Oli's Adventures in Writingland

As a child I didn’t see what moral right any adult had to order me around: I had, and have never had, any respect whatsoever for authority figures. This book is really the first time I have read an adult articulating a view that is supportive of such a position, although I’ve heard a few do so in conversation. This book, if you don’t know who A.S. Neill is, gives a very informal and engaging account of Summerhill School, the original ‘free’ or ‘progressive’ school, which has inspired many other (though not enough) similar schools worldwide. When the first edition of the book was published in the USA it was an overnight sensation, making Neill’s virtually unknown school globally famous, and his approach to education hugely influential (in theory, but sadly not in practice).

The ideas in the book ring very true for me, in terms of my thinking about teaching music in particular. For Neill, learning is always voluntary: coercion will get a kid into a classroom, it will get them following instructions, it will get them learning facts by rote, but it will never get them engaged with a topic or activity. Obviously, in the context he was working in, kids could be left to find their way to a classroom in their own good time, but there are still lessons to be learned for mainstream education. He had very little time for the idea of learning through play: for him, play was an end in itself, and his goal was never anything to do with exam results or educational standards. His sole interest was in enabling children to grow into happy adults, doing jobs that they find rewarding, and he understood the crucial truth, that children are not being prepared for life: they are leading their lives right now, and have every bit as much right as adults to do so in a way that is fulfilling and pleasing to them.

There’s far more to this book than I can possibly relate here. Neill is, for me, the model of the practical philosopher, with virtually no interest in theory, but a thoroughly thought out, robust and flexible worldview, informing his every action. The book explains his views, tells the history of the school, and relates Neill’s own biography, all in a relatively modest volume, and in very clear, plain language. I’ve rarely read a book which constructed its author so immanently, and Neill seems to live on every page: I felt a great sense of regret that I would never have the chance to meet someone whose views had reached such a similar position to my own, through a completely different route, and who was so obviously motivated by love, above all else.

It’s been a while since I posted an update about my writing, so I thought I’d say a few words (in case anyone’s interested). Basically, I made the decision to put music writing on the back burner, and focus on my novel, on which progress is being made, but slowly. I have come to realise that I’m trying to tell too much story for one book, and it’s going to need splitting into a trilogy (the story divides neatly into three parts in any case). I shall persevere with the first draft on the current basis, however, and then set it aside while I do some world building and write some short stories.

I had the idea (when the first draft is done) to start on a couple of episodic series, in the manner of comic books, which could be a fun way for me to develop some settings and characters, and to share my fiction writing with potential readers on a regular basis (since I’ll obviously need to keep short stories under wraps if I want to persuade anyone to pay me for them). So some time next year I’ll make a start on that, and just develop a couple of plot lines in a completely meandering fashion.

That’s all about the size of it. I’m hoping to start making more solid progress with the novel from next week (since life has got in the way in various ways). Strangely, although it’s now officially on the back burner, I’ve been writing some of my best music reviews lately, so please go and check them out on my blog (http://oliverarditi.com/).

The basic plot (farm boy goes on an unwished-for journey and finds himself consorting with the great and powerful) is basically the same as Jordan’s The Eye Of The World (and dozens of others, such as Star Wars) but where that book is flowery, sentimental, portentous and vast, Edding’s opening salvo is concise and workmanlike.

I guess Eddings could be described as a journeyman (bearing in mind that I’m speaking on the evidence of his first novel): he knows how to write a book, and he does so. He tackles only those themes which are specific to the genre, a genre he came to as a writer seeking a niche, rather than as a fan. Nobody will ever describe him as a literary genius, which it is very clearly is not something he’s seeking. He set out to write an idiomatic high fantasy novel, and in doing so to tell an exciting adventure story, featuring some engaging and memorable characters. The book is short, almost ludicrously so by the standards of its competitors, and the writing is unobtrusive. His world building is not very interesting in its own right, but his world is built very specifically to serve the story, and it does so to a tee. His characters seem to live in his world for the most part, although there are a few moments near the end when some seem to have unconvincingly modern outlooks: compared in this regard to Robert Jordan it’s a tour de force however!

I enjoyed this book a great deal, and I’ll definitely be reading the rest of Eddings’ series, although I’m not completely overwhelmed with the desire to find out what happens next, as I was with Martin’s stuff. It’s no nonsense entertainment, by an author whose sole interest is in writing novels that people will read. 

Re-reading the stories has been an interesting experience: just as everything seems smaller when you revisit a childhood haunt, these tales seem shorter than I remember them. I guess it’s because they sketch the history of the town of Palomar so convincingly that I recall a grand epic, where in fact there are a few well chosen pen marks: that’s the beauty of the comic strip as a medium, as opposed to prose fiction. A picture tells a thousand words, but a picture with a caption and a speech bubble can tell ten thousand!

This is definitely one of the best comics I’ve read, and I’m looking forward to continuing my rediscovery of Los Bros Hernandez’s work over the next few months (I have a few of these reissues stacked up waiting to be read!)

Tome Of The Undergates book is decidedly not ‘epic fantasy’, although its size and position at the start of a series may suggest otherwise: ‘epic’ suggests a certain set of themes (although admittedly the central meat of the story may develop in future books into a world spanning demonic invasion or something), and a rather larger scope, geographically and temporally. The action here takes part over the course of a couple of days, and although it contains a journey, it’s a short seaborne pursuit that lasts for less than a week.

Essentially, the novel is not about its eponymous magical codex, but about a bunch of misfits who don’t like each other very much, enduring conditions of extreme peril from which they miraculously emerge, not unscathed, but at least un-killed. It’s told engagingly, and amusingly, but, for a work that spends so much time in its characters’ heads, with something of a paucity of insights. Still, there are ways in which these characters are a bit more like real people than the characters in most fantasy fiction (where characters tend to be cyphers or archetypes), which helps, and it was a lot of fun to read. I didn’t get bored, and I chuckled several times.

The book has the atmosphere of an alternate reality, as depicted by Michael Moorcock or Bryan Talbot (or Iain Banks in his most recent novel), but its settings most astonishing characteristic is that it is real. How historically accurate David B’s representation may be, I couldn’t say, but the story takes place in a historical moment of great flux immediately after WWI, a time when so many possibilities were in the air that Europe really did resemble a nexus between a multitude of possible worlds.

The place is the Croatian city of Rijeka, which in the immediate postbellum period was a predominantly Italian city, and bore the name Fiume. It was briefly ruled, in defiance of the treaties that brought WWI to a close, and of international negotiations over its fate, by a proto-fascist anarchist/ futurist poet called Gabriele d’Annunzio. At this point, nobody knew what fascism was going to mean, and there was a brand of romantic nationalism in Italy that looked to the future with great glee and creativity, bringing what seem from today’s perspective like incompatible ideologies into a febrile, ultimately tragic, but briefly beautiful dialogue. This was the era of Futurism and Dada, both of which are powerful structuring discourses in David B’s work.

Black Paths is a gorgeous work of narrative art. The drawing style is a sort of sketchy expressionism, showing a strong influence (in roughly equal measure) of both early Hergé and Picasso. The latter’s obsession with African ritual masks (as echoed in the former’s The Broken Ear) is particularly in evidence.

Everything is provisional and ephemeral in the moment that David B shares with us. Every character is just passing through, and d’Annunzio’s free state lasted only from September 1919 to January 1921. There is a wonderful scene in which his advisors debate the form and policies of their government, and literally nothing is off the table. Eastern mysticism rubs shoulders with machine fetishism, anarchism with socialism and nationalism; it was an era when the aesthetic was a politically charged arena, and art was a matter of life and death.

The book is sometimes confusing, but that’s a part of what it seeks to represent. It’s a very beautiful piece of work, and a very rewarding read. French avant-garde comics don’t seem to stay in print for long in English translation (just try finding anything by Enki Bilal), so if I’ve tickled your fancy, check this out soon.

High points for me were two of the most theoretical essays, Middleton’s own on bridging the gap between popular music analysis and musicology, and Philip Tagg’s influential ‘Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method and Practice’, which condenses the methodologies employed in his groundbreaking 1979 book Kojak - 50 Seconds Of Television Music (which will probably be the next work of academic music criticism I read, although I’m planning to read more historical and biographical stuff for a bit now).

The best piece however, as scholarship, as polemic and as writing, is Elli Hisama’s ruthless and clear-sighted deconstruction of post-colonial racist/ sexist stereotypes in western popular music’s representations of far eastern women. Hisama’s cogent, well supported arguments convey a sense of righteous anger that is positively punk, not in its aesthetics, but in its uncompromising grip on the political and ideological, its refusal to let an ideology of pop-hedonism act as a Trojan horse for oppressive social structures, and its icily coherent relation of personal experience to social discourse. This is one of the best pieces of academic writing on music I have ever read.

The weakest pieces fail to adequately argue the meanings they ascribe to musical characteristics, as in Barbara Bradby and Brian Torode’s ‘Pity Peggy Sue’, which takes a psychoanalytical approach to the sequential development of vocal stylistic devices in the Buddy Holly classic. With this essay I found myself wondering exactly where the meanings the authors described were to be found in the transmission of the musical utterance, and finding it very hard to locate them in either the creation or the reception of the work. Meanings which seem to exist only for the critic, or which the critic can locate only in their construction of the listening subject’s subconscious seem to me to have a tenuous existence, but it was still fascinating to see how the techniques of psychoanalytic criticism might be applied to popular music.

This was an excellent read, and as a companion volume to Middleton’s Studying Popular Music and (ed.) The Popular Music Studies Reader it will give the interested academic or non-academic reader a good grounding in the textual analysis of popular music.

Banks has said that he wanted to write something like The Bridge, which uses an SF (and intermittent swords and sorcery) narrative to explore the mental processes of a comatose accident victim. In Transition there’s a narrative strand in which a mentally ill hospital patient experiences some ambiguities about the nature of his reality, but the reader is never in any real doubt.

This novel has parallel worlds, and protagonists who can transition between them; it has a variety of alternate historical contexts running in parallel; it has sex, drugs, assassinations and some steampunk tropes; it has characters who manifest in subtly differentiated versions of themselves in different realities. Is any of this sounding familiar?

Transition appears to be Banks’ homage to Michael Moorcock and Bryan Talbot. Temudjin Oh, Banks’ central protagonist, bears a certain resemblance to both Jerry Cornelius and Luther Arkwright, and his adventures resemble those to be found in those authors’ works, as do the themes that are explored, although it must be said that this is very much a Banks novel. It has his trademark handling of multiple viewpoints, and his audacious tackling of sharply contrasted worldviews, his characters directly addressing themselves to the reader in a manner that betrays his supreme self-confidence as a writer. At the end of the day, Banks has written a thinking persons thriller, that investigates issues of morality and personal growth in the medium of a ripping yarn. Or to put it another way, he has written a good book, about stuff, but he has presented it as an exciting adventure rather than as a bunch of middle class people having existential crises. I mean, there are existential crises, but they’re a bit more dramatically concrete than the ones you or I are likely to suffer… Once again Banks has come out with a brilliantly well-written and humungously enjoyable book.

In general terms, this is a thematic survey of science fiction, also touching on fantasy fiction, which it presents as a subset of SF. It’s a good approach, which it (and the exhibition) share with the Very Short Introduction to SF which I read recently (and also bought in the BL shop after seeing the show). 

The text is informed by a strong historical perspective on the development of SF, and a broadly based understanding of its scope. SF has been a socially engaged genre from its inception, and this is an aspect that is stressed throughout. There are many fascinating details, illustrating the importance and influence of the genre, such as the shocking fact that the Germans got the idea for a submarine blockade of Great Britain from a short story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s warning against that eventuality! There are also some moments of pretty dodgy prose, and appalling ignorance, such as the idea of Tim Berners Lee ‘developing the internet’. An expert on SF needs a better grasp than that on the the real world of science and technology…

Of course the real value of this book, as with all exhibition catalogues, is in its illustrations. It is a real visual feast (excuse the cliché), full of vintage book covers, movie stills and posters, illustrations and so on. I could sit and look through it for hours on end, long after re-reading and re-forgetting the text…

Love And Rockets is a comic I used to read back in the 80s. It had been around for nearly 5 years when I started, and as this book anthologises the first 5 years of Jaime Hernandez’s contribution (the other half of the title being written/ drawn by his brother Beto), the last few pages are what I was reading in the eagerly awaited issues of the bi-monthly (ish) magazine. I’d caught up on all the back story in compilation books though, so none of what’s in this book was new to me; I was revisiting old friends and old haunts.

I absolutely loved this comic as a teenager, largely because it was the only comic I’d seen that seemed to be about people like me. The fact that it was also a SF story about cute chicana lesbian punk rockers was just icing on the cake!

Jaime Hernandez is an absolutely superb comic artist. He takes the idea that comic art is a language of coded gestures, and runs with it, developing it in such a subtle and nuanced way that your eye does the rest and tells your brain it’s looking at photorealism. He has such strong draughtsmanship skills, and such a powerful spatial imagination that other pencillers must be green with envy (plus he does his own inks and lettering!). His dramatic and powerful graphic layouts, his sexy women, his clean style and his playful retro-SF details all had me hooked from the get-go. His style develops through this anthology, as he experiments with more or less modelling, but his mature style can be seen in snatches from the very beginning.

The story exists in a kind of dual reality; the characters inhabit a world of rocket ships, robots, superheroes and globe-trotting celebrity mechanics, but at the same time they inhabit a Los Angeles barrio in the early 1980s. Eventually, at the very end of this book, Jaime plumps for telling a story about the latter, as he turns out to be more interested in telling us about the characters that somehow come alive and fill out through the course of these first five years. Their tale is enormous fun, observational, touchingly funny and downright moving by turns. I immensely enjoyed re-reading this stuff (especially in this physically beautiful book), and I’d recommend it to anyone (although real lesbians might wonder why this male author’s fictional ones are so frequently seen in their knickers…)

Like many other people, listeners to his music programs, or to Home Truths on Radio 4, I loved John Peel in the way that I love members of my family. It was something of a moving experience to read these words, so unmistakeably in his voice that I could almost hear him speaking, some seven years after the calamity of his death. Of course there are other champions for truly creative and unusual music in the mainstream media, but few have had such an undiluted, agenda-free commitment to the music itself, and none have commanded the same widespread, genuine affection as Peel. He was unique, uniquely English, and responsible for my first exposure to much of the most interesting and rewarding music I’ve encountered.

John Peel was a very funny man, as well as a perceptive one, and someone who suffered remarkably little bullshit, despite his generally affable nature and how seriously he didn’t take himself. He could also be, at times, a very fine writer indeed, and it’s a shame he didn’t do more of it.

This book is a compilation of his columns for various magazines, written between about the time I was born, and the time I was in my early thirties. It’s a fascinating insight into the workings of a mind that was witness to, and heavily engaged with, the changing tides of popular music in that period, and while some of it (the earlier stuff) is a bit self-satisfied, it is consistently interesting, enlightening, and amusing, some of it seriously laugh-out-loud. It’s a great read, even if you’re not a Peelist, but if you are, it’s indispensible.

He is also the funniest SF writer I’ve come across, excluding those writing deliberate satire: serious science-fiction is often a bit short on humour, but Banks is a riot. No one else writes with such relish, or with such a sense of fun. I mean, Dune was a complex world, with a very convincing array of premises, but it really was a pretty joyless place.

I think a lot of what Banks does is wish fulfilment: he depicts a world in which all social and medical problems have been solved, and in which the vast majority of the population spends its artificially extended lifespan seeking out ways to enjoy itself. There is something deeply satisfying about a set of narratives that set out to explore the ramifications of such a premise: there is usually something similarly satisfying, in the sense of something we’d all really like to see, in all of his books, SF or otherwise (and the distinction between the two is always a question of degree with Banks, not kind). I suspect there may be a certain working out of the absurdities of an ordinary middle-middle class guy suddenly achieving fabulous success from doing what he’d probably do for fun anyway: collisions between great wealth and profound ordinariness are a recurring theme in Banks’ fiction.

Anyway, Matter is a mature Culture novel, with a satisfyingly complex plot, likeable characters (including a wonderful nod to Wodehouse), and it’s riotously good fun from start to finish.

In this book, David Seed surveys all of that, in a thematically driven text, that is divided, and executed, along lines that will be comprehensible to those unfamiliar with critical theory, or with science-fiction, but is still fascinating and rewarding to those who are. He looks, in separate chapters, at space travel aliens, tech, utopias/ dystopias and time travel, and then looks at some issues around the definition of SF, and the history of its place in the larger world of literature. It’s not a history of SF (as he says in the introduction, there are some excellent ones around already), so much a schematic anatomy. I shall be returning to it as a guide to my thinking on the slightly broader topic of ‘speculative fiction’, which takes in a few other genres not entirely easy to distinguish from SF, and I think it will provide any intelligent reader with a useful map to this fascinating literary territory.

Well, it’s been a while since I posted a proper update, and equally, a long time since I generated much prose. After our week’s holiday at the end of July, I found it hard to get back into either writing fiction, or writing about music, and I got somewhat distracted by a compulsion to read every word of George R.R. Martin’s ‘Song Of Ice And Fire’ series, which has made me pretty sure what kind of book I want to write next. However, I think things are calming down again, and I expect the next few months to see a return to regular posting at my blog, and to generating high weekly word counts towards the novel. I was hoping to finish the first draft this year, which may turn out not to be practical, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be close to it by Christmas…

There’s a moderately sophisticated engagement with the ethics of medical research, largely through the exemplar of the hero-scientists alzheimers stricken father, and of course the experiences of the apes in the lab. In the cinema, I was pretty moved, although I’m not sure if that would have translated to the small screen. This is well worth watching, not just for SF fans, but it is also that rare beast, a SF movie that truly lives up to the name of speculative fiction.

Sadly Jordan’s not moving on extends to the rest of his work: I guess in a way, he writes the novel that LotR could have been, had Tolkien’s primary interest been in writing novels. There is a lack of anything truly distinctive about his world; the same could be said of George R.R. Martin’s, but Martin has incredibly well drawn characters, and though his world also resembles medieval Europe, it does so extremely convincingly. You can’t believe in Jordan’s society or characters in the same way. It’s a bit of fun for people who like long books with swords and magic in, but it didn’t really do it for me.

This is the conclusion to a trilogy I caught up on late last year, and it stands out for two things. The quality of the world-building is one: McDougall imagines a world in which the Roman Empire survives to the present day, and she really nails it (read it if you want to know more). The second is the characterisation: she’s imagined her characters from every angle, so they really seem to live; she also has the knack of describing their internal life on a detailed, second-by-second basis, that reminds me of the early modernists like Woolf and Joyce, although here this technique is always at the service of the story.

It is tensely and intricately plotted, in a way that draws its power and impetus from the sympathy (or otherwise) that we feel for the characters, and has an unusual combination of terse, intense narrative with poetically metaphorical language. F****n’ awesome: I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.

I’ve recently been (and still am) frantically writing material for oliverarditi.com in order to fill up the schedule through the time I’ll be away on holiday at the end of July, and for a week after I come back (so I don’t have to hurl myself straight back into it). I’m proposing not to write anything while I’m away, although I plan on reading a lot.

I thought I would get this done, and then have time free to work on some fiction before we go, but that’s looking unlikely now, and I’ve been thinking about my priorities as a result. I would really like to get my first draft finished ASAP, so after the first week of August I’ve decided to cut back heavily on the amount of writing I do for my website: I’ll be publishing two reviews a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays, and Monday Musings may become a fortnightly essay as well. Of course, if anyone wants to offer me a gig writing music reviews for money, that would be another story…

I’ve honestly learned as much about the craft of writing from reading this book as I have from all of my own essays in the art. It’s a book with very clear goals, that sets clear limits on what it seeks to achieve. It doesn’t want to tackle big ideas, or transform its readers’ vision of the world: what it sets out do is tell the most involving and thrilling story it can, and it does so by drawing a diversity of characters, all with their faults, and all of whom the reader will have some sympathy for. It is a model of economy (even at 700+ pages): its prose is spare; everything is shown, not told; all incident and description is pared down ruthlessly to the minimum required to advance the plot and create the world. I found my heart pounding with fear and excitement, and, at other times, close to tears. Martin knows how to draw characters of all ages, but his children are particularly breathtaking to this apprentice in the field of which he is a consummate master.

This is, in most respects, a historical novel: medieval history is too well known to give Martin the freedom to play politics like this, however, and his world, though extremely well crafted, is a pretext for his tale (in exact contrast to many other writers, Tolkien chief among them). That this is genre fiction is almost irrelevant: I don’t read many thrillers, but this is the best I’ve come across.

It’s quite interesting to note that since I started posting reviews at http://oliverarditi.com/ singly, rather than two or more together, my site traffic has been down. I think it’s unrelated though: I get a certain base level of traffic from people who follow me (that’s you, dear reader, at least I hope it is), and above that what I get depends on how many fans my reviewees have, and how much/ well they publicise the review. I’m certainly not about to start picking my subjects on those bases, as I think one of the site’s strengths is that the music I feature is selected for quality, irrespective of all other considerations.

At least, it’s all stuff I would select, even if it’s sent unsolicited, but I have to change my submissions policy: I’m now getting sent too much stuff to maintain my promise to review everything that’s sent my way, although I still like to receive unsolicited music. The reason for dropping that commitment is not so much because of volume, but because I don’t want to disappoint anyone with a bad review, and I think it’s more than likely I’ll be sent music I don’t like as the volume increases.

It’s been a bit of a busy time lately, with lots of work, play and evening commitments, so I’ve not found much time for writing. The novel is growing slowly but steadily, and the big head start I had on my review publication schedule has been eaten up, to the extent that I haven’t written anything for next week yet. Creatively, I’m still on a roll though, so whenever I do find the time, I know just what I want to write, and the words come pouring out.

I’ve made a few tweaks at http://oliverarditi.com/, in the form of a lot of new content showcasing my fiction and poetry, on lots of new pages, and a new navigation menu. My about page has also developed a rash of hand drawn icons, like this: 

I’ve just finished re-reading Gene Wolfe’s astonishing masterpiece, The Book Of The New Sun: I had forgotten, or in fact, never realised, just how good it is. I don’t think I can recall ever reading a more complex or accomplished work of literature. I was continually open mouthed reading it, as I was dazzled with idea after audacious idea, and the incredible mental discipline with which they were so seamlessly integrated into an over-arching structure that deals with some seriously big themes.

Wolfe is a Catholic, and one who takes his religion seriously: The Book Of The New Sun does not elide or skirt around his religious convictions, which is, I have always thought, a singularly cowardly thing for a writer of religious faith to do. In his world, the Roman Catholic Church is long forgotten by a human race that is living near to the end of time, where mining means excavating archaeological relics from the thousand vanished civilisations that make up the upper layers of the earth’s crust, but his core beliefs ring out through his hero’s growing sense of the immanence of the ‘Increate’. As an atheist reader, my engagement was in no way diminished by this core characteristic of the book.

I received this book as a gift in my very early teens, from someone who worked for the publisher of the edition illustrated above. Along with Tolkien, and Herbert’s Dune, this work formed my sense of what speculative fiction can and should be. Its world is created with meticulous care, and evoked with cunningly revealed details and very little explication; its plot is driven by its characters, who are as individual and complete as any you will encounter; and its symbolic, thematic structure is woven into it at every level, from the minor detail to the grand arc of the tale. It is a huge achievement, that is literally bursting with ideas, a dozen in each chapter, any one of which might be enough to hang a novel off for a lesser writer.

This book is a major influence on me, and having re-read it, it will become a larger one, although the story I am currently trying to tell is a very different sort of novel. It’s going to take me some time to digest it, and to be honest I’m somewhat dazed. I think I need to read some nice, light critical theory textbooks to recover!

So I’ve nearly completed my transition to Wordpress, and I’m no longer posting full versions of my articles to the old blog: over the coming weeks I’ll be transferring the archive and progressively rolling it up behind me, until I finally delete the old place.

I took a break from the novel after completing the first section (1st draft) and it’s been taking me a while to get rolling again, although I am now writing regularly, if not in volume. I’m finding that detailed plotting is very hard to plan more than a couple of chapters in advance, and although I started writing with a scene by scene plan, that gets revised on an ongoing basis now, as I get to know my characters better. My main concern is not to get too bogged down in detail, or in worrying about whether I’ve got the right balance of action and description, or whether the dramatic flow is right etc etc. I want to complete a first draft, leave it alone for a few months, then read it and try to make some reasonably objective judgements.

I’ll try to give more of an ongoing account of the writing process from now on, with maybe a weekly or bi-weekly post here and on Facebook. Until next time, keep doing and being!

My blog at http://oliverarditi.com/ is more of a showcase for my writing, so I’ve decided to set up this Tumblr account where I can talk about my activities and progress in a less formal way. Check back often for updates!