All entries for January 2008

Regenerating L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

Writing about web page http://zimbabwe.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=5748&x=1

"The Renaissance DIALOGUE was practiced in meetings of writers, artists and scientists in an attempt to create a humanist world.

"For example in remote places in the Toscana in Italy, and besides drinking, eating and making love, they engaged in controversial discussions about everything, and were completely satisfied with a situation that did not aim at achieving a consensus about ideas, issues and theories. Everything was open for discussion, and through this openness, a temporary closeness could exist, but not vice versa. They produced no closed and thus restricted systems – they were the outsiders – but at the same time practices in a system – being insiders – but of a special kind. But there was a rule: one person present was chosen and had to remain sober in order to write the protocol of the dialogues – as did the individuals who chose to write the protocol of Dambudzo’s dialogues. This chosen writer produced a system which could only be a glimpse of the non-system as dialogue, but should be seen to be just as polyvalent and multivocal as the DIALOGUE itself. Thus the DIALOGUE is both the condition of art – as non-system and of science – as system. Today we see a dialogue as a condition of postmodernism."

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is useless without a social context; hence:

"L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y was not simply a movement to bring renewed interest to language, but to the structures and codes of language: how ideas are represented and formulated to transmit ideas, thoughts, and meaning...

"L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y also recognized that language is political. In the same way that American farmers hid behind tree trunks and took pop shots at British soldiers who stood in formation in open fields during the revolutionary war, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=S fractured the language in an attempt to wage their own rebellious assault against the social and political structure inherent in the Imperial force of the English language. In doing this, the entire reading process was overhauled, with the reader of this type of poetry forever changed in the way that he or she encounters text of any type." (source)

Hence Dambudzo Marechera. A D=I=A=L=O=G=U=E P=O=E=T.

George Ttoouli : 30 Jan 2008 11:07 |  Tags: Bettina Schmidt Creativewriting Dambudzo Marechera Modernism |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Bypassing publishers

Writing about web page http://www.nin.com/

I stumbled over some interesting music industry happenings recently. I say stumbled: Saul Williams is coming to the UK in February, to do an event for the London Word Festival, run by Tom Chivers of penned in the margins, who I've worked with on podcasting; and I'm a MASSIVE Nine Inch Nails fan. I put two and two together (i.e. I read the websites) and this is the story: 

Saul Williams' latest album is produced by Trent Reznor, who decided, having had trouble releasing the album through a major label, to make the album downloadable for free online. The results: 

"As of 1/2/08,
154,449 people chose to download Saul’s new record.
28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning:
18.3% chose to pay.

[...]

"If 33,897 people went out and bought Saul’s last record 3 years ago (when more people bought CDs) and over 150K - five times as many - sought out this new record, that’s great - right?"

[NB. These figures from this blogpost - go here for the full blog.]

The first 100k downloads were completely free, with an option to pay $5; since then the album's been available for $5. So a drop in about 5000 of actual sales, but a 500% audience boost, roughly.

What's really interesting is the cost of production and marketing. Trent's latest post points at an Observer article by Simon Napier Bell, on the topic of industry giants and how they screw the artists:

"Imagine the outcry if people working in a factory were told that the cost of the products they were making would be deducted from their wages, which anyway would only be paid if the company managed to sell the products. Or that they would have to work for the company for a minimum of 10 years and, at the company's discretion, could be transferred to any other company at any time."

Most notable fact is the 10,000% mark up on raw product to retail price. That profit mostly goes on rent, employee's salaries and into the pocket of the label, not the artist. Remove that and the relatively insignificant cost of hard copy CDs, etc. and you're left with just the artist's time and the producer's time and then the relatively magical concept of the art's intrinsic value (i.e. how much did you enjoy it?).

Compare to Radiohead's latest, In Rainbows. Originally available free, with an honesty box, which reportedly saw devout fans throwing £70 or more into the band's pockets. Now only available from the band's official merchandise website, for £40. Ouch. Ditto Saul Williams' Niggy Tardust, which uses Paypal to process credit card payments. (Waste appears to have its own system, but I couldn't be bothered to register. Maybe when I feel rich enough to buy the album.)

I've had a couple of chats with China Miéville about a similar line being taken in book publishing. Cut out the conglomerate vampires because soon digital reading tech is going to be as good and widespread as ipods. So how to control it, if it takes off?

Readers are swamped with text these days, they're up to the eyeballs in reading material (of a different sort to literature though? I add ponderously) on screen, off the 'net. So there's no question about whether it's going to grow, as far as I'm concerned. I've a friend who came back from Japan recently with a (Chinese-) modded Nintendo DS that allowed him to download ebooks to it from the internet, load up any text, whatever he wanted - correction, whatever he can get hold of, which, increasingly, means everything.

The future is here already, according to China (M, not the country), we just don't have it shipping free with new home entertainment systems yet. According to some people this and digital print in general mean (these are paraphrases):

• The death of the book in the next five years (China)
• A shift towards localised networks, devolution of readerships (Rupert Loydell, Stride)
• An interesting fad, that marketing departments need to be aware of and part of (Stephen Page, CEO Faber & Faber)
• Something that will create a new playing field for the publishing industry (Alexandra Pringle, Bloomsbury Editor, I think said something like this at her recent Warwick visit, as did various other small press people I've chatted to)
• A way to screw artists of their royalties (this comes more from music and television giants, like David Geffen, who set up that anti-piracy squad several years ago targeting mp3 websites)
• A way to screw conglomerate publishers (Steven King & Trent Reznor, though I might be over-interpreting them both)

China suggested that writers will eventually find themselves working directly in partnership with freelance editors, and releasing their books online, possibly with the kind of honesty-box donations that you get on Trent's site.

[Or the one that featured for a while on Stephen King's page, when he serialised The Plant online. The figures I saw published on King's website at the time showed him to have a net profit after the first one or two installments of about £75,000. The article linked above suggests total profits of nearly half a million dollars and that the project was abandoned supposedly because of a slump in people paying for the downloads. Nice work, if you can get it.]

But these processes are subject to one important point: artists with established fan bases can get away with it, but how do you draw new audiences on the net? What will new artists do when they only have a range to 100s or, if they're lucky, thousands of readers? OK, OK, Arctic Monkeys, I hear you say. (But don't say Lily Allen at me, she's connected.)

At the end of the day, being a good writer doesn't make you a good editor; being a good editor doesn't make you a good promoter; the business of publishing art is set up to work with skilled individuals and the idea that a writer is nothing without their readers is a strong one (but not one, in my book, that justifies pitiful royalties and contracts that hold artists over barrels marked 'profit'). At the end of the day, the book still needs to be written, then edited, then promoted. So writers who need editors who need marketers will find themselves working with an increasingly fragmented, independent array of individuals with various skills (accountants, PR people, editors, sub-editors, typesetters) so let's, for the sake of convenience, call this collective a publishing house.

And oh, right, we're back to square one, but with a chance to rewrite the history books. More tea, Comrade Lenin?

So, for me, there's some weight to Stephen Page's idea that the internet's effect on publishing is essentially a marketing problem, in need of marketing solutions. Publishers who don't keep up will look like dinosaurs, and lose face. Publishers who do keep up will be doing the same work as before (providing a collective, professional service) but in a new environment, alongside the existing one, until that, supposedly, dies out. If at all.

Piracy itself won't have that much of an impact on anything except the scale of operations - though the new model of publishing huge quantities of writers and texts that each sell in small quantities (cf. Salt, Shearsman, and, godhelpme, lulu) marks a change that will be much more noticeable at the lower end of the industry's turnover scale. The giants already have massive back catalogues, rights to recent classics and estates, that they won't have to worry too much. Their staff will though.

The main problem is that we're in a transition phase and, as usual, the industry is using it as an excuse to separate the wheat from the chaff in the usual fashion: through blinkered, unimaginative capitalism-tinted goggles. Similarly, you get the kind of shameless exploitation of artists that leads to protest (cf. Writers' Guild of America). Even the BBC is guilty of it, e.g. through early screenings of second episodes online and marketing sampler series to mobile phones. They've asked writers to 'go with it' for the sake of marketing experimentation, but bottom line here is that the broadcaster/publisher is getting coverage at no expense, from someone else's artistic product.

Sure, you could whine till the cows come home, only you can't afford any cows, or a field, because you've got no money. The obvious response is to go and do something it about it. Or go into banking.

George Ttoouli : 28 Jan 2008 09:00 |  Tags: China Mieville Digital Publishing Piracy Publishing Saul Williams Society Of Authors Trent Reznor Vampires |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Random Monster Encounter: China's workshop

[Draft produced from an Exquisite Corpse/monster exercise set during China Miéville's Weird Fiction series.]

*

I scanned the monitors for facility staff, anyone from the crew, rats, anything. Four screens on each level, four levels, buttons underneath each to control them. Jarry was supposed to be on the bottom floor, basement 3, searching the engineer barracks. The cameras swept left-right, right-left, grainy and monochrome. It was like watching a spliced up silent film with no cast. I pushed the security guard's body out of the chair and took his place.

There. Lowest level, second camera. Was that? No, Jarry was shorter. In a dark corner of what would have been a mess room - I checked the blueprints on my PDA to confirm - near the crew cabins. What was that? A woman? In a skirt? What was she doing? Hiding? I zoomed in. She was tall, hard to say how tall because of the angle, but well over six feet, I'd have guessed. In heels? The contrast was bad, I couldn't see her feet. She had a strange cone-shaped skirt that reached to the deck. At first I thought it was one of those Spanish gypsy dresses, but the shape was wrong, bulges rolled down the side like thick sauce on pudding; no, heavier, like rolls of fat.

And then I noticed she was bald - big ears, no hair - or maybe some tufts behind her ears, that stretched more like a kind of webbing. She - he, it - had no shirt on its pale, reedy, triangular frame. A man? Jarry must have seen it, he should have squawked it. A seven foot man in a skirt didn't just stand in the corner of a room unnoticed. I zoomed in as far as the image would go, so he filled the screen from top to deck and I blinked to try and resolve the pixels into something that made sense, but my eyes couldn't match up what I was looking at with any mental registers.

I looked away at the other screens - where was Jarry? I looked back at the man. Large round ears, though they seemed oddly shaped, more like fins, and that definitely looked like webbing, not hair. Its arms were flimsy matchsticks and... Fuck, what were they? It had no hands and the arms seemed to taper away to points. I couldn't make out any joints at the wrist or elbows, just these strange pale lengths hanging from its shoulders, the same pasty colour of its head and torso.

And then, for no reason I could tell the dark, lumpy skirt bulged out, billowed like it had caught an updraft and then the thing's arms started to saturate and pulse, extending up and outwards, ugly, erectile. And Christ! They were tentacles, plain fucking tentacles. At the same time I noticed it had three of them distributed asymmetrically, two on one side, one on the other. Was this some kind of freak of nature, an abominable human deformed from birth? Or had it lost one somehow?

This thing started to ripple and I swear I'd never seen anything this crazy before, these ripples that ran up its body, from the hem of its weird skirt all the way up to its neck. How can I explain it? It reminded me of a Russian contortionist I'd seen in a travelling circus, years ago, who had made his body creep along the floor like a worm, rippling like that. Three, four ripples, tightening, flexing. The thing's tentacles pulsed and grew until they were fully extended and the ripples ran up its body, contracting rings of muscle, like it was going through a form of peristalsis. But how did the movement pass from the skirt to the body like that? I couldn't see where the skirt ended and the flesh began, the image was too poor.

Its mouth widened into an o, grew to an O, and the contractions pulsed right up to its lips, which widened more than any human could have managed, revealing a circular set of fangs, long sharp teeth that ringed the inside of its mouth - it was sickening. Its lips slid back like a sheath until its whole jaw bared itself, a bony sphincter, curved talon-teeth whitish on the CCTV. The terror that took me then - I couldn't look away, but my breath came quieter and quicker. It was so alien, so horrific and all the worse as I realised how unlike a human - how wrong I'd been at first.

A violent contraction took a hold of it and I swear to you now I could see a - a lump run up through its skirt and into its stomach, something so big that it literally forced its body apart as it swelled to accommodate whatever was inside it, pushing its bones out, stretching its skin. Even under the shock of what was happening, I made out its skeletal frame pushing against the skin, a ribcage of sorts, but more like that of a fish, or snake, than a human. Its tentacles, damn! They thrubbed and fattened and its whole torso seemed to grow.

The contraction dwindled and then another took up, forcing the now smaller bulge in its torso up to its scrawny neck and its mouth widened even further and then the thing bent forward at the waist and began to vomit. A disgusting, dark mass of wet, mushy excrement oozed out of its mouth. God knows what it was - a soft, faecal matter steeped in liquid, with small, paler pieces clearly visible in it. The vomit caught in its teeth, slid down its chin and dropped in chunks and slurs onto its skirts in a way that made me think they were not made of cloth, but of some harder, rubbery material. I thanked every power I knew that I wasn't there to hear it or smell the stink of it. The animalistic lack of self-awareness was terrifying; the filth it was sliming itself with was utterly horrible, like a sick dog fouled in its own shit that starts to wash itself with its own tongue. But this beast's eyes seemed to glare at the room like a drunkard's, the grey panache of intelligence just visible behind a sheen of delirium.

The beast stood upright again and drew another great bellows of air, squinting its little eyes and then it exhausted a great burst to clear out its insides, so all the traces of vomit, the lumps in its teeth, sprayed out across the room, spattered the metal tables and chairs. Finally, then, the creature slackened and its hideous, sphinctral jaw retracted into the sheath of its lips, which narrowed to a dark aperture, not quite closed.

This, I thought, would be the godforsaken end it, but I was so fucking wrong you wouldn't believe. The next moment, it caught another billow of air and swelled up, so the whole creature actually rose up off the floor. It began to move, taking up momementum, the edge of its skirt rippling like the fins of a flatfish, propelling it forwards, hovering, levitating, I couldn't tell what, but the moment it started to move, to come towards the camera, I felt so terrified I sobbed. I looked and looked for signs of its feet, but the angle was wrong and everything else my eyes were showing me said that this thing was hovering.

Left behind on the deck, as it moved out of the dark corner of the room, was a whitish-grey pile, from which a mucous-like saliva trailed after the monstrous thing, stringing across the floor. And this, this I couldn't believe, I couldn't parse. I moved the camera down and spotted, in the pile, the unmistakeable flesh-stripped and hollow sockets of a human skull. The pile was a human skeleton. I retched over the desk, I had to look away, but my eyes fell on the dead guard, so I had to look up, stare at the lights until they hurt my eyes, chanting one of the training mantras to focus myself.

I zoomed out to view the room. Now that I'd found Jarry - what was left of him - I had to take care of myself, get myself out of the facility. The creature was already off the monitor. Then it appeared again slithering and gliding into view on the next screen, using its tentacles to drag itself along the walls, moving fast, through the view, then on into the next screen, the atrium at the bottom of the stairwell. It was trying to come up.

At the foot of the stairs, it stopped. Its skirts billowed and heaved, and it stretched its tentacles out to an unnatural length, extending them across the full three metre width of the well, its body seeming to narrow as it did so. It gripped the walls with the flat ends of its appendages, suckering and pulling itself up a few steps. It paused then billowed up again, a few more steps. I felt, then, unequivocally, though it might just have been the sheer, bloodless fear in me, that it knew where I was and was coming for me straight up the stairs, two flights and if I didn't leave immediately it would cut off my route to the ground floor, and the exit.

George Ttoouli : 26 Jan 2008 17:28 |  Tags: China Mieville Creative Writing Monster |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Aggressive Interview with Rupert Loydell

Writing about web page http://gistsandpiths.blogspot.com/2008/01/aggressive-interview-1-rupert-loydell.html

I've just posted an 'aggressive interview' on Gists and Piths, with Rupert Loydell, editor of Stride. (So called, because I took the opportunity to fire a few dirty questions and throw in some cheap gibes, to liven up the subject.)

Stride is an independent poetry publishing house with an emphasis on experimental writing. Notable recent anthologies include The Gift, ed. David Morley, The Allotment, ed. Andy Brown; as well as a great range of material by the recently departed poet, essayist and artist, Peter Redgrove. The press has a strong international flavour, especially as regards American experimental poetry.

The interview opens up a few interesting channels, to do with how marginalised cultures filter through to the mainstream. This is worth thinking about both in terms of the 'avant garde' experimenters and also marginalised cultures - black british, asian, middle eastern, esp. Palestinian and Afghan, for example - in relation to dominant trends in western cultures.

In poetry, the mainstream vs. avant garde debate has been bandied about too often for some tastes. The media tend to pick on the polarity as a simple, dumbed-down way of presenting certain cultural phenomena (can't believe I just called poetry that) that don't have widespread appeal. It reduces the argument to an understandable abstraction.

I find the debate interesting mainly from an anthropological perspective: it highlights how tribalism can operate in different areas; it's a microplay of the greater theatre of economics and empire. However, it's also a reductive debate, and gets in the way of my ability to engage properly with the actual content and technique of various poetries.

I'm not yet sure whether my interest is healthy, but I do know that I have a tendency towards the more experimental and challenging end of the cultural spectrum. And I'm often overtaken by an urge to spread the word about the things that move me most; but the resistance of more conservative readers and forces to these texts depresses me no end.

Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

-- William Faulkner

George Ttoouli : 21 Jan 2008 10:00 |  Tags: Gists And Piths Interview Rupert Loydell |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

M John Harrinson

I'm always banging on about the fact that in any kind of writing, you have to do the work of constructing the world you want to portray to your reader. This could be a completely imagined fantasy, or a version of a known part of the world. You still need to bring it to life for the reader in some ways.

After China Miéville's workshop last night, we had a little chat and he recommended M John Harrison to me. And, along those lines, I found these posts on MJH's blogs (to be read in this order):

http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/viriconium/1/
http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/01/18/licensed-settings/
http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/01/27/very-afraid/
http://uzwi.wordpress.com/worldbuilding-further-notes/

From the get go he's saying some fantastic things here - I'm particularly fond of the idea that JRR Tolkien's world relies on a degree of poetry in the style and language to create the correct atmosphere for the reader to 'buy in to' the world of Middle Earth.

This reminds me of a workshop I trialled over summer using the herbalism and chanting, as practised by komboyannites (or 'Vikos Doctors') in Greece, over the centuries. The combination of blessings, preparations, meditation and chanting during the application of herbal medicine helped to create the correct mental state in which healing could take place.

Similarly, Jim Crace's work - Continent, Quarantine - relies on a degree of immersion in the rich language, the atmospherics, to deliver the world environment. As MJH continues, this clarifies in his argument:

"Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism... & in other worldbuilding news: Bush adminstration announces War on Climate Change– “We’ll fight with smoke & mirrors.”"

Perhaps it's more the broad brushstrokes that locate and contextualise the story, its characters. The smell of the landscape, the environmental pressures. Just creating the world isn't enough. This is there in HP Lovecraft's work, in his purple prose: the world is a verbose, graphic, flowery and frightening one, the syntax odd and historical. That's as much a description of the worlds in his stories as the technical specifications, but it's the poetry of his world, not the detail.

George Ttoouli : 17 Jan 2008 16:17 |  Tags: China Mieville Constructing Worlds Creative Writing Fantasy Writing |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

Dave Eggers' Short Shorts

Writing about web page http://books.guardian.co.uk/shortshortstories/0,,1178980,00.html

Here's the link to Dave Eggers' short stories. These were serialised in The Guardian Weekend magazine a few years ago, but are still available online.

They've since been edited and published by Penguin as part of their 70 years series of booklets.

Also have a read of 'Short and Sweet', his article about them.

George Ttoouli : 16 Jan 2008 14:40 |  Tags: Dave Eggers Icw2007-8 Short Short Stories |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Recent Reading: Egger and Kluun

Boyoboy. Two cancer books in one holiday. Ouch. And I didn't realise either was about cancer until I had them packed with me over the holiday.

First up, Dave Eggers' A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius. This has been on my list for a long time - students have been quoting it at me for years and I've had a signed copy on a shelf since May '07, when I saw Dave reading from What is the What at Hay Festival with Valentino Achak Deng. I've stuck to reading his short short fiction mainly because it's more tolerable when you've only so much time in the world for 500pp novels about dying parents.

What I didn't realise was that the book was about both of Dave's parents dying, within five weeks of each other, of different types of cancer. And how Dave, aged 21 at the time, had to become a parent to his brother, Toph (pronounced toe-ff, short for Christopher) who was about 10. It's difficult subject matter.

I think what struck me most about the book is that it is one big magician's act - the voice, the mayhem, the energy, the fictionalising and then revealing of the fictions, the postmodern self-awareness, the insistence that book and its author are anti-ironic; and the trick of a young idiot trying to keep his brother entertained and in school and fed and housed. All in order to distract the eyes, the reader, from the gaping sorrow in his life, his brother's life.

I clicked with this mentality quickly - that it's all an act, for show, in order to bury up the pain he was going through - because the book gives you its coda very quickly. And then I immersed myself in the mayhem of it. It's wonderful. Above all, it's intelligent and unafraid of this. It has no sham to it, it is nothing but emotional honesty throughout. And it has a plot: Dave is trying to become something, run a magazine, find/keep a girlfriend, change the world. All the details of his life become inspirational by knowing what he's going through at home.

Something I find in David Lynch's films (e.g. Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive) is in this book - the tricks, self-delusions or illusions that people will create in order to hide themselves from their own suffering. When you're faced with such enormity of emotional distress, there can be no end to the lengths you go to avoid confronting it. I found myself having sudden palpitations, panics and fighting back tears from the most innocuous sentences, while also laughing out loud regularly, throughout. The book turns corners, switches back and forth. It's incredibly deft and the writing is actually wonderfully in control; I found myself completely trusting everywhere it went.

On top of that, it's at the cutting edge of storytelling techniques, if you ask me. McSweeney's, The Believer magazine, all that stuff is the new voice of American literature. And AHBWOSG is a demonstration that this new self-awareness is not just tongue in cheek. Just as some people mistakenly accuse modernist writings of being all cerebral and lacking an emotional grounding, this stuff can be dismissed too quickly. In fact, it's the extremes of emotions that drive people to skirt around the issues, to camouflage themselves in personae or don the armour of technique, in order to reach the places where they are at their most vulnerable.

Which is why, in contrast, Kluun's Love Life, the second novel, succeeded in jerking a few tears out of my cynical eyes with its highly predictable ending, but left me extremely annoyed. Where AHBWOSG was intelligent, painful and bursting at the seams with subtextual anguish, this was banal, revelling in ignorance, cheap and repetitive. I bought the book as a requested present without looking at the blurb in any detail, but ended up reading it myself when I heard about the subject matter.

Kluun (that's his nickname and author name, but real name is Raymond van Kluivert), was a Marketing/PR man based in Amsterdam, happily married with a daughter of 2. At the age of 35, his wife is diagnosed with breast cancer and dies within a year. Just like the main character of Love Life (the book is called A Woman Goes to the Doctor in the original Dutch version, a hint that the book is supposed to be a heartrendingly cheerful attempt to make a joke out of sheer misery). Coincidence? If only, because then the idea might have been fictionalised into something more interesting.

You should  notice at this point that I'm going to stop distinguishing between Kluun and his main character, (whose name I've now forgotten anyway, but may as well be called Kluun). He is a serial monophobist (people who are scared of being stuck with just one partner). So having established a life of endless deceit, cheating on his wife with ex-girlfriends, random women in bars and, when these are both unavailable, visiting prostitutes, his wife is diagnosed with cancer and he is forced to face up to his own behaviour.

And his behaviour barely changes until the last two weeks of her life/the last 20pp of the book, and mostly consists of:

- Shallowly associating everything that goes well or badly to football (mainly Ajax's history, which is not an oven cleaner, but a Dutch team)

- Fucking women, shallowly

- Swanning about shallowly in bars, drinking heavily and devising ways to fuck women

- Having shallow yet poignant conversations with his mates about his behaviour

- Making shallow comments about other people with cancer and then commenting shallowly on how other people must think of him and his wife

- Trying to justify his own behaviour to himself and then avoiding the subject by drinking and fucking women

I can't put any of this shallowness down to the translation, which is loose, colloquial (towards US English, but still gets across the point of how laid back the original is). It doesn't rise above the kind of retarded vocabulary generally found in Nuts, except when Kluun finds himself struggling with long medical words and has to go look things up on Google, which he does while also emailing various women to see if they are available for fucking.

Oh and I almost forgot to mention that he uses 'wrampling' throughout - quotations from pop songs, stolen and reworked into the text - in order to make sure the level of the language never rises above the banality of your average pop song (great as songs, but fucking terrible on a page). Quotations open every chapter. They pepper the language, like his analogies to football. I found myself thinking things like, "If I have to read another fucking football analogy..." or "Please god, not another FUCKING Bruce Springsteen quotation..." 

He just about puts down his monophobia to a mental disorder at one point. That's his best defence. And when people suggest he go get some counselling, he scoffs. If anything, crashing his car has a greater impact on his behaviour than his wife's diagnosis - which could have been a painfully useful way of demonstrating the narrator's difficulty with change, but by that time I found myself wishing he'd died in the crash so I could stop reading.

The worst part about the book is that it is probably more honest than Dave Eggers' novel. In that, incapable of the techniques needed to write an actually entertaining book alongside a loosely veiled memoir, he has instead changed all the names (no doubt to protect them from his cack-handed portrayals and slovenly grasp of plot and narrative) and merely reported in a crass fashion, his wife's dying and death. It's a case in hand demonstration that having major traumatic things happen to you doesn't mean you're necessarily going to be up to the task of communicating them in the best way.

The overall impact of the text, especially from when the initial impact of Kluun's almost depraved banality had worn off (about page 20) up until his wife's imminent death (as I said above, about 20 pages from the end), was that this book was a cheap way of alleviating Kluun's guilt while also cashing in on his wife's cancer.

I feel like a horrible human being for writing that. But that's the technical part of me talking. Emotionally, the book still has all the cachet of angst that losing someone you love early can bring. And I had to go somewhere private to read the last 20pp as it was so damned sad. Writing about trauma and pain is often necessary, even if it's never shown to anyone. I don't think it's possible to displace the need for consolation into language, which is what some peope seem to try and do when they demand reactions from people on their suffering-made-text. But you can alleviate and displace the emotional turmoil, make sense of yourself, or set up barriers in yourself. Consolation comes in other ways, in reality; at least for me.

I think though, that what Dave has done with his experiences by comparison is the far better choice. He too treads the line between exploitation and need to bear witness, and he is aware of it. He also makes the reader aware of it. And he entertains, damn it, he lets his understanding of what he likes to read take over from what actually happened.

The good news is that I have What is the What to get through as well as a Best of McSweeneys anthology. The bad news is that Kluun is working on a follow up book, based on travelling across Australia with his baby daughter. nd next on my list of cancer books is Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.

George Ttoouli : 12 Jan 2008 18:30 |  Tags: A Woman Goes To The Doctor Ahbwosg Cancer Dave Eggers Kluun Love Life Review Tales |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem