Things that have made me LOL today

* I love internet memes. I like to think that within the dog's yoyo is a smaller you, and that you also has an even smaller yoyo with a dog inside that... Would Borges approve? No, he'd say it was silly.

* This South Park clip always has me in stitches. "Artemis Clyde Frog" is great. I now can't take 'Wild Wild West' at all seriously when it's repeated on TV - although whether I took it particularly seriously in the first place is another matter...

* Earlier in Paddington I witnessed a two tourists trying to pay for their KFC with Euros. The man at the til looked at them like they'd just turned up with wheelbarrowfull of Zimbabwean Dollars.

* We've noticed that 'Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares' seems to have fallen back on an utter reliance upon it's conventions. Now we've got to the stage where we can predict, with a high degree of accuracy, what'll happen: he'll turn up, call the waitress 'my darling', completely diss the crap out of all the food he's given, argue constantly with the boisterous owner/chef (who will likely be Italian-American and live somewhere on the East Coast - usually New Jersey) - then he'll say that they've "lost their passion". He'll bang on about 'fresh local produce', revamp and slash the menu, make the portions smaller (this is, after all, America), then his team will "work through the night" and completely reinvent the restaurant's interior - which the staff and by now abashed and humbled owner will love, especially the photos of their family which he's had put up around the place in a schmaltzy appeal to sentimentality. There'll be one highly problematic night to show how much of a mess the place is, then a successful one after Ramsay's changes. He always comes up with a signiture dish for the place (Italian cuisine? Meatballs then!) which debuts in a P.R. event for the local community. By the end of the show Ramsay has mended both the restaurant and the relationships between the people working in it and their families - hugs and learning all round. Then he disappears in his black coat like David Carradine in 'Kung Fu' or Banner at the end of an episode of 'The Incredible Hulk' - his work is never done and he must move on. In so many ways it's a perfect example of how shockingly bad US TV can be, but we're addicted. It's just too easy to take the mick.

* I find a lot of humour in the idea that Emilio Estevez bears a secret jealousy of Charlie Sheen and spends his days watching 'Mighty Ducks' on repeat, muttering "I could have been the big star with the sitcom, I wouldn't have become a f*cking sex addict..." I also like the idea of him as a Gormenghast/Farseer-Trilogyesque black-sheep of the Sheen dynasty, unable to bear the family name (although Estevez actually is the family name) and working clandestine plots to regain his rightful throne. Yep, that's a bit of a weird one.

* I've also been deriving much amusement from pissing Sara off with my Jackie Mason impressions. What, you want I should stop?

The making of a hero

I discovered the 'Hero Factory' via Mark Newton's blog and decided to have a go, seeing as I'm feeling 'tired' and it's probably the most creative thing I'm capable of at the moment.

Here are the results:

Not sure about the name, I think it's a little too functional - hardly going to strike fear into evildoers' hearts is it? I prefer...

UNPUBLISHEDWRITERMAN!

Watch him battle the evil forces of procrastination and writer's block! See him drink beer and consume epic amounts of KFC and chinese food with his mighty spork! Remark upon the fact that he needs a shave at your peril! Listen to him talk endlessly about 'the novel' which hasn't even reached the first 100,000 words yet, let alone a first draft!

Marvel have yet to call me back. Bastards.

Progress

Yeah!

Don't bother telling me that's unreadable...

My problem is...

...I can't write padding. Well, it's one of my problems.

I don't know how on earth this novel's going to reach 15000 words - I'm barely at 15K and I've already given away too much, moving on too quickly, and so on.

Hopefully by the time I hit 50K I'll have developed a better sense of how to pace it, and will have bulked up the chapters I've written so far. Once again I'm reminded just how big an undertaking this actually is.

When satire transforms into sincerity

I'm so taken with an idea for a nonexistant book that I posted on one of my other blogs that I'm actually considering writing it as a proper story. It started off as a sort of generic Magic Realist pisstake but I've grown increasingly fond of the title and basic plot idea that I came up with. It's funny how these things turn out.

Holler at ya President!

Shouts out to all my presidents

BBC One - 'The Victorians' presented by Jeremy Paxman

"Victorian paintings have long been derided by the art world as sentimental rubbish, but what do they tell us about the world the artists inhabited?

In a four-part series for BBC One, broadcaster Jeremy Paxman delves into the "goldmine" of information the paintings provide about Victorian life.

Using the paintings as a tool to explore Victorian society, Paxman looks at how the middle-classes, mill-owners, working people, and those on the bottom rung of society's ladder lived in those buttoned-up times.

The Victorians airs on BBC One on Sundays at 2100 GMT"

-Taken from BBC News

I saw the first episode 'Painting The Town' last night (available on BBC iPlayer) and was pleasantly surprised. It's no secret that I like Victoriana and that it looms large over my reading & writing preferences. The programme succeeded on two counts really: the Victorian history side appealed to me, and the art side to my other half. Believe me, it's rare that we find something on television by chance that ticks boxes for both of us.

I discovered two artists over the course of the program that I immediately ran off and Googled afterwards: John Atkinson Grimshaw and Gustave Doré.

- Grimshaw, Humber Dockside, Hull, Dated 1882

I've always liked landscapes, city scenes, sunsets - I'm quite a philistine and a sentimentalist I suppose, in art terms, but they please me. I was struck by how much Grimshaw's paintings remind me of some of the kind of book cover artwork that I find myself most drawn to, the kind of thing I'd like to put on the covers of my own works one day (touch wood).

- Doré, Warehousing in the City, London: A Pilgrimage (1872)

Doré on the other hand dealt primarily with engravings. He lends London a look of permanent night, in a way (as Paxman points out in the programme) - a dirty, overcrowded, gritty, stinking, vibrant, beautiful, baroque, organised mess of a place. This is precisely the way I like to look at the place both in terms of others' depiction of it in fiction and in their cities based in some way upon it and also my own.

Things that probably aren't

Inspired heavily by the likes of Steve Aylett's 'Lint' and Borges' apocrypha, I've started another blog - 'The Apocrypharium'.

It'll contain reviews and the like pertaining to works of literature, cinema, music, and TV that may or may not actually exist. Likely the latter.

I'd be more than happy to include anyone else's contributions.

Extract from prologue

...sated, it turns its head ponderously this way and that, eventually facing upward: a dizzying wealth of stars. Once they were familiar but now they are made strange by the years. It reminds itself that there are no stars where it lies now, in a place where memory comprises almost the totality of existence and all else is cold stone and silence. With a deft exercise of will it scatters these thoughts and returns to the past.

Stars. No end of stars, blinking into existence and disappearing again as quickly, the life cycle of entire worlds played out before there is time to recognise it. Time is liquid, abstract, to be lived or recollected as slowly or quickly as it chooses. It slows then to the tempo where concepts like nights and days have meaning in time to see a meteor shower rake the horizon.
       As the glittering fire falls through the atmosphere a new image transposes itself: dust motes caught in a beam of light, in a small room with bare floorboards, and now it is shooting down toy soldiers with a cork gun...

John Fante - 'Wait Until Spring, Bandini'

I began reading this novel last night and finished it during the early hours of this morning, as I'm wont to do occasionally. It was the same with the last one by John Fante that I read, 'Ask The Dust' - as with the likes of Charles Bukowski, Richard Brautigan, and sometimes Adolfo Bioy Casares, I seem to be able to rampage through Fante's prose like a monster truck with its breaks cut. I meet no resistance at any point - it's a pleasurable and easy venture - and this is not to be confused with simplicity.

Devotees of Bukowski will probably find much to like in Fante's work. The former freely acknowledged him as a huge influence, and when reading the likes of 'Wait Until Spring, Bandini' you find echoes of Henry Chinaski when in fact you have to remind yourself that it's the other way round. Both are concerned with the workings and foundation of the male psyche in bygone days of blue collar America. Bandini's America and in particular Bandini's Los Angeles feels very much the same as Chinaski's.

Knowing the cliche yet throwing myself entirely upon the reader's mercy in the hope that you won't adopt too much of a scornful expression, I think part of the reason that I enjoy and relate to the works of Bukowski and Fante so much is that I was once a young man not even out of his teens who, mostly in the name of beer money, did a variety of jobs he hated and was attuned to the sense of unfairness, humilation, cynicism, and above all boredom that such a situation inspires. Bukowski writes in his introduction to 'The Bandini Quartet' that at one point in his life he was prone to exclaiming "I am Bandini, Arturo Bandini!" and this in turn mirrors the spirit in which many read his own tales of Chinaski - there is much to be found that is real and true if you've led and found yourself stuck in a certain way of life. I am not Arturo Bandini any more than I am Henry Chinaski, but enough of their thoughts and lives coincide with mine that I find it hard not to identify strongly with them at times. This is a testament to the power of both authors I think, although probably also to my own inclination to insert myself in some way into narratives that truly grip me. We all do it though, right?

Behold: the ultimate archvillain

A bizarre combination of 'the most evil man in history' and arguably one of the most harmless lifeforms on the planet.

Saying goodbye

"I felt what we always feel when someone dies - the sad awareness, now futile, of how little it would have cost us to be more loving"
- Jorge Luis Borges

My grandmother died this morning. I had mixed feelings as to whether to post about it and still do but she's all I'm thinking about at the moment so she's all I can write about.

It's a strange experience to hear of someone's passing when you haven't seen them for a matter of years. You don't really believe it; it doesn't register. I've been feeling quite numb all day, for the most part, and I've felt bad because of it. I wonder how other people deal with death: you can never really know, not really.

At the moment I'm still wishing I'd visited more. I can't really excuse myself that. Life's been busy, but never that busy. It's the very worst kind of regret. I hope she was proud of me, and would have continued to be. I'm going to try my best to ensure that. Always.

Love you Grandma Dot. I'll miss you. If we could have just one more of those sunday afternoons like when I was a little boy, nothing could make me happier. You'll always be in my thoughts.

The story so far...

Well, this isn't all the story so far, but a collage of small sections representative of it. One that you can't read. I know, what's the point of it? I don't know myself. Sort of satisfying though. Look! I am actually getting things done!

I'm very pleased with how it's going. One thing I've realised is that you can think and plan all you like, but it's only when you're really in the process of writing it that the story blossoms. There's not a buzz in the world like it.

As you might be able to tell from that series of screenshots, I've set the page layout up as close as I can to that of a "real book" - this helps me psychologically, as weird as that sounds, to feel more like I'm writing "a real book". Laugh it up, I deserve it, but it works for me. It also gives me a better idea of pace and structure.

I wish I could post up an extract. I really do. Soon come.

Ross Kemp hits those mean streets

Bare lolz

Two productive days

Well, I've almost written a chapter. I'm aware I have to write roughly fifty times this much to reach publisher expectations for a novel 'in the genre', and that I'll probably spend even longer editing, but it's a start. I'm really tempted to post up an extract, but I'll have to keep that impulse at bay. I think it's a bad habit picked up from Creative Writing seminars and DeviantArt - the need to have instant feedback/validation as soon as you've banged out a few thousand words. The 'real world' is a very different place, and needs certain adjustments in attitude and approach accordingly.

I had a couple of chapters I wrote months ago, but they were on my old hard-drive that spectacularly died on me, a terrible loss that I'm still mourning. Those earlier few pages bear so little resemblance to what I'm doing now, though, that maybe it's a very good thing: a fresh start.

Let's hope I can keep up the momentum.

The cake is a lie

A delicious lie but a lie nonetheless.

I suppose it makes no difference though as there is no spoon either.