Well, last night I had one of those wonderfully deep sleeps that no earthquake (did I tell you about that? 🙂 ) could have disturbed and, as one might expect, woke this morning with a stinking headache, feeling as if I hadn’t slept a wink. I thought about working, realised I’d already hit my two month target (40,000 words in the bag!), and decided a day off was called for.
So, I caught up on my feeds, read a little Ray Bradbury (who I’m just rediscovering) and somehow, don’t ask me how, got onto the subject with my father of why Pixie & Dixie (and Mr. Jinx!) aren’t on television anymore. Real cerebral stuff, I know, but I’m playing the headache card, don’t forget, so I think I can get away with it. We drew no real conclusions, but, naturally, it was by this point too late; I was feeling nostalgic — and therefore quickly headed over to YouTube.
The animation is a bit naff, the plot suitably simple (cat hits mice, mice hit cat — you get the picture) but it’s a nice bit of fun.
Oh. And my Texan friends will love this particular episode, I’m sure.
Well, today was apparently E-Day — a day set aside for folk like you and I to “leave it off” (i.e. turn off all those devices that we’d normally leave on standby etc.) As with all of these badly-publicised, goody-goody “days”, it’s been a huge success and at the end of the official twenty-four hour period we as a nation have reduced our energy consumption against the average by +0.1%!…
Hmm… no, wait a minute. A saving of +0.1% [EDIT: in the sense used on the E-Day site, not the true mathematcial sense!] isn’t a saving at all, is it? E-Day usage is actually up on the daily usage average!
Serves ’em right, says I. I mean — did they really think I was going to shut my computers down just for them? Sheesh. What a preposterous idea! When the rising seas are lapping at my doorstep and I have to wear factor 400 sunblock even on a cloudy day, then I’ll shut the computers down and not before!
So there.
(This post was brought to you with a healthy dollop of irony.)
I thought I was dead. No, really. Woken from a deep slumber — the bed shook like someone really quite hefty was having too much fun beside me, the floorboards creaked and groaned, the wardrobes rattled and I thought, Hmm, this isn’t what usually happens. [Translation: What the fuck…?!] Still half asleep, I thought someone was in my room — or that the local chemical plant had blown itself to smithereens. But no, it was only an earthquake.
Basil Fawlty – Fawlty Towers. To Sybil: “Oh dear, what happened? Did you get entangled in the eiderdown again? Not enough cream in your eclair? Hmm? Or did you have to talk to all your friends for so long that you didn’t have time to perm your ears?”
Mrs Merton – The Mrs Merton Show. To Debbie McGee: “So what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”
Edmund Blackadder – Blackadder II. To Lord Percy: “The eyes are open, the mouth moves, but Mr Brain has long since departed, hasn’t he, Percy?”
Roseanne Conner – Roseanne. To husband Dan: “Your idea of romance is popping the can away from my face.”
Father Jack Hackett – Father Ted. “Drink! Feck! Arse! Girls!”
Carla – Cheers. Cliff: “I’m ashamed God made me a man.” Carla: “I don’t think God’s doing a lot of bragging about it either.”
Patsy Stone – Absolutely Fabulous. “One more facelift on this one and she’ll have a beard.”
Jim Royle – The Royle Family. Nana: “Is this hat too far forward?” Jim: “No. We can still see your face.”
Malcolm Tucker – The Thick Of It. To a junior minister: “All these hands all over the place! You were like a sweaty octopus trying to unhook a bra! It was like watching John Leslie at work!”
Statler and Waldorf – The Muppet Show. Statler: “Wake up, you old fool, you slept through the show.” Waldorf: “Who’s a fool? You watched it.”
Inspector Monkfish – The Fast Show. To a bereaved woman: “I realise this must be a very difficult time for you, so put your knickers on and go and make me a cup of tea.”
No Offence – The Fast Show. “I notice you’re not wearing a wedding ring which, given your age, means you’re divorced or a lesbian.”
Rupert Rigsby – Rising Damp. To lodger Alan, who complains his room is too cold to study in: “The only thing you study is your navel. You even shave lying down.”
Nan – The Catherine Tate Show. Describing an encounter with an overweight hospital volunteer: “She said to me last time, ‘You look bored, Mrs Taylor. I’ve got three words for you: Barbara Taylor Bradford.’ So I said, ‘Yeah? I’ve got three words for you too: calorie controlled diet.”‘
The Professor – The Mary Whitehouse Experience. “I have here a copy of your book, Origins of the Crimean War. It smells of poo.” “That’s because it’s been inside your mum’s bra.”
Alf Garnett – Till Death Us Do Part. “You Scouse git!”
Alexis Carrington – Dynasty. “I’m glad to see your father had your teeth fixed – if not your mouth.”
JR Ewing – Dallas. “Ray never was comfortable eating with the family – we do use knives and forks.”
Dr Perry Cox – Scrubs. Dr Elliot Reid: “I don’t think you understand the severity of the situation here. I am dangerously close to giving up men altogether.” Dr Cox: “Then on behalf of men everywhere – and I do mean everywhere, including the ones in little mud huts – let me be the first to say thanks and hallelujah.”
Dr Gregory House – House. “You can think I’m wrong, but that’s no reason to stop thinking.”
Gary Strang – Men Behaving Badly. “Let’s face it, Tony, the only way you’re gonna be in there is if you’re both marooned on a desert island and she eats a poisonous berry or a nut which makes her temporarily deaf, dumb, stupid, forgetful and desperate for sex.”
Arnold Rimmer – Red Dwarf. “Look, we all have something to bring to this discussion. But I think from now on the thing you should bring is silence.”
Larry David – Curb Your Enthusiasm. “Switzerland is a place where they don’t like to fight, so they get people to do their fighting for them while they ski and eat chocolate.”
Sam Tyler – Life On Mars. To Gene Hunt: “I think you’ve forgotten who you’re talking to.” Sam: “An overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline-alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding?”
I have a reputation for being “wordy”, in my everyday life and in my writing. It stems in part, I think, from a particular teacher I had when I was ten (one of the better ones!) who would invariably mark my compositions with the words “not long enough”, but I believe it is also a product of my love of texture and layering. I like to feel the sentences and love nothing more than paragraphs that have to be excavated like an archeological site. Strata of meaning, each telling something the others cannot.
Nonetheless, it has at times hindered my work, and so with Children of the Resolution I decided that I would approach the project differently. I knew it had the possibility of running to a massively self-indulgent 200,000 word plus novel if I cared to let it (it covers a fourteen year period, for one thing.) But I didn’t want that. It would, I felt (and still do), detract from, dilute, the meaning behind the story. Something I can’t afford.
My solution — my way of preventing my habit of literary overkill — was to outline extensively beforehand. I didn’t know if it would work, but suspected that knowing exactly what I had ahead of me might help me hold it in check. So far it seems to be working. My prose feels fresh and uncluttered, and there seems to be little in the way of redundancy.
One thing I am finding difficult, however, is the related matter of what material should and should not be used. (“Difficult” is stretching it a bit. It’s a minor niggle that I nevertheless know I must resist.) The “difficulty” relates to it being semi-autobiographical. I have a rich well of material to draw from. The more I write, the more I remember, but because of the constraints of length and theme, I’m finding I can actually use very little of it. The line has to be drawn somewhere.
A possible solution, I suppose, would be free-to-read, online “spin-off” stories. A free-form “further adventures of” affair. It would solve my little problem and provide a neat promotional tool.
“I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer, and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.”
I’m always rather shocked when science is accused of being “cold” or bereft of “meaning” by those outside the field. As a non-scientist who has been increasingly drawn to the discipline over recent years, it was in fact the sense of beauty and wonder I felt when I read about Darwin, Chaos Theory, the Big Bang etc that prompted me to read and learn more. I didn’t feel threatened or afraid, I felt exhilerated and, yes, a little surprised that I could understand a lot of this stuff (albeit in a fairly rudimentary way.)
So today I’d like to share this video with those of you who haven’t already seen it (I’m also including a transcript, but I would urge you to watch the video if you can.) The article was written by Richard Dawkins on a trip to Galapagos and originally published on The Guardian website.
The Lava Lizard’s Tale.
TRANSCRIPT:
A guide at the Natural History Museum stated confidently that a particular dinosaur was 70,000,008 years old. When asked how he could be so precise he replied, “Well it was 70 million when I started this job, and that was eight years ago.” The evident experience of Valentina Cruz, our wonderful Galápagos naturalist guide, suggests that I must add a similar margin to the estimate of 100 years that she gave us for the age of the black lava fields on the island of Santiago. The exact date of the great Santiago eruption is not recorded, but it definitely happened on one particular day in one particular year around 1900. I shall call it SV day (Santiago volcano day). I need to seem as precise as the museum guide, although the exact date doesn’t matter. Perhaps it was January 19 1897, 100 plus eight years before my visit to the island.
SV day was one day in the late 19th century, a day on which, elsewhere in the world, somebody’s grandfather was born at some particular hour. Somebody else died. A moustached young man in a straw boater met his true love for the first time and was never the same again. Like every day that has ever been, it was a unique day. Every second of it. It also was the date of the great Santiago volcano, the one that made the lava fields that I walked this January in the company of lava lizards, Tropidurus albemarlensis, although I knew it only when they moved and betrayed their camouflage.
Lava lizards are pretty much the only things that do move over these barren fields of black, clinker-ringing rock. And as they do so their splayed hands are feeling – though they do not know it – the fingerprints of past time. Fingerprints? Past time? Wait, that is the theme of the lava lizard’s tale.
Santiago was one of the four Galápagos islands on which Charles Darwin landed in 1835, and it was the only one where he spent any time, camping for a week while Captain Fitzroy took the Beagle to fetch fresh supplies. Darwin called it James, for he and his shipmates used the English names of all the islands: the evocative Chatham, Hood, Albemarle, Indefatigable, Barrington, Charles and James. He and his small camping party had trouble finding a clear spot to pitch their tent, so thickly did the land iguanas carpet the ground. Today there are no land iguanas left on Santiago. Feral dogs, pigs and rats did for them, although there are still plenty of land iguanas on other islands of this iconic archipelago, while the closely related marine iguanas abound on all the major islands including Santiago.
The black lava fields of Santiago are an unforgettable – almost indescribable – spectacle. Black as a female marine iguana (of course the simile really should go the other way) the rock is called rope lava, and you can soon see why. It is drawn out and plaited in twisted ropes and pleats, folded and gathered like a black silk dress, coiled and whorled in giant fingerprints. Fingerprints, yes, and that brings me to the point of the lava lizard’s tale. As the lizard scuttles over the black lava of Santiago it is treading the fingerprints of history, rolled out by the sequence of particular events that tran-spired, minute by minute, on one particular day late in Darwin’s century, marking the minutes of that day, the day of the Santiago volcano.
There cannot be many other ways to see, laid out before you, a complete history, second by second, of one particular day, more than a century ago. Fossils do the same thing but over a much longer time scale. The molecules of a fossil are not the original molecules of the animal that died. Even fossil tracks, like those Mary Leakey found at Laetoli, don’t really do it. It is true that Laetoli shows you the exact places where two individual Australopithecus afarensis (those diminutive hominids carrying chimpanzee brains around on human legs), perhaps a mated couple, placed their feet during a particular walk together. There is a sense in which these footprints are frozen history, but the rock that you see today is not as it was then. That couple walked in fresh volcanic ash which later, over thousands of years, solidified and compacted to make rock. The lava ropes and pleats of Santiago, those giants’ fingerprints, are still composed of the very same molecules that were frozen into precisely those positions, only a century ago. And the time scale over which the distinct ropes and pleats were laid down is a time scale of seconds.
Tree rings do it on a time scale of years. Where the whorls of lava fingerprinting are laid down second by second, and fossils are laid down by the millions of years, each tree ring marks exactly one year. Thick rings or thin label good growth years or poor and, because every sequence of half a dozen years or so has its own characteristic pattern of good and poor years, the patterns can be recognised, again and again in different trees, as labels of particular clusters of years. Old trees and young trees show the same fingerprints so, by counting rings and daisy-chaining the patterns from increasingly ancient wooden relics, archeologists can compile a catalogue of fingerprints outspanning the longest-lived tree.
Something similar can be done with sediment patterns laid down on the sea bottom and revealed in cores of mud taken up in deep sampling tubes. And, over the longer time span of hundreds of millions of years, the named strata of the geological series are, in their own way, fingerprints of time. What is so remarkable about the lava fields of Santiago is that these fingerprints were set out on the timescale that we humans deal with every second of our lives, the time scale of musical notes, the time scale of an artist’s brush, the time scale of everyday actions and the stream of human thought.
This is a real thought for a surreal landscape. And the Galápagos islands are replete with images that could have come straight from a surrealist’s canvas. A tiny desert island off Santa Fe (Barrington to Darwin) looks fit for Man Friday except that instead of palm trees there are giant cactuses. As if the Arizona desert had been transplanted into an azure sea; no surrealist could have done it better. And what are sea lions doing in the Arizona desert, to say nothing of shocking pink flamingos, equatorial penguins, or flightless cor morants earnestly hanging their impotent, stubby wings out to dry? As for the large flounder that I saw when snorkelling off North Seymour Island, it was pure Salvador Dalí. Changing colour to match the corals over which it slid like an oval carpet, I would certainly not have spotted it if Valentina had not gracefully dived to point it out to me. It was only later that my wife compared the flounder to the flowing, bending watch of a Dalí painting. And wasn’t that very painting, the one with the bent watches, called The Persistence of Memory ? Not a bad title for the lava fields of Santiago, scuttling ground of the Galápagos lava lizards.
Reality, if you go to the right place, and see it in the right way, can be stranger than a surrealist’s imagination. No wonder Darwin drew his early inspiration from these enchanted islands.
Over the years (twenty-one, in all), I’ve tried writing many different styles and genre of novel — from horror to stream-of-consciousness psuedo-literary pap — with varying degrees of satisfaction and success. I’ve learned that enjoyment is a good marker of the latter (in a personal sense, at least), but when this is supported by reader reaction it’s especially rewarding.
Children of the Resolution is getting some wonderful responses, and this is definitely helping with the writing. Chapter Seven is underway (36,000 words) and, even though the more difficult chapters are ahead of me, I’m still feeling very positive.
Whilst wandering around the BBC News site this morning, I stumbled upon this fascinating article on Ray Kurzweil and was immediately captivated by the scope of this gentleman’s ideas. I read it and read it again, wondering just how reputable Kurzweil really was and finally realising that I didn’t much care. His ideas are brave and spine-tinglingly insightful — and whether he turns out to be right or wrong on the whole subject of the Singularity etc., it’s entertaining, at the very least.
A web search on his name led me here, and I felt like a kid again, watching The Six Million Dollar Manfor the first time and thinking, Yeah, I’ll have some of that.
In the coming decades, a radical upgrading of our body’s physical and mental systems, already underway, will use nanobots to augment and ultimately replace our organs. We already know how to prevent most degenerative disease through nutrition and supplementation; this will be a bridge to the emerging biotechnology revolution, which in turn will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution. By 2030, reverse-engineering of the human brain will have been completed and nonbiological intelligence will merge with our biological brains.
I’ve never considered myself a “disabled writer”. The obvious jokes about a disabled writer being a writer with his computer unplugged aside, it’s always seemed an especially ridiculous concept. I don’t define myself or the scope of my work so limitingly, and I find it more than a little odd that others (especially artists/writers with “disabilities”) should feel the need to do so…
But that’s not what I really want to discuss today. Instead I want to talk about expectation — more particularly, the special case of expectation regarding disability in fiction.
I don’t always feature characters with disabilities in my novels. Looking back, I’d say that, roughly, sixty percent of the novels I’ve written haven’t had a disabled character in them (although this depends on how broadly one defines one’s terms!) When I do, however, their disabilities are only a small part of who they are — not because I have a political point to hammer home, but simply because that’s just the way it is. I treat them the way I would any other character. Why on earth wouldn’t I?
All of which leads me to a story concerning a literary agent I submitted to many moons ago — a reputable agent with some highly notable clients (no, I’m too discrete to name her.)
I’d written an especially awful horror novel called Transfuse. It was a ridiculous story, so I’ll spare you the details, but one thing it did have going for it was an especially bitter and twisted protagonist — a bitter and twisted protagonist who just happened to have a severe disability. I was tired of all the smiley, PC representations that were becoming popular and I wanted to write someone who was just… not nice. Someone, also, very removed from me and my experience. Circumstances that had absolutely nothing to do with his disability had led him to his vengeful state of mind, and I made no special dispensations.
The novel was rejected, of course. I expected that. But what left me utterly flabbergasted was one comment from the agent it question. She strongly objected to my disabled protagonist being so bitter and twisted because, well, disabled people tend to be well adjusted individuals who live fulfilling lives et cetera, et cetera! And she knew that I had a disability and that I was, if my earlier correspondence with her was anything to go on, actually very well-adjusted myself.
None of which had any relevance when it came to the creation of my character. He was not a politically correct “type”, he was a character whose personality had been shaped by a back-story that involved both of his parents being murdered. Wheelchair or no wheelchair, he was going to be bitter.
These are obstacles all writers, disabled or not, face in one form or another. Ignorance from those who really should know better. It isn’t the norm, but it is more common than might be expected.
File it away and move on. Then blog about it years later. My advice.