Talking About A (Lit) Revolution - Me on the Papertrail Podcast

I talked to Sophie Hopesmith of the Papertrail Podcast about 3 of my favourite books.

 

Writing As Metaphor

In my new novel, one of the main metaphors is that of writing. But it is not a book about an author or the act of writing itself, I always feel that is rather self-indulgent. It is more about the role that language plays and how it works (and more significantly how it transmutes) when written down. 

In the late 1990s, all over the globe there was the race to decode the human genome. To set down the language of every one of the 20,000 genes (out of the 3 billion we possess) that constructs and formulates us. Despite the complexity of the DNA molecule, there are only four chemical bases that bond with one another to form genes. This being chemistry, these four bases have conferred a letter abbreviation to stand for them, so the DNA ‘alphabet’ contains just four letters, ‘A,G,C &T’. 

Yet from such a small palette, a myriad of chains of these four letters spells out the complexity of DNA, genes and ultimately us. Our bodies and our consciousness. The human genome is one of the 3 voices of my novel. Being inanimate (at least in the pre-protein expression state), the genome cannot speak for itself, but in the novel it uses our computers it is hooked up to, in order to berate, challenge and bait us; we may have a 26 letter alphabet with which to express every complex idea and invention we’ve ever had as a species, but we get nowhere near approaching the intricate complexity of the DNA molecule and its mere quartet of characters. To the genome, it is as if the alphabets are reversed, we humans only have 4 letters to work with, while it leaves us in its wake with a full complement of 26 characters to permutate meaning from.

The genome wryly comments that its mechanism is the polar opposite from Medieval Monks and Jewish scribes transliterating perfect copies of liturgical texts; one error in transcription and the whole volume is junked, whereas the genome relies on misprints in order to foster variance and mutation to drive evolution. The modern age has come upon the genome with the human desire to ensure there are no errata in its transcribed language and if there are, they can be corrected through science. It is no longer sufficient to operate at the level of the word and the sentence. Now there is a need to drill down to the letters that form the words, as the very DNA of the words themselves. 

Online in the virtual world, you are also dealing with code. With hyper-text and binary computer code that also combine to project personas and people and ideas and well, everything. Just like with genes, hypertext can code non-sequentially, unlike our plodding written syntax of predicate, verb, object noun. The second voice of the novel ‘exists’ incontestably online, but it is entirely unclear whether that equates to a real person in actual life. It is a persona that only announces itself through the electronic written word, yet it appears to present feelings, opinions and have dreams. But can this language be trusted? And it seems to fail to obey the laws of time as it evanesces and disappears from view, only to reappear elsewhere, like the Cheshire Cat. 

The third voice is a mother who confides into her journal in order to retain some vestige of adult conversation, having been surrounded all day by two young daughters. But the pages of her journal are out of chronological order. The development of her daughters which proceeds in a fairly fixed sequence controlled by their genes, is fractured in the non-linear reportage of her writing. Where she lives in sectarian Northern Ireland, murals, colours and the visual image out-trumps the written word. In trying to shield her daughters from the violence, she is trying to assert the primacy of the written over the visual.

But all three are unconsciously writing part of one of the others. The online voice is threatening to use the open source data about the human genome, to undertake some radical genetic engineering of her own. Which is possibly why her compound is currently under siege from the authorities, an event followed online by the mother far away in Ulster. And she herself is battling with the stages of maturation pre-programmed in her daughters by their genomic programme, trying to support their development, including helping them to learn to write. 

So this is a book about language and writing, but it is not about writers. It is about a pre-coded language, working away at the unconscious level. And it is when this writing goes wrong, when there are errata, it can produce dire consequences. A mutation changes the replicated code within a gene and can lead to a debilitating genetic condition. The mother is stymied in trying to trace the development of her second child, when the journal reporting that of her first child is shuffled out of order. While the online written broadcasts to help save fellow souls, has attracted the wrong sort of attention and has lead to a siege that is likely to end catastrophically, pursued by men with three-lettered acronyms stencilled on the back of their flak jackets. Men whose lives are entirely ordered and prescribed by their three-lettered alphabets such as FBI, ATF, DEA. Her online posts are attacked by viruses and digital interdiction that unravels the very letters of her typed words. 

We are all written, yet none of us are characters in a work of fiction. 

Published by Dead Ink Books 

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

Shortlisted for the Not The Booker Prize

For videos, reviews and interviews

Book Launch - Reading & In Conversation with Lee Rourke

So my novel "Three Dreams In The Key Of G" was officially launched at Burley Fisher Books in Hackney with a reading and then hour long discussion between me and fellow author Lee Rourke about the book's themes; reality and fiction, feminism and the patriarchy, biological determinism and culture, consciousness and imagination and the role of language.

In conversation with Lee Rourke

Extract

Watch out for some big news about the book to be revealed next week!

Published by Dead Ink Books 

Available from Amazon  and all good book shops in the UK

For videos, reviews and interviews

In Conversation With Author Adam Steiner

With publication of Adam Steiner's debut novel  "Politics Of The Asylum" (my review here), I was very struck by his stylistic and linguistic approach as well as the fact that the novel is that most rare beast in UK fiction, a political novel. So we got together to talk all things writerly and compare and contrast our approaches to language and politics in fiction. 

MN: The novel is called “Politics Of The Asylum”- How political do you regard your novel?

AS: Good question – it's hard to say how political any novel is under the skin. We can all make declarations of intent, expose horrors and strike out a short sharp j'accuse but it doesn't mean we're actually saying something [new] about a given state of affairs that hasn't already been expressed – although, the flip side of this would be Orwell's 1984 and Margaret Atwood with The Handmaid's Tale. For me, I don't think I've said anything particularly controversial, but I certainly took the extremities of the current situation and drew them into wild and sometimes illogical conclusions [as I say, it's fiction] but what is odd, as opposed to it being purely prescient which is what most people say about the above titles, the book exists in something of timequake – I started writing it in 2011/12 – so it has kind of stretched and warped according to contemporary context. What gets me is that the book expresses so much paranoia, alienation and self-loathing [personal, public and political] that it is slightly smothered under a fair swathe of negativity, hate you could call it, such that the saving of lives is undermined and undervalued – as I keep saying – Ballard's Death of Affect – what else can you feel when people are living through bludgeoned times of near-PTSD. I think you nailed this in your review, I don't think the book is miserable or depressing per se, but it is a challenge and a confrontation, hopefully that sparks meaningful arguments.

MN: Is there a danger with political or even contemporary writing that it gets out of date and becomes a historical snapshot?

AS: Yes – absolutely – there is the absolute danger that people can have well-meaning terms applied to them, which for some spark a death-knell, of being "relevant/timely/urgent" – I appreciate that angle, but lots of my kindest reviewers have said those kinds of things because they are very true. It is utterly bizarre that PoTA makes more sense now than when it was first written years ago, and in the intervening period the events and themes of the book have become more real, or if you like, calcified.

I guess the risk is that in writing a book [novel] which is too much about current events or trying too hard to fix/save the world you risk your own obsolescence and it does betray some lack of imagination. Equally, people don't seem to change too much, within the lessons of Greek tragedy especially [hubris – trump] so much of which holds and we are still re-making these scenarios. But even then, the historical snapshot has value, because looking back we can see that people did care, did speak out in their own small way, ideally these books would evoke that time. People still refer to Dickens or less sensationally George Eliot and Thomas Hardy [none of whom I really like] as being of their time, and I do admire that striving to be contemporaneous not escapist. What gives their work credence in that sense is that they provided analysis, they had an angle, they evoke and draw upon their times to make something new, this is why pure soc-realism falls flat on the heart and the ears.

By way of a positive example, I saw that Nikesh Shula who has been pushing greater diversity of stories and publishing pros for ages, before most big publishers bothered to notice, has written a real-time novel in relation to riots. The England riots happened in 2011, ages ago in modern terms, but, I get the sense that he saw there was something socially significant in this which had not been fully explored beyond the media – so I think it's great he has stepped-up and used the riots to how us something about our society which we are still experiencing the repercussions of, without fully-knowing why.

MN: Just what political impact can fiction have?

AS: I think as above, we all have feelings, inclinations and leanings about how things should be in the world, but because we are ultimately human, feeling beings [most of us] these exist quite outside of and in incompatibility to political systems, much of which is essentially a game, for and by politicians, quite rarely are they real people, they tend not be particularly qualified in anything that counts in real life – I think that makes us all pawns, de facto, just look at the royal family – you wave a flag for them and kiss their feet – they are strangers – they do not know you or care what happens to you - they just want your money [and to be adored] – books are great to spark ideas – but it only takes a few pitchforks, a few matches...

MN: What do you see as the current landscape in the UK for political fiction writing?

AS: Hard one to answer. I'm not one for Pikkety's examinations of capitalism - over my head – but in terms of fiction, I do think that creative non-fiction can play a stronger hand. People build a human narrative into real events [twist and tweak the events slightly] and this gives insight, drives empathy and helps people to see how and why things matter. This is perhaps a better "in" for letting people appreciate the human impact of politics, when democracy in action is often third-hand to most of us. It is so hard in the UK, a country riven and driven by class to attempt to put yourself in someone else's shoes, to feel their own struggle. It's all very well checking your privilege, but it doesn't bring us together; the prince and the pauper were both alien to the other, and think that's important, because you either strike off a whole swathe of people, who will then never vote for you or seek to align their views, or you try and force them into a homogeneity, we are anarchic beings, political divides should not be able to constrain us.

MN: ”people build a human narrative" - is not the problem that every narrative can be neutralised by a counter-narrative and that all government has to do is react to narratives that cause them problems and counter them, often by blowing enough smoke in our eyes? The Big Society idea of David Cameron to restructure the nature of charitable giving in this country was abandoned very quickly (and quietly), yet Charities rely absolutely on the human narrative of the the people they seek to help, save a child's life/sight/give her clean water in order to get us to put our hand in our pocket, set against the political narrative of constantly wanting to cut the foreign aid budget. And then charities are blighted by compassion fatigue?

AS: Indeed! That' a comprehensive overview! Ironically, narrative display our personal drives; our paths betray us. Saying is no replacement for doing, and on that note, giving money is rarely doing, clicking as an action – it just doesn't translate. The right wing view off charities is that they self-perpetuate, thrive on myth-making – they kind of have a point. By being perpetually under-funded, always needing more, it is continual war, a la the NHS, as in Orwell's 1984. So then what? I do think that humans have a disposition towards the right/left and within that selfishness abides, so we have to struggle with the better angles of our nature. I would like to go Buddhist on this and say be better, everyday, where you can. Change is life and little things make a big difference. charity begins at home, meaning helping yourself enough to be able to help others; to do small acts of kindness, without reward or virtue signalling. there doesn't have to be a metaphysic to this; it is the form of work that is engendered by hospital staff, anyone can wrap a bandage, take blood, try to break the worst kind of news – it is the way in which these repetitive acts are performed that define your disposition, as a thinking, feeling [human] being.

And yes, the foreign aid budget is vital. We already pay our taxes but we are rarely given the option or transparency to know and decide where they are dispersed – potholes, street lighting and bin collections are not the same thing as creating wells for water, sexual health programs and creating sustainable micro-economies. We have a collective colonial responsibility, still – so may of us choose to ignore. There are no borders, no citizens of the world, only human beings.

MN: With novels that have challenging language, is there is a risk of being too exclusive for a general readership and therefore undermine any political designs for the fiction?

AS: Definitely. But I go back to me earlier mutterings and attest that it is really important to use the voices at your disposal, and to remark upon your prejudices and misunderstandings; to show yourself tripping. I wanted to write as an orator, not a speech-writer or a marketing consultant – see Jonathan Meades on Jargon [BBC doc]. I always loved the line in Alan Bennett's The History Boys: "etcetera is what the Nazis would have said." I think he has historical accuracy slightly off, but it speaks of a tyranny of reductionism, crushing depth and expression. Libraries gave us [GIVE US] power – I see so many writers at the moment, especially the financially struggling of London [who don't have a spare room/desk/office space] using libraries as a stronghold to write/read/learn/resist – in the days of internet access [information overkill/spin/troll anger/alternative facts/post-truth] books offer you an escape from noise and bullshit – its an impressive show of solidarity that they fight the government from a desk in books that will sold and read by the underground and in indie bookshops across the world.

MN: Could you elaborate more on writer as orator? I've not conceived of it in those terms before (and yes the Meades' programme was wonderful, how jargon is used to shut down conversation and communication).

AS: I guess the writer has an obligation to do the police in as many ways as they can find or create. You establish voices for your characters, and your narrative and style, and you throw them as best you can. Let the blind man see and the ignorant show their vulnerability. One problem of the UKIP crowd and the Britain first lads is they feel disenfranchised and neglected, ignore the ignorant – I agree – but it'll only get you so far. This iwhere all but the most exploitative and populist politicians fail, if you cannot bring people on side, instead of existing in an echo chamber, what is your use, what are you for?

I didn't want to establish a platform for particular views necessarily, but I did want to show how good people can easily become "bad" and how bad people are not rotten to the core, there is capacity for change, quit on that and you quit on hope.

I think the one thing I can say for myself and the book, is that it is honest, within its own confines.

MN: Also, speaking of a tyranny of reduction, how do you view social media, in how its algorithms channel users into echo chambers of people with the same views, plus the shouting down and hectoring of those with different views?

As to artistic resistance, I think this is a myth. If resistance art sells, it will be absorbed by the authorities and corporates and defanged as with punk. After the Grenfell fire, lots of writers put up their wares for an auction to raise funds for the victims which was laudable, but none of those authors were what you would call activists or political, being writers of romance or fantasy, so there will be no sustained outcome of their campaign beyond the money raised? For me this is little different to the equivalent of performers snorting cocaine backstage at Live Aid, a well-meaning giving of their time but of limited duration as they then slide back to their normal writing lives with no more interaction with the political.

AS: Interesting. Social media is damn tricky. So many voices, so many flare-ups, policing the internet begets trolling and the marshalling of arguments - minefield. for me, it's a great way to share knowledge and connect with other people, who I can then have a proper human conversation with, ideally. I mean, look at trump, he just rants and accuses, he states opinions as fact and the rest is just follow mein leader. Into the abyss...

I think people might find cause to change from getting involved in activist causes. And I think people can write out their own truth, similar to what I was talking about earlier, people can find and offer solidarity, and so many amazing things are sparked or started by revolutions in the head, people arm themselves with the knowledge or passion gleaned from books – that's encouraging.

and - surely the artist has a right to cocaine - give the anarchist a cigarette..

What this means is that an angry generation are making a stand [by] writing their works, and the offer of the library, or just reading and expanding your mind is to empower yourself. My point here is, like Russell Brand who has a silly authentic-ish accent but is very articulate, we should allow for difficult writing, challenge, extremity. I wanted to write in my own way, not just to sell books, not within the pre-conceived notion of the novel as entertainment, music and films can give you exactly the same level of brute sophistication, it's too easy to tune out, drop out, browse with no appetite or hunger, just to be entertained.

A book like mine might exclude some people and that's ok. Not because it is so high minded or too brilliant for them, more likely they choose not to put the effort in, or they want twists and turns and a knowing surprise at the end – fuck off – go to McDonalds, put your head in the trough, ignore the storm – get thee to a library, learn your language[s] as a tool, learn how to spell, get inspired, go read a fucking book instead of just consuming.

I'm starting to sound like my character now...


MN: The language is very lyrical/poetic, what are your thoughts on the poetic novel?

AS: It can go either way. I was keen to experiment, this was the first book I ever wrote [finished writing] so let's have fun, play and learn. I read up on purple prose and meddled with bathos, so easy to slip into this, trying to make someone feel X or Y rather than feeling it yourself in the work of your writing [ this is very difficult, not sure if I achieved it 100%]. I think prose-poems are specific and valuable thing, like poetry, a bit precious, it can spark the fire against the everyday. There's value in reading widely, stretching your brain.

MN: Is language the highest value for you in a novel?

AS: I wonder...it was definitely playtime for me, but I put effort into making archetypal characters, almost cut-outs that suited the pop-art scenes that jump out at you throughout the book. I worked towards a plot, but I'm happy to have some failure, a healthy dose of crash and burn. The language is perfect, but I think I spent the most time on it, I wanted to make every sentence ring [impossible] and not have to say ordinary things, I wanted it all to be pointed, I think like PiL it perhaps came out too spiky – but I'm cool with that. As much as I tried to take the brilliant in the banal dull and mundane, I wanted to luxuriate in language a bit, rather than just drag the reader from character A to B, through door C and then have them talk about an affair, death in the family - I wanted those things to bleed off the page.

MN: The language IS perfect and the sentences do ring - just a comment, not an actual question.
There is a lot of both word play and visual manipulation of the type such as words stretched out by the spacing. What effect do you see these as having for the reader? How do you decide when and where to employ them?

AS: I think [know] I was slightly crazy at the time [ another luxury ] and as such I could push the form, the artwork in the book is not pictures of the characters, like in Sherlock Holmes, it wasn't an illustrated guide; equally the physical madness of the text was stretching new muscles within the form, if yes, then why not? I love beautifully weighted prose, but I also want rough edges, hard angles, thwarted landscapes; you can do all of this with words and the breakdown of their structures – equally – you can't just take the piss.

I think it served to alienate the reader, bore them a little, keep a safer distance – all the headfuck that was Nathan [Finewax, the protaganist] I thought the book could be filmic, the way impressionistic shots will blur a murder through a doorway, you get the sense of what's happening, even though your sense are impaired, you're living their dream-nightmare along with the character. To be taken out of the ego of our own headspace is the most liberating things about art – like getting drunk.



                                 



MN: I think that's a really interesting thing to aim for, but it does risk alienating the reader, or perhaps demand that the reader be guided how to read this book, not in the sense of its meaning, but in its language, typography and how its sentences work (which is also a high risk writing strategy). Did you have that in the back of your mind as you were writing it?

AS: I don't feel I respect my reader. That's about it. I don't necessarily value them like I should. But, I had the armour of newness, striving, trying, enge-nuity - fresh genius. If everything was for and of the reader, then I would be Lee Child – brilliantly done, but I'm not sure why I would be writing then, apart from money...

The reader deserves to be pushed and pulled, come along for the ride, this is the way step inside. I broke no boundaries, but if I'm bored then the reader must be also. On that note - boredom is sometimes underrated. Nathan's boredom is a pain we can all share, it is the gripe and grit of work, and we are increasingly deadened by administration, what could be more relatable than that?

MN: It’s clear what the role of sound is in poetry, but does it have a role across the length of a novel?

AS: I was conscious to show zings and zips, and the sharpness of too many sips. Sounds that seem to evade the listener but exist as non-music, non-functional performances of crashes and fractures, all very real. Hospital is a great example of this, noisy, then extremely quiet – it comes back to the war analogy, all quiet until it kicks off - which can be any time, its an unhealthy headspace, sounds, like an illness, can creep up on you like a darkness. I also went quite lyrical at times, I wanted to chain together a run of ideas, what might seem like a dirge for some was a sprint for me. Over the course of the novel, the voices recede, become muted noises, incidental. I think more like a breath, you get the sense of withdrawal, closing in and closing down.

MN: Oh to have scratch and sniff versions of novels!
It’s not surprising that a book about a hospital devotes so much writing to the human body and its failings. But does all your work start from the body?

AS: I’m really drawn to the influx/reflex of the body; how sense impressions can be an overload where and when you indulge them. This can be internal stimulus, brooding, overthinking things, but also external influence and alterations to a settled state. Within the the novel, I allowed myself to get lost in every inflection, the creep of skin that is always shedding but attached to you, it is and is not your own. You can easily go too far in this; they said Eliot's main failing was that he was the kind of fella who could hear the grass grow – that is nice to indulge but it can be overwhelming. I guess bodies just have so much to teach us, but listening can be deafening, like we lack capacity as beings to hear ourselves, easier to deny.

MN: There’s so much more to say on that last point, perhaps the starting point for a future novel?

AS: Who can say? It might be that the body-reflex is a perpetual concern for me, and I never knew it except in writing. Willing to take that most domestic of chances! I just think that in showing so much ugliness you can sharpen the appetite for something better, to that nature cannot be all bad, and to recognise those worse off [as we might see it] than ourselves.


Trailer

Paingyric - Short Story

Like a suicide bomber, regard this video to be my last will and testament, only unlike him I do not proclaim myself martyr and will not be ushering anyone else into death with me. I have spent a lifetime wreaking both effects on those unfortunates in my orbit in any case. I have taken to the camera lens since I can no longer cradle an actual pen between fingers, contorted by freshly minted muscle memory of clenched teeth and cramped hands. Cruel perhaps that this reflex strikes at such strategic loci for the production of words, when both are the furthest peripheries removed from the actual epicentre of the pathology. My pathology, the rest of my corpus in revolt against me. And perish the thought of my digits ever dancing across a keyboard ever again. But my mouth still functions. Little surprise to those colleagues and peers in the industry that it would be the last constituent of me to seize up and relinquish the fight. Alas however, the pen is not mightier than the sword, judging by the rotisserie blade that has impaled my liver and convolutes it above my internal infernal fires, sending off a shower of metastasised sparks to all other parts of my benighted body. Particularly having a liking for and coming to rest on my brain. Because it’s relatively spongy up there I suppose. Soft landings for terminal take-off. 

Even though my name bears considerable commodity value, there will be no pecuniary charge to access this video, as it shall be made readily available on the free file sharing sites. My offspring have been well provided for already by my career, though it cannot compensate for the other incommodious dearths that came about in its wake. Was one contingent upon the other? I already know their answer, so that my response matters not, for it carries no weight. This may be my testament, but only they can testify to the fallout of its contents. See who turns up to my funeral I imagine. A veritable dead reckoning.

Every so often you’ll have to excuse me as I pull on my metal straw of liquid morphine. Here in my sippy-cup, forged from metal as betokens the status of a seething adult. I have to adjudge the optimal time to imbibe, as close to the Richter Scale peak of crescendoing spasm as to be able to maximally alleviate it, without leaving it too late from evacuation so that the pain quake obliterates all other competing consciousness. In such a way the opiate serves as an inkwell, dipping the pen in to prevent the flow of words becoming sundered and surrendered. A sharpening of the senses emerging only with the assistance of anaesthesia.

So, to the meat of the matter, albeit marinaded in morphine. Reading is a hybrid art form. That I say this might surprise you since the author’s sole tool, his only palette, is that of language, which makes it perhaps the purest of art forms, unmediated by its materiality; no coloured pigment on canvas; no 50-piece orchestra, conductor and opera singers; or no electrified amplifiers for the screech of guitars. No, it’s hybrid because it requires both senses of sight and hearing, without privileging one over the other. We read the words with our eyes, but ‘hear’ them sounded inside our heads and that way we hear the voice of the absent author. Alive or dead. Or somewhere in between, soon to pass from one state to the other. It’s a different mechanism from listening to an interlocutor who is stood there in front of you. So why have I taken to this filmic medium that most definitely privileges the optic sense over the aural? Because in one respect there is very little visual variegation to keep your eye entertained, so you would ordinarily have to focus solely on the words. No mis en scene, no carefully constructed image within the frame. Yet what ocular paucity on offer, is, I rather feel, vital. You see before you a middle-aged man in decline. Though unless you are a part of my serrated inner circle, you would not see me incrementally enough to be able to discern any such decline. I was fortunate enough to be an artist in the pre-social media age. My putative audience had and have no idea what I really look like beyond the fly leaf photo with all its high production values. A fiction for a fiction. So it is not this image of a crumbling man that you should or could fix on. It is this flask. Because the flask is the central image. Even though it has no magical powers. It is no elixir restoring me to life. Nor does it hold back the press of barbarian hordes of tumescent incoherence from the Palatine redoubt of my upper stories. At best it allows me to reach the end of my sentences.

But why it is so important for this image to be front and central, is because it represents something that no amount of skilfully composed words can ever achieve; it stands for death. It represents and embodies pain in a way I could never harness simply through language. Morphine, the tincture of dreams, the realm of Morpheus after whom it is named, when actually it serves as the very antithesis of dreams; death as the eternal dreamless sleep. Palliative care while the pall-bearers are merely suiting up. No matter how intricate and resonant I articulate, death resists my metaphors. Here I am, throwing liquid analgesic down my gullet to try and allow me some fleeting joined-up seconds to contemplate what it is I’m grappling with. Yet it is really too late in the day to really come to grips with the intractable. Interesting word ‘palliative’, it bears a sense of extenuating or mitigating pleas in law, or apologies of which I have none. And yet its Latin root is the word for a large mantle or cloak, that you’re concealing or shrouding something. Which brings us back to the pall cloth over a coffin. As if we could tuck death out of sight. Like an unsightly coffee stain under a doily. Or look here, a morphine smear on the table’s glass top. See, the flask is to be in plain sight at all times during this broadcast. The flask is the motif of this talk; motif of course as in motive… Oh the pain siren is a howling… Motile, as in both one’s fructifying semen and the free movement of metastasising cancer cells, which is most assuredly unfructifying. 

Sometimes I wonder if these twinges are the prod of some sort of internal critic or censor, outraged at myself. Even though I have never once felt any compunction to retract what I have written. I stand by everything I say, or in this present case, sit doubled over in agonised throes… There, that’s better, sucking succour. A blessed modicum of damnable relief. Until even Morpheus’ soothing powers are dulled through what is laughingly called ‘tolerance’. At that point you can only beseech morphine not to relieve you, but to release you. For you will probably self-medicate yourself to death before the cancer culls you. Ironic that the root of the word ‘release’ is to loosen or relax, which is what you count on the drug to do for you in these last knockings, yet the apposite word ‘relief’ has a connotation of getting you back on your feet, of raising you up from being prostrate. Neither are related to the word resurrect which has an etymological root of resurgence. More’s the pity. The surging going on is in one direction only and it’s to my absolute detriment. There, that hits the spot. You know, the most galling thing about this self-medication, is that as an inveterate smoker of cigarettes, which as you can see, I still do because, hell what’s to lose, but the action of lifting the flask to my lips and puffing on the straw, is akin to vaping. I suppose I could have opted for an audio only rogation, but who listens to the wireless these days anyway? The word wireless now standing instead for networks of frenzied, swarming airwaves that have superannuated the original wireless with its singular stentorian voice. But no, I rejected the Godcast, because the flask has to be up front and central. A flask will and testament if you will. And you will, unless the disarticulations of Alzheimer’s gets you first. 

I had always thought I was offering our species profundities in my writing. But this pewter flask tells me I fell oh so far short of that. Not that my work wasn’t more insightful than the drivel the vast amount of other writers produce… Excuse me… That coughing jag would have been produced irrespective of my current blight. The carcinogenic splutterings of most other writers stops up one’s breath, through the audacity of their musings being so feeble. Some of them even choose to pontificate on the contents of this flask, yet couldn't see what was staring them in the face. Reflected in the adulterated silver sheen. Alloyed with lead, the supposed barrier against radiation but proffering a differing poison of its own. Same duplicity as morphine, on both counts… Even abutted hard up against it, yet still these so-called writers (with apologies to the ‘so-called Islamic State’) couldn’t see what was clearly right under their noses. Or in it in the case of some, trying to shortcut the creative process, to get to the lesser seen parts of their selves, when in truth they weren’t worth accessing in the first place and even if they were, just put in the requisite bloody work! You can't mainline genius! Instead they all plumped for the fanciful altered reality vistas offered by Morpheus, rather than the ineffable singularity of death.

But who am I to cavil and carp, when in the greater scheme of things, I now question the merit of my own endeavours and even that of all possible writing? In the manner of the Classical Greek philosophers and the Christian theologians who squatted on their shoulders, I was pursuing the wrong lines of inquiry. It is not a question of what constitutes a ‘good’ life, or an ethical one. It is just the question of life itself we should be interrogating. As framed by our flagrant mortality. I’d employ the word ‘blatant’ rather than the hyperbole 'flagrant', only its root is to prate and babble, when we never speak of death at all, so the word does not befit. Yet ‘flagrant’ isn’t quite right either, with its sense of flaming and fulgurant, iterative of an enlightenment that is anything but. Words fail and break down in quietus’ vestibule. You have no power to lobby once in Death’s lobby. At this late stage I am afeared that writing and language itself just isn’t up to the task. Sculptors of stigmatic saints and martyrs have got to better grips with pain and agony and their corollary of surcease. Whether theist or humanist in their outlook, many rendered the wound of humanity right on the nose. Because it is non-lingual. An expression of pure emotion which always eludes language that has to take the roundabout route of metaphor. Pain etched into skin is far more pertinent than printed words etched into the grain of paper. Let alone on a monitor screen which possesses no grain at all. The pain wreaked across my features says more about life than my entire wrote oeuvre. Wrought for nought… 

How we are obsessed with origins. Ting. With original sin. Ting. With formative Oedipal relations. Ting. With identity and founding myths. Ting. When everything should in fact proceed from eschatology. Ting ting. Flask your father, oh you can’t, he’s dead. While we're about Herr Freud, if we are to invoke his Oedipal theory, why not also his oral, anal and phallo-genital stages as well? We writers should play with ludic language with orality, with anality as well as genital gay abandon. In our linguistic sandbox, we should throw words around like our own shit. James Joyce did, not that I'm comparing myself to the master. We ought to bite and gnaw and lacerate text with our teeth, I mean words emerge from our mouths right? But we don't, we meekly succumb to the superego of grammar for arranging our words into syntactically governed, linear sentences, instead of bloodied smears and seminal gobbets. In doing so we mute language’s energies. But cancer won’t stand for that, for it is a mutiny against any and every muted energy. So I also am not immune from such criticism, as I too yielded before the publishing proprieties suggested by my various careworn editors over the years. Consider the beginnings and ends of novels. Every reader is thrown in the deep end at the opening of a novel. They have to find their way into the world and the language of the book, enter into the voice of their character guide. Consequently authors devote a lot of attention to the beginning, to hook the reader in. But the ending of books? How many endings have ever truly satisfied you the reader? They just seem poor apologies for concluding the book there, like it ran out of steam, or offered a lumpen twist to try and give the novel some last minute perspectival weight. The attention given is the wrong way round. The beginning will always remain inchoate as the reader comes to it blind. But the ending...? The ending must be utterly defined, even if it leads to inchoateness beyond the final full-stop, for after all, death ushers in the inchoate. 

Oh, the flask is empty. Out of juice. Out of words. Out of time. I'll just unclip my throat mic here and set the flask upon the table next to it.

Literary Lacrosse Stick - Literary Quiz answers

I set a 25 question literary quiz here


Here are the answers

Literary Lacrosse Stick Quiz!

Yesterday I did an author Twitter takeover of my publishers Dead Ink Books  As part of the mayhem & madness, I set a 25 question quiz, with questions posed as crossword cryptic clues. (Hence the title, Literary Lacrosse Stick, to represent that my new novel has a couple of acrostics in it).

In case you weren't able to join in but have a hankering to pit your wits, here are the questions again.

I give the cryptic clue to the book title, the year of publication and the country of origin of the author.

Here's an example for you:  Junky American author’s unadorned repast (5,5) 1959

Answer: 

I'll publish the answers on the blog in a couple of days.

Happy solving!

1) UK author’s ossified time keepers (3,4,6) 2014 

2) Russian MA (Hons) celebrates with a salted rimmed glass of tequila & triple sec (3,6,3,9) 1967 

3) Polish émigré switches off all the lights at the hub (5,2,8) 1899 

4) Manchester author’s wind-up citrus fruit (1,9,6) 1962

5) Korean eschewer of animal comestibles (3,10) 2007

6) All change for this Czech, but the DNA remains exactly the same (3,13) 1915  

7) Junky author’s vermillion nocturnal municipalities (6,2,3,3,5) 1981

8) Anglo-Dutchman’s Sub-subcutaneous? (5,3,4)  2000

9) Pacifist Yorkshireman’s Infernal unison (3,6,6) 2006 

10) Yugoslav Civil Service as the source of agonies? (3,8,2,4) 2006

11) Austrian sporting custodian’s twitchiness in the face of punitive leathering (3,11,7,2,3,7,4) 1970 

12) Japanese Alice eschews egg-timer for the final apocalypse (4-6,10,3,3,3,2,3,5) 1985 

13) US author has Theseus’ conquest submit to its craving for nicotine (3,8,5,1,9,5) 2000 

14) Modern day French misanthrope would gladly blow each and every one of us to bits (8) 1998 

15) Orphaned NYC Borough (10,8) 1999 

16) Irish author’s nominal aphasia? (3,9) 1953

17) Count on this midday British author’s attribution of the cause of hay fever (6) 1995 

18) American writer’s ignited abecedary (5,8) 2012

19) Frenchman’s 26th and last, the back to the beginning for the first (4) 2010

20) American author relocates Hades between Brooklyn’s Polo grounds and Dallas (10) 1997 

21) Scottish author double negative rejection of state benefits amid mañana (3,3,5,3,4) 1983 

22) French author drops a quartet of aitches? (1-1-1-1) 2010

23) Nothing to sneeze at Russian SciFi author putting murder up his nose (5) 2011 

24) English author’s tale of the dictator of London’s W11 (3,8,2,7,4) 1904 

25) US once-a-decade novelist’s nuptial plans? (3,8,4) 2011 

Answers can be found here

The Tome Raider Considers the Novels of Ben Marcus

A Maggot - Flash Fiction

“I pluck the last apple from the fruit bowl. I wash the apple then have it sit, presenting spherical in the palm of my hand. The water globules shimmy shimmeringly as I turn the apple by its stunted stalk in the course of my inspection. They seem to draw up the apple’s red hue within their vesicular protuberance. An osmotic trompe-l’oeil. The skin appears pristine. I move into the study and am struck by a thought, what if a water droplet is precisely aligned over the wormhole caused by a boring larvae, so as to diffuse beyond my sight? I shake the apple vigorously and watch the spray of moisture fly off like a swarm fledging. There remain fewer, but more tenacious drops, elongated by their smearing perturbation on the surface of the apple. I briefly think of Newton. The stem bowl, already a recessed tunnel of sorts, is particularly hard to descry, being of similar hue to larval frass. However this whole morsel does indeed seem untouched and virginal. Apart from the chemicals waxing it verglas of course. Confident that there would be no codling moth larval Amundsen defeating my caterpillary Scott in the race to the core, I sink my teeth into the red peel. A mist of the apple’s own juices flies out into the air. Too fine to echo the beads of water purged by the action of my earlier convulsion, also they leave no darkening umbrage on the carpet. As I chew the pulpy mixture of soft rind and crisper pome, I inspect the lacerations in skin collapsed like a mine shaft and see the borders picked out by the indentations of my teeth. Ordered like a file of marching insects. Why are my mind’s associations with this fruit always insectival? Liquid beads on red skin could so easily conjure up the flesh of a mate emerging from the shower, or a swimming pool. I blame my mother. Or Eve. Or the serpent. I take another bite which has a more percussive sonance, presumably because there is no muting by the softer outer casing. My teeth impressions have vanished, as has the red skin to reveal the white seam beneath. I revolve the apple to its south face in order to offer me its unscaled scarp, but in doing so I must have pincered it too hard and the pads of my fingers are sunk into the tender flesh. I pick at the puckered rind with the point of my fingernail until I have abraded it away. Sure enough the cells beneath have bruised under the imprint of my digital pressure. I marvel at the celerity of the discolouration, even as I am disgusted by my clumsy adulteration of the fruit. I reduce the span of my bite to nibble the flesh either side of the blemish, as the appetising pleasure falls away, reducing to just the chore of consuming it. I'm beginning to think I would have been better off with a glass of draught cider. By its end, the habitual aesthetic satisfaction of scrimshawing to the hourglass core, remains still denatured by the canker of the bruised protrusion. Like a chrysalis awaiting to hatch the apple’s seeds buried beneath. I throw the core into the recycling bin. No, that’s the wrong appellation. Into the organic waste receptacle”. 

I woke the next morning and readied to edit the manuscript. I picked up a red biro and steeled myself that this draught would involve no proofing, but solely focus on a purge of the metaphorical element. For I had tossed and turned half the night, concerned that the piece contained too much symbolism, rendering it far removed from the actual experience I was trying to harvest. Having said all that, the very first amendment I made, was to add a comma within the second sentence. Sure enough in no time at all the paper was soon spotted with red warts. But these were all superficial syntactical markers. I was irritated with my own ill-discipline. I had plumped for the surface soft rind rather than the crisper pome beneath. I plucked the sheet of paper and wafted it in the air away from me, by way of symbolic gesture to have the spray of red corrigenda fly off like a swarm fledging. That in my imagination the paper would return to its untouched and virginal state, prior to this premature waxed verglas edit. My head now cleared, I reapplied it towards fresh inspection of the text. However it was as if my little ritualistic conceit had taken actual form, for I seemed to have been left with a mote in my eye. The characters on the page, both the red and black, started to diffuse. They shimmered shimmeringly. Momentarily confused, I shut my eyes trying to clear their wateriness in order to return the apple of my eye that was my own writing, to its pristine, stable state. But the caterpillary convulsion continued. The ink, surely dried from yesterday’s initial application, was beginning to run. The letters elongated by their smearing perturbation on the surface of the paper. Re-ordered like a file of marching insects, peeling themselves right off the folio. A few, more tenacious letters clung on in place, while their neighbours bored tunnels of their escape. I imagined that I could almost perceive a mist of deliquesced letters flying out into the air. The few remaining letters looked stunted, pit props vainly trying to brace a collapsed mine shaft. Lacerations amid the text wherever you looked. The red and black inks now blended and merged into an unsightly discolouration. An ever-darkening umbrage, my script had the appearance of nothing less than insect frass. My ideas were evanescing in front of my very eyes. The paper regressed back to its pulp. Even the pen’s indentations formerly filled and occupied by ink, were smoothing out their puckered selves and returning to first flush of a pristine white seam. An unscaled scarp. How do I know this? Because I rushed to seize a pencil from my writing bureau and began to shade across the grain hoping to reveal the vanished letters. But to no avail. I pincered the paper hard between the pads of my fingers and shook it vigorously. This only ruptured the tender tissue, as if it really had become degraded through moisture undermining its integrity. This pulpy chrysalis had no seeds of creativity left to hatch. My text denatured by the canker of words. I balled the leaf up wrinkled spherical, sat presented in the palm of my hand where it proceeded to unfurl some of its serpent coils. Its insectival wings. I threw its empty core into the recycling bin. No, that’s the wrong appellation. Into the organic waste receptacle. 

Tome Raider considers the Historical Fiction genre through the lens of Laurent Binet's "HHhH'