NaPoWriMo: Day 4

This is a poem partly inspired by John Updike's brilliant, 'Ex Basketball Player' and partly based on truth. I love Updike's style, banal and brilliant and I tried to fit that style a little here, I don't know if it's worked, but it's my contribution for today:

Plugged in

There are no wires, not here, not now,
and we sit, not talking, not aware
of time passing.

They came across county lines and sit planted, awaiting news.

He reads you the paper, which you
never did when you were awake,
still, your eyes twitch when they mention Diana.

I want to be like Rabbit and
leave here, back on a train, escape,
instead I turn the page and think
about anywhere not here, not now...

NaPoWriMo: Day 3

I popped out on saturday night to pick up some drinks for friends and found myself caught up in the crowd for Kylie. I watched two thirty-something year old women doing cartwheels outside Victoria station, giggling away like they were teenagers again. This poem is for them:

For two women waiting outside Victoria station on a Saturday night.

You share cigarette smoke chatter, under
train station canopies and practise cartwheels
on the gravel. Under glowstick Manchester
sky you change into comfy shoes, tossing
neon purple high heels with dismissive regal
hands. There is electric blue air dancing,
sparking, swaggering around and fractured
disco ball glisten spotlights dancefloor puddles.

A couple embrace under departure board green,
threatening their children with further displays;
you giggle a fifteen year old girl's giggle,
twenty years in waiting; polish off plastic
glass of wine and walk on, leaving no trace,

but a single slippered heel.

NaPoWriMo: Day 2

Day 2 of National Poetry Writing Month. Yesterday I spent the day writing a fairly long piece of fiction. I took a break when my sister came over and we were having a coffee on my balcony when a steam train came rushing across the bridge near us.

Time Travel

Columns rise above skyscraper
outlines; it treads through the
city, disturbing saturday
shoppers and young balcony
residents. For a moment
they watch in steam powered
anticipation then as
carriages pass and the view
settles once more we come back.

We have travelled in time.

NaPoWriMo: Day 1

Morning all,

National poetry writing month is upon us, and began yesterday! I have a poem for you, brand new and hopefully you'll enjoy it. I'll be writing a rough draft each day and posting a poem on here the day after, so whilst this is day 2 right now...you're reading poem 1. My final poem will be up on the 1st of May!

The first is called Galactus Hungers! For those of you who don't know, Galactus is a Marvel comics character, who eats planets and worlds. He's always accompanied by the Silver Surfer, another cosmic character who seeks out planets for him. I quite like that relationship of master and servant and wondered what it would be like for Galactus to reach old age and start dying, in a very human way. I like to think that the Silver Surfer would be there by his side. Anyway, here's poem 1,

Galactus Hungers!

He floats on metallic bodyboard
reflecting white dwarf light across
Bedroom cosmos; he brings coffee
weak and milky, empties my bedpan.
I don't remember dreaming.

I eat baby red giant for breakfast
only manage the atmosphere
He wants to know how I'm feeling
Holds my hand, emits and Kirby crackle
That I cannot feel.

Today I'm five years old and devour
planets filled with sentient life
I chase galaxies and climb nebulae
and shout for my father. Instead I see
silvery wisp of surfboard.

He says I cry when I sleep but
I can't. Galactus doesn't cry.
Galactus hungers! Galactus destroys!
My prescence repeals physical law
or did, or does, I forget.

I wonder how it will happen
whether I'll fall and break or rather
just sleep away forever, while
the universe turns. He reads adventures,
daring do's, Burroughs, Kipling.

Teenage years were; notorious menace
Twenties spend terrorising; grew into
Sunken eyes and bar fights, now this
Pathetic weak man, cannot even stand
Galactus hungers. Indeed.

What I've Been Reading: 2011 so far...

So I've been gone a while, haven't I? What have you all been up to while I've been out? Playing cards, drinking...and...oh I see. Well we'll get that fixed later. So I've been reading a whole bunch of novels and short stories in the past month or so, and I'll give you a few mini reviews below:

The Casebook of Thomas Carnacki by WH Hodgson is one of the most insane Sherlock Holmes rip off's I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Carnacki is an occult detective, who ends up mostly debunking paranormal activity using an electric pentacle. He uses tricks that Victorian psychics used to use to fool people and applies them to murders and hauntings. He's essentially Derren Brown crossed with Van Helsing. The book dates back to just after Sherlock Holmes appeared on the scene and the influence is easy to see. Each story starts with our narrator being called to Carnacki's house and being told a story, and then being told to leave again without even a whiff of conversation. I would heartily recommend this bizarre artifact of a bygone penny dreadful age.

Which leads me to a book I wholeheartedly wouldn't recommend, The End of Mr Y, by Scarlett Thomas. I don't like to hate a book, and I certainly don't like to call an author out on bad writing/plot/character but this book has it all in spades. The story concerns a PHD student who comes across a copy of an extremely rare (and apparently) cursed book, the titular 'End of...'. What follows is a mish-mash of Being John Malcovich, Neverwhere, and sub-Douglas Adams characters. The main character is written explicitly as an extension of the author, some sort of insane hyper-sexualised wish fulfillment character who is a geniunely horrible person. At one point she prostitutes herself in a dirty toilet to make money for a hotel room...never really making a clear case as to why she doesn't just get the guy she's with to pay for a hotel room to have sex in. There are few books I would tell you to leave well alone, this is one of them.

Sometimes a book can have all the elements of a bad book and somehow work, Boxer Beetle is just such a book. Written by Ned Beauman (his debut novel), the book tells three intertwining stories. The first, a modern segment about a Nazi memorabilia collector (one who collects Nazi memorabilia) nicknamed Fishy who discovers a letter from Hitler to a Professor, and becomes the target of a very Welsh assassin, works in part due to the healthy sense of humour that Beauman injects. The second storyline (which encompasses the second and third points of view) tell the story of the Professor in the letter and his experiments with a nine-toed Jewish boxer. The book is hilarious, and whilst the mystery maybe doesn't stand up quite as well as Beauman thinks it does, it keeps the pace up and doesn't outstay its welcome.

Quite possibly the highlight of recent reads, The City & The City by China Mieville has been getting all sorts of plaudits over the past year, and quite rightly. A bizarre crime novel, it's Raymond Chandler filtered through Phillip K Dick. Telling the story of a murdered girl, and the police officer who has to investigate her murder and ends up crossing into the neighbouring city to follow the trail. Only thing is, the neighbouring city occupies the exact same space as his own. This is a fascinating book, and a very, very strong thriller. If you want a perfect example of the twelve rules of a mystery story you need look no further than this novel.

I've read a few more and I'll have some mini reviews up on here soon, so look out for Heart Shaped Box, Big Machine and Rabbbit, Run.

Bad Writing: The Back Up Plan

I'm amazed sometimes by the lack of grammatical accuracy in some adverts. More amazed by the fact that people who speak and write using the English language, also fail to notice, or are not just as annoyed as me by the misuse of said terrible useage.

For today, let me direct you to the following, the film poster for shitty rom-com The Back-Up Plan.

Yes, terrible poster for a terrible film. Let's forget the holier-than-thou smug expressions on both their faces and instead concentrate on the tag-line.

So, here's a quirky tagline for an awful film. Why has it riled me up so much? Let's take it step by step. The tagline is clearly in the style of a to-do list, ordered by priority. It's been edited in a pink pen to realign these priorities.

Before editing, Fall in Love is at the top of the list, then Get Married and then Have a Baby.

Post editing, the list would read Have a Baby, Fall in Love, Get Married. This would require the last item of the list to be moved to the top. One move. However, the editing of the list has two edits on there. One moving Have a Baby to the top, and then another moving Get Married down. This doesn't make sense. If you were to move the third item to the top, you would not require any other editing to put the list in a new order.

To make matters worse, there is a footnote to the whole list that reads, 'Not neccessarily in that order' making the whole listing, and prioritising of the list completely redundant. This whole poster is needlessly complicated and the people who designed it clearly thought they were being intelligent.

Rant over. We will resume normal service shortly.

Skippy Dies and the multiversal coming of age story.

Skippy Dies, as you may well be aware, was my choice for the number one piece of writing of last year. The six hundred page behemoth is a complex, heartbreaking work of art. It is primarily concerned with the idea of 'coming of age' but what I want to explore is the idea of this happening at a multiversal level.

The novel concerns Skippy, a young boy at a Catholic boarding school who dies mysteriously in the opening prologue set in a diner. Skippy writes the name of the girl he loves in donut jam before dying in front of his best friend Ruprecht.

The story flashes back to cover the tales of how Skippy meets this girl, her ex-boyfriend and his drug dealing expansion plans (involving ADHD tablets), their teacher Howard The Coward and his attempts to have an affair with a temp Geography teacher, and Skippy's best friend Ruprecht who is attempting to break into the multiverse.

Paul Murray uses these stories to play with the idea of parallel themes, whilst Skippy's story on it's own is a bittersweet love story, it's played alongside the story of Carl, the psychotic ex-boyfriend who's journey is the complete opposite. Likewise, the story of Howard, whos life has been, at the start of the story, fairly linear and calm, is thrown into chaos at the arrival of Miss McIntyre. When they eventually do sleep together (at a school dance) it happens alongside mass vomiting, an outbreak of rap music and hallucinagen spiked punch. Almost as though the one event, caused the other.

This is Murray's greatest achievement with Skippy Dies, that his overall point isn't that 'coming of age' is restricted to just one character, that one character can affect another, and another, and another and so on until what you are writing is a sprawling epic about the universe. It's spelt out best towards the end, when Lori, the object of Skippy's affections and Ruprecht talk about the theory of everything;

"Maybe instead of strings it's stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that's why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people's we know, until you've got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word..."

Skippy Dies is available now, and I urge you to pick up a copy.