The return of the guest

Thanks to those of you who supported my call for another gem from my brother, Ron. It had the desired effect and, as you’ll see when you read it, it brings a much-needed breath of culture to this fetid spot. (As a bonus, and quite unsolicited, it also does a bit of PR for The Figurehead.) Ladies and Gentlemen, give it up for (I believe that’s the current terminology) the inimitable Ron Kirton.


I’m taking a break from reading “The Figurehead” for two reasons:
Firstly, I am flattered by my brother’s thought that another blog entry from me will raise his profile but, chiefly, it was Scary’s directness in her posting of July 25th which led me to take the bait. The last time my name was uttered more than once by a woman was in 1963, when The Crystals sang it in their hit, “Da doo Ron Ron” (although, bizarrely, the object of their Crystalline desire was called Bill.)

“I met him on a Monday and my heart stood still,
Da doo Ron Ron Ron, da doo Ron Ron.
Somebody told me that his name was Bill,
Da doo Ron Ron Ron, da doo Ron Ron.”

But that’s as cute as this piece is going to get because I’m going to break an unwritten rule of this blog and have a moan.

Earlier this year I read an article in The Sunday Times about “a team of art sleuths” who had set out “…to crack a string of historical conundrums posed by the works of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Van Gogh.” The sleuths were about to present their findings to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego. (I believe the findings were also published in an issue of “Sky and Telescope” magazine). I’ll give you a flavour.

“A mysterious flood cited by the Franklin in The Canterbury Tales has been linked to a freak tide in Brittany on December 19th, 1340.”
These words from Hamlet – the “same star that’s westward of the pole”- refer to the Tycho star, or supernova, of 1572.

So far, so what, you ask. Well, instead of being enlightened, I’m angry when I learn that these detectives have pinpointed the exact time and day on which Van Gogh painted his “Moonrise.” (July 13th 1889, at 9.08pm local time, since you ask). The number of experts involved and the materials and methods they used: lunar cycles, Van Gogh’s letters, computer calculations, aerial photographs, weather charts, etc, are bewildering, though not as bewildering (to me) as the question hanging over their researches, namely, WHY?

I guess one simple answer is, “Because they can”, and I’m willing to accept that, in the name of science, not everything is going to be plain for ordinary mortals like me. But how does it benefit me to know that the blood-red sky in Munch’s “Scream” has nothing to do with the artist’s state of mind or the mania he was seeking to convey, but more to do with the volcanic dust thrown up after the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883? My frustration comes to a head, but then is gradually eased, when I read of one sleuth’s current project, “…to calculate the times at which Monet painted Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross bridge from the Savoy Hotel in 1900-01.” And there it is, veiled by my naivety: my own little clue. You can just see their funding application; “…we envisage our researches will necessitate detailed observations from the Savoy, possibly taking a number of weeks.” And I bet it was nice down in the south of France, searching for that Moonrise, in July. Advancement of Science? This is no less than the American Association for the Advancement of Scientists.

(I mentioned the article to my friend Sunderland George, something of a scientist himself, who thought that he might approach the same funding agency to support his own vital research into why the tassles sometimes fall off the nipples of exotic dancers.)

I, meanwhile, shall return to “The Figurehead” and wonder at my brother’s research which helps him place a “middle adze” in the hands of a craftsman and a “fichu” around the neck of a lady, helping me to live in the book; far more honest.

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cop-out blog number three

Time’s still pressing so I’m having to cop out again, but this time I thought I might ask for help. First of all, it seems that my brother Ron reads these postings now and then so I thought it might be an idea to set up a clamour for him to guest blog again. If you decide to leave a comment, therefore, I’d be grateful if you’d join me in bullying him into making another contribution.

Next, Dragonlady (aka Diane Nelson) was indiscreet enough to suggest another Dinsdale the whale exercise might be appropriate. I immediately jumped at the chance and invited her to write it. She’s quite a busy person so we won’t expect anything from her until August but, as before, if you’d like to throw in some suggestions of things she MUST include in her offering, they’d be very welcome. She’s good, so don’t hold back. I’ll offer some of my own nearer the time.

Finally, I’ve once again ‘borrowed’ (i.e. plagiarised) from the list of similes created by real students in their GCSE essays. As I was starting to group them in categories, however, it struck me that they’re so inventive that they could easily have been produced by some well-known authors. So which literary greats might have scribbled the following in their exam answers? I’ll number them for ease of identification.

1. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

2. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

3. The thunder was ominous sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.

4. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

5. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free cashpoint.

6. The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.

7. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a dustcart reversing.

8. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature British beef.

9. Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a first-generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightened.

Good luck.

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Why?

I have to write something. It’s been ages. But again I ask myself the question – why am I doing this? Why the compulsion to write something when I’ve got nothing to say? Who cares? There are blogs which are informative, angry, satirical, issue-based, world-changing, committed, and the blogosphere is a welcome phenomenon when almost all the media are in the hands of predominantly right wing proprietors who dictate public opinion. (For several demonstrations of how bad our tabloids are, check out the excellent http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/.)

Mind you, there are some extremely unpleasant bloggers, too, across the whole political (and religious) spectrum, but so far it’s a place where freedom of speech is a reality rather than something to which lip service is paid by pressure groups hiding behind dubious interpretations of constitutional ‘truths’.

But what am I doing here? The short answer? Being self-indulgent. Peddling trivia in the hope of getting a laugh and maybe fooling enough of the people enough of the time to sell a few books. I think digressions such as the one which invited you to contribute to what became Dinsdale the whale are interesting and, for me, very enjoyable. They give me the chance to be even more self-indulgent and have a good time writing something without deadlines and with just the joy of writing as a stimulus. The fact that Diane then put it into print is a source of pleasure but, since I didn’t know that was going to happen, it wasn’t part of the ‘why am I writing this?’ equation.

I wonder whether, like other online things, it’s delusional. I genuinely believe that some of the contacts I’ve made through blogging and reading other people’s blogs are real rather than virtual. But it would be too easy to start believing that I really do have 144 ‘friends’ on Facebook or however many ‘followers’ I have on Twitter. Wait, though. That last thing makes sense. Since I hardly ever go there, what are those followers following? Nothingness, absence. Now that makes sense. All my followers there are waiting for Godot. They’re confirming that virtuality is a void.

In a way, it’s sort of comforting that this online experience that dominates so much of our lives is illusory. We’re all figments of each other’s imagination. It’s perhaps especially true for writers. We’re sitting at our keyboards anyway and thus have such a handy displacement activity which we can pretend is ‘networking’ or some other post-modern advantage and which is part of the fictional world we inhabit all the time.

But enough of this self-indulgence. This blog is supposed to be ‘about’ something and not just me preaching at you (until I reassume my guru persona and we have the grand hut opening). So let me offer just one highlight of the past week. It came as a question in an email from my son. A friend of his was driving along with his wife when they passed a man with two young boys wearing Spiderman outfits.
‘Oh,’ said the wife, ‘look at that man with his two Spidermans’.
The husband ‘corrected’ her. ‘Spidermen,’ he said.
‘There’s only one Spiderman,’ was her answer.
My son was asked for his take on this seeming paradox and, either because he sees me as an oracle on things linguistic or because he likes to throw me titbits to help keep my mind active in my dotage, he passed the query on to me. I, in turn, asked my wife and a French friend who was here. This led to a short debate involving other superheroes and the rules of grammar (and the discovery that Asterix wasn’t a suitable example because a terminal ‘x’ is already a legitimate plural in French). Then, the following day, at a birthday party, I asked other guests (two teachers of English as a foreign language, a professor of English and a lecturer in linguistics) for their professional opinions.

I know, I know – once again you’re thinking ‘what an exciting life he has’ and ‘what great parties he goes to’ – but the matter was resolved (to my satisfaction, at least) and I hope marital harmony was restored in the home of my son’s friend.

So there, a blog about the possibility of creating a plural form of a unique concept. The world is now a more informed place. But I have to stress that the questions with which I started were rhetorical. When I asked ‘Who cares?’ I certainly wasn’t soliciting a chorus of ‘We care, O Master’. On the other hand, it would be interesting to know two things:
• why you yourselves read or write blogs and
• your response to the Spidermans/Spidermen conundrum.

I leave the punchline to one of my heroes, Samuel Beckett. ‘Nothing is enough.’

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Life’s kaleidoscope

We leap from moment to moment and none of them lasts. But, even though it’s only as memories, the feelgood (or feelbad) factor of each of them blends with all the rest and gives us a sensation that does join them up and give the impression of continuity.

I know, I know – what the hell’s he talking about? Well, I was just reflecting on recent incidents and the accidental nature of everything and pretending to philosophise about them all. Instead, I’ll just tell you what they were.

The ongoing fact is that I’m still writing these two books, but occasionally I stop, take a rest from them and do something else. With the appearance of a strange round yellow thing in the sky on Tuesday, I decided I needed some oxygen, so I drove to a local hill and walked up it. It’s only about 1000 feet, probably less than that, but the views from the top are terrific, you’re all alone, and the only sounds are birds and rustlings in the heather it’s probably best not to think about. And it’s so different from sitting at a keyboard that it feels as if you’ve achieved something.

Then, on the way home, I stopped at the River Feuch and watched the salmon trying their incredible leaps up the falls. I don't think I've ever seen one actually make it to the top so it's a perfect symbol of the good old Sisyphus syndrome (even though they do obviously make it otherwise there wouldn't be any of them left).

Then … No, I’ll save the next ‘then’ for last.

Meanwhile, e-book and e-serial instalments of The Figurehead have been dropping into my inbox, the book’s on sale in the USA, and ought soon to be available here, too. And the garden’s lush and overgrown, which is how I like it. And I’ve started carving an owl for my sister. And the World Cup gave me an excuse to watch telly (even though it’s been the worst one I can remember).

Then there was a suggestion from Michael (of May Contain Nuts fame – and probably several other fames, few of which can be mentioned in mixed company), that it might be fun for him to interview me. I agreed and it turned out that it was. Over a few days, we exchanged sub-Wildean wit and some deep thoughts about crime-writing and you can now read the result on May Contain Nuts. It provoked some nice comments from Facebook friends but won’t make either of us rich.

So all of these things produced little (or large) reactions and gave an impression of variety, change, surprise – and I love unpredictability. But then, and this bit concerns several of you personally, came a surprise to add even more to the mix. Diane (DragonLady) Nelson is a prolific writer and editor. It was she who supplied the first response to my call for ingredients for what became Dinsdale the whale. But then, when both parts had been posted, she surprised me by asking if she could include it in her latest book – Shotgun Shorts. Needless to say, I jumped at the idea and so now those of you who contributed other elements of the story can see them in print (and on screens). I’ve acknowledged you all by name so future literary historians will one day be researching what they’ll probably call ‘The Dinsdale Collective’.

And it’s all these things, these little shifts of chance, alleyways, ring roads, that keep feeding different responses into life and give us an impression of duration, continuity. Which, when really all we are is poised on a ‘now’ which never lasts, is somehow reassuring.

I bet you wish I was still doing cop-out blogs.

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Dinsdale the whale - part two

As the ‘part two’ suggests, this is a continuation of an experiment which started when I asked readers for ingredients for a blog. If you’re new here, it’ll make more sense if you start by looking at the blog before last, called A (probably very unwise) challenge. And, for ‘The story so far…’ check Dinsdale the whale – part one.

Dinsdale said she was different right from the start. He was contemplating a poem about horses so he’d been eating nothing but hay for a week and booked himself in for a penis extension. She’d heard him whinny as he waited for a bus and surprised him by identifying him as a piebald mustang which had probably been broken in by a member of the Sioux nation. Everyone else at the bus stop had told him to shut up and bugger off.

I only met her once myself. It was about two weeks after that at our local. When I went in I saw them at a table. She was rolling some leaves into a tight, purplish-green cylinder. The blade cut, sharp, snicking through, releasing an aroma of...
‘Bloody hell,’ said Dinsdale. ‘That smells like dog shit.’
She smiled and, in a low, breathy voice, said ‘No, my stallion. It has the aroma of pungent prairie, the fragrance of soft hidden yearnings’.
‘Ah, right,’ said Dinsdale.
He introduced us. Her name was Peggy Sioux.
‘Ah, Buddy Holly,’ I said.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.’
But there was no aggression in her tone and pretty soon she was telling me, in that extraordinary voice, that Peggy Sioux was only her pretend name. Her parents had been well into their forties when she was born so they saw her as a gift from Manitou and named her Thing Called Love. It turned out to be an apt name because, when she was saving to come to the UK, she had to work and the only vacancies on the reservation were for croupiers or escorts. Escorts earned lots more and so the name Thing Called Love took on an extra resonance.

She’d lit the green cylinder and she and Dinsdale were passing it to one another, sucking in great lungfuls of the dung-flavoured smoke. They offered it to me but I could see the effect it was already having on them so I decided not to risk it. By the time we got back to his place they were well away. But, for Thing Called Love, it wasn’t enough. She went through to the kitchen and called back ‘Dinsdale darling, where did you put the microtome?’

‘By the Bran Flakes,’ he shouted and, almost at once, she reappeared with a lump of whitish meat, a cutting board, some assorted herbs and spices and a scalpel-like instrument. She put the meat, which I could now see was a brain, on the board and began slicing into it.

Dinsdale was clearly excited. Apparently, so he told me later, this was the ultimate high. Depending on what memories the brain’s previous owner had, eating it could take you into all sorts of unanticipated places. I watched as the microtome made a further pass through the brain tissue, barely a whisper as it took a paper-thin slice. She flicked it onto the cutting board and seasoned it with sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, a hint of garlic and a sprinkling of sage leaves. She then quadranted it, wrapped the seasoned side round a plump sea scallop, stood up, and beckoned us to follow her.

We went through to the kitchen where she turned on the gas. I heard Dinsdale suck in a quick breath.
‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘Is this going to be …?’
He stopped. Thing Called Love smiled and nodded. I was lost. What was the question? Too many weird things were happening. My brain switched off. I felt foreign and longed for a return to simple phrases, things I could understand. Even some of Dinsdale’s crap poetry would do.

‘What’s happening?’ I said, pointing to the meat. ‘What is this, Thing Called Love?’
‘Sssshhhh,’ said Dinsdale. ‘She’s going to release the phlogiston.’

She stuck a fork into the parcel of meat and held it over the gas ring. The flames licked around it and danced over it, their colour changing as they consumed the fats and oils. Dinsdale, way out of it by now, was making the sort of noises teenage boys try to stifle as they leaf through old copies of Asian Babes in their bedrooms. Thing Called Love was in a sort of trance, too. She trailed her fingers through the flames rising from the meat, muttering ‘Phlogiston’ over and over again.
‘What’s phlogiston?’ I whispered to Dinsdale.
He simply pointed to the flames.
‘They are,’ he said.
‘But … but I thought it was only a hypothetical substance,’ I said. ‘I thought Lavoisier proved it didn’t exist.’
‘Banjaxed,’ said Dinsdale. ‘David Bowie, Guinness, Halley’s comet, eggs.’
They were both in another dimension, neither seeming to know I was there, both transfixed by the look and smell of the flaming brain with its inner scallop. It was when they began eating it that I left. They didn’t even notice. I could see that this woman was very dangerous indeed.

Dinsdale was still being a whale, making those stupid noises.
‘Ever hear anything of Peggy Sioux?’ I asked, trying to deflect his attention from being a tidal behemoth.
‘All the time,’ he said.
‘What d’you mean?’ I said.
He tapped his head.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’m with her. She’s with me. Always. Forever.’
‘Bloody romantics,’ I said.
‘No. I mean literally,’ he said. ‘She needed a bit of my brain. I said that was OK. I got the surgeon to take a slice off while I was under anaesthetic for the penis extension. So now, I never see her, but we do it all the time. We’re insatiable, both of us.’
‘What d’you mean?’ I said.
‘Easy,’ he said. ‘I know when she’s eating my brain. I feel it. I know she feels it, too. Even as all trace of sentience spins hopelessly into chaotic darkness I sense her pearly teeth crushing my neurones by their millions, feel her hot impetuous breath which used to caress my skin so softly - when I had a skin - and the thought sparkles into renascent consciousness: by this means I penetrate her very being, leaving her in rapturous melodic spasms that will sweep, soft, sensually over her carapace, a metronome of desire and despair. All sensation a pulsating prelude to a pregnancy test.’
I’d had enough.
‘Dins,’ I said. ‘You’ve always talked shite, but this is more excremental than I’ve got words for.’
I pushed him overboard. That was the last time I ever tried writing on Tantilly.

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Dinsdale the whale - part one

If you're new to this blog, this particular posting won't make sense unless you read the previous one, in which I unwittingly asked for the ingredients for a blog. I should have known better. So the blog which follows is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events described herein are products of the imagination of the author and some of his more or less deranged friends. All is fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Oh, and any material which seems to resemble that of other writers is straightforward plagiarism.

I think I’ve spoken before about research for The Figurehead being practical (wood carving classes, sailing on a square-rigger) as well as bookish. But it doesn’t always work. When I started writing it, a few years back, I still had my boat, Tantilly. She was moored in Findhorn Bay and, as well as sailing her out on the Moray Firth with the Black Isle's mountains as a backdrop, I loved just sitting at the moorings and relaxing. I once thought it might be interesting to take the laptop out and try writing some of the sea-going passages while I was on board. Big mistake.

It was OK at first. The water was flat calm so I could type quickly and easily. ‘The Chester River snakes inexorably toward the bay,’ I wrote, ‘narrows bleeding into broader expanses until the silver-grey fresh water bleeds and twines with the turgid march of the tidal behemoth waiting at the mouth’. (I rather liked the idea of a ‘tidal behemoth’ and made a mental note to give it a story of its own one day.) I thought for a second, looking at the glassy water, then wrote some more.

‘We'd upped anchor early, the sky threatening, sails pulling hard on a downhill run, lifting, twisting in a gut-wrenching swivel to slam hard into the next short swell...’ Bloody hell, this was good stuff. I read the passage again, out loud this time, feeling the words on my tongue. It was a mistake. I heard a sudden bubbling followed by a gasp and the squeaking of rubber against the hull. Bloody Dinsdale again.

Dinsdale is OK. He’s a sort of friend and he’s always trying to pick my brains about his writing. I’m always happy to help other writers when I can, but Dinsdale’s different. You’ve heard of Method actors – well, Dinsdale is a Method poet. If he wants to write an ode to daffodils, he spends a week lying on the grass and, when there’s a breeze, waving his hands a bit. His haiku on a rainbow, which he called ‘a phantasm of colour’, involved him standing under his shower for a day with a torch shining through the droplets. And it took him two months to recover from his preparations for a sonnet on necrophilia.

Anyway, it was Dinsdale – wet-suited and treading water beside the boat.
‘It’s fate,’ he said.
‘What is?’
‘You and me. What we’re writing.’
‘I don’t get it,’ I said.
‘Your tidal behemoth,’ he said. ‘That’s me. I’m writing a prose poem about a whale. Want to hear some?’
I didn’t, but I knew I’d have to at some point, so I hauled him on board and he sat in the stern.
‘All is green-blue,’ he said. ‘The water flows past my massive brow, while my powerful tail propels me forward into the plankton bloom.’
I was about to suggest that his tail could hardly propel him backward when he started making weird whale noises.
‘Weeeeeehoooooooofrrrrkkkkkkk...... the joy of being flows through the green-blue world,’ he sang. ‘TkTkTkTkTkTkTkTk frrrrr eeeeeeeeee tKtKtK.....it will always be so.’
‘OK Dins,’ I said. ‘First, you’re sounding more like a dolphin than a whale and…’
But he was gripped by his inspiration.
‘I sometimes catch sight of birds swimming in the thin air as I surface to blow,’ he said, ‘and wonder at their stupidity, living in an element that provides so little flotation’.

Ah, there it was – the word that gave him away every time. Flotation. Ever since his brief affair with a Native American student who’d come to Aberdeen to complete her PhD thesis on Mythic Pleomorphic Asymmetrical Koaniform Anagrams in the works of Enid Blyton, he’d been hooked on some of the substances she used to induce the trances she needed to help her overcome the crushing boredom of academia. According to her, she entered a world of ‘flotation’ and she often took Dinsdale with her. They rose through layers of vanishing consciousness until they reached the ‘portal to universal intelligence’ (her words), indulged in several versions of excess and eventually dropped back down into reality and its attendant bitterness.

(End of part one. Next time – we meet Dinsdale’s student friend, toy with cannibalism, and encounter … phlogiston!)

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A (probably very unwise) challenge

OK, here’s a thought. I feel guilty for having copped out so frequently and I know that millions of people world-wide are probably having a crisis of faith at having been deserted so selfishly by their guru. (But let me just remind those whose faith is teetering that even gurus have to earn a living.) Anyway, back to the guilt. Back also to a talk/workshop I gave last night to a talented, energetic group of writers whose input into the main exercise was enthusiastic and highly entertaining. From names, settings, jobs and objects randomly chosen they created a series of characters and incidents all of which could have been developed into absorbing, readable stories if there’d been time. I hope they had as much fun as I did with it all. I drove home (40-odd miles) feeling exhilarated by their creativity and I woke this morning buzzing with ideas about how we could have taken the workshop further and got into such things as the details of opening paragraphs and twists in the tails of their tales.

So …

I wondered if that would work for a blog. Now this is me setting myself up for a huge fall but I’d be interested to see whether it’s possible to use a similar technique to produce not a crime story but a blog. I’m still busy with the two books but it’s important to take an hour or so off from them from time to time just to make sure my approach to them stays fresh. My suggestion, then, is that I should write a posting that combines random elements. I don’t mean I should write a story but that I should – let’s say ‘simulate’ – a blog. But the question then is, where do I get the random elements? I can’t generate them myself because, even if I was honest, there might be some subconscious aspect influencing my choice. So what’s the answer?

Well, you are. I’m suggesting that, as a comment, you simply challenge me with a word, a name, a theme, a setting or whatever and I’ll try writing a blog around a selection of them. If you like, we could even make sure the selection itself is randomised somehow. The problem is that there are untold hordes of you and most of you are writers so if you all contributed something, the length of the posting would make the whole internet crash and ensure that the two books never got written. Realistically, though, despite my claims of gurudom and world domination, I know that my readers are few and mainly visit out of sympathy, so I don’t anticipate excess.

So it’s up to you. I can now sit back and wait for the inevitable sagebrush silence.

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