New book review.

New review for Catherine Copper's The Golden Acorn up on The Ultimate Book Guide blog. Winner of the Brit Writers’ Awards 2010 for unpublished writers. A lovely little book that made me smile. Well worth the read.

Creative Process

I made a very spur of the moment decision last week to buy Imogen Heap's Everything In-Between The Story of Ellipse. It's a documentary that follows Imogen during the three years of creating and releasing Ellipse. I've just finished watching it and it may be one of the best purchases I've made in years.

I've been in love with her and her music for more years than I can remember. To get a glimpse into the creative process of arguably the most inventive musician working today was incredible. It's fair to say that I'm more in love with her now than ever, but more importantly she has given me a view of pure creativity and clues on how to get there myself.

It's been a few years since I left university, and my creativity has never been a prolific as it was during my studies. In the place of flow and imagination I've been possessed of inertia and claustrophobia. I used to sit and play at the computer. Write two thousand words of an idea just for fun. The last few years I have had to agonize over every word written. Sitting at my desk had become painful and melancholic.

After watching Imogen create her album I finally understand what is different between university and now; what it is that I've lost. Such a simple precious thing as to have been overlooked on previous self meditations. The answer is fun. I stopped having fun. At university I played and did pretty much anything that I felt like. In the years after leaving I stopped messing around and tried to be serious. Trying to figure out what my writing was and what it would do only allowed me to lose sight of why I did it in the first place. It was fun. I write because I like it.

Forget the big ideas. No social or philosophical agendas. Just create for the pure enjoyment of it. And not only words. Sing, draw, paint, carve, juggle, do anything that comes to mind. I was successful at university because I had an idea and followed it until nothing was left. I would spend ten hours playing with words just to get a sense of what I wanted. I would go further than most to get the exact piece that I wanted.

I need to let myself have fun again. Not this sanitised professional form of writing. It doesn't work. And more to the point, I need to let that sense of fun spread into the rest of my life again. Throw away the professional persona I've been using these last years. Let go. Forget everything and come back to myself. My new Job with Waterstones is allowing me to do some of this. I go to work and it's like playing in a big sandbox. I can be the over the top joking self and it works. Now I need to let that sense of fun and play get into my work.

In short, I plan to sing too much, jump around like an idiot, unpack my hats and juggling balls, and be a better more creative version of myself. Many thanks to Imogen Heap for reminding me to be silly. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.

A change of tack

The dictionary will list one of the verb meanings of tack as to 'turn into the wind' and so it is that I am turning. Amending direction.

I've been musing over the point of electronic publishing since setting up this blog. As technology progresses our networks and connections seemingly broaden as our existence reduces; reduces to the pluralised reality of a parallel digital persona overlapping, imposing, and occasionally superseding our real selves. In the craze of self publishing espoused by Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and the very many social networking tools, I feel the need to stop and qualify exactly what my existence is. Where lie the boundaries between my real and digital selves? And to what degree is my day to day existence qualified by said digital self. It is a core existential dilemma that has plagued mankind from the genesis of creation. The modern equivalent of Plato's cave and his shadows. I sense the allusions to T.S. Eliot's Waste Land in the line "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and I fear that internet publishing is but another form of fending of man's fear of impermanence.

It seems to be a core human desire to leave something of themselves behind after they have passed on. The nature of the point can be argued from many differing aspects. It can be viewed as as the biological need to procreate being expressed in the subconscious of a thinking mammal. Perhaps an ego driven delusion fuelled by fear of the unknown, of death, and the grasping need to exist on afterwards. Whatever the cause, be it physiological, psychological, even spiritual, it seems to be a need that exists to a degree in all of us. As a writer I am possessed of my own fair share of this sentiment, although it presents itself in a more specific form. That of the quest for meaning.

What is the meaning of my life? What am I trying to say with my writing? What is my reason? A man far wiser than I once wrote that there are three constants in life; rules if you will, and they are as follows: Paradox, humour, and change.

Paradox: Life is a mystery. Don't waste time or energy trying to solve it.
Humour: Keep a sense of humour at all times, especially about yourself. It is a strength beyond compare.
Change: Everything changes. It is a universal constant. Make peace with the fact and all will be easier.

Taking these to be true, at least in my own life, I have decided to try and stop searching for the meaning of my life, writing, existence. I am going to attempt a little faith. So with that resolution the content of this blog will change a little. It is still so early in the content of this blog as to mean there won't really be any form of transition. I intend to use this page as an exploration of my own art, and the process I take to create it, alongside the occasional academic contextual article. To frame it in terms most writers will be familiar with, this page will be a critical self reflective and academic monologue of my personal creative process. I hope that you find it enjoyable reading.

Illustrations

I have updated the illustrations page with the latest of my works; and have a couple more which are nearing completion. It won't be long until the main body of the new illustrations is finished, at which point I will need to invest in some Mayan resource materials to complete the illustrated portion of the project.

I find this type of illustrating interesting and time intensive. It is less a process of artistic creation, than it is a study in stillness. A capturing of a physical place in a metaphysical construct. This is the first time I have created an illustration with more concern to the context than the content.

They are, after all, representations of a memory discovered in an inner metaphysical landscape. That the content lends validity and momentum to the letter that they are included within is important, yet it is the monochromatic style and intense level of detail used to create them that ultimately empowers the narrative, both episodically and in its entirety.

I hope that the viewer comes away feeling the intense stillness and cold of the images. The memory they are formed from is past, and the world they are found in is dead and contradictory. With luck they will help to create a subtle tension in the reader's suspension of disbelief. Not a common narrative tool admittedly, but one which should, contradictorily, serve to draw the reader deeper into the overall narrative thematically.

The power of the strange and uncanny should never be underestimated in literature. Indeed the word uncanny holds a particular pertinence to this and all of my projects. To be specific the form of uncanny as seen in its German form 'unheimlich' and as described by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit. Without exploring this in detail, it is enough to say that uncanny means the anxiety experienced in the indefiniteness of reality. The collapse of everyday familiarity as the existential mode of being-in-the-world conflicts with the mode of the not-at-home (Apologies to Heidegger fans for a bastardised form of his text).

So it is the brake down of the definiteness of the borders of reality that will hopefully pull the reader on. I can admit that the text as it is still needs more to get it to this point; and certainly there are authors who have achieved this affect with far greater haunting precision, but hopefully with more work I will get there.

I will look to put up more illustrations as they are completed; and I'm sure when I feel stuck with the words, I will pick up the pencil as succour.

Tempus Fugit

There are not enough hours in the day. I have so much work to do that I don't where to start. I have at least two articles in my head, a laundry list of illustrations pending, a fiction piece that needs to lose around five hundred words, my research dissertation rewrites, and I promised myself I would illustrate several Christmas cards this year. Oh dear... I feel like Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit muttering "I shall be too late!"

The blog is now up and running, and I can begin to work on the outstanding projects. I guess I should embrace linear narrative for once and start at the beginning. The Christmas cards are the most time sensitive. Watch this space for the designs.

Art and Photography

As a writer my innate preference in art, and I use the term in its broadest possible context to mean all the products of human creativity, falls into the textual; but the more I explore the written form, the more I find it difficult to separate it from the visual arts. The written word is in itself a graphical representation of oral communication. And so it is with painting, photography, and, to a similar extent, sculpture. They are all representations of an element of our physical or internal metaphysical world.

            So where does the boundary between written text and visual art lie? Do we draw the distinction that text is ‘the main body of written work as distinct from illustrations or footnotes’? If so, what happens if we examine oriental calligraphy? Suddenly this classic boundary seems wholly inadequate.

            In Japanese there are three distinct writing systems: Hiragana (ひらがな), Katakana (カタカナ), and Kanji (漢字). As a written text I don’t understand a single one, but as a piece of visual art I find a great deal of beauty in their construction. Both the Chinese and Japanese seemingly do too, as a great portion of their traditional artwork involves delicately wrought calligraphy.

            And what happens to our definition if we look at the work of Bob Cobbing? Bob Cobbing was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet and a central figure in the British Poetry Revival; and ultimately the incitement behind my fascination with the idea of text as ‘Art’. His work reached beyond the written word as word, and into sound and visual art. In his own words, “Gone is the word as the word, though the word may still be used as sound or shape. Poetry now resides in other elements.” – Bob Cobbing, 1969.

            As a young poetry undergraduate I remember being shown a Cobbing poem that was unreadable as a traditional piece of text. The title eludes me, but I remember feeling so challenged by it, that I became a little obsessed. Below is an example of his work.

 Detail from kurrirrurriri (1967)

The more we examine, It seems to become clear that for all the wealth of ‘text depicting actual words’, a strict definition between written forms and visual arts can never be declared with any authority. Modern poetry and post-modern works aside, this is evidenced in oriental cultures where the written form and visual art were so intimately interwoven from their beginnings, as to be nigh on indistinguishable. So perhaps it’s not the definitions that matter, but the intent behind the piece of ‘Art’?

            And when examining the intent of a piece of art, it now becomes possible to draw several, albeit flimsy, boundaries between the classical forms of ‘Art’. These boundaries do not deal with definitions of the forms, but rather attempt to qualitative the efficacy of differing forms when imparting a particular idea. Simply put, when does classical text, photography, painting, or even music operate as the most efficient vehicle for meaning? Would Van Gogh’s Starry night have been better as a poem, or maybe a piece of music?

            I think we can say ‘no’ with a degree of certainty, but it is this form of distinction that we can draw between the forms. A contemporary example would be the motion picture Troy. From my literary standpoint, the film was a dreadful adaptation of a great text; it just didn’t work. Thankfully Homer didn’t have the medium of film to consider when writing his text.

            So how do we decide which form to work in? Truthfully most ‘artists’ don’t have a choice. We may excel in one medium, but fail dreadfully at another. I am a writer so I write. I would love to think that I could write and perform a song instead, but as anyone who has heard me sing will attest, I really shouldn’t.

            But were I possessed of talent in all creative arts, then to make the decision, I would have to examine the benefits of each form individually. And it is this examination that leads me, for this blog, to consider photography.

Photography has one of the heaviest social burdens of all the arts. We will all be familiar with the popular maxim that ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’, and nowhere is this clearer than in the News media. A captured image has the power to deeply affect the viewer on an almost visceral level. Below are several examples of images that are instantly familiar, and extremely evocative.

Photographs can be so powerful that governments will go to great lengths to censor them. China and the Tiananmen Square Massacre is one such image. The unknown rebel, armed with his shopping bags, standing defiantly in the path of the army’s tanks is, to my mind, one of the most powerful images ever captured. In the west we are all familiar with it, but in China it has never been seen. Censorship is so absolute that it can’t even be found on the Chinese internet.

So what is it about photography that makes it so powerful? In the most reduced terms, photography gifts us with the ability to view an event or object in its exactitude that we were not present to witness. But it is not this ability alone that makes it so powerful.

            To quote another maxim, ‘the camera never lies’; an unedited photographic image is an objective, that is unbiased, representation of an event or object. However, even if the process of capturing images is objective, the act of capturing them is purely subjective. The photographer decides what to capture, what to include and discard, how to frame the image. In this regard a photograph will always attest to the many differing facets of the photographer’s personality, along with the subject material. Susan Sontag argues in ‘On Photography’ that “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting one’s self into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge, and therefore like power.”

            So in every photographic image we are viewing pure objectivity and absolute subjectivity. It is this embodiment of dichotomy that marks photography as a true and powerful art form. These seemingly simple representations afford us a chance we rarely ever experience in our day to day lives. To, in a small sensory way, experience the exact perception of the world from the photographer’s viewpoint.

            It is an act that will never be precise. The biological visual process means that my perception of the colour red will differ from yours. Not to mention the idiosyncratic psychological, sociological, and even experiential baggage that we each bring to the viewing. For example, the colour red is considered to be lucky in China, and this feeling will never be divorced from an image that includes red.

            But, I would argue, it is these differences that ultimately validate photograph and render it precious. In each image the photographer is giving us a similar escape from reality that we find in good fiction; and we the viewer interact with a similar suspension of disbelief in the hope of being shown the photographer’s world. Ultimately this process of interaction is subconscious and requires little to no effort on the viewers behalf.

            Is it this effortless instant journey from own perceptual reality to that of the photographer’s that makes photography important to me. This experience is becoming increasingly needed in modern society. As technical modernity speeds up our daily lives, photography, at least for me, offers a moment of respite and beauty; a reason and experience to pause and reflect over: A chance to be reminded that our existence is so much more than our daily routines.