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:

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Possibly you’ll have checked it out by now already, but I just started a new blog, or rather sub-blog, about videogames and I’m going to talk about it now.

The Blog

As you may have guessed, I like writing, literature and stories, which is why I blog about them. I also really like videogames, and particularly videogame stories, so I want to blog about them too. The only thing is, I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap between the two interests for a lot of people. If you drew a Venn diagram of people who like literature and people who videogames, it would look something like this:

I figured the people who came to HBenjaminPetrie.com to read about the books I’ve read and read my stories, aren’t going to be interested in reading about videogames. And the people who are interested in videogames, aren’t going to come to my site about fiction for the occasional post about what I’m playing. It’s a shame there’s not more overlap because I think a lot more people would enjoy videogames, proper ones I mean, not Wii shovelware, if only the barriers to entry weren’t so much higher than, say, a DVD player, but oh well.

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There’s some things you own that you’re particularly proud of, objects that give pleasure just from being in your possession. Usually these objects are uncommon, collectors’ items, or they hold sentimental significance, or they just say something about you. I’m considering doing a series of posts on some of my favourite possessions, but I will start with a fairly recent acquisition of mine: Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.

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.

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You know how sometimes you get lines from songs stuck in your head? Not necessarily the music, but the lines themselves. Well I do anyway. Lines like “And still we will be here, standing like statues” or “do you believe in magic?”, though they’re much better with the music to go with them, and when they’re sung in a certain way. Lately I’ve had a few literary lines stuck in my head, two of them from James Joyce, one from Simon Armitage. Sometimes the best sentiments come from the fewest words, and some quotes are brilliant not because of what they say, whether they’re a pithy little aphorism or a well-put piece of rhetoric, but by what they suggest, and how they seem to carry a whole weight of ideas that is much greater than the sum of their parts.

Without further ado in this short, sharp little post, the three lines I have stuck in my head, that I thought I would share are:

i. Yes I said yes I will yes.

This, as everyone really ought to know, is the final, triumphant line of Joyce’s Ulysses. I love the emphatic expression of affirmation it embodies. It’s only seven words, and yet it is so enthusiastic in conveying its message. It’s so well-balanced as well, the way two words separate each of the three yeses. It’s probably even my favourite line in the whole novel.

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Recently, since reading Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway, I’ve come to a new appreciation of the short story. I’ve always written short stories, but I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, to tell long, grand tales over hundreds of pages. Consequently, I’ve always read novels rather than short stories. And novels are worthwhile, fulfilling experiences. But they take a long time, and it just hit me that maybe, and I think this is true of myself, though I can’t speak for anyone else, I generally don’t enjoy novels while I’m reading them, only afterwards, when I look back on them. (more…)

This is an essay that I wrote as part of my university course, a little heavy-going perhaps, but it was something I enjoyed writing and I suppose some people may enjoy reading, so here it is:

Only one reason is shared by all of us [novelists]: We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is¹ – John Fowles

‘Real’ is subjective, changing from person to person and with the passing of time. Because of this indefinite nature, the representation of what is ‘real’ both in literature and in other art, has always been difficult. While all novelists may “wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is,” absolute ‘realism’ has not been the primary goal of every novel ever written: Many seek only to create enough of an internal realism to sustain suspension of disbelief. For example, no one would mistake a fantasy novel such as The Fellowship of the Ring² or even a Magical-Realist novel such as One Hundred Years of Solitude³ as reality because of the implausible and fantastic aspects of them. But there have been various movements and individual novels over the last century-and-a-half that have sought to represent the most ‘realistic’ real possible, to get as close to life as art can.

Three movements for which this has been the goal are Realism, Modernism and Post-Modernism, and three novels that typify the objectives of these movements are George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). Each of these movements and novels has sought to be ‘realistic’ in a different way.

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Okay. Firstly, something I’ve wanted to do for a while is post other people’s work on my site alongside my own, for the sake of variety and extra traffic. The first of these I’m going to put up after this post.

So this that I’m going to post by another writer is from a girl I added on Myspace, Molly, who writes some pretty superlative poetry. At least, I think so. It might just be the use of words like ‘skitter’ and ‘colloquial’, and some interesting images, but I think the voice is quite unlike a lot of poems that I’ve read. Anyway, I like them.

Next, at some point in the next few months I want to make this site ‘better’. Not sure exactly how it will improve much, but I want to vary the content some more, and write some more personal pieces, like I did at the start, so it’s more like a blog, than just a collection of short stories one after the other.

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