….. can now be read at the Featured Story page. A summer story this one, so only fitting for the time of year. ‘Microcosmos’ was originally published in Interzone #222.
Author: Nina (Page 63 of 64)
The British Fantasy Society is forty years old this year, and to celebrate, the current chair David Howe has been busy putting together a mammoth forty-story anthology entitled Full Fathom Forty. The book will be launched at this year’s FantasyCon in Brighton. I was surprised and delighted to find one of my own stories, ‘Feet of Clay,’ selected as part of the line-up.
‘Feet of Clay,’ which was originally published last year in the anthology Never Again, edited by Joel Lane and Allyson Bird, had a curious – not to say panic-stricken – genesis. Joel and Ally’s brief was simple: they wanted stories that expressed an opposition to fascism or any other form of racism or hate crime. Not a difficult sentiment to express, you might have thought, and I also believed I had my submission all worked out. As an older child and young adult I adored dystopian fiction. The strong anti-totalitarian message contained in such novels as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World and Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day was a positive reinforcement to the idealistic left-wing politics I was dabbling in back then, and I loved the skilfully cadenced call to revolution these stories inspired. The mixture of SF and politics was driving and compelling. More subtle explorations of these themes – Keith Roberts’s magnificent Pavane and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (possibly my favourite book then and still my favourite Wyndham to this day) made me even more of an addict.
The book that changed everything for me, in a political sense most immediately but in a more far-reaching artistic sense also was Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. It slapped my innocent face with its experience, stunned me with its tensely fought counter-arguments to exactly those questions I had been so devotedly pondering, and – most of all and most importantly – thrilled me with its radical and decidedly European style of engagement with the issues that mattered most to me: freedom of expression and the freedom to decide one’s own fate. What it also showed me – like Orwell’s great novel before it – was how political argument could be voiced in terms of a moving and compelling drama of the emotions.
(It’s a far cry from Chernyshevsky, believe me…… )
What stuck – and sticks – most about the Koestler was its ambiguity. When art is employed in the service of politics of whatever stripe, a dangerous game is being played – dangerous for the politicians (hopefully) and for the artist (certainly). No writer of any worth can ever place himself wholly and one-hundred percent in allegiance with any one party – if he does he’ll find he’s doomed as a writer. For me the ‘simple’ task of writing a story ‘against’ fascism turned out to be hideously difficult. The most obvious pitfall was cliche – it’s all been done before and so much better. Close behind it came the slipperiness of the arguments, the elusiveness of the ‘enemy’ himself: was the death of Heydrich worth the destruction of Lidice? Certainly not. The most obvious means of fighting oppression are rarely the cleverest.
I had decided the best thing to do would be to try my hand at precisely that kind of dystopian tale that had so caught my imagination when I was younger. I took a fragment of something I had tried to write a year or so earlier and turned it into what eventually became ‘The Silver Wind.’ A disastrous decision as it turned out, because Ally and Joel wanted stories of 6,000 words or less; ‘The Silver Wind’ came in at 16,000.
At that point I had precisely two weeks left to meet the deadline. I like to have at least a month to work on a story, and I was in a right panic. In a desperate effort to pull something out of the bag I tried something I’d never attempted before, and wrote the story outwards from the centre. The central scene I had in mind at least was clear to me: a father and a daughter, exploring the hills of the Derbyshire Peak District and talking about a death in the family. That was all I knew at that point, but once I got Jonas and Allis having their conversation it came together. The story even manages to make some points about fascism: not just the horror of its more outrageous crimes, but the insidious ambiguity of its legacy, the Midas-like toxicity of any form of violence, in whoever’s name.
Reading the proofs of the story for Full Fathom Forty I experienced that surge of surprise you occasionally get as a writer when you come upon your work unawares. It was more than a year since I wrote ‘Feet of Clay,’ and I felt glad I had written it.
If the ToC for Full Fathom Forty is anything to go by, this promises to be a book packed with variety and surprise, a genuine ‘snapshot’ of the face of British fantasy in 2011. The only story in the book (apart from my own) that I’ve read thus far is the Rob Shearman, brilliant and brilliantly original as always. The rest I shall have to look forward to along with the rest of you.
For those of you not coming to Brighton, you can pre-order a copy of FFF here
It’s hard to focus on anything fully when you’re caught up in the maelstrom of moving house, one of my least favourite activities in the world, ever. It looks like we’re into the endgame now though, so my dreams of spending the second half of this year researching, planning and beginning actual written work on my new book may yet come to pass.
In the meantime, I’m pleased to report that I’ve completed the final draft of the new Martin story and the revisions of the earlier pieces in the set, and so my mini-collection The Silver Wind is now complete.
I’m happy with the way it turned out. Watch this space for publication details.
No sooner had I sent the ms off to David Rix at Eibonvale than I had an article on Robert Aickman to finish – that’ll be in next month’s issue of Starburst Magazine. It was a real rush to meet that deadline, but I can’t really complain, because reading and thinking about Aickman is a singular pleasure. His story ‘The Swords’ is just so damn brilliantly weird, and ‘Ringing the Changes’ holds – bizarrely perhaps – such happy memories for me because hearing the Jeremy Dyson radio adaptation in 2000 was my first ever encounter with Aickman’s work.
Currently indulging myself with Stephen King’s most recent clutch of novellas, Full Dark No Stars. That’s rare steak on the skillet perhaps after the refinements of Aickman, but by God that man can tell a story.
With so much dashing, rushing and packing it’s hard to believe that less than a fortnight ago Chris and I were in Paris……
I went to the ICA this evening, to see Jessica Oreck’s new (I say new, but looking at iMDb I see it was made in 2009 and has only just had its UK release) documentary feature Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. The film explores the intricate and intimate relationship between the Japanese people and….. beetles! I knew I had to see this film the minute I read about it, and that if I didn’t grab the chance this weekend I would miss it. Even in our enlightened metropolis, movies about buglife aren’t likely to be granted more than a half-dozen screenings.
Even I, one of the weird handful of people who would actively go out of their way to track down stuff like this, was unprepared for the extraordinary revelations this movie had to offer. Why dream of alien planets when right here on Earth we have a city where giant scarabs are as common a household pet as the hamster or gerbil, where crickets are invited into the home to provide live music, where the dragonfly is a symbol of bravery and the emblem of the warrior class?
In Toyko, you can go to the mall and pick up a new pair of jeans and a pair of Nikes, then pop into the store next door and buy a rainbow beetle and a pack of synthesized tree sap to feed him with. The amusement arcades are packed with kids playing computer simulations of Bug Hunt and Bug Wars. Adults and children set off at weekends into those patches of forest and wild places that still remain close to Tokyo to have a picnic and to track live insects.
Families gather at dusk to watch the fireflies. Our beetle seller from the mall proudly shows us the red Ferrari he bought with his earnings.
It is not just its content that makes this film extraordinary but the directorial vision that lies behind it. Beetle Queen appears to be Jessica Oreck’s first full-length feature, yet it speaks with the kind of self assurance that if not born of long experience can only come from a genuine and passionate commitment to its subject matter. It is not a conventional documentary. It is a work of impressionist art, a montage, a collage of ideas and images that leaves you feeling you’ve been granted a privileged glimpse into one artist’s unique methodology as well as the secret mechanisms of an entire culture.
The Tokyo of this film is a world of hidden allusions and complex symbolism, an environment we in the West have come to think of as the most intensively urbanised in the world and yet whose people still maintain their connection with nature in ways that make you re-evaluate everything you thought you knew about Japan. It made me think about my other most recent literary and filmic experiences of that country – David Mitchell’s Number9Dream, Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, Richard Lloyd Parry’s compelling book about the life and death of Lucie Blackman, People Who Eat Darkness – and what Beetle Queen had in common with all of these was the sense it carried that this is a world that we as Westerners can gaze upon but never fully enter. Unlikely though it may seem it was Noe’s film that kept coming to mind while I was watching Beetle Queen. The interplay of colour and light, the almost hallucinogenic swirl of sensory impressions, the interlocking grids of train-tracks, street intersections, city freeways that characterise both films, drawing you down into a mind-maze that both dazzles and disturbs.
In particular I was enchanted by the attitude of the children, girls and boys alike who treated their pet insects with respect and rapt wonderment, a small boy sillhouetted in the ultraviolet light of a moth trap, releasing a grey-green Lunar Moth back into the wild as a trainer might toss a racing pigeon into the sky, the three young friends who called their dung beetles ‘brothers.’ The idea that one should fear or loathe these creatures would, I suspect, be utterly alien to them.
After the film we were lucky enough to be given an impromptu and completely unadvertised talk by the Curator of Beetles at the Natural History Museum. His mini-lecture, sprinkled with phrases such as ‘the other day when we were in Peru,’ and ‘we’re in the course of naming this beetle after one of my colleagues,’ was sheer delight, all the more so given that he had brought several cases of beetles with him to illustrate it. These we were allowed to examine in close-up, and audience questions were not in short supply as a 20cm Amazonian beetle larva made its rounds among us in its jar of formaldehyde. ‘Careful with that,’ said our tame entomologist. ‘The lid’s loose.’
Which just goes to show, I suppose, that a love of beetles has very little respect for national boundaries. And according to the staff of the Natural History Museum, the number of girl coleopterists is on the rise.
I love this city.
Read an interview with Jessica Oreck here.
As the stories I write tend to adopt the weather conditions prevailing at the time they come into being, so they often become irredeemably associated with a certain album or piece of music. I must have listened to Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ concerto about thirty times when I was writing ‘The Muse of Copenhagen,’ five times in succession on some days. I can’t always have music playing when I am writing – if a first draft especially is proving difficult it is dangerously distracting – but while second-drafting it is a wonderful stimulus.
The odd thing about it is that it seems to be the stories themselves that guide my choice of music, that demand the concentrated absorption in certain pieces that only obsessively repeated listenings can bring. I’ve been working on the second draft of ‘Rewind’ this week, and the story will now be forever associated for me with The Harrow and the Harvest, the hypnotically sublime new album from the alt-country singer Gillian Welch.
Gillian Welch became famous when she guested on the soundtrack album of the Coen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou. She is an infamous perfectionist. Fans of her music have been waiting eight years for a new album – she simply won’t put anything out unless she feels on a gut level that it’s the best work she can produce at that given moment. As someone who found her 2001 post-O Brother album Time (The Revelator) as close to being a perfect piece of work as it is possible to produce, I have to admit I was a little disappointed by her 2003 follow up, Soul Journey. It wasn’t that I didn’t love it – there were some great individual songs on it, and I’ll listen with pleasure to anything Gillian sings in any case. But for me at least it had a bit of a commercial feel about it, and the tracks simply did not fit together the way the tracks on Time did. In its marvellous coherence, Time is like a set of linked short stories; Soul Journey felt more like a ‘best of.’
So I was apprehensive as well as excited when I heard that Gillian finally had a new album out. Could it possibly be as great as Time, or would it be another Soul Journey, enjoyable but not quite it?
I think if I tell you I’ve listened to The Harrow and The Harvest approximately twenty times in the last three days I think you’ll guess my answer to that question: Gillian Welch and her partner Dave Rawlings are at the top of their form, and this gorgeous album is worth every day of the nine-year wait.
How can I dsecribe her music, except to say that Gillian Welch is a natural born storyteller. The thing that’s most often said of her tracks is that they have the sense of being already old, of being handed down for generations among the musician-families of the Appalacians and the Adirondacks. I can’t add to that really because it’s true. The songs are like cross-stitch samplers, or patchwork quilts, the story as much in the making, in the texture of the warp and weft, as in the recounting of specific events.
Her language, both musical and verbal, is strong, simple, direct. The images she conveys are arresting and often stark. Yet there is a tenderness and poetry in the rendition that grabs at the heart.
The Harrow and The Harvest is not lighter than Time, but its silks are finer. If Time (The Revelator) reminds me of Wisconsin Death Trip, Harrow reminds me of Tarnation. The lyrics and rhythms of my favourite tracks – the central triptych of ‘The Way it Will Be,’ ‘The Way it Goes,’ and ‘Tennessee’ – already feel like they have been in my life for years.
Gillian Welch is a writer’s musician. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait another decade for her next album.
Just started reading: Mr Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi. Loving it so far, magical and funny and assured.
Walking: along the Stade, with echoes of Daphne…..
As a child of seven or eight, already harbouring the secrets of a confirmed madman, I seemed even to her (who also was far from normal) unusually sulky and indolent; actually of course, I kept daydreaming in a most outrageous fashion.
“Stop moping!” she would cry. “Look at the harlequins!”
“What harlequins? Where?”
“Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together – jokes, images – and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”
(Look at the Harlequins Vladimir Nabokov 1974)
I love Nabokov’s final novel more and more, and on some days most of all. We now know that it was not meant as a farewell – VN was fully immersed in writing a new novel right up until the time of his death – but in its reinvented autobiography it has that elegiac feel. It also contains – as quoted above – one of the most beautiful and evocative descriptions I have ever come across of what precisely it means to be a writer.
I read Lila Azam Zanganeh’s The Enchanter and was enchanted by it. What I loved was its sincerity, its passion. I didn’t mind that occasionally her close and clever pastiching of VN’s (in truth) inimitable style left me wishing she would use her own voice with a little more confidence. I didn’t mind, because there will be time enough for her to learn to do that, and this was a book she clearly felt an urgent need to write. And having an urgent need to write is, perhaps, the one true prerequisite for becoming a writer in the first place.
Zanganeh ‘gets’ Nabokov in a way that far too few of the major critics and experts do. She taps straight into his first and really only subject, which is the way in which our human mortality is redeemed by art. I felt, quite simply, joy in her epiphany, and privileged to witness it in one with such a power of expression. Too many commentators, especially British and American ones, tend to see VN as a trickster, a caricaturist, a ‘master stylist’ whose arrogant self-satisfaction makes him interested only in displaying his own linguistic brilliance. They dismiss his tender and emotive characterisations as mere puppetry. There has even been latterly, I feel sad to report, some embarrassingly embarrassed attempts to suggest he might have shared – at least in his fantasies – some of the sexual abberations of his own Humbert Humbert.
There was a spate of programmes and features on Nabokov a year or so back, to commemorate the release of his unfinished novel The Original of Laura. One of the programmes featured a longish interview with Martin Amis, who for years has cited VN as his literary hero. You could say I’m not a huge Amis fan, but as a VN fan this was something I had to see. I was shocked to discover that Amis, by his own admission, had only actually read about half of Nabokov, that his ‘expert’ knowledge is largely based on VN’s early, satirical novels (Laughter in the Dark and King Queen Knave, those novels which in fact – if we can say such a thing – are closest to Amis’s own) and Lolita, and that Ada, arguably VN’s masterpiece, had thus far eluded him.
He’d tried to read it three times and each time failed. Not to be beaten, he set himself the task, specifically for this programme, of finally slogging through to the end. Not liking or not understanding what he read, he described it as ‘stillborn,’ VN’s failure to recapture the high ground he’d won in Lolita.
I’m using Amis’s experience as an example here not to have a go at Amis (although that might be fun, too) but to illustrate the misconceptions so many seem to have about Nabokov: that he is ‘difficult,’ or ‘precious’ or simply incomprehensible. These are misconceptions that Lila Zanganeh does not entertain even briefly. She shows, in a variety of delightful, original and audacious ways, how Nabokov is a writer to be read, not studied, a writer to get passionate over, to argue about late into the night, a writer who can inspire us on a daily basis.
The one thing she doesn’t get is the butterfly thing, which is a shame, because without any doubt ‘The Aurelian’ is my favourite VN story.
I finished the first draft of my new ‘Martin’ story today. To celebrate I went for a stroll along the Stade, a working fishing beach that is more or less unique to Hastings and one of its many delights.
It also features in the story, and I had the curious sensation while walking there that I was intruding on one of my own fictions.
Stonefield Road, Hastings
For some time now I’ve been hinting that I might have a new book in the offing. Well, I’m very happy to announce that I’ve recently signed a contract with Pete Crowther at PS Publishing for the publication of my book Stardust, which will appear in the autumn of 2012 as number 11 in the ‘PS Showcase’ series highlighting up and coming writers.
The question friends have asked me most frequently about Stardust is: is it a novel or a collection of short stories? The most honest answer I can give is that it is both. Although each of the ‘chapters’ in Stardust does work as a standalone story, they were written in sequence with continuing characters and references and were always meant to be published as a single unit. Two of the ‘chapters’ are substantial novellas. The work as a whole adds up to more than just the sum of its parts.
For these reasons and by virtue of my own gut instinct I prefer to call it simply a book.
For anyone curious to know what Stardust is about, I’ve written a ‘sort of’ synopsis, which appears below. I shall of course be posting updates on Stardust as and when, and would like to take this opportunity to thank Pete and the PS team for their support and appreciation of my work.
STARDUST – A SYNOPSIS
Michael Gomez is fifteen and he is a chess prodigy. He has never lost a game before, but he’s about to learn that troubles come in threes. As he leaves the sports hall where he has suffered his first serious defeat in a competitive tournament, he learns that his teacher and mentor is terminally ill with cancer. As he struggles to come to terms with what has happened, he finds himself drawn into a world he thought existed only in the movies.
The woman of his dreams is Ruby Castle, a charismatic beauty who became famous for her roles in horror films and then notorious for murdering her married lover in a jealous rage. Ruby’s glory days are long behind her, but for Michael her cinematic fantasy world is the only escape he knows from the world of chess. As Michael is forced to decide if he is willing to make the sacrifices involved in becoming a professional champion, his reality begins to take on the dangerous glamour of a Ruby Castle film. Walking home across Blackheath Common he is apprehended by the Puppeteer, the evil genius of the film that made Castle famous. The man should not exist – and yet somehow he does.
The novel then takes us back to the world Ruby Castle grew up in, the isolate and sinister domain of the travelling carnival, and the story is taken up by Marek Platonov, a knife thrower with troubles of his own. Marek was Ruby’s childhood sweetheart. As her astrological twin he knew her better than anyone, but as they enter adolescence the two become estranged and Ruby starts to cherish dreams of becoming an actress and a future that does not include Marek. Castle runs away to London, where hard work and natural talent make her a household name, but a part of her is unsatisfied even by this. The films that make Castle famous do not have happy endings, and Ruby seems destined to suffer the fate of one of her own doomed heroines.
Castle’s story unfolds in a series of snapshots, of overheard conversations and fleeting glimpses, the myths repeated and reinvented by the people who in one way or another fell under her spell: an antiquarian bookseller with a passion for magical artefacts, the mistress of the poet who was once Castle’s lover, a young girl in a future Russia who dreams of escape. As the novel reaches its climax these worlds collide and the boundaries between the fantastic and the quotidian appear to break down completely. Vernon Reade and Clarissa Goule, a middle-aged couple in the early stages of a new romance, go on holiday to the Canaries and narrowly escape being torn apart by a mythical spider god. Strangely enough this is exactly what happened to the couple played by Castle and her lover in the film they made together just before Castle committed her crime of passion. Charlie and Vernon have a happy ending, the way all good Hollywood couples should – but is the ending we have been shown the true end of the story?
Ruby Castle is as much the sum of other people’s fantasies as she is a real person. In the end the world she lived in and the world that she created through her films become dangerously indistinguishable.
Stardust is the lure of fame, the fallout from a burning rocket, the evanescent glister of a vanished dream.
There’s nothing more exciting than starting to write a new story. Or at least that’s how it feels before I begin. In fact it’s the before-writing that is the exciting part, those weeks or days when the idea is still fresh in my mind but when I haven’t started trying to set it down yet. When the story is in fact nothing more than a sense of itself, a couple of pages or paragraphs of scribbled notes.
My longhand script is messy. It’s become worse since I abandoned longhand drafts and began writing straight into the computer. This scares me a bit – if I’ve given up on longhand, passionate lover of navy Quink ink and Parker pens and wide feint spiral bound notebooks that I am, does this mean that handwriting, like its cousin the postage stamp, is ultimately doomed? But then again I know writers younger than myself who still do all their first drafts in longhand, so perhaps we’re still OK on that one.
The messy longhand notes are crucial, though. I don’t always look at them again, but the act of putting them on paper releases something. It brings the life of a story into being. At this point, writing is a delight. The possibilities seem endless, profuse as daisies. I feel confident and fully alive. The new story is going to be the best I’ve yet written.
With the setting down of that first paragraph everything changes. I realise, as I’ve realised on every previous occasion, that not only do I not know precisely where this story should start, I’m not entirely clear on what it’s about, either. It’s like diving into the sea. Suddenly I’m in a new element, new actions are expected of me. The gulf between the mind and the page feels unbridgeable. Everything is more immediate and more obscure.
When I wrote ‘The Muse of Copenhagen,’ the story that is to appear in the Solaris anthology House of Fear later this year, I moved quickly from a state of elation to one of gritted-teeth despair. I started the story four times, jettisoning about 5,000 words in the process, and feared I might never finish it. On the fifth attempt I got it. From that moment on there’s nothing I can do but write, nail down the first draft as quickly as I can in case it gets away from me again.
For me, the process of writing a first draft is like trying to untangle a ball of wool. Not a new ball of wool, but one of those odd remnants you find at the bottom of your grandmother’s knitting basket, one that has been there so long it has worked itself into a Gordian knot, a tangle so dense and so rigid it appears to be a single solid mass. The colour is so right though, nothing else will do for what I want to make. So what I have to do is start unpicking. I work a fingernail between the strands, tugging gently to find the place of least resistance. Sometimes when I pull the skein tightens still further, so I stop what I’m doing in a hurry and try somewhere else. After a lot of trial and error I might manage to work loose the thread end, and at that point I have something to go on. Finally the wool unravels, sliding between my fingers. It’s always an intoxicating moment.
Over the past few days I’ve been making notes for the final story in my ‘Martin’ series, a loosely linked collection of stories about a man who’s in love with timepieces. I’ve just reached that point where I have to start writing something. I’m both excited and apprehensive, as I imagine a fencing master must feel before a duel.
I like that image. I’ll probably use it. But not now.
The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness Lila Azam Zanganeh/Allen Lane May 2011
I had expected to find enchanters and demons in Nabokov. Shuddering magic. The stuff of fairy tales, ‘noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings.’ The rest, in truth, was something akin to falling in love, a haunting feeling of native otherness.
(Lila Azam Zanganeh, foreword to The Enchanter)
I found out about this book a week or so ago. Today I purchased my copy and have just begun reading it. My reading pile grows more unwieldy by the day, but I found The Enchanter was a book I could not ignore. I first read Lolita when I was in my early twenties. It was a book I devoured in a single sitting. I was disturbed, upset, perplexed, thrilled and above all transported by the experience. Lolita was then (and perhaps still is now) what is sometimes referred to as a ‘notorious’ book, and of course I was curious about it. In the event I found that most of what I had already read about it was either completely wrongheaded or beside the point. More than anything I felt I had discovered a unique genius, a writer who spoke to me in ways I had never encountered before and who left me in a state of perpetual nostalgia for the world – both material and creative – that he invented. A genius who spoke uniquely to me.
Of all the writers I came to know during this crucial period of development and learning it is Nabokov who has remained a stalwart, a constant inspiration in my life and whose works seem as relevant and electric to me now as they did then.
So when I read about Lila Zanganeh’s attempt to chronicle her own literary love affair with Nabokov I was instantly both intrigued and on my guard. Intrigued because her feelings about Nabokov seemed to concur so closely with my own, on my guard because, well, she was trying to pull off something that was impossible. No one can compete with the master, or should even try, and yet here Zanganeh was, playing games with his style, having imaginary conversations with him – how was this ever going to work?
This girl clearly had some guts or some nerve. Either that or she was insane.
What unnerved me most of all though was some of the online tittle-tattle surrounding this book. I found numerous instances of hostility at the very idea that The Enchanter had been written, let alone published. Many of these comments were personal insults aimed at the writer. Most of them were written by people who had not, at least to date, read the book. Not exactly what you’d call informed debate.
I found this to be deeply distasteful. It seemed to me that Zanganeh had set out honestly to do something brave and original, and that this, of and for itself, should be applauded. (It’s what good writing is all about, surely?) The idea of fusing biography with memoir with fiction with literary criticism seemed to me beautiful and audacious, an idea I could get fond of myself. Whether or not I end up liking this book I’m glad it has been written.
And if Zanganeh’s work draws new disciples to the feet of the master that goes double.
Sorry I’m a bit late with this post. I wanted to have it out in time for Bob Dylan’s birthday on the 24th, but what with being deeply embroiled in writing a ghost story and my own closely adjacent birthday to contend with it didn’t quite happen. Never mind. So far as I’m concerned, any day is a good day to talk about Dylan.
I’ve been enjoying the various articles in the media this week: fans listing their Dylan top tens (I have to admit I’m a bit of a list junkie), personal reminiscences and most of all the imput from the next generation of Dylan obsessives, young people who weren’t even born when Dylan first started cutting records but who find his timeless lyrics and unique delivery as affecting and relevant now as they were for their mothers, fathers and teachers in the sixties and seventies. I couldn’t help smiling though when I came across yet another discussion around the subject of whether Bob Dylan should be counted as a poet or not. I would have thought it would be obvious to anyone reading Dylan’s lyrics that his use of rhyme and assonance, word association, literary reference and pure lyrical expression makes him one of the most gifted, original, anarchic, articulate, relevant and expressive poets of the 20th century.
My first awareness of Dylan’s daring use of assonance came when I first listened – properly – to his classic of 1975, ‘Simple Twist of Fate’:
They walked along by the old canal/A little confused, I remember well/And stopped into a strange motel with the neon burning bright/He felt the heat of the night/Hit him like a freight train/Moving with a simple twist of fate
The cheekiness of the line-break on ‘freight train’ still astounds me, makes me lighter inside with the pleasure of it. Thinking about this, it came to me that what people are responding to when they call Dylan a prophet or a revolutionary – even if they don’t consciously know it – is his graceful articulacy, a use of language so fluid and so natural that it can break any rule you set for it and still come out kicking ass. The ‘message’ of Dylan’s lyrics, after all, is not a call to revolution or political activism but an injunction to remain true to oneself, to reject all party allegiances in favour of artistic integrity. It was this rejection of the political that was one of the central causes of his split with Joan Baez.
I’m privileged to have genuine memories of Dylan from the time when the tracks were still new. Indeed it was Dylan’s lyrics that formed the basis of one of my earliest horror stories. The track in question was ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,’ which I must have heard for the first time when it was released as part of the Greatest Hits Vol 2 in 1971. From the moment I started paying attention to songs – which happened at a very young age – I was obsessed with their lyrics even more than their melody. My interpretations were often distinctly strange. At six years old I was convinced that ‘Mobile’ was about a kidnap victim being held in some kind of underground cellar! I’m happy to say that I also have more nebulous, magical recollections of songs like ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ that for me then were cornucopias of imagery, words like jewels that I hoarded and wondered at, not knowing quite what they meant, understanding only that I found them bewitching.
My rediscovery of Dylan came in the early 2000s, when I began listening to him seriously and this time as a writer myself. I was stunned by what I found. Not just by the classics, but by songs I’d never known existed and from every decade of his remarkable career. It was then that I started looking at him ‘on the page,’ and became a devotee. His lines make me shudder with rapture, not simply at the depth of emotion expressed but with the sheer power and strength of the writing. To see something done this well, intention so boldly and securely executed, is one of the purest delights known to me.
I’m not going to list my top ten – there are plenty of those to choose from already – but I would like to draw attention to a strand of Dylan’s oeuvre that means a lot to me, that stimulates my imagination endlessly and that perhaps has deepest resonance for any writer and that is Dylan’s work as a narrative poet, a balladeer in the truest sense of the word, where the ballad is not a slow love song but a compacted, lyrical retelling of a tale of love, freedom and infamy. The first stanza of ‘Idiot Wind’ illustrates this perfectly:
They say I shot a man named Gray/And took his wife to Italy/She inherited a million bucks/And when she died it came to me/I can’t help it if I’m lucky…..
Who was Gray and what did he do to get himself shot? Is the narrator being ironic with his use of the word ‘lucky’ and how did the wife die anyway? It’s a mini-ballad in itself, enough to provoke a thousand much longer stories.
In ‘The Changing of the Guard’ we have a story and a lyric that could encompass the whole grandeur and repeating tragedy of Greek mythology:
‘Gentlemen,’ he said/’I don’t need your organization/I’ve shined your shoes/I’ve moved your mountains and I marked your cards/But Eden is burning/Either brace yourself for elimination/Or your hearts must have the courage/For the changing of the guard’
I love the earlier line about being ‘caught between Jupiter and Apollo,’ summarizing the woman’s divided attraction between the man of power and the man of physical beauty. The song – which has sometimes been derided as ‘incomprehensible’ – is a masterpiece of passion and concision.
The shaded beauty of Dylan’s scene-setting in ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,’ is given as much weight as the bloody action itself and demonstrates a commitment to the business of storytelling that is up there with Leonard and Chandler:
Outside the streets were filling up/The window was open wide/A gentle breeze was blowing/You could feel it from inside/Lily called another bet/And drew up the Jack of Hearts
I can feel that breeze, the only relief from the stuffy, dustbowl heat that is a metaphor for the fight that is about to take place. Dylan’s narratives are filmic in their scope. ‘Senor: Tales of Yankee Power’ takes place in the same blasted, blood-streaked landscape as Jodorowski’s El Topo or the Coen brothers’ magnificent No Country for Old Men. The sound of that song is the sound of the spaghetti Western, the mariachi-sounding sax riff directly evocative of the music of Morricone.
And the lyrics! If we’re still playing top 10s, which I think we probably are, I would have to place ‘Senor’ as my personal number 1:
There’s a wicked wind still blowing on that upper deck/There’s an iron cross still hanging down from around her neck/There’s a marching band still playing in that vacant lot/Where she held me in her arms one time and said ‘forget me not.’
It must say something that I don’t have to check these lyrics online before I post them because I have a typed copy of them folded inside the cover of my current working notebook. Scanning the dozens of reader comments on The Guardian‘s ‘Top 10 Dylan’ blog, it struck me forcibly that not one person had included ‘Senor’ among their line-up. I’m therefore doubly proud to draw attention to it here.
Time to stop listening to me, and get back to your own favourite Dylan! On Dylan’s birthday itself I put Blood on the Tracks on my headphones and walked from Hastings through St Leonards along the promenade. The sea was a glister of rhinestones. The castellated facades gleamed white against a burnished sky.