Books versus Vignettes

I wonder how long I drag out the self-referential fox jokes for. Until they’re as frayed and meatless as scraps of dried up kebab dragged from a 6am takeaway by hungry urban vermin. I light a fire which consumes discarded snot rags and street wood. My housemate pours me a glug of Laphroaig whisky and puts a Tom Waits record on. It is raining outside but also not raining. Water cascades off the roof and dries mid-air as though it had never been. Never reaching the ground which is dry cold and aches with a sadness belonging to more troubled souls than you and I. The lights inside flicker but don’t quite go out. The bulbs uncertain as to whether their time is up and they should take a long walk into the darkness. I read a book because it seems like the right thing to do with the music and the fire and the whisky. There was a TV scene I watched the night before in which a teenager explores his estranged father’s house for the first time. The first few rooms are typical Californian beach bum novelty, but when he enters the final room there is an entire floor to ceiling wall of vinyl records and on the opposite wall facing it a floor to ceiling wall of beautiful books. Life goals, I think. We gradually build up a pattern, one healthy glug of whisky per side of a record. Chapters of books fall out of sync with this, however. Disappearing into a broth of eloquent prose and non-existent plot. Time passes and pages turn. Tom Waits becomes Neil Young and books become cigarettes rolled up and smoked beneath the spotlight of a winter moon. Wild flames turn to hot coals emitting white heat and heavy thoughts. Cigarettes become books once more. Unraveled, unsmoked. Words return faithfully  to the page, climbing inside eyes which transmit them into language for a wet warm brain of pink. The fire and the vinyl crackle briefly and fade as one. We fall seamlessly into the sleep of winter, born away on soft dreams with the promise of spring.

© Kirsty Fox 2016

As Blue As The Land Beneath The Ice

The summer you gave me has frozen over inside an empty flat. Black on blue like the bruises insomnia leaves below my eyes. The flat is the barren plain where scraps of scrub grow resilient to the weather which beckons their death. The shabby forms of five writers sit on the shelf above the television set which is fuzzy and speaking only in tongues. Icicles form stalactites below the broad shelf, the scuffed shoes of the writers dangling as they look to each other for an answer to the question my eyebrows pose.

Jack scrapes grit from his boot with a dirty finger.

“I know the most about this winter. This icesheet. But why should I help someone who has condemned me as tired cliches your young self believed in?”

He looks at Gabriel.

“No pedestal for me when sat next to him. But I make you write don’t I? Because you think you can do better. With him you tremble with love and forget the plot.”

Gabriel said nothing. He grinned at me warmly. His face was weatherbeaten and tanned. But a tan in the light of winter looks a strange and suspicious thing. His teeth were crumbling, the more he smiled the more they slipped from his mouth like sand. His dark eyes held a love and sadness that made my heart break. That simultaneously brought value to what I felt and devalued it as trivial nonsense.

Margaret is reading. A shabby old leather-bound book, the title so faded that I can’t make it out.

“Margaret,” Jack says. “Surely you have an opinion? Like me you always do.”

Margaret lowers her reading spectacles with a long finger and peers at me and then over at Jack. They look like the construction workers hanging over New York City in that famous photo. Smiles and lunch boxes, legs dangling into the metropolitan abyss. But Margaret is the tallest and the only one who doesn’t wear a hat.

“Are you making this political, Jack? You’re not always subtle.”

Jack pointed to a spider shivering in is cobwebbed lair. “I don’t make it. It’s just the shape it comes. The pieces just fit together what the picture says is up to you.”

Margaret chuckled wisely and turned to me. “Make of that what you will!”

Her voice is clipped. American English. Two Americans and one Latin American. And what of the others? Who are the mystery pair in shadow on the end of the shelf? The whites of their eyes faintly visible in the gloom as they study the cold room with puzzlement.

“Why is it winter in here and summer outside?” I ask aloud this time. My voice shakes as though my vocal chords are wired up to a distortion pedal. as though the frog in my throat is a snake’s rattle.

The distortion moves around the room, latching onto other sounds which gather like a storm until the writers’ voices are lost. The creaks of the house become shrieks. The slight hiss of electricity becomes a mass. The spider scuttles to safety.  Time folds up on itself like origami crushed under foot. And inside the folded pages I hold my ears and cower, waiting for the end.

Thorsbairn…

Thorsbairn…

Murky psyche vibes of caves inside caves. The planet feels turmoil through its bedrock. Inner cavities drum with restlessness that isn’t boredom. A restless waiting. Knowing that thing to be coming. Stalactites climb down from the roof. You fast-forward in the mind’s eye their architectural lifespan. The shadows jitter-bug across the cave walls.

We are all here in spirit. A race of vagabonds bound to search for the centre of the planet but never ever able to dig deep enough. Never able to mine all the resources Mother Nature almost forgave us for violating. She stays hidden and elusive. She speaks softly to some of the creatures, tending to them with a maternal instinct she has lost with us. We are the child discarded in a wicker basket, floating downstream with the chuckle of the burn…

Night Logic

I am nocturnal by habit and happily so. It must be the fox genes. So it made beautiful sense to me when someone in my writing crit group distinguished the idea of night logic and day logic in writing styles. It’s like when I first ‘discovered’ magic realism. I was already writing it, I just didn’t know it had a name. Nor a complex cultural history, emerging between old folklore and contemporary writing styles like a shadow with its own mind and its own experiential narrative running through inky hand-drawn veins.

Night logic loves ambiguity, the fantastical, the subconscious seeping like goblin juice through the fine line between reality and the imaginary hinterland. I could easily slip here into a dense debate of whether there even exists such a thing as objective reality, but frankly I’ve not had enough whisky for that sort of talk.

I don’t dislike day logic. It was a mixed diet of both Ken Loach and David Lynch that turned my teenage self into a cinephile, after all. But in terms of both acute inspiration and self-expression, magic realism and night logic are my default setting. From Maurice Sendak, to Jorge Luis Borges, to Gunter Grass, to Richard Farina – my eclectic voyages into the human soul, into why we are what we are, start and end with the subconscious, with night logic.

All characters written, read or experienced are first and foremost a mystery. A mystery unravelling to themselves and the figurative reader. We show the most about ourselves in what we subdue, in quiet moments, in the black box recorder buried somewhere amongst our vital organs. Some stories just can’t be told with straightforward chronology, with clinical terms. We must wage battle with abstract nouns, mythical struggles and the restless song of the night-time breeze which refuses to explain what that strange sound was, or why our eyes forever play tricks in the dark.

This blog is written as a part of the Magic Realism blog hop organised by Zoe Brooks. For more on the magic realism hop here plus an ebook giveaway.

Further hops…

What is Magic Realism?

Sporadic Musings

Magic Realism or Fantasy?

Flying High with Magic Realism

Magical Realism and a Floating Life

Urban Fantasy and Magic Realism Matter

Serendipity – Down the Rabbit Hole

Real Magic and the Mythkeepers of this World

Facts and Fiction – Historical Magic Realism

Magical Realism Blog Hop Giveaways

White is for Witching

Magic Realism in Movies

Every Little Thing I Read is Magic

Everyday Magic Realism

What the Masters of Magic Realism Say

Some Brief Descriptions of Magic Realism Books

The Moon & Cannavaria – Children’s Fairytale Short

Extract From Company of Shadows

The Unknown Storyteller

Magic Realism for Men – No Swords or Flowing Beards Here

The Pro-Active Insomniac

In the solemn heartbreak of the small hours, the street is paved with whisky suds and gospel of past times and pastimes. The gutter that dreams are made of.

He is tall and stoops to scribble with his eyes a pattern on the tarmac. The girl in grey waits for him to approach. She sees in his face that he has not slept for days, maybe years. Waking time has drawn Saturn rings around his eyes, sketching a face that is older than its sum of years.

The girl in grey rests folded hands before her, long grey skirt billowing slightly in the 3 am breeze. When she blinks her lashes are like moth wings, frantic for a light not owed to creatures of the night. He stalls when her sees her – quietly waiting, as though she had waited for all time. He had not noticed her as he approached, but then lack of sleep fuddles him and he was busy scribbling the new order on the road beneath his feet.

He sees she is grey from dust and wonders what time has nibbled from the edges of her soft silhouette. He has written countless roads and walked countless books, but he is still stalled by the look in her eyes, as the moth-wings flash in the half-light. He scratches the tip of his interesting nose in indecision. He trusts chaos to bring him all he needs and all he doesn’t need, this has served his story well, for he always knows that something will happen. Whether or not it’s the right thing, is neither here nor there.

But now he is struck dumb in his abstract frame. Chaos has gifted him the girl in grey, but he must do something or say something. Or else she may well fall to pieces like the mist in his hands.

“You must be Nether Ed,” says the girl in grey.

Nether Ed crinkles with the kind of happiness the gutter can only dream of.

Doggerel – Moving Image & Literature

 

Promoting literature in the landscape of the post-MTV generation isn’t easy. No surprise the ‘book trailer’ has become a thing. When I first set up the website for Bees Make Honey a friend of mine (from the putrid bowels of The Social, step up Sirus Garfur) said “Looks interesting, but that’s a lot of words. Can you just tell me what it’s about?”

The short we made for Dogtooth Chronicals was born in chaos & utterly flawed. The starring role was taken by someone who looks nothing like the character, Wolfgang (as much as we tried to tramp him up & ply him with strong coffee to make him look wired). But I’m still dead proud of it & happy I got to experiment with using scratchy doodles.

So, a few points on book trailers & our piece in question…

• Don’t try to be a film trailer. You’ll fail.
• Don’t stick a camera in the author’s face & let them ramble about their masterpiece unless they’re more enigmatic & batshit mental than Hunter S. Thompson.
• Be prepared to make many compromises. I had to sacrifice a funny bit of dialogue about Rotherham bus station due to practical constraints. Bygones.
• Think outside the box, but remember point one (you’re not David Lynch). The extract we used for this didn’t make the cut for the novel – as it progressed neither plot nor character – but it was perfect to represent a bunch of things about the novel quickly.
• (Plug) If you live in the Midlands or Yorkshire Phil is totally available for hire to help make your book trailer. Email me fox.beesmakehoney@gmail.com for details.

I posted a few of my favourite bits I had to cut from the novel on this blog many moons ago, so here is the full extract for Doggerel complete with dictionary definition, should you want it.

Pyro

Tangled sinews twist up beyond the ether. A match strikes & a flame gasps into life. The dripping rag takes the flame, becoming alive in deep orange light. The gleam of an oil painting in which he is both the viewer & the subject. His body is for a moment suspended in a crouch, eyes shining faintly in the contemplative light. Then his arm stretches, reaching through the broken panel of the doorway. In through his sweater the edges of stubborn glass shards graze his arms, marking him as the culprit if forensics were ever to bother looking. But they won’t. The heat on his outstretched hand is now unbearable. He drops the flaming rag & retracts. He is shaking his hand & licking the skin between sweater & glove where it is scorched. Another mark that only the bathroom mirror will find. Private crimes that climb into his own eyes & settle. They’re promises to the fiend inside. He has been true to the flames. Flames which now lick the edges of the laboratory, searching persistently for fuel & oxygen, to feed their need to destroy.

The Graveyard Shift

THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT

Dusk came early, gulping the city and surrounding valley. Irish Steve clocked on as the builders and engineers packed up and left for the day. The easy craic and banter of the local lads soon dissolved in the approaching mizzle. Pulling on his high-vis vest over a thick wax jacket, Steve gazed about the place. The building site changed a little each day, but as night fell it loomed with the same ghouls and echoed with same sounds. He sat on the threadbare swivel chair in the foreman’s hut and pawed through a newspaper by lamplight.

The tiny lamp inside the tiny hut made the surrounding darkness deeper, darker and colder. Towering girders rolled overhead, reaching out into the indigo which enveloped the seven hills, the seven hopes, the seven places of shelter for a fugitive of daylight. The city sat spread-eagled in between, its gennels and gulleys running amok over broken-heeled cobbles. Mosswood bridges over the sound of brooks babbling, the boards creaking under the weight of ghostly padfoots patrolling the twilight.

A distant farmer making a last check on his sheep looks down from his stile. Beyond the shadowy pasture, heath and stubble fields Sheffield twinkles with secrets. Rustic bricks battle Utopian concrete. Ribs ache from laughter and drunken mishaps. Tomfools lying on cracked curbstones, while piss-artists sing at the pockmarked walls.

Irish Steve checks his watch. Many long night shifts have taught him patience, but not the kind his boss expects of him. The bricks and mortar provide stoic conversation, the sprites and goblins melancholy nonsense. Steve answers both with dry humour and the boldness of a man who has faced worst demons. A nearby derelict warehouse focuses in the gloom. Every grey window with a brick through and whiskers twitching, tiny scuttles disturbing the dust. Scrawny pigeons flock in to roost for the night, calling neurotically to one-another amongst downy twigs and shit splattered brickwork. The cold sets into bones and Steve can already sense the routine of travelling home on an early tram. Home to Brokers Place and the 7am sleet.

It’s too long to wait. He knows his will power is too weak and his guts crave beer and human conversation. A nearby stack of rubble is gurgling, damp from the soft weightless rain which is barely falling.

“If they got me a damn dog, it wouldn’t be so dull. But he’d do a better job anyways, so I’d just let the mutt mind this rammel,” he says aloud to the rubble and rats.

His newspaper rustles in reply. His breath is shallow like the lamplight, but still seems loud in the gloom. He longs to be away from sobriety and creeping loneliness. Sometimes he enjoys the solitude. He was brought up in the sticks after all, used to conversation with sheep and grasslands. Used to the mocking wind and chatter of hail. But now his kids are grown and left, he needs silliness even more. Up the hill in the city centre, the football fans will be flocking in, half-cut and full of jokes. There are local haunts where the barkeeps have named him ‘Irish Steve’, just like the dayworkers. His face is familiar – lined with a life of laughter and troubles drowned with cheap lager and knock-off cigarettes. He’s built a habit of skivving for large parts of the evening. He’ll still be on site in the small hours when the toe-rags are most likely to come looting for tools and making mischief. But the graveyard shift passes a damn sight quicker with beer in his belly and a takeaway brought back to the shabby little hut.

The same dull details, the same signs. Hard hats should be worn at all times, and hardships must be shoved into steel toe cap boots. He lights his second cigarette of the evening and puzzles over whether the newspaper belongs to today. The stories seem familiar, written for an audience that wants the same thing day-in, day-out. Sun rise, sun set, and after it sets, Steve is alone with a night-time that no-longer spooks. He smokes some and idly checks his watch again, knowing it’s a terrible habit. He tries, at least, to last a little longer each night after the lads have left. Counts up the minutes as rewards. An extra bag of pork scratchings deserved, buy that pretty bar maid in The Duck a drink tonight. He’s not one for sleazing, but takes small pleasure in seeing her smile at his jokes. When they’re good enough.

It’s colder tonight, though. So much easier to keep the icy air out with a beer jacket on. Nodding off for a wee while at 1am to the fuzz of the radio. He rubs his hands close to the little heater, which is about as hot as a candle, and stares at the dried up skin around cracked nails. The open door shifts on its hinges and outside the half-built walls grin cynically at him.

“Already?” A discarded wheel barrow says.

“No bother.” He sniffs. With weary predictability he stoops to a stand and shoves the maglite in his jacket pocket. Pushing the door further open his steps down, then stops his casual tracks. His ears chase a sound across the deconstructed brickland. There’s someone else on the site, creeping suspiciously about.

“Fur fox sake.” Steve emits a hefty sigh. He pulls out his torch, positioning it just above his head, the beam reaching out into the dark.

 

© Kirsty Fox 2013

Books vs Films – A Dystopian Tussle Between Page & Screen

A book is a commitment, a film is a brief fling. I can cram several films into one week, even between hefty work & play commitments, whereas even short novels take me at least a fortnight to digest. I take a very deep breath when opening a chunky & complex volume (such as my current three-months-and-counting marriage to Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon).

*I know this seems rich from someone who debuts their writing career with a 700 page beast, but…*

Despite beginning as a novelist, it is well-documented that I’m a huge film geek. For some reason I feel more confident blogging about films. While there are still hundreds of key titles I’ve not yet seen, I feel pretty film-literate. I’m happy to argue til the cows come home over which directors I think are a bit overrated & which I’d gnaw through my own paw to work with (Park Chan Wook? How about it? Gwan, gwan, gwan…)

*Yes I did just couple a Father Ted catchphrase with patois. You’re welcome.*

On the subject of dystopia, there is much meat on the cinema chicken. I would argue, however, that a truly authentic dystopia requires the depth, development & complexity usually only birthed through the art form that is The Novel (or its graphic relations). So, here’s a few favourites…

1. The Road

Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy (who also wrote the brilliantly brutal Coen-Bros-return-to-form No Country for Old Men) & directed by John Hillcock, The Road gives little indication of what brutal apocalypse created the living hell described. Yet the atmosphere of dread crawls into your veins & stays beyond the end credits. Despite only having one really frightening scene (in terms of an audience numbed by modern cinema), it has a visceral horror than runs throughout. Could such a subtly cruel skeleton of a story be written straight as a screenplay? Possibly. Could such a premise have been funded for filming without an incredible novel behind it? Doubtful.

2. Battle Royale

Before that other book/movie franchise with a similar premise brought the word ‘dystopian’ to the cinema-going masses (I don’t need to name it, it gets enough attention), there was the great cult hit Battle Royale. It was only recently I discovered this had its origins in a Japanese novel of the same name by Koushun Takimi. Battle Royale depicts a future in which as bizarre ‘punishment’, a group of school children are taken to an island & forced to play a game in which the only way to finally survive is to kill everyone else. It is the layers of understanding in young human relationships & behaviour that set this apart & add validity to its exploration of controversial subject matter.

3. Bladerunner, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report & Total Recall

That’s not even the full list of films adapted from novels or short stories by Philip K. Dick, the godfather of metaphysical Sci Fi. And these are just the stories attributed to him. Arguably, (like George Orwell & H.G Wells) most dystopian cinema owes him something in terms of the complex exploration of speculative ideas.

4. Brazil

I include Terry Gilliam’s Brazil as a counter argument. It was written as a screenplay & is up there in the ‘best of dystopian cinema’ list. It owes a great deal to the novelists listed above though (& a few not mentioned).

5. Never Let Me Go

By Kazuo Ishiguro. While I know the dark premise, I’ve neither read the book or seen the film. This is because I have the book & I want to read it first, but going back to my opening paragraph, I’m a slow reader. Checking details on the IMDb though has led me to notice the screenplay was adapted by Alex Garland, who I can geek about until my hair falls out. Garland is an auteur of both novel & film. His first two novels, The Beach & The Tesseract, were adapted into films (despite great subject matter, both are watchable rammel) before turning his hand to writing screenplays (mostly for The Beach’s director Danny Boyle). Both 28 Days Later & Sunshine are Alex Garland creations.

6. Children of Men

I passed this by on its release, it just seemed like one of those heavy-initial-context films (a future in which humanity have proved infertile for 18 odd years resulting in many bad things), which was likely just an excuse to shove a chiselled face in front of the camera (step up Clive Owen), and play out a bunch of action set-pieces which result in said-chiselled-face saving the world. It’s actually based on a novel by P.D. James (good gosh, a woman) & while beautifully shot, also holds a gritty Britishness (Gritishness, thanks Layts). It feels very unsettlingly authentic – from the mundanity of turning-a-blind eye to the illegal immigrants caged outside tube stations, to the creepily self-righteous agenda of the anarchist ‘Fishes’, to Peter Mullan’s bent copper. (Michael Caine’s hippy character refers to him as a fascist, but really this assumes he believes in something.)

7. Metropolis

Out of curiosity I looked up one of cinemas greatest & earliest explorations of dystopia, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Turns out it was written originally as a novel & translated to screenplay by his wife & long-time collaborator Thea von Harbou. In fact it looks like she wrote most of his best work & some of F.W. Murnau’s too.

8. Casshern

A little known & much underrated film in my humbles. This is a live action film based on an Anime from the 1970s. It’s of the post-nuclear war, dead-hero-reincarnated-to-battle-a-race-of-mutant-androids variety. I’m not sure if the complex plot holds water, but mainly this is a sumptuous feast for your eyeballs. It calls up aspects of graphic novels, but at the same time also the visions of Romanticist painters. It’s beautiful. Really. And this brings to light the other great birthpool of cinematic dystopias – comics, anime & graphic novels.

9. A Clockwork Orange

The funny thing about A Clockwork Orange is that the film was very much Stanley Kubrick’s version of the novel by Anthony Burgess. I read an article recently which suggested the humour that comes about from the so very bizarre, disturbing character (& characters) of the film was not Burgess’ intention. He was deadly serious. He was actually quite conservative. He wrote it possibly more as a fantasy of revenge after his pregnant wife was violently beaten by American servicemen & later miscarried. It was an exploration of juvenile delinquency & free will, rather than a comment on how ridiculous & horrible it is to try to ‘cure’ the deviant mind in this way. Apparently he wasn’t too impressed with Kubrick’s creation.

10. Twelve Monkeys

Another Terry Gilliam chink in my poorly armoured argument. But it brings me to raise another of my great heroes to the light, Chris Marker. Chris Marker was a French filmmaker who made the original short film Le Jetee, which the clever premise of Twelve Monkeys is loosely based on. It is largely agreed (by me & whoever else in the pub whose seen it) to be one of the greatest film shorts ever made. He also made the brilliant San Soleil, you can buy the two together on compilation, something I urge you to do if you have even the slightest interest in filmmaking, philosophy or art. Twelve Monkeys is also pretty damn good.

Dogtooth Chronicals snowy sale…

Until 21st February 2013 Dogtooth Chronicals ebook will be available on amazon for just 98p & smashwords for £2.14 Both offer samplets so you can try before you buy…

Click on the big cover icon to the right for the amazon version, where you can also read several glowing 4-5 star reviews. The paperback is available on amazon also for £8.49 Please contact me directly if you would like a bulk discount on 4+ copies e.g for book clubs – fox.beesmakehoney@btinternet.com

Dogtooth Chronicals is here on Smashwords available in pretty much every electronic format your heart may desire…

Many thanks to all those who have bought copies so far & given me feedback. You are supporting an independent niche micro-publishing venture where profits are reinvested in the local creative scene.

Happy reading, see you on the flipside x