Music and Lyrics - Contains Spoilers

If you were under forty years of age in the eighties, it is extremely likely that at some point in the decade you found yourself reciting illuminating pieces of surrealist poetry such as wake me up before you go-go, don’t leave me hanging around like a jo-jo. I know that I did, even though I was not tall enough to reach the front door’s peep hole and could barely tell cats from dogs.

One of my cousins was particularly smitten with George Michael and to this day, every time I see him, she always comes to mind, her tiny, tiny frame quivering in anticipation, squeals et al, when he was about to appear on the tellie. I must admit to find it more than a little shocking that so many people did not figure out he was gay in those early days. When I watch old videos it just seems so damn evident that one has to wonder whether those ghastly popular poodle perms just went to people’s heads, short-circuiting, not just their hair shafts, but their eyesight too.

If you harbour a secret passion for the decade of the cheese please, if you love Wham and George and more, you absolutely must watch Music and Lyrics with Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant. You know how you are usually hard-pressed to find anyone willing to admit to a fondness for romantic comedies? They are a bit like Titanic; the movie grossed over $600m worldwide and yet I cannot find anyone (bar myself), prepared to admit, while keeping a straight face, that s/he loved it and cried like a baby when Jack died. It seems to me like romantic comedies are the chick lit of cinematography, a sub-genre that so many people, female and male, enjoy but do so in secret.

Music and Lyrics is one of those movies that crept up on me, something that I remember being aware of in a vague kind of fashion, thanks to a handful of shots from People magazine capturing the actors while filming in New York. When I sat down in the cinema, I was not expecting one of the most hilarious opening sequences ever, this one:



Pop Goes My Heart, by eighties fictional band Pop, is a piece of excellent musical satire and, like all satire, only speaks to those who recognise what is being satirised. So if you’re aware of Spandau Ballet, of Duran Duran and of Wham among others, you will see references in the stilted dance moves as well as in the shooting technique, one which often saw members of these bands act improbable plots in an improbably cheesy manner. Yet, isn’t this Pop Goes My Heart really catchy? Of course it is, because that’s the catch of those catchy eighties tunes (cheesy pun intended, sorry): they are actually quite good, happy songs that once infiltrated into one’s brain are difficult to eradicate and can provide so-called brain itches, those instances whereby a tune keeps playing in a loop in one’s head, years down the line. I know that Pop Goes My Heart is one such song.

Alex is a has-been, lingering on the sidelines of the music business following Pop’s split in the nineties. He gets another shot at fame when Cora, the world’s greatest pop starlet, bigger than Britney and Christina put together, asks him to write a song for her upcoming album. Alex however cannot write lyrics, only melodies, and this is where Sophie enters the scene. She is a neurotic girl who has a talent with words but not enough self-confidence to see her efforts to the end. Watch them riding the waves of an extremely intense creative process which stretches over a mere handful of days and which lies the foundation for a successful partnership in music and life.

While on a plane earlier this year I had the opportunity to catch Music and Lyrics again. What is it with Hugh Grant and planes? Why are most of his movies so inherently watchable, so spectacularly entertaining especially while on a transatlantic flight, when one’s own destination seems light years away, not a mere 6,000 miles?



Years ago, on the way to San Francisco, I watched Bridget Jones’s Diary four times over, my not-so-stifled laughter resounding throughout the cabin above the snoring of so many others. I find that Hugh himself is a bit like romantic comedies; I suspect that very many people enjoy his work and rather love him, but are too cool to admit it. I am not and can freely say that I love Hugh Grant, and I have done so ever since, little more than a child, I first set eyes on him in Four Weddings. I know many, especially men, cannot bear his mumbling version of English idiot, but that is Hugh’s winning charm, as is the cad splashed right across the screen in Bridget Jones. He is fabulous in those two movies, miles ahead of Arsy Darcy, providing great comic relief laced up with irresistible charm.

A friend of mine from Norway once confessed that she moved to England in order to find herself a Hugh Grant-like adorable Englishman. Can you believe it? And she found one, even though Rich is not as tall, as thin, as irresistible or even as old as Hugh. I haven’t spoken to her in ages but I bet she loves Music and Lyrics. And in fact, I’ll tell you more; if you do not feel a wave of happy tears rising to your eyes as Alex kisses Sophie, their music and lyrics at last playing in the background, I am afraid it's one of those instances whereby you’re a cinematic idiot and I feel sorry for you.

Off

Today I took a day off. This may sound preposterous to those of you that know I do not have a job as such, but all writers will tell you that they never quite feel like they are taking time off. This is because a writer doesn't just work with a pen or a computer but first and foremost away from both, in a perpetual state of trance where ideas, and their development, unfold. Yesterday's work was minute or indeed felt that way. Reading never is considered work, even if it is necessary in order to be able to write. When I checked the weather forecast at the end of the day, I had great hopes that I would wake up to a frosted garden and I was not disappointed. And so I took the day off in order to wander around Knutsford, which I had not done in a few weeks, to think about something other than writing and to spend some time with horsey.



Late autumn, and indeed winter, should always be as today was, cold and dry, with an unapologetically blue sky that somewhat reminded me of Chicago in the middle of January, minus the skyscrapers, the wind, the lake and the excitement of being in America of course! Still, it was great to be able to walk aimlessly and to browse the windows decked in Christmas paraphernalia, something that I love looking at. In fact, I myself should get down to it and start decorating the house.

Try as I may, writing is never too far off. I always carry something with me so that, when the time is right, I can snatch some time, even from idleness, and read something that one day may come in handy. Such was the case with some essays about Dracula and some stories off Christmas Stories. The library pit-stop saw Terry Brooks's Sometimes The Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life coming home with me and I am sure that you will get a lecture about it in due course.

As the sun was very low on the horizon, I went to see horsey who is currently growing his mane and feathers and spending his retirement in the company of his latest girlfriend. I took him for a walk around the fields and although it was a bit of a snort-fest at first, no doubt annoyed as he was that I turned up sans carottes this time, he still obliged and allowed me to point-and-shoot in order to freeze his latest look in time. Et voilà!



He was also glad to have a nose-to-nose with his best (male) friend Conor, who also checked my pockets in case I was hiding treats. He left in disgust as he noted nothing more than a mobile phone. Not that it stopped him having a nibble in the past mind you...

Chickpea Soup

It seems like a long time since I last wrote about food. I must admit that it hasn't been at the forefront of my mind as of late; that spot has been usurped by various projects, some of them I already talked about, others I will. However, something I had in mind in the middle of summer was the most lovely chickpea soup there is, the one that my grandma used to make. For this you will need the very best chickpeas you can find, the sort that swell as they cook and become big and juicy, alas not something I have found. So I used run-of-the-mill supermarket chickpeas which I soaked overnight in plenty of water and bicarb but I can tell you, it just was not the same.

You'll need:

250g dried chickpeas
1 tbsp plain flour
1 glug of olive oil
3 white onions
fresh rosemary tied in a bunch (use white cotton thread for this, not blue garden string à la Bridget Jones!)

Soak the chickpeas overnight in plenty of tepid water and a tablespoon of bicarb of soda. Rinse well and place in a large saucepan. Now add olive oil and one tablespoon of flour. Stir well, turn the heat on, add plentiful cold water, sea salt, the onions and the rosemary and wait for the chickpeas to come to the boil.

They will foam, therefore remove this as it appears on the surface of the water. Failure to do so will result in some mighty mess on, and especially off, the pan. Fast boil for ten minutes, now lower the heat to medium and keep simmering for approximately 90 minutes. Serve with some Parmesan on top and also with an extra glug of oil if you like.

I know it seems like a lot of waiting hassle for a soup, but you'll only think this way until you make it!

Finished

This morning I wrote the last line to my book and I am going to share it right here with you, because it’s not my own last line at all, but a quote:

‘As we grow older it’s eternity that is our boon’.

I didn’t think this would ever happen, but I felt a frisson of excitement mixed with sadness, sadness especially. Writing this book has not been painful as some writers often say of their own endeavours and neither has the route to publication been fraught with danger or heart-ache. Heck, I didn’t know this stuff fit for publication back in September; it’s like it happened out of the blue, as I was pursuing agents over another endeavour (yes, adding insult to injury). Well now this work is done and I feel orphaned.

After this I will drag myself to the lounge, the room that, together with Starbee in Wilmslow, saw most of the recent work getting done, books and comics strewn all over, with evil little post-it tongues sticking out of every other page. Au revoir Leatherface, Jason, Michael, Freddy, Spider-man, Batman, Joker, Jorge, William, Adso, Lestat, Blade companions of many days spent squeezing my brains trying to conjure up something intelligent to write in order to celebrate these characters as righteous representative of popular culture, not at all inferior but in fact on a par with Mona Lisa, Stan Lee as relevant to our culture as Leonardo himself (Da Vinci, not Di Caprio).

Au revoir Dark Knight script, Spider-man The Icon, Marvel Vault, The Killing Joke, The Name of the Rose; au revoir mountain of splatter DVDs, hurrah! I am now going to celebrate with Bridget Jones and won’t think about any of this ever again. Or maybe not until The Dark Knight DVD comes out. It’s only two weeks to go, isn’t it? I can't wait already...

Conclusions

I hate conclusions. Like, really, really hate them. More than introductions. And you know why? Because when you write an introduction you are actually fishing from the middle of your work and piecing it together. In fact, an introduction may even help you in conjuring up more ideas once you already have some on paper. Yet, get to the conclusion and you will start hating your book, yourself, your characters and even your family and friends. How hard can it be?

Oh but it's not just me, no, it's not. As I was lamenting conclusion-related issues to Mac in recent times, he told me that it took him one year to write the conclusion to his PhD. Did you see that? One year. Ye-eeear. For like... three bastard pages. I’ve agonised over the end of my book all day today, trying to write three little paragraphs that, somehow, manage to tie everything up (hateful, hateful, I like open endings) while not repeating something I said before. Is that possible? Maybe it is, at the moment it doesn’t bloody look that way.

Footnotes

So much for creativity. I have spent something like six hours on one footnote. One. And do you know what’s really irritating? The footnote already existed. So why fix something that isn’t broken? I don’t know my friends, all I know is that I often create tragic issues when I really do not need to. I’ve been re-writing the same for hours, cutting and pasting, moving things around, re-writing, re-deleting. Then I checked my biorhythms and thanked my lucky stars for them. My intellectual one is nose-diving today which made me really happy. When my editor asks me ‘what’s this crap?’, I’ll be able to blame several people at once and now my biorhythms as well. I feel better already.

Thank You For Reading (Or Not) - Part II

Months ago I wrote about Ugresic’s great book Thank You For Not Reading. Over the past week, I graced this screen with a few extracts from Snoopy’s Guide. One in particular, this one, has prompted a few people to drop me a line after they picked themselves up from the floor. But you know something? Ugresic has even better examples in her book and today I am going to share them with you.

" A successful book proposal must also answer the question of what type of readership the book is intended for. I can sort of understand the hook business, but I just can't imagine my readership in advance.
'Imagine that you are writing for Harrison Ford, maybe it'll go better,' suggests Ellen.
Ellen does not realise how right she is. For a book proposal is nothing other than a screenplay, an effective account of an imagined film.

The nineteenth century, France, a young woman married to a provincial doctor dreams of love. Torn between a tedious husband and one lover, then another, burdened with debts accumulating daily, the woman commits suicide. The book is intended for a wide female readership.

'Good,' says the editor. 'Just change the nineteenth century to the twentieth, and add another lover or two. Give the husband a bit of fun as well, let him turn out to be gay. And forget the suicide at the end! No one would believe that!'

The nineteenth century, Russia, a married woman belonging to high society falls in love, leaves her husband and son, lives as a social outcast with her adored lover, and when he leaves her to go to war, she throws herself under a train. The book is intended for a wide female readership.

'Great!' says the editor. 'Two sisters, one lives in Soviet Russia married to an KGB officer, she falls in love with a dissident. The other emigrates and marries a boring French doctor. In 1990, the sisters meet. Flashbacks, two different lives, two female destinies. The illusions and disillusions of East and West after the fall of communism. Title: Two Sisters. Start writing!'

My first success encouraged me. I even became obsessive. Recently I have done nothing but write book proposals. I took the trouble to write a book proposal for Remembrances of Things Past. It was turned down, Boring, too long, change the title...

Now I'm testing the market. Camouflaged Shakespeare works great. Ulysses got nowhere. Despite my having told it as a soap opera, The Man Without Qualities ended up int he trash. Memoirs of Hadrian too, and The Death of Virgil. All right, I agree, the great European writers were always a bit tedious. But even Hemingway didn't do any better, although I did manage to sell The Old Man and the Sea. I disguised it a bit. I stressed the ecological aspect of the whole thing. And I changed the old man into a good-looking young Cuban exile, gay. The proposal was immediately accepted.

[...]

I'm not complaining. Except I haven't written a line for ages. I mean, a literary line of my own. I'm completely absorbed in these book proposals. I'm becoming increasingly impudent. I camouflage less and less. I've just sent an editor the proposal for One Hundred Years of Solitude.
'Forget the contents!' said the editor. 'No one could possibly follow that story. But there's no reason not to use that great title.' "

Now dear reader I ask you this: what chances does the new novelist stand when even Flaubert (first proposal above, Madame Bovary) and Tolstoj (second above, Anna Karenina) get rejections? And of course I am not sharing this great essay in order to discourage you but... just to make you aware that you will find some ignorant editors in your way. Proceed at your own peril.

A Life Of Its Own

To people who never write anything other than shopping lists, the idea that ‘writing has a life of its own’ is as alien as beefburgers are to me. Yet, anyone from John Donne to Stephen King would testify that characters, regardless of whether they inhabit prose or poetry, acquire a life of their own. This does not apply to prose or poetry only however; it does so to all types of writing, no exception. I am particularly versed in literary and film criticism and I can assure you that I may know where I am starting from (at times), and that I may know where I am going (less often so), but I swear I never know what happens in the middle before it actually happens and when it does, when the various tesserae of the mosaic start forming an intelligible picture, I do not know how they formed that picture to begin with. The process is similar to entering and exiting trance while I drive; I can tell you what I was doing before as I become aware of the after, but the transition from one to the other and back is a mystery that the human brain isn’t capable of processing.

When I started writing Slaughter Is The Best Medicine, a long, long time ago, I had a vague vision for it, but not even a title. I do not remember what I wrote first, but I do know it was not the introduction because I never start from the beginning, I start from the middle. I do not like to introduce anything, neither do I like to conclude anything, mostly because both of these are nothing other than the clouds amassing overhead and the same moving over and away after the storm. It is only the narrating of the storm that interests me. So I started somewhere in the middle. I seem to vaguely recall something about the Nightmare movies and something about the monster behind the mask, but I can’t be sure. Then The Texas Chainsaw Massacre got into the picture, as did a reason to be talking about these in the first place, what a call the legacy of imagination of the Romantic Age.

The book then lingered for a long time, incapable as I was to make a somewhat logical jump from horror to super-heroes, incapable to link the two worlds without sounding like a popular culture encyclopedia or The Marvel Vault. As is often the case, the link was right under my nose; I turned the horror table around and instead of looking at representations of horror, I looked at how we see horror where there isn’t any, affected as we are by real-life examples that leave us unable to comprehend it when it affects us first-hand, when eyes can see, but mind cannot process.

I wrote the introduction after I finished a section about Batman Bagins and then I lingered again, waiting for something more significant to come along and to become the turning point of the book, the actual raison d'être of the entire effort. I got that last summer, when The Dark Knight came out and I watched it three times over in quick succession, trying to imprint my mind with it, trying to see between, above and beyond the lines. Laughter had me enthralled for a while, but not by itself. As I hope to be able to be an advocate of popular culture, the person that is unafraid to defend it where defense is due, I roped in a literary classic with the aim to give kudos to the latest representation of chaos and madness as The Dark Knight would have it.

I don’t know how all of this came into being. I don’t even know how I thought of the last few sentences I wrote this morning, when I finally succeeded in dropping in a few relevant passages to the entire discourse. Now I have one last piece to sort out, an analysis of the Reapers from Blade II, something that I have tried to do for one year and then I put it off and then I talked about it and then I forgot about it and then I put it off some more for the past fourteen months to be precise. Not that I would really know what I did with these fourteen months you understand...

Snoopy's Guide To The Writing Life - Part IV

Snoopy's Guide To The Writing Life - Part III

On the subject of rejections, something Snoopy is very well acquainted with, Jack Canfield writes:

"Dr Seuss's first children's book, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, was rejected by twenty-seven publishers.

Margaret Mitchell's classic Gone With The Wind was turned down by more than twenty-five publishers.

Jack London received six hundred rejection slips before he sold his first story."

And of course, as ever, I am leaving the best last:

"Eight years after his novel Steps won the National Book Award, Jerzy Kosinski permitted a writer to change his name and the title and send a manuscript of the novel to thirteen agents and fourteen publishers to test the plight of new writers. They all rejected it, including Random House, which had published it."