Antonio Pappano’s Opera Italia series on BBC 4 has done nothing to change my opinion that the story of Italian opera after Monteverdi is the story of the unremitting betrayal of the idealistic principles on which he founded the art-form; composers like Rossini, Bellini, et al, reduced his fusion of words, music, dance, and drama to a medium for the onstage preening of singing peacocks…
From the Guardian’s Ten Rules for Writing Fiction:
‘Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.’—Zadie Smith
Colm Toibín recommends ‘No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working’ which might have been good advice twenty years ago, but is, in the 21st century, frankly the position of a Luddite: these days, it’s much more important for a writer to wean him- or herself off broadband.
‘Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.’—Roddy Doyle
I have a picture of Yeats on the wall of my study. He lived to enjoy a rare old age.
‘And if all else fails, there’s prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.’—Sarah Waters
Amen to that (and, just in case, Andra moi ennepe, mousa: you never know).
I have never rated Martin Amis very highly as a novelist, essayist, critic, or thinker. I think I may now not rate him at all, in the latter two categories at least.
To state, as Amis did recently, that JM Coetzee has ‘got no talent’ is to display a serious lack of critical judgement. The truth is, Coetzee has thought more profoundly and more sustainedly on the character of the novel, and the purpose and process of writing novels, than Amis ever has.
Coetzee has depth, whereas Amis is all surface.
Or, to put it another way, it’s about truth (if I may use that word; maybe ‘a truth’ or ‘a specimen of truth’) and difficulty versus glibness and mere facility.
This is what passes for serious contemporary Irish writing? Really? Well holy God, Josephine, but I must be more out of kilter with the zeitgeist than I thought: I hated just about every insincere scatalogical word in it.
It is caricature without purpose, grotesquerie without menace, lyricism without imagination. There’s no animating idea at its heart, other than an utterly banal exploration of the gap between a deluded bien-pensant townie and those weird drunken lascivious word-vomiting leprechauns who infest that land west of the Shannon known colloquially as Oireland. It ends with an epiphany in which the narrator comes to accept (no, let’s capitalise that: Comes to Accept) the fact that he’s growing older. There’s even casual mention made of the emigration boats. Oh Mother of Mercy, spare us: please.
And don’t tell me it’s meant to ‘ironic’: there’s nothing ironic about dressing up third- or fourth-generation clichés in their Sunday best before sending them off to the relatives in New York. There’s a word for that kind of writing, and ‘ironic’ is not it…
Do you know what this is? This is Synge-pastiche; Synge with all the truly provocative bits taken out, and all the merely scurrilous details left in, which makes it’s worse that stage-Oirishry; it makes it cartoon-Oirishry.
No wonder Goughy liked recommended. It’s plugged into the ‘culture’ all right, while saying absolutely nothing new or interesting about it (though without any mention of an Xbox, or any other advanced interactive gaming platform of the 21st century; an oversight, surely).
In a rant that is as predictable as it is ‘intemperate’, Julian Gough calls on Irish writers to produce work that is more violent, scatological, and cartoonish and to plug into ‘the electric current of the culture’.
Fine: let him off. It’s not an aesthetic I’m likely to adopt, much less endorse. I have always thought that writers, like prophets, need to stand against the currents of the culture (to warp Gough’s metaphor), not wallow in them.
Prophets? Yeah, I know: that one word probably tells you all you need to know about me. I have a history of taking (this sort of) stuff way too seriously.
Forgive me, Father, but it has been over a year since I last blogged.
What have I been doing in the meantime? Oh, you know, the usual: sometimes despairing, but mostly laughing at the state the world has gotten itself into. Writing, too, of course, albeit to little effect—my second novel was completed last June, submitted to a publisher in London, and thereafter rejected.
I am currently working on a substantial revision of the manuscript. I don’t know what I’ll do with it when I’m finished. I may seek to place it somewhere else, or I may, as Declan Burke at Crime Always Pays suggests, look into publishing it myself. I self-published Aisling Ltd, after all, and it was a great experience; I would happily dance that way again. Indeed, the only plausible reasons for seeking to publish via a established house are validation and money, and those are the very things that are being wrung out of traditional publishing by the realities of the contemporary marketplace for books.
In such circumstances, self-publishing seems like the only responsible decision to make.
My, but I do like validation and money…
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