October 01 2023, 06:01
A Haunting in Venice (2023)
Director: Kenneth Branagh
I ummed and ahhed about this year’s #31DaysofHorror because life is particularly hectic this year, but as frivolous as it might seem, the project is one of the few that is just for me, so I’m going in again. I started with a classic whodunnit, an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en_Party, which Branagh has shot through a horror genre lens. It’s set in 1947, so the characters are still traumatised from the Second World War. Hercule Poirot has retired to Vienna. It’s playfully shot, with fish eye lenses, hand-held cameras, spooky children and Viennese masks all building a distinctive mood.
This was my third visit to Venice in three months: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning in July, Saving Venice in August (a BBC documentary about saving Venice from the damage of rising tides), and now this. Venice’s buildings and bridges and alleyways scream history, and the labyrinthine walkways and squares, overlooked by windows, balconies and rooftops, suggest someone always watching. The water, dirty water from the sewers, regularly floods the streets. Venice is old, filthy and rich.
A Haunting in Venice opens with Poirot being harassed in a quiet, opulent city, then pivots to a single palazzo, an old orphanage, on a stormy night, sealed off from the world. It’s fun, and a mystery, so I’ll say no more.
September 17 2023, 10:31
Envy
Picked up Brother of the More Famous Jack. Barbara Trapido is an incredible writer. Nagging envy made me put it down after the first five pages. I’m a reader, thank God, but the writer in me takes a toll from everything I read. Reading is a solace; films too. Writing is torture.
Don’t edit the first draft. That’s the story told, and it might work for some, but it’s never worked for me. The advice is a mirage. When you are thirsty in a desert you are desperate for the oasis. Don’t censor—I agree with that. But don’t edit? Editing is where the work happens. For me. If you can bash out a solid first draft, I’m ragingly envious, but good for you. Enjoy. But editing is the activity that allows my unconscious to do its work. I don’t trust simple answers to complex questions. I know what has worked in writing a novel, and it was a difficult, draining path. But then, it could be I am a difficult and draining person.
I wish I enjoyed it more, that’s all. I wish that I believed more forcefully that writing was worth the effort and agonies. To write again I would have to put aside duties and comforts. The thing that hurts is that I don’t feel like I have a choice in whether I write or not. Turning away from the fight doesn’t mean the fighting stops, it prolongs it and lets it get meaner and dirtier. A writer not writing is carrying an infection of the soul. But I’ve said all this before with different words. I don’t want to be that writer who writes about a writer who doesn’t write. Christ, I exhaust myself.
September 10 2023, 13:01
Worth and work
I’ve been reading more this month. I decided to read a novel for thirty minutes uninterrupted at least once every day. I had to dig around to find the motivation to do that because I’d fallen out of love with reading (again). I wanted to break the cycle. I wondered (again) if reading was a waste of time. This is a terrible trap for a writer to find himself in. My head was already full of coding, podcasts, films, and catastrophising (of course). Eventually I decided (this took quite a bit of thought!) that reading was something that lifted my whole experience of living, and luxuriating in literature gave me far more felt experiences than I could have in my physical life, so why wouldn't I drink deeply from the well, as long as it was balanced with being active in the external world?
Today I was asking myself why I kept struggling with sticking to the habits that keep me physically healthy. My right glute flared up at the end of last week, and I struggled walking for an hour on Saturday. I’ve gained weight because I’m emotional eating again. Looking for ways to eat more healthily, I wrote:
... It needs organisation and discipline. Like writing. Like making anything with complexity that’s of worth. Worth. Work. Worth work worthwork wrthwrk
The worth lifts the work. Knowing the reason makes the task more than just an item on a list. Understanding the purpose, feeling the importance of it, makes me engage creatively, and forgetting the reasons why I read led me to stop reading. The same with writing, eating healthily, and exercise.
I can be aggressive in asking why I’m doing something. I talk myself out of all sorts of potentially valuable things. Creative engagement is an elusive mindset. I’m terrible at taking orders, especially from myself, and after one too many compromises, or if I lack clarity of purpose, my unconscious swiftly calls on the gods of mutiny and self-sabotage.
All I can do to find my way through these defences is to keep doing the slow, thorough work of bringing the defences into the light, and as the saying goes, to ‘give them a good listening to’, with kindness and respect. The forces at play deep under the surface of my conscious mind are powerful and can work for me as well as against. The trick is to realise when I’m using ‘the work’ to avoid action. I want to change, but I have to bring my shadows with me, because they are the ones who will make the changed life worth living.
August 29 2023, 12:44
Duality
I’m deep into my summer break, which has not gone to plan. Instead of being in an AirBnB near Lake Geneva, we had to stay home to take my father-in-law to daily radiation therapy for a fast-growing lump on his neck. The speed of his decline is hard to absorb.
He noticed it in June, got an urgent referral in July, and started radiation treatment mid-August. He was driving a week ago, even as we wondered if he should be. His energy was fading with his appetite. Last week we drove him every day to his appointments, and each day he found it harder to get in and out of the car and walk through the hospital. On Friday he agreed to use a wheelchair. At the weekend, he became delirious and fell at home. An ambulance came. It doesn't look as if he’s strong enough for the necessary treatment. There’s a rough month ahead.
Against this backdrop, as awful as it is, I’ve been able to recover my mojo after a torrid year with my own father and a tough work environment. Dad’s okay and managing at home well enough, which is a relief. I’ve written a lot more in my notebook about films, books, writing, technology, my desires, and all the good things my creative practice needs. Being able to help other people energises me, and I’m excited for September and October, my favourite months. Bring on the leaves, cooler winds, patterned jumpers and the rejuvenation I experience every autumn. It hasn’t been much of a summer in the UK, but autumn can’t disappoint.
(A grim duality. There’s loss coming, it’s in the air, like the sound of the steam train in Something Wicked This Way Comes.)
August 12 2023, 10:21
Eastmouth and other stories
Author: Alison Moore
First published: 2022
Beautifully crafted, easy to read stories by Alison Moore that are intricate studies in helplessness and despair. The characters find themselves enmeshed in situations that keep getting worse until often they are crushed. The environment shackles them. Language holds them. Revenge arrives, soporifics are deployed, the decay is in all things. They are drawn to that which will damage and destroy them.
The stories are ruthless shadows. They span a decade, most published in magazines, a few published in this book for the first time. Her last collection, The Pre-War House and Other Stories (2013), contained stories written before The Lighthouse (2012), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She’s written four novels since then: He Wants (2014), Death and the Seaside (2016), Missing (2018), and The Retreat (2021). It’s an impressive run. I wonder how the Eastmouth stories fed the novels, and vice versa? I like the pattern of writing short pieces alongside longer ones, then releasing a collection when there are naturally enough stories to fill one. Pretty poison pills. It seems natural. Healthy, even.
August 11 2023, 11:52
Pick something
In the bookshop I let my eyes drift over bright modern covers and serious-looking classics. I didn't buy a book. I have books. My problem is I can't choose one to read. Fiction. Buying a novel is a cheat—it gives the dopamine hit of a decision without requiring the commitment of following it through. I could have bought five books from five different genres that together represented something vital in me, and I would have felt excited, validated, alive even, and they all would have gone on my ever-expanding shelf at home where I wouldn't read them. This time next week my butterfly soul would have landed somewhere else.
I met my friend Tim for dinner last week. He's a writer, and I don't see him enough, even though he's nearby. As he walked with me back to the train station, I blurted out that we should start a book club, and meet up more regularly to talk about books. The next day I posted a photo of my to-read shelves on social media and tagged him in. He suggested one of three that he'd ordered. I let him choose. The final choice is, at the time of typing, undecided.
It's a cliché to express the despair and overwhelm at the reality of all culture available all the time. I've said it enough myself, but I still haven't come up with a strategy that works to get me to consistently fucking pick something. Asking Tim to choose a book is another cheat, albeit a lesser one, because at least I will read the book.
Tim said something that hit home. When he feels overwhelmed with family life, say in the summer holidays with his two young children, and he finds a sliver of free time, he gets back to the book he's reading. That way he can, in his words, maintain a vivid inner life when his external world is at the mercy of others.
When I have ten or twenty minutes spare, I play the golf video game, or browse news online, or open social media apps on my phone, or review my film watchlist, or eat something when I'm not hungry, or make a cup of tea when I'm not thirsty. I NEVER read a book. Those other activities might help me relax, but none of them serve my soul.
The irony is, reading is the ultimate pick up and put down pastime. I see my daughter listen (listen!) to television shows while she makes lunch or does homework. I've never been able to multi-task like that. Words don't go in unless I am giving them my full attention. When I've given myself a film challenge, I've watched films in thirty minute segments, because that was all the time I had, and it wasn't as satisfying as watching them in one go. It's one of the reasons I don't like television drama series. I need to watch a story in one go if possible, but I can read a book happily in several sittings.
My summer holiday is at the end of August. I've been planning on reading more then, when I will have more time, but that's another cheat. Holidays are not everyday life, and if I'm not reading every week, I'm not suddenly going to start in that week.
I'm currently reading Eastmouth and Other Stories, by Alison Moore. Short stories are perfect for those fifteen minute gaps in the day, and that's how I'm reading them. After all that reflection, I'd forgotten that I've already started moving towards a fresh reading habit. It's funny what you forget.
August 07 2023, 19:41
Meg 2: The Trench
The first Meg was fine, but I admit to being more excited this time around because Ben Wheatley was at the helm. His filmography is a string of pearls: Kill List, Sightseers, A Field in England, High Rise, Free Fire, Happy New Year Colin Burstead, Rebecca, and In the Earth. They’re not all brilliant, but he’s always interesting. His best films are made with his partner, Amy Jump. Her name is not in the writing credits of Meg 2.
Monsters escape the deepest recesses of the ocean when greedy humans breach the protecting boundary. Teeth and tentacles chomp, devour, squeeze and rip through submarines, boats, research stations, and eventually a holiday resort. People die. Lots of people having fun die. I found myself laughing because the creatures are ridiculous, partly because it’s clear they are CGI, but also in their relentless, pounding rage at all living things. It’s a relief to see that part of me expressed on screen. Who doesn’t sometimes want to grind the world up, swallow it all down and pass out in a carb coma?
Anyway, I’m not recommending Meg 2: The Trench. It’s a stupid film with terrible dialogue, clichéd story-telling, annoying characters, and a clear eye on the money, but I went with my son, and he enjoyed it, and I enjoyed seeing it with him. That’s the sort of film it is.
August 05 2023, 13:15
Open roads and blue skies
This is my new website design. It’s a bit like a newspaper, which wasn’t the original intention, but I’ve come to really like it. So, farewell to the old website! Welcome to the new!
I’ve arrived at an approach to posting online that I’ve been resisting for years, but has become inevitable with the slow death of Twitter: one place for my stuff, that I control, with cross-posts to the social media platforms as appropriate. I’m a writer, and readers are scattered ever more widely — Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, Twitter/X (hopefully not for much longer), Substack, Tumblr... I want to spend more time writing new material and less time on social media. Going all in on one place doesn’t make sense anymore. Farewell Twitter. I wouldn’t be here without you.
And hello to my website. I could have switched to Wordpress, but I wanted to build my own thing, in this case using Jekyll, a static site generator. That means all of my posts come from Markdown files in Github and are mixed together whenever the site is built and released. There is an RSS feed, which is from the past but also part of the future now that social media is fragmenting.
Websites are coming back. I might even create a category for tech/coding. We’ll see. I’m planning on interacting with people on socialz, posting ‘notes‘ to my website, and putting fiction and behind-the-scenes stuff on Patreon. It’s all new from here.
July 16 2023, 08:33
Go gently
I hit an emotional wall a couple of weeks ago. Looking back, it’s been coming for months, but when you’re in a storm for long enough it begins to feel normal. This is mainly a day job thing, and I don’t talk about that here, but emotionally everything is connected, so of course there are knock-on effects. Anxiety got into every nook and cranny of my life, including family, walks around the block, meal times, evenings, weekends, and dreams.
Some part of me pulled the panic cord. For days afterwards I woke at night with memories of real conversations blended with imagined responses, alternative choices I might have made, alliances I could have struck, things I could have done differently. As a partially-reformed people pleaser, I’m wary of my tendency to always wonder what I could have done better. Asking for what I need doesn’t come easily. Boundaries are hard-won. Part of me was wise enough to jump out of this hot pot before I was boiled alive. I’m grateful for that.
It’s been ten days and I still feel shaky. Before this, I would have said I was an above-averagely anxious person who managed it well enough through tools learned in several years of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I think that is still true. I suspect those tools, along with strong support at home, have prevented me from having a more seriously damaging experience. When I am not thinking about my job, I’m okay—more lethargic than usual, a bit down—but when I find my thoughts drifting to work conversations, and the fast-paced interactions, the big personalities, adrenaline floods into my body, my heart rate accelerates, my stomach churns, and I’m overwhelmed again.
Dad went into hospital just before I started this project. (My last project went so well!) His vulnerability, three hundred miles away, and his reasonable requests for help at random times, have taken a serious toll on me. So much driving. So much sleeping in a ghost house, away from my family. I feel blasted, roasted, blank and exhausted.
What’s the route forward from here? Keep letting the anxiety go, listen to intuition, ask for help, be patient, be kind to myself. Go gently.
June 30 2023, 17:10
Angles, curves and spin
The year barrels on and tomorrow we hit July. It’s the halfway point. The summer solstice has passed and the hottest months are ahead. Time doesn’t take a break, even when I ask politely.
Dad gave me some of his old golf clubs. He took me to the Steelworks golf club when I was twelve and taught me to play, but then when I was fourteen I chose tennis over golf, and I haven’t played since. I still play golf video games though, because I’ve always loved the curve of a ball through a landscape. Tennis gave me a similar thrill. Angles, curves, spin, and the laws of physics.
I booked a beginners course at my local golf club. The club has always been there, but I’ve never wanted to visit. Five Saturdays, nine am, one hour, all equipment provided. I know I’m going to be sucked back in. That’s why I’m doing it. Perhaps it’s part of the process of letting my father go.