The True Wheel

When work's going well I stop talking and I stop reading. Not entirely, but generally: when your head's good, stay in your head.

I'm writing long on this one. I have to keep reminding myself that novels take longer to write than they do to read. Authors read faster than a bush fire. A lot of the work goes into what's not on the page. The underpinning has to be right but a reader can go a long way into a novel without caring about that.

Brian Eno discussed production to consumption ratios in music with Richard Williams in 1979:

"I have a theory that, as a maker you tend to put in twice as much as you need as a listener. It's the symptom of contemporary production. With the facilities that you have today, you tend to plug every hole.. You're always looking for that charge, so you put more and more in to get it. But as a listener you're much less demanding... you can take things that are much simpler, much more open, and much slower. It's often happened that I've made a piece and ended up slowing it down by as much as half. Discreet Music is an example: that's half the speed at which it was recorded."

Somewhere in the index of Platonic forms there must exist the perfect ratio of writing-to-reading hours. If the time invested in creating a work far exceeds the time it takes to decode, the text becomes a bottleneck: an obstacle to all but the most perservering -- the "important but unread" category. At the other end of the scale would be the pulps -- the real pulps, not the good ones -- that are so light that they offer no challenge and no reward.

I suspect that a prerequisite for book to be a best seller is that the narrative has to be constructed at the same speed at which a reader is prepared to unpack it. Errors and stylistic missteps are irrelevant: in fact, the clunkiness of the prose humanises the narrative. As Johnny Cash said, 'Your style is function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.'

Bedside reading, 1975 #2

I am kind of looking forward to John Carter. "Kind of" because Disney dropped "of Mars" from the title, and the fanboys are grumbling. "Looking forward to" because I read the series when I was very young and liked them a lot. Clive James once said that good books are the ones we feel slightly guilty about reading -- an observation I come back to more and more.

What is striking about John Carter of Mars is how it practically minted a genre. Edgar Rice Burroughs' ideas have become storytelling standards, their components recycled to power Dune, Avatar, Star Wars and many more. Like Edgar Allan Poe or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his pulp fiction is a gift that keeps on giving.

I read Dune later. (As someone else may or may not have once said, the golden age of science fiction is twelve.) I had no time for any of the sequels -- Children of... and all that crap -- but Frank Herbert's original was strange and appealing. I read it at the beach one summer so the images mingle, pleasantly, with sands I saw every day. And I liked the David Lynch movie very much. After Lynch's Dune SF movies had a choice: they could do his version of what scifi looked like, or Ridley Scott's in Bladerunner. Critics and fans hated it, but lately it has been revisited. Writes Andrew Stimpson:

Dune's closest analogue is John Boorman's Excalibur. At the time of its 1981 release a US critic, while denigrating the film as a whole, noted that "the images have a crazy integrity". It was, in effect, a greatest hits collection of Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur: an artfully visualised series of key scenes and epic occurrences that lacked a uniting flow. The same could be said of Lynch's picture and its source novel.

Dune was in development for many years by insane person Alejandro Jodorowsky:

Salvador Dali was cast as the insane Emperor of the Universe, who lived on an artificial planet built from gold and had a robot doppelgänger (actually conceived as a way around the real Dalí's extortionate fiscal demands for appearing in person) to keep people guessing, fearfully, which one they were dealing with. He accepted the part with apparent glee, his only demand being that the Emperor's throne must be a toilet made from intersected dolphins, the tails forming the feet and the mouths to receive piss and shit separately.

Nowadays, of course, that would all be done in CGI.

Jodorowsky's mad-as-fuck version was never made -- all the artists, including writer Dan O'Bannon, ended up working on another little film called Alien -- but you want the flavour of what it would have been like -- and you know you do -- watch Santa Sangre or The Holy Mountain.

PS: Not-a-prequel Prometheus viral marketing starts here. (Milk and cookies keep you awake?)

PPS: The Hollywood Reporter says John Carter is not so bad.

I've paid my dues to make it

Walter Mosley on writing, interviewed by Charles L.P. Silet:

MysteryNet: Obviously you don't see much distinction between what we would describe as genre or crime fiction and straight fiction or literature.

Mosley: No, I don't see any difference in it. Of course, in the genre there are certain kinds of things that you have to do, but it's the same in a coming-of-age novel, somebody has to come of age. So you have to follow the conventions. Good fiction is in the sentence and in the character and in the heart of the writer. If the writer is committed to and in love with what he or she is doing, then that's good fiction.

MysteryNet: Who have you read both in crime fiction and in regular fiction that's had an influence on you?

Mosley: In crime fiction, I've read lots and lots of people. Charles Willeford, I just adore. Every one of his books is so deeply flawed plot-wise, but it matters nothing to me because he's such a wonderful writer. I was reading one of his books the other day about some old guy and his wife; he was seventy-two but looked older and she was sixty-three and looked older than him. It was so funny; just the way he wrote it. My God, this guy is fantastic! Hoke Mosley is a real guy. It's so right. I've read everybody -- Gregory MacDonald -- I've read all the Fletch books. I thought they were wonderful. Parker, of course. Vachss, who I adore, because I think that he is so deeply committed to what he believes in. I feel the heart coming through it, and I compare him to Dickens. Rex Stout. I've read almost everything Simenon ever wrote. The people I love for writing are the French: Malraux, Camus, Gide, for just the style of writing. It is almost the heart of fiction for me. Then the older guys like Proust, and tons of black poets: Gwendolyn Brooks, Derek Walcott, Amiri Baraka. It doesn't matter who writes it, no matter their sex or their race or what period of time they lived in.

Raymond Chandler, from Frank MacShane's The Life of Raymond Chandler (1986):

My theory was that readers just thought that they cared about nothing but the action; that really although they didn't know it, they cared very little about the action. The thing they really cared about, and that I care about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description.

Our dried voices when we whisper together

So I finally got to see The Ides of March and Moneyball. Clooney is not as smart as he thinks he is and Brad Pitt is not as charismatic as he thinks he is. Which is no crime. Clooney is a good director: he knows when to hang back and he really lets the actors speak for themselves. His style reminds me very much of Robert Redford's in Quiz Show: he shuts up and lets the story get on with it, and the drama is character-driven. The weakness is in the script (three credited writers, based on a play) which turns on Ryan Gosling's moral character making an immoral choice. Why he does so isn't set up or explained. Basically the character acts out of character.

The Moneyball screenplay is credited to Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin: a sort of screenwriting supergroup. Liked it a lot, again because the director lets things hang a little, but Sorkin's dialogue tennis is best served fast and Pitt plays it slow. I don't think I've truly enjoyed Pitt in anything: like Alfred Molina, he is likeable, talented and nearly always miscast. He's tremendously physical -- in one scene, tossing a bat aside with the fluidity of a dancer -- but every role he takes involves doing annoying things with his mouth (sucking a spoon, chewing on a sandwich or, in this case, spitting gum into a coffee cup). But when he looks rundown or downcast or subdued, he ages ten years and becomes terrific. Edward James Olmos' line to the DOP was "don't make me look pretty." Pitt could use that.

Both films are about money and the lack of it. I enjoy this as a subject. It's becoming more current.

Neither are as good as The Ghost, which I finally got to see as well. Polanski knows how to build tension. He deploys clichés like a sail, adjusting them gradually. In The Ghost an exiled politician lives by the sea: one shot has his groundsman sweeping the sand off the steps only to have the approaching wind blow it back. At which point I decided: I fucking love this movie. The Ghost is as melodramatic as Ides of March; as esoteric as Moneyball, yet recognisable, spooky, obsessive, human. Square inside a genre, buckling down on character and above all witty. I guess this is what it was like watching Rosemary's Baby when it first came out.

I'm obsessed with 'drama', now. People walking in and out of rooms, talking. It's amazing how much you can do with that.

Pat

Patricia Highsmith interviewed by Gerald Peary in 1988:

She owns no copies of films made from her books, not even Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 version of her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950). "It seems to be entertaining after all these years," she acknowledges. "They keep playing it on American TV, ancient as it is. A few years ago, there were requests to me, 'Can we make this?' I said that I have no rights. Contact the Hitchcock estate, which won't release it for a remake."

Strangers on a Train was sold outright for $7,500, with ten per cent of that to Highsmith's agent. A meager recompense, some would say, but Highsmith disagrees. "That wasn't a bad price for a first book, and my agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment. I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes."

Hitchcock purchased Strangers On A Train through an intermediary so Highsmith's agent wouldn't know who was bidding for it and ask for a larger advance. It's interesting that the author puts so much distance between herself and the director: critics and fans put them hand in glove.

NB: Nice sweater.

You hit me with a flower

One-star reviews such as:

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
"So many other good books... don't waste your time on this one. J.D. Salinger went into hiding because he was embarrassed."

...always remind me of the 'Review of Winslow Homer Show at LA County Museum' from Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes, pictured above. (I have a first edition -- Putnam, 1977 -- sitting in storage with the rest of my books.) In addition to his many other talents, Steve Martin may have predicted the internet.

Now, more seriously, Time's Lev Grossman has examined the phenomenon of "it sucks / it rocks" reader reviews in depth:

It's a basic but still weird fact about books that two people's experiences of the same book can be radically different but equally valid. On the face of it it doesn't seem possible. When we read a book and find that it sucks, that doesn't feel like a personal judgment on our part, it feels like an observed fact that everybody else who reads that book should acknowledge — and if they don't acknowledge it, that means that they suck. It goes against our instincts as a reader that two people can have opposite reactions to a book, and that both reactions can be true...

Grossman concludes:

I feel like there should be more talk about the criteria by which we make literary judgments. More and more books are being published every year, but we have less of an idea than ever (what with aesthetics being dead, or at least resting) how to filter and sort and organize and canonize them, or even whether we should.

The full article is here.

Driving down your freeways

James Ellroy in the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

You were away from Los Angeles for twenty-five years. Why'd you come back?

JAMES ELLROY

One reason: Cherchez la femme. I chased women to suburban New York, suburban Connecticut, Kansas City, Carmel, and San Francisco. But I ran out of places, and I ran out of women, so I ended up back here.

INTERVIEWER

Did you miss the city?

ELLROY

While I was away, the Los Angeles of my past accreted in my mind, developing its own power. Early on in my career I believed that in order to write about LA, I had to stay out of it entirely. But when I moved back, I realized that LA then lives in my blood. LA now does not.

Full article is here.