Sunday, July 27, 2008

Good writing and bad sex

It has become a habit of lazy book reviewers to throw in a statement that some of the writing in the work under discussion would be a candidate for the Literary Review's Bad Sex In Literature award. What they often mean is that it is badly written from start to finish, including the sex bit, which isn't the same thing. But I'm not sure whether the criticism is entirely justified: there are good reasons why writing about is hard [hur hur hur] - difficult; unintentional humour is one of them.

More generally, though, there is the question of credibility. Novelists can tell me any sort of nonsense about the workings of the Moscow underground system or the administrative records of a police investigation and I will believe them as long as it sound as if they know hwat they are talking about. I've been told that Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a completely unreliable guide to motorcycle maintenance. But if someone is writing about an area of which I have experience, I can check whether they are not just plausible but authentic. So a different level of scrutiny is applied.

There is a problem here for the writer writing for the naive reader: it will be assumed that any experience described realistically must be real. Kingsley Amis admits to abandoning a novel with a first-person gay narrator because he didn't want his readers to speculate about the extent to which it was true. This seems a bit bizarre: one assumes that Thomas Harris is not suspected of being, or even wanting to be, a cannibal.

Then there is the question of language. Preferred terminology for body parts depends on the writer's (and reader's) age, gender, nationality, class, sexual orientation etc; use of what seems natural for the writer may have an adverse impact on some of his or her readers. For example, Martin Amis' reputation a a misogynist writer incapable of creating a convincing female character may be partly derived for his preference for terminology which is typically male (it is also partly derived from his inability to create convincing female characters: it is notable that the two most fully realised, Nicola Six in London Fields and Mike Hoolihan in Night Train, are cop-outs because Amis explicitly says that they are 'male' psychologically).

And there is the wider question of the extent to which one wishes to be seen to be writing pornography. Somewhat bizarrely, 40 years after the Chatterley trial, using Lawrence's terms in literature would be seen as rude if no longer shocking. To retreat into medical terminology runs the risk of making the act of love sound as exciting as a computer program. Since sex is 90% imagination and 10% friction [source unknown], most of the time writing is about the quality of the activity as it is experienced, and is as much about emotion and attitude as it is about mechanics. This is I think why so much writing about sex is flagged as being bad, in the sense of pretentious or over-ambitious. Even clever writers like Nick Hornby these days steer clear of anything hinting at high style: simple words in simple order are the norm. Purple prose is something of an endangered species in modern literature (with good reason, of course).

There is a danger, though, that being overcritical of the attempts to address the subject will lead to the easily-swayed from avoiding it altogether, leaving us with a mechanical prudishness at the core of fiction. Sex is important as a way of revealing character and a way of communicating mood, and on the whole writers should be encouraged to attempt its description, even if some are bound to fail.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

The Modern Dictionary


Wednesday, July 09, 2008

End of the road for Sandi Thom

"Did you know that Sandi Thom is working at Abbey Road with Will Young, Michelle McManus and David Sneddon?"

"Are they recording?"

"No, they're the night shift at St John's Wood MacDonalds."



I have been following the story of Sandi Thom with, perhaps, more interest than it deserves, especially since I have no strong views on her music. It happened to be one of those news stories, like the WMD dodgy dossier, where it was obvious at the time that the media had been fed a line. At the time, those unfamiliar with the Web might believe that electronic word of mouth might increase nightly webcast audiences from zero to 40,000 in three weeks, but nobody else did. In the rush of skepticism that followed, many were left believing that the whole webcast thing was a stunt and that she had been signed to RCA/Sony beforehand, which isn't true (or at least is specifically denied by those who would be in a position to know).

It seems that the sands of time are running out on her career. The follow-up album charted for a single week, the single for two, despite media and personal appearances, interviews and advertising on YouTube. Any day now, RCA will surely pull the plug. It remains baffling that of the 300,000 people who were happy to buy the first album, only 1% wanted to buy the second (whatever its merits): she just seems to be one of those people who can sell large numbers of records without inspiring loyalty or affection from the purchasers. It looks as if "Punk rocker" will suffer the same fate as the Diana version of "Candle in the wind" as a record people are reluctant to admit having bought.

Tory boy

David Cameron's policy on addressing the rise in the number of obese people is to tell them to help themselves. No David, that's not going to work: they're doing that already.

The Times Online have, alas, retitled their version of the story after spotting the potential for misunderstanding.

The commodification of exercise

fitness.jpg
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Of course, it is possible that the gym is being a responsible business and catering for its users who want to work out but cannot cope easily with climbing stairs (people needing physio, for example). But it doesn't look as if the people on the way in are in that category. One of the triumphs of modern culture is the packaging of exercise as a consumer activity that involves clothes, a venue, and money: you are offered the chance to effectively buy, or, perhaps, more accurately, rent, fitness at a rate of so much per hour. It is a triumph, because it works. I can remember thiking how handy it was that the gym is so close to work. It took a while to spot the flaw in the thinking. In how many lifts in how many office blocks around the world is someone saying at this moment as they step in "I won't get a chance to work out today".