1) Godwotterous writerly brain syndrome 2) Blaming your tools, looking for magic programs
More writerly occupational hazards
Adopt a new writing program? Sure. Classic avoidance behavior, combined with the “let’s buy a new guitar because the old one doesn’t work” syndrome. Or was Scrivener something my writing project direly needed? Could this be the Rx for godwotterous writerly brain syndrome?
I’ve been thinking about the plasticity of the brain, and the notion that everyone from musicians to London taxi drivers grow relevant volumes of brain—in some cases, I’m going to imagine, positively Schwartzeneggerian neural structures—to cope with what they need to know and do. I’ve also been thinking about the way my speculative trilogy has been going (call it science fiction if you must), and I fear my own brain is evolving in parallel with the novels.
My question: Might my brain be starting to resemble what the Brits describe as an architectural folly? That’s right. Mirroring the trilogy, it could be effectively growing turrets, niches full of neo-classical statuary, ramparts and doodahs on all sides, probably surrounded by a godwotterous garden in which you could lose an army. What kind of writerly Muse would want to live in a joint like that, eh?
I have another question, one perhaps best addressed to a psychiatrist. What happens when—supposing I finish it—this unlikely novelistic epic succeeds? Will the neural scaffolding then remain, a rambling, ramshackle folly standing in a garden full of grottos and gazebos and arbors and obelisks? Not to mention pink flamingoes and gnomes? Christ. What will I be able to do with a brain like that? Except maybe embark on another trilogy. The horror, eh?
Given the number of digital and hard-copy files, and notes and working drafts that have accumulated over the years as I scribbled bits in the interstices between bread-and-butter gigs as a writer/editor, even my freakishly refashioned mind would have to fold at the thought of making sense of it all. (Better, perhaps, I simply burn the lot of it and set out afresh.)
Except that I’ve been given new hope.
I’m now working in a program called Scrivener, which I heartily recommend to writers and researchers everywhere.
I’ve long resisted the idea of having software programmers decide they know better than I do how to proceed. But Scrivener doesn’t work that way. It has itself evolved over the past few years in light of feedback from working wordsmiths, and it’s an entirely unobtrusive, unpresumptuous, endlessly flexible godsend. It works. Magnificently, it works.
Here’s a link to a review that helped swing me.
I’m not even getting a commission.
Some good things to do with an Internet addiction
"The Joy of Quiet," a story by Pico Iyer in the NY Times (29 Dec. 2011) resonates with something I proposed a week ago at a Christmas party.
.
I'd been talking about plans to go away for a few weeks to finish a novel in draft. As usual, when such an idea is broached, people were quick to say things such as, "Hey, I know a great place on the coast down south" or "My uncle has a yacht crewed entirely by world-class lady beach volleyball players winding down between tournaments." That kind of thing is all very well, but what I really need is somewhere barren of interesting people to chat to (including beach volleyball players), at least one room with a blank wall and no view of wonderful scenery and, most important of all, no Internet connection. In fact, I'd been thinking of some grubby little upcountry hotel here in Thailand.
This is not mere eccentricity. Lots of writers feel the same way, I believe. At least one successful writer (whose name escape me just now) goes so far as to say no one can write a book in the vicinity of an Internet connection. That may be no exaggeration.
At this point my Sara, as is her wont, interrupts. "All you need is self-discipline," she says.
Uh-huh. That's right. I don't even have the self-discipline to activate Freedom, a program I installed on my computers that allows you to disable your communications programs for anywhere up to eight hours at a time (see “Addictions, spinal deficiencies and disciplinary infinite regresses”).
But let's get back to my proposal, which will make both me and some obliging investor rich overnight. All I need is enough cash to buy and renovate a smallish hotel, preferably here in Bangkok.
Here's the deal. We subdivide the joint into windowless cells, each of them equipped with comfortable office chair, desk, adjustable lighting, cot, a basic toilet and washroom, coffee machine, and, by default, no Internet connection. Oh, yeah--and a solid door that unlocks only from the outside.
Just a prototype; we'd tart it up somewhat.
Whoa. We’ll have writers queuing up to pay our exorbitant rates for incarceration till they finish their book in draft or else cry uncle (for which we’ll charge them a hefty penalty). The punters can order food which, for modest charges, our staff will slip through a slot of the sort used in solitary confinement in all the best prisons. Writing supplies, computer repairs, etc. will be provided in the same way.
The real money, though—and this, I have to admit, is pure genius—will come from what we'll charge for temporary access to the Internet. Clients who just can't manage the cold-turkey route may submit a formal written request, agreeing to pay ridiculous sums by the minute for the privilege of being allowed online for a stipulated time. (Of course clients will also have to sign an initial agreement that protects us from charges of kidnapping and unlawful detention.)
So we provide a much-needed service for our age, amassing heaps of good karma at the same time we get obscenely rich.
This idea’s time has come. As I read Pico Iyer’s article, I kept feeling he was on the verge of stumbling upon it himself. I await good news from prospective investors.
Any good ideas for what to call this facility, which in my mind is already becoming an international chain? Mistress Muse's No Mercy Mansion isn't quite right, though it is pretty alliterative.
Writerly occupational hazards: Emotional opportunism & spiritual callousing
Two years after his death, Michael Jackson is back in the news, with his former doctor defending himself against charges of involuntary manslaughter. I’m not sure what emotions this case is arousing in the general public, but it has caused me to revisit my first reaction to the so-called King of Pop’s untimely passing.
“A long time after painting [his first wife] Camille on her deathbed, Monet confessed to his friend Georges Clemenceau about the pain or shock he felt when he suddenly realized, while painting [Camille Monet sur son lit de mort] that he was studying her pallid face and noting the tiny variations of tone and color brought about by death, as if they were an observable everyday matter! He ended by saying: ‘Ainsi de la bête qui tourne sa meule. Plaignez-moi, mon ami.’ (Like the beast who turns his millstone. Pity me, my friend.)”
John Berger, “The Enveloping Air: Light and moment in Monet” (Harper’s, January 2011).
My own initial reaction to Michael Jackson’s death presented a real parallel to Monet's experience, and makes me question my own compassion.
Of course Jackson’s passing was sad—his whole life was sad, by many accounts. And what was my immediate response upon hearing the news? What a pity, I thought. I’d looked forward to seeing where his continuing reinvention of himself would eventually lead. But now I could no longer enjoy imagining the range of potential 80-year-old Jackson personae.
Does that strike you as callous?
Maybe. But, beyond his curiosity value, Jackon, effectively, was a leading exponent of a novel evolutionary development. Cultural evolution has long since superceded biological evolution. And now, what with advances in plastic surgery, bioengineering, and cyborg-type replacement parts and augmentations, human beings are increasingly taking a deliberate hand in their own design (and all this to much applause from the Transhumanists).
Which leads me to the following proposition. Jackson’s real contribution to posterity might have been this: He was our canary in what is becoming an ever deeper and more mysterious pit of our own devising, filled with perils we cannot yet see.
And now our canary is dead.
RIP MJ. I offer commemorative haikus (which, as I’ve said before, are much easier than writing books).
Michael Jackson, our
Tranhumanistic
Canary in a soul mine.
Michael Jackson, our
Commoditized
Ingenue in a gold mine.
Psychopharmacologic
Infelicity.
Michael Jackson, dead.
Psychopharmacologic
Alternative life-
Stylish Jackson death.
An eighty-year-old
New Michael Jackson
We’ll never know.
It occurs to me to ask: Will I be able to view myself with the same writerly dispassion, as I morph away over the years remaining to me? I’ve already had my eyes lasiked; not long ago I had a bathmat installed in my thorax (patching a ventral hernia, or containing the alien? ); there’s every chance that, should I live long enough, I’ll wind up the proud owner of artificial knees… Hell, they’ll probably be implanting info & communications chips right into our heads even before I get around to retiring my already antique, nearly four-year-old iPhone 2G.
Click on the first photo for a progressive portrait of Jackson over his life. (It has occurred to me that visitors often don't realize that many of the illustrations in these posts are linked to URLs.)
Can the novel survive the demise of novelists?
The demise of the novel? This has been predicted again and again over the decades, if not the centuries, yet people keep reading novels. Here’s a recent vote of confidence in their persistence:
“The book-length text is coded in our DNA and will never go away; it is the written version of the oral myths and histories told on consecutive nights around campfires for 80,000 years. In each new generation, roughly the same percentage of people is born with this mutation: the need to be immersed in a long story told entirely through words.”
(Russell Galen, prominent New York literary agent)
Galen’s take is encouraging. But compare Booker Prize-winner Graham Swift’s even more recent remarks regarding the effects of e-books on writerly livelihoods:
“I think the tendency will be that writers will get even less than they get now for their work and sadly that could mean that some potential writers will see that they can't make a living, they will give up and the world would be poorer for the books they might have written, so in that way it is quite a serious prospect.”
Quoted in The Telegraph (17 August 2011)
Swift would seem to be saying yeah, novels are good, but you actually need novelists to produce them, and without even a whiff of financial support to keep them at it, how many books are they likely to write? Except of course, for those purest of artists who are able to live on love alone. 
Another writerly occupational hazard: starving to death.
Savage Chickens cartoon used with permission of the artist, Doug Savage.
Graham Swift's Amazon page.
Writerly occupational hazards: Plagiarism
Plagiarism has become more tempting and easier, perhaps, in this digital age. The danger of being found out may also be greater.
Here’s a copy of the letter I e-mailed a week ago to The Tribune, New Delhi (I've yet to hear from either the newspaper or the writer):
Dear Editors,
I must inform you that more than half of Uma Vasudeva's review of C.Y. Gopinath's The Books of Answers (The Tribune, New Delhi, 7 August 2011) has been lifted pretty well verbatim, with no acknowledgement, from my own online review, which I blogged on 19 July and posted on the Smashwords website on 18 July. The passage in question extends from "The book is compulsively readable" to "Pat's relationship with his son Tippy".
Perhaps infected with a laissez-faire attitude that threatens to prevail in this digital age, I considered ignoring this matter. But plagiarism bespeaks intellectual laziness and dishonesty -- theft, in fact -- and I believe it should be resisted, no matter what changes our popular culture may be undergoing.
I'm not blaming your publication for the plagiarism; I expect you published the article unawares. I find it difficult to believe, however, that the writer in question wasn't aware of what she was doing, and thought you would want to know.
And here’s Jack Shackaway accusing yours truly of being a kettle and calling the pot black.
Hope in dark times
Just when things couldn't get any worse, they did. But it turned out they didn't really, and Sara's right, I worry too much.
I've just come back into my office, and I heard this horrible rasping from the left wing of my iMac. My mind is going, "It's the fan, right? It can't be the hard drive, it can't be the hard drive, aiyeeeee."
Careful investigation has revealed the real problem. I had an online jazz station playing, way down low, and what I heard was the drummer's hi-hat going tska-tska-tska and scaring the shit out of me.
Good News 'R Us, eh?
Earlier case of falling-sky syndrome.
Worrywart (alt. worry wart) from eymonline.com: 1956, from comic strip "Out Our Way" by U.S. cartoonist J.R. Williams (1888-1957). According to those familiar with the strip, Worry Wart was the name of a character who caused others to worry, ... the inverse of the current colloquial meaning. The Word Detective has more.
Home-grown back therapies rool!
Caption: Our adventurer, with his new office chair, just after summiting the roof of his apartment building five times in a row without oxygen.
Breaking news on the old-crockish falling-apart front: I've just cured a rogue back, gone bad in the prime o’ me loif and all, by giving my office chair to the guard downstairs in favor of sitting on an exercise ball at my desktop computer, alternating this with standing at my filing cabinet with a laptop on a shelving plank resting across the second drawer from the top. The rest of the self-prescribed therapy has entailed running up and down the fire-escape stairs till I'm all fucked up.
And it has worked. One day last week I had trouble getting off a bed; now I appear to be fighting fit.
But the really good news is that I narrowly missed paying 45,000 baht for an Aeron ergonomic office chair instead. (Cost of alternative therapy: 450 baht for the 75cm exercise ball—that’s 100 times less than the Aeron technological miracle.) Medical note: That makes me feel good all over, not just in the back area.
By way of celebration, Sara yesterday bought a leather-upholstered lounger for the living room, which means I now have a third work station.
A link just provided by Jeff the Giant Anthopologist, the NY Times on what to do with a back.
Here's a theme song I can safely pack away for future reference, sometime way down the road, I hope:
Ain’t Gonna Need This House No Longer (Stuart Hamblen)
And an extra, added bonus, only because I like it:
Truckin' (The Grateful Dead).
Writerly occupational hazards: Ersatz creativity (boozing)
Inebriation is a false Muse. As seductive as they may be, chemical substitutes for true creative intoxication don’t work.
Maybe there are exceptions that prove this rule. Malcolm Lowry, e.g., did much field research for his brilliant novel Under the Volcano, which included a main protagonist who was drinking himself to death. (Lowry, unfortunately, perhaps in his quest for verisimilitude, was himself to go all the way at an early age.) Emulating his own hard-boiled detective protagonists, writer Micky Spillane claimed he’d go to the office, get his feet up on his desk, crack a bottle of whiskey and dictate the next book off the top of his head to his (leggy) secretary. I can almost believe him, having read a couple of his stories way back when I was a boy. Though I suspect he asked his secretary to have a quick look at his punctuation, after she washed out his shot glass and ashtray and before sending the ms. to the publisher.
Generally, though, writing and boozing don’t mix.
James Joyce had this to say about matters:
Boozing does not necessarily have to go hand in hand with being a writer, as seems to be the concept in America. I therefore solemnly declare to all young men tyring to become writers that they do not actually have to become drunkards first.
Samuel Johnson, with his usual verbal parsimony, suggested this:
One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
What the hell. I’m moved to coin an aphorism of my own:
Our fiction-writing faculties may also produce splendid daydreams. Especially when inflamed by alcohol, these in turn conduce to celebrating one’s literary awards before they’re awarded, not to mention counting one’s groupies before they’ve hatched.
Our friend Jack Shackaway says all that’s rubbish. He tells me that boozing provides him with much literary lumber for the building. In fact, here’s something he has just passed me:
“Doctor, doctor,” I say. “I am suffering from a chronic hangover.”
“Yes,” she tells me. “That is an occupational hazard of piss artistry, and there is no cure unless you find another line of work.”
“But all I know is writing.”
“Then we can only treat the symptoms. There is no cure, although I personally find that a Bloody Mary with double vodka and a megadose of vitamins B and C on the side can work wonders.”
At this point in my dream the doctor takes to looking much younger and shapelier and she starts to remove her clothes, and I’m wondering whether this is part of the treatment, when I’m awakened by a nurse.
I see my doctor riding shotgun in the background. Then she comes forward to say, “It’s confirmed. You have dengue fever.”
Dengue fever, eh? When you’ve had as many force-10 hangovers as I’ve come up with these past months, you laugh at dengue fever. Almost.
I make a grab for the nurse, but then I wake up again, and I’m at home.
And it’s really a hangover I’m looking at after all
QED, eh? (Referring to my earlier claim re. drinking and writing.)
A last perspective, this from Philip Larkin:
Get stewed.
Books are a load of crap.
That, and the other literary quotes, aside from my own, are from Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anedcotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights, by John Winokur.
The cartoon illustration is from “The Joy of Hangovers" in Bangkok Old Hand, by Collin Piprell (out of print).
Inspirational hobologoist aphorisms & epigrams
Insights into the hobologoist mindset.
Money corrupts.
Impecuniousness rools, OK!
Artists must suffer.
I have my principles.
Solipsism means never having to say you’re being corrupted by money and prizes.
I like semi-colons; commercial editors can go screw themselves.
I like [literary practice of your choice]; commercial editors can go screw themselves.
Hobologoists don’t write query letters.
Nobody ever read Antoine Blorschacterforth either.
Save the trees, save the bytes, save having to explain to critics why they are fools. Remain unreadable, unpublishable, unflappable in face of famine.
Zen hobologoism: “Why write a book that no one reads? That is the whole point.”
Taoist hobologoism: “Stuff happens. Some of it we call books. Better to contain these than let them lead to readers and critics, eh?” (Few people realize that Taoism originated in Canada.)
Chief Smokey Tent: “I write my novels on the wind; read them if you can.”
Collin Piprell: “Haiku are easier than novels, unless inscrutability is your first aim.”
Marketing model for hobologoists.
Kafka portrait by Dimitrije Popović.
Gallows humor for writers
I see I haven’t posted an item since 17 March. Excuses range from “I’ve been too busy to blog” and “I’m suffering a multi-tasking deficiency” to “I’ve sustained a fit of sanity, wherein I see no percentage in posting elaborate messages into the Void.”
Mostly, though, I've been in thrall to a draft sequel for MOM. The Muse, revealing herself as a dominatrix this time around, has shacked up with me big time. (I speak only figuratively, of course. Good morning, Sara.)
This novel is shaping up to be a real monster—in size and, if I’m not careful, in Frankensteinian ungainliness as well. Unless of course the Grim Reaper intervenes, which—given average lifespans for the modern male and the rate at which I'm proceeding—is a statistical near-certainty.
Working dust-jacket copy:
This book is for real readers—for people with almost pathological cravings for gnarly substance, for readers who take Proust on picnics, who wish that Hegel’s sentences were longer and who are sorry David Foster Wallace’s editors convinced him to reduce the endnotes in Infinite Jest from a few hundred to just one hundred pages (388 extant notes in total, with notes within notes and, in least one case, notes within notes within a note).
If you aren’t this sort of reader, then go f*** yourself. This book isn’t for you.
“You can’t say that,” says my Sara.
“You don’t understand modern marketing,” I reply.
Man for an age
Recent Posts
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- Some good things to do with an Internet addiction
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