I don’t think I’ve read or watched anything of great inspiration lately either, not something that’s made me want to go off and write or even write about it. The last really great movie I watched was Let the Right One In, which I highly recommend, but otherwise I seem to have just been watching b-movies and comedies and such, oh, and I watched Forbidden Planet finally, but I was tired and half-asleep by its end, and somehow it wasn’t quite all I’d hoped for: I rather prefer the implausability and exaggeration of movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invaders from Mars.

As for reading, I just a few minutes ago finished Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. It’s a very short novella, and it has the typical Capote flair in the writing, but there’s something about his writing style that’s kind of boring. It’s hard to explain, but stuff that is consistently good can be boring, and with Capote there’s none of the wordplay or sudden flights of fancy in Joyce or Woolf. It’s like with those latter writers they really feel what they’re writing, but Capote seems more like he just developed this rather masterful manner of expression and from that base is able to just churn out stories. The plot also seemed a little ridiculous, with a sixty year-old woman running away from her sister’s house to stay in a tree-house for several days with her sixteen-year-old nephew, from whose viewpoint the story is told. The characters seem a little too colourful to be plausible, only a little, mind, but it was a little too much for me. Capote, I’m also going to point out, was good friends with Harper Lee, and there was speculation for many years that he actually wrote, or largely wrote, To Kill a Mockingbird and put it out under her name. To Kill a Mockingbird I think is quite different from what Capote work I’ve read, and far superior, so I don’t see how people could have believed that.

The other book I finished recently was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, one of the classics of Russian literature. I’ve never read a Russian novel before, and the only Realist novel I’ve read was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which did not compel me to read to its conclusion. I was rather disappointed with Crime and Punishment also. For a start, there was a lot of authorial intrusion, which irks me, though I doubt the average reader is even aware of the term. It basically means the author interjects opinions into the text, even though the author is this ethereal voice that exists beyond the text, on a different ontological plain if you want to get poncy about it. Modernist literature doesn’t do that, primarily because the Modernist movement was a reaction against the Realist fiction of the previous century. (This is what my dissertation is about, so I’ve been learning more about this lately). So authorial intrusion, I find, kind of takes one out of the story, because it’s like the director of a film jumping in with comment suddenly out of nowhere. The characters also seemed to lack psychological depth, or at least the psychological depth I like in Modernism. It’s debatable whether that’s true or not, but it would be accurate to say that in Realist fiction characters are defined through action and in Modernist fiction characters are defined through thought. I prefer the latter. So, yes, I saw the book through to the end, and I did feel a certain amount of intrigue waiting for the next twist of the plot, but every twist never quite satisfied me, and even I felt the title seemed unjustified: there was neither that much crime, nor that much punishment.

I’m starting a new Virginia Woolf book tonight though, so that might at least make me happier, though it will be Night and Day, her second novel, so not quite as ‘modernist’ as her later novels. Anyway, since there’s been so few updates recently, and really,  I have nothing new to show, I thought I’d drag out something old, from the archives you might say. So, in a minute, I shall paste in some poetry I wrote when I was a teenager, and a young one at that. Bad poetry, of course, the sort one does write as a teenager. I’d like to think I got marginally better over the years, but poetry has never been my forte. And, if you’d like, you can use the following three examples as instructional aids in how not to write a poem. Really, if you ever write anything resembling this, I recommend not showing it to anyone with any semblance of earnestness, only perhaps as a novelty five or more years afterwards.

No more than human

No need to speak,

there’s an eternity of words,

and sensations,

in every touch,

and with every touch,

millions of sensory neurones tingle,

as the heart flutters.

Slowly, nervously,

(anticipation makes the blood flow faster)

the covering is pulled away,

and, like candy,

no matter how beautiful the wrapping,

the inside is always sweeter,

expected and proven.

Every curve flaunts its perfection

in the soft ambience of the clouded sunlight,

the eyes know it,

the fingers know it,

the tongue knows it,

no more than human,

no less than love.

Love has no glory

Once upon a time,

Distance was our only division,

But love could not prevail,

You made too deep an incision

We had something once,

That distance could not take,

My dreams are still of you,

But the truth hurts when I awake

You took it away,

With his love that you returned,

Now we can’t go back,

Our crossed bridges we have burned

I hold on still,

To that distant memory,

It was only ever a dream really,

Love has no glory

Ropes and strings

Time like a spool

A reel ahead

A straight path laid out in

Red string

Two hearts tied together with

The strongest rope

Unbreakable

The strings just strengthened

The bond

Until

They got so tangled

There were too many of them

We lost sight of the rope

We weren’t sure whether it was still there

Any more

Or whether it was just the tangled

Spaghetti strings

Tying us together

Strangling us

Now came the scissors

The blood

The hurt

Cutting everything

Down to that central rope

It was still there

As strong as

ever

And if, for some reason, you liked reading these, perhaps in the way that I enjoy watching really shoddy, low-budget horror films, there’s plenty more where it came from. Just let me know in the comments and I’ll be sure to post up some more. I might even dig out a few old teenage stories about vampires and angels and such for your delection.

P.S. My girlfriend illustrated Glitter and you can see the pictures over at Victoria Stitch.

Bank Holidays

I don’t think many people die on bank holidays
leastways, they probably don’t have funerals on bank holidays.
Rain excites me on those days, but mostly the clouds
seem too bored to drop it, or even move aside for the sun.
I wish the shops didn’t close; I wanted some tea.
I wanted rose tea, because of the soft petal-taste
and the bitter black after-taste.
Cathode Ray pixels brand my eyeballs when I close them,
so I look out the window and the trees look back,
forlorn now, since the wind took their feathers.
I mean leaves. It’s not a day for poetry.

My other additions to the site include a flavicon, which is the little logo you should now be able to see next to the URL at the top of the screen, or in the title bar of the tab this site’s open in, if you’re using tabbed browsing, and a simple line break to separate posts in place of the rather obtrusive borders I had before. Also, I re-enabled comments on all posts, so you should all feel free to tell me what you think about anything.

Minor as these changes are, they herald the beginning of further updates and improvements I have planned for the site, which have unfortunately been delayed by the apparent death of my computer. Yes, I thought it would be a good idea to reinstall my OS with a newer version of Linux Ubuntu and at the same time sort out some problems I’d been having for a while. Naturally I predicted there would be problems, wireless internet being one of the prime culprits, but I didn’t expect the computer to completely freeze multiple times halfway through installation or, even after installation, at random intervals every few minutes, forcing me to reboot.

At first I blamed the new Ubuntu, nicknamed in the quirky Ubuntu tradition ‘Jaunty Jackalope’, but I had the same problem reinstalling the previous version, ‘Intrepid Ibek’. Consequently I removed the case to check for overheating, and discovered the fan on my graphics card had stopped working and the whole thing was becoming horrendously hot.

I took out the graphics card and tried to reinstall ‘intrepid’ while I worked out if the fan was completely bust or not. It turned out it was just clogged up with dust, which I delicately cleaned out with a bent paper-clip (which has remained with the other tools in my drawer for quite some time now, and has proven surprisingly useful for a multitude of tasks).

‘Intrepid Ibek’ Ubuntu did eventually install, by which time I had built up in unexpectedly multitudinous collection of dust bunnies from the tiny fan and heat-synch, but only to experience again the aforementioned problems. I reinstated the graphics card, the fan which is now so unhealthily loud that it can be heard throughout the whole house, and resolved to reinstall Windows XP, lest it should be a sudden problem with Linux that my computer developed.

Well, that ‘installed’ alright, or so it seemed, because now my computer can’t get past the splash screen; it just goes black. So something is seriously wrong with that computer, that’s obviously not a software problem, but is very possible the result of something overheating and burning out.

To be fair, the computer is now either four or five years old (I forget which) and the graphics card only a few months younger, so I suppose this was inevitable. Still, I am left at something of a loose end with regards to the writing I planned to do and the updating of this site, not least because I’m looking for a job at the moment with little success and without any supplement to my current funds, shall have £160 to live on until September, once all my rent is paid, and not accounting for any bills I have to pay when we move house in August. So, unless I dip into my savings account or scrounge some money off my father, perhaps with the incentive that I tried really hard at uni this year and got good grades, I can’t really afford a new computer.

(By the way, anyone reading this want to hire an aspiring writer?)

Fortunately, I do have my Eee PC, a marvelous little machine which, although an updated model was released at a lower price-point within weeks of me getting my first-generation one, remains handy whenever, for whatever reason, I don’t have access to my main desktop. In fact, it’s what I’m typing this post on right now, rather awkwardly though, due to its minuscule keyboard (which I can still touch-type on and would take any day over any normal-sized laptop keyboard), and small screen, which causes some awkward formatting on pages such as the WordPress dashboard.

Anyway, when I am back with a large keyboard and screen, I shall begin work on the new improved The Aspiring Writer, which should hopefully be more attractive, receive greater traffic, have a larger diversity of articles including some ‘how to’ posts as soon as I work out some subjects on which I know slightly more than the next person, and should hopefully at least offset to some extent the cost of running this site.

Until then, keep checking back, because I will continue to post at my regular irregular pace,

Henry.

Molly

What was faceless is now historic,
with no ones name to carve into soft metal portraits,
that time and rain will soon bend into a reaction,
(they mean the world to people who know nothing.)
Blame it on me.
For we are all the pennies in the world,
and with them we can build a home bound with inks,
to shade the chasing sunlight from our eyes.

I bite my lip. A rabbit crawls from my chest.
Down my arm, it sits on the back of my hand
and looks up at me. Contemptible creature,
I sneer. I try to shake it from my hand. Still
it sits there, staring pathetically up at me
with glassy eyes. I stare back. My features soften.
It looks to my breast. I shake my head, sadly.
Tentatively, the rabbit crawls up my arm
and sits uneasily on my shoulder.
There it stays, nibbling at my ear.
Then she enters the room and the rabbit
darts back into the spaces between my ribs.
At night it lays with me, nuzzling against me.
Contemptible creature.