Write on red

Famously, Laurie Lee, one of the nation’s most beloved novelists, wrote ‘on wine’.  Whether or not he was ever drunk in charge of a typewriter is unclear but one has to entertain the possibility that, as a poet, he typed without due care and attention.  He did his writing in the Greek Islands, presumably because in the days before bargain booze, affordable New World wines or even Blue Nun, this was the only way he could become sufficiently inebriated to welcome the Muse should she come to visit.  Also, proximity to Mt Parnassus may have helped.

Rock stars smoke, inject, inhale and presumably occasionally insert for inspiration.  Writers drink.  Christ alone knows why, as excessive booze normally leads to feelings of alienation from the world and a profound sense of being under-appreciated and misunderstood, all of which is achievable through the simple act of publishing a slim volume of verse.  Alcohol also inhibits early morning creativity, and certain writers famously were at their creative peak at first light.  Presumably this meant they could post the latest chapter of their novel off to their publishers at eleven in the morning on their way to the pub.

However, in the spirit of enquiry G&P is embarking on a five-part special to explore the effects of various types of alcohol on writing, beyond those of not being able to remember that fantastic idea for a novel you had last night (something about a boy wizard?) just before you passed out, or not being able to decipher the notes scrawled on a beermat that could be a poem, or somebody’s e mail address.

We continue with…red wine.

In doing so, it would be wrong to ignore the role that red wine has played in art.  By art, I mean proper art, a man at an easel with some oil paints, a glass of thinners, a glass of red wine and, if he’s painting a nude, a semi.  I was once told that artists drank red wine to clear their sinuses, or something.  Knowing artists (as I don’t) it was more probably to stop the voices screaming at them to paint, paint, paint the sky green.

On first inspection, the literary associations with red wine appear obvious, it’s all about the horror novel.  Not only does it look like claret, (actually it sometimes is actually claret), but red wine and other red drinks (strangely never Ribena) appear to be the alcoholic beverage of choice for those who wear rings, have lace at their cuffs and have a LOT of vampire literature on their Kindles.

Let’s make this clear right now.  You only need one vampire novel.  It’s called ‘Salem’s Lot’ and after you read it, you will never want to read any vampire fiction ever again.  Front cover blurb quotes?  I’ve got one for the publisher right here “G&P: this book will FUCK YOU UP!”.

So, moving on…

If you are a writer, you can drink red wine to achieve success in a couple of genres.

The first is horror and, as previously pointed out, it might be cliché but damn if it isn’t good fun to read a ghost story with something red at your elbow.  A bloody good horror story has a sensation of creeping dread much like the way a good red creeps up on you.  It swills and swells and surrounds the senses until you feel a bit queer.

The red is the drink of the mystery writer, the murder, the whocaresdunnet, the red is as thick and as dark as the clouds of confusion in a novel or the fog that lends atmosphere (literally) to a story.

Why would you drink red if you were writing?

Well, it mellows things, flattens them out.  Ideal if, in your first draft, you had ‘FUCK ME, THE FANGS, THE FANGS!” as the opening line and then a separate paragraph with 227 exclamation marks.

Red wine builds up to stuff (see also, fortified wine).  It’s the wine people drink three to four decisions ahead of taking a decision, a light procrastinating wine, if you will, and so ideal for mysteries.  “I’ll check out that death threat tomorrow, but first, a glass of this lovely looking wine left on my doorstep!”

It’s also the perfect winter drink (you can stick Horlicks up your arse and, in the case of a recent Horlicks-botherer, actually can).  You’re by the fire, there may be a blanket, there’s certainly an armchair. You have three uninterrupted hours ahead of you, you are of an age when you pick up a paperback rather than a smartphone, what better than a bottle of something cheeky to the point of impertinence to enhance the experience.

The other genre associated with red wine is a niche one; the military biography.  There are three obvious connotations.  The first is blood, soaking into either sand, turf, water or snow depending on your theatre.  The second is the colour of a military man’s coat, either intentionally during the Nepolionic wars where a red jacket was just the thing, or quite unintentionally in any other era when a red jacket meant that you, or somebody near you, had just encountered something sharp.  Finally, red wine is second only to the pineapple as being an essential element of any military anecdote.  ‘This bottle here, these were the damned Frenchies’, that sort of thing.

And that’s that.  There’s a book for every sort of reader and there’s a drink for every sort of writer, some writers indeed (Kinky Friedman, I’m looking at you!) enjoy several types of drink.  Laurie Lee wrote on wine and wrote brilliantly, but sometimes it’s interesting to consider that, if he had written on beer or fizz, he could have left a lasting legacy of military yarns or even romcom.

Of course, what he’s most famous for is cider.

Review - Thursdays in the park

Oh Jesus, make it stop. 

Reading this is like literary waterboarding, with slurry.

It’s worth noting that this edition at least had 1.5 line spacing, so it’s actually a slim novel. 

Better still if it had been anorexic. 

The first page has a husband criticising his wife because she drinks too much.  Certainly reading this book drives one to the booze, so actually being a character in it would inspire a terrible thirst one would imagine. 

So far, so formula, the reader gets all of two thirds of the way down the first page before wondering when the first vicar is going to pop up.  In that at least, the book does not disappoint (page three, in case you were wondering).

Full disclosure: writing this review was something of a challenge, as the most straightforward way of conveying my opinion of this book would to be to take a well-used carpet knife and gouge the words ‘THIS IS SHITE!’ into the cover of the book. 

Then smear it with excrement.

Then torch it.

I freely acknowledge that this is an over-reaction.  There is no place for the exclamation mark in any considered review.

So just how bad is it?  Let me express it this way.  If the Taliban’s media strategy had been to post one of their trademark fuzzy, foam flecked rants on Youtube with some bearded arse pointing to a copy of ‘Thursdays in the park’ and screaming ‘this is where educating females to write gets you’, and not ‘let’s shoot schoolgirls’, then I’m not saying anyone would be any more accepting of their wicked message, but maybe, just maybe, they’d be playing a little less dodge-the-drone every time they popped out of the cave for some fresh milk.

This is a sad, unhappy and deeply cynical book.

Why cynical?  The author has clearly thought carefully about the demographic of her readers and how to convey that her principal character is successful and affluent.  Hence, early on, it is established that the main character’s kitchen has Bosche appliances and is decorated with National Trust paint.  Mid-range appliances and a paint brand more associated with heritage and tea shops than actual decoration sends a message alright, and that message is ‘the author looked round her kitchen and described what she saw’. It’s cynically judged to appeal to people who either want it confirmed that they have achieved the sort of middle-class life that they read about, or who aspire to owning a Bosche cooker and decorating with National Paint.  It’s also not right.  Affluent people who live in leafy suburbs of London have Agas and decorate with Farrow and Ball paint.

Sad and unhappy because it’s full of sad and unhappy characters.  Everyone in this book is, to a certain extent, sad and unhappy and that includes, by about page seven, the reader.  The principal character is unhappy because her husband has moved into the spare bedroom and won’t explain why.  Her daughter is unhappy because her husband is annoying, the husband is unhappy because he is an unappreciated artist, the bloke the principal character meets in the park is unhappy because, oh, I don’t know, either he’s a widower or allergic to trees or something.

There are a couple of toddlers involved. 

In fairness, they are not unhappy. 

But by Christ they’re irritating.

The toddler also provides the plot driver for the Great Peado Scare.

It has a plot so formulaic that this novel could have been packaged not so much as an e book but rather a powerpoint slide at the sort of desperate conference held at a hotel chosen for its convenient transport links rather than its beauty, where the chef is on the run and the rest of the staff are hoping to be deported back home any day now.

Positives?  Well, it’s quite short, and it confirms all the prejudices one might hold about the sort of people who frequent health food shops, but essentially it’s an exercise in grinding frustration unhappy married to a failed attempt at being a novel seeking to examine the relationships of family life across generations and the effect dramatic change can have on what are thought to be certainties.

e publishing

It’s called a Kindle because it’s the next best thing to burning books!  Centuries of traditional type and publishing have given us everything from the Bible to Penguins – the books, not the bird or the biscuit.  Ten minutes with electronic publishing has given us fifty fucking shades of fucking grey and fucking fan-fucking-fic.  Time was when you wanted to read filth discreetly you wrapped a copy of the Times around your Razzle and the only thing fans produced were scary shrines and purple-printed fanzines advertised for sale in the back of the NME. 

And what of the second-hand bookshop?  These are among the greatest places on Earth, what will happen to them without any second-hand books?  And what about the smell, slightly musty, slightly academic, wholly bookish?  What about the proprietors of these magical places?  Do you know how hard it is to find a job in retail that enables you to open and close when you want to and to wear carpet slippers on the job? And what about their smell, slightly musty, slightly academic, wholly bookish?  Do you know why so many wannabe writers complain that they could paper their walls with rejection letters from publishers?  I’ll give you a clue, it’s not because editors, agents and publishers are all sadists.  Time was when self publishing was rightly described as vanity publishing and was the only way the otherwise unprintable memoirs of retired men with forthright views about foreigners saw the light of day.  Now, any idiot with an iPad and a few hours to waste can publish their ‘original’ moody bloody vampire novella.

As for digital magazine downloads, what a shocking idea.  Every edition of the ‘People’s Friend’ had a free rain-hood stuck to the front cover. Try giving away free essential old-lady apparel as a digital bloody download.

Kindling again

Apparently, women are reading erotica on their Kindles. This is, apparently, newsworthy. Newsworthy for a couple of reasons, firstly because it allows editors of tabloid newspapers to write about women reading erotica, and possibly use a saucy picture of a woman with a Kindle looking a bit flustered, and also because if the paper is owned by a group with a publishing arm, it allows them to plug a few of their filthier titles. Newsworthy also because any bloke reading it will be staggered that a woman can both own and operate a gadget, despite previously showing no aptitude for technology beyond the niche talent for bringing up the browsing history on your laptop, yet apparently still being incapable of fucking recording the footie when asked.

One wonders how this story ever surfaced at all, as one of the features of the Kindle is that nobody can tell what you are reading without looking at the screen. Possibly a Guardian journo was on a bus journey and noticed the woman next to him with a Kindle in one hand, furiously thrumming herself with the other, but more likely somebody checked out the on-line sales chart, wondered 'who the hell is reading this crap?', downloaded it and concluded 'women'.

This is a natural conclusion. Women read erotica and men read porn the same way that ladies glow and men perspire. If a bloke wants to read porn, he goes to the top shelf, not the book shelf. It has to be noted though that in recent years, the top shelf appears to have got rather prudish, with wrappers round the covers. This is despite the lower shelves awash with lads mags with covers featuring the sort of thing that requires artful captions to keep things even within stroking distance of decent.

So, people are reading things on their Kindle that, presumably, they would be embarrassed to read if it was in paperback form, although this has not stopped the publication of 'Fisty shades of shite' or whatever it's called now being published as a paperback, with a discreetly arty cover.

Possibly this is a reasonable fear. People do make judgements about other people based on what they are reading, in the same way that they make assumptions about them based on the contents of their shopping trolly (fifty cans of cat food and a microwave meal for one tells a sad story). In the past, it was a frequent occurrence on public transport to find somebody attractive right up until the point where they pulled out a copy of the Daily Mail and started reading with every sign of enjoyment. Now that everybody reads the Metro, you won't know that somebody is a Nazi until you start talking to them, although its a pretty safe assumption that if they are reading the Metro, they're an idiot. It's also a safe assumption that if you are English and on public transport, you won't be talking to anyone.

So the Kindle allows people to read books that they might otherwise think twice about reading in public. This applies not just to erotica, but for instance to far right literature. The bloke next to you could be smiling and nodding while he reads 'Mein Kamph' or whatever the hell it's called. Likewise, they could be reading the literature of the hard left, if Socialist Worker ever gets round to putting out a Kindle version.

And of course they could be reading children's books. This implies that there is some kind of shame in reading children's literature if you are a grown-up, a trend that was reinforced when Bloomsbury brought out editions of the Harry Potter books with different covers for adults. I didn't think there was any shame in reading the kids' edition, certainly not compared with the shame of paying an extra quid for the adult cover. I certainly know people who still have all their old Enid Blyton's and why shouldn't they while away a train journey reading about the famous five? Certainly better than reading the bloody Metro.

As for me, I shall stick with my 'Lads Book of Fun' from 1957, discreetly tucked inside a copy of 'Razzle'.

Kindling

When I was a kid, I used to watch 'Tomorrow's World'. This programme showcased inventions that would someday change the world, or at least your front room. For instance, Michael Rodd was the first, and only, man to spread jam on a CD to demonstrate that it did not impair performance. Everyone who subsequently bought CDs and discovered that a speck of dust could cause the CD to skip like a kid with ADD and a haribo habit concluded that maybe Michael would have been better off showcasing the weapons-grade laser that must have been used to read the preserve-smeared disc, as anything that could do that could probably shoot down an ICBM, a much better use for a laser than being used to bring forth the musical stylings of Dire Straits.

They also showed an electronic book. About the size of an etch-a-sketch, each book was on a micro-chip, which you slotted into place. The text displayed in red LED of the sort then popular with digital watches. This, we were told, was the future of reading. I agreed, I had read 'The Hitch Hikers' Guide To The Galaxy' and knew that electronic books were the way forward. It never went into production, possibly because of costs, probably because it was a bit of a shit idea.

Now, of course, it appears that just about everyone has an electronic book. Kindling used to be something you chopped or collected or, if a tourist on a cottage holiday, paid too much a bagful for, now it's a description of a popular pastime.

After years of waiting for an electronic book, the kindle is an enormous let-down. Its so...grey. The screen is grey, the plastic case is grey, the text is black (there's variety for you). This is not the sort of thing that Ford Prefect would tote around. There is nothing science fiction about the kindle, it's as exciting as an iron. And you know the big selling point for the kindle? You can read the screen in direct sunlight. Whoop de fucking do because, you know, you can't do that with a book, can you? The point of an electronic something is that it should be better than the non-electronic version. The computer is better than the abacus because you can't play 'angry birds' on an abacus.

An electric book needs to have two features to make it exciting. First, it should narrate books, in the voice of Claudia Winkleman. Second, you should be able to download books from the future.

Only these would overcome the tremendous drag factor of the many things that the kindle cannot do. It's shit at providing future fodder for second hand book shops, and if you are the sort of person who derives please from a well stocked bookshelf, a slab of plastic the colour of a dead sheep lying there does not have the same effect.

Worst of all is the lack of being able to annotate. I bloody hated French at school, each lesson an exercise in misery, until I opened what looked like an unremarkable exercise book, a battered hardback text book that had been through the hands of countless boys before me. This one though, was different. Some hero had, with a black biro and a tremendous surge of filthy imagination, annotated every illustration accompanying the stories of Jean, Xavier and Marie with illustrations and speech bubbles (in English) that turned even a simple trip to the bouloungerer into a pornographic festival of filth. When I turned the page to 'a visit to the stables' I had to work so hard at suppressing my laughter that I nearly ruptured something - nothing I've since seen on the internet has even come close.

Years later I was to encounter the artfully defaced book once again, this time flipping through the pages of Dickens to find that all of the illustrations had been re-captioned, with shocking and surprising results. If you want the formula for hilarity - it's using the word 'cockflicker' in the context of describing a picture of an earnest looking bloke in a top hat.

Try doing that on a kindle.