Hot under the collar: Fortnight #7 of the Burns

Macandrew Bay

Fortnightly word tally: 8,279

(1^st week: 3,018; 2^nd week: 5,261)

(Novel 4,097; poetry 1,356; blog 2,215; essays 611)

You may be able to guess from the fact it’s Thursday of the week following the end of my seventh fortnight that things are a bit of a jumble at the moment.

Right now, the Dunedin Writer’s Festival is on. I have a session tomorrow about the end of the world and one Saturday about Found Poetry – both topics are just far enough outside my wheelhouse that I’ve needed to put some work in to feel ‘ready’. I’m also trying to get along to as many other sessions as I can.

Then there’s getting ready for Italy. I fly out on the 20^th and have had to prepare two presentations that I’ll be delivering to earn my keep, in addition to playing travel agent for myself for the 7 days I have after my conference to location scout for my location scouting novel.

It’s fair to say I feel bad about progress on THE LOCATION SCOUT. Even if I didn’t have the Italian curveball (which I still feel, on balance, is an awesome curveball to have been thrown) I would still be a bit mired right now. I keep coming up with structural innovations that don’t seem to work / aren't necessary / are insane when I attempt to make them in the manuscript. Fool!

But these fallow(ish) patches are all part of it. 

There’s a cult in my book (or there will be) that I didn’t know would be there two months ago. I’m probably another two months of writing (and gallivanting) before they appear on the page, but it’s the time I spend now -- reading apparently unrelated Guardian articles or watching Fargo or peeling mandarins and having fragmentary thoughts about the downside of a surfeit of freedom and what charisma is in a post-John Key world -- that will equip me to write this cult to life in July (or whenever – this isn’t one of those contracts with the universe, alright?).

Barefeet in May? My son might be a Southern Man, yet.

April Consumption Diary

Books

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (novel, audiobook)

I was really looking forward to this. I even changed which Audible shop my account was under to access it. And I knew that the variety of narrators (both on the page and in the audiobook) would take some getting used to. But as a novel, it never really lifted beyond two linked concepts (Lincoln through the eyes of contemporary accounts; the 'lives' of those in the Bardo). It just felt like a (really) long Saunders short story; the length left this reader unable to escape (or forgive) the work's unevenness.

My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki (novel, audiobook)

I can't remember why I read this. (Stares into space for five minutes.) Oh yeah, one of the two plot lines followed a gopher/translator/producer of a TV show, and I thought this might be interesting given I'm working on a novel about a director/location scout. But it was so dull. The two parallel plotlines with periodic convergences. The deflating prolepsis. Oh well.

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick (non-fiction, audiobook)

I can remember why I read this: a) I listened to this and Danyl and Pip made it sound good and b) I've been interested in time travel for a long time (I even have a notebook dedicated towards a time-travelly novel on Evernote).

Gleick's book was really good. Like one of those popular histories for people who like to think they're too smart for popular histories. Most of the recent time travel books/films I thought about during the earlier sections were mentioned later on in the book - but by then Gleick has abandoned literary criticism for theoretical physics and philosophy. Which is fine. This is the guy who wrote a book about chaos theory. But I think there's another book (or at least a few decent chapters) on what people are doing with time travel after a century of the genre, and dismantling this from a predominantly literary perspective.

Picture This by Joseph Heller

I was writing a scene where people clambers to see a friar levitate in the year 1653, and wanted to show that this wasn't so long ago by mentioning things going on elsewhere in Europe. One of these was Rembrandt painting Aristotle contemplating a bust of Homer. Which led me to read Heller's novel all about this painting.

After the first three chapters, I was like: fuck this is good. God, Heller's a genius. But after another I was like: Hmm. Didn't I think the same about Closing Time and Something Happened but can't really remember what happened in either (and did I even finish Something?)?

And eventually I started skim reading.

I think the technique - factual retelling of history (focusing on the quirks/convergences) powered by a strong narrator - could work over a longer narrative, with a few tweaks (or with some narrative breadcrumbs followed in a more traditional fashion). I thinking of Vonnegut's Galapagos, which is by no means perfect, but (perhaps because it has to get fictional very quickly as it relies on flashing 1000s of years into the future) does enough of the story-telling basics to pull a reader through to the final page.


Others: poetry (especially when looking for things to read at the Town Belt Traverse), academic articles about Damanhur, Nomadelfia, magnetic levitation... but the big 'other' was podcasts, which probably deserves it's own category (I haven't recorded these in my previous two consumption diaries). So...

Podcasts

S-Town
I devoured this over about 48 hours. I don't think it was morally indefensible. (Someone in my Facebook timeline posted this righteously - and no, they hadn't listened). I thought it worked we as a non-fiction audio-novel. I liked the way it shifted gears at the end of the third episode. Yes, it was a bit uneven. Yes, the last two episodes were a bit circular and drawn out. But it was a good story, well told in a (relatively) fresh way: the best book I read this month (if it had been a book).

Missing Richard Simmons

I listened to this late March/early April. Not quite as absorbing as S-Town while ploughing a similar field. The fact Simmons is still alive, still hiding, meant the ending was always going to be a bit of a fizzer. But the way the penultimate episode promised a bunch of things that then weren't covered in the finale was shoddy and disappointing.

The Director’s Cut

Unlike the first two podcasts, this isn't sequential story-telling in podcast form. It's standalone talks (generally 30-50 mins) where one director interviews another director about the film they've just finished and (in most cases) the audience has just seen. And because this is the Directors Guild of America's podcast, you get some heavy hitters (Scorsese interviewing Spielberg, the director of Rogue One interviewed by the director of the young Han Solo Star Wars flick, etc).

Even the lesser names/films are interesting (especially in my quest to write a novel about a couple of filmmakers). The most recent episode featured the director of straight-to-Netflix-movie The Discovery, which I just watched on Netflix and thought - this was like The OA without the time afforded by a TV series. And who was he interviewed by but the director of The OA (and the two of them went to film school together!!).

Others

I also listen to every episide of 3 New Yorker podcasts: New Yorker Fiction Podcast (a writer picks a short story from the New Yorkers archive to read and discuss... I did a list of my top episodes of this podcast to date in 2011); New Yorker Poetry Podcast (poet chooses a poem from the archive to read and discuss and also one of their own); The Author’s Voice (short stories from the most recent edition of the magazine read by the author).

Music

This was the month where I found out how remiss of a Tragically Hip/Gord Downie fan I’ve been the last few years. When I first heard about Downie’s terminal diagnosis last year (a couple months late on that, too), I was numb. Downie’s music meant more to me that Bowie and Prince. I’d exchanged emails with him (basically: Him: thanks for the book, I haven’t read it yet, but found it again when we were moving house; Me: hurrmurrhurgunugh!). I don’t know if he ever got around to reading A Man Melting.

I listened to The Hip’s most recent album, Man Machine Poem (2016), a few more times after learning The Hip’s days were numbered, but didn’t take to it. There seemed too much overlap with Now for Plan A (2012), another album that never really stuck with me. I could have gone back and listened to Phantom Planet and Day for Night and Trouble at the Hen House and Music @ Work and Battle of the Nudes but that kind of maudlin impulse didn’t fit with how I felt about those albums.

I thought about writing another email to Gord, but that would really be for my benefit, wouldn't it? His time was more precious than mine, so I saved him the hassle of reading and deciding whether to reply (eight months on, I’m not sure this was the right decision, but).

So I put Gord outta my mind.

For whatever reason, in April all of this came back to me. I found out Gord had already released his solo album, Secret Path, which is really good. Maybe not as great as Nudes, but at least as good as The Grand Bounce.

Then I found Downie had made an album with The Sadies, And the conquering sun, in 2014. (It isn’t available on Spotify, hence the absence of any tracks from this album in my April playlist).

THEN I found Justin Rutledge’s Daredevil, also from 2014, which is an album entirely of Hip covers (cherry-picked from their heroic peak). Rutledge strips back these songs in a way that’s reminiscent at times of Gary Jules’ cover of Tears for Fears’ ‘Mad World’. The ‘Jules Approach’ has been employed often since, but Rutledge isn’t mellow for the sake of mellowness. He’s trying to give Downie’s words fresh air, and succeeds.

From the songs Rutledge selected (eg ‘Grace, too’, ‘Thugs’, ‘Springtime in Vienna’), I reckon we have similar tastes. Though I could easily propose another ten songs for a covers album that’d be just as awesome and complete.

I've also been working on a project about the Dunedin Sound, hence all those bands on my playlist this month. And I discovered Arboretum and am really into them at the moment. They remind me of Rook-era Shearwater (y'know, before they went all disco).

Films & TV

Better Call Saul (Season 3 thus far) - I agree with Jose Barbosa's claim that BCS is better than Breaking Bad (at least more consistently good-to-great) though my reasons might be different.
Fargo (Season 2)
The Discovery
I'm Still Here
Heavy Metal
Gangs of New York
Louis CK 2017
Segnati da Dio

Nth Degree: Fortnight #6 of the Burns

Milford Sound with rainbow

Wordcountz

I was going to do some graphs and trends-after-12-weeks stuff this time around, but I've got a bunch of other things to cover and post. So I'll leave the maths for another fortnight when I find myself less interesting.

As for fortnight #6, here it is, by the numbers:

• Total words for the fortnight: 7,395 words (cf 12k last fortnight)
• 1st week: 3,955 / 2nd week: 3,440
• 89.6% of these words were on the novel

Going to Fiordland for Easter took a chunk of time of out the end of week 1 and the start of week 2. 

The plateau that I mentioned last fortnight persisted longer than I'd hoped (not so much in terms of total words, but how far into the story I managed to proceed). I resorted to alternative means of generating content (see cut-up chapter below), and managed to get something or somewhere.

With recent opportunities (see below), I'm still trying to figure out how much I try and get my location scout moving through time, or if I need to pull back and get things planned out better...

Travels (with Tomtit)

Misty ol' day in the Sound

Waterfall with seals, Milford Sound

Tomtit

Lake Mistletoe

Lake Manapouri

Mug

From Fortnight #1:

So I’m still using the dinky little Arcoroc cup I found in the dinky little kitchenette and having to make too many trips to make tea during my day and maybe I will end up ordering something in another moment of weakness.

And so it came to pass.

It depicts scenes from Monty Python's Holy Grail in a Saturday morning cartoon mode, which is kinda sorta exactly what my novel will turn out like if I'm not careful.


Outings

Octagon Poetry Collective

Last week I went to a reading at Dog With Two Tails. The feature poets were Sue Wootton (above) and Victor Billot. There was also an open mic for the collective members - it was an incredibly well oiled machine, each poet getting briskly to the mic, reading a single poem (some with patter, some without, but never more than necessary) and blending back into the crowd.

After an intermission, the chair came to me and lightly twisted my arm, so I read a poem ('Transition', with a rambling preamble that did not do justice to the preceding efficiency). While I've published quite a few poems, sporadically, I think the last time I read one of my poems in public was in 2006 at the Museum of City and Sea in Wellington.

It was a fun night and Sue and Victor were great too.

Town Belt Traverse

After going 11 years between public poetry readings, the next gap was five days. And instead of reading one poem, I had two and a half hours to fill!

The event was the annual Town Belt Traverse, organised by the Dunedin Amenities Society. As the Burns Fellow, I was positioned at the 5th and final station in Prospect Park and asked to "recite some verse" (people who talk about reciting and/or verse tend to think of poetry as they might dinosaurs or unicycling).

These first arrivals were the hardout walkers who hadn't really mucked around at any of the other stops and weren't going to lower their heartrate for a spot of poetry. Fair enough.

After about half an hour the stream of people became a bit more steady and in less of a rush, and I found my groove. People we much more comfortable stopping to listen if I was already reading, so it helped to have some longer pieces. (I learnt quickly that starting a poem as someone past made them feel as if they'd triggered a security light). In addition to about 20 poems of my own, I read some others' (Emma Neale, Geoff COchrane, Alice Oswald), and two short stories that are bitsy and poetic ('30 Ways of Looking at Marumaru South' and 'Parents in Decline').

I was joined in the middle span by one of the PhD candidates from the English Department who read Owen Marshall's 'The Divided World' (great choice) and two of my own poems (a weird experience). Thanks Damien!

Despite some awkward moments, I really enjoyed it at times, and had some good chats with people in between pieces.

The long and blinding road

A selection of 40 or so fake quotes from my fake famous director
 in the process of being ordered and rationalised before
being incorporated into the novel

TBH there are times when working on a story or a novel when it can get scary. 

Scary because suddenly what you are working on becomes clear and there’s a bigger meaning to it, or a bigger question underlying the work, that you didn't quite know was there when you started and are confronted with the task of being the one to see this through. 

Am I really fit to be asking this question? 

Can I really write a novel that dramatizes this particularly big thing that I didn’t know I was even grappling with until ninety seconds ago?

In time the feeling fades. You mock yourself for your self-importance. That's the only way you can proceed, or at least that I can.

One does not sit down each day and produce work of genius. One might come upon it, in the course of one's work, and if one is careful not to look directly into its eyes, might encircle it, once, twice, thrice, each revolution claiming a little more of its power for your own...

Or not. Probably not.

Internet Explorer

I mentioned last fortnight that I was spending a lot of time looking at places in Italy on Google Street View. At the risk of turning this place into selfie-central, I bought this t-shirt to embrace the desk-bound nature of my research/creativity.

HOWEVER...

Things move quickly in these here parts. 

Next month, I'm off to Italy and, after fulfilling some non-novelistic duties, I'll have the chance to 'scout' locations in person.

This is good news. Great news, even. Except, it does mean a lot of this next month is gonna be spent playing my own travel agent, trying to squeeze as much into my time on the ground, and preparing for the primary reason for my visit (education business). 

A welcome spanner in the works. 

Perhaps I need a new t-shirt?

Is it wrong that I really, really like Gore?

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We goin’ Sizzler: Fortnight #5 of the Burns

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There is pleasure in the work
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Words this fortnight: 12,320 (cf 8,702 the previous fortnight)
(Week 1 - 7,956; Week 2 - 4,364)

Still a case of the first week of the fortnight being the more productive (65 percent of the fortnightly tally this time) but not as pronounced as some previous fortnights.

Some blogging in week one distorts the figure, slightly. When looking just at what I added to THE LOCATION SCOUT, it's 5.4k vs 4k, figures I'll happily take for the next forty weeks, please and thank you.

I had two days of 2,000+ words twice this fortnight, one in each week (both Tuesdays). These were my first days over 2,000 (on just the novel) for the year.

I did strike a plateau with the manuscript around 18,000 words. It's the transition from the first act to the second, from what was known to what's much less fixed in my mind. So: a few days of casting around the internet, staring at Google Maps, watching YouTube videos, and then a bright idea in the shower and voila, someone has turned the word tap back on (just in time for another 2k Tuesday).

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If there is no pleasure in the work

what chance have others of finding it?

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Birds!

Chilly bike ride this morning but the Royal Spoonbills were loving it on Anderson's Bay inlet. pic.twitter.com/qUTe9Ywdkz

— Craig Cliff (@Craig_Cliff) April 3, 2017

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There is pleasure in the work (x2)
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The Dunedin Writers Festival programme is out and I'm appearing in two events:

• The End of the World (panel topic set before the subject of Eleanor Catton's next novel was announced) 
• Found Poetry

It looks like it'll be a great few days in May, which is rapidly approaching.

In thinking about what I might do for the Found Poetry session, I've become VERY interested in Recurrent Neural Networks and their potential to generate text. I met with someone from the university's Computer Science faculty, who put me in touch with some of his colleagues. I'm working slowly towards a collaboration, though I'm not quite sure what the final product might be.

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If there is no pleasure in the work, down tools
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My location scout in THE LOCATION SCOUT has landed in Italy and is scouting locations I've never been to. It's an interesting experience, wedding imagination and Google Street View images. There's a chance I might be able to get to Italy before the book is finished, but I'm treating that as a nice bonus rather than a necessity. Believe it or not, the book's not really about location scouting!

So for now, the internet and I will suffice.

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There is pleasure in the work (x2)
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Me and my motley crew are off to Milford Sound and Te Anau for Easter. So expect next fortnight's update to be photo-rich and wordcount-poor.

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There is pleasure in the work (fade out)

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March Consumption Diary

Music

Playlist

Concert

Nadia Reid at Port Chalmers Town Hall, 31 March

The second of two sold out shows in Reid's home town (don't get me started on how Dunedin's city boundary is insanely large, swallowing up towns like Port C and Mosgiel).

Wooden halls are notoriously difficult acoustically, especially with a full band,  but the sound was pretty good. There were moments in almost every song where it was clear Reid - her talent - has this trajectory that few artists have.

One thing I noticed live that I hadn't noticed after hours listening to both her albums at home: every second song seems feature lyrics about direction, in particular forward movement. Overall, her lyrical palette is restrained, which is probably a good thing. And most lyricists have tics that become apparent after two-dozen or so songs. Will be interesting to see how, and where, her lyrics evolve in the future.

I won't go over the comparisons that I've seen in other places, but seeing her leading the rockier numbers I was put in mind of Niko Case when she fronts for the New Pornographers. Which is most certainly a good thing.

My favourite song at the moment is 'Richard', which has a very Kurt Vile groove, but there was something about Reid's voice that reminded me of something older. Last night I thought it might be Shawn Colvin's 'Sonny Came Home'. Listening to that song now, I'm not sure if that's the one.

Anyway!

Just a phenomenal talent and a bloody good night.

Books

Bandits by Elmore Leonard (novel, audiobook)

I find listening to a Leonard novel a useful reminder about the power of dialogue and the cancer that is disconnected exposition.

This one had some links to my work in progress (an ex-nun who kinda fell for St Francis of Asissi), but everything is connected, somehow. See Fortnight #4’s discussion of first draft solipsism.

The Man Who Could Fly: St Joseph of Copertino and the Mystery of Levitation by Michael Grosso (non-fiction)

This book is clearly connected, no neurotism required. And it only came out last year, so after I did my initial deep dive of research. But I can't imagine what writing my book would be like without reading this one.

That’s not to say it’s a good book. It’s really not. It’s often turgid, disjointed and uses logic selectively. And it took an age (2 months) to get through, despite being massively het up about the subject matter.

But it did give me something to argue against. And that, my friends, is a precious gift.

The Dreamer’s Dictionary – Stearn Robinson and Tom Corbett (non-fiction)

I was looking for a catalogue of common types of dreams (falling dreams, flying dreams, teeth falling out dreams) but this turned out to be a tool for those hoping to divine meaning from their dreams, as if they were tea leaves.

For example:

Halo. To see someone wearing a halo in your dreams indicates sad news; if you were wearing the halo, it predicts travel; if you dreamed of taking off a halo you can expect some kind of improvement in business or financial matters.

Bah!

But I did like this, from the Introduction:

…as dreams allow one to go safely and quietly insane for a time each day, it is not, as heretofore believed, the sleep that is necessary for our well-being, but the dreams.

Universal Harvester by John Darnielle (novel, audiobook)

So, I loved Wolf in White Van, and I loved the first half of Universal Harvester. I mean, that title seems at once the most bad-ass Sabbath-era metal album title (Darnielle has also written a 33 1/3 book on Sabbath’s Master of Reality) and totally prosaic and farmy (the book is set in rural Iowa).

I normally listen to audiobooks on 1.25x or 1.5x, but early on in Universal Harvester I wanted to savour the experience. At a little over six hours normal speed, I felt the book (read by the author) was slipping away too fast.

The way horror (think: horror movies) and grief (think: lost parents) intersect, it’s really powerful. The novel has this genre-fied hot rod engine that is ready to take the reader anywhere, but then Darnielle chooses to keep it idling. Actually, he parks the hot rod out back and completely forgets about it for a while, and then, on the last page, when we’re all a bit tired and strung out and only a handful of us have any hope left, he runs to the hot rod, jumps in and goes for a very brief blat. But by then, it’s too little too late for most of us.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion (novel, audiobook)

I wanted something light and commercial and I got it here.

I’m totally not comfortable with the way this and many entertainments before it derive so much of the content from the comedy of the main character’s non-standard brain wiring (Don Tillman is somewhere on the ASD spectrum, but so are we all). At times it felt cheap, easy and/or untrue. Whenever Don’s wiring or the demands of the chick-lit genre come into conflict, the genre wins.

But still, I listened. Still, I lapped it up. Says something about my brain’s wiring I guess. Though I’m going to try hard to resist any urges to add any Helen Fielding to my Audible wishlist.

In My Father’s Den by Maurice Gee (novel, NZ, audiobook)

This was like the anti-Universal Harvester. I started listening to this novel on a day I worked from home (lawns to mow, washing to hang out, meals to cook) at 1.25x, but after a couple minutes felt comfortable cranking up to 1.5x. After an hour of biological time, I pumped it up to 1.75x and managed to finish the entire book in a day.

It’s been a number of years since I read Plumb, but I only read Rachel Barrowman’s biography of Gee last year. In My Father’s Den was like a mash-up of both of these (the autobiographical stuff about Henderson/Wellsford, the contrasting religiousness of Paul Prior’s parents) extruded through a classic crime novel (seventeen year old girl found dead in the scrub, half-scalped). But rather than conform to the crime genre, we get the story in a very NZ literary novel way: nothing procedural or quote-unquote pacy about this. The solution to the mystery is stumbled upon, rather quickly in the scheme of things, and resolved predictably enough (the climax does feature a tomahawk). While it might fail as a piece of genre fiction, it success as literature thanks in part to the momentum it borrows from genre. It doesn’t, unlike Darnielle’s book, park the crime story behind the shed and forget about it. It’s there, always, but Gee is able to buy enough time to give us the narrator’s entire life story, which, cunningly, allows the murderer’s motive to be neatly foregrounded without rousing the reader’s suspicion.

A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (novel, audiobook)

Another genre piece, this time from the master of the spy novel. I found this the hardest to manage as an audiobook. The genre demands the accumulation of significant detail, frequent reversals and assumed personas, and I found it hard to keep it all straight in my head. It wasn’t that it was all moving too fast for me (I found some parts went on too long), but that I couldn’t flip back a chapter or two to check things, such is the inexorable progress of an audiobook when you’re cycling, or hanging out the washing, or doing the groceries.

Film & TV

(some of these I may have missed off my Jan/Feb list)

• Do The Right Thing
• Sex, Lies and Videotape
• The Legend of Bagger Vance
• Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (My wife asked me why I liked watching documentaries about bands, as if this was something weird. My dad used to tape music docos from the TV. The Beatles. Pink Floyd. Beach Boys. So I grew up around not just this music, but people talking about the music, the making of the music. I'm interested in how any art is made, but music will always be the thing that is most immediate for me as an audience member, and the thing most distant from me in terms of talent. And I don't even like Rush, much. Like * sacrilege alert*: Neal Peart is not a good lyricist. Gimme 'Working Man' over anything Peart ever penned. But then, I didn't listen to Rush when I was going through puberty, so...)
• Grillo vs Grillo
• Dave Chappelle Netlix specials (x2)
• I Don’t Feel At Home in this World Anymore
• Green Room
• Demolition Man
• 2 Guns
• Entourage: The movie
• Tootsie
• The Dead Lands
• Jackie Browne
• Love (Season 2)