The Truth About Lies

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Holy day of obligation
2008-02-13 17:30:00
Being a man of a certain age I am not ashamed to say that I have loved a great many women in my life; a few of them even loved me back. And every single time it has been different. 'I love you' is such an easy thing to say, but a hard thing to communicate. Saying it is never enough. It feels as if it should be because it is often hard to reach the point where you have the nerve to mumble those three little words. And, at first, we manage to cram everything we feel into those words, we love hearing them and we love saying them. We make the words our own. It doesn't matter that other people have been whispering them to each other for yonks; no one else grasps their significance like we do. Eventually, though, we start to rummage around for other ways to express that love, trinkets, cards, flowers, chocolate, more chocolate. Somewhere along the line, sometimes even while we're plucking up the courage to proclaim those three immortal words for the first time, we plonk ourselves down...
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Buy Fresh
2008-02-10 15:45:00
A lot of attention was given to the Scottish Book of the Year winner, A L Kennedy, for her novel, Day, and I am sure deservedly so, but I never heard a peep about the Scottish First Book of the Year: Mark McNay's Fresh .Canongate, the publisher, very kindly sent me a copy to review last week which they described to me as "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich set in a chicken factory" and who could resist a description like that? McNay has acknowledged in interview the Solzhenitsyn novel as a starting point, but that is all it is which is perhaps why he didn't jump at "One Day in the Life of Sean O'Grady" as an obvious title. The great Russian is not his only influence; the book also tips its hat to the work of fellow Scot James Kelman with its realistic presentation of a Glaswegian accent.I found the book a fast read, probably because of the amount of dialogue, though I could imagine someone sitting and reading the whole thing in one session; it's definitely a page turner. And,...

Expletive ʄ#@%ing deleted
2008-02-07 01:03:00
I don't swear, not real swearing, although I am partial to the occasional minced oath. I have sworn. I can swear. I don't have some sort of physical or mental impediment that prevents me from swearing nor do I support any ideology that either frowns on or outright prohibits blasphemy, profanity or obscenity. I don't have a chip in my brain that causes me excruciating pain if I try to swear. I just don't do it. The question I have to ask, and I'm asking it publicly here (something I've not even really considered privately), is: do I have anything particularly against swearing? The answer has to be, no, but I was never brought up in an environment where swearing was common. I can only remember my father cursing once in a fit of temper and I burst out laughing because he never said "bloody", he pronounced it "bluedy" – not a good thing to do when you're just about to get a hammering.I have no idea the first time I swore myself but I know it was a conscious decision as was the ...

It's a poem because I say it is
2008-02-04 01:32:00
“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.” – Paul Dirac“A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it, by way of the poem itself, all the way over to the reader.” – Charles Olson“Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power.” – Paul Engle“I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.” – A E HousemanIn November 2007, United States Judge John F. Keenan had the unenviable job of ruling on whether a letter written by famed writer and poet Dorothy Parker was, in fact, a poem. To do so he first had to define what a poem is:A poem sometimes possesses rhyme or meter, though this is not necessary. A poem is typically free from the usual rules of grammar, punctuation and capitalization. Before World War Two, a poem almost always had rhyme or meter. Now, the popular definition of a poem has become much more lenient...
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Reading through the keyhole
2008-02-01 12:54:00
It's always nice to see one of your poems in print, even if it takes twenty years to make it that far. My poem Naked Truth will be appearing in Issue 21 of Aesthetica Magazine. The issue is due for release today. Aesthetica is now available from Borders and WH Smith Bookshops UK, as well as ICA, BALTIC and other national galleries. And a PDF of the magazine can be downloaded, for a price, here.           NAKED TRUTH           Without thinking     &nb sp;    I barged into her room      & nbsp;   only to find her praying.     &nb sp;    She paused       ;    and looked up in silence     &nbs p;    like the time she caught me spying       ;&...
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What Tao Lin, Woody Allen and I have in common
2008-01-28 23:00:00
Most writers are very protective of their words. I know I used to be terrible. I would fight tooth and nail over every comma vehemently, passionately, as if some nasty editor was setting about my children with a pickaxe. Nowadays I'm nowhere near as difficult. Part of the reason for that is that, as one would hope after all these years, I'm getting the hang of this writing lark and not making so many glaring mistakes. But if someone were to come along and suggest a major rewrite then they'd have a fight on their hands. I spend a long time on editing and making sure that exactly the right words are used, the very best words for the job in hand.I think I'd hate for a screenwriter to get a hold of anything of mine. That said, I'm a practical man so I'd sign on the dotted line (in blood if necessary), take the money and run and hope they didn't screw it up too badly. The writer in me wouldn't be content unless he got total control over the project but let's face it I'm no Wood...
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Once upon a time in the west of Scotland
2008-01-25 01:10:00
Today is January 25th, the anniversary of Robert Burns birth. In Scotland and throughout the world many people will be sitting down to eat a Burns Supper. And I suppose you expect me to say something about it. Okay, I've never been to a Burns Supper in my puff, I've never worn a kilt, I hate whisky and I was a grown man before I tried my first haggis. Burns, for me, is inseparable from primary school where we were force-fed the stuff. And then there were the competitions, sing-songs and visits to the Burns Museum. I can't even look back and feel the slightest wee bit sentimental about it because I don't. I did win a prize when I was nine or thereabouts for a project on Burns, the prize being a collection of Burns poetry, but that was the highlight of Burns for me. I can't even imagine if I ever emigrated, not that there's much chance of that now, that I'd suddenly (or even eventually) become all nostalgic, because I don't think I would.I'd be lying if I said Burns never aff...
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Judging a book by everything bar its cover
2008-01-22 11:27:00
I was one of those kids who did not like to eat his greens amongst a lot of other things. I ate with my eyes. If I didn't like the look of it then I knew, I just knew, that I wouldn't like it. In fact any possibility of that happening was negated by my use of the present tense, "I DON'T like it." That vegetable did not exist in my future. You know how the rest of that conversation goes.Now I'm what passes for an adult and everything I didn't like as a kid I pretty much relish now. I'm particularly fond of red cabbage actually even if it does give me wind. I've learned not to judge a book by its cover. Most of my books have pretty naff covers, to be totally honest, apart from Adrian Chesterman's cover to The Demolished Man (which I once saw as a poster in Edinburgh and I regret not buying it to this very day). In fact some of the covers I have are simply boring-in-extremis like the cover to Nabokov's Bend Sinister. There is no picture. All you have is a sickly yellow backgro...
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Come closer… closer… closer…
2008-01-18 01:20:00
During an interview Oprah Winfrey asked the Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison: “Do people ever say they have to go over certain passages a bunch of times?” to which Morrison replied: “That, my dear, is called reading.”I've written about reading before but I'd like to dwell a bit on close reading. Vladimir Nabokov suggested that, "In reading, one should notice and fondle the details." Consider for a moment the concept of speed-fondling. Okay, it's a fun concept, take a few more seconds – enjoy.Right. Enough of that you at the back. Pay attention.Close reading is not slow reading although reading slowly helps. A better description might be careful reading but really the term needs to be expanded on rather than simply trying to find another potted expression to explain it. When you're watching television or a movie you have the benefit of audio and visual cues, the tone of voice, the glint of an eye, even the background music, but with the written word these are of...

Obliterature Rag
2008-01-15 01:12:00
In my last blog/rant I moaned about the rate at which the blogosphere is expanding:There are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day: about 1.6 million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.There's nothing we can do to discourage it. But maybe there is something we can do to encourage the growth of some of the better blogs out there. To that end you will find the article I intended to post today at Obliterature Rag which describes itself as "the duffer's alternative to the TLS" – that's Times Literary Supplement. Sorry to ask you to click again to get to it but if I'm going down with RSI – that's Repetitive Strain Injury – then I'm taking you all with me.Obliterature Rag is a new blog. Time will tell if it's a good blog but it has good intentions and that's always a start. If any of you feel like supporting her while she gets this new endeavour off the ground then I'm sure she'd be very grateful. I told her I had a few intelligent readers out the...

Everyone is on the stage. There's no one left in the audience.
2008-01-12 02:02:00
Everyone needs to have a rant every now and then. Please join me on one of mine.Writing, and by that I mean putting pen to paper or rattling away on a keyboard, is easy, child's play. Pretty much everyone can read and write. All you need is something to write about and voila! You’re a writer. And of course as soon as you're a writer then you need to get published because that's what writers do, real writers anyway.Why doesn't everyone who has ever heard Beethoven's Fifth Symphony suddenly decided they want to be a composer? Or what about everyone who's been exposed to Édouard Manet's Olympia? Do they drop everything and splurge this week's wages on a set of oil paints and a stack of canvases then try to convince the woman next door to strip off for them for art's sake?Most don't because they realise there is something more to being an artist or a composer and maybe the woman next door simply isn't that kind of lady. No one (unless you're the next Mozart or Picasso) si...
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Writing in outer space
2008-01-09 04:06:00
A comment made by Doris Lessing in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech refers to the concept of "space" and how that affects writers:Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write?" Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.If this writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.When writers talk to each other, what they ask each other is always to do with this space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?" One of the facts that are often reported about my fellow Scot, J K Rowling, is the fact that she did a great deal of writing in numerous cafés (e.g. Nicolson's Café and Elephant House Café). Now, of course, she has all that Virginia Wolfe says a woman needs to ...
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Walking and chewing gum at the same time
2008-01-06 11:32:00
The following appears at the beginning of an article in The Telegraph about the burden of e-mail:In the London Library, the natural habitat of the London writer, there are two main rooms where people work. In one, the Reading Room, people do exactly that - read.In the other, the Computer Room, they tap away on computers.Over the past couple of years, I've noticed an odd thing. The really prolific and distinguished writers - A N Wilson, Sir Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett - tend to sit still, reading in the Reading Room. to which I responded:The reason "the really prolific and distinguished writers" have so much to write about is that they do exactly that. It's the old principle from Ecclesiastes 3 that there is a time for everything.They have learned what our parents tried to hammer into us that you can't do two things at the same time to which we responded by sticking a piece of chewing gum in our mouths and walking out the door taking care to slam it behind us of course.Oh we knew i...
More About: Time , Walking , Chewing Gum , Chewing

Basic Engly Twentyfido
2007-11-28 12:43:00
I take language seriously – spelling, punctuation, grammar, the whole kit and caboodle. I think about what I'm going to say before I say it and that goes doubly for whatever I commit to paper and triply for anything I'm having published. Of course one can't be serious all the time. At least this particular one can't. Language can – and should – be fun.The humour I appreciate most in this life is typified by someone like Ronnie (Fork Handles) Barker whose writing revolves around wordplay, especially puns. Or Steven (What's another word for Thesaurus?) Wright. I agree with Nabokov that the pun is mightier than the word (not his precise words). People who don't know how to play with words and enjoy playing with them cannot properly work with them.But there is one man who only has to open his mouth and I start to smile, a man who will be forever remembered for talking the most entertaining nonsense in the world, "Professor" Stanley Unwin.Unwin was the inventor and finest exp...
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Guess what reading is
2007-11-25 10:24:00
This is reading. You've just done it. You've read. You're still reading and the odds are you will continue to read till the end of this sentence at least. We do it every day. We look at this word, then that one and then the next. Or block of words. Most people, it seems, read a whole chunk at a time because the meaning of words is so often dependent on context. But that's only a part of it.Here's a clever man's definition of reading:Reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game. It involves an interaction between thought and language. Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and identification of all elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time. The ability to anticipate that which has not been seen, of course, is vital in reading, just as the ability to anticipate what has not yet been heard is vital in listening. - Kenneth Goodman in Journal of the Reading Specialist (1967)A ...
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Reasoning rhymes
2007-11-23 09:47:00
Andrew Philip has just posted the latest in a long series of blogs about rhyme on his site Tonguefire to which I've just added a comment. It is a fascinating and involved discussion and one every poet should have a look at. We need more writers like this.
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If ain't broke don't fix it. In fact, if it's broke don't fix it either.
2007-11-21 02:33:00
CHANGELINGIt is true that everyseven years we change.Turning fourteen I startedthinking poetry.I am now twenty-nine andsafe for six more years.15 December 1988A romantic notion exists which states that our bodies renew themselves every seven years. I first heard this from my father and of course everything our dads tell us is the truth. I never questioned this growing up even though I could see flaws in the logic. I've since heard that some of our body parts do exactly this only not always every seven years. I've also heard that it's bunkum.Personally I don't care but it did start me thinking about what exactly might change every seven years. Certainly people do change as they grow older. Much of that has to do with their upbringings and experiences but I wondered if the seven year rule might affect me in ways other than refreshing my spleen. What if the change subtly altered who I was?I cannot explain what it is like to think in poetry. There are people who suffer from a condit...
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The quest for the perfect sentence
2007-11-17 16:34:00
I read an interesting article a while back by Wendy Keller called The desire not to write, a part of which goes:The reason writers don't write is because we simply know that language cannot begin to convey accurately the words in our hearts, minds and spirits.She has a point.As I may have mentioned I have a fondness for the work of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Well, not all of it. I own all of it and I've read all of it but some of his early prose goes right over my head. As a young man, a young intellectual, his work was deliberately esoteric and referenced now quite obscure classical literature, heroes of his like Dante and Racine, but over the years he moved farther and farther from his origins towards, to use his expression, "a literature of the unword". In fact he waged a lifelong battle with words and suffered frequently from bouts of crippling writer's block. He was rarely satisfied with his efforts and always self-deprecatory when presenting new works. His final text,...
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The 10-20-30-40-50 meme
2007-11-14 11:34:00
Fifty years ago: 1958 (minus two years old)There were no books in the house in which I was born. Probably a bible. Possibly a dictionary. God alone knows how they produced a reader, let alone a writer. I never saw either of my parents pick up a work of fiction other than to read a story to one of the children.Forty years ago: 1968 (eight years old) I used to cycle down to the local library every Saturday morning. I was regularly first in the queue. The librarian, whom I remember as the big-bosomed, twin-set and pearls variety of librarian who smelled of eau de cologne, was a bit of a tartar (and probably had nowhere near as pneumatic a bosom as my memory has ascribed to her) who would only let me take out books from the pitiful children's section though I could wander freely throughout the place as long as I didn't get under anyone's feet. Her husband was a local councillor or something of that ilk and the woman, as far as I could see, pretty much looked down her nose at everyone...
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X-Factor for authors anyone?
2007-11-12 11:22:00
The Times, the UK's newspaper of record (at least that's what Wikipedia calls it), published an article on Friday, Jeanette Winterson on the cult of personality, to which I responded. I have a lot of time for Winterson. I don't always get her writing but I enjoy not getting it. It's a good article, as you would expect, well-written and humorous and worth a read, as is the response I posted yesterday but which only went online today.You can read both here.
More About: Authors , X Factor , Factor , X-Factor

Practice, practice, practice
2007-11-10 12:55:00
This is a response to A Recipe for Creative People.Practice is great. I'm all for practice. But, if you're doing things wrong in the first place all the practice in the world isn't going to help much. It's simply going to ingrain bad habits. Sure, sometimes by doing something over and over again you start to realise that your method isn't necessarily working and you start to investigate other ways of working, but I think that's the exception rather than the norm.When I used to weight train back in my twenties I followed a fairly strict regime. First you eat, and you eat well, then you let the food digest, then you exercise, then you rest. If you trained every day, which I did, you never worked the same set of muscles two days in a row. And, on top of all of that, I read everything I could about new food supplements (I found it hard to eat 3000 calories a day) and improved methods of training.The most important thing was that, before I started, I studied how to do the kind of w...

Why is writing not just talking written down?
2007-11-07 10:50:00
I think Woody Allen writes wonderful banter. I can watch his films over and over again, like a kid who knows what's coming and delights in the fact that it does. The fact that a wee old Jewish man spent ages scribbling it all down on yellow legal pads whilst lying on his bed in a posh Manhattan apartment doesn't really come through. And that's why the banter is so brilliant, because it's not off-the-cuff; it's been mulled over, taken out, put back in, reworded, fiddled with and, only then, does it feel like a throw-away remark. The same goes for all those wonderful period dramas the BBC churns out.I do make a habit of reading what I've written out loud. To my mind, and I'm not the only author to think this, if it doesn’t work when read aloud then it simply doesn't work. This is where I struggle with a lot of E. E. Cummings' poetry; I don't know how to read it most of the time. There are exceptions like the beautiful poem about the rain having small hands, somewhere i hav...
More About: Writing , Talking , Written

Raking in the ashes
2007-11-04 15:20:00
On November 5th it's Guy Fawkes Night here in the UK. When I was a kid it was something we used to get very excited about. Every community had their own bonfire. Ours used to be on a site behind Third Avenue before they built the industrial estate there; in fact my earliest memory is my dad come looking for me there while it was being constructed and it was safe for a four-year-old to wander the streets on his own. Nowadays, unless you live in Sussex, all that has stopped. Some of the local councils do fireworks displays but the whole community thing has died a death.It's another Bonfire I remember fondly. It didn't have nearly as long a life but it burned bright and left a beautiful corpse.It was a literary journal that wouldn't publish poetry without commentary. The reason? To try and provide some insight into the writing process, to help younger poets who were simply dumping raw emotions onto a page and thinking they were poems just because they said they were. There should b...
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A dung beetle's guide to the universe
2007-11-01 10:12:00
One of the things that has concerned me for a while is the fact that very little of my work is easily classifiable. It certainly isn’t mainstream, but neither does it fit neatly into the big genres of, say, science fiction or crime fiction or even romantic fiction. My wife – lovely woman – suggested my work was slipstream fiction. It sounds cooler than cross-genre and not as pompous as fabulation.It's becoming more and more popular in music: fusion, cross-over artists. I suppose they have a similar problem, if it's not this and it's not that then what is it?The term slipstream (something of a play on mainstream) was coined by cyberpunk (Now would that be a sub-genre?) author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye in July 1989. He wrote: "...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility." The complete article is available here.I...
More About: Universe , Guide , The Universe , Guid , Univers

Ants in the wind
2007-10-28 16:00:00
I read an article a wee while back Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore, and it made me think. Actually everything makes me think, but not everything I think about is something I necessarily want to write about. Trust me, not everything needs to be written about.With the rise of the internet there are more people committing their thoughts to "paper" than at any other time in history. This should be a writer's utopia. Why then do I get the distinct feeling that there's trouble in paradise?The first thing I discovered when I dived headfirst into the wonderful world of the World Wide Web was that there were people all over the globe that were exactly like me (and some were even female which was fantastic). Suddenly I wasn't alone, there were others who did this writing thingy and considered it not only perfectly acceptable to drop whatever you were doing to get those words down on a paper, it was expected. There was just one word came to my mind: home. That was twelve yea...
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Warning: this blog is not inspired
2007-10-25 19:10:00
Whilst working on my entry for Nothing Binding one of the fields asked for my sources of inspiration. There's no easy answer. It's not that I haven’t thought about it before, why one piece of writing is only okay while another one rocks. It's nothing to do with intelligence or ability. They're factors in the equation, more constants than variables. The critical issue is often to do with inspiration, but we'll come back to that.First of all, what is writing, I mean beyond scribbling words down on scraps of paper? Why do I have to write? Why is writing the answer the thing I naturally gravitate towards when something affects me? Why don't I curl up in fœtal position or simply bang my head against a wall?Okay, let's have a stab at it: Creative writing: NOUN, a delayed sympathetic reaction following an emotional response to specific external stimuli expressed in words.Not perfect but not bad. (Please feel free to have a go yourself.) In others words, a red rag gets a bull's d...
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And your point is, caller?
2007-10-22 10:30:00
The following was, for a long time, the opening paragraph to my fifth novel. I clung on to it for dear life but it simply refused to fit with the tone of the book. I had to scrap it – along with the next 9830 words. Ouch! The thing is, I still like the point it has to make.Write about what you know. It’s the most patently obvious piece of advice budding authors get presented with, more often enough by non-writers. Sage advice it is, too, up to a point. It’s like recommending that an art student draw only what they can see and best start with something that keeps relatively still – how about a nice bowl of fruit? I really shouldn’t pass judgment on anyone who feels moved to toss any beginner a scrap or two of encouragement; advice is free which is why it’s so easy to turn ones nose up at it and that is the voice of experience talking here, believe you me. That said, being without a single solitary artistic bone in my body, I can honestly say, hand on heart, that I have no...
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Poetry under glass
2007-10-18 15:21:00
When I returned to Glasgow in the mid-1990s, after living with the teuchters up north for a bit, I settled in the West End of the city, as it transpires a bit of a haven for artists, writers and students. It wasn’t a part of the grand plan but I wasn’t complaining. The West End is peppered with book shops, galleries and wee out-of-the-way knickknack shops, but it was a small concern on Byres Road, run by a family of Asians, that caught my eye, one that sold bags, shoulder bags, hand bags, travel bags – you get the idea.It’s common in that area to find adverts in shop windows, especially ads for bed-sits since Glasgow University is only a few minutes walk from there, however, in the window of this particular shop was simply a “daily poem”. I read it – it was suitably dire – and thought no more about it. But the next time I was there, I made a point of checking in again and this became a regular thing for me. I started paying particular attention to my fellow shoppers...
More About: Poetry , Glass

New fashioned values
2007-10-15 01:30:00
I like the environment. I use it on a daily basis and often recommend it to my friends. The thing about the environment is that it directly affects me and it is something I can have a direct effect upon. Without having to nip someone’s head to put an end to human trafficking or the spread of AIDS, I can do something worthwhile every day. After a long delay our local council has now provided a collection service for recyclable paper, plastic and metal products (nothing for glass yet) and I’m very conscientious about recycling every scrap of paper down to the last bus ticket. I only print what I really need to and use e-mail wherever possible. The latter is easier said than done, so many businesses and agencies shy away from encouraging e-mail correspondence.The big problem is I’m a writer and if there’s one thing a writer will do, given half a chance, is use up paper, reams and reams of the precious stuff, just to see stacks of his blasted book with garish ‘three-for-two’...
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What God knows about TV drama
2007-10-11 13:00:00
My first experience of Samuel Beckett the playwright was in 1979 when I caught a broadcast performance of Waiting for Godot recorded for Open University students. I got up at the crack of dawn on three occasions to watch it but I didn’t own a video recorder at the time and I’ve never seen that interpretation again.When Beckett died in 1998, the BBC dusted off a few programmes and gave them an airing. This time I was prepared and made VHS tapes of everything, but after moving house several times, God alone knows who got custody of them. One thing’s for sure, they’re not in my collection now and I doubt they’ll ever be transmitted again.When, in 2000, Channel 4 announced it was to air all Beckett’s stage plays I got dead excited but they dried up and the only way I eventually got to see them all was to fork out over £100 for the boxed set because God alone knows when, if ever, they’ll get round to showing them again.Fortunately, I managed to catch the BBC4 recording of ...
More About: Drama , Dram