A great film needs a great writer

I added this to my diary Latest News at www.chronometerpublications.me just now. And it fits here as well.
Had a two hour walk today down the mountain to Vernet Les Bains, once the home of Rudyard Kipling. The eye held up ok in the heat. Thought about a clutch of films I have seen this year: The Good Shepherd, Page Eight, Tinker Tailor (plus the old TV series) and, last night, A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg's take on Jung and Freud. Why bind them together like this, apart from the costume drama nature of them? I like the writers' penchant for telling lines, the fact that they all had a literary, stylized feel and they had an eye for period psychology. Keira Knightley has leapt to the top of my want-to-see actresses. She is phenomenal in the last named film by Cronenberg. In a sense, this latter film is just as much a spy drama as the others in its emotional subterfuge, deceptions and uncovering of truth. Trust is at the heart of all the films - broken, abused and rarely unshakeable. Just So stories for me. It made me want to get back and write a bit more of the novella about the eye surgeon and her discovery of the conduit to the soul.

On The Road Again! And another short story

Thanks to Canned Heat and a bit of Kerouac for the title which sees me writing this in Millau - the place of the greatest bridge this side of St Peter's Gates. As The Latest News window mentioned ( www.chronometerpublications.me ) we were in an Auvergne B&B last night. The host, Francois, appears to have done everything the 20th century hero should have done. He's a pilot, a seagoing captain, a mountaineer, a hunter, a driver for ambassadors, a wine maker, a cheese maker and has the capacity to talk the hind legs of a herd of donkeys. Less of that and more of something else. He said he could never write, though he keeps a diary. In due course he told me about his father - a perfect little tale, which I will convey to you with all the lack of frills of Borges.

"My father was forty and knew he was going to die. He bought a coffin and placed it in the front room, near the front door. Every night he slept in it for practice for the final moment. He died when he was forty three. When the autopsy was done it was established that he was perfectly sound and there was no reason for his death."

You see? We writers imagine our tales like card players but constantly find our hands outplayed by life. For my own yarns, longer and fleshier, go to:

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Writer as medium

The joy in writing what you could never have known to be true until afterwards is both spellbinding and uplifting. During the ten years of Azimuth's emergence from my unconscious I learned to leave control over the destiny of the narrative to my imagination. What transpired was occasionally quite spooky. Characters with strange lineage, implements that they used, landscapes and cataclysmic events, the stuff of fantastical fiction, later proved to have more than a grounding in fact. Checking it later was at times like a history programme searching for evidence of solid events which might have given rise to what we have always regarded as mere myth: Atlantis, Ulysses or astronomy of the Ancients.

Writing has this capacity to transcend mundane reality, to travel across time, to make miraculous connections so that, in a sense, nothing need ever be lost from the human experience. It makes a writer feel like a medium, a little bit of a shaman not a sham.

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