Life the damper: Fortnight 22 of the Burns

Addendum to consumption

In addition to all the November reading and watching I discussed yesterday, I should also say I've been working through Werner Herzog's filmmaking masterclass on, uh, Masterclass.

I actually did the Aaron Sorkin scriptwriting masterclass at the start of the year (it costs money but it's for my novel so: tax deductible) and it helped me get inside the mind of a scriptwriter and to think about structure for film and TV in deeper and more nuanced ways (not saying it's totally deep and nuanced, just that my starting point was pretty superficial).

But my novel is more about filmmaking rather than scriptwriting. I didn't really know that in January but I do now.

Because I did the Sorkin course, Masterclass spams me with other courses I should take. I took notice when they said there'd be a Martin Scorsese one in early 2018. And if I paid the cost of that course now, I could have access to ALL masterclasses for 12 months.

(This sounds like a paid advertorial at the start of a podcast, but I promise it isn't.)

So I started watching Herzog's videos and he got his hooks into me. I've watched Fitzcarraldo (didn't like it) and Grizzly Man (meh), but that's probably it. I did listen to a DIrector's Guild of America podcast where Kevin Smith interviewed Herzog after the premier of Fire and Blood. Herzog says some of the same things in his Masterclass as he does in that podcast, but it's much easier to focus on Herzog's message when it isn't accompanied by Kevin Smith's post-ironic wonder at the fact Herzog reads books or goes through the films budget with the accountant every night during the shoot.

Herzog is better without that. As a character study of him alone, the masterclass is worth the time.

Oh, alright...

I was stalling, but here are the numbers from last fortnight:

Fortnight 22 wordcounts
Total words: 6,899 (17% on the novel, 26% on this blog, 57% on non-fiction)
1st week: 3,018
2nd week: 3,881

The non-fiction was prep for two talks I gave and an email interview with a website in the US ahead of THE MANNEQUIN MAKERS release there on 12 Dec.

But yeah, a crappy fortnight in terms of productivity and quadruply so when you think I really wanted to leave Dunedin with a first draft of my novel complete but I could only muster 1,150 words on the beast in 14 days. 

The last time I worked on the novel was 22 November.

Eek.

How come?

Here's how come

Well, I was in Wellington for five days (school visits for my daughter, catching up with friends and Ministry colleagues). 

And we stayed in this cool old place right by the beach at Island Bay and the weather was great and, and, and... I'm not really complaining.

And when I got back from Wellington.I prepared for and gave two talks, and took part in a daylong workshop.

My first speaking engagement was at the Southern Cities Creative Hui on 30 November. I spent the whole day there, because the lineup of speakers was pretty darn impressive, with Kiwis like Hera Lindsay Bird, Shayne Carter and Victor Rodger, and visitors from Italy, Papua New Guinea and Australia.

Shayne Carter reading from his memoir-in-progress

My keynote was on digital and analogue perspectives on storytelling, keying in on what a novelist (me) thinks when playing a narrative-driven game mode of a basketball simulation (NBA 2K18's My Career mode).

At afternoon tea I bonded with Shayne Carter over our shared love of the NBA. I had a slide of my created player in a Sacramento Kings jersey, and he told me how much he loved the Kings when they had Demarcus Cousins and Isaiah Thomas, and I was like, Bro!

I'd previously confessed to him that I'd used a computer programme to mash his lyrics from Straitjacket Fits days with a bunch of other Dunedin Sound bands to make "poetry" and he'd seemed genuinely interested instead of horrified or, worse, bored.

So I'm left with one question: did I just make friends with a rock star?

(Pause for effect)

Did I mention that his memoir will be amazing if the snippet he read is anything to go by? I think I did on Twitter, at least.

The next day of the Hui was a collaborative futures workshop in the basement of the Athenaeum (an old library on the Octagon).

Basement of the Athenaeum

I took part because I'm kind of in love with this city and even though I'm moving back to Wellington (*sad trombone*), I wanted to be part of brainstorming ways to take the UNESCO City of Literature thing further and connect Dunedin more widely with other UNESCO creative cities.

(Did I mention that, as a Burns Fellow, I'm now eligible to go on City of Literature residencies, even if I stop living in Dunedin? It's like an open relationship without the bit where one or more people get their hearts broken.)

I had to head up the hill during the lunch break to talk to the Otago Association of Teachers of English. 

Their Big Day Out for Professional Development had two keynote speakers to break up their workshops. In the morning they heard from someone from the Dunedin Study (so, you know, evidence based and world renowned) and in the afternoon they heard from me.

Addressing OATE

I had an hour to fill, and did so by talking about to join two bad ideas to make a novel (stepping through the genesis of both THE MANNEQUIN MAKERS and my location scout novel-in-progress), read from the novel-in-progress (the chapter 'Pietrarubbia'), talked about my experiments with artificial intelligence and read one of the Dunedin poems (see above), and also covered video games (see above), before ending with my reckons on teaching English in 2018 and beyond.

It was a bit weird talking about St Joseph of Copertino and questions of faith in a high school chapel, and the mic crapped out after about 15 minutes with a lot of time and a large space to fill, but all in all I had fun and some of the teachers (the younger ones) commented that they got something out of it.

Yay.

Past tense

After that rush of public appearances, my dance card is pretty clear.

I've got to judge the Robbie Burns poetry comp and attend the ceremony on 25 Jan, and that's all I can think of.

But don't think I'll suddenly get back on top of the novel and knock out a couple 20K fortnights. 

There's this thing called Christmas (we'll be spending it in Chch). 

And the move back to Wellington (the packing, the logistics, the drive up with a few stops along the way).

And I've agreed to review four books in the next two months.

And my son is sick again and my wife has run out of sick leave (her contract is up just before Xmas).

And there's already a photo of me up on the second floor of the Uni library, as if I've already left, or died, or both.

May my tombstone read: He set terrific goals.

Fortnight 19 of the Burns

Fortnight 19 summary

Total wordcount: 14,660 (65% on the novel, 29% essays, 3% on the blog and 3% on poetry)
1st week: 9,251
2nd week: 5,409

That Thursday (19 October)

1)

I woke to news that Gord Downie had passed away.

I wrote about Gord's brain cancer and The Hip most recently in my April Consumption Diary. It's the tip of the iceberg, really. The Tragically Hip have been an obsession of mine for the last 15 years; their music has underwritten so much of my creativity over that time.

One nice thing: Gord managed one last album (a double LP called Introduce Yerself) which comes out on the 27th of October. I'm working on something to accompany the album dropping, and hopefully it'll find a home somewhere online...

2)

The fates (or the editors of the Otago Daily Times) chose that same day for the publication of my profile in the local paper, a full two months after the interview and (very brief) photo shoot.

(I'm so over thinking about my writing (and being written about) in terms of juggling paid employment, family and writing. One of the great things about this year is writing and money have been pretty well merged. But IT IS temporary. So I guess I'll just have to run the risk of looking like a part-timer until I have another book to speak on my behalf.)

3)

In the afternoon, the Sacramento Kings played their first game of the new NBA season. There are zero expectations in terms of winning or the playoffs for the squad this year, but half the roster have one or fewer years experience in the NBA, and it's going to be fascinating how the young guys develop.

Against Houston, they delivered the expected 'L', but the game was great to watch and the young guys who made it onto the court played well. I noted in Fortnight 11 that I was sceptical about D'Aaron Fox, but so far he's proving me wrong.

4)

I went to a talk at 5:15pm on 'Fake Religions, Fake News and the Allure of Fiction', by Carole M Cusack from the Universtiy of Sydney. As I'm writing a book that features a fictional cult (which touches on but is not the sole representation of a kind of alternative spirituality), this was very timely.

After a bit of academic calisthenics, Cusack provided an interesting survey of new religions that have appeared since the 1960s, predominantly those inspired by works of fiction (the Church of All Worlds, Jediism, Matrixism, Dudeism, Bronies, etc).

It was fascinating, if a little superficial (such is the nature of surveying such a proliferation of movements in an hour).

During the Q&A, Cusack mentioned the 4 million Americans who claim to have been abducted by aliens, and how she was looking into ufology: was there something in it, or was it a case of cascading mindsets?

I probably asked questions in about 2% of Q&As I attend - I just don't think of questions, and if I do, they're so niche I feel no one else would benefit from hearing the answer. But in this case, surrounded by a lot of Religious Studies academics and students, the whole talk was probably too niche, so I thought what the hey.

I asked what is it about new age, syncretic religions, like Damanhur in Turin (and now elsewhere), that do a really good job of selecting good aspects from the religious pick'n'mix that's available to them, but then they go and overreach by believing in something like UFOs or, in the case of Damanhur, time travel? Is it that they feel that to be a religion they need something beyond human comprehension? Or is it, more cynically, a marketing thing: to cut through the noise of the other movements, they need something to hang their hat on?

Both were likely, according to Cusack, who also noted that in many countries, in order to be acknowledged as a religion (and thus receive favourable treatment in terms of tax etc) the legal process definitely privileges those with out-there beliefs.

5)

When I got home and switched on the news, Winston had finally made up his mind and went with Labour (and, implicitly, The Greens).

My Twitter bubble was going bananas.

It'll certainly be what 19 October 2017 will be most remembered for around these parts... But my wife told me Downie's passing was on the list of most read articles on Stuff.co.nz earlier in the day, and I'll cling to that.


Tales of Chip Pnini

The week previous, The Spinoff published my piece called: 'Everything wrong with NBA 2K18’s MyCareer mode and one possible solution'. It doesn't cover everything, but it gives you a good idea of my take.

And reader, I'm still playing.

Taieri Gorge Railway

On Saturday, we (wife, two kids and in-laws) went on the Taieri Gorge Railway to Pukerangi, then got a shuttle to Middlemarch, biked the first 5kms of the Central Otago Rail Trail (enough to know it was not enough; but more than enough for the two pre-schoolers).

On Sunday the train ran from Middlemarch, so we caught it back to Dunedin. Another great wee trip. Bless you Otago.

Debris from the flood a couple months back

Last for a reason

How's the novel going? Let's just say I read a takedown of Dan Brown's latest book this morning (as if he hadn't been taken down in all the ways you might approach literature a hundred times over; like, the only reason I read it was to see why anyone would go through that effort in 2017, but I'm still none the wiser) and found myself thinking: shit, a reviewer could say these things about MY NOVEL!! 

I tell myself that, even if that was true about what on the page (or some of the pages) at the moment, the manuscript exists as an incomplete first draft. I can get rid of the Brownisms and make scenes that aren't working work with a bit of elbow grease on the next go round.

But far out. Can I get to the end of this thing already so I can spend my days making it better rather than making it feel worse?!?!?

September Consumption Diary

MUSIC

BOOKS

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster (novel, audiobook)

After getting a sixth of the way in (and writing about it in my August consumption diary) I didn’t listen to Auster’s forking doorstop for a week thanks to time in Invercargill and Stewart Island. 

And it really is the kind of novel you need to read in a sustained burst, as you’re trying to keep four different versions of Fergusson straight in your head. 

Auster is pretty good at differentiating Fergusson 1 from Fergussons 2, 3 and 4, not labouring the differences and not being too repetitive, but it’s still a massive undertaking for a reader to keep everything straight in their head.

Especially when Auster’s two key weapons in sustaining interest and momentum over such a long book are prolepsis (telling us what will happen ahead of time) and ellipsis (leaving things out). I’m particularly fascinated by prolepsis – it’s a move a lot of writers don’t pull. And Auster isn’t a virtuoso like Muriel Spark in the way he uses it – he’s more plodding, more deliberate, less playful. But it’s still fascinating, especially as you need to keep straight which version of Fergusson's future we've been told.

After a few solid hours, I got back in the swing of things and fair devoured the last 20 hours of the audiobook. 

I was about an hour from the end when the Booker short-list was announced. I was surprised by the amount of shade thrown in the direction of 4 3 2 1, which made the cut.

Like this from The Irish Times:

Anyone possessed of a sense of humour will smile at the inclusion of US heavyweight veteran Paul Auster with 4321, a bulky work best described as worthy and a lifetime’s personal statement. Repetitive and unconvincing, it is laboured in the extreme and while it was a surprise to see it on the longlist, its inclusion on the shortlist is a shock. So unlikely a contender as this must be the one to wager your house on; the odds will enable you to purchase several more.

“Worthy”? “Repetitive and unconvincing”? “Laboured in the extreme”? Had the writer read the same book? I suspected Ms Battersby did not make it far, if indeed she ever really tried.

But then, in the novel’s final movements, Auster attempts to tie things up in a way that befits the Master Metafictioneer he showed himself to be with books like City of Glass. But here it only served to unravel what had come before and leave me reluctant to defend his book in online comments sections. Maybe it was laboured and worthy? I mean, I wasn't listening to the same book as Auster was reading.

Still, would I rate this over the only other book on the shortlist I've read (Saunder's Lincoln in the Bardo)? Yup (much as I love Saunders short stories).

Anything is possible by Elizabeth Stout (connected short stories, audiobook)

Last month I read My Name is Lucy Barton, and wrote:

Cool control, that’s how I’d describe Strout’s style. This doesn’t pack the punch of Olive Kitteridge (or even attempt that book’s scope), but it still has teeth. I’ve got Anything is Possible, Strout’s latest queued up as my next read, so I might write more about this one with reference to that.

Anything is possible is certainly closer to Olive Kitteridge in scope, and the fact it picks up where Lucy Barton left off might make it even more ambitious. I got the sense, mid-way into the second book, that both MNiLB and AiP had been originally conceived as a single book of connected stories, but the Lucy Barton section grew too big / had sufficient exit velocity to become its own thing, while the gravity of it still influences the stories/chapters in AiP.

But unlike Olive Kitteridge, which is most memorable for me because of the complex and often nasty eponymous character and the smudges and shadows of her in some of the other stories in that book, Lucy Barton is without malevolence. She’s the poor girl from the troubled family who got out, made a life in New York City and is now a successful author. So hardly Randle Flagg.

Which is why, for all the concise mini-dramas and the elegant interlocking that goes on in Anything is Possible, it’s missing that hook to really hang around in the reader’s memory.

Gone with the mind by Mark Leyner (novel/memoir, audiobook)

Described on the back cover as a “blazingly inventive, fictional autobiography”, Gone with the Mind begins with Leyner’s mother introducing him for a reading series within a mall’s foodcourt. The only people in the audience are workers on their breaks from Panda Express and Sbarro. The mother’s intro (read in the audiobook my his actual mother) runs for over an hour and covers all many of private and embarrassing things. Then Mark Leyner gets up and gives a few prefatory words before reading excerpts from his autobiography, Gone with the Mind, only these remarks take six or so hours and he never gets to the excerpts. There’s a final section in which Mark and his mother discuss the reading in a bathroom stall.

The book has blurbs from Gary Shteyngart (don’t they all) and Sam Lipsyte, and these two writers give a pretty good indication of what Leyner’s doing. He loves long medical names and short but impenetrable lapses into theory. His main interlocutor is an imaginary friend (The Imaginary Intern). But amid these deliberately high-grown weeds, there’s a lot of exposure, or apparent exposure. It’s an eloquent, truthy book for an ineloquent, truthy time.

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood (memoir, audiobook)

Following closely on the heels of Leyner’s fictional autobiography we have Patricia Lockwood’s poetic memoir. Leyner wrote his book as a 58 year old prostate cancer survivor. Lockwood writes from her early thirties, having limped back to her family home with her husband in tow, for financial reasons. Her father, the improbable Republican, boxer shorts and nothing else, misogynist, guitar hero Catholic priest, is held up as star and hook for the book, but her mother is equally complex and interesting (and gets more time at the mic).

Lockwood writes of her poetry, including publishing the viral hit ‘Rape Joke’ and her first collection, but always with a remove that doesn’t exist when laying bare the working of her family. But her poetic vision and poetic muscle is laid clear enough in the prose of every page, and is given free(ish) rein in the final pages in order to wrap up a memoir as someone in their thirties must (not with knots but frills and flourishes).

VIDEOGAMES

I played quite a bit of NBA2k18 to see what gaming in 2017 is like. This is part of what might become a project, or an event, or something I abandon. Who knows?

FILMS

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I didn’t watch much of anything in September. I think because I was away a lot and playing NBA2k18 and have been listening to audiobooks while cooking/doing dishes rather than watching something on the iPad. But I’m trying to watch old movies on Kanopy, two of which I watched with my daughter (4). She wasn’t that into Nanook of the North (it held my interest) but we both loved Buster Keaton’s The General. My October project is getting through all the Kurosawas I can with my wife (she hasn’t seen any).

Consumption diary – January/February 2017 (part 2)

For music, see my Burns Fortnight #2 post.

Books

The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell (novel, audiobook)

Hard to mention this without it sounding like a massive humblebrag, but I remember talking to David Mitchell about this book (he was nearly finished with it) when we were both at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2011. Reading it now, there's a lot in the Crispin Hershey section that borrows strongly from Mitchell's experience at Australian writers festivals (mostly those that pre-date 2011). And there's a New Zealander in the novel BUT he's a dude from the Chatham Islands who is granted the secret to immortality in the 1st half of the twentieth century, so safe to say NOT modelled on me!!

Mitchell is a go-to writer for readers who want chunkiness and can live with the unevenness that is part of the bargain. I enjoyed it, but all the references back to other Mitchell novels felt too much like a self-congratulatory version of the Shanghai Knights effect (oh, so they're in Victorian England, so they have to meet Arthur Conan Doyle etc). It's worse in that the big conceit of The Bone Clocks (there are these two warring factions of immortals and lots of other people have psychic abilities) has now retrospectively infiltrated Mitchell's back catalogue. Most significantly affected/diminished are Black Swan Green and The 1000 Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Yes, so a book about which it is easy to feel conflicted.


The Ask and the Answer - Patrick Ness (novel, audiobook) - Book 2 in the Chaos Walking trilogy, read a couple of years after I really enjoyed Book 1. This one felt more static, and as a result, longer, than the first. But still a pretty great exercise in -building (world-, character-, patois-).


Ready Player One - Ernest Cline (novel, audiobook)

The first two hours (audiobook, remember) felt like 90% exposition, but I enjoyed it anyway for its unabashed geekiness. Take a step back and it's a bit uncomfortable to think about how Halliday, the deceased game designer who kicks off the hunt for the key to his fortune, is essentially vehicle for Cline's wish fulfilment. Gee, if only everyone in the world loved the same stuff I love? What if there were hordes of Gen Y, Z, AA and BB kids who devoted 12 hours a day, as Wade Watts does in Ready Player One, to absorbing 80's sitcoms and mastering arcade games? What if everything I know and all my useless skills actually became valuable?

Some problems with pacing, characterisation, and the ending, but I enjoyed this book more than anything I've read in the past year, so there.


10th of December - George Saunders (short stories)

Re-read this to help me think about short stories and oblique angles. Also, gearing up for reading Lincoln in the Bardo next month.


Hicksville - Dylan Horrocks (graphic novel)

Another re-read, another effort to re-centre myself as I geared up for a new/renewed writing endeavour.


The Man Who Could Fly - Rudolpho Anaya (short stories)

Short stories from 'the godfather and guru of Chicano Literature', chosen because of the title story. Interesting without being uplifting or massively transportative.


More Than This - Patrick Ness (novel, audiobook)

Chose this instead of finishing the Chaos Walking trilogy because a) I didn't feel like more sci-fi just yet (though it's not that sci-fi) and b) I was curious what Ness's other YA stuff is like. I'd describe More Than This as emo.

Visual media

This will be an incomplete list as I haven't been keeping record of what I watch, but I think it's a worthwhile exercise this year.

* Films

The Last Valley, Platoon, Sneakerheadz, A Few Good Men, Goodfellas, Trouble with the Curve, Silence.

Silence was the only one I saw in a theatre. I went to a 2pm session on a Friday - one of the affordances of fellowship life - but it was research for my novel. No, honestly. Maybe I'll explain one day.

But Silence. Um. Cinematically, it's essentially a series of torture scenes connected together by shots of greyscale people huddling in one place or another and the crickets and air conditioner hum soundtrack. It's been described as a Scorsese passion project because it was in the works for 28 years (and because it was never going to be The Wolf of Wall Street), but maybe it took so long to come to fruition because of a lack of sustained passion?

It's a one-note film that goes for more than two and a half hours. If I had a passion project, it would be some massive overreach - a symphonic shambles of ideas. But that's just me, I guess.

(And isn't any novel written by 99.9% of writers a passion project, in that it's something the establishment doesn't really want from you. That's how I see my work, anyway.)


* TV (a misnomer - I wonder if we'll ever get around to calling it something different?)

The OA, Fargo (Season 1), Abstract, Luther, selected episodes of The West Wing, and so much Paw Patrol (I wish there were more girl dogs but when I asked my daughter, whose favourite is Sky, she wasn't fazed).

Notes: 

• Roughly ranked in order of appreciation.
• Entire series run to present day, unless otherwise noted.