Bad writing

Friends from both sides of the Atlantic had been on to me about Breaking Bad. I resisted because I was already following Ronald D Moore's BSG remake, Mad Men and the first three seasons of Burn Notice, which could have been and still might be the new Rockford Files, and three TV series in your life is already too many.

Breaking Bad came out around the same time as another what-would-you-do series, Hung which tailed off (sic) in the first season and I imagined Bad would go the same way. The premise seemed obvious, and cancer storylines are depressing. (1970s TV characters were usually felled by a heart attack which finished things quickly.)

When I finally caved I discovered what I liked most about Breaking Bad was that the premise was obvious. The second thing I loved was the scripts. Series creator Vince Gilligan discussed the writers' approach to the show to Robin Kelly:

"I look for good visual storytelling. We take pride in our dialogue, but TV and movies, this is visual storytelling. It's the difference between a play and a screenplay. A stage play is all about the dialogue, and I've seen and read some wonderful ones, but that's not what we're doing here. We're telling a story through the images. I specifically look for visual writing, which is to say not the dialogue on the page, but the action lines, the scene description. How much is the writer getting across through a look, through a bit of body language, the omission of an action or the action itself? Versus a writer who gets everything across verbally. Because in real life, very often we don't say what we mean; very often we say the opposite, or we don't say anything at all."

Series DOP Michael Slovis talks about the arc to the LA Times' Josh Gajewski:

"The other thing that 'Breaking Bad' has in its favor, which is very interesting to me, is time... There is no need to rush anything in 'Breaking Bad' because it's an ongoing story, so you don't really have to re-explain things visually or storytelling wise, so we have time to actually let people move through spaces, down halls, into homes, in a very sort of European storytelling way."

In an interview with J.C. Freñán for Slant Gilligan talked about the difference between writing for movies and TV:

Slant: You've worked in both television and feature films. Do you have a preference for either one?

Vince Gilligan: I would have to say television, because once you are on a writing staff, or once you create a television show, for as long as that show exists you know that you're writing, you know that your work will get produced. The same can't be said for writing for features, unfortunately. Write a movie script, you can put your heart and soul into it for months, for years, and peddle it around Hollywood and ultimately it may well go nowhere. I've experienced more heartbreak in the movie business than in the TV business.

Slant: Is there anything about the format of serial television itself that influences the way you write, that you have a preference for? Is it easier to write a one-off film than it is to sustain a season at a time?

VG: They're both hard, but I suppose that the saving grace about writing a television show is that you don't have to wrap up everything plot-wise at the end of every episode, and you can leave certain questions unanswered. You can leave certain emotional issues not quite completely tied up. In a movie, on the other hand, you have to tie up every loose end that you have set for yourself, and you have to wrap things up emotionally in a very satisfactory manner, and you have to complete the plot in that two-hour segment of time that you're allotted. Endings are just very tough for a writer, at least speaking personally.

In 2010 Gilligan talked to Slate's Noel Murray about ending season three:

My writers and I sit around and dream this stuff up and then we see it executed a week or even days later, and it's a wonderful feeling and it's magical. Especially in moments like that one, which was a great example, because I had high hopes for that scene and then seeing what Adam Bernstein the director did with ['Half Measures']... He exceeded my expectations. That moment was thrilling to watch in the editing room for me. I've never had children but it must be akin to the pride you feel watching your children grow or be born or something. I don't know. I don't have that background in my real life. But it's an intense pride. And it's not a pride of "I did this," it's a pride of "we did this," because it really is a group effort. There's no one person doing it all in television or in the movies. It's always a collaborative effort and anyone who tells you otherwise is awfully pumped about their own contributions to the endeavor. But it's a great feeling, a great collaborative feeling, and it's wonderful.

Lock the parents out, cut a rug, twist and shout

Whenever I hear the song 'Santa Baby' I always think 'spider baby,' like that head in John Carpenter's The Thing, i.e.

Spider Baby, slip a sable under the tree for me
Been an awful good girl, Spider Baby
So hurry down the chimney tonight...

And so on, until the authorities are called in with their flame-throwers.

There was a trailer for the Thing remake in the movie theater last night: the kids in the audience kept talking over it and didn't notice. But when Paranormal Activity 3 started they went quiet – no texting – and then they all screamed, a lot. The movie includes one gag specifically from Halloween and some tricks Carpenter employed very effectively in Prince of Darkness (still one of his scariest). The pan-and-scan sequences put me in mind of the long, unblinking cabin shots in Friday the 13th, and there is a nice pay off that improves on The Blair Witch Project, a movie which is now so old that many in the audience would have only seen it on the small screen. It made no difference: the kids were shitting themselves. Paranormal Activity 3 is scary but above all harrowing. Despite the faux-casualness – handheld is the new sprezzatura – it makes you sit and watch. Loved it.

Amy Winehouse died from drinking too much. This is old news but still depressing. Some editorials are trying to paint her music as part of her suffering but it wasn't, which only makes it the more tragic. She didn't suicide: she just didn't cope. Being so physically small can't have helped.

I'm forcing my way through Stieg – a better translation this time, but his obsession with detail undermines his own plot. In contrast to the oddly entertaining details about sponge cakes, sandwiches and coffee – Blomkvist is a man who always knows where the next snack is coming from – it drives me crazy that in twenty years, nobody thought of trying a Bible code. A row of numbers, anywhere, anytime, that's the first thing anyone reaches for either in the real world or fiction. On the other hand the Hedestad sequence with the photos is great – Antonioni's Blow Up via De Palma's rock-and-roll editing suite sequence in Blow Out. Salander is not Pippi, she's Hannibal: the NeXT Lecter. Anyway, I'm making myself finish it this time so I can be up with what the young people are skimming.

Just one last thing

Television, I dare you.

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.

Bedside reading

Woody Harrelson at the BFI

Before Woody Harrelson came on stage for his live interview at the BFI London Film Festival an official reminded the audience not to take their own photos. I respectfully complied while everyone around me snapped pictures on their smartphones and cameras for the next 90 minutes. Some of them even used flash.

It's always interesting to see movie and TV actors in the flesh. Harrelson looks and sounds exactly has he does on screen: crooked smile, Texas drawl (he was raised in Texas and Ohio). It's interesting that such a distinctive actor has had such a varied filmography. He called his career sketchy but it could be compared to Michael Caine's: the same presence tuned to different intensities.

The interview presentation leaned to the political. Harrelson was queried about his roles in The People vs Larry Flynt and Natural Born Killers in terms of their political and social "impact" and the actor responded in kind, saying he had "learned things" from every role and that "we don't have free speech in my country." But the tilt of the questions implied a right and a wrong answer, resulting in some awkward silences. It's only acting, after all, and off someone else's script.

Harrelson majored in theater arts and English at college before moving to New York and landing no parts for two years. His breakthrough role in Cheers came a few months after he landed an agent whom he credited more than once for his success.

He talked about Oliver Stone's "gentle quality" and mimicked Milos Forman's fatalistic gruffness. He cited Marlon Brando's quote that acting is not an art and said now that his kids are at school, "school always wins out" against career decisions. He dropped a good-natured hint (not picked up) about drinking with Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock and is still friends with Larry Flynt. When Harrelson and his wife "were having some trouble" in the past Flynt "helped out" by appealing the actor's wife on his behalf. We don't know what the trouble was or what the publisher of Hustler said to her that helped. Cue another awkward silence.

The best question of the night came from the floor, about working on The Thin Red Line. Harrelson said Terence Malick was an interesting man and "kind of a savant" before raising his voice to a childlike whine and imitating the director standing with his head tilted, pointing at a field of grass saying, I kinda like the way the light falls; let's film that.

Harrelson was at the London Film Festival to promote his new film Rampart, which is based on a James Ellroy story. The clip looked good. Harrelson said the dramatisation differs from the source not least of all because director Oren Moverman has been "making a lot of changes in post," his emphasis implying changes beyond traditional editing. In the clip that was shown Harrelson's crooked smile appeared to tilt the other way and I wondered if the footage had been flipped: the opposite of the man we saw on stage.

Hey Jupiter

The Moon and Jupiter, 2150hrs.

"I spent most of my life trying to humour people"

Hunter S. Thompson talks about The Rum Diaries.

Departure Lounge on air

Someone's just told me that National Radio are re-broadcasting their dramatised reading of Departure Lounge all this week, afternoons at 2:30pm. Not sure if it's available as a podcast. Happy if it was. The radio version is abridged, read by Jed Brophy and features a Fripp & Eno track.

As a child I was introduced to many stories via the radio version. I particularly remember a dramatisation of The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle: it was scary and atmospheric.

Anyway, Departure Lounge is on, or was by the time you've read this. If you're quick you can still catch the ending.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

I reviewed Midnight in Paris in 1985 when it came out as The Purple Rose of Cairo; before that it was, broadly, Play It Again Sam. Paris is Woody in his magical mode, better than its predecessors but not as flip as, say, Scoop, or as sexy as Match Point, and it's not the fizzy slam-dunk of Vicky Cristina Barcelona... but it's still a delight, and a relief. I wish more movies were made this way. The camera is about the lens and the takes are long because he worked out that that way, he can spend less time in the editing suite. The script flows in his own voice; when "Hemingway" talks it jars but when Brody comes on as Dali things lift off.

By setting his late-period movies in Europe Allen has become the great chronicler of the Comfortable American – a five-star Continent of hotels, shopping, tourist strolls – without being seduced by it. Gil (Owen Wilson) is likewise bored. Spirited back to the 1920s, the American writer tells Bunuel about a great idea for a movie about a dinner party. Bunuel doesn't get it ('Why don't they just leave?'); Gil can't stop to explain. Midnight in Paris is an old man's movie: short on time, not fussing over the details.

He churns them out. That's what I like most about Woody Allen. He just goes out and does it, making two a year sometimes, and lets them stand or fall. He's sentimental but doesn't look back; sour but not bitter; captivated by youth, but casts them in great parts. It's a story of magic: it's just another piece of work.

Find Your Ancestors: The Avengers girl

The Cathy Gale role was originally written for a male. When the makers decided to recast the role for a female the studio was too cheap to commission rewrites so Honor Blackman was given the first eight scripts as they were written, dialogue and fight scenes included. Thus the "Avengers girl" was born.

BRIAN CLEMENS: I didn't do Diana a very good service. It made her an international star but I think I could have done more for her as far as the script was concerned. She was rather a stooge to Patrick Macnee's Steed.

JULIE NEWMAR: This is what I get from people when they talk to me about the original Catwoman and compare it to the latter ones. I think people prefer the more humorous one, the lighter one. People seem to complain that the recent ones are too dark in spirit. But that's what reflects what's going on... It was a heck of a lot more fun when Adam West and I did it.

BOB RINGWOOD: We had to justify the catsuit. Where did the Selina character get it? Black, shiny fetish clothing can very easily slip into the sleaze/porn world and this, after all, was a film for family viewing.

Q: How much information did you have on the Catwoman issues before drawing the covers?

ADAM HUGHES: Sometimes I'll get one of Will Pfeiffer's scripts, and sometimes I'll get a synopsis because Will is still writing the script. And then sometimes I'll say, "Can I draw Selina in a pool?" And they'll say, okay.

ALAN MARTIN: During the mid-eighties I was in a band with the then unknown Philip Bond. One of our favourite songs was a track we had written called 'Rocket Girl.' I was studying at Worthing at this time, which is where we met up with Jamie Hewlett. He and Philip hit it off straight away. I was a little put off by Jamie's habit of drawing huge penises on any paper that he came across.

Jamie had drawn a grotty looking girl brandishing an unfeasible firearm. One of our friends was working on a project to design a pair of headphones and was basing his design on the type used by World War II tank driver. His studio was littered with loads of photocopies of combat vehicles. I pinched one of the images and gave it to Jamie who then stuck it behind his grotty girl illustrations and then added a logo which read 'Tank Girl'.

DR: Where you surprised at how popular she became?

AM: It didn't really come as a shock to us.

STIEG LARSSON: I considered Pippi Longstocking. What would she be like today? What would she be like as an adult? What would you call a person like that, a sociopath? Hyperactive? Wrong. She simply sees society in a different light. I'll make her 25 years old and an outcast. She has no friends and is deficient in social skills. That was my original thought.

When we were very Jung

Drive feels like the movie I have been happily watching my whole life: Le Samourai by way of The Driver, Vanishing Point, Medium Cool, 8 Million Ways to Die, 52 Pick-Up, Thief, Heat. The references are indirect: Drive is in the spirit of those films, and the tone. There is not that much driving in it and the violence is overdone and it's a little under budget but these limitations feel right, too, if not appropriate to the genre. That's just Drive's thing: cars, LA and robberies cast in the blue key of existential. For all the darkness, it's a bright, upbeat tale of brooding.

Drive is presented as "A Nicolas Refn Film" but is based on a screenplay which is in turn based on a novel so the director is a realisateur rather than an auteur. The blissfully spare screenplay is by Hossein Amini, who also recently adapted Elmore Leonard's Killshot, and is based on the novel by James Sallis.

Sallis was born in Arkansas 1944 and has written 15 novels - seven in the Lew Griffin detective series. He has written SF and worked as an editor and essayist as well as a translator, translating works by Pablo Neruda, Mikhail Lermontov, Pasternak and Pushkin, among others. He's also a musician. Sallis published Drive in 2005, when he was 61.

In an interview with Paul Kane Sallis talked about his Lew Griffin character, and crime as a genre:

Kane: Do you see yourself as primarily a crime writer or simply a writer, period?

Sallis: A quick look at my list of publications should answer that: collections of poetry, books of musicology, a biography, translation, a lot of science fiction, wide literary-magazine publication, a large body of criticism. I'm a writer who writes, among much else, crime fiction.

Did you choose crime fiction or did it choose you?

I came to crime fiction rather late, actually – after many years of involvement with science fiction, then, when that market changed, with "literary" fiction. I was introduced to Chandler and Hammett by Mike Moorcock when I was in London editing New Worlds; this would have been 1968 or so. I read constantly in the field: Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Chester Himes, Ed McBain, Larry Block, Donald Westlake. I didn't turn to writing crime fiction for some years after. The Long-Legged Fly was the beginning.

What can you do in crime fiction that you can't do in a straight literary novel, or in say science-fiction? What possibilities does the genre offer you?

Crime fiction shares with arealist fiction (fantasy and science fiction) a built-in edginess: an alienation, an apartness. It gives access to a straightforward skeleton of plot that's able to hold as little or as much weight as you wish to pack on; and it's connected more directly to the archetypes within us, which can be a source of tremendous power. I should probably add here that one of my agendas as critic has been to tear down as many of these artificial distinctions as possible – crime novel, "literary" novel, commercial novel....

In 1997 Gerald Houghton interviewed Sallis about the Griffin novel Eye of the Cricket:

Q: In Cricket we are told that New Orleans is a city that 'could still be 1940.' The Griffin novels take place over many years and yet seem to exist within the same time - almost out of time. References to beepers and e-mail in the novel leap out.

Sallis: The modern touches are to some extent meant to be jarring. In Cricket for the first time Lew begins to feel that the world has passed him by, that he's on his way to becoming an anachronism. New Orleans, as Lew says again and again, is a kind of island, cut off from mainland American society, timeless in its own peculiar way, filled with people (as well as buildings and social structures) who are anachronisms. Remember, too, that in these novels Lew is looking back on his life, relating it; memory, as it always does, runs things together, blurs them (more poet than reporter). That's pretty much the reason for using the title for The Long-Legged Fly from Yeats. Lew, like the fly in the poem, is sitting up above the stream of time, watching it flow beneath him.

The full interview is here.

Preparedness

Cover art by Mr Ian Dalziel.

Hooked on a feeling

A friend (gracias) scored me a ticket to hear Guillermo Arriaga speak as part of the 2011 BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters' Lecture Series. The Mexican writer / director talked at length about following your heart and not a formula, ignoring the rules, not bothering with research, writing what you know, following a story without knowing how it will end and so on: music to the ears of the budding screenwriters in the audience.

Arriaga started out in partnership with a director, Alejandro González Inárritu, and compared their working relationship to that of the Coen Brothers. Since Babel the two have fallen out, acrimoniously. One got the impression that Arriaga's approach to screenwriting, with its interleaved storylines and non-sequential scenes, must have been an easier sell with a director attached. Still, a lot more fun than Robert McKee.

If I'm jaded about (hearing about) screenwriting it may be because the quality of writing for television is currently going through the roof. All I want to watch is Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Breaking Bad's creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan says he also writes without knowing where things are going, although he does admit to knowing how things will end, and surely that's a plan. Vince worked on a show called the X-Files, which was hot damn wonderful for about two-thirds of its run.

(Pic: Rolling Stone)

Some may sink but we will float

David Mamet on his (terrific) film Redbelt (2008):

Everybody's gotta take their pigs to market. You know? You can be the best chair-maker in the world, but you gotta sell the chairs. And all through history, even today, everyone's kvetching about the middleman; "That guy isn't doing anything, that guy doesn't do anything." Well, if that guy isn't doing anything, you could do it. You have a choice; you don't. Why? Because middlemen are necessary; commerce is necessary. It's not enough to just be great at your craft; one has to engage in commerce in the free market; and nobody likes the middle man because he doesn't partake of the purity of craft. But whether you're a fighter or a chair maker or an auto maker or a dry cleaner, you gotta get down to the market and get involved in commerce. And if you get involved in commerce, whether it's as a fighter or as a filmmaker, at some point you will be abused, disappointed, robbed, betrayed. Because there are such people in the world; that's just the way the world works.

Full interview here.

Honey, we ain't ever goin' home

My third novel Shirker (2000) has been pirated. I came across the torrent link when I was searching for information about one of the German editions (DTV). The novel is one of six German language titles organised alphabetically and compressed as a 53mb RAR file -- about the size of a compressed audio CD -- and so is likely to be one of many published books someone has made available on the internet for free.

Shirker was published internationally and in several non-English editions -- French, German, Italian -- but never as an ebook. The pirated version is a non-flowing-text PDF which would be a chore to convert into MOBI or EPUB format but not impossible. You could also print it out, although the cost of ink and paper would be comparable to the printed book and heavier to carry.

Like the weather, new technology rolls in whether it's welcome or not. A revised edition of my first novel Pack of Lies (1993) has just been published on Kindle (you can find it here); there are plans to put out ebook versions of Heaven and The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself as well. In the meantime someone has left a battered version of Shirker on the digital park bench: anyone can pick it up.

Is the internet killing rhetorical questions?

I feel sometimes that it is. This question may have been asked before but if I Googled it first then I wouldn't be asking it, and it wouldn't be rhetorical. Few people understand quantum physics but everyone understands this paradox. More people would understand quantum physics if they looked it up. It's all online.

My grandfather was fond of saying, everything you need to know is in the library, waiting for you to go find it. The difference is that one's interaction with a book is to read it and learn from the experience. Sure, some scribble in the margins. Others steal the books themselves. But to critique a text line-by-line or to hammer out a lengthy rebuttal would be crazy territory. Only serial killers and Joe Orton did that. Although Orton's boyfriend killed him. I'm sketchy on the facts – I saw the film but did not consult Wikipedia before writing that line.

I have a theory that the web is making fact-checkers of us all. Facts are important except when it comes to fiction or art or music or dance or whatever, when one needs to work without a net. And fly. Not think defensively: not snipe. You can't move forward if you're watching your back.

I'm doing a lot of research and the research is good: it's full of facts that I'm nailing down like loose floorboards. All the better to coast across when I come to the real writing. At which point I don't want to hear comments, feedback, comeback, chatter, other people's voices -- unless they're singing, and even then only maybe.

I miss unanswered questions and puzzled looks and mystery. There's less of it now the world is at our fingertips. You can leave a book on the shelf, which vexes publishing as an industry, but as an art form, this is invaluable. Books are bottled knowledge, waiting to be uncorked; the internet's a whine-seller.

Re-make / Re-model: Pack of Lies (1993) now on Kindle

My first published novel Pack of Lies (1993) has been reissued on Kindle and is out now.

Perhaps appropriately, Pack of Lies has always been hard to find. The courier lost the printer's typescript, the edition appeared late and mainstream booksellers resisted the format. Unity Books stocked it and everyone else got theirs from the library. I often see copies of the first edition floating around on TradeMe for a few dollars; international readers can buy a secondhand copy on Amazon UK for £19.76 + £2.80 delivery, a price that would seem less outrageous if I was getting a cut.

So it's a rare bird, this 35,000 word tale told by the lying and unreliable teenage Catrina. My expectations for the new version are set low. As with the individual stories, the goal of this digitisation is about making the work available to readers, and having a bit of fun. I always thought when the technology came along it would be great to add a soundtrack or something; now digital's here, all I care about are the words. They work by themselves.

The Kindle edition of Pack of Lies has been revised, particularly in the opening chapters. I hadn't planned to touch it but as I was formatting the text some things just nagged. The revision process was instinctive. I was editing in plain text (for HTML) and found myself skimming the prose in the same way I'd read a site or text on my laptop screen. On digital a change is a keystroke away.

Writers write and read off their computers all the time so why then do so many of us cling to the idea of a paper book? Directors edit in a digital suite to create a projected film. Musicians press digital samples to vinyl. When David Hockney exhibited 'A Bigger Splash' he had gallery technicians aim a spotlight directly at the splash to supplement the painted effect. Artists play in the gaps between media.

As noted previously my work's not on Smashwords due to a shortage of time and patience. Like I said, Pack of Lies was always hard to find...

Do your thing

In a sure-to-be-discussed-everywhere article Kim Wright asks why so many literary writers are shifting to genre:

The good ship Literary Fiction has run aground and the survivors are frantically paddling toward the islands of genre. Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but there does seem to be a definite trend of literary/mainstream writers turning to romance, thrillers, fantasy, mystery, and YA.

The evidence may not be empirical but this does seem to be a trend. If it is I would answer the question by saying that literary authors were always writing in a genre in the first place. John Birmingham and I stumbled towards saying this at the Sydney Writers' Festival in 2003:

"Big L" literature, as they describe it [says John Birmingham] no longer connects to the real world. It's left to "small L" literature writers, the journalists, crime writers and drug scribes, to get their fingers dirty and get the meaty stories out there." 

"I really love literature, you need it like you need vegetables," said Taylor. "But it's become this timid thing."

Strolling around a big bookstore (because I find less in them to stop and read, let alone buy) this timidity becomes apparent. From subject to tone to style to title and packaging, "literature" follows as many rules as "romance" or "historical."

David Mamet spotted the "trend" in 2000:

For the past 30 years the greatest novelists writing in English have been genre writers: John le Carré, George Higgins and Patrick O'Brian. 

Each year, of course, found the press discovering some writer whose style, provenance and choice of theme it found endearing. These usually trig, slim tomes shared a wistful and self-commendatory confusion at the multiplicity of life and stank of Art. But the genre writers wrote without sentimentality; their prose was concise and perceptive; in it the reader sees the life of which they wrote, rather than the writer's "technique."

O'Brian wrote the Master and Commander novels, of which Our Mr Reynolds was a great fan. He was always pressing them on me. I didn't like them so much but we found common ground in Le Carré – the early ones, at least.

Maybe lit's still good. There's crap in the genre shelves as well. The Clean said it best: Great Sounds Great, Good Sounds Good, So-So Sounds So-So, Bad Sounds Bad, Rotten Sounds Rotten.

Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night

(Red laser, L'Avventura, Crash, Breaking Bad)

Many happy returns

I write longhand and type it up on a computer. When I'm typing I'm really word-processing but I think of it as typing: I write in chunks which I then print out and revise and print out again. I work the same way I first worked on a typewriter. I like watching the pages build up in a stack and no matter how much technology advances there is no mechanism more useful than changing the order of the pieces of paper and flicking through them to see how the text reads. If something's no good I put a line through it; if the page is revised I score a diagonal from upper right to lower left corner; if my revisions become too dense I change ink colours, from black to red to green; if I run out of space I draw an arrow with "PTO" next to it and write on the back of the page in case, re-reading the page, my other self forgets to turn it over. (My revising self consistently underestimates my writing self.) I have doctor's handwriting: a draft ms can be tachiste.

I use a lot of notebooks and when the novel is finished go back through them, fillet any pages that might prove useful and throw the rest out. Raymond Chandler kept an exemplary notebook – there's at least one copy in stacks in the Auckland Library – as did Patricia Highsmith: her cahiers, she called them. I collect things on my laptop: text grabs, PDFs and images, so in terms of research my computer notebook is my real notebook.

But the finished novel is created on a computer so it matters to me how they work. New iterations of the Mac OS are doing away with the "Save" feature. Instead of entering a command to save a document, the system will back it up automatically. This is logical, Jim, because it's a computer but when I first heard about it I felt a twitch. Saving a document is the writer's late 20th / early 21st century equivalent of hitting a typewriter's carriage return: a self-confirmation that yes, you wanted to keep the words (data) you've just typed (entered). Says Michael Gartenburg at Computerworld:

I've long argued that we must get past the need to use a save command. This vestigial remnant of the early days of computing has caused more than one user to lose hours of work as penalty for not saving often enough. Next thing you know, the power fails or you inadvertently close an application thinking your work has been saved. Auto Save eliminates that problem, and it also helps make Versions a great new feature. With Versions, you can "go back in time" (à la Time Machine) to see older versions of any document.

Do writers want to go back in time? If I'm making a major revision to a digital manuscript I save a draft and go to work on the new one. The drafts are numbered in case I need to go back, but I never do. The early drafts are the same as my notebooks: I spot a few useful things here and there – a few pages' worth – and dump the rest. Not that one needs to dump digital drafts. A life's work will fit on a cell phone, with enough room spare for a movie.

Blanche, Anthony

These are not the redirects you're looking for

What you were searchin' this month, and what we think it might mean:

• chadtaylormarginalia.blogspot.com*
• alien movie spacesuit
• ingrid pitt jason king
• prometheus alien et
• model with uplit face **
• rayograph
• shunryu suzuki quotes
• steve martin 1977
• avatar wasted legs
• avengers touch of brimstone
• christine perfect
• kraken pulp noir
• fighting irish tattoo fail**
• liz phair naked***
• nazi chick heels****

* Success!
** Not so much!
*** But not really.

**** Best I can do, sorry.

Two dollar pistol but the gun won't shoot

I pushed my way through two of Henning Mankell's Wallander novels, Faceless Killers and Firewall and was not so impressed. They were commendably bleak but surprisingly loose with the plot. Here for instance, Hastings, is Firewall not summing things up:

They never did manage to find a satisfying answer to why Sonja Hökberg was thrown against the high voltage wires at the power station, nor why Falk had been in possession of the blueprint.

Which was only central to the entire plot. To quote Raymond Chandler, Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel (1949):

The mystery novel must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law courts. Contrary to popular belief, this has nothing to do with morality. It is part of the logic of the form. Without this the story is like an unresolved chord in music. It leaves a sense of irritation.

Still, Mankell sells mega, so it's a reminder maybe that mysteries are not all about answers. (I've pleaded as much myself.)

I am however a hard and fast fan of the Swedish TV production starring Krister Henriksson. A few of the handsomely produced movie-length episodes were based on Mankell's novels while the remainder were storylined by the author and scripted / worked up by television screenwriters. The encroaching professionalism means that over the course of the two seasons the series evolves into something not unlike others we have seen but at its core Wallander is grim, locally authentic and refreshingly awkward. One aspect of this is the locale – as with Stieg Larsson, the extremes of winter are both an elemental symbol and threatening plot device. Another is the mood of the players: the Scandanavian cast are naturalistic and react in ways that are unexpected. Kurt Wallander really is curt; Prosecutor Katarina is brittle; Martinsson is blinking and uncomprehending – a by-product of the writers not giving him many lines, or the camera needing something/one to cut away to. Sometimes the stories are just damn clunky, but there's really something there, and so the dramatisation has sent me back to the novels to puzzle them out. I love a good mystery, especially the conundrum of how the writer did it.

End of days no really

Critics are saying Cowboys & Aliens didn't work, and wondering if the western is dead. Saying the western is dead is like saying the blues or jazz or figurative painting or the novel is dead: some things will always be there, in one form or another. What disappointed me instantly about the film was the aliens: I was expecting a 1950s flying-hubcap saucers vs. cowboys mashup, but I guess Indiana Jones and the Collective Noun of the Crystal Skull put everyone off that. (It nearly worked in Mars Attacks.)

Along the same line, thrillers are back. (THRILLERS! ARE! BACK!) Or rather, we flee to them in a menacing world dada-dada-da-da. As I've said before (somewhere...) I believe readers –broadly – turn to crime / thrillers because the genre commits to telling a story. At a recent literary event a publisher told me she classified a crime novel as being about "something that has already happened" and a thriller as "something that hasn't happened yet."

Screen caps from the Comic-Con trailer for Ridley Scott's Prometheus are up here. I am now officially keen. David Slade has directed S04E03 of Breaking Bad. Collider reviews it here. So that's more viewing to catch up on.

If you watch TV via torrents the New Zealand and UK governments are coming for you. Torrentfreak claims that the consultation process for the UK's Digital Economy Act was a sham and that the decision by then Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson to disconnect downloaders was a foregone conclusion. Exotically, Mandelson supped with Dark Lord Dreamworks founder David Geffen to discuss the matter, a mashup more discombobulating than Cowboys & Aliens / Alien Vs Predator / Frankenstein Vs The Wolfman. (Does Geffen put down the white cat with the diamond collar when he is at table? How does Peter eat with his fingertips touching together?)

New Zealand Sony general manager Andrew Cornwell says the new anti-file sharing / anti-download / You Wouldn't Steal A Car / Hey Kids Stop Tagging law is targeting the muddle:

"You're never going to stop it entirely. There will always be some hard core people who want to take on the system and get a lot of pleasure out of defeating it and proving they're smarter than the next person. The whole thrust of it is aimed at middle New Zealand who might do the occasional download."

So... the industry will be aiming its thrust at the amateurs who don't cost them very much while leaving heavy-duty downloaders to establish a second tier distribution network which will undercut legitimate corporations by supplying what users want, when they want it and at a lower price. Because that is, after all, how the drugs war was won.

But in America – the last country which Americans can't push around – former Google CIO Douglas C Merrill says Limewire was good for artists. And CNET reports album sales are climbing:

Wayne Rosso, the former president of defunct file-sharing network Grokster who now blogs about the music industry, says that the last time the recording industry saw album sales climb was in 2004, when there were a dozen file-sharing services operating, including Grokster, eDonkey and BearShare. Rosso said plenty of studies show file sharing stimulates song sales.

"This minor blip is nothing to get too excited about," Rosso said. "But it really shows it's all about the product...music has to have legs. That's what has been lost in the last decade: quality."

Full story (bar charts, balanced reporting) here.

Break my heart and leave me sad

Recording a track with Amy Winehouse for a duets album, Tony Bennett told her she reminded him of Dinah Washington:

"The minute she heard that, her eyes popped wide open and she said, 'You know that I like Dinah Washington?' I said, 'She was a friend of mine.' She was all excited that I knew Dinah Washington and that was the main inspiration. And from that moment on, the record came out just beautiful...

"Everybody just said, 'Oh, I don't know how you're going to handle her,' but I felt completely different. She really loves to perform. Every great artist I ever met, Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey, they'd always have the butterflies. And Amy Winehouse was like that, she was always apprehensive of what was going to happen."

Postmortem: sales of the singer's music skyrocket; likelihood of a third album to be released; possibility that Blake Fielder-Civil may be in line to inherit the estate. (Update: or not.)

I hope there is a third album. I'm sure there are parts of one somewhere, which is all a record company needs. Her most recent single was a brilliant workaround; her limitations, we now learn, included emphysema.

Online listeners and critics are already discussing how Amy Winehouse will be remembered. Frank is eclectic but above all observed, like a good student doing her jazz homework. The themes of heartbreak are acquired and the lyrics so neat the arrangements are practically ruled off underneath. It was only with Back to Black (as uneven in texture as many other albums from her UK contemporaries – don't engineers mix any more?) that the artist began to inhabit and embrace the dissolute jazz persona the performer had created.

I still don't buy the title track or 'You Know I'm No Good', with its fifth-form poetry imagery but when she cracked the lyric 'He walks away / The sun goes down' for 'Tears Dry On Their Own' I fell for La Winehouse hook, line and sinker. With that track she put everything she had on the girl group sound and doubled down. Restless, pissed-off and charming, that single was shorthand for a whole lot of music that came before and a hint of what might have been.

Clint

Clint Eastwood interviewed by Stuart Fischoff Ph.D. for Psychology Today, 1993:

Psychology Today: One part of your film career - the "Dirty Harry" aspect of it - contains a lot of violence, as well as people who use violence to resolve conflicts. There's an argument that, if enough of these points of view are put in movies or on television, eventually it becomes an educational experience. So do you ever consider the social implications of your films before you make them?

Clint Eastwood: I consider them, yeah. I consider the social implications. But you mention violence as a means of resolving conflict. Well, conflict is the basis of drama. I guess that goes back as long as time has existed as far as mankind is concerned, dating back to the Greek tragedies or the Old Testament. And violence is a form of conflict, so whether that's catharsis or whether that has some socially damaging effect on audiences - I suppose that would just depend. I tend to believe that audiences are relatively well-balanced people. You're making the film for the average person. You are not making it for the one guy out there who is going to take it seriously and go, "Yeah, gee, that's crazy, I might jump off a building or what have you."

PT: Did you think about the social messages of the "Dirty Harry" movies?

CE: I approached it from the uncomplicated point of view, that it was an exciting detective story but it also addressed the issue of the victims of violent crime. In the 1960s and early '70s, it was very fashionable to address the plight of the criminals instead of the victims. Dirty Harry came along and it seemed like it was ahead of its time.

And also, like my character in White Hunter, Black Heart said, you can't let eighty million popcorn-eaters pull you this way or that way. You kind of have to go ahead. But as you get older you try to do things that please you more. You get a little more selfish. You start thinking I want to do things where I enjoy myself. I don't want to go and just jump across buildings. You know, shoot nameless people off the top of stagecoaches or what have you. That's not interesting. That's why Unforgiven became a very important film for me, because it sort of summed up my feelings about certain movies I participated in - movies where killing is romantic. And here was a chance to show that it really wasn't so romantic.

(...)

PT: It has been said about artists, that even if consciously they didn't have an idea, subconsciously they had a kind of shadow government there - the subconscious mind working and being creative.

CE: Yeah, yeah. I think there is a shadow government there. It's sort of part of the soul. But it's probably a combination of what you are. The shadow government is something running inside you and you don't tap into it consciously. If you do, you're afraid it might shrink.

PT: That's a fear that a lot of artists have. It's really true.

CE: I think so. I think a lot of people feel and I must say I felt that same way, too - that if I start fooling with it maybe it will go away or maybe I won't look at it properly.

Full interview here.

Brothers, sisters shoot your best

I genuinely flinched during Captain America: The First Avenger, in a moment when Cap's shield whangs! off a tank and back to camera. So the 3D cinema experience has advanced, for me, at least: instead of making me want to barf in Avatar and slightly blurring Tron Legacy, in Captain America the technology added a sense of delight to all manner of small things. Canvas tent flaps, rivets, paper flags pinned in maps, Tommy Lee Jones' nose: it's all jumping out at you. There were even dancing girls flashing their gams in a nod to the now very-old title sequence in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, and an upskirt. Classy, pleated, very Busby Berkeley, but still an upskirt.

Although Joe Johnston treats the World War II period action with family-friendly, fair fightin' decorum – dude really knows his Jane's Secret Aircraft – he has an eye for the ladies. Chris Evans' Cap is the hero but Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter is the star. Like Jennifer Connelly in The Rocketeer and Emily Blunt in The Wolfman, she adds lustre. She is a sharp shooter and a bombshell. The men are cheery and lantern-jawed, a rainbow coalition bound by courage. After the death of a friend, Cap discovers his scientifically enhanced super body is too healthy for him to even get drunk. This could be the most Aryan version of Americana since Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers.

Above all, Captain America is about heft. The stereo-ified weight of props and machinery is as palpable as each component of the plot clicking into place. The narrative is as carefully balanced as a Disney film, as smooth as a legal argument. If there is a common aspect to all the recent Marvel and DC movies, it is this defensiveness: the desire to get it right always second to the fear of getting it wrong. The hero dons a deliberately bad version of his uniform early on to allow the audience to get over the titters; a somber mentor is sacrificed too soon to give matters gravity (a tweedy and kinda Prada-ish Stanley Tucci, enlarging on Shaun Toub's affecting Yinsen in Iron Man); a Greek chorus of talkative supporting characters to voice the scepticism of any actual scientists / historians / four-star generals who might be present in the theater. Each comic book movie enlarges the canon of plausible solutions to underpants-on-the-outside, and thus cinema marches forward. If Captain America is Captain America not done wrong it is at least Watchmen done right.

There is a Stark Snr (with more dancing girls – I really did enjoy them), and a child who appears to be from Little Orphan Annie, and hey, wasn't that alley from Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy? The Nazis are not Nazis really. Says Johnston without irony, "We turned them into Hydra, the über Nazis. Real Nazis aren't funny, but you can slaughter them in all kinds of interesting ways and get away with it."

Captain America does get away with it. A bullied orphan is engineered into a killer, loses his best friend and the only woman who loved him before being snatched from his world and abandoned to a friendless future, and we are all entertained.

Pic c/- Empire Online.

We float

Ando Hiroshige, Cat looking at fields at Asakusa (1857), from 100 views of Edo.

Bedside reading, 1970 (Get your ass to Mars)

You can't judge a book by its cover but you sure get an idea of what the publisher was thinking. Another childhood birthday present, from 1970, Captain W.E. Johns' Return to Mars, swiftly repackaged for boys who had enjoyed Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. But even for a younger reader the discrepancies between these possible futures and the Captain's world of tomorrow became all too apparent. To summarise:

Professor Brane, 'Tiger' Clinton, his son Rex and the Professor's butler, Judkins, travel back to Mars.

Still, nice pic. (More vintage W.E. Johns covers here.)

The colonialist vision of space lives on in Avatar and Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, now filmed as John Carter. And manservants? Said Michael Fassbender of his role in Ridley Scott's Alien prequel Prometheus:

"I play a 'butler.'"

Desktop images

What I love about images from movies and TV is that somebody wrote them.

Bedside reading, 1975

On my eleventh birthday one of my presents was the mass-market edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles. I was already familiar with the short stories and I loved the character of Sherlock Holmes, his coldness balanced in no small part by Sydney Paget's illustrations for the Strand Magazine. (You will observe, Watson, the detective's profile in Paget's own features.)

The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the most popular Holmes mysteries, although the mystery is solved early on. In his forward to the little 1975 paperback John Fowles (yes, him) attributes the novel's success to its supernatural element: "One thing Doyle must have seen at once . . . was that he had at last found an 'enemy' far more profound and horrifying than any mere human criminal. The Hound is the primeval force behind Moriarty: not just one form that evil takes, but the very soul of the thing."

But although it may be the most famous Holmes novel, the detective is absent for most of the story, hiding out in the moors and wandering around in disguise. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had become bored with his creation and killed off Holmes at Reichenbach Falls. Later, forced by loathsome success to reanimate him, the author chose instead to shape the narrative around Watson.

When I first read The Hound of Baskervilles, Holmes' absence was confusing to me. I decided that it must simply be a rule for detective novels that the central character was not there; only later when I got around to reading Fowles' forward and afterword was I educated. (Boys never read the instructions.) Nowadays I indulge in my own authorial contrariness, and it's become my mantra that the main character or even the narrator should be mysterious, covered up, or missing.

Got a weird thing to show you, so tell all the boys and girls

A friend of mine works in an office where all the systems keep crashing. Email doesn't work, applications are losing data and user log ins fail. IT suspects the problems stem from their recent upgrade to the new version of Word.

Putting out my short stories on Kindle (here, ici et voila) required coding HTML and graphics, zipping and uploading it to Amazon, checking in two different applications and adapting to the quirks of same. Publishing on Smashwords would have required updating manscript(s) in Word. At which point I thought fuck that, and returned to my (new) writing. I don't have time for that shit.

I wrote my first novel in Word 4. On a Mac Plus with an external 30 megabyte hard drive. Word 4 was brilliant. Word 5 we were told to avoid. 5.1 was tolerable: more features than you needed but the keystroke to capture and move a paragraph up or down was useful. I think Word 6 was not Mac native code – Apple was a dying company, and Microsoft ruled the world. I lost track of the next versions. I became so frustrated I briefly attempted working in Claris Works. (A benchmark of desperation.) Then I discovered Final Draft and started working in that.

Final Draft is not perfect either but it is simple. One font, thank you; one page layout, automatic page numbering (top r/h corner), para and linespacing preset (1.5, with a line break after each para), and that's it. You write in scenes (or chapters) which can be viewed as index cards and, most wonderfully, moved around in chunks. Prints one way, too; saves to easy to locate back up folder. There are some production planning features for real screenwriters which I don't require. I block out a treatment in FD (automatic scene numbering) and then write in the app or in Text Wrangler and drop them in. Just like typing.

Word could do all that, of course: the problem is getting it to do just that and no more. 'You can configure it,' as my friend Paul Reynolds loved to goad – we would bang on about Word the way other men talk about sports – but no matter what macros I deleted or features I switched off, something else would pop up: an auto address complete, a custom ellipsis, a line that demanded to be Helvetica bold italic underline, the pod bay doors that wouldn't open. That's why I started working on laptops: they're easier to throw across the room.

I still have a copy of Word on my computer and flinch when I have to open it. I don't know anyone who enjoys using the application. It puzzles me that after decades of computers and software becoming better, faster, sleeker, simpler that Word only gets harder, more tangled, more complicated, less reliable.

Recently played (iPod)

1. Private Life - Grace Jones
2. Mohawk - Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie
3. Hotel California - Eagles
4. Carry That Weight - Beatles
5. Quinn the Eskimo - Bob Dylan
6. Get Some - Lykke Li
7. The Night I Fell in Love - Luther Vandross
8. Steppin' Out - Joe Jackson
9. Harder Better Faster Stronger - Daft Punk
10. Golden Birdies - Captain Beefheart
11. Forever - Minuit
12. Graham Greene - John Cale
13. Kiss Them For Me - Siouxsie and the Banshees
14. Bones - The Killers
15. Nothinginsomethingparticular - The Associates
16. New York State of Mind - Alicia Keys
17. Reckless - Crystal Castles
18. Band of Gold - Diana Ross & The Supremes
19. The Blower's Daughter - Damien Rice
20. Truck Sweat - Tobacco

Working

When you sit down to write, is that what you do? Just say, "Okay, I'm starting a book" and then sit down and keep writing until it's done? Do you take breaks? Do you ever get writer's block?

No. No writer's block. Never had it. Don't believe in it. Doesn't exist. I don't buy that one.

Ernest Hemingway said it... If you've got writer's block, write one sentence. And if you can write one, you can write two. If you can write two, you can write three. If you've written three, you have a paragraph. There's just no such thing as writer's block.

I work all the time. I write all the time. No days off, not for any reason. I get up in the morning and I start at it, get into the afternoon, I work out. I work at it at night. I work on it until I go to bed at eleven. I keep a notebook by my table and I write in the middle of the night sometimes. Sometimes I'll write from maybe 4AM to 6AM and go back to bed, but I write all the time. And I always have. That's the way I've always done it.

James Lee Burke. Full interview here.

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.