Oli's Adventures in Writingland

Eventually I’ll get around to reading some comics from the last twenty years, but my mission to catch up on and revisit everything continues apace. The Incal ran from 1981 to 1989, which if you just read it for the story is an awfully long time to get out a very thin plot with no detailed characters… However, a comic book is a lot more than its script, just as a song is far more than its lyrics. The story is science-fiction fantasy, a ludicrous space opera with the kind of daft mystical pretensions that hark back to the 60s and 70s; however, it’s redeemed by a wickedly satirical streak, and the reader has the choice of reading the dialogue as incredibly dire (like, George Lucas dire) or hilarious. It is a very psychedelic tale, but it’s drawn with a clarity and precision that undermines any sense of the mystical; instead it signifies very strongly as a conventional adventure narrative built from the language and imagery of psychedelia. Like all French comics, the women characters are extraordinarily beautiful and inexplicably naked; the art is incredible throughout, very idiomatic, and exploiting all the gestural conventions of the comic book to great effect. It is of course the work of the great Moebius, who tragically died recently, with probably many years of good work left ahead of him; it is a major inspiration for the movie The Fifth Element, and its authors actually sued Luc Besson for plagiarising The Incal, although Moebius had worked on the film. So in short, it’s extremely silly, but a lot of fun, and it’s visually breathtaking.

I have been meaning to get around to reading WG Sebald for a long time, for two main reasons. First is local interest: he spent most of his academic career in Norwich, a city not far from my home, to which I have strong family connections; and his novel The Rings Of Saturn is based around a series of walks in rural Suffolk, which is where I live. The second reason is the frequency with which writers, artists and musicians whose work I admire cite Sebald as an influence (particularly experimental musicians). So did I buy myself a copy of The Rings Of Saturn and insert it into my huge stack of books waiting to be read? No, I just randomly came across On The Natural History Of Destruction in a charity shop and bought it on impulse.

The book is a collection of essays, the first about the strange absence of Germany’s horrific wartime suffering from its cultural memory, and the others about specific writers’ engagement with the issue. I’ve read none of the work discussed, so essentially I was reading a novelist I’ve never read discussing several other novelists I’ve never read. It was a rewarding experience nevertheless, and in a way, all the more informative for my having no opinion on any of the writers. Being unable to fall back on my impressions of the work, or of what kind of author Sebald is himself, forced me into a, perhaps more abstract, but undoubtedly more fundamental and rigorous consideration of the ontology and epistemology of fiction and of writing in the broader sense.

The book is a moving and deeply humane work, informed throughout by a desire to understand Sebald’s native land’s response to its suffering, and by a profound sense of empathy. It is also an involving philosophical discussion of the etiology of war and totalitarianism; his observations on the inevitability of the bombing campaign once the infrastructure had been set in motion are particularly telling. He also makes some important points about the centrality of scapegoating minorities in fascist politics: for him, the death camps are a central expression of Nazism, not an incidental horror that might not have taken place had Germany been ‘racially pure’ to begin with.

This has been an intense and thought-provoking read, which has fed into my thinking about the thematic content of my own work, and has also renewed my desire to read Sebald’s fiction.

Complex book, this. Big, as well. In fact, it’s big and clever. It’s a baroque and convoluted tale, set in a baroque and convoluted world, with an extensive cast of fascinating characters, which are either three dimensional, or built around one dimension so compelling the lack of another two is entirely incidental. Miéville’s powers of invention and extrapolation are prodigious, and he uses them to explore some weighty intellectual/ existential themes. Free will is a particular concern here, and The Scar approaches it from multiple angles, in a kind of pincer movement. There is some unpleasant behaviour in the book, some terrible violence, and acts of immense cruelty, but this is not a moralistic work, and Miéville seems to be a pretty empathic person: there are no evil characters, no great dark enemy, no plot to end the world. It’s still about as epic as fantasy gets, however.

Miéville’s world combines multiple intelligent species, of diverse morphologies, ubiquitous and powerful magic, Victorian era technology which interfaces with the magic in an integrated way, and widespread use of technological body modifications (involving both biological and mechanical, steam driven, additions). His social and political milieus are sophisticated, complex and well realised, and his plots are fantastic.

It’s not perfect: I had a few issues suspending my disbelief in respect of some aspects of the setting. Miéville’s approach is eclectic, and his world sometimes seems as stitched together as his Remade characters. This is partly due to the sheer diversity of intelligent species in play, and partly due to a sense of linguistic incoherence. I never get a sense from the names of places and characters that there is a real linguistic hinterland behind them; this might be a trivial issue in a lesser work, but a world as nuanced as this seems to me to deserve better. The English language is a real presence, particularly in the culture of New Crobuzon, and no explanation, convincing or otherwise, is given for this. The effect is to make the world curiously ahistorical. The English language can’t exist without its history, and if English is a part of your world, so are Beowulf and Shakespeare: a culture can’t be assembled from disparate pieces of history, social practice and language, because all of these things are articulations of each other.

Similarly, some of the characters do not seem to be rooted in a coherent cultural context. Some are, and a few are incredibly well drawn, their subjectivities constructed from the social materials that Miéville posits and no other. There are some major exceptions, however, including the protagonist, Bellis Coldwine, who shows every sign of coming from twentieth century Earth.

These reservations aside, this book stands head and shoulders above most works of fantasy fiction, and indeed above most works of fiction. I have some differences with China Miéville regarding the requirements of a convincing fantasy setting, but he is a breathtakingly imaginative, audacious, and technically virtuosic writer, and The Scar is a truly brilliant book.

It’s been a long while since I last updated about my writing. As far as fiction goes, I was doing something time consuming with little to report on an ongoing basis, and then I wasn’t really doing much… however, both of those things are changing.

I had been fairly fixated on completing the first draft of a novel, but I have to admit that i had embarked on writing it without a clear idea of what it would take to get there. Eventually I realised that I was trying to tell a story that required a trilogy, and that although my draft was shaping up to be a very lengthy novel, once it had been split into three it would need expanding considerably. In the meantime I had been getting interested in telling some different kinds of story set in another part of the same world.

I will certainly be returning to the novel/ trilogy, but I don’t know when. My focus has shifted to developing the background for my new location, and writing some short stories for character development purposes. I’m also planning a connected episodic serial, dealing with one of those characters, which I will publish at oliverarditi.com, and try to start growing an audience. As I write the shorts and the serial I will be developing the plot lines for a longer work; what that turns out to be, and whether I will embark on it before I return to my original story are decisions for the future…

One (of many) lessons I’ve learned from my first run at a fantasy novel, is that I need to develop my background as much as possible before I start, and let the setting dictate the story rather than the other way round. I’m sure the opposite approach works well for some writers, but I kept finding myself getting stressed by trying to catch up with my narrative, and getting frustrated by having to warp my maps into the shapes dictated by decisions I’d already made about the plot. So I will be spending a substantial effort on development before I write much narrative, although the beauty of using short stories is that I can’t get myself in as much of that sort of trouble…

I’ve been having a lovely time re-reading all the Love And Rockets stuff, but with the last part of this book I’ve moved beyond re-reading into new (to me) material. Human Diastrophism is the title of an extended story that forms the bulk of this book, a story which ends with tragedy of an unexpected nature, for all that it concerns a serial killer… This is the second consecutive L&R book to reduce me to tears, in both cases with stories I already knew inside out, having read and re-read them repeatedly in my late teens. I won’t drop any spoilers: suffice it to say that these stories follow the interwoven lives of a large cast of characters in and around the fictional town of Palomar, in an unspecified South American country. It takes a magic realist approach, with supernatural happenings and ghosts driving the story along in a way that intensifies its emotional impact, without it ever becoming relevant whether or not the reader can contemplate a literal belief in such things.

I used to think that Jaime was the better artist of the Hernandez brothers, but I realise now that Gilbert, although his work is less flashy, and less polished, is every bit as strong a draughtsman, and is certainly equally capable making his lines expressive enough to carry the weight of a complex character. Sometimes, the dialogue is almost superfluous. Prose narrative has to keep moving forward, but drawn narrative has the capacity to linger, to stop the reader’s eye from roving on, to pause in silence. Prose simply ceases to exist in silence, and that is the comic-book medium’s great strength. I think I made similar points the last time I wrote about a L&R book, but whatever. This was a hugely involving read, and it’s simply beautiful from start to finish.

It’s hard to know where to start with this book. My aim with these Tumblr posts is to bash out a quick and simple description/ response of the stuff I read, but all of my responses to this are long and complex! I’ll have a go, anyway…

In Praise Of Copying by Marcus Boon is a work of critical theory and philosophy that pulls together strands, or surveys perspectives, from Eastern and Buddhist thinking as well as Western Academic thinking, in an act of synthesis that is an intellectual challenge for the reader to assimilate, but makes for a far more incisive, broad and nuanced understanding than I’m used to finding in academic books. Its subject (although by the time I finished it I was unsure if it could be held to have one in the normal sense) is the practice and discourse of copying, and how that is understood and manifested in culture. Along the way, it presents some tools that can cut through the fat in any field; specifically it completely dissolves any perceived incompatibility between Western and Eastern thought, and for me it offers a powerful lever to integrate what I still insist on regarding as the spiritual and intellectual sides of my consciousness.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the book is its grounding of post-modern theory in the insights of Eastern practice. Post-modernist academic practice often seems as hazy and groundless as the world of contingency and floating signification that it describes, but by relating its observations to a rigorous system of meditation and transformational praxis it gives it as much substance as a theory can have - allowing that its principal insight is that nothing has substance, and the true essence of everything is nothingness, non-existence, essencelessness…

Copying, if you try to pin it down, is a very slippery concept (like most ideas, really), but Boon is far too intelligent to try to ascribe any fixity to the idea; instead he looks at mimesis as a class of transformation, and examines its ontological basis, as well as much of the ideological paraphernalia that has arisen around it. Similarity and difference obviously come into the discussion, and it becomes clear that the difference between ‘copying’ and ‘not-copying’ can be imperceptible in certain contexts, the distinction revealing more about political and economic power structures than it does about any ‘underlying reality’ of imitation or plagiarism.

This is not a book about the ethics of copying, but it’s essential reading for anyone who wants to think about such an ethics. If you’re familiar with my views on canons, mainstreams and eclecticism, you’ll realise that for me to use the term ‘essential reading’ is incredibly unusual, but I find it very hard to imagine another work that speaks with as much ruthless clarity on the subject as this one. Boon is not a dogmatic opponent of copyright, but he certainly questions many of the assumptions that surround it. For this reason, his book is available free in PDF format, under a creative commons license, and you can download it here.

This is a very theoretical work, and it’s easy to get confused, especially since you’re likely to be in unfamiliar territory, beyond the limits of your usual thinking and perceptions, from an early stage. Trust me, it’s well worth persevering. The only issue I take with Boon’s thinking is his repeated use of the idea of an ‘energy of mimesis’; he never really addresses what he means by ‘energy’ in such a context, and I’m not sure that it really has any validity. What I know about energy in the physical sense is that it doesn’t really have any existence as such, but is a way of describing the way that transformations are generated by difference, and the equalisation of difference, e.g. electrical difference generating voltage, or water flowing downhill under gravity. It occurs to me that such an idea of energy is of direct relevance to the idea of mimesis, and maybe that’s exactly what Boon is getting at…

Fortress Of Eagles is the second book inCJ Cherryh’s Fortress series. It follows the continuing adventures of her magically constructed naïf Tristen, as he finds himself bounced around by various political forces, and given a troublesome, rebellious duchy to look after. Cherryh, on the evidence of this and the previous volume, takes an approach to speculative fiction that I wholly approve of: she establishes a set of conditions (social, cultural, political, circumstantial) and imagines with great clarity, in great detail, what it would be like to experience those conditions. The two Fortress novels I’ve read have both been entirely character focussed, and have both done a fantastic job of convincing me that their characters are three dimensional human beings, with breadth and depth (even Tristen, who is an adult at less than one year old).

They’re not without their faults: the language is far from clumsy, but it is unnecessarily, self-consciously archaic, and at times bizarre. The speech of one working class character in particular gives the impression that Cherryh had a bag of apostrophes beside her as she worked, which she scattered on the page by the handful whenever she gave him a line. Sometimes her focus on the internal dialogue of her characters seems excessive, and in the first half of the book there were moments when I was a little bored, waiting for something to actually happen.

However, when something does happen, she writes it with such taut, perfectly paced precision that it is utterly gripping. She also really thinks it through, and researches it impeccably, so her handling of battles, horsemanship, the movements of armies and noble households, court and religious politics, is always entirely convincing.

Like George R. R. Martin’s world, the setting for these books is a relatively conventional pseudo-medieval world, which although it is realised with an involving and believable degree of depth and complexity, is not particularly interesting in its own right. Like Martin, Cherryh’s use of it makes the perfect setting for her characters, and there is a sense that it might start to distract from that central focus of the work if it were more strange and wonderful. The world is a pretext for the story, and Cherryh is a master storyteller.

So, a great read, fascinating characters that I am desperate to follow into the coming episodes, and a convincing sense of a complex, living world. I still, however, have absolutely no idea whatsoever why it’s called Fortress Of Eagles…

I should point out that my interest in Steve Jobs’ career began before he became a symbol of big business and technological monoculture. As a kid I became aware of this guy who was something of an outsider, an entrepeneur who was so passionate about making good, useable computer gear, that he was willing to compromise his commercial success to that end. The IT industry was in the hands of dull, suited executives and engineers, who had absolutely no sense of the fun their products could enable, and no awareness of the hacker mentality that was in fact driving progress, below the radar, in their own companies. Then Jobs hit the formula for success in the late 90s, by bringing his kind of products to a market that was by then gagging for them, and destroyed his reputation. Had I not been interested in his work already, I wouldn’t have had much time for him, but I do think he’s an interesting figure, and this short graphic novel, which speculates about his relationship with a Zen monk he studied under, seemed like an amusing proposition.

The book is not an attempt at a full biography, although it does depict incidents from throughout Jobs’ adult life. It specifically aims to explore the influence of Zen thinking on Jobs’ approach to product development, and to engage us in a story about the meeting of two complex, maverick minds. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really pull off either thing. It spends some time exploring the Zen concepts of ‘ma’ and ‘mu’, and how they relate to the design of Apple (and NeXT) products, but we don’t really get any more than the obvious ‘simplicity is beauty’ schtick. Basically the book is too short: to dramatise something as subtle as that would take a rather more Zen approach to storytelling. Similarly, the tale of the two men is reduced to a series of encounters, selected to establish the author’s theses about the development of Jobs’ approach to product design, and any sense of character development is very schematic. Again, the book bites off more than it can chew in so few pages.

Then there’s the art. It’s frankly not very good. Comic art, however stylised, needs to be very expressive of character; the tale that’s told about the characters is told in their body language and facial expressions, but the characters in this book fail to convince. That’s a creative shortcoming, but I have to say, the draftsmanship is actually poor in general. I can draw as well as this, but I wouldn’t bother. With really incisive art, the story might have survived a little better, but as it was, when Jobs’ mentor meets his tragic end, it didn’t really register, emotionally, or even factually. Kobun Chino Otogawa drowned while trying to rescue his 5 year old daughter from a pond in Switzerland: his daughter also drowned. I only found this out from reading the prose biography of Otagawa that’s included as an appendix. So, all in all, a bit of a disappointment…