Virtually published, really knackered…

Much excitement on my return from Yorkshire to discover that my short story ‘Golden’ (first published a couple of years back in The Third Alternative) is now up on Infinity Plus, here. And of course the course in Yorkshire was just fantastic, more on that when I have reactivated my brain…

‘Cities are slow computers’

…is today’s thought from the day from Matt Jones, talking very interestingly at the Interesting Conference on Saturday - suspect much online content will be going up about it over the next week or so, starting with Charlie Frith here (with links to other attendees) - and thanks to Russell for sorting it out! Not strictly a literary event, so a bit out of the normal subject matter here, but very, very thought provoking indeed.

Anyway, more on that later… most immediate impression, in its blend of diversity and obsession, acute professionalism and inspired amateurism, it felt much like a physical manifestation of a really interesting (and slightly random) afternoon’s net surfing.

Which also made me realise that the web is built round a geography of interest – unlike the real world, when you’re online what’s closest to you is what obsesses you the most. And again, Saturday’s conference was very much a literalisation of that.

And today I’m writing in telegraphese! In half an hour or so, I’m off to Yorkshire for a week’s writing workshop with Liz Williams and Graham Joyce. Should be very enjoyable, and hopefully will also launch a very substantial sharpening up of the novel. Not sure if I’ll have any web access over the next few days, so – until next Monday – farewell!

Scott of the Rantarctic

Well, despite a bacon, mushroom and brown sauce sandwich, and a rather nice cappuccino, I’m still hungover, so I’m just going to rant a bit, releasing my inner literary Richard Littlejohn (for non-UK readers, a noted right wing ranting journalist / loon) on the world.

We’re going to hell in a handcart!

If there’s one thing that winds me up, it’s the way that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comment that ‘there are no second acts in American lives’ is taken to mean that there are no second chances in American lives. You see it quoted all over the place – such-and-such has returned triumphantly from failure, ‘disproving FSF’s famous dictum’, somebody else falls into obscurity, ‘proving FSF right’.

You couldn’t make it up!!

But – if you think about what the term ‘second act’ actually means in a narrative structure context – you realise that’s not what he meant at all! Classically, in the First Act you establish a goal for your protagonist, in the Second Act you create obstacles to the achievement of those goals, and in the Third Act you show what happens when those goals are finally achieved.

It’s Political Correctness GONE MAD!!!

So, when FSF said that there are no second acts in American lives, what I think he really meant was that there’s an expectation that there should be no barriers between the desire and the fulfilment of the desire. And that’s a very intriguing comment, perfectly describing the promises that much of modern consumer culture makes to us all. You want it? You got it. No effort needed, because there’s no longer a second act.

Now that’s much more interesting than no second chances.

And it’s OUR TAXES THAT PAY FOR IT ALL!!!!

Dystopia IS utopia

Flicking through the Ballard entry on Wikipedia just now, and I was interested to see that they describe him as a dystopian writer. On the surface, a not unreasonable judgement, but for me there’s something a little more complex going on there.

Ballard’s always explored – in a very engaged and fertile way – the destructive forces that make us who we are; our reckless engagements with technology, our roots in profoundly irrational drives that consistently overwhelm and make obsolete our more considered selves.

For Ballard, rationality is a convenient fiction, easily discarded. We love destruction, chaos, mayhem; otherwise we wouldn’t produce so much of them. Ultimately, our most creative response to partial, rationally driven structures - like, for example, classic utopias - can only be to break them. Being human means that dystopia IS utopia.

Ballard helps restore normal service

Good grief, what happened yesterday? Everything seems so much more relaxed today. Very strange. Anyway, a thought to help get things back to normal from J. G. Ballard, who reminds us that:

‘Most people do not even grasp the fact that they need information to keep their imagination up to par.’

A need for jumping off points - the more, the better. And of course the starting point determines the destination. It’s not so much look before you leap, as leap from many places at once.

Went to a reading Ballard did a couple of years back, btb - he comes across as an immensely clubbable, affable fellow, and you listen to him for a couple of minutes, and suddenly realise just how sharp and subversive a mind he has. I imagined an alien scalpel of uncertain origin and purpose, potentially lethal if mishandled, cunningly disguised as a double gin and tonic on a Surrey golf club bar.

‘A person’s obsessions are as close to reality as you can get.’

Words to live by.

Time regained

Broken city. Shattered buildings, where they had climbed out of the ground, gnawing away at the dense certainties that held them down. I saw so much rubble, so much death - vivid and prowling through the streets, faces carved from chalk, flesh harder and so much more ragged than the bones that support it.

I thought of Erkenwald, summoning the dead to speak, and then dismissing them. These memories of men cannot be so easily laid. The graveyards from the Victorian stews emptied, the plague pits gave up their dead. Churchyards erupted. Bone warriors climbed out of long flattened tumuli, leading skeleton horses behind them. I saw a legion form up by Trafalgar Square, tarnished armour rattling against hollow, dessicated chests.

There is no more history, only now. The past has broken into our world and insisted that we acknowledge it. We are all immigrants in time, losing ourselves as the years pass. I thought I saw the shadows of old buildings staggering up, where the new ones had been shattered. I flew through it all. Ghost lights flickered in Cremorne Gardens as broken dandies danced with their dead ladies. A man fled through Victoria Station, he looked like Chris. The suburbs heave with the children of the necropoli.

Now I will go out into the city again. I have lost thirty five years to yesterdays, I hold a single precious second in the present, and as this broken city I have no future. Like these revenants I shall walk these ageless streets, and reclaim all the lost time that should be mine, and live in it forever.

Breaking out

Every so often there are low, rumbling thuds outside, muttering like thunder. I’m keeping away from the windows. I thought about taking the tube, but when the web was still up it said that no lines were running. There are all those urban legends about stations built through the old plague pits. So many tunnels must pass under churches and graveyards.

I can reach my bike without being seen from the street. Then I’ll go as fast as I can. Chris is coming with me, I hope he can keep up.

It’s worse now that there are no sirens. I thought I heard gunfire earlier, and screaming. Some colleagues went out, and didn’t come back.

There’s nothing at all now.

Unreal city

For some reason I can’t get the ‘unreal city’ sequence at the end of the first section of ‘The Wasteland’ out of my head. Must be the heat. The humidity clings. I’m beginning to feel trapped.

‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?’

Chris says his friend Hal up north has gone quiet, which is very unlike him. News of more ruined buildings in the City. The BBC news website is speculating about earthquakes. It took far longer than normal to load.

Silent builders

I can see the street outside from my window, looking down into the dead building opposite. Funny that I hadn’t noticed all the building works before yesterday. The builders don’t seem to be very active. Some of them are climbing around in the cellar, while the rest seem to be just standing around.

Apparently the rioters at Brookwood are illegal immigrants. Nobody can understand what they’re saying. They just appeared from nowhere. They’ve been contained, it says.

Chris tells me that another building’s collapsed, this time in Aldgate. The builders over there clearly more enthusiastic than the people over the road! They must be really badly paid. Most of them are dressed in rags. The ones without shirts look really skinny.

The building has been almost completely stripped out. Support struts gleam bone white in the sun.

Dead cities

Reading about a disturbance at Brookwood on the news. Then, I went to get lunch. The building over the road has been completely gutted, ready for development. Dead buildings rise again very quickly; in a couple of months it’ll be something completely new. People are more difficult to bring back.

But then again, London is built on dead architecture – layers of the stuff, running all the way back to the Romans and beyond. There’s a layer of ash half an inch deep that Boudicca left behind, when the city first burned; the remains of a temple to Mithras half exposed at Temple Court; street names in Fulham referencing a spring where Belenos was worshipped, 2,500 years ago.

Roman London, Celtic London, Medieval London; all buried, unreclaimable. Maybe it’s the redeveloped buildings that are anomalous, awkwardly reborn where all the rest have fallen away?

Glad I’m cycling home tonight, it’s a hot, sticky day. Just saw Chris Billett, he’s getting even twitchier about his sirens.