Am I a writer if a tree falls in the forest and...

Are you a writer if you're not actively writing?

Deep, man. A friend posed this a little while back, in the rhetorical fashion. As I remember, all of us readily agreed with sentiment; after all, it's about slogging and grafting, not coasting. But I can't help thinking the question has a telling ring of 'if a tree falls in the forest' about it, and much like that old favourite, I think the answer entirely depends on your terms.

I've had a think about it (it takes me a while) and I've come to the conclusion:

The objective correlative

So once again, I ally myself with the hordes by talking about things I know bobbins about.

Am I a charlatan for not quite getting Hamlet? It seems more celebrated for its contribution to the English language than for whatever it is actually about. T.S. Eliot baldly declared the play an artistic failure, taking apart the play in an essay Hamlet and his Problems. In this essay he argued that the the play failed to show the emotions and ideas expressed by the the character Hamlet:

The art of apple eating to illustrate the passage of time

In the beginning, all action was fast paced. If you could have been in the Garden of Eden, before that unfortunate incident with the apple, you would surely have seen Adam zipping about like a child overdosed on Sunny Delight, hurtling from one screwball caper to the next. I've never quite got past the suspicion that the world is running more slowly now that it has nearly seven billion people on it. No wonder the lunchtime queue in Tescos is so long.
Tweet

Lit crit of the week, #3

"I didn't fall asleep - I just started to think about death."

Tweet

The Myth of The Basement Office

Ten Openings That Never Went Anywhere - #4

They stared at the screen together.

Across a vast, snow-covered square so large that the ends were lost in the sky, innumerable ranks of grey-green figures stood in tight rows, from the cameraman seemingly all the way to the blanket white clouds. In the distance, along one side of the square, a square black limousine struggled like a beetle, almost broken by the weight of the enormous portrait of the Dear Leader it sustained. It was only the sheer scale of the scene that revealed any sign of humanity. Rows of mourners that in any smaller number would have appeared drilled with laser-like precision revealed the subtlest kinks in the foreshortened middle distance. Perspective could be harsh.

Notes On A Lack of Scandal

I'm comfortably listening to Radio 4. Suddenly I hear a demented but tooth-grindingly familiar melody. I drop my mug of coffee on the workstop where it will bounce a couple of times, and launch myself headlong at the radio, one arm stretched out ahead, to connect to the off button on the radio. All in slow motion of course - I sail through the air, a look of pain on my suddenly pale face, splashes of coffee gracefully ascending from the worktop, and there is a slowed-down shout of

Nooooo!

It's The Archers, of course, and if anyone else in Britain is anything like me then I'd imagine there must be a sudden drop in power usage on the national grid at that moment.

Foreshadowing

Why the gap in blog posts? Was I on holiday again? No. To tell the truth, I was planning a post after reading the Iliad - it just lasted me a little longer than I'd first anticipated. Don't know why that should have occasioned me such surprsie, given that it runs to 24 books. But then you get caught up reading footnotes, and one thing leads to another, and...

The subject this time is foreshadowing. It's almost a dirty word in storytelling. 'Little did young Christopher Plumley he know, when he first joined the service of Count von Dastard D'e'Ville, of what horrors would transpire...' Who would write such a sentence now? It seems quaint, from a period when the world was Newtonian, effects followed causes, and clockwork inevitability seemed a fact of life. I suppose this is what would traditionally have been called fate - a subject that doesn't come up in fiction too often. But more's the pity?

What Microsoft Visual Studio thinks of my internal monologue

Public Sub TestMethod1()

If everybody had an ocean across the USA Then everybody'd be surfing like californi-ay

End Sub

Ten Openings That Never Went Anywhere - #3

He flexed his legs under the table to stave off cramp.

There were times, of course, when conducting a particularly boring meeting at this record company, that he would pass from one agenda item into the next and as the conference phone crackled into life, and someone in A&R began the longest possible explanation of why they were not entirely redundant in the workplace, with worked examples - and he would actually pass out with the boredom. Just for a second. One moment he'd feel himself falling, and then arrest his collapse back into his chair with a jolt, usually before anyone had even noticed, and with the A&R man still waxing boringly about the future of rock and roll. People regular blacked out during this label's meetings, and it wasn't as if he was likely to miss out on the next big thing in the space of a mere second or so of unconsciousness, but he'd never heard of anyone blacking out during their own meeting.