Blog
“I wanted a red one…”
The GDR I visited before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 was a cloud-cuckoo-land of misplaced trust. Citizens had invested their lives in socialist ideals. Whatever you think of the GDR regime, change was unavoidable. Its citizens were shafted, by Honecker, the SED elite and the Stasi. Living in Hamburg at the time, I felt driven to document the changes I was seeing. Inspired by a recent photo gallery on Der Spiegel’s website, I decided to blog my 1989 essay about the way it felt then. It’s not objective but it does capture the prevailing mood. Twenty-three years later, in the rubble left by the GFC, there are lessons for those of us who feel shafted by a form of power that differs less from the SED’s than we thought it did at the time.
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wordsSHIFTminds - writing that changes your mind
This is the website of author, twitterer, blogger and editor Chris Bell. wordsSHIFTminds is its own mission statement: writing that changes your mind. That change might come via a story about an imagined future Auckland and a regime that has outlawed the internet, which survives underground in dens where the citizens connect to their past via a kind of neural Wayback Machine. Or the shift might happen through trying to remember a time of innocence when it was hard to beat the taste of granny’s toast.
It’s perhaps best summarised in a quotation from Russell Hoban, taken from the Preface to A Russell Hoban Omnibus, which Indiana University Press kindly granted the author permission to reproduce in the Expanded E-book-only edition of the short story collection The Bumper Book of Lies:
“It seems to me that the realest reality lives somewhere beyond the edge of human vision; I don’t know that it can ever be seen, but I’ll keep looking.”
Interviews
Five minutes with Emily Perkins
Emily Perkins’ new novel The Forrests made a more noticeable impression on me than any new book I’ve read in 20 years; in fact, by the end of it I was buzzing as though I’d taken a drug. I had to go back over the last 30 pages and immediately reread them because the effect was so powerful. An interview with Perkins has been on the cards (or the books) since The Good Word became required viewing for writers and book lovers, a show that will be sorely missed when the station is closed down in June (boo!). (Photo: Patricia Phelan)
Five minutes with John Sundman
John Sundman is author and publisher of the cyber-nano-biopunk novels Acts of the Apostles, Cheap Complex Devices, and The Pains. After Sundman blogged about selling his books at the hacker convention DEFCON, science fiction author Bruce Sterling described him as “the future of printed fiction”. Sundman lives on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.
Five minutes withDave Pell
Dave Pell, the founder of delivereads – curated content delivered to your Kindle – is an internet early adopter who’s stuck with it, in spite (or perhaps because) of having blown cash and time on more than 50 startups, including: Corrigo, Dealbase, GrubHub, Liftopia, Marin Software, SendMe, Three Rings and Trazzler. He also tweets and blogs on Tweetage Wasteland. His posts are syndicated on NPR, Gizmodo, Forbes and Huffington Post. delivereads sends articles from the likes of GQ, Esquire, the New Yorker and the Boston Globe direct to your Kindle – the most satisfying place to read an article apart from on paper.
Five minutes with Steven Pressfield
Steven Pressfield says inspiration comes from the Muse. I no longer believe in angels or muses, but I do believe writers tap into the collective consciousness, and having now read Pressfield’s motivational books I’m willing to suspend my disbelief. I’m not the first writer to confirm his methods succeed – what we have in common is that we’ve sat down and are writing. It’s that simple, so far. As revered screenplay instructor Robert McKee says: “When inspiration touches talent, she gives birth to truth and beauty. And when Steven Pressfield was writing The War of Art, she had her hands all over him.”
Five minutes with Lisa Dierbeck
Lisa Dierbeck is the author of two novels, The Autobiography of Jenny X and One Pill Makes You Smaller, a New York Times Notable Book. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Dierbeck has contributed to the Boston Globe, Glamour, New York Observer, New York Times Book Review, People and O, The Oprah Magazine. The Washington Post Book World has described her as “An undeniably talented writer”, and the Los Angeles Times as “passionate, observant, and funny.”
Poems
Tuesday poem: black and white
When it comes to movies the old ones are still the good ones; at least in many important respects.
Reviews
All watched over by machines of loving grace There’s already much to like about a documentary named after a Richard Brautigan poem. But after stumbling across part two of Adam Curtis’s thought-provoking if infuriating three-part film All watched over by machines of loving grace on BBC Knowledge recently, I’d have sympathised with Zoe Williams writing in the Guardian, “I kept thinking the dog was sitting on the remote”, had I known she’d said it; even though I don’t have a dog and she was on about something else altogether. This may have been a bit of a mind-fuck for an introductory paragraph but it’s nothing compared with what Curtis almost pulls off in these films.
E-books
Steve Jobs’ last words “While cutting back the flat-leaf parsley today I discovered a South American rainforest tribe living in the vegetable patch.” Those who know me and who are familiar with my writing won’t be surprised to discover that Steve Jobs doesn’t appear in this new, previously unpublished short story. It doesn’t include his much-reported last words, either; so if you don’t know what they were, I recommend the search engine of your choice. The first ‘chapter’ follows, by way of a teaser. “Steve Jobs’ last words” is US$0.99 from the Amazon Kindle Store and if you join Amazon Prime you can borrow it for free.
Short-shorts
Fareham Fourth Dimension In a fourth dimension somewhere, on a windy day, Jackie Leven is carrying a rustling Somerfield carrier bag towards what appears to be the Fareham Burger Van. The man in the van, the Burger Man, seems to be Russell Hoban. Inexplicably, he is wearing a Sunderland team soccer jersey. He is holding a bottle of bright red, almost radioactive chilli sauce.
Excerpts
Sustain: Saccade, an excerpt The resonance of Himalayan singing bowls sustains in your head all week, so the following weekend you return to the farmers’ market. The square of carpet and the singing bowl man’s stand are there, along with his arrangement of bowls, his incense burner, his CDs, but not the man. You circle the market once, hoping he will return, but he is nowhere to be seen. You leave several folded banknotes under one of the bowls and take a CD from the display. No one observes you leaving and the singing bowl man does not materialise.
From the NZBC archives
Amis-hater challenge I’d decided not to re-publish an old post about Martin Amis, until I discovered a David Barrett article on Standpoint. I was defending Amis’s writing long before it became fashionable to deride him for being, as some would have it, “a really lousy writer”, “talentless” and, heaven forbid, “really annoying”. But if Barrett’s examples from Amis’s body-of-work are unconvincing, it’s incumbent on the haters to dazzle us: specimens from his superiors should be so incandescent that quotes by a talentless and lousy writer would shrivel and turn to ashes in our hands. I challenge anyone to do that by posting examples of inarguably better writing than the ones Barrett quotes. In the long silence inevitably to follow, here’s what I said about London Fields.
Stories
Everything Is Not Enough Sometimes we walk through the world so full of our own troubles that we don’t even see the world around us. Not even when it includes mangroves and snapping shrimps.
