Six Sentence Sunday: It's a Curse

Howling out of Dark Valentine Press later this month, "It's a Curse" is one of the Roman Dalton stories in Drunk on the Moon, tales of the werewolf detective created by Paul D. Brazill. Mr B has lured me into the crime world much like a stranger with candy. I may be some time.

This is another story I can blame on The Fall, forsooth, by gad, verily! The opening owes as much also to Kingsley Amis, who set the bar high for hangover scenes in his classic of academic ambivalence, Lucky Jim. What can I say? I'm competitive.

I could feel my eyeballs roll in their sockets before I opened my lids: never a good sign. I steeled myself for the brutal fact of daylight, but the dawn was as grey as if it hadn't yet decided to get dressed. I reached for the crumpled pack of gaspers lying next to the bed. The object my groping fingers found puzzled me.


I opened one eye warily. It was a handkerchief, floral and trimmed in lace...

Poor Roman: things are going to get worse before they get better. Oh, wait -- no, they're just going to get worse. Hee.

Are You Anybody?

I had a rather surprising piece of mail this week, that made my head spin around for a minute and then re-read the message. I've been invited to be a keynote speaker.

Huh? Me?!

Apparently so. It's the eleventh annual Craft Critique Culture Conference at the University of Iowa next April. You can see this year's schedule online and get a feel for it. Here's their description:


Craft Critique Culture is an interdisciplinary conference focusing on the intersections among critical and creative approaches to writing both within and beyond the academy. This year’s conference will explore the dialectical relationship between the periphery and center, specifically questioning the nature, theory, practice or role of the periphery. We invite the submission of critical, theoretical and original creative work in a variety of media and across the humanities, sciences and legal disciplines. In the past, submissions have included not only traditional scholarly papers but also film, video, music, writing, visual art and artists’ books.

So you can see from this description (and as Katie and Sofia, the organisers emphasized), the reason they asked me was for the very thing that most of my mentors suggested I avoid doing: everything! Hee. But it's true. From the time you hit college and even more so in grad school, it's all about specializing. I'm constitutionally incapable: it's natural to me to make connections, even if they're the kind of things that no one else sees. It's quite exciting to have a chance to share that with such a lively group of young scholars and trumpet the positive side of writing across disciplines and the high/low culture divide. Big thanks to my pal Dana who apparently was the one to drop my name in the hat. Several years ago Dana was the brash teen who joined the Horror list; now he's a grad student in Media Studies. How cool is that?

My first thought was that I have to be Vonnegut-worthy in my speech. After the initial euphoria, of course, came the doubt. Then it was Jim Dixon who came to mind, in particular his "Merrie England" speech. All those years ago when I read Lucky Jim for the first time, I had no idea I would become a medievalist. How weird is that? Amis' hero nonetheless resonated with me in part for my (continuing) love/hate relationship with academia.

Then again things turned out all right in the end for Jim: he got the girl of his dreams and a cushy job in London. Could be worse, but I don't think I'll choose "Merrie England" as my topic, although there may be a medieval theme. But no Dutch courage, for sure!

Friday's Forgotten Books: You Can't Do Both

I read this novel in England this summer; I've been on a bit of an Amis kick, filling in missing volumes while I mull over the overall effect of this pursuit. Projects tends to develop this way; I get obsessed about something, immerse myself in it, then when the time is right, chuck it all away and write. I'm also knee-deep in Angela Carter, so I can't really explain how they intertwine (could two people be less likely to intertwine?).

You Can't Do Both tells the story of Robin Davies, who lives in a south London suburb, winds up going to Oxford and then the Second World War and eventually into the adventure that is marriage, though not on purpose.  Davies' father is a weird amalgamation of strident atheism and puritanical control. His mother offers a sometime refuge against his father's rigidity, but without much substantial help. When at last he's freed of his stifling suburban home, he tries to live up to his fevered sexual dreams but encounters the realities of women who are likewise a bundle of eagerness, confusion and contradictions.

Amis plays this for some wonderful laughs, no surprise. But he also carefully details the way that the misogynist tendencies develop from these encounters. Women are denying him the one thing he must have. As Richard Bradford suggests in Lucky Him, this novel comes much closer to the truth of Amis' life than his memoirs, a highly fanciful selection of events and memories. There is a sensitive and moving depiction of a friend of Robin's who turns out to be gay which makes plain the costs and dangers of that identity in the not so distant past. You'll also find an evocation of what the Oxford days with Larkin might have been like and the awkward development of his first marriage, grown out of an uncertain alliance that quickly developed into habit because of the sexual connection, then threatened by pregnancy.

Davies never ends up being likeable exactly; by the end, he's distinctly unlikeable. But the dissection is fascinating and if not really an apology, it does seem to offer a bit of an explanation for how Amis became what he was. And at his best, that was a lot.

Now to get hold of a copy of Colonel Sun...

See the round-up of other neglected tomes over at Patti Abbott's blog.

Review: Lucky Him

Oh, Mr Amis...

This picture shows up in both Lucky Him and in the Letters of Philip Larkin. It just makes me laugh. The goofy expression of someone caught by surprise and making a funny face to cover it up. The two of them, Amis and Larkin, were close friends and correspondents, as I've mentioned before. A wonderful CD of Robin Hardy and Alan Bennett reading some of the letters remains criminally out of print.

I got Lucky Him: The Biography of Kingsley Amis
as a gift recently because I have been muttering about a story idea inspired by Amis and Angela Carter (yeah, Angela Carter: A Literary Life will probably be next); it was a nice surprise.

The book is a bit different as a biography, because Bradford mixes together fact and Amis' fiction to show how his novels were often more truthful -- and illuminating -- than his memoirs. While it may seem counterintuitive at first, it does make sense to me. Fiction has to fit together, whereas memoir rests on the very poor faculty of memory. And when it comes to our lives, metaphor will tell truly what we wish to disguise, particularly when it comes to protecting the feelings of others. Not only to we tend to shape our memories (consciously and unconsciously) but we may not even be aware of the effects events are having on us as they unfold. Bradford shows how even when Amis sought deliberately non-representative narratives, he gave telling clues about the real events of his life that seem clear in retrospect.

Having finished the book, I find I miss Amis. The latter part of the book was sad, watching his descent not only into a physical frailty enhanced by his drinking, but also into a rigid dismissal of many of the things he once celebrated. But for so much of his life Amis was a funny and shrewd observer of human behavior. Long after his politics veered into reactionary territory, he still maintained the ability to make readers laugh at his blackly humorous observations. Lucky Jim remains a book that will make me laugh out loud and Ending Up, while cruel in its ruthlessness (as only one can be to one's peers), is also impeccable in its timing.

I envy his wit -- and I'm not alone in envying Amis. And I miss him. He's not known for his poetry, but here's one that will amuse (as opposed to the late one, never published, that might make you weep) and features that double-edged view of both writing and women.

SOMETHING NASTY IN THE BOOKSHOP 
by Kingsley Amis

Between the Gardening and the Cookery
Comes the brief Poetry shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
Offers itself.

Critical, and with nothing else to do,
I scan the Contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
No one my age.

Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape Near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.

"I travel, you see", "I think" and "I can read"
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
Poem for J.,

The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;
Girls aren't like that.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
Can get by without it.
Women don't seem to think that's good enough;
They write about it.

And the awful way their poems lay them open
Just doesn't strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
No wonder we like them.

Deciding this, we can forget those times
We stay up half the night
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,
And couldn't write.

[I'm not sure if this qualifies as a "Forgotten Book" but stop by Patti Abbott's blog for a wide range of recommendations of books that you may have forgotten, or never known at all, but will like!]

Between Work and Wit

That it is National Poetry Month has not escaped me, but I will not bother to mention it as 1) I am not a poet and 2) poets get far too much attention as it is and 3) there are far too many bad poets who would only find this encouragement to go on. They make me think of the incredibly overwrought poet O'Bannion from Auntie Mame. Bad poetry can be found around most any corner, even in an economic downturn. It multiplies like cockroaches. Cockroaches, however, don't get open mic nights.

Oh, sure -- there are good poets, and I've quoted from many of them. In fact I've had Philip Larkin on my mind today [er, yesterday, as I wrote this ahead of time, shhhh]. I blame Lucky Him, which I've gone back to reading since I had to return The Talented Miss Highsmith to the library yesterday, lamentably unfinished. Its 700+ pages daunted, especially as I went gallivanting off on a trip and decided not to lug the doorstop-sized hardcover along with me, accustomed as I am to traveling light. Larkin, who often served as an audience and confidante for his friend Kingsley Amis, seemed to feel the weight of the disparity between their experiences, which he wrote about in "Letter to a Friend about Girls" with some tartness and not a little envy.

The magic of good poetry is that it is precise. Every word needed, no word extraneous. No wonder I prefer prose -- there's wiggle room there. While every word should have its job and no other in prose, too, it seems that there are on occasion a few layabouts who serve no earthly purpose in a sentence, but hang tightly around the ones that are doing the work, so the careless supervisor assumes they're all busy and passes on by. When I unpack the taut efficiency of Donne's "Flea" I know I have a lot of calisthenics ahead of me before I could run in that kind of race.