Leveson and the UK

It is in every author's interest to contest any attempt by the State to introduce legislation regarding what can or cannot be the subject of media interest. Freedom of the press (TV, art and literature generally) is the cornerstone of a critical society that keeps its politicians in check. Democracy implies 'the voice of the people' and that voice must never be muted. We know that when there is oppression of any kind, people will tend to shy away from speaking up. They need the media to speak up for them.

To maintain an ethical code for decent, informative and investigative journalism merely requires heavier penalties for criminal and spuriously invasive activity together with front page retractions and apologies. A resort to existing law should always determine whether privacy violation is criminal or for the greater good.

Rock of Ages

I watched successive television news coverage of the Rolling Stones at the O2 arena the other night and was struck by the ageist tenor of much of it, particularly on Sky. Plucking the main threads from their verbiage I was left with they are very old and they are charging a lot of money. Indeed a couple of the presenters, attractive women in their mid-thirties, screwed up their faces into pictures of prudish disgust at the thought of going to a Stones concert. Dirty old men. Just as similar women did when the Stones were young and brash and irreverent and a banner headline in a middle page spread asked, "Would you let your daughter marry one of these?"It is curious to have grown up with them. I am around the same age as Jagger. I don't feel particularly venerable. Whilst they may be tame compared to those early days they still have retained a symbolism among those who have grown older alongside them. Rebelliousness. Maybe they have stopped a sizeable proportion of people from becoming atrophied and truly old in their minds and slippers by mirroring their desires to be freer agents.

We have three dogs in a large compound in Accra. A male Doberman, a female blonde Alsatian and an Alsatian/lurcher cross. We bought the first two because our previous two dogs died of a reasonably old age (very old for Ghana where a dog's life expectancy is low owing to diseases and heat.} The latter is 14 now and quite deaf and blind (what news presenters imagine The Rolling Stones should be). He was  a curious animal when his first two companions were alive. Third in the pack, always craving attention but generally impeccably behaved except when there was a fight between the other two. He'd see which way the battle was going and join in the maul with the victor. He wanted to belong. Nowadays this deaf dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean chase the ball. Actually he's not dumb, he barks lustily as he vaguely follows the other two in their chase for balls, mangoes and oranges. Sometimes he wins because his nose is as good as ever. We give him the prime cuts from the offal, helping him to eke out his comfortable and occasionally exciting old age. To say that he was revivified on the two new pups arrival is an understatement. Now they are big dogs aged two. And his old tail whirls and he prances on his toes, occasionally half-falling from a stab of arthritis.

The point being that ghettos are bad for everyone. The old need the young and vice versa. They both need rock and roll to energise their desires for nonconformity. Those Sky "ladies' could do with a bit of naughtiness.

Shadows on the Cave Wall

I know what Plato meant when he said that we could not apprehend reality directly. Everything is an echo or a facsimile or obscured or misrepresented or a lie. We are islands unto ourselves and though we build bridges to each other's habitats, we never actually cross to them. Love is our best word for reaching out and almost touching the other. Abandonment is the horror of discovering that it is just one more slippery word.
As writers we are experts in the field of deceptive realities, though, paradoxically, we believe that our fictions contain more truth than the most meticulous academic factual account. I have just finished the first draft of the novella, now with a changed title. Easeful Death has become On Being Sinbad. I am working on the dialogue. It says too much at the moment. It is too literal. Literality does not really exist in the world of human communication. Approximation is all there is and that's when you're really good and have a real handle on words words words. Cutting back the dialogue so that it is truly spare enables the reader to make it his or hers by filling in the gaps. That's what we like as humans. Filling in the gaps others leave. We are not then faced with the enormity of being on islands and uncomprehending of each other's plight.

Casting Bread Upon the Water


I made the point some time ago that writing e-books was akin to putting messages in bottles on your desert island when what you really wanted was a full-size steamer to come by and save you (a book publisher). A friend muttered the other day that he did not want to broadcast his thoughts, implying that tweeting and blogging somehow involved a dumbing down of the high arts. I pointed out in return that there he was, nearly seventy, and unable to pass on his worldly wisdom because of fear of exposure. In other words, since he felt he could not measure up to Tolstoy then he had better keep his powder dry for reincarnation.

I once wrote in an A to Zen of Management (www.chronometerpublications.me) "Tell everyone everything there is to know about you and they cease to have power over you" That's it, really. Exposing oneself in tweets, blogs and e-books begins in acts of faith that you have something to say and ends with a sense of empowerment because you have added your individual voice to a discourse. We are made to feel embarrassed and a failure in our schooling and this carries on through life unless we use aversion therapy - which, in this case, is publishing and broadcasting our views.

Writing blogs and tweeting are both acts of personal exposure but also of marketing. Read my blogs and you might read my books, should you like the style, the humour, the insights...

www.chronometerpublications.me

Cheating Death

As you will have read in the last blog, I am writing a novella about what happens when a man is given three months to live. Maybe this preoccupation with death is just my age. Close friends have died this last year. It's a conundrum to have them alongside me one moment and then not, the next. Thus it is that odd phrases are caught, mid-air, from what people say or from what appears in text. Phrases that stop you 'dead' because you hadn't interrogated their meaning in depth. 'Cheating death' is one such. It is used a lot. People escape from infernos, the water, severe diseases and other seemingly impossible situations and we say that they cheated death. Death is personalised. The Grim Reaper. In The Seventh Seal the hero plays chess with death and can live as long as the game can be drawn out. But the end is inevitable. Cheating Death is anything from a momentary experience to a life long one. Babies cheat death. People live to a 'ripe old age' before succumbing to the scythe.

I'd like to cheat death for a little more time yet. I may be doing the right things, who knows? It appears it is all dependent upon telomerase. Look it up. If you have long ones you will go on awhile. If you have short ones then get your pen and paper out and write a fancy will. The startling news is that you can lengthen them. Diet, exercise, purpose in life and social networks. Can you be bothered? That's the thing. Most people can't until it's too late. Once the sentence has been handed down, then they start scrabbling around for their 5 a day.

In Azimuth, Death is a Lifetaker and differs according to the person's psychological baggage. S/he can be anything from a cuddly pet to a devil with horns. We live uniquely and we die uniquely.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com
www.chronometerpublications.me




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Easeful Death

As a subject for a novella, proscribed time is very powerful. This is the common enough eventuality that you will know exactly how long you have to live. Until the surgeon tells you and you are in a care home or a hospice or you are finally returned to your bed for the last few days, you tend to disregard it. Throughout our lives time is attenuated to the point where it seems infinite on the one hand and crudely finite on the other. You can keep both notions in your consciousness at the same time, sliding from one to the other, almost unwittingly. I would assume that we have evolved a mechanism in our brain which mutes the prospective horror of an eternal blankness to enable us to get on with our daily round.

Given that it is the subject of my current writing - whose working title is also the title of this blog, I wonder what line you might take in constructing a fiction about it. Would you put yourself in the place of a friend who endured such an end to his or her life, documenting sadness and loss, bitterness and rage? Would you make it the subject of a thriller narrative as in Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith and the great film, The American Friend by Wim Wenders, in which a man given weeks to live, is offered a fortune which will take care of his family after his death - IF he commits a murder. Would you focus upon the effects upon his or her children? Would you offer the tantalising bitter-sweet picture of falling in love with no time to go? Deeply psychological treatments can be found in Golding's novel Pincher Martin and the quite brilliant little film called Incident at Owl Creek or in Becket's novel Malone Dies. The transition from life to death is one of the two great changes in our lives. It makes for magnetic reading but is a huge challenge to the writer. Like the bad sex awards given to writers who hump their prose to the point where it becomes risible, there should be bad death awards for those who create such a cloying sentimentality that we are asphyxiated in the syrup. The film Love Story comes to mind and the death of Little Nell.

Maybe with that baggage in my mind, Easeful Death is a tale wherein there is no sentimentality, no empathy and very little sympathy.  As such it might fall into the category of black humour. But maybe it shouldn't be put in that box. Maybe it is the best way out for us all!

Eventually it will appear at this portal:

wwwchronometerpublications.me

 
"...two nations divided by a common language"

This quote is likely to have issued from the lips of George Bernard Shaw and, of course, refers to Great Britain and the United States of America. Having watched, or had inflicted upon me, the election carousel for the American Presidency over the last few months, I become more aware how language causes cognitive and emotional dissonance. In other words I am at a loss to fully comprehend or believe what is actually being said and felt by US citizens. This goes all the way from manual worker to the President himself, whose rhetoric can be so overblown and flowery it has me trying to uncurl a tightly locked bum. Of course I wanted Obama to win but at what cost? The amount spent on the election (money that would have wiped out Sandy inflicted debts) the continual reference to the United States as the greatest nation on earth, the projection of the US as 'one family', the over simplification of issues, the relative lack of reference to the disastrous Bush years and the negative campaigning seemed less like a democracy in action and more like a mammoth, self-inflicted character assassination. When I worked in Uzbekistan after the break down of the Russian confederation, the whole impetus of American businesses there was so capitalist, market hungry and self-aggrandising that I could not work with them. Not that the UK, in its own unique way, is any less paradoxical when it comes to self-presentation. Or France. Or Ghana. Each imagines it is democratic but has a different way of demonstrating it and conjuring it up in language and behaviour that is hard for outsiders to penetrate fully..

Having worked and lived in Accra for nearly five years, partially supporting my wife's business www.sixteen47.com which involves around forty staff on three times the national average wage for their lines of work and with free literacy and IT programmes, medical support and western working hours, the difficulties of expressing exactly what I want from colleagues are manifold. They are equatorial people without many UK/US business reference points such as seasons of the year, postal addresses, disposable income, legal process, reporting, appraisal and so on. It has taken over a decade to create a critical mass of staff who understand the disciplines of working as one team, planning and being strategic within a global marketplace. This is often because these concepts are utterly different from the world of their upbringing in an oral culture that is opportunistic, dependent on largesse and reactive to harsh daily circumstance and the often corrupt practices of the powers that be. Even though they speak English as well as tribal languages, everything still has to be painstakingly defined by stripping down concepts to their absolute essence. The consequences can be gratifying for everyone. Now, every worker can go to a cyber cafe and download his/her paycheck, every one has a bank account, illness through poor diet has decreased measurably and the ethos of the work place is vibrant and lauded by regular inspections from Ministry agencies. These days there are no senior managers. Everyone is in a team and has a supervisor with strict parameters of responsibility. Individuals who were illiterate a few years ago are handling orders, stocking the website, taking fashion photographs, discussing problems with UK colleagues and supporting their sometimes irascible customers.

The point I am making is that cultures are often deeply antithetical even when a language is shared. The effort to establish shared meaning requires intensive intellectual labour and dedication to the notion that it is lack of opportunity and experience that prevents a village man or woman here from aspiring to middle class wealth and achieving a career and a future for his or her family. Ghana suffers from poor to non existent universal education and health programmes. Its middle classes are not overly disposed to raise universal standards.

On top of that there is this problem of language. As a Star Trekker might say,  "It is the English language but not as we know it Captain."

Prose Portal

You might take a look at www.chronometerpublicatons.me which is my portal to books I have written. The Mondrian design presentss an instant summary of what I have to offer. The two novellas I have completed since I published Azimuth are yet to be added. They will supplement the range of genres. What you have is the Azimuth Trilogy, a one thousand page saga following the life or death adventures of a man in search of enlightenment, embedded in a further narrative of political intrigue; a noirish, mordant detective story called The Strange Attractor in which chaos theory plays a significant role in catching the criminals and Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story which approaches the taboo boundaries of family life. To be added is a sci fi story about the death of one civilisation and the birth of another called Sex:Future Imperfect and a surreal fantasy about an eye doctor who operates on her own eye called The Visionary. Currently I am working on Easeful Death, a novella about what you might do if you are given three months to live.

As you see, #writing is now my way of life. It keeps me sane. It is a fantasy land, every bit as real or unreal as every day life. It is a conversation with the unconscious that draws self-knowledge from the well. It is a bridge between my world and yours. It says far more about me than any attempt at direct self-description. It is a curious paradox that we hide so much from each other in the normal to and fro of existence but if we become writers we disclose far more than we might like. The writer exists in a goldfish bowl of his own making.

To be or not to be


I love The Unicorn by Rilke, a fact I have mentioned before. It goes to the absolute essence of human credulity.

O this is the animal that does not exist,
But they didn't know that, and dared nevertheless
To love it...and Because they loved it, it came to
be a...pure creature.
They always left a space for it,
and in that space, clear and set aside,
it lightly raised its head, and hardly needed to be.

We live in a world of make believe and erroneous assumptions. For example Americans firmly believe they enjoy one of the world's great democracies and that they are a leading light in bringing freedom to foreign climes. But it is a society which is dominated by money and roughly half of it sees no reason why the other half - the poorer - should be supported in any way by State largesse. Nor does it question unduly its history abroad which is riven with appalling self-aggrandising policies, wars and sinister interventions in far off places the vast majority of its population couldn't find on a world map. In Ghana here, cultural differences become apparent after a few years. Romantic love,  which drives much of present day western advertising, social networking and daily fantasies, hardly exists at all in a country that sees its people more concerned about relationships which provide food and shelter than ones that put stars in their eyes.

Religious people believe in an unprovable God. Here, in west Africa the evangelists encourage adherents to pray for worldly goods like houses, cars and washing machines. Religion as pure capitalism.

The point of these few examples is that the more you travel and explore the psyches of other nations and the day to day rituals and beliefs of their populations, the more you realise that everything we do and believe is constructed by human imagination and has no great basis in fact. There is little that is universal.

Good writing reveals the absurdities, false assumptions and personal belief systems of its characters. Sometimes this is called irony and sometimes it is more direct and polemical. The paradox is that a good writer lures you into yet another world of erroneous assumptions and persuades you to believe it, just as you believe the one in which you are currently living. Reality is a grain of sand that promotes a pearl. But the pearl is precious only because we believe it to be. The pearl is fiction.