masterkidderminster.net

Rozhodl jsem se se snažit psát post v ceštine. Chtel jsem skusit už fakt dlouho. To možná byla i cást duvodu proc jsem vubec zacal s tím blogem. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my most common reveries is of getting involved in some kind of trouble, getting beaten up. This dates right back to my days at Kidderminster college at least, where I attended as a depressed and socially anxious ninteen, twenty year old. Then, the function was clear. The beatings expressed my anger at myself, and my solecisms. They expressed too my anger, and desire for a fight with some low lifes. So too did they speak of my need for others to see me in a different light, as hard done by, certainly, but also as having an uncommon and unsuspected grit and integrity. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday creeps up every time. Every Tuesday, Wednesday I get this sense of dread that the week is slipping by already, and the depression and anxiety sets in that I’m drifting still towards that waterfall, doing nothing with it. I started getting angry yesterday, uncommunicative and evasive. M couldn’t get anything out of me. Nothing except my desperation to write. I couldn’t do anything else. She left me to it. She has done so now again and again. We made an effort for a while, and our problems were a novelty, demanding of my time, but it all cracked last weekend when she had the weekend off and had been planning exactly what we could do with it, but I became desperate at exactly the same time and had to write. God, I can’t believe it has been a week since I tried to write a poem, The First Circle, which I shall be posting about some time soon when I get round to it. That fact depresses me. It literally feels as if I haven’t lived for a week. Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago at Christmas I got a book, a collection of stories by Adrian Tomine called Sleepwalk which touched me deeply. I had come back from Prague, where I had spent Xmas with M’s family, and my notebook. I had been dog-sitting for hours every day as they went to visit M’s grandmother, who was seriously ill in hospital, and I filled page after page with scrawlings, sketchings and ideas. Read the rest of this entry »

In my time writing this blog, that is, trying to, trying not to, writing those desultory pieces in the useless downtime I could not set to any other useful purpose, I have scratched the surface of what it is all about so little that as often before, I tend to feel it is better not to have opened my mouth, put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard at all, than to settle for something so inchoate, that will inevitably allow people to know me less rather than more. One of the things I have barely mentioned is my notebooks. Strange, given that, I suppose, looking back, these notebooks, full of thoughts badly expressed, drawings, poems, names of novels and stories, song lyrics, inventions, angry jottings, ideas for anything from monetary systems to bicycle, camera and guitar designs, stories, of course, are a more consistent part of my behaviour since childhood than anything else. Also, they are the place I sketched out (literally), my ideas for this site which has, of course, come to be nothing remotely like the eccentric but coherent and characterful website I first planned out. Read the rest of this entry »

My immune system’s down. I’ve been smoking for a while now. Took it up again when M was away in Prague for a couple of weeks. I’ve been away for a while now. My priorities once again completely shifted. This blog wasn’t going where I wanted. I didn’t have time for it. It was taking time from what I needed to do. I was only making myself more misunderstood. Failing to get through to anyone. Read the rest of this entry »

It must be five years ago now I started a piece entitled something like “Araf” after the Welsh word for slow painted on to so many of the tight bends of the roads around Snowdon. I was between jobs. Between two of the same jobs, underemployed with my first class honours degree, working in a Wilksons first in my home town and then in Scab City, my university town. I had organised a transfer. Or rather, since I was incapable of doing anything so proactive, so profound was my difficulty with concentration at the time, my manager organised it for me, trying no doubt to earn brownie points. And with a little time in hand I decided to go away with a friend, travelling in Betsy, my first car, a Toyota Corolla I had inherited from my Mum (I have since inherited my second, also Betsy, although not so emphatically, a Corolla identical but for the colour and its prepensity to rust, from my brother). Read the rest of this entry »

Chutzpah is the latest easy-to-write novel that I’m going to just churn out. It’s more autobiographical than I’m happy with, being basically an extension of the original conception of yeswehavenobananas.net, the sister blog of masterkidderminster.net.

It will concern the writing of a couple of stories, and the shifting of my priorities in the process, my reveries, ideas and moods.

I would need to document some reveries and the like to do it. I’ll try and note a few now.

Billy Liar type disquisitions, sending in the SAS to brothels, and answering questions in foreign countries about how a brothel owner was shot in cold blood by saying that any brothel owner or anyone working in the industry who is concerned about the health problems associated with their profession should go to their nearest Job Centre to discuss the possibilities for training.

Inventions for Dragon’s Den. A range of sockets with timers and key locks to prevent use of such devices as Playstations. This after a productive meeting with a students’ psychiatrist.

We’ll give you the stars. The slogan of a political movement that cuts out light pollution.

Ringing round Prague for a hotel for the head chef, who was upset over a deal falling through.

The usual secretaries. The sex blogger at a literary awards ceremony giving me a blow job under the table as I’m called up.

But I’m tired and my priorities have been shifting round all day.

1> Guitar [up]

2> Chutzpah/No Satisfaction (latest novel) [new entry]

3>  Dating site [new entry]

4> Obsession with Macs [new entry]

5> Playstation [new entry]

6> Obsession over making a guitar/customising [new entry]

7> Gym [up]

8> Tristram Shandy. Displacement (I must read Sterne to  write Chutzpah) [up]

9> Music in general, buying, listening [up]

10>

Checkmate (formal struggles) [down]

Lanark (does nothing for me) [down]

Book Club (don’t want to be lumbered with books like the above, nor do I want to be some control freak with this a further part of a failure to socialise well) [down]

Blogs (disillusionment [down]

Writing in general (disillusionment) [down]

G/F C/F diet [down]

Short Story reading [down]

This is the first story in the collection, since I started reading it again at the end of the summer, which to me is entirely unsatisfying.<--More-->

It is a short piece and the main character is indeed a dragon. Now, I have no objection to stories about animals, nor even fictional animals. There is one story by Kafka which I began to read some months ago about a mole-like creature living in a constant state of anxiety. That was a longer story, and I stalled in reading it. I was reading several things at the same time back then, but the story also failed to sustain my interest. At least, however, I could see what was being expressed. Just as Temple Grandin, who writes about autism and studies animal behaviour, has written about animals and considers that the state of anxiety that aspergic and autistic people tend to experience is redolent of the state she considers most animals experience themselves, Kafka was making a point about humans which raises this story to a level where it demands attention as a part of his oevre. I do object, however, to a reliance on the fantastical to shore up a story. For me, every writer who supplied a positive quotation for that insipid tome The Life of Pi where even the protagonist cannot be named without some phobia of ordinary life getting in the way, is tainted. Here too, just with talking tigers who are said somehow to provide proof of God, the problem was mainly that dragons do not exist and so fail to excite me. But another issue here is that there is little substance to the humans who populate the story in its few pages. Nabokov resorts to some simplistic satire in collapsing the town targeted by the dragon, who finally ventures out of his cave, into a struggle between two tobacco firms. The first puts posters all over the dragon, who sleeps off his indigestion after eating a few people, and then the second, mistaking the dragon for a rubber mock-up provided as a PR stunt sends out a man on a horse dressed up as a knight. This sends the dragon back to his cave in remembrance of the death of his mother. Soon after, he dies.

The problem here is that we have no reason to care about anybody or anything in this story and so the only thing which could conceivably amuse would be the satire, which is pretty broad brush stuff, or the fantasy, which is itself pretty pedestrian, especially with this dragon expiring so easily after no confrontation at all.

Given the satire there is no reason for us to favour one tobacco firm over the other, to salute the inventiveness of one manager over the other, especially given that the death and retreat of the dragon is serendipitous.

I have not yet decided what to make of this author as a short story writer. Of course, I have not yet tackled his great works.