of the publishing business is snobbery, but the organizations for whom I toiled were preoccupied only with the “bottom line”. So I was a commercial publisher with a brow below the socks, and I believed in trustworthy information or a good story rather than smart reviews.” Nick also believed in the old-fashioned publishing virtues of commitment to authors and cultivating budding talent over the long haul, and he was a pleasure to deal with.

In the 1970s Nick became Senior Fiction Editor at Pan. “It was a bit of a fib inasmuch as there was no Junior Fiction Editor, but you know how organizations employ such subterfuges to massage the ego in lieu of wages.” Though not a scientist he had a lifelong passion for cosmology and it was this enthusiasm for science and dislike of humbug that underpinned his relationship with Douglas Adams. Their great height and liking for beer and lively conversation also seem to have helped. In 1979 Nick bought the rights and commissioned Adams to convert the radio script for the first series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy into a novel, and thereafter they remained friends until the latter’s death in 2001. He was modest about his role in the book’s success; as he put it, “We were all taken by surprise. I thought it would do well, but had no idea that it would go utterly bonkers (publishing techy term).”

Nick was to work for Penguin, Granada, Hodder & Stoughton, and Sphere where he was Managing Director when the company was acquired by Penguin and later when it was under Robert Maxwell, whom he disliked intensely but was able to handle by responding in tedious detail and at boring length to the latter’s memos. He was also Managing Director of Simon & Schuster UK between 1991 and 1999. Given his convivial nature he found the lifestyle at the top end of the business in this period congenial: “It was great fun, but alas it made my waistline bigger than my IQ.” Typically Nick took no credit for his own success, and, when he lost his job at Simon & Schuster in circumstance that many considered unfair, he commented simply that he had been “found out”, as if he had done nothing in particular for the previous twenty years and the fact had only now been spotted.

After Simon & Schuster, Nick found himself increasingly disillusioned by publishing and tired of the ruthlessness of large corporations. He involved himself in a start-up dotcom venture, but it failed after running through the seed money. He was also, for a spell, Editor-in-Chief at Duckworth. For most of the time however he was working on his own literary projects, studying for a Certificate in Astronomy at the University of London and making the occasional progress round the country and abroad to visit his pals. He was also very fond of Deal where he had a second home and yet another circle of friends.

It was natural that Nick should be approached to write Douglas Adams’s biography, Wish You Were Here, but he didn’t find it an easy task. “I felt uncomfortable, like some moist reptile from one of our many crap papers. All that private stuff, some of which I never mentioned in the bio, was not for the eyes of some biographer, even a pal.” He struggled with the inherent problem of writing about the recently dead, namely balancing the biographer’s duty to the reader with showing some decent feeling for those who would be affected by what he wrote. He was unconvinced that he had made the right call in deciding how much of the darker, more difficult side of Adams to reveal, and for this reason was frank in saying his book was not the last word on the subject. Perhaps, yet it remains a primary source about the life of a possible genius, and for that reason important.

Of The Dictionary of Bullshit (2006) and The Dictionary of Political Bullshit (2010) Nick said, I confess that in my time I have been responsible for disseminating a fair tonnage of BS and would like to make amends.” The books are funny, insightful, and informed by a serious purpose. Nick loved words and despised bullshit because it corrupts the integrity of language as a vehicle for expressing truth. Characteristically he regarded the task as a collaborative effort and invited contributions from anyone who wanted to stick the knife into purveyors of hypocrisy, meaningless blandness and cunningly disguised evil. His friends duly chipped in and this accounts for the uneven length and tone of the entries. However the overall effect is pure Nick Webb.

Nick was universally popular (or as near as makes no difference) because he liked people and was kind and encouraging to those who struggled in the difficult business of writing and publishing books. Even the most trivial encounters with him were fun. He was committed in his friendships and always open to new ones. Quoth Nick: “Gather ye sense data while ye may. I don’t hold with this Death malarkey.” How true.

Nick was devoted to his family and adored his wife and daughter. He married the author Susan Moore in 1979. Their daughter Catherine is the successful fantasy writer Kate Griffin. They and his mother, Eve, survive him.

Jim Williams

THE NEW AUTHOR – by Ruby Barnes – a Review

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The New Author, by Ruby Barnes – a review

The New Author is a very good book and highly recommended to anyone thinking of independently e-publishing their work.  It’s full of detailed practical advice, including warnings about the pitfalls, and the style is very engaging.  In fact it’s an excellent piece of writing, combining deceptive simplicity, lucidity and charm: a trick which in practice is very difficult to pull off. The book is also informed by considerable intelligence and analysis founded on firsthand experience.  Ruby Barnes has succeeded in e-publishing and he (yes, it’s a bloke) knows what he’s talking about.

 

The book is simply and logically structured in three parts, but in this review I’ll reserve the second until last because it deserves fuller treatment.  The first part deals with what can loosely be called the Rules of Writing.  This is not specific to the e-format and, as the author acknowledges, the subject is dealt with more fully in many other works, and he seems to have included this section (rightly in my view) for the limited purpose of writing a  primer covering all the basics as well as his own special contribution.  As for the content of the section, he repeats the commonly accepted points of writing technique in a clear commonsense manner and with an appropriate level of scepticism as to the possibility of writing by rule.  This section is a useful summary and most writers probably need nothing more.  The truth is that the trick is in the practice not the theory, and what most aspiring writers need is informed critique of concrete pieces of work.

 

The third part is a detailed exposition of how to convert a manuscript into an e-publishable form compatible with commercial e-readers.  It goes on to explain how to place the book with a free e-publisher such as Amazon, and various post-publishing matters such as reviews, pricing and tracking of sales.  One would have to try it out in order to verify how correct and user-friendly this account is, but Ruby Barnes has been through the mill and writes well and intelligently, so I take this section on trust for the present.

 

The heart of the book is in the second part, which is explains how to parlay your e-book into a bestseller by leveraging the opportunities provided by Twitter and social networking sites to create a product brand and an aware and active readership.  At this point I’ll digress in order to give my take on where we are and why Ruby Barnes’s book is necessary.

 

For six hundred years the printed codex has been the technical format of books. The cost of production has influenced the proportions and outlets for books purchased and books loaned, and to a large degree countries have maintained national literatures rather than succumbed to international authorial brands; and this has been the model of mass readership for a century or so.  It’s this model, with its accompanying train of agents, publishers and bookshops, that has been largely destroyed in the last twenty years without its becoming wholly clear what the new model will look like.

 

I’ve never seen it clearly stated, but it seems to me true that the worldwide demand for commercial fiction can be satisfied with an annual production of a couple of hundred books.  The success of translated Scandinavian crime fiction sold through superstore outlets along with a mere handful of other books seems to me to prove this point.  The fact that historically many more books have been produced has been the result of a segmented, decentralised market and distribution system founded on technical limitations and cultural differences.  The globalisation of economies and the creation of a homogenised international culture, driven by free market capitalism, lead with books as with any other product to attempts to simplify and control demand and achieve economies of scale.  Although pundits talk of the loss of cultural diversity and reader choice, I don’t think this loss is in reality experienced by leisure readers of commercial fiction.  The few hundred books that I refer to as one possible outcome of the current process still offer a broad enough range to feel like sufficient choice for a significant portion of the market.  But this, of course, means death to the hopes of most aspiring authors.

 

The working out of these changes has been on various fronts.  The Waterstones model (also followed by Ottokars, Borders and others) has applied general supermarket principles of piling high and selling cheap, and has covered these economies by depressing producer prices i.e. amounts paid to publishers, printers and authors.  This model puts new writers and independent publishers on the spot.  The anticipated sales won’t support the required discounts.  Accordingly the works of new authors (and moderately performing existing authors) start from a platform of being not only less popular than the bestsellers, but actually more expensive.  It’s very difficult for an aspiring writer to escape from this bind.

At the same time as the bookstore chains have been marching to triumph, their foundations have been undermined on three fronts.  Firstly, the general supermarkets have recognised the truth that, when it comes down to it, the reading public doesn’t really need the selection on offer, and they have creamed off a limited range of best sellers that in the past cross-subsidised other works.  Secondly on-line retailers, in particular Amazon, have created a low overhead distribution system that is also tax-advantaged.  And thirdly, the e-book looks set to displace the codex as the preferred reading format.  The last two developments are not yet fully worked out, and so we don’t know if they will wholly destroy the Waterstones’ model and the independent bookshop, or whether these will survive as low level or niche operations.

 

In predicting the future the following seem to me to be relevant considerations.  There are many readers who are casual consumers of only a handful of books in a year – holiday readers, if you like.  They may not consider an e-reader as a worthwhile investment, and therefore they may survive as a base market for the traditional hard format.  That said, there may be a tipping point at which this residual market cannot be serviced economically from the standpoint of producers and distributors.  The price of e-readers, and the cost of producing and distributing hard format books are in flux, and I don’t think one can be confident as to how this will all play out.

 

I can envisage a future in which books develop almost as two separate art forms, like theatre and film.  A small stratum of bestsellers (my two hundred books a year) may survive as hard format books, sold through limited outlets suited to casual readers, and behind this will be the cloud of e-books.  Where does “choice” stand in this scenario?  In the world of the hard format, it will be very reduced, but, I suggest, not necessarily experienced as such by consumers.  In the realm of the e-book, however, the range of choice will be vast as new entrants, who in the past would have been excluded from being published through bad luck or incompetence, pile into e-books.  Here the question is whether the enhanced choice will be meaningful, or perceived as white noise, a mere cacophony.

 

Ruby Barnes’s book faces up to this changed scenario and says – rightly, I think – that predictable success can only happen through deliberate manipulation of social networking in all its forms.  In the second part of The New Author he takes the reader in detail through various techniques for doing this and identifies key forums of opinion.  His start point is a level of current engagement that, in fact, I don’t have (as with many Idiot Guides, I need to up my game to qualify as an idiot), and so I can’t speak with confidence as to the detail and whether it is described in an accurate and user friendly manner, but it seems to be.  However this course is not for the faint hearted.  Barnes explicitly warns against the trap that engagement at the required level can become obsessive and time consuming, and in a couple of nice vignettes he makes his point with wit and style.  In fact, I’d go further.  In my opinion the complete programme is only suited to the full-time writer.  The demands are intense.

 

Speaking personally, I struggle with this marketing concept.  At the risk of sounding pious despite my many failings, I value my friends for themselves: for their autonomous lives and intrinsic worth; and I try to apply these criteria to strangers to the point of not even demanding that people like me as a precondition of whether I like them.  I find it hard to contemplate engaging with people with an outward show of interest and friendship and an inward agenda of using them instrumentally for what they can do for me; yet it seems to me that this is what lies at the heart of the e-marketing project and it makes me profoundly uncomfortable.  My experience of social networking has been limited and I did do it with a view to promoting interest in my books.  I had a spell in MySpace and have a nominal presence on Authonomy.  The people with whom I’ve had contact seem to be individually nice, but Authonomy in particular seems at times to be a hell of screaming wannabes and fraudulent at its core.  It presents itself as a market of opinion in which good books rise according to the estimation of the writers’ peers.  In reality it’s a ruthless test of networking skills and “push” in which poor or mediocre books succeed solely through the promotional efforts of their authors, only to be winnowed at the “Editor’s Desk”, where books are rarely accepted for publication.  This isn’t a realistic route to publication commensurate with the efforts required and the disappointment of those who achieve the Grail of the Editor’s Desk only to be rejected must be profound.  It seems a cruel system.  As for these two sites generally, I found them haunted by an indefinable sadness.

 

The New Author belongs to the class of self help books, a subject I studied when writing How To Be A Charlatan And Make Millions.  It differs from those written by charlatans in that Ruby Barnes offers authentic, proven techniques and makes limited personal demands (“Buy my book,” not “Sell me your soul,”).  However it shares certain characteristics common to the genre, including the frauds.  Far more than the general run of novels, self help books (as distinct from mere technical manuals) pose profound questions of identity.  They confront the reader with an existential choice between himself as he is, and himself as he wishes to be – or thinks he wishes to be, until he is forced to consider the price.  There’s a reason why the number of self-help books sold is infinitely greater than the number of readers who’ve become high-earning sex magnets with the spiritual insights of the Buddha.  Whatever their conscious beliefs and motivation, people only rarely overcome the inertia of their own nature.  They are who they are for reasons, and those reasons have little to do with a lack of knowledge of the techniques for selling e-books.  When it comes down to it, over the long haul few people are up to the discipline and demands that self-help courses impose.  The New Author is an excellent book, but I doubt many readers will be able to follow its precepts for long.

 

And as for me?  I’ve come to the sobering realisation that self-publishing e-books will probably not work for me.  I’m not the person described in this book.  I’m not sure I’m capable of becoming that person.  And I’m not sure I want to be.  However my choices bind no one.

 

The New Author is a terrific book and I recommend it.

 

 

Flying with Monkeys

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FLYING WITH MONKEYS

It’s 1991 and here I am in Delhi for the first time with my Indian lawyer, Mr. Ratnadatta, on the lookout for a likely fellow to name as our candidate on a three-man arbitration panel. Mr. R has suggested we approach Mr. Shiv Dut, the leader of the majority party in the Indian Senate, which is why we find ourselves driving into the Presidential compound, where Mr. Shiv Dut has a villa somewhere among the neem trees and monkeys.

The Presidential compound was built by the British in the twenties. Mr. Dut’s villa is a small affair of faded white stucco with a bored and shabby guard outside it. The man himself is in a large, scruffy room fixed up as an office. Bizarrely it has an enormous fireplace, though I’ve been to Delhi in all seasons and never seen occasion for a fire. Still there it is: and before now I’ve arrived in town at night in December in my shirtsleeves to find Indians wearing sweaters or squatting in shawls like rows of frozen pigeons. These things are relative.

We sit and accept a cup of tea and do the polite, which involves Mr. R fawning on Mr. D as if he were the Messiah. This is a feature of Indian manners that jars with Westerners but shouldn’t be taken seriously. And maybe Mr. Dut is the Messiah? Certainly he knows Henry Kissinger and Mikhail Gorbachev, as he tells us in a casual way as if we too are pals with Hank and Mike.

We drink our tea and eye our host and the room. Mr. D is tall and well made with a round face, very glossy and black. He seems to be wearing a dirty white nightie like Wee Willie Winky in the nursery rhyme. He is extremely intelligent with a polished manner, though Mr. R tells us in an aside that Mr. D was born an Untouchable and once worked as a boot boy (in that sense literally pulling himself up by his bootstraps). So what are we to make of his flattery of such a low creature? Mr. R is a higher caste: Kshatriya and therefore polluted even by accepting the cup of tea. I know he is to some degree religious because – he tells me on another occasion – he sometimes drinks cow piss for its holy qualities.

As for the room, unnoticed by anyone except me, a bird is flying in circles round the ceiling fan and a lizard is running up and down the wall. I am going cross-eyed watching them while trying to follow the conversation. The latter has turned to the subject of economic development (as discussed with Hank and Mike no doubt) and is about to take a bizarre twist.

“We want to get back to the high tech society we had in ancient times,” says Mr. Dut.

“Yes, you are so wise,” agrees Mr. R eagerly.

What ancient high tech economy? I wonder.

“At the time of the Ramayana we had flying machines,” says Mr. Dut, stating a fact known to everyone. “That is how Rama travelled with his army of monkeys to Ceylon to fight the Demon King.”

Ah! Conservatively, I estimate the Ramayana to be three thousand years old. And flying machines? They sure beat the hell out of Noah.

As far as I can tell, Mr. Dut is entirely serious and Mr. R responds in the same vein. If the proposition of flying monkeys, which seems so natural to them, strikes me as strange, it’s only because it isn’t in my tradition. For me it has no privileged truth-value and has to be proven by evidence like any other alleged fact, and the only evidence I’m aware of is an inference from a three thousand year old religious epic. I haven’t heard of any relics of a simian airforce.

In this respect, the Bibilical Fundamentalist and I are on common ground. Neither of us would accept this Indian account of history simply because of its antiquity and religious standing. Our difference is that the Fundamentalist doesn’t see that the Bible and the Ramayana have essentially the same value as historical evidence for the remote past. He doesn’t see that both have to be judged by common rules.

The Fundamentalist thinks that a man called Noah escaped from a Great Flood.

I think the Fundamentalist is flying with monkeys.

The Wit and Wisdom Of the Williams Boys

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I’ve written before about the couple of planned gigs by Alan Williams and me at the Lymm and Buxton Festivals in July. He will deliver his songs and I shall read my verse and prose. We hope for international stardom, but expect to look like a pair of amiable old buffers before an audience of family and friends who love them. The second outcome is probably preferable.

The update is that Alan and I met with resepctive spouses on Good Friday and talked the matter over, and it really does look as though it will happen.

Gawd help us all.

When I was a serial killer and my mate was a gay porn star

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OK, it’s time to come clean and lift the veil on a disgraceful past.

My friend Rangoon Jim cheerfully confesses that, in his foolish youth in the seventies, he was a gay porn star. We think he played the refrigerator repair man in the classic movie Get Stuck Into Work. We’re not sure. His memory is unreliable. In fact non-existent. The evidence, however is irrefutable because we have the photograph. That luscious hair. That dodgy moustache which would make Engelbert Humperdink’s look tasteful. We can’t think of a more plausible explanation.

I used to be a serial killer. Again the memory is unreliable, but photos don’t lie. I stare at my wedding snaps, and Fred West stares back. Chilling or what?

I’ve often remarked (yes, that means that I repeat myself) that in our youth we all take part in a costume drama, and yet we never know it. It’s just clothes we wear and stuff we do.

In the 1950s I think I modelled for one of the kids in the Beano comic. I forget which one.

Nowadays I look like Yul Brynner. But I don’t think I am.

He’s dead.

I probably would have noticed.

An Atheist with the Pox

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As easter approaches, I’ve been remembering a delightful holiday the missus and I spent about five years ago. this piece is what I wrote about it.

*******

An hour and a half north of my home lies the Forest of Bowland: an expanse of grassy vales divided by long moorland ridges; a country of small sheep farms and stone-built villages with schools and alms houses founded in Tudor times. Its capital – if it may be said to have one – is Clitheroe: a pleasant market town dominated by the ruin of a Norman castle.

This is where Shirley and I went for our Easter break. We rented an apartment in a converted mill near one of the villages, and, during the day, went for walks of three or four hours and spent the evenings mostly reading.

This time of the year the hedgerows blossom with blackthorn, which in the autumn will yield sloes, a sour plum that can be steeped in gin and sugar to make a liquor ready for Christmas. The roadside verges are thickly sown with daffodils. The grassy spots are carpeted in celandines and the first wood anemones are appearing. Lambs gambol in the fields, and, in the sheds, sheep are being shorn as we discovered when we went into a farm to buy some fresh cheese. Elderly men on powerful motorcycles – Hell’s Granddads – tear up and down the narrow lanes in convoy

On Saturday night we drove to Blackpool, a seaside resort I used to visit as a small child. It was invented a hundred and more years ago to provide cheap holidays for the workers in the cotton mills and mines of Lancashire, and it was always cheerfully tawdry and vulgar. Its hallmark is a replica of the Eiffel Tower, put up in the 1890s on a smaller scale but still 300 feet or so high. It rises out of a Victorian palace of entertainments that houses a circus and a huge ballroom decorated in breathtaking gilded mouldings, where one can dance to the strains of a mighty Wurlitzer organ. Shirley and I had a mind to dance.

We stayed for an hour and took a few turns about the floor, where little girls with ambitious mothers were practising their dance school routines. Two elegant gay men in black were dancing beautifully together – something we’ve seen twice in the last twelve months and no one bats an eyelid. The trouble is that the Wurlitzer rips the soul out of music. Shirley and I like live music: but here only the musicians are alive: the music isn’t. And so we leave.

The evening is cool. The girls don’t wear coats as they teeter on high heels along the promenade past the gaming arcades and fast food joints with the sea close by. They sport cheap, flimsy dresses and hug themselves to keep warm. They have tattoos and bad hairstyles and are more or less drunk. The men wear gold chains and sports gear made in Chinese sweat shops, but otherwise don’t look in the least sporting. The pavement is littered with trash. People are snarfing their dinners out of polystyrene trays and the air stinks of burgers and fried onions. In my childhood Blackpool was a cheerful spot where respectable working people had fun with their families. Now it caters for cheap hen and stag nights, and competes with Prague and Lithuania, which low-cost flights have made accessible. It aspires to have a huge casino and become Atlantic City.

By midnight Shirley and I are back in our country retreat, reading and having a nightcap. Blackpool belongs to another life: one we might have had but didn’t. Education and good luck spared us. I’d like to say that wisdom also came to our aid but – in my case at least – I doubt that’s true.

On Sunday we went bird watching among the reed beds of Leighton Moss. Or, rather, Shirley bird watched. I sat at the back of the hide, reading a biography of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester and a celebrated rake of the reign of Charles II. He was fiercely intelligent and an atheist, wit and poet, but drink and the pox did for him and he died in the arms of God at the age of thirty-three. In short he was another fool. But in his case luck didn’t save him – though God may have done for all I know.

Joining the dots

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Several things happened yesterday. A close relative is on the point of death. A friend I love dearly is in distress because her partner is undergoing one of his episodic breakdowns. I have tried out my new food processor and I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble and expense.

These matters aren’t connected – or rather they are connected, but only because I’ve mentioned them together in this blog, and that naturally leads to an expectation that in some way or other they are linked. Even I share that expectation, although at this point (I mean literally at this point of pressing the keys) I have only a vague idea what the links may be.

The great discovery of twentieth century artists (and I include writers), is that the essence of art is not creation but framing. By “framing” I mean that the artist simply declares that the subject within the frame drawn by him constitutes art by virtue not of the fact that he has created it (it may be a ready-made, an objet trouvé), but by the simple fiat of his declaration that this is art. Admittedly the artist is talking self-glorifying bollocks for much of the time, but occasionally he does have a point. Anyway, this blog comprises a frame, and the three topics mentioned in the first paragraph are connected because I say so. I’ll take my chance that I’m just a gobshite.

A few comments on my chosen subjects. My reactions to the three events have been fairly banal. Not trivial, but banal because I suspect most people would probably feel the same and so I’m adding nothing to the World’s store of wisdom. The impending death led my wife and me to reflect on the undeserved joys and miseries that come people’s way; in our case mostly joys, for which we are grateful. My friend’s distress leaves me flapping my arms impotently as I try to offer help or useful advice. However it seems it’s enough for her that I offer a sympathetic ear. In the scale of things, that really isn’t very much, is it? As for my travails with the damned food processor, it offers a note of comic relief: a reminder of Life’s light and shade.

My novel Recherché has the subject of stories as one of its themes. The Narrator finds his neighbour Harry Haze telling him his life story, including his careers as a vampire, nazi war criminal, and Jewish stand-up comedian. The fancifulness of this account forces the Narrator to try to derive a meaning from it, though he never arrives at any firm conclusion. The Narrator’s mistress, Lucy, perhaps comes closest to the truth when she suggests that Harry’s stories are not something to be explained: rather they are the explanation, as best Harry can give it. In other words, if Harry had known the meaning of his stories, he would have skipped them and cut to the conclusion. If I knew why the three incidents that happened yesterday mean something, I’d tell you what they mean.

“Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena” – I quote the great Bob Carroll (may his camels never decrease), who defines the term in the Skeptics’ Dictionary (see http://skepdic.com/ – ). Human beings are designed to invent patterns and to search for significance. It’s an ability that helps us find sex and lunch. But it’s also one that often leads us into irrational thought, for which reason artists and charlatans exploit it to flog paintings, novels and snake oil.

The reason that the simple act of framing causes art to come into existence is that it changes the relationship between the observer and the object in the frame.  Until it was framed, it was no more than one item in the general landscape and viewed mainly for its relevance to the matter in hand (sex or lunch or interior decorating).  Once framed, it compels us to look at it as art: it has been isolated from all other similar objects, thus forcing us to consider its uniqueness and “thereness”. 

Yeah, yeah.  The fact remains that we aren’t obliged to accept or value the artist’s apercu.  He may still be a twat.

 I suspect that sometimes we can do no more than recognise harmonies. Ultimate meanings will always elude us. The stories of Harry Haze may delight and amuse us, and their hints at significance may tantalize us. But we shall never get further.

This blog is a collection of dots. Go draw your own lines.