Matryoshki

International trailer for the new version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is here. I don't know if anyone can top Bernard Hepton as Toby Esterhase but Gary Oldman looks (and sounds) good enough to become a new generation's George Smiley.

What is the formula for determining when a character has become an archetype? How many iterations does it take, and over what period of time? So many writers hit it straight out of the box: Rebecca de Winter, Walter Mitty, Marlowe, Lolita, Lisbeth Salander (nee Longstocking), Hannibal Lecter, Tom Ripley. But a certain type survives to accrue layers of interpretation: Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, 007. Batman's archetypal; Superman isn't. Emma Peel ought to be, although she lives on in other characters. Likewise Number 6.

Actually maybe not Bond. I think we broke that. (He hasn't transmuted into Bourne, either. The Bourne movie trilogy is the Frankenstein myth – the post-modern Prometheus.)

Disclaimer: this is not a Joseph Campbell reference (sic). Time to close that book.

New (old) short stories on Kindle

Rusty Blades is a collection of five short stories from 1988-90 now available on Kindle: 'The Man at the Door', 'Two Friends', 'Geisha', 'Girl from Mars' and 'Rusty Blades.' This is part of an ongoing project to make my early and hard-to-find short fiction available in digital formats, as much as an archive as anything. (Special thanks:Rob O'Neill.) I have thoughts about this which I'll post later – I'm working on new stuff – but if you're interested Rusty Blades is available on Amazon here.

It feels good to be able to finally make these stories available again. Looking back over them I wanted to make some changes but resisted the temptation, apart from cleaning up some unintentional repetition here and there and, okay, changing three words. I can see what I got wrong with the stories as well as what I got right. And I feel a lot older now. 1988 – man...

Self-publishing is a chore so I look forward to going back to the other kind. But I do still have the Huxley stories which will come out as little one-off ebooks for 99 cents, like the pulp paperbacks I used to enjoy when I was a kid. (Do magazines and newspapers still do winter / summer fiction? Must ask someone about that.)

I'm still in two minds about ebooks. I'd be more excited if the platform was set up to supplement or alter reading behaviour, rather than replace the reading I already do. Ebooks are ideally suited for shorter fiction (i.e. novellas) and collected short stories, especially stories which are intended to be enjoyed as a series. The idea of readers subscribing to a character or series of narratives which are then pushed to their devices, like podcasts, actually sounds like fun. Tapping through Ulysses with an index finger does not.

We're all going on a Billie Holiday

No, no, no. Said Bill Bailey on Twitter:

what a terrible shame about Winehouse - she was great on Buzzcocks, even though there was Malibu in her mug.

I can't watch the video. Pete Doherty can fall over and it doesn't matter but Amy was great for music.

Farmville

William Gaddis interviewed by Zoltán Abádi-Nagy for The Art of Fiction:

INTERVIEWER

What moved you to write JR?

GADDIS

Even though I should have known from The Recognitions that the world was not waiting breathlessly for my message, that it already knew, and was quite happy to live with all these false values, I'd always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a "people's capitalism" where you "owned a part of the company" and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you're not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don't know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this. Because JR himself, which is why he is eleven years old, is motivated only by good-natured greed. JR was, in other words, to be a commentary on this free enterprise system running out of control. Looking around us now with a two-trillion-dollar federal deficit and billions of private debt and the banks, the farms, basic industry all in serious trouble, it seems to have been rather prophetic.

Full interview here.

Work

Raymond Carver interviewed by Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee for The Art of Fiction:

INTERVIEWER

In an article you did for The New York Times Book Review you mentioned a story "too tedious to talk about here" — about why you choose to write short stories over novels. Do you want to go into that story now?

CARVER

The story that was "too tedious to talk about" has to do with a number of things that aren't very pleasant to talk about. I did finally talk about some of these things in the essay "Fires," which was published in Antaeus. In it I said that finally, a writer is judged by what he writes, and that's the way it should be. The circumstances surrounding the writing are something else, something extraliterary. Nobody ever asked me to be a writer. But it was tough to stay alive and pay bills and put food on the table and at the same time to think of myself as a writer and to learn to write. After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novel, a two- or three-year stretch of work on a single project. I needed to write something I could get some kind of a payoff from immediately, not next year, or three years from now.

Full interview here.

Can it be that it was all so simple then

WIP. A page from one of my first published short stories ('Two Friends') Other Voices (Brick Row / Hallard Press, 1988), now scanned and OCR'd. I'm in the process of converting my back-catalogue to digital, particularly the early and hard-to-find short stories. I might also add some new short stories, just for fun.

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