A recent thread on LP exploring literary categorisation made me wonder more, not less, about the difference between ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ fiction, or, as a few LP-ers implicitly referred to that supposed dichotomy: ‘good’ v. ‘bad’ writing. In fact it quickly became clear that most agree that things are not parsed this way at all - that while there is such a thing as ‘good’ writing and ‘bad’ writing, there is also such a thing as ‘good bad writing’ and ‘bad good writing’.
Great, then.
Having failed at my latest attempt to write a good ‘good’ novel – congrats to William Elliot, by the way, the jammy over-rated Johnny-come-lately judge-blowing taxpayer-leeching little bastard scumbag arsenobber of a literary loser winner - I am still pretty much in the dark about ‘good’ writing. So, entirely uninvited and eminently ignorable, I am hoping to enlist this blogsite in the service of making the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing clearer.
Here’s the challenge…odd and presumptuous but one which might also amuse a few regular contributors/readers, and leave us all a bit clearer about the qualitative nature of literature. More than happy for anyone to amend or fine tune it to make it more useful and accessible.
The Literary Information:
John Smythe’s wife Jane is three months pregnant. John has just learned that she and his Best Man David Jones have been having an affair. John enters a sex club where he knows David is drinking, approaches him at the bar and stabs him in the throat with a sharp object.
The Literary Challenge:
In no more than 1000 words (normal /- 10% limits apply, tho’ the fewer the ‘better’, if Bellow is to be believed?) convey all this narrative information in a piece of fiction prose of any stated style, category, genre, etc. (You may set this basic narrative/character information within any broader assumed or implied additional narrative/characterisations you like).
Your piece can be as ‘good’ a piece of writing as you can manage or as ‘bad’ a piece of writing as you can manage – both judged according to the criteria of your chosen style/genre/category. You should nominate whether your piece is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ attempt; if you’re bored and have lots of blogging time, you may even enter both a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ entry in the same category/style/genre. Whatever, you should be prepared to ‘theorise’ about why your specific example is ‘good’/’bad’ as the discussion ensues. This may include explaining what you think the good/bad criteria for your chosen categories/etc are in the first place. Discussion in the thread can thence explore the ‘whys’ of ‘good’ writing and ‘bad’ writing examples on a ‘level playing field’ – that is, using the internal conventions/demands of each prose vehicle as its own set of ‘good/’bad’ benchmarks (rather than trying to qualitatively square off Tim Winton and Stephen King, etc)…all while demanding of us would-be fiction writers a collective, qualitative discussion of ‘good’ v. ‘bad’ literature as per usual (yawn)…BUT using concrete examples we provide, thus putting our own words where our big mouths are.
The Literary Rules: (LP, modify if/as required)
1. Participants should preferably write under their regular LP names, or at least declare if they are regular LP-ers writing (out of shyness, tactics, professional reasons, etc) under a pseudonym. First-time posters are also encouraged.
2. As ‘good’ a piece of writing should be just that - the best the contributor can manage - no self-protective irony or artificial cynicism allowed here, unless that is an inherent part of your chosen entry (ie you’re writing a McSweeneyesque riff).
3. RWDB LP-ers who routinely bemoan the crap-ness of post-Whitlam Australian literature are heartily encouraged to enter, in order to show us incestuous latte-lefties and Australia Council titty-suckers just what we’ve been doing wrong for so long. Show, that is, not tell.
4. There will be no winners, for as a thoughtful aspiring Australian writer of serious fiction I firmly believe that competition in all its human forms is gravely damaging to what remains throughout the Seven Ages of woMankind the fundamentally naïve person-child huddling, foetus-like, within us all; o yay, sweet child Man, gentle and all-wise, vulnerable and frightened, as, lonely, you swim your lone path through the lonesome cosmos-void, lonely and alone. To abandon that miraculous fragility to the raw-boned coarseness of The Machismo, of mano-a-mano brutality, the Cockstrut Blues and the Clash of Gash…to expose the Child Within to such criminal Darwinian notions as qualitative differentiation and ‘winner take all’ and Primus Inter Parus and ‘good, better, best, bested‘…why this, Sirruh, this would in literary terms surely be as to cock one’s snook in the Godlike Face of Shakespearian Universality & Inclusiveness Itself! T’would grieve me deeply, that is to say, for if this Challenge is to have a motto at all – nay, if Australian Literature in its entirety is to have a motto…then let us all proclaim that it shall be:
Everyone’s Writing Is As Crap As Everyone Else’s - Except Mine.*
5. If however the process of LP peer assessment/debate in the thread to follow does clearly (if informally) identify the best ‘good’ example and the best ‘bad’ example of ‘writing’…then the (optional) prize for both will be one hour of sexual activity of your choice with…me. I’m more than happy to swing both ways in the name of Australian Literature, and within biomechanical limits I am comfortable enough ‘writing’ in both the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ voices across a range of ‘literary genres’, iykwim. (Ho ho ho, fellow bookish rumpy-pumpites, eh!?)
6. All naughty come-ons aside, the real ‘collective prize’ arising from this challenge is of course one in which we can all share: the chance to explore our opposing ideas of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ writing by way of specific examples. Hey nonny-nonny and Huzzah!
7. Finally, I am aware that this is blog-crashing of an extreme kind. As one who has a longish history of personal and collective blogging I am grudgingly familiar with the various blog-conventions and etiquettes I am likely transgressing. The Moderators hereabouts will and should naturally ignore this challenge, and preferably erase it ASAP, should it be deemed silly or ill-judged. Or if, for example, LP-ers, for all their high-falutin’ book learning and huffledy-puffledy pompous academe-speak, are in fact a bunch of SMUG, JIBBERING, BLATHERING, SELF-IMPORANT, WANNABE CHICKENPOO DILETTANTE PEN-LICKERS WHO ARE ALL TOO SCAREDY-WAREDY TO SHOW ANYONE THEIR UNASHAMEDLY ‘BEST EFFORT’ FICTION-WRITING CHOPS, NYAY NYAH NYAH YOU WUSSBAGS….!!!
Ahem.
I do present this challenge in seriousness and good faith and hope very much others here might see it as an interesting literary experiment, if nothing else…one worth its own thread even.
But I am nothing if not a cyber-realist, and in these free-market-information times recognize that Great Literature, perhaps above all other market commodities, is now all about ‘The Bottom Line’. Thus, as an incentive to what after all must appear to be a fairly onerous (and intimidating?) challenge/chore to LP’s lazier cynic-scribblers…I’m happy to announce that I will donate a $5 ‘entry fee’ to LP’s coffers on behalf of every genuine attempt to rise to this bait. I’ll have to limit this donation to a total upper limit of $200 (which = about half a week’s wages for me), to save me embarrassment with rent and food this month.
But I am keen to see what youse f***kers can do with fiction even briefly, and I don’t mind paying what I can afford for the privilege if that’s what it will take. Anyone else who reckons this is a worthwhile experiment and who, like me, is interested in seeing just what writers of the stimulating potential calibre/diversity of Mark, Nabakov, JC, Bring Back EP at LP, Kim, Laura, Naomi, Brian, Yobbo, Jason, CS, Steve Edney, Geoff Honner, Zoe, JPZ, et al et al et al can do…please do feel free to add further financial impetus to my challenge.
There, I’ve named some of youse, so youse can’t wimp out, can youse.
* I would be grateful if a Riverside lad or another LP-er of that ilk might ‘Latinise’ this for me for effect.
The Literary Cock-on-the-Block
As I said I hope this isn’t a too-gauche hijacking of your excellent site. I’m just a little sick of all these ‘death of literature’ scares being discussed ‘in the abstract’. The size and age of my own rejection slip collection demonstrates that I myself haven’t yet learned the difference between the ‘good’ the ‘bad’ (and the ‘ugly’) of fiction writing, and perhaps I just don’t have enough talent in my gas tank no matter how much I keep at it (sigh, rage, yaarrrpp, rage)….but for what it’s worth I’m happy to provide the first example entry as a guide.
* * * *
Example entry:
Genre: Contemporary literary fiction
Style: Straight narrative
Writer: KKKKKKK
LP Status: 2nd time commenter
Entry type: This is supposed to ‘good’ writing.
…almost as if the neon lights were mocking him that way, until suddenly there’s John Delaney Smythe, rage rising and lumpen bulk descending, veered in and down the steps, leaving his centre of gravity with the doorman’s wrong-footedness and lurching for the low-line in one falling parcel of sweat and flesh. Pausing on the sticky landing of Level B2 to extract the nine-inch Phillips from his pocket, still wrapped in its clear plastic sheath but with the naked tip cutting ominously through, he saw David Jones immediately. He was leaning back onto the main bar on one elbow, grinning like a country and western singer on an album cover. Smug as a….cuckholding c–t. Struck cold by the familiar overpowering profile, John Smythe wondered if five months downstream Jane’s baby would look like…but…her baby…for Christ’s sake - wincing inwardly at that distancing grammatical tic, that internal nod to doubts now hovering…because yes, fucking yes: what if when it arrived it did burble up at its dupe of a putative father from the puddle of blood through just that characteristic curled grub of flesh - David Jones’s lusty upper lip there, just over there, leering at the disrobing slag on the bar stage as if she’d just crawled out from under his own naked hairy bulk, reeking of sweat and self-disgust?
What if the filthy brat was his?
And then John desperately wanted a daughter, too; there was that. Here, in a strip club, about to confront the lousy bastard who’d been spiking his duffed wife for god knows how long…part of the poor suckered dipshit here was still thinking about how lovely a little baby girl would be. Aawww…blinking, John suddenly felt like he’d caught himself wanking in a church, and for the briefest moment even more unconscionable juxtapositions of flesh and fertility – the cuckhold, the wife, his lover, their pregnant infant daughter the pole-dancer - nearly made him throw up. Again, he wanted to cry. His Best Man had been back in Sydney for…what, about five months, two weeks, two days and sixteen hours? About that…goddammit, how long had they been doing it…if you gave a shit about precision in any numbers outside the Department, that is…which John, until then a walking cliché in impractical academic eccentricity, now did. Sure - had done since about ten past three that afternoon, in fact. Eons ago, really; personalities ago…it was interminably slow, this business of involuntarily shedding your certitudes on a sudden bummer twist like this, man; discarding the bedrock assumptions of your previous life, all thanks to the lamest and dumbest of married life clichés. And so now 1 1 was 3-in-a-bed and Pi was the ratio of his cock-size to yours, say….with Professor John Smythe here still a goddamned lingering Newtonian in a seven dimensional field roiling with rampant rutting quanta and cavernous, heaving singularities.
Looming.
There in the dark, staring at the treacherous prick under neon at the bar, he knew that shrug the last of the old equations off he must. And would. Here, now, forever. The singularity looming. Here, in Dinamites, where young girls came to take off their clothes and have sex with strange men, for money. For numbers. A fruity bottom-line for a fruity bottom line. There was a moral in there somewhere, but John had other things on his mind just then. Fast things, now: everything was speeding up, becoming almost pointlessly fleeting, and he knew it was futile to seek refuge in reasonableness or rationality or – joke – ‘professional ethics’ for the next bit of his life. Not now, not anymore; not when he was forever marooned in the dead zone of the asymptote x = 1/3:10 pm. What he wanted here was testosterone and hate and the warmth of torn bloody flesh under his jaws. The singularity looming…and he found that the ancient necessary energies were there, alright…it was there. The dog was still in him, coughing itself awake and uncurling now under the nasty metal prods. If the eight hours since he learned about the affair had seemed turgid, wounding deeply but in dulled slow motion only, now that the architect – ‘architect’, yes, another drollery - of his humiliation was within physical hurting distance, the hatred was growing unbearable: sharp and hot and now compelling and finally…liberating.
Release cost John Smythe eight strides, four words and, discovered later in the splendid Sheraton bubble bath with which he garlanded his first battlefield triumph, a strained right rotator cuff. With the thin young blurred white slip apparently sharpening her labia on the stainless steel pole directly beyond his former best friend, the UTS Chair in Geospatial Mathematics barreled in hard and close, arm raised, and bellowed over the music:
“Is it yours, you fuck?’
And poor David Jones, just a little tanked and fatally chained to the past himself, not seeing the rearing singularity as its author leapfrogged past…he just pivots idly on his stool, flexes his arms, grins through his stupid beard. Arches his white throat high to meet John’s gaze, as if in invitation.
A blessing, that; he really should have stood. Even John Smythe’s fizzing bestial core had been stumped to then on where best to spike the fucker.
“John…ing here? Sorry….what?â€?
With the girl now removing her spangled panties directly behind his dropping shoulders. And David’s eyeballs already flickering up and to the left, too, the rest of him skewing instinctively away from the high quivering glint there. Pennies tumbling into space-time place, or poker machines…click, click…dagger, dagger…
“Is it YOURS?� …is this another …dagger?…
And so then there’s like this smallest momentary absenting of lewd beat; a null of quiet, a pure fluke; and so then this girl on the stage just happens to enter the tableau, too; and to John her scream might as well have been a green flag thrashed towards the tarmac.
“….wait…John, wait…SHI…� …dagger…4 gay blades, K-ching!…and then the blood flowing like a jackpot mainline vein, or spewing, or spraying, really. Looping. Slithering. Snaking. Geysering. Only a month later does anyone notice the crusted Pollock-arc gracing the ceiling; meanwhile, glasses like dominoes across the bar, as David Jones goes down sideways and slow, just a shade off elegance, guided - almost tenderly - to the ground by his former friend. Meat-hooked there off the embedded tool was he laid soft down to rest in a pool of warm beer, the stool toppling mournfully in the opposite direction in spite of John Smythe’s best efforts at maintaining spatial discretion and decorum outside the matter directly at his hand.
Already the music urging the screecher on stage to get on with it again; blood-flecked and retching, she’s gone off these sexy clubs for good, but for a few long seconds she actually goes through the motions. Blinks it off. Screams again, finally covering herself.
Crouching, John Smythe watched the last man to fuck his wife shiver into death, thumping gently against the base of the bar. When he straightened it was up into a new world. Immediately he felt a million feet tall. He weighed ten thousand tons. In his new self reposed a galaxy of killing machines. Immortal and invincible, at one with…then the incontinent blood and the girl’s flat keening and the sudden silence and the sound of yelping from elsewhere registered at last.
“He was screwing my wife,� he explained, to no-one in particular.
With many heads swinging his way now he turned and made bloodily and calmly for the stairs. On the way up he had to sidestep three charging bouncers, but they gave him no trouble, no trouble at all.
* * * *
Some entry types (‘good’ and ‘bad’ examples there-of) additional to CLF I think would be fun, interesting and useful in discussion:
Genres: Crime, Erotic, Historical, Romance, Techno-Thriller, SF, Political, Young Adults, Fantasy, Sex-n-Shopping, Comedy
Timeframe?
I’ll leave kkkkkkk to determine that.
Open timeframe I reckon Zoemobile…just let it run its natural course. Like many creative endeavours t’all may die in the bum v. quickly once the initial rush of enthusiasm ebbs, anyway…what it does need to work at all I think is a mutual willingness to speak bluntly about other people’s writing specifically. This is much harder than Harold Bloom makes it look.
ie to take just one tiny example, if I were not my Manifest Towering Genius At Work I would probably think:
This: “With the thin young blurred white slip apparently sharpening her labia on the stainless steel pole…” is wince-inducing ick. Eeeeuuuww…too explicit, too redundant, too - tacky, tacky, tacky. It would better be, say: ‘With the thin young blurred white slip apparently sharpening herself on the stainless steel pole….’ The mind’s-eye visual effect is the same, maybe, without the try-hard provincial gratuity…actually I think the whole sentence is skankily mismatched anyway…do thin young blurred white slips sharpen themselves on anything? Maybe just ‘girl’ would have been better as the subject of this line, rather than that nervous rush of adjectives. Like a lot of under-confident (ie unpublished writers) I tend to try too hard to ‘Write’, huh…the whole piece feels like a Creative Writing Class submission (which I s’pose in a way it is…)
Anyway, let’s all park y/our egos and do y/our best and worst…timewise, let the challenge/thread live and linger and die as it will. And thanks again for giving this idea a run, LP.
I’ll bite.
Episode 1
I call it bricolege à clef.
Mmm…above piece is overwritten. Too many adjectives. Over-use of fragments. Shifts in tense somewhat confusing. Tendency towards melodrama. Rein it in.
Competitions are fickle. There could be any number of reasons for not making it into the final cut.
‘Overwritten…too many adjectives…’…’Rein it in’ - (yes!)
Elsewhere I agree, but - for the sake of discussion - to paraphrase Amadeus: ‘Which adjectives are too many, exactly….?’
…lumpen (bulk)…sticky (landing)…naked (tip)…cuckholding (c–t) (sic)…familiar overpowering (profile)…distancing grammatical (tic)…internal (nod)…fucking (yes)…putative (father)…characteristic curled (grub of flesh)…lusty (upper lip)….disrobing (slag)…naked hairy (bulk)…filthy (brat)…lousy (bastard)…duffed (wife) - WINCE -…poor suckered (dipshit)…little baby (girl)…briefest (moment)…even more unconscionable (juxtapositions)…pregnant (infant daughter) - surely I deserve a special ‘bad sex’ award for this skin-crawler - …walking (cliché)…impractical academic (eccentricity)…interminably (slow)…sudden bummer (twist)…bedrock (assumptions)…previous (life)…lamest…dumbest married life (clichés)… goddamned lingering (Newtonian)…seven dimensional (field)…rampant rutting (quanta)…cavernous, heaving (singularities)…?
On second thoughts I think I’ll stop there, Elsewhere. Bit too hideous to push on…
I am by nature a terrible over-writer and I think we can safely agree that I should ban myself from using any adverbs or adjectives in order to force me into the habit of choosing verbs and nouns more carefully. Fairly standard advice these days…most good writers seem to view adjectives and adverbs with great suspicion. I sometimes wonder why this has become the case - presumably adjectives were invented for a reason, and certainly purple prose was once all the rage. Presumably, too, there are times when strings of descriptives serve a legitimate ‘good’ writing purpose. I do wonder how much impact modern mass media styles and practical constraints has had on our definitions of ‘good’ writing. Apparently if you can say something in 100 words, it is a ‘better’ piece of writing than the same thing said in 200 words, or 500. Or 500, 0000…if that’s an assumption we tend to make, then why is it automatically legitimate? Because we all have less time to read, so ‘good’ writing is writing which takes les time? Because modern life has sped up, and our reading attention spans can’t hack Proust anymore?
TV?
If that’s even a small part of your ‘too many adjectives/overwritten’ case, Elsewhere, then could it be that one ‘problem’ aspect of writing that contains ‘too many adjectives’ might not be ‘bad’ writing as such, but ‘bad’ reading…or is it something more than just the consumption-time aspect? Is Patrick White a ‘less good’ writer now than he was in 1972? Melville? These guys make me look minimalist…
Re: the competition comments, Elsewhere, thanks. Fickle they may be, but the thing I really like about competitions is that you are at least assured of getting some - maybe even all - of your novel read by someone who takes it at least half seriously, and at face value. Like most unpublished wannabes, it’s not outright rejection that I find demoralising, but uncertainty - not knowing whether your polished gem is even going to roll across anyone’s desk, let alone sit there for long enough to allow your ‘too many adjectives’ to put someone to sleep. I think everyone else must feel the same, too…competitions are probably the biggest growth area in literature, after fake memoirs.
Thanks for taking the time to comment, E. Can’t wait to see your entry…can you do my scene in under 50 words using no adjectives or adverbs at all?
Ku Klux Klanxie — I was tempted to give a mean answer and say, ‘all of the above’, but I think the issue is more about developing a style and voice appropriate to the genre you’re emulating or transgressing. So it’s more than just a question of someone doing a mechanical edit job and removing the adjectives and adverbs they think don’t work. As for the adj/adv Nazi stuff — it tends to apply to writing good realist fiction well, which appears to be the genre you’re writing in. Some contemporary writers *do* write in a lush, imagistic style (eg. Jeanette Wintersen), but it’s a question of, er, doing it well, she said nebulously, with things like tone, rhythm, imagery, deeper layers of meaning all coalescing together nicely.
Agree with much of what you’re saying about length. I think the small fiction proposal is a great idea. You could run the fifty word competition as well (is it going to be judged blind? or voted on democratically by LP punters?) There is a lot happening in above plot-line tendered — I start dissolving when I try & imagine fitting all of above into 1,000 words. I think the ‘bad’ writing category might be easier than the ‘good’ writing category, for that reason.
Actually ‘all of the above’ would have been the kindest, not meanest, cut, E. One of the
strikingcharacteristics aboutover-writtenmy stuff is that it gets ‘worse’ with everynewre-read…f**kinghell…I agree with what you say on the ‘mechanical edit’ angle…expecting someone else to be able to teach/show you to write ‘good’ original fiction is a slightly exasperating, even oxymoronic, notion. (Vaguely akin to that old chestnut about the ‘best axe I’ve ever owned - it’s lasted ten years and I’ve only had to replace the handle six times and the blade twice). I am
brashlyconfident that my ‘lush’ piece above could be turned into fine prose if I could only get Winterson to remove, replace and rearrange a few words here and there!That’s where the ‘nebulous’ talent bit comes into play, obv. Although there’s a lot of creative writing courses around nowadays which would appear to imply otherwise…
Re: the 50 word bit, that 1,000 word limit is by no means mandatory…ie everyone’s welcome to have a go at the scene in whatever length, style, genre etc they please, so long as the basic Information is conveyed. More than anything else the aim is to provide various specific start-points for observations on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing.
Genre: Bricolage a clef (Episode Two)
Style: Multiauthorial hypertext
Writer: Nabakkkkkkkov’s co-ghost
So this expectant mathematician goes into a bar on Glasgow’s Great Western Road to ask the sleazy traitor watching the show a question…but ends up serving him a screwdriver instead! Boom boom.
Well fuck my cotton socks KKKKK&K, that was exactly the Ballardian “invisible literature” cut up approach I was about to run out with. ‘cept with better links like The Smoking Gun and Kyocera.
So OK now, I’m gonna go all short, sharp and adjective and abverb free instead. Like James Ellroy goes Oulipo.
“You killed David?”
“Yes.”
“At the club where you and I met?”
“Yes.”
“With a knife?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know who’s the father of the child I’m carrying?”
“Yes.”
“No you didn’t.”
By the by, I knew many of the main players in a real life version of what K5 fitfully sketched out here.
For those of you here that may have flirted with and flitted through Melbourne’s demi-monde in the very early nineties, you might recall a certain bad drugs/stabbing/graphic designer/bands/sex ring/murder thing. No names, no pack drill but I certainly got out of being entangled in that one by arriving back a month late - and sucking up my teeth’s foreskin.
A faithless young fellow named Jones
Took to warming up beds not his own’s.
But his friend grew quite jealous
Of this crass kiss-and-tell-us,
And soon Jones became Jones’s bones.
FWIW, (and having been named in the original complaint, as it were), I’ve been playing around with a version that would actually be something like a real live entry into kkk&c.’s literary game. But damned if I’ll post it unless other folks volunteer, too. Because, a) I’m a chicken, and b) if there’s only one serious post, then any ensuing discussion about theory of writing (the original intent, I thought) becomes too darn limited and weird.
Just lettin’ ya know, because I suspect others feel the same way about being the first one into the pool. Now, if you know there’s other toilers out there, you can get back to work!
Nabakov: Shit, a thousand Bridge Walks, do excuse. I wasn’t sure whether or not that ‘Ep. I’ tag was ironic or time-tactical, but got so enthused by your structural cunning plan that I couldn’t resist grubbing all over it. And of course the only thing mealier than literary plagiarism is literary plagiarism that stuffs up the nicked idea anyway…
In penance, make this one a double. LP donation tally: $10.
On the Ellroysian version:
1. ‘With a knife?’ Authorial sloppiness or author-reader sly-aside (ie why is he lying to her…about the screwdriver of all things?)?
2. The dissonance in tense b/w lines 7 and 9 is the sweet killer blow. Ellroy is great at this: a single line, especially one of dialogue (as above), inverting/subverting an entire preceding paragraph, page, etc. Another striking feature of Ellroy is the way his story-telling ’swings’…I vaguely remember a Martin Amis review of his style (I hope I’m not getting wires crossed here - I can’t find it online, alas) in which MA reckons that JE’s unique rhythm stems from his invention of a whole new verb tense: present continuous as imperfect (or some such). Roughly, instead of writing: ‘John stabbed/stabs/will stab/has stabbed/was to have stabbed/must stab/(or even) is stabbing….David right there in front of the whole damned bar….’, he might write what seems at first to be a fragment:
‘John stabbing David right there in front of the whole damned bar.’
Exquisite, exquisitely American, like jazz used to be. (Irresistible to jackdaws…er, plagiarists…er…wannabes, too…that rolling narrative mode, which I’m guessing may have deeper origins in Black American speech patterns…has influenced so many post-WW2 story-tellers, across all media…). But it allows a genuine original ‘voice’ to flow; story-telling as smart-ass side-of-the-mouth running commentary. Perfect for Crime Genre. And more or less everything else about Ellroy’s laconic, sharp-yet-shuffling story-telling, Amis thinks (I think)…wells up from that unusual verb tense.
If anyone can think of similar Eurekas! at that basic technical level which became fundamental to other great writer’s voices, I’d be interested…I remember reading a Mailer interview where he said that his ‘voice’ breakthrough on N&TD was discovering ‘fuggin’ as a publishable facsimile of the GI-ubiquitous adjective…sometimes the tiniest technical idea can set off literary revolutions.
Thanks, Nabakov. Pardon me again for prematurely hijacking your idea.
LP donation tally: $15
JPZ: Re: JPZ’s Limerick, the rules are taken from Wikipedia:
“The rhyme scheme is usually aabba, with a rather rigid meter. The first, second, and fifth lines are three metrical feet; the third and fourth two metrical feet. The foot used is usually the amphibrach, a stressed syllable between two unstressed ones. However it can be considered an anapestic foot, two short syllables and then a long, the reverse of dactyl rhythm. However, many substitutions are common. The first line traditionally introduces a person and a location, and usually ends with the name of the location, though sometimes with that of the person. A true limerick is supposed to have a kind of twist to it. This may lie in the final line, or it may lie in the way the rhymes are often intentionally tortured, or in both. Though not a strict requirement, the best limericks are usually those that additionally show some form of internal rhyme, often alliteration, sometimes assonance or another form of rhyme.”
Erk! Er….
When JPZ lim’ricked, 7-K
Thought: ‘good’? How the hell can I say?
Dunno how to parse
A ‘foot’ from me arse
Can some LP Poet save the day?
LP donation tally: $20.
JPZ, re: the more extensive effort that you’re sitting on…(deep breath)…
Yah boo sucks scaredy-waredy Yank wussbag…come on, show us your pen, you big gurly blouse…you Yanks are all mouth, no words…chewy-on-your-pen-chewy-on-your-pen…Hemingway was mah beeyartch…Fitzgerald’s a whiny little no-talent ponce…ya boo sucks, American Letters…’American Letters’ - now there’s an oxymoron up there with ‘Genuine Baby Boomer Genius’ and ‘Interesting New Gen-X Voice’…man, the only decent writing ever to come out of Seppoland was ‘The Man Who Loved Children’ and the cheaper Yank imprint of ‘The Oxford Guide to Commonwealth Literature’…Americans are illiterate…how can they write Good when they can’t even spell dooG…yah boo sucks…Hey, JPZ, call me Ismael, man - no, wait, why not call me ‘Boring Over-rated Self-important Pompous Yank Classic’…as in classic dunny fodder, that is…so soft, yet so absorbent…like wiping one’s bum on Leaves of Grass, say…hey, Yank, Eat My Short Stories, you talentless typists….Bellow? Mailer? Updike? Hell, why bother with wannabes when you can just read the real thing….European first and last, of course, just like all us Aussies, which is of course why we’re all such Genius Writers…unlike talentless Yanks, such as for example that creepy little pervert Roth…hey, Phil - have another public page-wank for us, like, tossing off is like soooooooooo interesting the four millionth time around (not!)…yes, only a dopy Yank could fart out four bazillion pages on…wait-for-it…the inner life journey of a…waaaait for it…a BASEBALL! Yes, apparently inanimate sporting objects are the Very Stuff of Shakespeare these days…O, Epic, Epic, Epic Great American Novel…we can’t wait for the follow-up down here in Oz, JPZ. So wotcha got next, Yank - the Adventures of Augie Jockstrap? The Naked and the Astroturfed? Catch-22 Footballs? The Racehorse Connections? The Pitcher in the Rye?…but wait..wait a moment…what’s this?…why….yes, it’s the Latest Hot New Thing from CrapWritingLand - and just what the literary world needed, too…yes…it’s…ANOTHER frickin’ Holocaust frickin’ Riff…HUZZAH!…say, Yank, whilst we all think of it, how we wish the next ‘ground-breaking’ Black American Geenyus would write the next Fat Tear-Soaked Nationally Self-Obsessive Tome on Slavery, too…how we crave another Po-Mo American Geenyus farting out another desperately-needed Po-Mo Tap-Dance On Literary Celebrity-as-Mass Murderer-as-Biting Satire-on-Mass-Konsumption-Kultchoor…we want more fake memoirs from drug-addled bores…more droning redemption narratives from aging lushes…say, hows about a few ‘Self-Help’ books - by golly, the world could use a few more American Self-Help Books…zzzzzz….yes, backwards into our precious reading time did all these ‘must-read’ Yanks write until snuffed it forever did our collective literary minds…nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah, JPZ, youse can’t write, youse can’t play jazz, youse can’t do shit original anymore…Imperial-Empire-In-Decline-Along-With-Your-Artistic-Ooomph…RIP American Literature…groan, yawn, zzzz…JPZ, do wake the rest of us up when your lot gets its literary nuts back, will you, there’s a good chap…couldn’t scribble your way out of a wet sack of luke warm mouseshit if youse had ten million nukular missiles for pens…chewy-on-your-nib Yank…aveagoyamug….etc, etc, etc….er, hang on, you are American aren’t you, JPZ…?
Now…I’ll have the rest of youse know that this here trolling business is demmed exhausting. So do ‘bring it on’, LP-ers, as JPZ more politely urged. Do your worst…ahs a-itching to spends all mah money on this challenge, if nothing else…for it can’t work, as JPZ says, if no-one else but he and me is up for it…goodness, is that the time? Best off to take my lunchtime pills, then.
Thanks v. much for your comments and urgings, JPZ, do pardon my incontinence (hope I’ve not fired too far off your chuckle radar)…and as for the rest of youse, do remember: the sooner you scaredies take your plunge in turn, the sooner I’ll shut up with the taunting-as-shilling, already…
7ks: that Martin Amis essay whereof you speak is actually about Elmore Leonard. It’s in The War Against Cliche.
I would never look at anybody in particular and suggest that is a book which ought to be read.
Laura: How to Make a Pretentious Fool of Oneself 101…sigh. Thanks. Got my smart-guy styles askew. As usual with me a little bit of knowledge is an embarrassment waiting to happen.
‘I would never look at anybody in particular and suggest that it is a book which ought to be read.’
Not sure if I understand your intention here. Do you tend towards an anti (any) canon as a matter of literary principle, or are you just anti-prescriptive by personal inclination? If it’s the second case, not my business, but if it’s the first it’s hard for me not to query your statement along the following line of thinking:
1. I presume you know what writing you like.
2. I presume you think that what you like is good.
3. I presume you think that good writing rather than bad ought to be read by others, if others are going to read at all.
4. Should you not then think that ‘X book/writer in particular’, which you think is ‘good’ writing, ‘ought’ to be read by someone seeking something to read? You may of course be wrong as they see it, ie your tastes simply may not end up according with the other person’s…but that is beside the point, is it not?
I know the debates about canons are complex and (by now) pretty exhausted…but I guess part of this whole post is to grapple with the way ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing are defined.
To take a more extreme situation where an Authority Figure has to ‘prescribe’ a ‘Canon’…Laura - how would/do/ought parents select books for their kids to read?
From his website, shorter Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing:
1. Never open a book with weather…
2. Avoid prologues….
3. Never use a verb other than ’said’ to carry dialogue…
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ’said’…
5. Keep your exclamation points under control…
6. Never use the words ’suddenly’ or “all hell broke loose”…
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly…
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters…
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things…
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip…
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
If you go back to the post where all this started, I think that the lovely Zoe indicated she was going to have a go. Just sayin…
Seven Ks, you presume quite a lot. Why? You’re wrong on all four presumptions.
As it happens in my job I am constantly making up canons and foisting them upon other people. Outside of work, fiddling about with canons is one of my chief hobbies, along with getting annoyed about other people’s attempts at canon-building. It’s possible that I have the only blog in Australia which has a separate archive category exclusively devoted to the issue of canonicity.
My opinions about canon formation are many and dull so I will give you just one: literary canonicity has very little to do with style.
In the hypothetical about parents and children, I think the parents should take the children to the library & leave them there on their own for a bit.
I’ll have a go later as well. I have a few ideas but have a few other blogging ideas to try and get out first.
Laura: “Seven Ks, you presume quite a lot. Why?”
Just a quick if clumsy means of groping towards a better understanding of your original statement, Laura. (”I would never look at anybody in particular and suggest that is a book which ought to be read.”)
“You’re wrong on all four presumptions.” Apologies, noted. Though I do now at least know a bit of what you don’t think.
OTOH, I’ve had a brief look at your Canon archive & threads, and in-passing statements from you - presuming (again!) that you post there as ‘lucy tartan’? - like ‘…(followed by Dan Brown UGH)‘, and ‘…Fyodor, I’m surprised mostly that Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods rates so highly. I guess I hadn’t realised it was such a bestseller. I didn’t like it much myself…’ do seem to contradict your gainsaying of my presumptions here at least partly. You seem to ‘like’ Austen…you’ve read Brideshead many times…can I…well, presume that you ‘like’ that book ‘in particular’, and know that you ‘like’ it (even if you don’t think it’s ‘good’, as such)? Can I even perhaps ‘presume’ you’d recommend it to someone else (if not say they ‘ought’ to read it) if they asked you for a good yarn about Faith, class, adolescent male sexuality and decline of empire?
I’m not a creepy archive stalker-pedant, btw, and I know that over time blogs develop as unruly organic conversations rather than consistent linear arguments…still, it’s hard for me to reconcile your original statement above with the general tenor of your own blogs on books and writing, where you seem to have no reservations in making qualitative calls.
On the kid’s reading query, bit of a cop-out, I think. We’ve all got to learn to read before an hour’s adult-free time in a library is much good to us…and that involves de-facto canon imposition itself. Pretty influential/formative ones, at that.
Sean: point taken re: time factor. I’ll shut up for a while now, and/or until anyone plays…
Apologies, ‘Sean’ should be ‘Shaun’.
Libraries have picture books. My favourites were “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and “Where the Wild Things Are.” I also remember the illustrations in “Little Black Sambo.”
My remark about not looking at anyone and saying that book ought to be read referred specifically to ‘that book’ named in the previous sentence, The War Against Cliche. I was fantasising about what a very nice piece of smug bastardry recommending a book with that title to somebody known to be a writer would constitute. In general, though, I take the recommending of books for recreational (as opposed to scholarly) reading very seriously, and don’t do it unless to a person whose tastes I know quite well, or unless it’s very warmly solicited. The responsibility is too great.
Disendorsing a book is another matter altogether.
Brideshead, oddly enough, contains a nice little three-way discussion about the difference between liking something and thinking it good. The overwhelming mood of the scene is “this is a tiresome subject, let’s change it”, and the discussants do.
Ah, right. (Perhaps that’s why you wrote the relevant sentence in a way that said precisely as much in the first place…der.) Ta.
kkkkkk quoting from wikipedia: “…it can be considered an anapestic foot… the reverse of the dactyl…”
Any poet who quotes Wikipedia
Is no poet in word, or in deed-ia;
This ain’t physics nor fractals,
So dact me no dactyls!
It’s a limerick. Just write what ya need-ia.
– j_p_z, enjoying cocktails (so to speak) with The Young Man From Nantucket…
kkkkkk — by the way, excellent diatribe. And yes, I had plenty of laughs… you also managed to slap around not a few of my own arch-enemies. (So long as you leave the sainted William T. Vollman and the heavenly James Schuyler alone…)
Are you familiar with the passage in ‘Finnegans Wake’ which may be the longest continuous insult in the English language (as I recall, it’s an entire chapter, in one sentence, one character insulting another… if you can *call* it English, that is). My other favorite run-on insult is the original, unexpurgated version of Klaus Kinski’s insane autobiography, “All I Need Is Love,” in which it can be argued that the entire book is one long crazy insult directed at Herzog. Phew.
Well, if other players do take seats at the table, I’ll happily post my effort. But since I make no claims to priding myself as a fiction writer, my version is just a stab at solving some of the technical problems posed by your challenge, not a thing of ‘literary’ beauty in its own right. In other words, it’s merely fodder for discussion. If we wind up actually starting that discussion, I’ll gladly leap in. But no point in tormenting anybody with my 1000 words if the game gets called.
Til then, cheers….
j_p_z — that was breathtaking. ‘fractal/dactyl’ — oh, my. And your scansion is a thing of beauty.
Yeah, uber-bravs, JPZ. ‘Dact me no dactyls…’ After this line I see you standing away from the keyboard in your little knitted hat, turning a couple of introspective pirouettes, to the crowd’s delight and bewilderment…then sitting back down to take it home with no further explanation…those were the days…mind you I’m sure that that nice young Wynton can blow ‘Epistrophy’ note-perfect in every key every time.
JPZ, where best to start with Vollman and Shuyler, do you think? I haven’t read either yet (*blushes*). What say?
As for FW I’ve tried a few times and never got far, certainly not to the insult passage you cite…not that I’d recognise it if I had, I suspect. James Joyce done me a power of bad in my youth, alas. Eighteen months locked in a caravan in Ireland trying first to understand Ulysses and then to emulate it. Pathetic, really; just the sort of earnest literary windmill-tilt a try-hard provincial autodidact looks back on and alternatively cringes/cries over. (An absence of such literary insecurity is, along with other more mundane reasons, why I envy those who make a living studying and discussing writing more than it’s possible to express. What a job, eh…)
As for Kinski and his manic abuse of Herzog, one word: FITZCARRALDO!
Kinski was like Monk, really: the artistic real thing, a like of which I fear our anodyne age won’t see again.
Thanks for your continued help in trying to get this rickety old thang to fly, JPZ. Enjoy your cocktails…and agreed, let’s just wait now and see if anyone else posts a proper entry for discussion…I can feel whatever momentum there ever was ebbing…
Someone give that woman a glass of champagne.
(The author, I mean, not the puking preggers policeperson.)
(Although she could probably do with one too.)
*pops open the bubbly*
Naomi, when you are finished with your PhD, there’s a cushy job awaiting you in the script department at The Bill HQ.
More champagne for Naomi, at once!
And, a book contract!
Captivating reading. Please do finish your Ph.D. and then get back on the beat… we all want to read Chapter 2. As that estimable literary critic, Mr. James Brown, once put it:
“Get it together, right on right on.”
Oh my. How splendid.
Like JPZ, I want to know what happens next, and in the end. And as far as your chosen genre goes you can’t ask for a ‘gooder’ outcome than achieving that so crisply and cleanly. It’s all there: a killer twist (I defy anyone to top that, given such mundane basic information and such limited length to turn it inside out); clean straight prose and a dynamic narrative exposition, mostly via fast-paced dialogue; an immediately compelling protagonist; fabulous set-up for the rest of the story…talk about ticking all the right boxes. And with such a light touch. Bravo. Stitch 100 chapters like that together and you’ve got a hit. Maybe even the basis of a best-selling series…she’s interesting already, this Doriemus. (Great surname - no wonder she kept it…)
Thanks for having a go, Naomi. I just hope you haven’t stunned everyone else into awed silence…
Donation tally: $25
Pavlov’s Cat — (belatedly) Thank you, ma’am, for the kind words.
kkkkkk — all right, then, in spite of my not wanting to follow a brilliant act like Naomi’s, I guess I need to be as good as my word; so here’s my entry. Sadly, it doesn’t pack the punch of Naomi’s, but what can you do? We can’t all write like rock stars. (May have to split it up into two posts, to avoid the moderation filter.)
btw, Schuyler was a poet, so the place to look is the “Collected Poems,” available at Amazon. For a taste, you can find his exquisite short poem “Korean mums” online at plagiarist.com Vollmann is more oceanic, and just a wee bit excessive, but good starting points are “Rainbow Stories,” and esp. “13 Stories and 13 Epitaphs.” Personally my fave is “The Rifles,” but that’s too plain hard to dive into first. Good hunting!
Well, here goes nuttin’. Your wasted time will not be refunded.
“Let’s get married before we know too much about each other…�
–William Gaddis
A story? “Tell us a ‘story?’�
He could have told them anything, he reckoned — about Oliver Twist, say, or Three Skeleton Key. Instead, without really knowing why he was doing it, and in a sort of thinking-aloud manner that surprised even himself, he launched into the whole sorry business about David Jones.
He began with the happy stuff. How Jane had married Smythe so recently, so abruptly. And, he’d reckoned, so happily; thinking of the fun at the wedding, or of the pair of them at Christmas dinner, Jane draping herself across Smythe’s shoulder, puffing his cigar while he held it for her; of the baby on the way. But then of course he got to David — well, to Jane and David.
The things you find out later. The people you think you know.
Having watched it all from a distance, and so seen only the most obvious non-intimate details, Martin now rehearsed things aloud for his own benefit: the subtle growing tensions, then the long discomfort, sliding imperceptibly into the long, well, torment. Martin sensed he was now talking far out of his depth, but the thing had taken over and he couldn’t stop. He felt as though he himself were not speaking, but hearing for the first time a story about people he didn’t know. And maybe that was true.
Already he had got there, to the awful heart of it, was talking far too freely about all of it: honeymoon long over even figuratively, marriage vows all but forgotten, the bitterness of it all erasing for good the simple happy facts, the hows and whys of their ever having been in love. Hadn’t he known these people? Loved them? (Well, Jane at least; and “love me, love my dog, too� as she used to say; so he had taken to at least ‘liking’ Smythe and David.) Couldn’t anybody see clearly enough to forgive anybody else? How could it even have been happening?
Thus he found himself rummaging through the parts he knew: Smythe’s endless, vaguely suspicious half-questioning of Jane, the compulsively-picked quarrels, her tear-filled phone calls to himself at all hours. Maybe the man was just afraid of being a father. Maybe this was a species of panic attack, working itself out incoherently in clichés of marital unease. That had been Martin’s theory at the time. Now, in retrospect, he reminded himself that she’d never fully spelled out what the quarrels had been about. If God is in the details, then the devil surely is in the gaps.
And next, the persistent, subtle… what would someone else call it about Smythe? Research, yes. The research about Jones, David N. Personal habits, details of his business doings, day-to-day here-and-there. The smaller things friends assume they must of course know about one another — then, when called upon to cough up the actual specifics, come to realize they don’t know. And so, of course, took steps to find out. The very idea that David was (was this the right word?) an habitué of something as silly as a strip joint! Could he not manage to get himself a little, in any other way? Well, of course that couldn’t be true, could it, in light of the other…if he’d also been an habitué, so to speak, of Jane’s own bed…
What could it do from there but get worse. The sneers, the loaded hints that made no actual sense, the endless cold-blooded studying. What could Smythe really have thought he wanted – some sort of confession, some provocation? No, it couldn’t be – after all, he could’ve killed David in private, over dinner, any number of times, had he truly wanted it to be that way — so that wasn’t it. And why would it even have to be about killing? None of this lot, Martin was quite sure, had ever so much as split a knuckle against a front tooth in anger. Don’t these sorts of stories have other endings, too?
The things that build up in secret, if no one tells. By then, Martin had certainly heard enough half-hidden pieces of the thing, little incoherent slivers from all three of them, for months on end — yet he hadn’t put it together, had not seen this coming. He now thought that all along, probably without knowing it, the man had been hunting. In his clumsy luckless urban way, he’d been following what he took to be tracks and droppings, sniffing the wind for scent. Stalking silly, rutting old David back to some sort of, well, lair, for the kill.
It didn’t make sense any other way. Kill a bloke in public, with half a dozen girls on stage as witnesses, when you’d had countless private opportunities? What fucking sense did that make, if it wasn’t some insane sort of lower-brain, ritual response? Do it in front of the ladies, must.. impress.. females… oh, for heaven’s sake. Please, not that stupid. And Jane, who’d always been quite brilliant, as he knew, had gone and married a man who had this sort of nonsense inside him. Deep inside his own head, thinking of it this way for the very first time, Martin felt a bitter urge to laugh.
And then when it was all over, and poor, selfish David lay twitching on the dirty linoleum in his own blood with the blade of a fish knife broken off in his throat, dying in a haze of tacky gel lights, and bad house music, and glitter-covered girls emitting horror-movie screams, the tawdriness of the scene, the sheer undignified humiliation of it, must have at last seemed perfect to Smythe. To have gotten him where he lived, so to say… and to have “where he livedâ€? be symbolically here — and not in Smythe’s own bed, as he must have thought, as he must have wanted very badly to think. Perfect, and just.
That is, If you like it that way. But really, how long was that satisfaction going to last? The man will come to his senses eventually, Lord knows he’s got time enough on his hands for that now… and when he does, he’ll know that he hasn’t won, not at all — he’s destroyed three lives instead of one. But then, maybe he’d reckoned his own was lost already.
To Martin, even after talking himself into making a kind of sense out of Smythe, the thing really revealed nothing. Not even with the clever explanation. It was all just ugly and stupid and sad. In a simpler world, had he but known, the simple thing would’ve been to just knock their three heads together, and have done. There’d been no good reason for it to turn out this way. None at all.
“It was a 12 week pregnancy, that belonged to the man the uniform were cuffing now.”
I don’t understand this sentence.
j_p_z - yer over-egging the pudding.
“honeymoon long over even figuratively”
“as split a knuckle against a front tooth in anger”
“Deep inside his own head, thinking of it this way for the very first time,”
“some sort of, well, lair, for the kill”
“emitting horror-movie screams”
“undignified humiliation”
…etc
If yer suck ‘em in and set ‘em up, then there’s no need to explain, describe or qualify any more than yer hafta.
Trust a critic with a handle like ‘Nabakov’ to spit on his hands and end the literary love-in, which was indeed becoming altogether too icky. The purpose of the exercise is after all to identify good and bad.
Naomi, I think Nab is right: for such a fine twist it’s a bit too obtuse in presentation. It took me a while to ‘get it’, too…and I’m only presuming I ‘got it’ as you intended, btw…ie Nabakov: Naomi’s cop/protagonist is David Joneses lover/John Smythe’s wife, ie she’s Inspector Jane ‘Smythe’ (AKA/nee Doriemus). (I hope that is what you meant, Naomi.)
To me the overwhelming ‘good writingness’ of this piece - both as stand-alone piece of writing in itself, but more relevantly (here) as a laser-sharp ‘entry’ into this silly challenge/literary exercise - is that it heeds all the ‘Information’ requirements I set out in an original, fresh, clever way while also doing great justice to N’s chosen genre’s internal criteria. However, I do feel (on blokey group-think reflection, ahem…), Miss Naomi, that a final polish/sharpening of that alluring Chap 1 sucker-inner is necessary for maximum impact. ‘Non-subjective’ proof of this lies, I submit, in the observable fact that Nabakov - surely an above-average ‘average punter’ in narrative-cognition terms - remains fuzzy about it.
So clearly that twist’s execution needs a slight tighten. Why/how might be a matter of discussion. Perhaps for starters the construction is a little clumsy:
‘It was a 12 week pregnancy, that belonged to the man the uniform were cuffing now.’
We can argue forever whether ‘that’ or ‘which’ is more grammatically correct as the (conjunction?) here, but either choice linking those two critical expositional clauses does ‘clunk’ a bit to my ear - that mechanical ‘bump’ distracting the mind from the task of taking in the narrative information it delivers. It’s a bit like hearing the punchline to a very funny joke…just at the moment you drive over a nut-crunching pothole.
I reckon this would have been better (or some such like it):
“It was a 12 week pregnancy. It belonged to the man uniform were cuffing now. As they led him away, Doriemus was craving anchovy icecream all over again.”
Or, you know, whatever - ie something that makes it slightly more obvious that ‘the pregnancy’ is hers…that’s what’s been making her sick all along, as hinted at in the very first lines/paras. Except we now suddenly realise that all that opening ‘It wasn’t the blood….that was making her nauseous…’ stuff wasn’t meant as a literary ‘turn of phrase’, a way of negotiating the bloody cliches of an awful crime scene in a vaguely fresh way…no, it was far more literal, sillies - our author was simply telling us what was going on - the plot. It’s a classic Crime Genre plotting tease-tactic…make the too-pretentious git punter read what you write as ‘your brilliant prose’ - as ‘literature, don’t you know, old chap’ - when all along you’re actually sneaking in important plot clues and hints…telling them the story. Playing with the reader’s conceits…we’re all thinking, as we read (what we think is) that oblique opening ’scene and tone setter’: ‘gosh, Naomi can really write purty…’, and she’s sucking in her Silk Cut at a yard a word and thinking, fiendishly: yeah, that’s it arty-farty suckers, ignore what I’m actually, er…SAYING in these purty sentences…which is not ‘Hey, Isn’t This Good Writing’…what I’m really telling youse is: there’s a VERY GOOD PLOT REASON why she feels a bit off, you twits…Oy! Look! I’m telling youse, in plain words: it’s NOT the crime scene that’s making her feel off…it’s NOT the blood…hint hint…’
Hell, N, you could prob’ly string this out even more, I reckon, providing it too were disguised as ‘Arty Writing About The Awfulness Of Murder Scenes’ well enough…think of the ‘non-metaphorical metaphorical’ options: unsettled tummies, needing to wee, sudden mood changes…etc, etc…
But for maximum head-smack impact it means that Doriemus’s pregnancy must be made crystal clear by those last lines, N…because only then does it all suddenly fall into place with that v. pleasing ‘oh-yeah-didn’t-consider-that-obvious-possibility-what-a-dipshit-I-am…’ click: the characterisation, the plot, the sense of lots-more-to-come-from-this-yarn. You think: ‘Oh my god, so she’s NOT a wussy girly copper who can’t handle murder scenes after all…she’s preggers…OMIGOD to the KILLER…her husband…OMIGOD didn’t the barman say the killer killed this guy ‘cos he was…fucking his wife???? Omigod…what an interesting central character/situation we have here…one hell of a ‘what if’…(’what if’ that guy that Marge Gunderson had rolled over in the snow in Fargo’s opening minutes had been her lover…’what if’ William Macy had been her husband…how is this pregnant protagonist, who we like already, going to resolve this mess…what really happened…)
It all unfolds instantly on that one twist - which is why Nabakov is by implication right, Naomi: it needs to be tighter so that even dozy plonkers like him aren’t excluded.
Goodness, I do rather witter on, don’t I. Sorry, I just get very enthusiastic about this sort of caper. I hope no-one minds too much…in fairness I usually turn out to have run so far with the bull’s horns as to be worth a good laugh in itself…
JPZ: Wow. Will need some time.
You clever bastard.
Earlier kkkkkkk comment on Nabakov version:
1. ‘With a knife?’ Authorial sloppiness or author-reader sly-aside (ie why is he lying to her…about the screwdriver of all things?)?
‘Information’ criteria:
“…in the throat with a sharp object.”
Nabakov, re: that first of my comments on your Elroy meets Olipo version - Naomi’s ‘corkscrew’ just made me double-check my own terms, thus highlighting my sloppiness. ‘Pols, & disregard.
Sucked in, damn it. Now on top of everything else, I’ve got a piece of Pre-traditionalist/Orientalist smut to finish writing. Or not. No spoonerisms this time though.
I understood about who the cop and the father both were, and glossed over the ‘that’ and ‘which’ problem, but I did balk a little bit at the idea that ‘the pregnancy’ ‘belonged’ to the man being cuffed. Or any man, really.
But God forbid I should start yet another shemozzle on this innocent thread about whom pregnancies ‘belong’ to.
Gummo T: “….no spoonerisms…”
Bonus $1 entry donation for every (different, unforced) word/word cluster you squeeze in that fymes with ‘rhellatio’, then.
As far as I can tell, in the Western lit, the main classics of murder-over-infidelity are “Othello” and “Woyzeck.” While Buchner’s “Woyzeck” is sharp and spare and mysterious, “Othello” is long and crazy, and full of observation and implications… and it’s *also* mysterious.
Though I much admire “Woyzeck,” when push comes to shove I prefer “Othello.”
Just to lighten the tone, here’s my quicko science-fiction entry…
“Jane, darling.”
“Yes, John, dearest?”
“Would that be David Jones, sitting in a parked car in our driveway?”
“Why, yes it would, John.”
“Hmm. That’s odd.”
“Why do you say so, love?”
“Well, because only an hour ago, I went to a strip club and murdered David in cold blood, because he’d been bonking you. He was quite stone dead at the time I left. And now, there he is again.”
“Hm, yes. That is quite a tickler.”
Pause.
“Jane, darling.”
“Yes, John, dearest?”
“By any chance… you wouldn’t happen to have, erm, taken the time machine for a spin, and gone back in time to prevent me from killing David, would you?”
“Well, actually John, that’s just what I did. You see, I quite enjoy bonking David on the side, and I saw no reason why your silly murderous instincts should get in the way of it.”
“Ah. How pleasant.”
“Quite.”
Longer pause.
“Jane, darling.”
“Yes, John, dearest?”
“If you… er, prevented me from killing David, then *why do I still know that I did that*? Um, I *do* hope that no breaches were made in the continuum of the space-time fabric… don’t you?”
“Why, yes, of course I do.”
Pause. Giant brontosaurus rips the roof off the house. Then, both of them together: “Oh, shit.”
Hm. Genre clarification, please — is this SF, revenge tragedy, or a ghost story?
Quite different criteria for critical assessment apply in each case.
Pavlov’s cat, next time you go to Tuscany will you please take me?
I need SOPHISTICATION!
Markus, you old hobo, you might think you’re doing well here, but never count your brulees before they’re hatched! Okay?
Hobo. Yes.
(Golly, I almost said homo!)
RH, if that’s the best RWDB version you can manage, you may need some help from the Australia Council, old chap…
Surely there’s a non-PC riff in some lurking pen out there…??!
(PS: BTW, I assure you my credit is good, sirruh.)
R.H.: “…never count your brulees before they’re hatched…”
Okay, wait a minute.
Just as a foreigner, I’m mystified. Exactly how much latte, cabernet sauvignon, chablis and creme brulee are youse folks consuming?!? Judging from the various running commentaries, it seems to be 80% of what youse digest! I had an entirely different cliche idea of the cliche Aussie diet.
Having said that, we’re now hypocritically off to chow down 12 oz. Angus cheddar cheeseburgers (well, a 60-40 sirloin/chuck mix, with baby organic lettuces, if truth be told), which we intend to wash down with the nefarious Cabernet of Doctor Caligari… (SINISTER LAUGH)…
Careful, k7. The (thinnish) Literature Board walls have ears.
I had brulee for dessert the other night, as a matter of fact, at a rather swish Law Society do. It had apple and rhubarb lurking at the bottom of the dish, which was where I left them. Fancy cluttering up a perfectly good brulee with fruit.
Sorry, RH, I haven’t been to Tuscany since 1993, and if I do ever go again, I’ll make sure I’m alone.
What?
You dirty bums!
You filthy swine!
I hate you!
All!
Oh yes? Well okay Miss Pavlove, but what if I just meet you there, outside the post office or something? I want to teach you a few local customs, like how to eat minestrone with chopsticks. Then we could hire an old Kombi and travel around a bit. Because you mightn’t think so, but I’m used to roughing it! My golly yes, I’ll outrough you any old day. So don’t get too posh, okay? Or I’ll shove you out at the next village - straight into the arms of all those LATIN LOVERS you’re going there to see anyway!
Now listen here multiple kkkkrazy, I am not a dirty beast. Okay? I am Right Wing on Monday, Left Wing on Tuesday, and a peeping Tom the rest of the week. Understand?
And I’d never bother trying to bum from the Australian Council, there’s too many Enid Blytons cadging dough there already. I’m happy on the dole, that’s all. For life!
Yes, and initial man, I do not take kindly to yankee foreigners telling me how to tie on the feedbag, because I’ve been to MULTICULTURAL San Francisco where they advertise SOURDOUGH BREAD. And who the hell would want to eat that!
So wake up! No wonder the trams run on cables, you’ve never been smart enough to get them ELECTRIFIED! Don’t know how. What a joke! Ha Ha Ha!
Greenhorns!
-Robert!
JPZ, I thought your Tragedy was exquisite. It surprised me that anyone would have a go at Tragedy at all. I’ve been trying to figure out why yours works and how you did it, and I’m a bit befuddled…but let me have a go and see if this makes sense to you and/or anyone else here.
First impact: you know it’s going to be a Tragedy from sentence three. You guys want a story? (You want an ‘entry’, kkkkk?) Fine – so JPZ, after pretending to be coy earlier, isn’t scared of announcing that he’s not planning to fuck about. None of your Melodrama (Oliver Twist) or Crime/Thriller (Three Skeleton Key) versions here…it’s the Big One: Tragedy.
As required by the form, he begins his story with the Classic Tragic spruik:
‘… he launched into the whole sorry business about David Jones.
Roll up, roll up….come and see a Man Undone By His Own Man-ness. Roll up, roll up, for his Self-Doom will be your Catharthis…that’s why we write Tragedies and that’s why we read/watch them: to observe one of ourselves, of our age, against the Fates of our times, meet his Tragicke End after following a character arc - NOT a plot arc, as such - to its inevitable doomed completion. Such that we may better understand the Man-ness in ourselves that could easily lead us to that same end…etcetera.
Balls, that’s for sure. But there’s a huge problem he immediately sets himself to solve: the straightforward murder of a cuckold by the man he is cuckholding is about the worst possible narrative fixin’s from which to rustle up a convincing Tragedy. Becau