Today's BrainFart Is Brought To You By The Word Procrastination
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If you need a break from the daily grind to indulge your girlie side, this is twinkly pink on steroids.
And now I need a big stick with which to beat people who use words like 'girlie'. It's a short step from 'girlie' to 'girlie girl' and then I'm afraid I shall have to vomit all over your sparkly pink shoes. It's all so very unnecessary.
I've reached 40k on Nano and I have a huge sprawling mess of partially related babble which I'm probably going to use about ten per cent of, but then that is kind of the point. I actually had a suspicion of a plot this time but it's run away and started crying in a dark corner somewhere and I can't coax it out. I really do envy people who can cook up huge cohesive plots, plan them and then write them. I'm a crappy planner because planning seems to suck the fun out of writing for me - it's like I know what's going to happen, which is fine if I've read it before, but I can't read it a second time without actually putting it down in words, so. I always read like this as well - one huge gluttonous gulp of a first read, in which I will read a book until my eyes almost fall out just to get to the end, and then a second read to savour all the good bits.
I'd get annoyed at University because there was never any more time than to do anything than stuff the texts down your throat whether you wanted to or not, and no time to actually digest. Except for The Scarlet Letter - we seemed to be looking at that one forever, although if time passes when you're having fun...well...I should really give that one another go sometime. I'll pigeonhole it for the next time I want to read the turgid homespun burpings of a twee, sanctimonious arse who thinks pointing out hypocrisy in the clergy is anything other than excruciatingly banal. No, wait - I'd better not, had I? I'm clearly not over that particular literary trauma.
Lately I've actually started dusting off some old college books and reading like a student again, as opposed to reading like a writer (Nitpick, nitpick, oh I see what you did there, whoops well that didn't work did it? Rinse and repeat.) and I've been kind of appalled and at the same time gratified by how thick I actually was as a teenager. I used to look back at my nineteen year old self and think 'Yeah, so you had all the common sense of a spongemop but a well-tuned, well-trained brain.' Then I'd curse my own thirtysomehow woollyheadness and wish there was some way I could combine life experience with the wits I had as a kid.
Nope. Not so. I was really kind of a bonehead, for all those now incomprehensible notes I made in the margins of Mitchell and Robinson's. (Genitive plural - what the pink rubbery fuck? I don't know what that even is. Possibly didn't know at the time. Who knows?)
I'd written GUILT in large letters in the margin of Doctor Faustus, next to the first appearance by the Good Angel. And then I'd written AMBITION beside the Bad Angel's first speech. Well, duh. Good Angel v. Bad Angel - what could they possibly represent? I don't know. I need a degree in English Literature to figure this out.
There is not enough headdesk in the world.
It's a weird old play, though, and I'm not a hundred per-cent sure which version I read (There are supposed to be two.) but it really is strange - part morality play, part tragedy, spattered with strange moments of farce. I never quite got Marlowe in the way I got Shakespeare and Jonson, although Marlowe undoubtedly had the most interesting personal life of the Big Three Elizabethan/Jacobean playwrights. I mean, really - atheistic gay hellraiser who liked fighting and was rumoured to be a spy for Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I's terrifying and far reaching grey eminence? That's some sexy shit right there.
I was trying to reach for some kind of train of thought - something heaveny/hell blah blah, and I quite forgot what I was looking for, but I've still got Goethe to wade through, so that should be fun.
Also just finished re-reading Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and the overriding impulse is to curl up in a little ball and weep, because shit he was good. Really good. (Quite looking forward to the remake, although I can't quite see a thirty year old actor playing seventeen year old Pinkie. But Helen Mirren should be great.) I was really struck by how much I found myself wanting to smack Ida Arnold all the way through the book, which hadn't occurred to me when I first read it as a teenager. You get spoonfed the accepted version of literary criticism - Pinkie = Evil, Ida = Good. Cough that up in your essays ad infinitum and get an A+.
I came away with a completely different impression of Ida - a silly, synthetic woman who dismisses religion while basing her life decisions on a ouija board. She's all boobs and booze and 'I'm a kind woman, I'm a good woman, I know what's right' and repeats until you want to bash her over the head with her own ouija board. Nothing is real about her - she inspires lust and simulates passion, gets pissed and goes through the list of people she imagines she's 'saved' throughout her life - a beggar she gave money to, a man she dragged out of the sea (Although it's never said whether the man wanted to drown himself or not - probably did once he'd coughed the salt water out of his lungs and came face to face with bloody Ida rattling on about what a good soul she was. For fuck's sake, woman.)
Her self-congratulatory natter is painful, and it's obvious the lady doth protest way too fucking much. She can't be so dim as not to know what's ahead of her - she's fortysomething and in the last flush of her beauty. She can't go around bumming drinks and falling into bed with men forever. The one sensible thing she does is return to the husband she abandoned in search of excitment, finally eschewing her hollow idea of 'life' and 'fun' for the closest thing her shallow heart has ever felt to love.
She's not a representation of Good at all. She's too prating and abstract and plain bone thick to be good - bustling around imposing her own standards on other people. If she's a representation of anything I think she's a representation of Justice - a human, synthetic concept that bears no real relation to the deeper innate notions of Good and Evil represented respectively by Rose and Pinkie. Worse, she's the voice of loud, thick, braying justice - tabloid justice - the black and white screechings of the kind of brickheaded fuckos who regularly wash up being righteously ripped new arseholes on Speakyourbranes.
As for Pinkie I finally get it - why he shrinks away from adult vices like booze and smokes and sex and all the things you imagine a baby gangster would be wallowing gleefully in. Adult vices represent experience. Experience cultivates tenderness, empathy, humanity - and he's petrified of acquiring any of these characteristics because they will take away his emotional deadness and leave him raw, flayed, bleeding. He cherishes his coldness because it sets him apart, makes him an exceptional gangster. He begins to unravel after he experiences physical pain for himself - the experience drives empathy, hardens his concept of Hell.
The whole notions of innocence and experience in the book are really very interesting - Rose manages to be innocent and yet effortlessly good while Pinkie manages to be innocent and evil - but his evil takes effort. He spends the book shrinking from everything - everything from cheap music to sex - everything that could stir human tenderness in him. Whereas Ida is supposed to be experienced and stomps through everything with a crass, dim cluelessness that takes no account of anyone's feelings.
Lots of fun. A great book - richly textured, beautifully written. Highly recommend it if you haven't. Still recommend it if you have.
Right, I had better fuck off and do some more Nano.
If you need a break from the daily grind to indulge your girlie side, this is twinkly pink on steroids.
And now I need a big stick with which to beat people who use words like 'girlie'. It's a short step from 'girlie' to 'girlie girl' and then I'm afraid I shall have to vomit all over your sparkly pink shoes. It's all so very unnecessary.
I've reached 40k on Nano and I have a huge sprawling mess of partially related babble which I'm probably going to use about ten per cent of, but then that is kind of the point. I actually had a suspicion of a plot this time but it's run away and started crying in a dark corner somewhere and I can't coax it out. I really do envy people who can cook up huge cohesive plots, plan them and then write them. I'm a crappy planner because planning seems to suck the fun out of writing for me - it's like I know what's going to happen, which is fine if I've read it before, but I can't read it a second time without actually putting it down in words, so. I always read like this as well - one huge gluttonous gulp of a first read, in which I will read a book until my eyes almost fall out just to get to the end, and then a second read to savour all the good bits.
I'd get annoyed at University because there was never any more time than to do anything than stuff the texts down your throat whether you wanted to or not, and no time to actually digest. Except for The Scarlet Letter - we seemed to be looking at that one forever, although if time passes when you're having fun...well...I should really give that one another go sometime. I'll pigeonhole it for the next time I want to read the turgid homespun burpings of a twee, sanctimonious arse who thinks pointing out hypocrisy in the clergy is anything other than excruciatingly banal. No, wait - I'd better not, had I? I'm clearly not over that particular literary trauma.
Lately I've actually started dusting off some old college books and reading like a student again, as opposed to reading like a writer (Nitpick, nitpick, oh I see what you did there, whoops well that didn't work did it? Rinse and repeat.) and I've been kind of appalled and at the same time gratified by how thick I actually was as a teenager. I used to look back at my nineteen year old self and think 'Yeah, so you had all the common sense of a spongemop but a well-tuned, well-trained brain.' Then I'd curse my own thirtysomehow woollyheadness and wish there was some way I could combine life experience with the wits I had as a kid.
Nope. Not so. I was really kind of a bonehead, for all those now incomprehensible notes I made in the margins of Mitchell and Robinson's. (Genitive plural - what the pink rubbery fuck? I don't know what that even is. Possibly didn't know at the time. Who knows?)
I'd written GUILT in large letters in the margin of Doctor Faustus, next to the first appearance by the Good Angel. And then I'd written AMBITION beside the Bad Angel's first speech. Well, duh. Good Angel v. Bad Angel - what could they possibly represent? I don't know. I need a degree in English Literature to figure this out.
There is not enough headdesk in the world.
It's a weird old play, though, and I'm not a hundred per-cent sure which version I read (There are supposed to be two.) but it really is strange - part morality play, part tragedy, spattered with strange moments of farce. I never quite got Marlowe in the way I got Shakespeare and Jonson, although Marlowe undoubtedly had the most interesting personal life of the Big Three Elizabethan/Jacobean playwrights. I mean, really - atheistic gay hellraiser who liked fighting and was rumoured to be a spy for Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I's terrifying and far reaching grey eminence? That's some sexy shit right there.
I was trying to reach for some kind of train of thought - something heaveny/hell blah blah, and I quite forgot what I was looking for, but I've still got Goethe to wade through, so that should be fun.
Also just finished re-reading Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and the overriding impulse is to curl up in a little ball and weep, because shit he was good. Really good. (Quite looking forward to the remake, although I can't quite see a thirty year old actor playing seventeen year old Pinkie. But Helen Mirren should be great.) I was really struck by how much I found myself wanting to smack Ida Arnold all the way through the book, which hadn't occurred to me when I first read it as a teenager. You get spoonfed the accepted version of literary criticism - Pinkie = Evil, Ida = Good. Cough that up in your essays ad infinitum and get an A+.
I came away with a completely different impression of Ida - a silly, synthetic woman who dismisses religion while basing her life decisions on a ouija board. She's all boobs and booze and 'I'm a kind woman, I'm a good woman, I know what's right' and repeats until you want to bash her over the head with her own ouija board. Nothing is real about her - she inspires lust and simulates passion, gets pissed and goes through the list of people she imagines she's 'saved' throughout her life - a beggar she gave money to, a man she dragged out of the sea (Although it's never said whether the man wanted to drown himself or not - probably did once he'd coughed the salt water out of his lungs and came face to face with bloody Ida rattling on about what a good soul she was. For fuck's sake, woman.)
Her self-congratulatory natter is painful, and it's obvious the lady doth protest way too fucking much. She can't be so dim as not to know what's ahead of her - she's fortysomething and in the last flush of her beauty. She can't go around bumming drinks and falling into bed with men forever. The one sensible thing she does is return to the husband she abandoned in search of excitment, finally eschewing her hollow idea of 'life' and 'fun' for the closest thing her shallow heart has ever felt to love.
She's not a representation of Good at all. She's too prating and abstract and plain bone thick to be good - bustling around imposing her own standards on other people. If she's a representation of anything I think she's a representation of Justice - a human, synthetic concept that bears no real relation to the deeper innate notions of Good and Evil represented respectively by Rose and Pinkie. Worse, she's the voice of loud, thick, braying justice - tabloid justice - the black and white screechings of the kind of brickheaded fuckos who regularly wash up being righteously ripped new arseholes on Speakyourbranes.
As for Pinkie I finally get it - why he shrinks away from adult vices like booze and smokes and sex and all the things you imagine a baby gangster would be wallowing gleefully in. Adult vices represent experience. Experience cultivates tenderness, empathy, humanity - and he's petrified of acquiring any of these characteristics because they will take away his emotional deadness and leave him raw, flayed, bleeding. He cherishes his coldness because it sets him apart, makes him an exceptional gangster. He begins to unravel after he experiences physical pain for himself - the experience drives empathy, hardens his concept of Hell.
The whole notions of innocence and experience in the book are really very interesting - Rose manages to be innocent and yet effortlessly good while Pinkie manages to be innocent and evil - but his evil takes effort. He spends the book shrinking from everything - everything from cheap music to sex - everything that could stir human tenderness in him. Whereas Ida is supposed to be experienced and stomps through everything with a crass, dim cluelessness that takes no account of anyone's feelings.
Lots of fun. A great book - richly textured, beautifully written. Highly recommend it if you haven't. Still recommend it if you have.
Right, I had better fuck off and do some more Nano.