Gaiman & Grumbling

Awhile ago I posted about how disappointed I was by Neil Gaiman's "American Gods".  I felt rather guilty about reviewing a book that I couldn't get past the first 100 pages of, but having never disliked any of Gaiman's work I felt compelled.  I now probably owe him half an apology.

This has been an odd summer.  The weather never got very warm or fine until about mid-July.  Seriously I didn't even pack away my cashmere cardigans this year.  Then my landlord got pregnant and I had to move house. Then I wasn't sure when I'd have to move house, or when I'd be moving into the new place I found, or how I would be able to coordinate everything.  I will never move house in August or September ever again.


I had to force myself to read it.  I forced myself to read it sitting in a comfortable chair, in the bath, on the sofa, at the table, in bed - as much as possible. And then I came to a realisation.  It wasn't half bad.  It's just what I do for a living has made me kind of hate books.

I kept wondering how it compared to the neater, shorter, award-winning editor's version.  I kept cutting and trying to rewrite sentences in my mind. I couldn't help but to think if the book had been the edited version rather than this long rambling one I would have been able to turn my instinct off.


But of course I still need to move...

Now things won't really quiet down until the New Year, not really, but I think I'm doing the right thing. Trimming down my expenses.  I'm going to force myself to write.  No more waiting for the Muses to show up.

The truth is making myself read American Gods helped me. While I should know that authors need a lot of help between the page and the store shelf, sometimes I'm just so in awe of them that I put them up on a pedestal and fling myself downwards from the highest towers.  How dare I think of myself as worthy to be among them, but in reality, will I ever know my rightful place unless I reach for the stars?

This morning I woke up still swaddled by the fog of a dream. I recently watched Bukowski's interview on the French show Apostrophe, to give you an idea of what the set looked liked.  Jaime Oliver was asking me to list 5 books I wish I'd written.  Unfortunately my dog whacked me in the face with her tail good morning before I could finish my list.

In my dream:

1. William Gaddis' The Recognitions
2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude

When I woke up the first three books I thought of that I wish I had written:

3. JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit
4. W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge
5. ?

Then I decided that deep down the only book I wish I had written is the ones I have yet to write.

It's a sad thing to pack up my writing stuff.  All my notebooks, my outlines, my stapled and clipped pages of something that turned out to be nothing. My extra old laptop that I write on because I like the keyboard more than the keyboard on the other laptop.  My two typewriters, my framed picture of Victor Hugo, and a hundred books that will have to live in a box because I can't be without them.

I was wondering if I could list these books.  The ones I decided I needed around.  I should list them. Perhaps I will. I do love a good list of books, but be warned, some might not make sense, but no house would be a home without The Chronicles of Narnia to me.

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Neil Gaiman & American Gods

If you don't know by now I'm a huge fan of author Neil Gaiman (and I love his wife Amanda Palmer too). I've read all of Gaiman's Sandman, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Stardust, and Anasi Boys. Recently a friend of mine who borrowed my copy of The Graveyard Book passed me a copy of American Gods.

I have the UK edition published by Headline Review (ISBN 978-0-7472-6374-6), which starts with an introduction on this version of the book, which is different from the previously published version.

"...My editor was concerned that the book was slightly too big and too meandering (she didn't mind it being too odd), and she wanted me to trim it, and I did..."

Gaiman goes on to say the instincts of his editor were spot on because the book won a lot of prestigious awards (Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and the Bram Stoker award).  So short story long (?) when Headline wanted to reissue Gaiman's novels he had a whole book that he wanted people to read.  This edition of American Gods is 12,000 words longer than the one that won the awards, and it's the version of which Gaiman is "the most proud".

Here is the blurb from the book for those of you who haven't read it:

IS NOTHING SACRED?

Days before his release from prison, Shadow's wife, Laura, dies in a mysterious car crash.  Numbly, he makes his way back home.  On the plane, he encounters the enigmatic Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America.

Together they embark on a profoundly strange journey across the heart of the USA, whilst all around them a storm of preternatural and epic proportions threatens to break....


Now I'm going to be slightly mean here, but please don't hold it against me. As I stated previously I am a huge fan of Gaiman's work, just not this one.  I so wanted to like it, but I couldn't read it.  First I couldn't read it without thinking it was a very poor imitation of a Haruki Murakami novel (let's be honest as great as Gaiman is he is no Murakami) and then I simply couldn't read it at all.

Every writer ends up writing a book which is a vanity project. I think American Gods is Gaiman's vanity project book, something he wrote more for himself than anything else, and as the reader you either like it or you don't.

Also I hated the name Mr Wednesday. Maybe this is nitpicking but to me Wednesday as a name should only ever refer to Wednesday Addams (of the Addams Family). To say he was Mr Wednesday but not Thursday is a Chesterton reference someone of Gaiman's stature should not have made. Anyone who reads Gaiman has to be aware that he at one point or another read a fair amount of GK Chesterton and really liked it. Why he felt the need is beyond me, but it detracts from my being able to immerse myself in the story.

And with an "odd book" (Gaiman's words, not mine), one thing that is absolutely essential is that the reader lose themselves in the writing.  Nothing should feel out of place or unusual unless that is the writer's intention. Especially with some of the fantasy/magical surrealism sort of things Gaiman is trying to pull off in American Gods. The quotes, which are disappointingly from real people who wrote real books as opposed to Borges quotes from imaginary people and imaginary books, don't do anything for the story.

I suppose I will try to read it again sometime because I remain shocked by my dislike of it, but for now I'm going to move on to something else. Gaiman has a new book coming out soonish (The Ocean at the End of the Lane) and I've managed to beg myself an advanced reading copy from a friend at HarperCollins, so hopefully it will be better and I'll be able to get the bad taste out of my mouth, but sadly for this blog I've promised not to review it until it's released (I think in June?).

But fingers crossed. Considering the last book of Gaiman's I read was The Graveyard Book and how much I loved that, well, maybe my hopes and my faith in Gaiman's consistency of output were unrealistic.

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Updates & Steinbeck

Friday morning I moved my laptop from the coffee table to the dining table and heard an odd sound. My computer rebooted and then couldn't boot up the hard drive.

It sounded a bit like a car in the throws of a breakdown. I prayed, caressed the key riddled dash, and told her she could do it. She can't. She didn't. She needs a hard drive transplant. She is not the little computer that could.

It never fails that some sort of disaster strikes me when I'm getting in my groove. When I'm about - to quote  a  song from my youth, "put the needle on the record when the drums beats go like this" - thankfully there's a crap Acer backup computer with a wonky backspace key to help me through this latest shit storm.

I took a deep breath, made some chicken & sausage gumbo (delish!), some peanut butter blossoms with out-of-date Hershey Kisses, and tried not see it as yet another sign that my writing is not meant to be.

Neil Gaiman, a hero of mine - writes everything in longhand, I told myself. I know this because (@)Neil himself confirmed it to me on Twitter.

It was near my birthday. I just bought The Graveyard Book. It was like the greatest birthday present ever that Neil Gaiman (who I appreciate more for his non-comic book stuff, though Sandman was pretty fucking cool), directly shared his process with me. It works for Neil and my image of him sitting in front of a massive blank tome by candlelight like the monks in Eco's "The Name of the Rose" except without the killing and what I'll assume is a lot less Sean Connery (connerie meaning bullshit in French btw).

If you wonder why I blog  - why I often lay my soul bare on the Internet about writing and all the things I manage to do when I'm not trying to write -  well it's because of Neil Gaiman. Discovering his blog basically changed my life. There's a link on the blogroll.

I couldn't get my momentum back Friday or Saturday despite the comfort of a back up computer.

I go through phases. I like notebooks, but until I found my Midori Traveler's Notebook I basically bought every notebook I saw, wrote a few sentences, and the minute I didn't like those sentences I bought and/or started a new notebook. New idea, new notebook used to be my way of thinking. I sort of got around my bad habit by buying myself a notebook I love. If you want to know why, read you can read my rave here.

And that's the thing. I use my notebooks. I collage. I write longhand. I use index cards (à la Nabokov). I use blank sheets of paper; yellow legal pads; post-its galore to draw, write phrases, type phrases with an old manual typewriter. I have a lot of "methods" because I admit I'm falsely obsessed with the Muses, inspiration, blah,blah fuckity blah.

I hate my own conneries and excuses. I hate that I'm unable to discipline myself the way I have in the past to get shit done. 

I am filled with this sort of dread that because writing hasn't come easily to me, as many other things have, that I'm never going to get it done. It's why I'm superstitious (i.e. why I talk to my computer like she's Christine when actually she's not a she at all as HAL is genderless). It's why I struggle. It's why I'm constantly looking for answers to how to write although I know that there are no answers. It's like I don't trust myself, so I need to affirm this with the words of real writers, of which I am sad to say despite advice that if I'm simply writing I am a writer, I do not feel I am.


So here is my affirmation for today. Sundays are generally the days I wake up late and then Coco comes for his English lesson. I try to make a lot of coffee and stay in the swing of things after the lesson is over, but it's tough. I have just asked Monsieur Redacteur if he can't go to Coco's house to give the lesson. He gets it. I'm chomping at the bit.


And maybe it's just a bit of Sean Connery, but sometimes things like this help.


"I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.."

          Dear Writer:

          Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.

          The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all - so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.

          So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher's side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.

          It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn't, and maybe it's because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

          If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

          It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.

          I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic '20s, and I was going out into that world to try and to be a writer.

          I was told, "It's going to take a long time, and you haven't got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe."

          "Why?" I asked.

          "Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor."

          It wasn't too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time - a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.

          She told me it wouldn't.

    1963

That was written by one of my other heroes, the writer John Steinbeck. 

 


I love this newspaper clipping. "America was proud of its front porch until John Steinbeck showed the backyard".

I still remember when I realised that this cartoon was actually referencing Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men":

I still remember the first time I read "The Pearl". I remember struggling through "Grapes of Wrath", feeling pretty bedraggled by the words that seemed to my 14 year old self heavy and covered with baked earth that hid from me some meaning that I somehow understood of hardship and futility like tilling soil that blows away like the wind and isn't even strong enough to hold on to something by its root.

That lonely desolate path that Steinbeck speaks of isn't that lonely or at least it has never seemed that way to me. I've always sort of seen myself as a would-be hero on a quest. I imagine the end will be something akin to the ending of Michael Ende's "Neverending Story". I will find out like Sebastian I am making a book come to life. Then I'll soar around in my fantasyland on my luck dragon, wave to a tortoise, and see Artax again.

Tickity-tock, goes my cat plate clock. I have five minutes to tell you a little story, about this cat plate. It's a plate with different cats in various poses around the lip that the old Chinese man who owns an odd little shop on the Place de Torcy (Paris 18e, Marx Dormoy) turned into a clock. It is now three minutes to a grey tabby or, as other people might call it, eleven-fifty seven.

This clock was originally intended to be a Christmas gift for someone who turned out to be a real bitch. It sat around the house, it's mechanisms threatening to break, and so I finally put it up over the door for safe keeping. She really was/is a bitch and I now consider the cat clock my compensation for bitchiness inflicted.

I am going to, as we say in French, stop des conneries.

In the words of The Thing, one of Stan Lee's genius characters from the Fantastic Four, "it's clobberin' time!"

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Secret Origins, The Story DC Comics

When it comes to the two big names in comic books (DC and Marvel), I am entrenched in neither camp. I love certain Marvel characters, their creators, writers, and artists - like Jean Grey (X-Men), Galactus, The Silver Surfer, Magneto - too much to declare myself full on Team Marvel, but my first brush with comics came courtesy of William Moulton Marston's star spangled Wonder Woman and she has always been my favourite. Then there's Batman, The Green Lantern, and Julius Schwartz's revamp of The Flash.

It took me a long time to hunt down "Secret Origins, The Story of DC Comics" and am I glad I did. To hear greats like Neil Gaiman (whose reimagining of The Sandman was genius), Alan Moore, Jim Lee, and see the old clips and the old timers was worth the effort. It was like watching a movie about my friends. Not just the heroes, anti-heroes, and even the villains that I adore, but the people who brought them to life.

Comic books have had a special place in my heart for nearly three decades. I fell in love with Wonder Woman comics before I could read. I knew from the pictures she could deflect bullets with her bracelets and that she was on the side of "good". I aspired to, like my heroine, do good deeds.  This idea that good people do good things has stuck with me ever since.

I literally cheered during this documentary. Cheered when I saw Julius Schwartz and Neil Gaiman herald Alan Moore as a genius because he is - The Swamp Thing, Watchmen, V for Vendetta prove it. I was inspired by these people who loved something so intensely. Just as I cannot police the universe because I don't have Hal Jordan's power ring, I was not blessed with the gift to draw comic books. I'm not even sure I could write them. I say not sure because before seeing this documentary I'd have said I couldn't even write them.

Now I feel a little differently. Now I see that same passion and fire for comics I feel has been infused into every comic book ever written, so maybe one day. Maybe one day I'll toss off my glasses and ummm peel off all my clothes and I'll be a hero...

And if you feel inspired to read comics and never have, let me give you a few tips.

• Start from the beginning.
• If you can afford it, buy colour omnibuses.
• Watch the films made about comics to see who you might be interested in knowing more about. I recommend: Stardust, Watchmen, X-Men First Class, Batman (Tim Burton's or Christ Nolan's series based on Frank Miller's Batman), and certain cartoons such as the 90's Batman, Superfriends (which was amazing), and the animated X-Men series (which was also amazing).
• Ebay.
• Enjoy.

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