John Barry was married to the 21 year old Jane Birkin. He wanted her to cook for him and fetch his slippers so she shagged Serge Gainsbourg. The silly sod.
His theme from "A Doll's House" is one of my favourite pieces of music.
Monday, 31 January 2011
If it's Monday it must mean rejection
Another rejection from a literary agent this morning. Nothing unusual there except that the same agency had already rejected me some two months ago! They're queuing up to wash their hands of me at Eve White's!
Thanks Eve. I get it. I'll try elsewhere. You're becoming a pest. There are anti-stalking laws in this country, you know - let's not make this a police matter!
Thanks Eve. I get it. I'll try elsewhere. You're becoming a pest. There are anti-stalking laws in this country, you know - let's not make this a police matter!
Sunday, 30 January 2011
"I've used up all my tissues, on more seriouser issues," - B. Boo. (born 1970, Kensington,)
It's been quite difficult managing to do all the things I have to do at the moment. Something had to give and, in the balloon debate of my life, I have elected to eject sanity as not wanted on the voyage. It was a luxury I could ill afford. Most of this week has been spent sleeping, rubbing my head like a distressed bear in an Eastern European circus, walking up hills, walking down hills, feeling wildly, terribly anxious and polishing my shoes. I've started waxing the soles so I can slide home from the shops: "Skating with the stars"? Skating with the shopping, more like it. With a couple of French sticks I can ski home.
Have been feeling the lack of privacy very keenly this week. I like to pad around the house naked, my wet bits swaying like air-dried meat hanging from the eaves of a ChinaTown restaurant. To paraphrase John Shuttleworth "I can't go back to towel drying now!" I like to leave the door open while I'm in the bath and listen to classic detective serials on BBC Radio 7. Or read aloud in a variety of fruity voices from Robert Aickman's "The Unsettled Dust" (variations of James Robertson Justice's blistering baritone if I'm honest - I may yet produce an album called "Songs in the key of James Robertson Justice" (Billy Ocean on backing vox))
Sorry. Lost in my own parentheses there.
So yes. I like my ablutions JUST SO. And unfortunately I've been unable to swan around in the nip owing to the continued presence of other people in the house, people who might be offended by the sight of my naked glistening body. Which would be most people, and don't I well know it, but in the alleged privacy of my own home? Surely some respite! A man should be allowed to free-ball in the chilly environs of his own back-kitchen or pantry.*
Which is not to say I'm not grateful for these visitors. They help a great deal with every facet of our splintering lives. But it would be nice, every once in a while, for Kelly and I to pretend we were normal people.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Everything in the flat is breaking. The phone doesnt work. Broadband and the internet wax and wane like moons playing peek-a-boo. The toilet flush hasn't worked for months and now the seat is falling off. The microphone in the computer has disappeared, reducing Skype to a sort of desperate mummery - a silent film filled with pantomime mugging and hand written caption cards. Lately the doorbell doesn't work, the curtains are falling down and today the kettle blew up. Given all of that it seems odd that most of our visitors only seem put out only by our not having a microwave!
I feed 'em! What do they want a pot noodle for?
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Speaking of cooking, I've finally been given my Mullan family "Secret Santa" present from Hugh Arthur, bearded Patriarch of the clan. It is a mustard yellow apron with the words: "John Best Son-in-Law Ever" printed on it.
I waited till Kelly and Kate had gone to bed before bawling my eyes out.
*I have a pantry. I dry my pants on it.
Have been feeling the lack of privacy very keenly this week. I like to pad around the house naked, my wet bits swaying like air-dried meat hanging from the eaves of a ChinaTown restaurant. To paraphrase John Shuttleworth "I can't go back to towel drying now!" I like to leave the door open while I'm in the bath and listen to classic detective serials on BBC Radio 7. Or read aloud in a variety of fruity voices from Robert Aickman's "The Unsettled Dust" (variations of James Robertson Justice's blistering baritone if I'm honest - I may yet produce an album called "Songs in the key of James Robertson Justice" (Billy Ocean on backing vox))
Sorry. Lost in my own parentheses there.
So yes. I like my ablutions JUST SO. And unfortunately I've been unable to swan around in the nip owing to the continued presence of other people in the house, people who might be offended by the sight of my naked glistening body. Which would be most people, and don't I well know it, but in the alleged privacy of my own home? Surely some respite! A man should be allowed to free-ball in the chilly environs of his own back-kitchen or pantry.*
Which is not to say I'm not grateful for these visitors. They help a great deal with every facet of our splintering lives. But it would be nice, every once in a while, for Kelly and I to pretend we were normal people.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Everything in the flat is breaking. The phone doesnt work. Broadband and the internet wax and wane like moons playing peek-a-boo. The toilet flush hasn't worked for months and now the seat is falling off. The microphone in the computer has disappeared, reducing Skype to a sort of desperate mummery - a silent film filled with pantomime mugging and hand written caption cards. Lately the doorbell doesn't work, the curtains are falling down and today the kettle blew up. Given all of that it seems odd that most of our visitors only seem put out only by our not having a microwave!
I feed 'em! What do they want a pot noodle for?
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Speaking of cooking, I've finally been given my Mullan family "Secret Santa" present from Hugh Arthur, bearded Patriarch of the clan. It is a mustard yellow apron with the words: "John Best Son-in-Law Ever" printed on it.
I waited till Kelly and Kate had gone to bed before bawling my eyes out.
*I have a pantry. I dry my pants on it.
Saturday, 29 January 2011
...in which I'm very depressed
I'm very depressed. And exhausted. And stressed and anxious. It's a real pain in the arse, y'know.
Friday, 28 January 2011
The lonliness of the long distance writer
Here's a piece wot I wrote for Belfast arts pamphlet "The Vacuum"** for their children's edition. No idea if they ever used it as they didn't see fit to furnish me with a copy, but they said they would use it and frankly I can't imagine that they'd have had anything better to use in its place. There were some drawings that went with it too but I'm far too stupid to work out how to post those on here:
The lonliness of the long distance writer
I am a writer of children’s fiction and as such I crave rejection. I’m lucky in this respect because rejection, and its boon companions: “futile endeavour” and “time not spent in the pub” are the natural and super- abundant reward for the unpublished children’s author.
A novel can take years to write, can frustrate, torture and embarrass. The sending of a novel out into the world is not unlike sending a child off to school for the very first time. The book is nurtured and shaped according to your values and aesthetics; polished and neatened for its first interaction with the outside world and then sent blithely off, in squeaky new shoes and without a backward glance, while you bawl inconsolably at the school gates. This is where the metaphor breaks down however, as unless something has gone disastrously wrong, you should have your child back that same evening, more or less in one piece and none too traumatised by the event.
With your manuscript (solicited or otherwise) you can wait up to six months for any kind of a response. (Though most publishers and agents pride themselves on a three month turnaround) And when that response arrives it will be two or three lines of blandly discouraging guff on letter-headed paper with a looping signature in blue biro.
It may sound tired and jaded, and indeed it is, but my advice to any aspiring writer is: know someone. A friend of the family, a college mate; a de-frocked priest who owes you – anyone who can help you stick your head above the paper parapet. You may not rise to the top of somebody’s teetering slush pile but you will leap like a ticklish salmon over those manuscripts that come without a recommendation.
And there are going to be a lot of manuscripts in a children’s publisher’s slush-pile. This is because everybody thinks they can write a children’s book. Children are idiots, they can barely read! They’ll settle for any old rubbish: a bee with non-stick legs,* a giraffe with whip-lash; a bulimic cow. Stick it in a moralist framework with loads of faux- naïve illustrations and you can herniate your postman with massive royalty cheques.
It’s at this point at I become sickeningly idealistic, so readers of a cynical disposition may wish to look away now. I believe that the best books are children’s books. The best children’s books are full of uncertainties and subversion; little upsets and tiny revolutions. They should be about assessing preconceived values and puncturing facile assumptions. Good children’s fiction is about ideas in a way that almost all adult fiction isn’t. Most adult books are about women shopping and men blowing things up. No books are more beloved, more stark and strange than those you read as a child. None are as closely scrutinised, as learnt, as those you read in your teens. As an adult you don’t have the time and you don’t have the focus – you’re too busy worrying about weight-gain, downsizing and the accumulation of tattoos. A child is a perfect reading machine and to be a children’s author is a privilege, not a right or a fore-gone conclusion. Unless you’re Geri Halliwell.
But unless you get out of that in-tray and not into the recycling it’s never going to happen. Now I’m not saying that publishers are going to throw your manuscript into the recycling. They won’t. And that’s not because publishers are massive eco-squanderers (though they DO get through a lot of trees!) It’s because most publishers won’t accept unsolicited submissions at all. The first defence of the publishing industry, and most people’s only point of contact, is the Literary Agent.
These are the men and women with the address books; literary hustlers who know what sells and who to sell it to. They also have a lot of advice, much of it contradictory and all of it involving a lot of rewriting.
My own book “The Improving Parents”, an everyday story parental oppression and childish revenge, caught the eye of several agencies when I sent out the standard submissions package (three chapters, a letter of introduction, a synopsis and an embarrassingly brief description of my publishing history) and they each asked to see the complete manuscript. None of them have subsequently seen “The Improving Parents” as the 100% solid kid-nip it clearly is or offered me piles of cash. But a few were interested enough to give me notes, advice and actual constructive criticism. The criticism would have me construct the narrative in completely different ways: if one liked the “knowingness” of the dialogue, another asked me to tone it down. If one thought the chapters were rambling and unfocussed another thought them gnomic and tight-lipped. If one was a fan of Eric the protagonist another would prefer his friend Freya. It was all wildly inconsistent and I was wildly grateful!
These people don’t have to do this; I’ve had enough tersely polite notes describing “a lack of enthusiasm” (this is publishing speak for “it stinks like ripe brie in the toe of a work boot”) for my work to really appreciate time spent actually discussing it. They aren’t paid for it; they don’t necessarily stand to gain by it: it really is because they see something in the work. And any advice is good advice; if you have a clear-eyed notion of the value of your work and there is a good idea at the centre of it, then you can bend and stretch it in all sorts of directions. One passing remark from an agent allowed me to re-imagine the entire story, adding narrative twists, layers of meaning, new characters and literally doubling the length of the book! This extra work has made the story a much more viable commercial proposition and made me more confident about sending it out into the world.
So in conclusion: it’s a shitty business, don’t even try and don’t queer my pitch!
*Actually this one’s pretty good – I’m using it.
**I actually had to learn how to spell vacuum before I sent it in. They don't see the human cost.
The lonliness of the long distance writer
I am a writer of children’s fiction and as such I crave rejection. I’m lucky in this respect because rejection, and its boon companions: “futile endeavour” and “time not spent in the pub” are the natural and super- abundant reward for the unpublished children’s author.
A novel can take years to write, can frustrate, torture and embarrass. The sending of a novel out into the world is not unlike sending a child off to school for the very first time. The book is nurtured and shaped according to your values and aesthetics; polished and neatened for its first interaction with the outside world and then sent blithely off, in squeaky new shoes and without a backward glance, while you bawl inconsolably at the school gates. This is where the metaphor breaks down however, as unless something has gone disastrously wrong, you should have your child back that same evening, more or less in one piece and none too traumatised by the event.
With your manuscript (solicited or otherwise) you can wait up to six months for any kind of a response. (Though most publishers and agents pride themselves on a three month turnaround) And when that response arrives it will be two or three lines of blandly discouraging guff on letter-headed paper with a looping signature in blue biro.
It may sound tired and jaded, and indeed it is, but my advice to any aspiring writer is: know someone. A friend of the family, a college mate; a de-frocked priest who owes you – anyone who can help you stick your head above the paper parapet. You may not rise to the top of somebody’s teetering slush pile but you will leap like a ticklish salmon over those manuscripts that come without a recommendation.
And there are going to be a lot of manuscripts in a children’s publisher’s slush-pile. This is because everybody thinks they can write a children’s book. Children are idiots, they can barely read! They’ll settle for any old rubbish: a bee with non-stick legs,* a giraffe with whip-lash; a bulimic cow. Stick it in a moralist framework with loads of faux- naïve illustrations and you can herniate your postman with massive royalty cheques.
It’s at this point at I become sickeningly idealistic, so readers of a cynical disposition may wish to look away now. I believe that the best books are children’s books. The best children’s books are full of uncertainties and subversion; little upsets and tiny revolutions. They should be about assessing preconceived values and puncturing facile assumptions. Good children’s fiction is about ideas in a way that almost all adult fiction isn’t. Most adult books are about women shopping and men blowing things up. No books are more beloved, more stark and strange than those you read as a child. None are as closely scrutinised, as learnt, as those you read in your teens. As an adult you don’t have the time and you don’t have the focus – you’re too busy worrying about weight-gain, downsizing and the accumulation of tattoos. A child is a perfect reading machine and to be a children’s author is a privilege, not a right or a fore-gone conclusion. Unless you’re Geri Halliwell.
But unless you get out of that in-tray and not into the recycling it’s never going to happen. Now I’m not saying that publishers are going to throw your manuscript into the recycling. They won’t. And that’s not because publishers are massive eco-squanderers (though they DO get through a lot of trees!) It’s because most publishers won’t accept unsolicited submissions at all. The first defence of the publishing industry, and most people’s only point of contact, is the Literary Agent.
These are the men and women with the address books; literary hustlers who know what sells and who to sell it to. They also have a lot of advice, much of it contradictory and all of it involving a lot of rewriting.
My own book “The Improving Parents”, an everyday story parental oppression and childish revenge, caught the eye of several agencies when I sent out the standard submissions package (three chapters, a letter of introduction, a synopsis and an embarrassingly brief description of my publishing history) and they each asked to see the complete manuscript. None of them have subsequently seen “The Improving Parents” as the 100% solid kid-nip it clearly is or offered me piles of cash. But a few were interested enough to give me notes, advice and actual constructive criticism. The criticism would have me construct the narrative in completely different ways: if one liked the “knowingness” of the dialogue, another asked me to tone it down. If one thought the chapters were rambling and unfocussed another thought them gnomic and tight-lipped. If one was a fan of Eric the protagonist another would prefer his friend Freya. It was all wildly inconsistent and I was wildly grateful!
These people don’t have to do this; I’ve had enough tersely polite notes describing “a lack of enthusiasm” (this is publishing speak for “it stinks like ripe brie in the toe of a work boot”) for my work to really appreciate time spent actually discussing it. They aren’t paid for it; they don’t necessarily stand to gain by it: it really is because they see something in the work. And any advice is good advice; if you have a clear-eyed notion of the value of your work and there is a good idea at the centre of it, then you can bend and stretch it in all sorts of directions. One passing remark from an agent allowed me to re-imagine the entire story, adding narrative twists, layers of meaning, new characters and literally doubling the length of the book! This extra work has made the story a much more viable commercial proposition and made me more confident about sending it out into the world.
So in conclusion: it’s a shitty business, don’t even try and don’t queer my pitch!
*Actually this one’s pretty good – I’m using it.
**I actually had to learn how to spell vacuum before I sent it in. They don't see the human cost.
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Running up that road, Running up that hill with no problems,
I'm fat. I'm a new kind of fat. In my twenties if I got fat (it was some sort of 24-hour viral fatness), I would stop eating and drinking for a couple of days and would become nice and smooth and flat again, like ironed linen. I barely ate in those days anyway and my own life-saving vanity took care of the booze. People call vanity a failing but if it wasn't for my vanity you would not want to sit next to me on an international flight. As it is I'm so small and grey and inoffensive you wouldn't know I was there. Indeed I have been plumped as a pillow before now; not the only time I've been neaded in the middle of the night. But perhaps slightly less than flattering.
These days when I find that I'm fat the fat stays put. I'm swaddled in the stuff now; I can feel it slapping me as I walk down stairs: I can feel it biting hungrily into my trousers. So I've taken steps. I've given up the booze, I'm watching what I eat (last night I watched myself eating almost an entire haggis) and I have taken to walking home from work.
I work in Swiss Cottage and I live in Finsbury Park and my chosen route home is of the "scenic" variety via Hampstead and Highgate, so it's a fair distance; about five miles by my reckoning (It may be less but in my mind it is definitely five miles).
To this end, and to keep me happy and motivated as I sweat uphill in an overcoat, I have procured stout and durable walking shoes (ox-blood Doc Martens) and an i-pod.
Here are the things I listen to:
1) The Visitors by Abba - This is Abba at their most miserable, and being Swedes Abba excel at misery, but here they are paranoid and rambling too. I once played this in a shared flat and was advised to turn "that techno shite" down.
2)Spacewalk by Momus - Am I really the only person happily bouncing around London while listening to a fey misogynist singing about taking e to squelchy retro-futurist acid? Yes I am. Obviously. A fox ran out in front of me while I was walking past Hampstead Heath and listening to this and in a freaky "Antichrist" moment seemed to join in with the "we're in the basement, we're watching baseball" line. Then suddenly it was gone. I don't know what this means.
3)Manu Chao's Clandestino album - Anything off this record is fine, even the one with the cackling old woman and the Space Invaders noises. Which is all of them.
4)White Belts by The Make-up - Probably the newest song on my i-pod. I've just checked and it came out in 1999. Ah well, I dont suppose I've missed much. This is brilliant, snake-hipped, cack-handed funkiness.Great for vaulting country stiles, which I never do.
5)Blood Embrace by Superwolf - This makes me want to kill everybody in my path.Features a clip from the film "Rolling Thunder".
6)Buckingham Green by Ween - Hilarious and anthemic. This is the story of "the child of eye" and his various encounters with royalty. The part where Dean (or Gene) Ween intones "Summon the Queen!" and the martial drums start is equalled only by the wind-machine epicness of the multiple consecutive guitar solos.
7)Differences by unknown - A curio in my collection (but then aren't they all): a hard rockin' number with psych keyboard interludes, it details the differences between homo and heterosexual culture in easily digestible vignettes. Straight men, it would appear, are interested in tinted windows and V8 engines and "Having" "It"; whereas gay men would like to know where you got that top from. That's when they're not introducing themselves to naval officers. As true today as it never was.
8) Les Petits Boudins by Dominique Walter - Rocking bit of hand-me-down Serge misogyny disguised as a scuffley skiffle. The lyrics tell the plaintive story of how it is easy to fuck plain girls as they are grateful for it. Mercifully we've moved on as a society since the sixties (except Danny Dyer). Nowadays even plain girls aren't grateful.
These days when I find that I'm fat the fat stays put. I'm swaddled in the stuff now; I can feel it slapping me as I walk down stairs: I can feel it biting hungrily into my trousers. So I've taken steps. I've given up the booze, I'm watching what I eat (last night I watched myself eating almost an entire haggis) and I have taken to walking home from work.
I work in Swiss Cottage and I live in Finsbury Park and my chosen route home is of the "scenic" variety via Hampstead and Highgate, so it's a fair distance; about five miles by my reckoning (It may be less but in my mind it is definitely five miles).
To this end, and to keep me happy and motivated as I sweat uphill in an overcoat, I have procured stout and durable walking shoes (ox-blood Doc Martens) and an i-pod.
Here are the things I listen to:
1) The Visitors by Abba - This is Abba at their most miserable, and being Swedes Abba excel at misery, but here they are paranoid and rambling too. I once played this in a shared flat and was advised to turn "that techno shite" down.
2)Spacewalk by Momus - Am I really the only person happily bouncing around London while listening to a fey misogynist singing about taking e to squelchy retro-futurist acid? Yes I am. Obviously. A fox ran out in front of me while I was walking past Hampstead Heath and listening to this and in a freaky "Antichrist" moment seemed to join in with the "we're in the basement, we're watching baseball" line. Then suddenly it was gone. I don't know what this means.
3)Manu Chao's Clandestino album - Anything off this record is fine, even the one with the cackling old woman and the Space Invaders noises. Which is all of them.
4)White Belts by The Make-up - Probably the newest song on my i-pod. I've just checked and it came out in 1999. Ah well, I dont suppose I've missed much. This is brilliant, snake-hipped, cack-handed funkiness.Great for vaulting country stiles, which I never do.
5)Blood Embrace by Superwolf - This makes me want to kill everybody in my path.Features a clip from the film "Rolling Thunder".
6)Buckingham Green by Ween - Hilarious and anthemic. This is the story of "the child of eye" and his various encounters with royalty. The part where Dean (or Gene) Ween intones "Summon the Queen!" and the martial drums start is equalled only by the wind-machine epicness of the multiple consecutive guitar solos.
7)Differences by unknown - A curio in my collection (but then aren't they all): a hard rockin' number with psych keyboard interludes, it details the differences between homo and heterosexual culture in easily digestible vignettes. Straight men, it would appear, are interested in tinted windows and V8 engines and "Having" "It"; whereas gay men would like to know where you got that top from. That's when they're not introducing themselves to naval officers. As true today as it never was.
8) Les Petits Boudins by Dominique Walter - Rocking bit of hand-me-down Serge misogyny disguised as a scuffley skiffle. The lyrics tell the plaintive story of how it is easy to fuck plain girls as they are grateful for it. Mercifully we've moved on as a society since the sixties (except Danny Dyer). Nowadays even plain girls aren't grateful.
Monday, 24 January 2011
Nun's Chuff
No booze for three weeks now. Sorely tested in the week by the arrival of Kelly's ex-boyfriends mum, an unreconstructed Glaswegian hippy (she knew the Humblebums!)with still flaming red hair and a thoroughly old fashioned lust for life. By the time I had got home from work she had been entertaining her way through a bottle of brandy, snapped the g string on my guitar (hours of bawdy fun with that one!) and was attempting to download karaoke songs for me to sing with her. Within five minutes of arrival, before the steam had lifted from my glasses, I was duetting on "Hit me with your rhythm stick" with a drunken middle-aged woman I had never met before. The brandy was winking stickily at me throughout. Later, when I walked her to the station, arm in arm, she confided to me that she had always considered Kelly to be her "dream baby". It was a tearful farewell. And then I got chips.
The last third of the brandy is still in the cupboard. That's at least two stcky fingers.
The last third of the brandy is still in the cupboard. That's at least two stcky fingers.
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