I got my first order of finished books yesterday. Fifteen shiny new copies ready to be palmed off on friends, family and casual acquaintances. The work I put into this book seems like a distant memory now, even though it was only a few weeks ago, but I want to share with you some of the cover designs I came up with before settling on the final one. Here are some of the best:

As you will very soon notice, most of the images I used as covers are of the same place at different times of different days. The view in these images is actually the view from my bedroom window, which I originally used as a test image to try out different text layouts. I had no intention of using something so immediate as my final cover, but after this first one I decided the view across the rooftops gave a fairly unique image.

This is the only image I considered using for a cover that was not taken from my bedroom window. I think the clouds are very striking in it, but it feels a little unbalanced with the great mass of silhouetted trees at the bottom.

For a long while I consider using this quite blurry night-time photo because what I really wanted was an image that was something other than a completely flat, uniform sheet of colour, but was not so visually arresting that it overshadowed the text. As I said before, I based my cover design largely on the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Finnegans Wake:

The cover image on this is very much in the background, almost to the point of inconsequentiality, and it’s the text that boldly stands out. I wanted the text of my title to be what drew the viewer’s eye, not how clever or unusual the image is. I suppose I also, although I hadn’t considered it until now, took some inspiration from A Softer World, as those comics use photos that are often blurred or cropped almost to the point of abstraction.

This image would have been the back cover if I’d used the previous image as the front cover. I’m not sure it would have particularly complemented the front cover though, since it’s a lot clearer and brighter. The problem was, I didn’t take enough photos, or I took as many as I thought I’d need to get a good image, but wouldn’t work on them until the next day, and then the lighting conditions of the earlier photos would be gone, meaning I couldn’t produce any more. To an extent I had the problem with the final cover, although that eventually worked in its favour, but we’ll come to that in a minute.

This image is quite similar to the image I ended up using, and was taken on the same day, but with the window open rather than through the window. The text is too much trying to mimic the Finnegans Wake cover though, rather than being its own thing, and the image is too plain at the top while having too much going on at that bottom.

This is my least favourite of the covers. It’s a complete tonal departure from the other covers and from the tone of the book, it’s also the most clichéd and has that TV aerial jutting out right across it. If my photo-editing skills were better, I could probably have gotten rid of it, but even so it’s not a particularly expressive image.

(Click this image to see it full-size)

(Click this image to see it full-size)

If you click the above two images, you’ll see they’re pretty large, 1,728 by 2,304 pixels to be exact, which is about the size Lulu.com recommends for A5 book covers to give them appropriate resolution. The problem you may spot is that I didn’t want to use this entire image, since it has the window frame and too much roof in it, meaning some serious cropping was in order, resulting in a smaller picture with fewer pixels. I think my front cover ended up being about half the size Lulu.com recommended, meaning I had to upscale to about a factor of two. That’s not so bad, with a decent image manipulator, barely noticeable to anyone other than a professional.

The image I wanted for the back cover however was an area of the photograph much, much smaller than the front cover. See if you can spot it on the first large image. This I was a bit more concerned about, because I had to roughly quadruple the size of the cropped image to make it big enough for Lulu to accept, causing a significant loss in fidelity. I was worried the image might turn out horrible when I got the proof copy. Fortunately though it turned out quite well, in fact, I like it more this way. I like the way the trees in the background are really shadowy and the colour’s sort of patchy because of the upscaling. It reminds me of when you scan old physical photographs onto a computer, and because scanners work at such high resolution, they come up massive and slightly blurred. So yes, although I haven’t got the highest fidelity images for my book which, let’s face it, wasn’t going to happen anyway with a Fujifilm Finepix (which, btw, is a lovely little camera with a big screen and small form factor), the images I did end up with not only encapsulate the feeling I was aiming for with my book, but also give me a warm nostalgic feeling.

Let me know what you think of my cover designs in the comments below and, if you’re so inclined, go and buy my book from Lulu.com:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/as-you-and-i-stand-motionless-here-the-world-becomes-very-far-away/13387176

The Book

First, the book. I just got my first copy of this from lulu.com a couple of days ago, and it’s looking pretty good. I mean, and perhaps I’m a little biased here, I think it looks really professional, like a proper book. And I’m pleased about that because it’s self-published and I did all the formatting and cover design and photography myself.

So what can I say about it? Well, firstly, you can buy it here:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/as-you-and-i-stand-motionless-here-the-world-becomes-very-far-away/13003519

But I’m not expecting you’ll want to go and do that right away, if at all, I mean I know how difficult it can be to spend your hard-earned money on a particular item, especially a self-published one, when there’s so many other things to buy in the world, and so many other books to read. To try and ease that decision, I’ve made the book as cheap as I possibly can, while still making a little bit of money for myself from it, not a lot, but a little.

What it says to me if you do decide to buy my book, whether in print or digital form, is that you care about my writing, you care enough to put a few pounds down on it and spend some time reading it. And that’s what I care about. I’m not trying to get rich from this, I just want to be read. Because, after all, what’s a writer without readers? And if I sell as many as twenty copies, I’ll be happy, because at least that’s twenty people who care about my writing.

But, of course, how can you care about this book if you don’t know what it is? So I’ll tell you. It’s a collection of twenty-three short stories, some longer, some shorter. Specifically, they’re the twenty-three best short stories I’ve ever written. Now, many of them are already available on this site for free, and they’re going to stay here, for free, because I want to be read more than I want to make money. However, many of the stories have been tweaked for this compilation in a kind of ‘director’s cut’ way, and two of the stories are brand new and exclusive to this collection.

Of these two, one is over forty pages long, an epic nestled among the more bite-sized narratives, and I’m particularly proud of it as one of my absolute best short stories. It’s called Emerald and I’d say it’s one of the primary selling-points of this compilation. But it’s not the only one.

The other reason I feel you might buy this book is because it’s nice to own a physical copy of something. It’s all well and good reading off a screen, but I find when I’m reading on the internet, I can’t concentrate on more than a couple of thousand words at a time, there’s just too many distractions going on when you can have multiple tabs open, and it’s just not comfortable for your eyes. And reading fiction for me is sitting in a sunny garden, or by a window, or, most often, lying in bed when everything else is quiet, not hunched over a computer desk, or squinting at a laptop screen. That’s why I hope you might consider buying my book; as a new way to enjoy my fiction.

So what are you buying when you go to Lulu and place your order? Well, if you look at the cover, you’ll see it’s called ‘As You and I Stand Motionless Here, the World Becomes Very Far Away’, a long title I know, but I did deliberate on it for a long time. If you’ve been following my stories for a while you’ll kind of already know what it’s about, but I’ll try to explain it concisely for the uninitiated.

Most of my stories, and particularly the ones in this collection, centre around a couple of people coming together, either by chance or by intention. That’s the ‘you and I’ bit. When these people come together, there’s often very little exterior action, they think and they talk, but often little happens to or because of them, except the occasional, brief physical connection, a kiss perhaps, or their hands brushing together. That’s the ‘stand motionless’ bit.

The idea of ‘the world becom[ing] very far away’ is a theme that recurs often in my work, and I’ve referred to it on this blog before as ‘distancing’. It’s almost an overarching theme of all my work in fact, that people in my fiction are often isolated, or feel as if they are, and they find it difficult to make meaningful connections with other people, but, occasionally, their shared experience of isolation can bring them together. So, while they are together, it is the world that becomes far away, inconsequential even, because they have found this brief connection to someone else.

You see, I’ve thought about this. And I wanted a long title because a) it makes it stand out from the crowd, b) some of the best titles are long and exact rather than short and snappy, and c) maybe I’m a little bit pretentious. With reference to b), on a little side note, some of the titles I was thinking of, that I drew inspiration from were stuff like, “if on a winter’s night a traveller”, “if nobody speaks of remarkable things”, “in search of lost time”, and of course, the shadow that persists over any creator of a short story compilation, “will you please be quiet, please?”

I spent a while creating the cover too, and you’ll see some of my earlier concepts for the cover in a future post, but ultimately I wanted an image that would match the somewhat subdued nature and ambiguity of my writing, and something that would not overshadow my title, which, being as long as it is, would take up most of the space anyway. One of my absolute favourite covers of all time is the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Finnegans Wake, and the cloudy scene on this inspired the rainy scene on my cover. But again, I’ll talk about that in a future post.

All that remains for me to say is that I hope you’ll consider purchasing my first publication and if you do, will enjoy the fact that you will then be in possession of a complete and considered work of fiction that was worth the asking price over a loose array of digital stories. The link again:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/as-you-and-i-stand-motionless-here-the-world-becomes-very-far-away/13003519

And look out for my next post in which I’ll be discussing the other thing I’ve been working on, my new blog about narratives in videogames.

This book is uncommon on account of the obscurity of its subject matter; it’s a synopsis and critical discussion of James Joyce’s final and most difficult work, Finnegans Wake. Outside of literary circles I doubt it was ever widely read and the book’s been out of print for years. My copy is from 1947, making it only slightly younger than the oldest book I own, a 1944 copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

I like this book on two levels: Firstly, it has a very pure bookish sort of quality. The cover is blue, the pages are slightly yellowed, though still in good condition. If it ever had a dust-jacket, that’s been long-lost somewhere down the years, leaving only its plain blue hard-cover. The front and back offer no clues to the book’s identity, the title being printed on the spine only, and there in gold lettering only distinguishable from the sun-bleached fabric by its metallic sheen. It has a charming anonymity.

Considering its age, it is in good condition, having been kept on a bookshelf where, for several years, the sun struck the spine and front at an angle, fading an L-shaped block of cloud-white into the cover. Obviously the books either side of this one where smaller, their imprint left in a rectangle on either side of A Skeleton Key that must be closer to the cover’s original colour. Inside, the book smells of what it is: old paper; the same smell that the case of an ancient Zenit camera I used to own had. There’s no smell of dust or tobacco or food. I like to think it was kept in some airy study somewhere.

I don’t think it was ever read though, not all the way through at least, because the final page of the conclusion is uncut. (I don’t know exactly how books used to be made, but I think they were printed on sheets bigger than the pages and then cut in half after they were put in. Sometimes pages must have been missed). Inside the front cover, someone has carefully written the number 47 in pencil, and on the following page is an indecipherable signature, probably of the previous owner, certainly not of one of the authors. Otherwise the book is unmarked. The following two pages are blank, and then there is the title, alone on a page in plain Times New Roman font. The next page has a slightly larger title with the authors’ names and the publisher’s information and then the book begins.

Here we move onto the content, which is what makes this book elitistly obscure. People who read my site or study literature are probably aware of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Some of them might even have read it. Further afield I would guess, and this is a complete guess, that fewer than 1% of English-speaking people are aware of Ulysses. Much fewer had read it. Of the people who are even dimly aware of Ulysses, I would guess that fewer than half are aware of Joyce’s fourth novel Finnegans Wake, and probably fewer than one-in-ten of the very few who read Ulysses have even attempted to read Finnegans Wake. I bet a tenth of those never reach the end.

And so, of that tiny proportion of people who are inclined to read the nearly unreadable Finnegans Wake, how many do you suppose are inclined to hunt down a book that discusses the novel? Naturally such an elitist challenge piques my interest, so now that I have finished university, I have set myself the ‘summer project’ of reading and understanding Finnegans Wake. Last year I read the first fifty or so pages, but comprehension escaped me, so I moved on to something else. Now I’m making the time for a second, proper effort at the book, with my guidebook, my skeleton key to Joyce’s secrets, firmly in hand. I’ll write about the novel itself at some later date.

What I liked most was that it was nearly all action, with only the most economic descriptions in between. On the third page of the novella, for example, after being briefly appraised of the primary protagonists, the son of the prince of Otranto, upon the day of his arranged wedding, is crushed beneath a giant helmet that appears from apparently nowhere. While the origin of this impossibly large item of head-wear is unaccountable, it is not with this mystery that the prince concerns himself, nor even with the loss of his only son: his concern is that the marriage of his son to a girl named Isabella would have cemented his claim to the throne of Otranto by uniting two families. He is then forced to desperate measures to secure this alliance, as he is aware of an old prophecy warning that his family would eventually lose the castle and the true heir would return.

If this sounds cliche, like any number of romances, or even Shakespearian drama, it is, in a way. What Walpole sought to do with The Castle of Otranto was create a ‘new romance’, a new take on the tales of chivalric knights that had been written for several centuries before him. His new take involved adding elements of the supernatural and macabre, harking back to the superstitious Dark Ages when the story is set. He called this new style ‘gothic’.

For me, the most obvious examples of gothic literature are Dracula and Frankenstein, with Wuthering Heights being another novel incorporating gothic elements that springs to mind. But The Castle of Otranto was the first to introduce many of the elements that would define that genre: it has the overbearing castle, obviously, a secret underground castle, mysterious happenings, a ghost, a prophecy, a mysterious stranger, scenes of the macabre, and probably some other things I’m missing out.

The tightness of the narrative is what so impressed me though. There is no lingering upon the unexpected absurdity of giant pieces of armour, even on the giant foot some servants claim to have seen, rather, the characters act according to their most immediate desires: the prince relentlessly pursuing his son’s former fiance, Isabella trying to escape his pursuit, and everyone else caught up in the middle. There is no great complexity to the story or the characters, yet from simple elements, Walpole weaves a compelling narrative, which is, of course, the best way to write: to create something complex from simple elements. The Castle of Otranto is like, to paraphrase a metaphor from Philip Pullman’s Clockwork, a beautiful piece of machinery that can be wound up and set going in an intricate display of delicate precision.

That characters are archetypes, yes, have even been described as ciphers, which allows you to immediately understand them. But then, as part of the machinery, they are also more. The Prince, Manfred, for example, though tyrannical and monomaniacal during the events of the novella, can also be seen as a sympathetic character. He is not entirely unreasonable, except when gripped with passionate rage, and there is suggestion that in less desperate times he was a well-liked ruler of his people.

In short, The Castle of Otranto has enthused me. I was getting rather bored with Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day, which isn’t as good as her later novels, and I’ve been losing enthusiasm for my own writing. My current work is far too aestheticised, and the story is being lost in it, so I no longer like it. I feel I may have to at some point, if not before my next assessment, significantly rewrite parts of it to make it more natural, more readable and more compelling. I kind of feel like I’d also like to try something new, because I’ve almost painted myself into a corner with my writing, gone so far down a Modernist-style route that I’ve lost my way. I think I need a fresh lease, though I’m not quite sure in what direction that will lie. For now though, since I’ve finished The Castle of Otranto, I have been inspired to return to Don Quixote, which is the most similar novel I currently have, and I had forgotten how well-written and how funny it is.

An explanation of what The Slender Man is can be found here, but if you can’t be bothered to read that, it’s just an urban myth that was fabricated on the internet. Some guy came up with it on this fake paranormal photos thread and attached a little story to it. The story is that there is this being who stalks and kidnaps children, who has no discernible face, wears a business suit and is able to extend its limbs and even increase their number. On the face of it, it sounds somewhat ridiculous and generic, but some of the fake photos of it are pretty good.

They’re nothing compared with the videos on MarbleHornets’s YouTube channel, however. I recommend starting with ‘Introduction‘ and moving along them in their numbered order as intended. They are brilliant. They are the sort of videos that YouTube, that the internet in general, exists for. Apparently there’s some sort of ARG (Alternative Reality Game) attached to them, which is ongoing, but the videos as a series are accessible without participating in that, so if you didn’t know what an ARG was, just watch them.

Want more explanation before you jump in and make the time commitment of a few minutes to the videos? Well, the story goes, as is explained in ‘Introduction’, that this guy Alex was making a student movie. Halfway through the project his behaviour changed, he became irritable and paranoid, and then he abandoned the project, even though he had filled up all these tapes. He planned to burn these tapes, but his friend, a fellow film student, asked to have them in order to save them from the fire. Alex agreed so long as the tapes were never mentioned again. The guy who took the tapes didn’t do anything with them for a while, then got around to watching them. He noticed that Alex had started filming himself more than the film, and was carrying a camera with him wherever he went. That’s the start of the story.

The videos themselves are presented somewhat out of order and are a mix of footage from Alex on the set of his film, Alex’s house and interviews with the film-cast. It’s all done incredibly realistically, without the contrivances of, say, Cloverfield, and for the most part the videos are quite mundane. The thing you start to notice is that in the background of a lot of the shots is a humanoid figure, often stood motionlessly watching. It shouldn’t be nearly as creepy as it is, and it wouldn’t be if the figure ever moved or attacked or anything, but it doesn’t. It just stands.

It seems that Alex has become somewhat obsessed with this figure, or perhaps it is obsessed with him. He often leaves his camera recording overnight while he sleeps, and often snatches it up when he becomes aware of something near him, frantically trying to capture footage of this creature which stalks him. He only ever gets snatches of it, except in the lingering day-time shots where it stands in the background.

The videos also have a clever use of various effects which make the footage much creepier. For example, some of the videos have massive sound distortion or no sound at all. When this is coupled with mundane footage of Alex location-scouting, it somehow becomes really sinister.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how or why these videos are so creepy, but they are. Go watch them. At night. With the lights off. I’ve never written a horror story, but if I did, this is the sort I would want to write, this sort dealing with pervasive insipid horror. There’s never yet any direct confrontation with anything, with the Slender Man figure, just a feeling that he’s always there, waiting, watching. It’s the stuff of childhood nightmares.

There are a couple of minor instances when the videos border on the farcical, suffer from being, as they obviously were, made by students, but as YouTube videos they are perfect, they deliver the kind of story, the kind of horror experience, no film, no conventional novel, could ever hope to. That they’re creepy in spite of the Slender Man figure being acknowledged to have been created on the internet from a few explicitly fake photographs, is all the more to their credit. It rather reminded me of something Stephen King once said, which I can’t remember exactly, so I’ll paraphrase. Something along the lines of:

“My audience are the intelligent, rational people who does not believe in such things as ghosts and monsters, but keep their feet under the covers just in case.”

That’s the effect I felt the Slender Man videos had on me: of course I don’t believe it, it’s just a story, but I wrapped myself up tight in my covers after watching them, and I turned more lights on than usual when I went to the toilet in the night.

Go check out:

http://www.youtube.com/user/MarbleHornets

and

http://www.youtube.com/user/totheark

Here’s a bar chart I made illustrating the point, although the y-scale is comprised of competely meaningless arbitrary numbers:

‘Book 1′ represents a very well-written book with a not very interesting story. I’d say this description applies to a great deal of Modernist literature, and is the type of book I most commonly read. Prime examples would be Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, in which a woman is planning a party for the evening, James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which a man wanders aimlessly around Dublin for a day, and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past / In Search of Lost Time / A la recherche du temps perdu, which spends the first thirty pages discussing how he often has difficulty sleeping, and the next hundred on what eating a type of French cake reminds him of. All of these, in isolation, are really quite boring stories of the mundane, and it is only the way they are written that brings them alive.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the type of work represented by ‘Book 2′: the interesting story that is not particularly well written. I’d say this is the most popular form of novel and includes the work of J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown. No one would argue that either Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code are well written or have any deep subtexts; they sell themselves entirely on their stories. Who cares that Harry Potter doesn’t deal with existential themes? We just want to see what happens to the boy wizard. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with this type of writing; it fills the same needs as mindless trashy television which, despite its lack of cultural value is often cathartic to just zone out in front of. To speak metaphorically, I would liken this type of writing to a sugar-rush, a sweet, high-calorie low carbohydrate snack. You read The Da Vinci Code and it’s exciting (well, annoyingly over-excited): “first there was this man and then he got killed! and then some people found him covered in blood! and then he’d spelled out this riddle! and they were about to crack it! but they got chased by the police!” There’s no fat to chew, and sometimes you just want that. Mostly though, as I’ve said, I prefer something meatier, and I’d say Modernist literature is a like a well-cooked rump steak with a fine wine, full of rich and subtle flavours that are satisfying, but not to everybody’s taste.

‘Book 3′ which strikes a mid-range balance between well-written and interesting story, is the kind of average good book. Something like E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights or, my favourite of all books, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Stuff happens, it’s well-described.

‘Book 4′ is the ideal book, with an amazing story and superlative writing. Almost no book has ever or will acheive this, and the only one I can think of that comes close is Homer’s The Odyssey, which was written well over two-thousand years ago. The story is as classic a monomyth as they come, full of exciting and memorable episodes that have weathered those two millenia to remain in the modern conciousness. The descriptions in it are also very well done, with Homer drawing simple paralells that demonstrate perfectly what he is talking about. I’d copy out some examples here if I hadn’t left my copy in another city or could be bothered to trawl through an internet copy.

Actually, I’d say that one other book which potentially comes close is Migeul de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, of which I’ve only so far read the first two hundred pages. This story is classic enough that the adjective ‘Quixotic’ and the idiom ’tilting at windmills’ have entered our language, meaning, respectively, someone like Don Quixote in that they are excessively chivalric and/or with a unique, perhaps misguided, wordlview, and, someone attacking invisible or misperceived enemies or otherwise engaging in a futile fight. The writing is well-accomplished in that it parodies chivalric romance tales while remaining original, witty and funny, and is often interspresed with original poems by Cervantes.

And that’s essentially my theory on what any piece of writing needs to have for someone to read it: a good story or a good writer. Whether you agree or disagree, please feel welcome to leave a comment below.

Here’s why I think Twitter is cool:

1. News – I’m only mildly interested that Stephen Fry is in a taxi on the way to a theatre (sent from his mobile) or that Felicia Day woke up early and drank some coffee to get ready for writing another season of The Guild, but I do have a stronger interest in a few of the days headlines, as reported by The Guardian’s Technology Section and The New York Times, or the lengthy free articles The New Yorker publishes online, or in updates to the blogs I follow less frequently than every day. In a way, Twitter is a page bringing together the various feeds I don’t want filling up my Toolbars or Bookmarks and, for me, has replaced the morning newspaper of a few years ago.

2. Trending Topics – On the right-hand side is a list of the top ten things that people are twittering about at any given moment. It’s an easy way to get an up-to-the-minute idea of what’s popular across the web, or in the news, before traditional sites have a chance to report on them. For example, and not that I particularly cared, I found out about Michael Jackson’s death first on Twitter, where the news broke a short while before any online newspapers had a chance to report on it, and several hours before print papers were published.

Of course, Twitter doesn’t really need me plugging it (right now it’s the fifteenth most popular website in the world), but my own Twitter account has pitifully few followers, and so definitely does. You can find it at twitter.com/hbenjaminpetrie. Apart from being occasionally updated with my random thoughts or decidedly mundane insights into the minutiae of my life, it also automatically updates with a link to every new post on here, and so offers an alternative to using my RSS feed.

Hope to see you there.

I just watched Away from Her, a movie about an old couple where the wife has Alzheimer’s disease and the husband has to cope with her slipping away from him as she begins to forget things and eventually who he is. It was decent, but not a lot more. The whole time I was just aching for it to be somehow more beautiful, by which I mean I thought about The Place Promised in Our Early Days while I was watching Away from Her and wished Away from Her could be even half as beautiful as the representation of separation in that film.

Admittedly, The Place Promised in Our Early Days does have the advantage of being about young people, immediately making it easier for me to relate to its characters. But then relationships, as anyone who has ever read any of my work, are something I’m very much interested in fiction, and the sort of degeneration of the wife in Away from Her is something of which I have comparable first-hand experience.

To the film’s credit, as far as I know, it did represent the effects of Alzheimer’s accurately. Unfortunately, while it got that down, the characterisation of the supporting cast particularly was a little off, with an over-bearing bureaucratic managing nurse type seeming particularly two-dimensional and cliche. The dialogue too often felt a little off, unnaturalistic, as if the writer wanted certain lines to be in the script because they sounded good, regardless of whether they fitted.

Now this is something I imagine, at least from my own experience, all writers do: They think of a really great line or a short exchange and go “yeah, I’ve got to write that into something.” And with more amateur writers you can tell when they’ve done that, while with the really good writers, they still do that, but their lines blend in so well you don’t spot that they were just trying to get to that one line all along. I’m trying to think examples of this, but all I can think of right now is Quentin Tarantino. He, I suspect, does this for every line; he just sits there thinking up great lines and jamming them all together, like “Like a Virgin is about a fuck machine” followed by ten minutes of snappy dialogue about why that’s the case. Of course, making films that are just the ‘great lines’ you thought of doesn’t leave a great deal of room for plot.

Not that I’m talking about Tarantino; I’m talking about Away from Her. I had a couple of problems with one of the main secondary characters, the kind of nurse who worked as a nurse, rather than the manager one. She’s all nice and friendly to the husband for most of the film, but in one scene she suddenly turns on him, and I suppose it’s to reveal some extra back-story and a hitherto unseen aspect of her character, but really it just came across as jarring. The other problem I had with her was that she seemed to have an awful lot of free time to just sit and chat with the husband when, as far as I noticed, there were only about two other staff working the whole care home. Now, I don’t know what healthcare is like in Canada (Michael Moore says it’s good, but I think he’s biased), but my mother’s a matron in an English nursing home and she’s lucky if she gets five minutes for lunch, let alone sitting and chatting with the visitors.

And apart from that, there were a few other contrivances in the film, like at one point the husband asks the manager woman for the home address of another visitor and she just gives it to him. I’m no expert on the policies of Canadian nursing homes, but I’m pretty sure that it’s bad practice to hand out the address of patient’s or their relatives willy-nilly.

I could forgive the film these small inconsistencies; I graciously forgave Makoto Shinkai for his wilder flights of fancy in Place and Voices (admittedly after a short burst of characteristically pedantic ranting), but there still seems to be something lacking. Another, even more comparable, story I wanted Away from Her to ascend to was the plot line that runs through Once Upon a Time in America, wherein the main character, Noodles, knows this girl his whole life, fancies her since she’s a kid, always loves her, even through the violence and the drugs and the other women, and she always kind of loves him, even after he takes her on their one date before she flies to New York or Hollywood to become a star and he rapes her in the car on the way home; but they can never be together because she says that she knows if she was with him he would lock her up in cage when she wanted to be free, and he said he would (not literally, obviously). Now that’s not even the main plotline in Once Upon a Time in America, yet it still held far more resonance with me than Away from Her.

Now, before I end this opinion, two more items: First, old people in films: they always look so idealised and unrealistic. Real old people, especially in nursing homes, aren’t all bright and cheery and running around on zimmer-frames spouting poignant life-affirming advice to anyone who wanders in with a problem: most of the time they just sleep and dribble a bit, or stare blankly at walls. This always strikes me in films and TV shows as particularly artificial, but then, thinking about it, almost everyone is idealised on screen, what with all the make-up. Real people don’t look like TV-people.

The other minor issue I had with Away from Her was too much old people sex. Admittedly it only showed the afterwards, but you still new what they had done, and that’s just wrong: no one over the age of forty has sex, despite what the internet says.

In a way, the story of American Beauty is just a vehicle for the imagery as if Alan Ball took that one image, of a bag blowing in the wind, and just went with it, building this entire story around it. Doing this congruously, in anything other than an abstract art-film, is not easy. Often, as a writer, I’ll see something, some little event or some interesting object, and think “that’s a nice image”, and want to use it. But it’s so easy to force such an image into a story to the point where it over-shadows the rest of the narrative. Even when I can work such images into stories, they are only short ones. The writer of American Beauty is therefore to be commended for what he achieved with this film.

So what is the deal with a paper bag blowing around in the wind? It’s certainly not the only of the myriad images in American Beauty, but it is the strongest. The build-up to it lasts longer than for any of the other images in plot-points in the story, and so much importance is placed on it be the character of Ricky Fitz that it could very easily have failed, been dismissed as cheesy or over-romantic. The bag image succeeds though; it’s so unexpected and off-the-wall that when Ricky says “do you want to see the most beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed?” and starts talking about how “this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes,” we believe him, and we empathise with Jane as she has her eyes opened to this new meaning of ‘beauty’.

This is the sort of idiosyncrasy that is often found in Indie films, but rarely portrayed as well as in American Beauty. And this isn’t a unique instance within the film, there is the more organic imagery, such as Colonel Fitz soaked in the rain after finally admitting who he is to himself, or the recurring imagery of the roses. There is also the beautiful black-and-white shots at the end where the Lester as narrator looks back on his life and describes “yellow leaves from the maple trees that lined my street” and “my grandmother’s hands and the way her skin seemed like paper.” Beautiful as these are, however, I find them the most incongruous of the images in the film. Before this part, right at the end, there is no reference to Lester’s childhood, except that midway through the film he buys a 1970 Pontiac Firebird, his dream car, which we are told in the images at the end he first wanted when he saw his cousin’s brand new one as a child.

The reason that these images stick out or me as unfitting however is most likely because the rest of the film is so well written, and not just in terms of dialogue, which is not only believable throughout but, at times, incredibly funny. This film really excels in the focus of its plot-lines and its dedication to its themes. The stories of all the characters are interlinked in a very natural seeming way, and the film never shies away from exploring the effects of one character’s actions on another’s story. And the tag-line, ‘look closer’, is perfectly apt, because that is what the viewer, and the characters, are encouraged to do right throughout the film. Although it seems like a fairly straightforward representation of life in suburban America, there is a lot more than first meets the eye to every one of the characters, the truth about which is revealed that or near the end, not in an M. Night Shyamalan twist, but in a subtle realisation that you suddenly understand the film has been building up to throughout.

Perhaps what I find most attractive about American Beauty is that it follows in the same vein as that Modernist literature I like so much in that it seeks to show the beauty within every day life, using realistic characters and, if not exactly mundane, entirely plausible events. Yes, it deviates from the everyday with a few flights of whimsy and Lester Burnham, though not in any way an action hero, is not a typical Modernist hero either. Still, as a contemporary and thoughtful Modernist piece, no film I’ve seen comes closer than American Beauty.

“Repetitions and lack of grammatical complexity both help to make Homer a swift, lively, vivid and easy read” – that is from Peter Jones’ introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Odyssey and I completely agree with that statement. I am often given the impression that The Odyssey is some long and arcane ancient text occupying a level well beyond the difficult language of Shakespeare, and just a little beyond Joyce’s Ulysses and Tolstoy’s War and Peace in terms of insurmountability: “You read the Odyssey?!” (with awed gasping). But really, it’s no more complex than, say, Philip Pullman’s excellent His Dark Materials trilogy; books primarily written for young teenagers.

What we have in The Odyssey is an uncomplicated narrative told in plain modern English. Although it is classed as an epic poem, it really bares no resemblance to what we think of as poetry today: the only reason it is poetry is that, in its original ancient Greek it was spoken and written in hexameter (that’s six metrical feet per line, or six pairs of two syllables), but this has been lost in the translation so that it now appears to be, essentially, a novel with numbered lines.

Don’t get me wrong though: that the language is uncomplicated and the narrative is easy to follow does not have any bearing on how epic the story is. It covers, amazingly, around sixty years of its heroes life, although not in strictly chronological order. It’s hard to explain exactly how Homer does this (Peter Jones does so admirably in his introduction to the text), but he manages it beautifully without the potential confusion of, for example, Pulp Fiction’s time-swapping antics. The main way Homer achieves his narration of events from many different times is through the use of stories within stories. While these could have the potential to either distract from the narrative flow or confuse the reader into wondering what time-frame the story is currently in, Homer avoids this by flowing naturally into the stories and then bringing the narrative out of them just as easily, usually by having a character mention something, which sparks the story, and then returning to what was originally mentioned at the end of the story (which is apparently known as ‘ring-composition’).

So what is The Odyssey about? The general focus of the story is Odysseus return home to Ithaca after a twenty year absence and fighting in the Trojan war. Before I go any further, let me just explain a couple of things, so we don’t get lost: Odysseus is a mythical Greek hero. His biggest claim to fame was that he was the one who came up with the Trojan horse trick in the Trojan war. The Trojan war was a ten year war between one lot of Greeks (the Achaeans) and another lot (the Trojans) after one of the Trojans kidnapped Helen, the wife of the king of Sparta. It is perhaps the single most important event in Greek mythology and is covered in, among other things, Homer’s Iliad (incidentally, the first great work of Western literature) and the film Troy.

So, Odysseus had left his home in Ithaca (an area of Greece where he rules as King) to go fight in the ten-year-long Trojan war, leaving behind his wife, Penelope, and his newborn son Telemachus. He becomes a war-hero and sets sail triumphantly for him. However, the winds are not in his favour for the return journey and he gets blown all over the Mediterranean, landing on various islands, getting into misadventures, and unintentionally pissing off certain Gods. Eventually this leads to him being trapped on an island for a further eight years by a demi-Goddess named Calypso.

Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, is growing up and is finding his house overrun by suitors trying to gain his mother’s hand in marriage. She doesn’t want to marry any of them because she still believes Odysseus will return home, so while they wait for her to change her mind, the suitors sit around in Odysseus’ palace eating all his food and generally making a nuisance of themselves. The unfairness of all this stirs the Goddess Athene to take pity on Odysseus and Telemachus and so she decides to help in return home, which is more-or-less where the Odyssey starts.

Sound simple enough? The only problem you could conceivably have with reading the text is keeping track of all the Greek names that are mentioned. For anyone who has ever read a fantasy novel, or even just seen Lord of the Rings this really shouldn’t be a problem. And, speaking of fantasy, though you might expect some problem with suspension of disbelief on account of all the intervening Gods and the Cyclopes and such, there really isn’t: each is described so nonchalantly and convincingly that you really don’t find yourself questioning, for example, Athene disguising herself as a family friend to talk to Telemachus and tell him to find Odysseus. And there is restraint too, which helps the suspension of disbelief: everything in the Odyssey is either human, or part-god, or God; there’s none of the swashbuckling skeletons and animate iron statues of Jason and the Argonauts.

If you’re still not convinced of the ease with which this great book can be read, here’s an excerpt from the opening page:

“All the survivors of the war had reached their homes by now and so put the perils of battle and the sea behind them. Odysseus alone was now prevented from returning to the home and wife he yearned for by that powerful goddess, the Nymph Calypso, who longed for him to marry her, and kept him in her vaulted cave. Not even when the rolling seasons brought in the year which the gods had chosen for his homecoming to Ithaca was he clear of his troubles and safe among his friends. Yet all the gods pitied him, except Posiedon, who pursued the heroic Odysseus with relentless malice till the day when he reached his own country.”

See? Nothing complicated, no big words, just simple, elegant writing. The Odyssey is a fantastic book for anyone to read: it’s the book equivalent of a more epic 300.