Drift

GQ's Eric Ducker interviews Greg Gonzalez:

The initial concept for Cigarettes After Sex was to create songs with honest lyrics, like Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" or "Chelsea Hotel #2." but with music inspired by new wave and synth pop acts like Erasure, New Order, and early Madonna. Gonzalez's words had more of a bitter edge back then, so he phased out the confessional part and tried to be more poetic. The music got darker and more reverb-y, like the Jesus and Mary Chain. Then in 2012, he had a particularly rough year—a close friend died, he was going through a breakup—and he fell under the spell of the Cowboy Junkies' The Trinity Session album, the one with their cover of "Sweet Jane" on it.

Has anyone not been haunted by the voice of Margo Timmins? Said Sam Usher in Electric:

Dawn was coming up. The light was the colour of cornflour. The traffic sounded like gentle rain. Somewhere between sleeping and waking she had slipped out of the bed and left me alone. Beyond the Chrysler Building the Eiffel Tower was fading in the sun. I was dreaming a lullaby: a girl singing 'Sweet Jane', her faint voice stretching to reach the notes. Na na na na na, sweet Jane. And then it really was a voice.

Also playing this week: M83's mind-blowing performance on KEXB.

Auckland on air

This Sunday France Culture will broadcast a documentary about Auckland featuring in situ readings from my novels Departure Lounge, Shirker, Electric and The Church of John Coltrane along with interviews with Auckland artists, musicians and general creative types. You can read about the broadcast and the podcast at the France Culture site.

His nibs

I got into clutch pencils late. I'm a fan of the old-fashioned wooden kind (2B) which I enjoy sharpening with a pocket knife (a 60mm Laguiole) or the aluminium-bodied sharpener that my grandfather gave me, which I've carried around the globe several times. When I was in Bali the humidity was so intense that graphite was the only thing that could make a mark on the wilting page but in London both knives and wood shavings are frowned upon so I picked up a plastic-barrelled clutch from Ryman's in Oxford Street and have never looked back. The Staedtler pictured here is aluminium with a plastic cap - 2B, 0.5mm leads. The metal barrel encourages the user to press harder than necessary - it's like holding a scalpel or a dentist's tool - but it has a nice action on newsprint, which is good for the NYT crossword. The Staedtler is also extremely well-balanced, and cylindrical. (With clutch pencils many people go for Pentels which are hexagonal, too short and set with a clip that's too low in the body. Fine for sketching perhaps, but useless for writing.)

The Rotring cartridge fountain pen glides across Moleskine stock as smoothly as a pencil. Rotring's black ink leaves a very satisfying mark but their red is rather wan. This model has a medium fine nib and a beautifully straight cylindrical barrel with no adornments which makes the grip comfortable, although the proportions are slightly wide; if I'm writing for a longer stretch I tend to change to the more slender Aurora. The Rotring is also very reliable. It has never leaked either in heat or an airplane cabin, and the shaft accommodates a spare second cartridge which cleverly balances the pen. It's also excellent for drawing, which can be a distraction. I have two but can identify this one as the going-away present I received when I left the Auckland City Art Gallery because it has a little dent in the cap.

I don't really like ballpoints but they write on anything so you need to have one. This model has obvious appeal because it's from the Royal Plaza on Scotts Singapore but it also has an extremely satisfying click action. Virgin Atlantic also do an excellent complimentary ballpoint although the clip is loose and easily lost. Flashing either sort about gives lazy thinkers the impression that you're richer and more successful than you are. (Disclosure: VA flight attendants on the Heathrow / LAX do a fantastic gin and tonic.) Both are also light enough to tuck behind your ear. I'm right-handed but put pens behind my left ear because I am contrary. (I can also write left-handed: I was very bored as a child.)

My Aurora uses longer Parker refills and tends to leak. It's fitted with a fine nib but with use the tines have spread to the point where it must be a medium now. I used this pen to write most of Shirker and Electric, using green legal pads because I found the colour soothing and it made the pages easy to spot after being inserted in a white-paged ms. (In New Zealand legal pads came in an onion skin finish but in the UK they're called Conference Pads and are scratchy, thick and no fun.) The Aurora's nib benefits from a smoother writing surface; at the moment I'm mostly using it on the Ryman wire bound Shorthand notebook. Because it's old it tends to leak, especially on planes, and the slit admits too much ink for recycled stock. Nevertheless this is the pen I use most - it's mah thinkin' pen. I use it as often as I use the lap top.

My disposable pen of choice is a Pilot V Ball which is the most precise marker on a Moleskine or almost any other stock. If you want to diagram something, it's ideal. But the short moulded barrels are ridged to secure the cap and the moulding digs after a while, which drives me nuts. What's wrong with a smooth shaft, people? The rolling tip also encourages poor penmanship so after half a page I end up writing like a doctor. I use the black one when I need to make notes or doodle during phone calls, the red to correct a typescript and the green to run big diagonal slashes across the page when I'm juggling the black, red ink and pencilled notes.

The Horse is dead

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is on now. Impossible to estimate how much I love a Western. I was raised on them by dint of the timeline: there was nothing else on. Five Card Stud was the first movie I ever left feeling depressed, and I wasn't even that old when I saw it. Since then that bad, sad-in-the-belly feeling has been my benchmark for all manner of art. If it's the Five Card Stud feeling then what I saw may not have been bad or good, but it moved me.

Westerns, like jazz and sci-fi, have become absorbed into the mainstream. I never enjoyed western novels, with the begrudging exception of Pete Dexter's Deadwood -- which is no relation to the TV series. But I refer to Westerns again and again, in Electric, in several short stories ('Running Hot & Cold' and 'Oilskin').

I grew up in the age of the counter western: El Topo, the Sergio Leone westerns (which we watched as the real thing and never considered ironic), John Wayne as the old guard -- gunfights as martial arts epic, a genre which my generation also understood. Prose was the stuff in between: the moody contemplation. I'm less certain now. But I still love the pics: the stretch of vistas, the changing climate, the rules.

Ms Fing

A notebook page from Electric. I was sitting up in bed late one night writing the novel ("lemonade" was later changed to "soda") and paused to sketch the cat ignoring me from the corner of the bed. She liked to perch there so she could be as far away from me as possible while I was writing. This only made me like her more.

Alex Kasman from the Department of Mathematics at the College of Charleston in South Carolina has reviewed Electric as part of MathFiction, a blog in which he collects information about significant references to mathematics in fiction. Even if he hadn't reviewed my novel I would still consider this approach to literature to be a very cool idea: a different way of slicing the data.

Translation

I've yet to meet every one of my translators. Strangers assume that the process of having your words swapped into a different language is intimate but I've found it's almost the opposite. The publisher gives the translator the novel and the translator comes back to the author with questions, and even then only sometimes. My French translators have had many questions, the Italians a few and the Germans hardly any. The biggest sticking problems with language have been those between editors in the UK and the US but even these have been merely a matter of a few words or a local phrase. In such cases the most important language becomes that of the printer, "STET" and "COLLOQ" being two useful examples.

Overall the experience of having my work transformed so efficiently and without fuss has been a nice reality check. No matter how much you sweat over a novel, in the end that's all it is: just another book.

My French translators Anouk Neuhoff and Isabelle Chapman speak English as well as I do plus a few other languages besides. I blame them for my dismal French because they are excellent conversationalists and even better hosts. Whenever I've attempted a few phrases in their presence their comments are nothing but kind. Anouk translated Shirker and Electric for Christian Bourgois in Paris, and Isabelle translated Departure Lounge. It's my impression that each has imparted her own style to my work but I don't know what that might be. I do know that in France even readers of popular fiction can pay as much attention to the translator's name as they do to the author's. Which is logical if not sobering.

The effects of translation on a writer's work can of course be radical. A good modern example is the Japanese author Haruki Murakami whose novels lurch in accessibility depending on whether his translator is Jay Rubin or Alfred Birnbaum. Rubin's English language version of Murakami is poetic and calm but Birnbaum's, I'm told, is "more Japanese." If readers of Lugenspiele (Pack of Lies - Aus dem neuseelandischen Englisch von Dietmar Hefendehl) or Fuori dal tempo (Shirker - traduzione di Massimo Ortelio e Annamaria Raffo) are experiencing a similar disjunction I can only be thankful to be in such company.

As a writer I owe a great deal to works in translation. When I was growing up in south Auckland the local cinema screened Italian spaghetti westerns and Hong Kong martial arts pictures in which the overdubbed dialogue or subtitles was an integral part of the viewing experience. Similarly the local library held an oddly comprehensive collection of French and Japanese novels which I enjoyed as much for the clarity of the translator's prose as I did for the stories. There were doubtless gaps in meaning but like scratches in a favourite vinyl LP or reflections in a painting's glazing the disjunctions seemed a natural part of the work.

Subsequently the thought that a novel might be translated has encouraged me to focus not on the details of language so much as the broader story. Even if my words will be changed I know the brute narrative will survive. The first question an author is always asked is "What's it about?" so it helps to be able to say in English or any other language. Travellers to foreign lands know how far they can spin out simple phrases such as "Do you have a table?" and "What time is the ferry?" Authors likewise could do well practicing the sentence beginning "My novel is..." Try it some time. Translating the words is easy: finding them in the first place is hard.

(Sunday Star Times, 2004)