Tales of madness

Chris Bell has a new collection of short stories out, The Concentrated Essence of Any Number of Ravens. You can read about it here and buy it here. The fifty-odd stories (some of them, very odd) are short and varied and fun. Disclosure: I wrote the foreword, because I like his stories. His other books include The Bumper Book of Lies and Liquidambar.

Authors have been a-Twitter about RJ Ellory using online pseudonyms to praise himself and criticise his 'rivals'. (In a post on his Facebook page, Mark Billingham called it 'the tip of the iceberg.') The scandal reminded me of James Frey being caught out for fabricating his autobiographical A Million Little Pieces. Writing fiction is personal and private and, above all, slow, but the online world advances publicly, 365/24/7, 140 characters at a time. If you're going to turn fiction into a competition, don't be surprised if authors start doping to keep up.

Many of the actors in the trailer for the new movie version of The Sweeney appear to be palsied: slurred speech, facial paralysis, wrecked physiques. The contrast between the actors' stasis while speaking and the action extras is extreme to the point of comedy, like a Steven Seagal flick. The Sweeney is one of a number of recent UK movies that have been produced almost exclusively for local consumption (St Georges Day is another): the sort of drama that no longer finds a natural home on British television.

The trailer preceded David Cronenberg's movie of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis which I enjoyed for the spectacle of a director sublimating all his obsessions to serve an author's voice. Claustrophobic and precise, Cosmopolis felt like a coda to the themes he explored in other films: biomechanical worlds (Videodrome), addiction (Naked Lunch), technological fetishism (Crash) and decay (The Fly, Dead Ringers).

I also finally caught up with A Dangerous Method which, like A History of Violence, is a pretty conventional narrative that suddenly pops with violence and sex before healing over again. A friend of mine remarked that you never worry about Sean Connery in a movie because you know he's really James Bond: when the monastery was burning down in Name of the Rose, you knew he had a jet pack under his cassock. Cronenberg suffers from a similar, if inverted, typecasting: sitting down to watch one of the director's movies you find yourself bracing for the very worst. When the three stern, uniformed nurses manhandled the screaming, muddied Sabina (Keira Knightley) into a room to merely bathe her, the audience slumped with relief.

Bo Ningen

And then sometimes the kids get it right. Last night at The Garage London-based Bo Ningen played support for someone else who doesn't matter because Bo Ningen were the business: not the retro-prog Bo Ningen, or the speed metal 'DaiKasei' (recorded live) but the four piece honed and sharpened into something else entirely: glassy, precise, modern, loud, monotonal, terrific. Lead singer and bassist Taigen camped it up, the drummer (Mon-chan) nailed it down, and Kohhei and Yuki (guitars) went all the way up to eleven. If you miss Nine Inch Nails, Bo Ningen will keep you warm. Recommended.

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)

Ein literarisches Roadmovie

In October I will travel to Berlin and Frankfurt where New Zealand is the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2012. There I will be taking part at several events to talk about, among other things, the new German edition of my 1993 novel Lügenspiele (Pack of Lies). The first event will be a reception welcoming New Zealand writers to Germany. More dates TBC.

My German publishers Mana Verlag have subtitled the new edition of Lügenspiele "Ein literarisches Roadmovie" -- I like the sound of that. I like the cover photograph, too, which is by Edinburgh-based artist Jeannie Laub.

HEAVEN (1994) out now on Kindle

My second novel Heaven is out now on Kindle, in a new and revised edition and with a brand new cover by Jonathan King.

First published in 1994, Heaven was later made into a feature film by Miramax, produced by Sue Rogers and directed by Scott Reynolds. The movie starred Martin Donovan (Trust, Boss), Richard Schiff (The West Wing), Joanna Going and a pre-Star Trek, pre-Judge Dredd Karl Urban. I wonder if you could assemble a cast like that for an independent New Zealand movie now.

You can pick up a used copy of Heaven for US$52: the ebook edition is priced at US$2.99 at Amazon.com.

I'd lived with the characters, and I cared about them

Tony Scott discovered Quentin Tarantino in 1991:

Tony Scott: When I was directing The Last Boy Scout, my assistant was hanging out with this quirky guy named Quentin Tarantino, and he'd be around the set. She said, "You gotta read his script."

Quentin Tarantino: When you're a nobody, it's murder to get anyone to read your scripts. The original True Romance script started with a long discussion about cunnilingus. Most people said the script was racist and that the grotesque violence would make people sick. I told Tony, "Read the first three pages. If you don't like it, throw it away."

Scott made True Romance, but changed the ending:

I took True Romance and I took Reservoir Dogs. I'm a very slow reader but I read them straight through. I said, 'I'll do both.' He said, 'No. I'd like you to do True Romance.' He's a brilliant writer, he fully conceives every character, no matter how small they are. Actors came to the set not wanting to change a word, which is unusual. The only thing that I did change was the ending. The original was very different. It ended with Alabama. She puts a gun in her mouth. She doesn't shoot herself, and then she just says, 'Oh fuck it, he isn't worth it.' She throws the gun out of the car window and drives off. Quentin thought it was truer to the character. I was trying to make a commercial film, I wanted a happier ending. I'd lived with the characters really, and I cared about them.

Who knows what people will say about Tony Scott now. But I remember reading (would it have been Premiere magazine?) that when the director hired Tarantino to do a script polish for Crimson Tide (1995) for a lot of money and very little work, it was as a thank you for True Romance.

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