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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I’m not sure if this is the same for all writers, but I have to really feel what I write. I suppose it probably is the same for all the best writing, otherwise fiction is just churned out soullessly. That’s kind of how I felt reading Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. It’s well-written, no doubt, but I didn’t really get any feeling from it, like he didn’t feel anything when he wrote it. If I don’t feel anything when I write, my writing becomes lifeless, and lately I haven’t been feeling anything.

You might recall the work I posted recently, An Unfamiliar Girl (extract from my current work). That seems to have halted production at around the twelve-thousand-word mark, and I still feel I’ve barely begun it. I’m quite sure there’s enough material in it for a novel, but it’s just writing the novel that’s the tricky part. And this one seems to have become tricky because it is based so much on feelings, rather than plot.

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I have been terrible at updating this site, and in being creatively generally, not only since the start of this year, this new decade, but a little while before. I’m not sure I believe in writer’s block exactly, it sounds like an excuse, but I’ve certainly had a dearth of creative output. Well, I’ve been writing my dissertation, but that’s only been here and there. No, I just haven’t been inspired for a while, and I’ve been busy, well, busyish. What have I been doing? I’m currently addicted to two games for a start: Forza Motorsport 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. The first is, as the name implies, a car game. I’m not even that into cars, a few months ago I couldn’t tell an R8 from a Veyron, a Dino from a Testarossa, but somehow I’ve been addicting to driving around in virtual sports cars, and it’s time-consuming. The second of those games is an epic fantasy game of the really geeky sort, with elves and dwarves and mages and such. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of that sort of thing, though I like the Lord of the Rings movies, but it’s such a well-made game that can’t help but love it. Girlfriends take up time too, but I can hardly complain about that.

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Sat now, alone at the party, my can empty in my hand, dented in several places where I had absently crushed my thumb and fingers into it, I considered getting another one, scanning the crowd for either an opening I could push through, or someone worth talking to, and was just about to stand when an unfamiliar girl threw herself down onto the sofa next to me.

“Hi,” she said.

Her face was thin and sharp, with a narrow nose and green eyes that looked away as I met them; cheeks rose-tinted, vasodilated; hair the colour of dry leaves, or of beer held to the sun, sticking out like straw, jagged and uneven because she cut it herself. In her hands, which rested on the patchwork fabric lap of her dress, she held two slim bottles. I did not think she was pretty.

“Hey,” I said, smiling, pressing the lager can between my fingers until it clicked and crinkled.

“I’m Remi,” she said, laughing nervously. Her laugh was not musical. “My name’s kind of a joke.” She looked down at her hands, tapped her fingers on the glass of one of the bottles.

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I’ve had this theory for a while about why we would choose to read a particular work of fiction. I was discussing it last night with someone I work with, and he seemed to not disagree, so I shall expand on that theory here: I believe that there’s two reasons we read what we read: either it’s i) a well-written work or ii) it has an interesting story. Obviously these aren’t mutually exclusive criteria and a work can be both or neither, but I think that, to an extent, one can compensate for the other, although there’s a minimum level of each anyone would be willing to accept.

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

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I recently watched the first season of The Hills, an MTV reality drama series about a girl called Lauren who used to be on another reality TV programme I’ve never watched, called Laguna Beach. For me, the show was interesting in two ways: firstly, it offers a voyeuristic look into American life, and secondly, more interestingly, it creates a strange interplay between the real and the fake. For example, the show is structured as a television drama serial, with each episode centring around a particular subject and leading to a climax within the episode, in the same way each season builds towards a climax, and all the ‘stars’ of the show are presented as characters, with certain traits enhanced through the editing. It’s certainly not a documentary, the way it presents this skewed view of its subjects, and instead, with the title referring to Beverly Hills, the city neighbouring Hollywood, becomes a reality TV show in a town where everything is fake.

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Lately I’ve been reading Marcel Proust’s Rembrance of Things Past (aka. A la recherche du temps perdu, In Search of Lost Time), which I supposed would be quite an undertaking, but am actually finding quite readable. I get the impression, and had the impression myself, that Remembrance of Things Past, like The Odyssey, is another of those classic novels that scares people away because they think it’s too difficult to read. Admittedly the sentences are often quite long, as is commonly the style with Victorian novels, but I think the main reason people are put off reading the novel is its length: I thought Ulysses was long at over nine-hundred pages, but the complete Remembrance of Things Past is about three-thousand pages long (which is practically inconceivable to me, whose longest work currently stands at about 120 pages). Daunting, certainly, but not so much when you consider it is split into seven volumes.

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Firstly, I would like to apologise for any typos in this article: I have a headache from trying to remember my password, and I’m typing on my little eee pc, which, as a counterweight to its incredible portability, does not possess the most ergonomic keyboard (and also an unresponsive ‘a’ key).

Anyway, I just watched The Shipping News, which is based on an Annie Prolux novel of the same name, and it is the best movie I’ve seen since… Once Upon a Time in America (not that I’m sure how many films I have seen since then). (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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