Life's Chalkboard 3

A snapshot of something I've been tinkering with recently...

Things I'm Unsure of/Don't Get About Modern Life

• Twerking
• Candy Crush Saga
• Reality
• Friendship/socializing
• Celebrity
• Authority/trust/politicians
• One Direction/The Wanted/JLS/Little Mix etc
• BBC3
• The Big Bang Theory
• Adverts (character-based and rhyming)
• Presenters (Russell Kane, Nick Grimshaw, Jeremy Vine, Chris Evans... seems like all the male ones are annoying twatshits)
• Love (is it or isn't it?)
• Cryptic crosswords
• Apps
• Energy drinks
• The price of stuff
• Music (pop, club, club-pop and sexist)

A Time To Read

A very dear friend of mine bought me John Grisham's A Time to Kill for Christmas last year, and as thanks to him, I'm gonna discuss it here. Also, it's to help me explore my thoughts on more traditional narrative styles and hopefully encourage people to pick up a book, if they ain't already reading one.

I'd seen Joel Schumacher's 1996 film of the same name a long time ago and really liked it, but since I knew the plot already, my reading of it was different to what it might have been. Naturally I drew comparisons between both visions as I read, contrasting Grisham's balding Jake Brigance (our hero) with the swish Matthew McConaughey version from the film, for example. One other comparison I had to draw was the size of the book. You hardly notice the two and a half hours of film go by, but the edition of the book I've got is nearly seven-hundred and fifty pages long. Quite frankly it looks a little daunting, especially when you consider how other authors have brought the most vibrant universes to life in a much smaller physical space (I want to mention David Markson, Alasdair Gray and Elfriede Jelinek as examples because they are much more experimental, with plot (or lack of it), form and voice respectively). Basically, being a pretentious PoMo guy, I was sceptical as to how I'd receive A Time to Kill.


The first nice surprise in the book was an 'Author's Note', which was honest and humble enough to hook me right away. Grisham explains a little bit about the process of writing the work, his hopes and dreams at the time and also a reflection on the finished article. He directly deals with my primary put-off - the length - saying, "It's a first novel, and at times it rambles, but I wouldn't change a word if given the chance." At reading this, all my pretentious pre-judgements melted away, and I settled down to give it a go.

I've heard Grisham's work (and others' in a similar vein) described as 'courtroom procedurals' which is pretty damn apt. There's no doubt that the themes are very engaging, the characters nicely rounded etc, but this plot-riche novel is chock-full of dry protocol. It's great for Grisham that he has such a wealth of knowledge on the American justice system (or should that be injustice system, ho-ho!), but I just can't help hearing my writer's voice shouting "CUT IT!"

One thing that struck me is how a whole chapter will be devoted to one strand of the narrative, then the final paragraph will reveal a shocking development elsewhere. The effect of this is startling, a sudden gear change that yanks your head back as your body speeds up through the action - certainly an interesting device that is present throughout and has a way of getting you to read on. I had thought of re-writing the book just including these final paragraphs (because they are the most 'to the point' bits of the book). I'm not sure why I thought that, perhaps just as a reaction to the heavy dependence on plot, but it would probably be quite lame without the rest of the chapter as a counterpoint.

I'm not saying everyone should be like Samuel Beckett, I'm not saying plot is evil and I'm certainly not saying A Time to Kill is a bad book. It was an entertaining enough yarn and I'm glad I read it - especially since now I can compare it to the film (incidentally, the way the film deals with expositional elements was a little better in my opinion, especially in the most important matter of Jake's 'final speech' and the jury's final hour). As I say, there are things I'd take out to streamline it, but Grisham himself admits that, as his first novel, he could've done better. You can't argue with how successful it is, though, first book or not.

Right, enough of my rambling. Should you give this book a go? That's what we're all here for right? You will like this book if family is important to you. You'll like it if racism, class and social order is a concern. You'll like it if you're sensitive to plight, not averse to harrowing events and, above all, want a happy-ish ending. It'll while away a pleasant few hours on holiday or, failing that, make a serviceable doorstop.

Peace out.

On the Probable Futility of Keeping Your Self out of Your Writing Picure

As you may know, I recently read Al Alvarez' The Writer's Voice. As with all good books about writing, it threw up many questions about the self, the world and the word, but the thing that really made me think was biography. People are absolutely mad for, and will voraciously consume biographical detail about authors; trying to pry into their lives, either to unlock something within their texts (as in the study of Literature), or just because they're nosy.

This is unappealing to me. And not because of some lame 'privacy violation'. What bothers me is the focus it takes away from the work itself, either in the sense that people would rather read something else about you, as opposed to from you, or in the sense that such information can bend and warp meaning in your work. At a recent wine tasting (no, I'm not a Tory, I was working), a customer expressed her disappointment at the prices of the wines being listed on the sheet. This extra context, for her, meant that she couldn't enjoy the wines for their intrinsic merits, and instead could only make relative judgements such as 'it's not worth the money', for example. It's not a big leap from that to writing, I feel. I want my work to be 'waterproof', to stand fully alone and be (hopefully) enjoyed for what it is, rather than let it leak in 'real' bits of my life that will obscure its inherent message.

As usual, though, there are many problems here, some of which I have hypocritically blundered through in my post here. The first one is all the detail I've already revealed about myself (that I work at wine tasting, for example). I could have taken it out, but not only is that 'how the post came to be', it also sets up a (rather poor) 'joke' about Tory poshness. So it stays. Even at the risk of revealing certain political allegiances... The second problem comes in terminology - what did I mean by "'real' bits of my life"? I was literally meaning 'true revelations', rather than the fake ones I sometimes put in for humour/other effect. But does the way I phrased that not suggest that the act of writing inherently involves putting bits of your life in? I'd say so. As David Shield says in Reality Hunger, "...all writing is autobiography: everything... including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it" which puts it nicely. And even if it is a made up life, is the author not living it on some imaginative level? Maybe I'm getting too metaphysical here, but I do want to stress the difficulties of writing and not revealing things in your life - that's where most inspiration comes from right? Think Plath's Bell Jar, Larkin's High Windows or Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata', as a pitifully small sample.

What are the options anyway? I've thought about deleting profile pages (or maybe inventing deceptive ones) and, in the unlikely event I'm ever published again, keeping my author profile as 'Martin Palmer is'. This might come across as arrogant and, to prospective employers/collaborators, unprofessional, but that's a personal sacrifice made for the work. I remember someone saying to me about my profile in Edge Hill's Question Mark vol 2, "You've not said a lot about yourself, look at everyone else's!" Well, I think perhaps I put too much ("Martin is a third year student of English and Creative Writing. Predominantly a scriptwriter, he also enjoys creating fiction, poetry and life writing."). So yeah, there's either abstaining from, or messing with, the profile. The former will make you mysterious and not-quite-there, but the latter, whilst meaning you'd have to perform a little on the level of a clown/jester, still runs the risk of tainting your work. And the things people read into it would be stranger, so I don't think that's an efficient strategy, as amusing as it might have been to list my occupation as 'Moonraker' or some such... thing... I don't know.

Another option could be the pen name, but my initial knee-jerk reaction to that is that it's my work, I want my name on it (complete with fist-banging-table motion). There's also an increased administerial duty here which, being a lazy sod, doesn't appeal. The benefits, though, would include a fresh biographical start. I wouldn't want to invent a new one, like Ern Malley or Rene Van Valckenborch because I wouldn't be writing as a new persona. I'd still be me, but no-one would know and therefore the work would stand or fall on its own worth, as opposed to some contextual consideration. Worth looking into for future projects... Need to come up with a better name than Nitram Remlap though...

Really, this is not the best medium to be judging myself on in terms of biographical detail. It's a blog, and this post is a personal essay - of sorts - and thus more susceptible to me 'being in it'. Also, it's not 'art' or literature, so the motivation for me to keep myself out isn't there as it would be in, say, a poem. In general, though, is there any point in trying to cover our tracks and make art 'self-sufficient', i.e. free from its creator/s? Sure, when we're still alive and our energies are more mercurial, there's less 'call' for biographical scrutiny. We are still in the act of writing, not just about inspirations from life and things we understand, but also writing in order to find meaning or revelation. After death, though, the call increases. People either miss the artist on a personal level or, maybe, the work becomes popular and/or the subject of research (i.e. by Literary academics). And these biographers know everything about everyone, no matter how far in the past the evidence is (could give any example here... Coleridge, there you go).

These days a biographer could dredge up all kinds of stuff from our ever-increasingly self-documented lifestyles, from how often you've complained about the sniffles to every single TV programme you've ever claimed to watch. So what's the point in trying to be nobody? There's a tome of biography hanging around all our necks with no lock on it. As soon as we're dead and the bounds of our life have set, you can be boiled down easily. If you tried a pen-name it will be cracked and then you're not just over-contextualized, but over-contextualized as the person who tried to avoid being contextualized, i.e. a failure. So this post has all been a load of rubbish then... It's unavoidable, really, to be tied to your work and run the risk of people using your life as a key to unlock (possibly spurious) 'hidden messages'.

Having just finished Elfriede Jelinek's Her Not All Her, I've found some possible ways to progress, though: master your own myth. Reto Sorg's afterword to this book is a very stimulating few pages, and here I muse upon't.  Sorg is guilty of the 'boiling down' I mentioned in the last paragraph when she says of Robert Walser (who the play 'is about') that he was, "...a naive genius who used his writing to reveal his existential position, whose career fell apart almost before it got started, who entered an insane asylum despite being sane, and who gave up his passion in order to live out the remainder of his life silenced as a writer..." Seems almost abrupt, non? She balances this out with an interesting thought on the topic of legacy; that, "...Walser himself contributed to the Walser myth." He did this, Sorg argues, by maintaining a, "...stoic view of his own life as a writer... as one who turns his everyday personal life into his subject." This, along with making "the context and act of writing into his theme..." produces an "overlap between the real person and the fictional character" which "becomes the vanishing point of his work." To sum up, "he invented himself in the act of writing and at the same time made himself disappear." So the ways to move forward are to either 'manipulate the myth' or give up altogether. After all, if you produce nothing, then it can never be ruined by context.

But that's never gonna happen!

Bye for now folks (and apologies for this being such a long post. Please share any thoughts you have, or even just tell me that you made it to the end and I'll congratulate you).