Chad Taylor

White rabbit


Fred Topel: How do you make a genre film your own?

David Mamet: Well, you can't help but make a distinct movie. If you give yourself up to the form, it's going to be distinctively your own because the form's going to tell you what's needed. That's one of the great things I find about working in drama is you're always learning from the form. You're always getting humbled by it. It's exactly like analyzing a dream. You're trying to analyze your dreams. You say, 'I know what that means; I know exactly what that means; why am I still unsettled?' You say, 'Let me look a little harder at this little thing over here. But that's not important; that's not important; that's not important. The part where I kill the monster – that's the important part, and I know that means my father this and da da da da da. But what about this little part over here about the bunny rabbit? Why is the bunny rabbit hopping across the thing? Oh, that's not important; that's not important.' Making up a drama is almost exactly analogous to analyzing your dreams. That understanding that you cleanse just like the heroes cleanse not from your ability to manipulate the material but from your ability to understand the material. It's really humbling, just like when you finally have to look at what that little bunny means. There's a reason why your mind didn't want to see that. There's a reason why you say, 'Oh, that's just interstitial material. Fuck that. That's nothing, right?' Because that's always where the truth lies, it's going to tell you how to reformulate the puzzle.

– David Mamet interviewed by Fred Topel for Diary of a Screenwriter

You're talking about memories

I wanted to find a passage I remembered from a novel I'd read in 1993. I had the book -- first edition, hardbound. I got it down from the shelf and flicked through it for a good 10 minutes but couldn't find the passage. But I could remember a phrase from it, and I had a copy of the book as an epub. So I opened the epub on my Nook, searched for the phrase and found the passage in seconds.

Digital beats paper.

Later that week I wanted to find a newspaper article about a person which I had saved as a PDF but I couldn't remember the person's name. After searching my laptop for every related phrase I could think of I looked in the Moleskine I've kept since 2010, in the last pages where I always put names, and found the person, and was able to locate the article on my hard drive immediately.

Paper beats digital.

Falling man

"The work gets slower, that's for sure. This latest book took me nearly four years to write and it's not even 300 pages. It's not a burden, it's just day-to-day. But at some point I realised I'd been sitting there for four years. Why isn't it a bigger book?"

You can't depend on a beginning, you can't depend on an end

Anthony Rainone: But let's talk about The Lost Get Back Boogie, which I think was rejected -- what, 110 times? What was that whole ordeal like? How did you cope with it day in and day out?

James Lee Burke: By the time I was 34, I had published three novels in hardback in New York, and had a fair amount of success, and I was a Bread Loaf Fellow. I thought I was on board. With The Lost Get Back Boogie, I assumed it would be published. But, boy, I went 13 years before I was back in hardback again. And the agency that was handling my works sent everything back. They cut bait. It was pretty depressing.

-- James Lee Burke profiled by Anthony Rainone for January magazine, October 2004.


With The Neon Rain, my first Dave Robicheaux mystery. I'd been out of hardback print for a long time, nearly 13 years. A friend of mine named Rick DeMarinis said, "Why don't you try a crime novel?" I thought about it, and three days later Pearl and I were in San Fran, right down by Ferlinghetti's bookstore City Lights. I bought a yellow legal pad and walked down to this Italian café that's right across from the Catholic Church there on the boulevard. I ordered an espresso, and I sat down and started writing the first chapter of The Neon Rain. That's a fact.

As soon as I started writing, I knew it. I knew it when it started.

-- James Lee Burke to David Langness of Paste, November 18, 2014

So I've got that on him

Bruce DeSilva: Why do you write crime novels?

Robert B Parker: I write them because I know how, and because it never occurred to me not to write them. The process I go through is the same process Faulkner went through. The difference is that Faulkner writes better than I do, not because he is not writing crime novels but simply because he is a greater talent. He's dead, of course, so I've got that on him.

BD: Some people don't take crime fiction seriously. They see even your best books as mere entertainments.

RBP: Writing is either good or it isn't. It's not good because it's about 20th century angst. It's not bad because it's about a private detective. If it's good, it should be taken seriously. There is a misapprehension that it's easier to write a bad novel than a good one. It isn't. You write what you can, and if it comes out good you are lucky.

BD: Why is this such a hard lesson for some people to learn?

RBP: Literature is perceived as what you were taught in college. Professors can't teach books that are not difficult. If students read a book and they all understand it, there's nothing left to talk about in class. The second thing I would say is that most reviewing in this country is not very good. Its main function is not to do something useful but to enhance the reviewer's career. It's easier to review a difficult book because you get to explain it.

BD: Tell me how you work.

RBP: I think up a story and then I outline. The outline isn't terribly long – four or five pages handwritten. Catskill Eagle took me three months to think up. It's the hardest thing to do. I may go two, three weeks with nothing on the notepad, but I am not nervous about it because I know it will come. It always has. When the outline is completed, I write five pages a day.

BD: No matter how long it takes?

RBP: Yeah. Sometimes it takes eight or ten hours, but usually it takes no more than two. But I deliberately don't press on because if you do, then you start thinking you should write seven pages a day. It's better just to stop. I type it up in a draft, make a few pencil changes, and someone retypes it for me and sends it in.

-- Robert B Parker talks to Bruce DeSilva in 2011

Before the morning comes, the story's told

JESSE PEARSON: I've heard a lot of writers say that sometimes novels take on a life of their own, and I've heard other writers say that that's just bullshit and that doesn't happen and you're always in control.

PETE DEXTER: It's not bullshit. I don't ever feel like I'm in control.

JP: I love that thought, but I'm trying to understand how it works.

PD: It's like you're writing and you get to a place or an event and you sit back and think about who the guy is and how he reacts to it. You don't know what that reaction is going to be until you actually think about the guy, put yourself in the guy, and then think about the circumstance. And then you see, and the choice he makes there leads to all his other choices. In that way, it's kind of like life. Now, the opposite of this is these guys who plot their books in the beginning. I couldn't write a book like that. It would bore me to death. This is a problem in screenwriting too.

JP: That's been made into this weird algebraic thing, where it's like, "Three minutes in, this has to happen. Twenty-seven minutes in, this has to happen."

PD: You get 12 guys around a table, eight of whom are afraid that they're losing their jobs, and they're looking at a script and they start doing what you're talking about. "There's got to be more x, y, or z here." They want to plug all these things in even though they don't fit, and that's why you see so many movies that look like other movies.

JP: Right.

PD: Because eight guys are worried about losing their jobs. But I've got no idea how you'd maintain any kind of spontaneity, even within the personalities of the characters, if you had the whole thing plotted out ahead of time. If it's any kind of a story at all, it grows as you write it. The characters grow in ways that I can't possibly anticipate at the beginning of things. As well as I know the story of my stepdad and me, if you'd asked me four years ago, before this book really got going, what it would be about and I had to guess, I promise you that three-fourths of the stuff I guessed would be wrong.

JP: So you have to let the narrative guide you as you write it.

PD: If you can anticipate to the end in any way beyond, you know, the feeling, then I think you're kind of cheating yourself as a writer. Things happen that ought to be allowed to happen.

JP: It also seems more courageous and maybe pure to write like that.

PD: To me, it's more economical. When you follow the story, as opposed to leading it, you're less likely to make huge mistakes. You used a good word when you said "pure" because, if you follow the story, the things that you write will be purely of the story and of the characters. Even if today you look at yesterday's work and can't use it, there are still going to be things in there—if you followed the rules—that are useful to you.

Trance state

"Once I'm writing a novel, it's like laying a few bricks every day to build a house until the house is done. I write early in the morning. I work from seven or eight until one o'clock in the afternoon. I just add to it. In general, I don't know where I'm going with it. I like to have a process of discovery, so it's kind of a mystery to me where it goes, but I know the characters well ... When I'm involved in a novel, it's really like being in a trance for the several months that it takes. I'm preoccupied. But the great thing, Todd, is that there are no rules. That's something I always liked about being a writer. However you get it done, you get it done."

 -- Barry Gifford interviewed by Todd Summar, 2015

Advice from a friend


Sent by a dramatist friend from London, on the occasion of the movie. From Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman (Macdonald & Co, 1984)

Why we work

 
Pretty much everything that ever inspired me to become a writer right there. Although I don't know if I could work with that view. Opening titles from Columbo, 'Murder by the Book' (1971), c/- @columbophile.

Apple Crumble: Tama Janowitz

Last flashback: Tama Janowitz on the line from New York. Her collection Slaves of New York was published in 1986. The movie came out in 1989 and was generally panned, as was Janowitz's next book, A Cannibal in Manhattan, the subject of which she hints at towards the end of the interview. I don't know how critics rate Slaves of New York nowadays but you can find traces of its DNA in everything from Sex And The City to Girls.

She had the most wonderful voice. Think Janice in Friends.
New York, New York, city of dreams. Where the streets are paved with gold and the Velvet Underground were invented. Where King Kong climbed the Empire State and where the editor of Vanity Fair gets a $20,000 clothing allowance. Where Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe worked and died. Where Def Jam was born. Where the stars go for lunch. Where art dealers live like rock stars. How are things in New York, Tama?

"It's raining."

Wow! No kidding?

*

Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York chronicles the city's urban sprawl in 22 short stories. It's her second publication (the first was the lauded but less sensational novel American Dad) and the subject and timing has captured the popular imagination. At its weakest the collection is a thin pastiche of Damon Runyon; at its best it's an amphetamine-paced chronicle of the art world that Robert Hughes loves to hate.

"I just went to New York and hung out and went home and wrote about it," Tama drawls. "I didn't see anybody else writing about this world. It was at a time when the art scene was like the rock n' roll scene. I didn't know anybody, but I could go to a gallery opening and someone would give me a glass of wine and somebody else would say, 'Do you like the paintings?' and 'There's a party on later tonight...' I mean I wasn't writing non-fiction, but I was trying to record some of the situations and problems that were occurring at that particular time and place.''

The stories first appeared in various publications, including the New Yorker. And one day Andy Warhol was leafing through a copy of the New Yorker and...

"Warhol first bought five of the stories from me to make into a movie, so I did a screenplay for him. After his death it turned out that Merchant lvory had been reading my work and they'd been interested in it for some time, so after Warhol's death they found out that my stories were available and they brought them from the [Warhol] Foundation."

Which is how the movie of Slaves Of New York came to be. Janowitz wrote the screenplay, Bernadette Peters played the central character / narrator Eleanor, and the film was produced by Ismail Merchant and directed by James Ivory.

Merchant and Ivory are the hard-nosed and starry-eyed guys who brought you Heat And Dust, Maurice and A Room With A View. They're the sort of films in which Julian Sands and Anthony Andrews ride bicycles around English colonial settlements and Helena Bonham-Carter frets over her virginity. Was Janowitz concerned that the makers of such films would miss the In Your Face style of modern New York?

"No. Merchant Ivory have been making films for 20 years, many of which have been set in social settings, and I thought in any event that if they could get down the Boston of Henry James and Edwardian England, then certainly that had to be more difficult than modern New York, which was standing right there in front of us. So I never had any qualms -- their work has always been about social mores and behaviour and rules at society and etiquette, and that was what I was interested in too."

On paper the Slaves Of New York are willing victims of the inner-city in-crowd, the Manhattan art-world madness that packs galleries and covers canvasses with some of history's most meagre scrawl. The art scene in New York has always been hyped but the 80s have seen it attain new levels of raging bullshit. Publicity-hungry painters like Jean Michel-Basquiat and Julian Schnabel make Madonna look like a hermit. The movie makes this point not without sympathy, but when it screened in New York the reaction was not good. The Emperor was naked, and in Cinemascope.

"They hated it," Janowitz says, her voice starting to whine. "They hated the whole thing. They said it was undermining the fabric of American society, and that Tri-Star was an evil company for making the film, and that Bernadette Peters was too old. Just one thing after the other. They went crazy.

"I don't think they liked New York being made fun of. They were angry that I got a lot of attention and they were angry that Merchant Ivory were doing something other than Henry James or E.M. Forster."

You'd think that New York could handle a media version of itself.

'They're like sharks here, they gang up on things. It was like the Ayatollah saying, 'Kill Salman Rushdie.'

"I'm not sure that the movie was sympathetic, or that the book was. To me, this is the way the city is. I don't think the people in it are all bad, or all good; I don't think they're all creative geniuses, or they're all hustling, ambitious people -- this is the way people are acting at this particular time at this particular place on the planet.'

New York definitely has its own folklore.

"Well, they come here from all over the place, from Holland and Germany and New Zealand, and they all think that they're gonna make it somehow. There are an awful lot of people here vying for attention -- and there are not many people willing to give any attention."

Which is something you capture -- the spectacle of intelligent people spending their lives trying to shout each other down.

"There are people living on the streets here -- I can't imagine Calcutta being much worse. These men are living in the park, sitting on lawn chairs with furniture, everything. People come from all over and they get stuck here, like on flypaper."

The premise of the title story is that apartments are so hard to get in the city that you end up being a slave to the leaseholder -- is that still the case?

"There are more apartments around now. Do you have a lot of apartments in New Zealand?"

Some. New Zealand's a place with not many people in it.

"That must be nice. My father wanted to emigrate there. You probably have good fishing."

Yes. Do you like fishing?

"No. But if I moved to New Zealand... I could take it up."

*

You had a cameo role in the film. Did you enjoy it?

"I didn't care for that too much. I couldn't remember my lines. It took me like three days to memorise them and it was agony. You have to say them over and over again and you have to get your face to make the same expression. But what the hell do you look like it you say 'Hi there, how are you?' I don't know how your face is meant to look to match that expression. I mean how do you look when you say something like 'Well I'm used to Roger cooking for me, would I have to cook for Bruce?' Am I smiling at that point or what? I dunno."

Playwriting, not prose, was Janowitz's main interest after leaving college. She is currently working on a new play for a Louisville theatre company ("Right now there are 12 players, but some may die") and reading the work of other playwrights to get ideas.

"I'm reading Joe Orton and some Pinter and Sam Shepherd and Beckett. And I like George Orwell and Nabokov and Saul Bellow. It depends on what style I need. I read Marquez for his style. I read a lot of true crime books. And I like to read News Of The World."

News Of The World -- that's the classy one, isn't it?

"It's a little different over here. It has a lot at stories about Siamese twins and women impregnated by aliens."

Is that a source of ideas?

"It makes you kind of ashamed, because if those things aren't true then somebody out there has a fantastic imagination. If they are true then all the better. If they are true, then why bother to write anything at all?"

(1989)

When the sun shines they slip into the shade


Thom Yorke talking to Alec Baldwin (2013):
Thom Yorke: A break is due because what I've found with a break is it can be an incredibly exciting, that thing of thinking of all the stuff you want to do, but you just force yourself not – you just force yourself to wait and get back into just time and space.

It's like anything. You start to go in small circles, so you've got to stop when that happens.

There's a threshold... if you want to shift with your work, if you want to shift. If you're writing, if you're being creative at all, you kind of have to stop to make that shift. Because if you just, "I'm constantly creating, I've got this mountain of brilliant ideas," you're making the basic mistake that you're assuming all your ideas are brilliant.
Brian Eno talking to Lester Bangs (1979):
One or two of the pieces I've made have been attempts to trigger that sort of unnervous stillness where you don't feel that for the world to be interesting you have to be manipulating it all the time. The manipulative thing I think is the American ideal that here's nature, and you somehow subdue and control it and turn it to your own ends. I get steadily more interested in the idea that here's nature, the fabric of things or the ongoing current or whatever, and what you can do is just ride on that system, and the amount of interference you need to make can sometimes be very small.
Barry Gifford talking to Robert Birnbaum (2003):
Let me tell you. One thing I love about writing, serious work, painting. [long pause] This is all subjective. It's not a competitive sport. I was an athlete -- you know that -- I mean the thing is, in a game is to score more points than the other guy, the other team. This is not that way. I prefer to think of it as entirely subjective. "Comparisons are odious" as Gary Snyder once famously said to Jack Kerouac when discussing Buddhism. And I really embrace that philosophy.

I basically write when inspired. I don't feel it's necessary to write every day. When I start on a project then I go I through to the end. Then I am devoted to it and I stick with it. I don't sit down everyday at the typewriter. I actually write in longhand and then go to manual typewriter. The thing is, I don't feel I have to sit down every day with a blank sheet of paper in front of me and wait for what comes or try to force something. I have never been that way. I try to sneak up on it, I don't know how else to say it. I like to do it without a certain kind of pressure.

I'll ring and see if your friends are home


Author and screenwriter Jonathan Ames talks to Jennifer Vineyard about being a writer on Twitter:
AMES: I don't have any certainty about anything. The reason it's hard for me to tweet is I don't want to pronounce anything, and Twitter is for pronouncing.

VINEYARD: Is that why, after joining a Twitter conversation involving New York's Matt Zoller Seitz regarding the criticism that Girls faces — noting that you had faced it as well, but perhaps not as loudly — you jumped out saying, "Very complicated topic for Twitter"?

AMES: I find it very hard to parse things out. I admire people who are able to do it, actually — it's sort of like reading runes. I quit Twitter at one point, and I lost all my followers. Twitter and Facebook, they were bothering me. I felt like I was only using them to self-promote, and that annoyed me, you know? But it is hard to get the word out on anything if you don't do it, so I thought, Well, I've got this novella about it, I want to tell people about it. I came back on Twitter in October, and but I don't know if my announcing it on there actually does anything. It's weird because it's silly and it feels like a time suck. I find it very constraining, and it's hard to talk about anything sensitive like that.
Read the full interview here at NYMag.com.

I am of the pre-Twitter generation that uses a phone to communicate with one person at a time. Pictured: Ray Milland in Alfred Hitchock's version of Dial M For Murder (1954), based on the play by Frederick Knott. In Knott's thriller the personal nature of the telephone call is crucial to the plot. The technology and the premise would later be updated in the too-often-overlooked remake A Perfect Murder (1998).

Frederic Knott worked as a script editor at Hammer Studios before spending 18 months writing the play about a perfect crime gone awry:
"I was always intrigued with the idea that somebody would plan a crime, and then you see that everything doesn't turn out right. You can plan a murder in great detail and then put the plan into action, and invariably something goes wrong and then you have to improvise. And in the improvisation you trip up and make a very big mistake."
The Hitchcock version is the most famous but Knott was still receiving royalties from the play up until his death in 2003. Hold on to those rights.

The end of our elaborate plans, the end


Forbrydelsen (The Killing) III starts off as a mood piece with Sarah Lund too far in the background, crowded out by her male colleagues. Lund has become the formalist instead of the maverick, the passive spectator rather than the active investigator, the weakling. Once she was driven: now she's just upset. The red herrings and interruptions are dispensed professionally to the point of routine. (Does anyone in Lundland ever finish a phone call?) Creator Søren Sveistrup shares the scripting duties this time around, presumably for scheduling reasons. The series feels like he hammered out a synopsis and the other writers fluffed it up. But things get going in the last four episodes, when Forbrydelsen suddenly becomes very good again. Stick it out for Sofie Gråbøl's performance and a tidy wrap up. Spoiler alert: everyone's fucked. Not a happy ending, but a good one.

Sveistrup talked to Holy Moly about creating the series:
When we started there were a lot of episodic crime shows. You know, these 45-minute shows with a heroine who solved the case and caught the killer and started dating the forensic guy, wearing heels. And I thought ‘well we won’t do that and we’ll try to do it more like a novel.’ Television is a great window to the world but it’s often used to do nothing. So I thought if somebody offers me this window, at least I can do my best. I can try not to be a recipe, I can try not to imitate the Americans or the English and try to do something original. Try, try, try.
He wanted Lund to be the strong, silent type:
She doesn't really talk much. She has to have these characters around her to push her into saying anything. The partner role is very important as it generates some pressure on Lund and pushes her in other directions. If she was just alone she would be speechless. And it's to show her annoyance with other people. She is always annoyed when the phone rings and that's part of the game: to annoy Lund.
Sveistrup has compared Lund to Clint Eastwood's Harry Callaghan:
I've always been fond of Clint Eastwood. The parts he plays are so silent, sometimes a bit biblical. If you watch Dirty Harry he's not especially likeable and I like that paradox about a character.
Director Birger Larsen said he modelled Lund on Clint Eastwood's The Man With No Name:
"I wanted her to be wearing a poncho like Clint Eastwood and I worked with that for many weeks. But Sofie said that she couldn't draw her gun. I said, 'if Clint Eastwood can do it, then you can do it as well'. But she said, 'no, it's not right'. And she looked so wonderful, so sexy, so good in the poncho. Exactly the Clint Eastwood one. She came along one day and said, 'I've got this sweater, perhaps we should use that'."
There are nods in the final episode to a certain Swedish trilogy. Sveistrup told Holy Moly that his influences also include the Mark Frost / David Lynch series Twin Peaks:
"The first episode of Twin Peaks begins with the discovery of the body of Laura Palmer and the first episode of The Killing ends with the discovery of the body of Nanna Birk Larsen. But I saw a lot of shows before we started writing and shooting. I was a big Twin Peaks fan when it was first shown and week after week I couldn't wait for the episodes, but then I guess I was a bit disappointed when the resolution happened. But today I can see that David Lynch was deconstructing the whole genre, and he was actually making a comedy. And in that sense it's perfect.

"I wanted to see if I could do it with no humour. And especially taking the parents into it, and their grief, I wanted to see if I could portray it in a more realistic way instead. So I think I owe a lot to Twin Peaks but it's an entirely different genre. We couldn't invent things like throwing a stone to decide where the investigation went – which must've been fun to come up with in the writing room – we couldn't do that. We had to stay loyal to the grief and the importance of the investigation."

Bedside reading


The great Thomas McGuane. Talking to David Abrams:
I haven't looked at Ninety-Two in the Shade since I wrote it. You know, when I was done with Ninety-Two in the Shade, I felt very complete. I had worked on it so intensely, I could recite the book. I've had no particular inclination to look at it again, however.
Interviewed in The Paris Review:
McGUANE
...I had been successful in creating for myself a sheltered situation in which to function in this very narrow way I felt I wanted to function, which was to be a literary person who was not bothered very much by the outside world. My twenties were entirely taken up with literature. Entirely. My nickname during that period was "the White Knight," which suggests a certain level of overkill in my judgment of those around me.

INTERVIEWER
What sorts of things had led you to develop this white-knight image?

McGUANE
Fear of failure. I was afflicted with whatever it takes to get people fanatically devoted to what they're doing. I was a pain in the ass. But I desperately wanted to be a good writer. My friends seem to think that an hour and a half effort a day is all they need to bring to the altar to make things work for them. I couldn't do that. I thought that if you didn't work at least as hard as the guy who runs a gas station then you had no right to hope for achievement. You certainly had to work all day, everyday. I thought that was the deal. I still think that's the deal.
From the New Yorker:
Q: There's something almost cinematic about the way you capture most of a life in a series of very quick scenes from it. Were you thinking of movies when you wrote this?

A: I'm not a moviegoer. I grew up in a town without a cinema and never caught the habit, though I have worked in the movies. I stole this narrative strategy from Muhammad Ali: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." It works if you have to cover ground in limited space. One of the limitations of "dirty realism" is that you can't budge. If you're a genius like Raymond Carver or his precursor Harold Pinter such confinement is an advantage. But, for many of their successors, it's claustrophobic.
Mark Kamine discusses McGuane's work at Believer:
McGuane is one of the rare contemporary American writers whose characters always do things. They run businesses, put up fences, farm, ranch, guide, fish. They are not people on vacations or grants, they are not professors, critics, writers, or artists—or, when they are, they are artists becoming cattle ranchers, as in Keep the Change (1989). In this way issues of class and money arise naturally, between bosses and workers, and the sense of automatic and persistent injustice is apparent and recurrent. The disadvantaged are abundantly aware of this, even when they themselves are acting badly.
The Blue Hammer is one of the best books in the Lew Archer detective series by author Ross Macdonald AKA Kenneth Millar.

Poetics


David Mamet interviewed in 1997 by John Lahr for The Paris Review:
MAMET
Now, there's a certain amount of essential information, without which the play does not make sense...

INTERVIEWER
And how do you fit that information in?

MAMET
As obliquely as possible. You want to give the people information before they know it's been given to them.

INTERVIEWER
So to you a character is...

MAMET
It's action, as Aristotle said. That's all that it is – exactly what the person does. It's not what they "think," because we don't know what they think. It's not what they say. It's what they do, what they're physically trying to accomplish on the stage. Which is exactly the same way we understand a person's character in life – not by what they say, but by what they do.

INTERVIEWER
If you hadn't found the theater, what do you think you might have been?

MAMET
I think it's very likely I would have been a criminal. It seems to me to be another profession that subsumes outsiders, or perhaps more to the point, accepts people with a not very well-formed ego and rewards the ability to improvise.

What I'm consuming

  • School of Seven Bells 'Secret Days' -- new single from the new EP Put Your Sad Down. They can be catchy to the point of twee but this one is just right: Suicide meets Trent Reznor.  In this 2012 interview Paul de Revere asked SVIIB's Alejandra Deheza about the band's emotional intensity:
    School of Seven Bells' music through your lyrics feels intensely spiritual, romantic, and devotional to me. Where do you pull that intensity from?

    I remember when I was first experimenting with writing, I would never notice that it was any more emotional than, say, something that I'd read or whatever. It wasn't until I would give people [my lyrics] to read, and they'd feel like they walked in on something and they'd be like, "Whoa. Girl, what are you going through?" I wouldn't even think twice about it. I never really noticed that it was more emotional than maybe usual.

    It's kind of hard to say where it comes from because it's just very natural to me. I feel like I've always been like that, for better or for worse. Writing lyrics and melodies is a really good way for me to keep balanced. I tend to feel things really intensely, and I feel like writing kind of evens it out.
  • Cat Power, '3,6,9' and 'Real Life' from the new album Sun. I find Chan Marshall talented but recessive: I never quite remember her until she comes on. I liked The Greatest, especially 'Lived in Bars.' From her 2006 Spin interview with Melissa Maerz:
    You've said you've been drinking since you were very young. What started it?

    People who drink habitually don't realize they're doing it, because it was part of their upbringing. Everybody from my immediate family to my grandparents to my great-grandparents -- there were always severe alcoholic and psychological problems. If your parents gave you fire to play with when you were two, you'd be standing in fire by the time you were an adult. [Before my most recent hospital stay] I was drinking from the time I woke up in the morning until the time I went to bed.

    You recently spent a week at the hospital. What made you decide to check yourself in?

    It wasn't for drinking -- this was for a reaction to drinking. This was the third time I've been in the hospital. I never really connected the dots. I never really thought, "When something bad happens, you go to the bar and turn off your emotions." I never realized that I'd gotten to the point of such depression. So that's why I can't drink anymore. I need to be able to face things.
  • Psychologist Judith Schlesinger has written a book that argues that the "tortured artist" is a myth:
    A persistent belief, fueled by media, is that creative people more often suffer bipolar disorder or other mental illness. In The Insanity Hoax: Exposing the Myth of the Mad Genius, Judith Schlesinger builds a strong argument that there is "no compelling proof that creative people have more psychological problems than members of any other vocation group."

    A musician herself, as well as a psychologist, Schlesinger clearly wants to defend her artistic compatriots from what she views as unfair attacks.

    From her data, "it's just as easy – and much better documented – to view the creative process as healthy and life affirming," and "only one characteristic of personality and orientation to life and work is... present in ALL creative people: motivation." In fact, creative people are ...actually complicated, not crazy; they are disciplined and committed, happy to take on hard projects and work hard at them; and they are intensely focused, with a 'rage to master' their chosen domain."
  • Writer's block, ironically, remains an excellent plot device. This week I saw the 'extended American' cut of The Shining. The differences between that version and the shorter cut are detailed but significant. The screening was a digital 4K print and it strobed. The opening titles rose up jerkily and during the maze scenes there were visible artefacts at the edges of the frame. Do we realise what we've gotten into with digital projection? It's shit.

On the road, 2012


Some other authors have blogged about the Frankfurt Book Fair: Robert Sullivan on the opening ceremony and Catherine Robertson on the whole week. I didn't blog because I was travelling without a laptop, which felt like a holiday. I used my iPhone for email. I carried a PDF of my new novel on FileApp Pro, which allowed me to fret over it anywhere, anytime. Caught without an English language version of Pack of Lies at the Mana-Verlag opening, I downloaded a backup ms from Gmail, and read from the phone at the lecturn. Not an ideal experience, but doable.

The practice of hotels charging and arm and a leg for internet access is alive and well in Frankfurt. (In Berlin, like London there is free wifi in most bars and cafés.) In the hotel lobby where the connection was free New Zealanders gathered in the mornings and evenings like smokers on a windy corner, emailing, texting and tweeting. (I've taken Twitter off my phone. It shortens the battery life and my concentration.) Internet access in the rooms was two Euros a day and limited, but at a few dollars a day for up to 25mg on a prepaid SIM, why bother?

For navigation I relied on a paper map of Frankfurt that I bought in Berlin, and for everything else a reporter's notebook and a pencil. Writing things down is still the best way to work -- you remember something better if you write it out by hand, and a pencil will never explode in your pocket.

On the final weekend when I received my Lufthansa flight confirmation I downloaded the boarding pass onto Passport, the iOS6 app. Normally I print out a paper copy of every travel document, just in case, but this time I passed through luggage check in, customs and flight boarding by showing staff the Passport screen or waving the phone across gate scanners. Lufthansa are one of the first airlines to invest in Apple's system and Frankfurt is a modern airport so this went without a hitch. At least half the people in the queue were checking in using smartphones.

The only technology I really missed on the road was a kettle in the hotel room but I knew not to expect that, especially after travelling in France for Les Belles Etrangeres. If you want tea in a European hotel you have to ask for a glass or thermos of hot water at the bar and carry it up to your room in the elevator. Barbaric. But at least then, you have tea. And so on the Wednesday night I sat up on the end of the bed in my room, drinking black tea while reading an ms off an iPhone and scribbling revision notes on a 79 cent notepad.

Ich bin ein Whatever


Christchurch photographer Maja Moritz took portraits of me for the press kit for the Frankfurt Book Fair. This is my favourite.

I feel like I'm clinging to a cloud


Having re-issued my back catalogue as ebooks and being on my way to Frankfurt, logically I should be online all the time now Tweetin' and bloggin' and extending the hand of digital friendship beyond the 6-8 people for whom this blog is intended. That's what writers do now, and artists, and heads of industry: post constantly.

It makes sense if you have minute by minute news, or if you're reporting on it; it makes sense if you have a wild life, and yes, it even makes sense if you work in private, alone, striving to lay some incremental track of the mind that chimes with others on a deep and subtle level. Death, taxes, Facebook. And nobody emails anymore... (Remember when email was the new thing?)

But the more I do it, the more I get that feeling that I'm too old for this, or too slow, or just too old-fashioned.

When I was a kid, everyone wanted to be just like Clint. Maybe that will happen... but not in the way we thought it would.

(Pic: Craig Warga, New York Daily News)

Oxygen

There's a way in which a writer can do too much, over-whelming the reader with so many details that he no longer has any air to breathe. Think of a typical passage in a novel. A character walks into a room. As a writer, how much of that room do you want to talk about? The possibilities are infinite. You can give the color of the curtains, the wallpaper pattern, the objects on the coffee table, the reflection of the light in the mirror. But how much of this is really necessary? Is the novelist's job simply to reproduce physical sensations for their own sake? When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it.
-- Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger (Sun & Moon Press, 1992)
1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?
-- David Mamet, Memo to writers of The Unit, 19 October 2005