Hieronymous the Anonymous

Bedroom voice

I woke up this morning thinking the time is now right to get my women's erotica business finally up and running.

That may seem an unusual statement, and one might wonder what dreams I had last night that led me to this decision. As I do every night these days I dreamt much overnight, but none of it related to this. Rather I woke feeling restless and impatient, tired of waiting for things to shift in my favour and wanting to do something for myself. The erotica business sprung to mind immediately, fortuitously in some ways. In the years since I first came up with the idea the technology to make it so has become simpler and more common, and the world itself I think moved in a direction more favourable to such a notion.

The original idea was this: erotic stories written for and addressed directly to women. The stories were told in the first person by the male protagonist, but spoken to the recipient - their lover - as if in a letter, or a remembrance, or a long monologue, X rated in parts like a Mills and Boon with the naughty bits left in. The hook was that these stories were to be recorded and personalised to the customer - say someone called Emma ordered a story then she would be delivered a recording in which her name was spoken and her blonde hair and blue eyes would feature. The idea was to create an intimate bond, and the market lonely or bored housewives looking for adventure and the touch of the exotic.

It was a winning concept. I wrote half a dozen stories without too much difficulty, all well received by my focus group. I created a website and did some pre-advertising, which returned very promising results. The problem I found was finding someone to record the stories. Some of it was my embarrassment - I felt pretty awkward asking these characters to recite these stories. The few guys who actually agreed to it were all wrong for it.

The stories had to be intimate and conversational. Not a story really, and not told as a conventional story would be. It was more a reminiscence, the free flowing thoughts of someone recalling a moment or a relationship, spontaneous and real in the way that people are. I didn't want a pristine performance of it - as some tried to give me - but rather the sort of naturalistic flow you get recalling something over a bottle of wine, or murmuring into your loved one's ear.

To that end I also knew the type of voice I wanted - educated, but colloquial Australian. That's how the stories were written, that's how they had to be recited. Of course I had much grander ambitions than that. Most of the respondents to my advertising were American, and clearly that would be my biggest market should it take off. While many would likely swoon imagining some handsome Hugh Jackman or Eric Bana whispering in their ear, the reality was that I would need American voices too.

That was the idea, but none of it came off. I couldn't get the voices and I struggled to find the technology to manage what I promised. The project was regretfully shelved.

Seven years later and times have changed. I doubt the personalisation - such a great idea - is viable even still, but much else has changed. I still need to get voices, but I can outsource much of that. The website is simple, the stories are written - though I'll probably need to write another half dozen for variety.

Bedroom voice is making a comeback. Maybe.

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More than gay fiction

Cover of A Single Man

Killing time in Sydney the other week I went to the Kinokuniya bookshop for a hour. This has become an unexpected ritual for me. There is something about the store I like though I can't explain what - it is far from the intimate bookshop of cliche. I've been to the store in Singapore also, a vast space you could spend days in; and the store in KL to, in the Petronas tower.

This time walking in I stopped at a table of so-called gay fiction - the gay mardi gras was days away. A few days before I had watched The Hours for the very first time and been impressed by it. Though greatly reviewed I hadn't ever considered reading the book. That changed after seeing the movie - and there it was. It seemed meant to be.

I picked it up thinking that it didn't really fit my idea of 'gay' fiction, though it touches upon the subject. That wouldn't have stopped me reading it necessarily, my problem hitherto was that it seemed too feminine a book. That was my ignorance. The main characters are all women which makes for an emphasis that is vaguely feminine and sensitive, but the themes are universal. I wanted to read it.

Beside it on the table was another book very much of the moment: A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood. The movie adaptation of this was one of the best things I saw last year, so this too I collected and took to the counter.

I am now reading The Hours after completing A Single Man.

A Single Man was great. Gore Vidal described Isherwood as one of the great prose stylists, and there are passages and scenes in this small book that are beautiful to read and perfectly constructed. As you expect there is a depth and sensitivity to the story that magically made its way to the screen. George is a flesh and blood character easy to understand and identify with. You care for him. As his tale unfolds, as he goes about his business with fleeting thoughts across his mind, deeper reflections and occasional encounters with others, a life is revealed very true to what we know I think, and how we live no matter our desires. It is rich in experience and memory; it touches upon the poignant hopes and regrets all of us harbour.

It is a beautiful book, but though the movie is very similar it is different in very key aspect. Right from the first moment of the screen version George has committed himself to ending his life at the end of the day. He has battled on since the death of Jim, but it seems a hollow, futile exercise. What he had won't come again; the peak has past, his moment come and gone. Why go on? And so we follow as he prepares solemnly for that end and goes about his daily rituals for the last time.

Surprisingly that is an invention of the screenwriters. In the book George has no thought of doing himself in. He repines for Jim, he recalls constantly different moments of affection and happiness which make it to the screen. He is not unhappy in the book, but nor has his grief outworn him. He will go on even if existence is thinner, if meaning is less tangible. He is no automaton, but he will continue in the groove until his time is done.

It's rare that I prefer the movie over the literary version. I think it is a great book, but the expedient used in the movie makes it more powerful. It is the medium perhaps that makes this little contrivance so effective. The clock is ticking, an understated urgency pervades the film as George goes about his life knowing as we do that these are his last moments, the final occasions. For this to be realistic George's grief must be deeper, more pervasive - or seem to be.

I loved the book - to read is a different experience, and this is the work of a great writer. The movie is great also, perfectly wrought from the material and with the astute change which might not have worked so well on the page. Just for the record I've since bought Isherwood's Berlin Stories, some of which are the basis for the Bob Fosse movie Cabaret.

I have since started The Hours and am about halfway through. It is expertly written. In sections it echoes Mrs Dalloway, which it mirrors in style. It is a dense reading experience, deeply felt, though it is perhaps a little over-written for my taste. It seems a harsh quibble. That's a subjective assessment, and it is meant to take on much of the dense style of Virginia Woolf. There is no question of how authentic it feels: this is how we live also.

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Staining the sheets

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I'm reading Portnoy's Complaint again this morning and laughing every couple of pages and thinking to myself that every woman should read this if they want to understand men. Not all of it is relevant - I mean the Jewish guilt thing won't apply in most cases, and perhaps most men aren't quite as sex-fixated as Portnoy is, but every man has that in him. They might have smaller doses, they might be cleaner, less scatological, in their sexual outlook and desires, but in every man I bet there exists to a lesser or greater degree that sexual focus.

It's not all about that, though everything ends up there. Portnoy has a Jewish angst in spades, he can't get enough of pussy in all its many varieties, and he's also an intellectual snob. For all it's ribald humour and brilliant exposition the book is a journey from an amusing bitterness at his prototypical Jewish parents and all they have done to him to an understanding of how judgemental he has become as a result.

'Monkey' is not not good enough for him ultimately because she comes from backwoods Southern stock, is poorly read and can't spell to save herself. I know plenty of people ready to make swift judgements on the same criteria, so it's not particularly unusual. Portnoy is the human rights commissioner however, a paragon of liberal virtue supposedly, and while plenty will rule someone out because of bad spelling (all my female friends do), Portnoy - Port-Noir - in his role as friend to the downtrodden should be better.

It's not as simple as that naturally. He doesn't mean to be. Often he doesn't really understand he's making those judgements. And if he is it's in large part because of the judgements he has been forced to grow up with - to be this, to do that, to live up to the impossible and occasionally ridiculous standards of a neurotic Jewish mother.

Amid the laughter and familiarity in reading this I find myself wanting to share the random thoughts that are refracted from the page. It's one of those books that makes me think, and want to share what I think. In a funny way my inability to really do that (outside of these pages) leads me around to Portnoy's view.

I'm a democratic character and have trouble in believing in subjective concepts of 'better'. Am I a better person by being smarter, taller or prettier than you? Of course not. Am I better than you because I spell better? No. Yet that's a judgement many people make every day. And I understand it.

There's a lot in this book that resonates with me. I have an IQ of 162. I've got used to the reality that much of what happens in my head I'll never get to share with anyone. Most people don't read as I do, don't read what I do, don't go off spinning ideas out of it. That I do doesn't make me better, but it makes me different to most of the population. That's life.

Reading this book though has re-awakened whatever angst I might feel at this. Part of Portnoy's complaint ultimately is finding someone he can be on equal terms with, without any of the great baggage he carries with him. He finds sexual companionship that is almost manic in it's obsession and imagination. If he allows himself he might find something of the emotional equivalent of it - though he doesn't allow it, not for long. What he doesn't find is the  solace that comes from opening your mind entirely and letting the intellectual bibs and bobs flow from it to another.

It may sound pretentious, but what the fuck, I remember now how I miss that myself. So much seems wasted, so much that with the right person becomes an integral element of a rich life together goes nowhere instead. Funny reading a book in which masturbation features so much to be thinking this because so much is intellectual onanism. I get up from bed reading my book, my thoughts staining the sheets.

Too good to let go

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At lunchtime browsing the shelfs of a bookshop I was moved to pick out Phillip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. I wondered if I did so if I was moved to do so by the news yesterday of the anti-masturbation nutter. This, ultimately, is the wankers bible after all - and a great book I read when I was a kid but never since. I bought it.

Back in the office I came up with a slogan for an anti anti-masturbation ad. Masturbation: too good to let go.

The Death of Ivan Ilych

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In my journeys to and from work this week I've been plugged in listening to an audio version of the Tolstoy story The Death of Ivan Ilych.

I read this the old fashioned way many years ago, when I was just out of my teens. It was powerful to me then and in the years after as I moved around the world, from one address to another, through jobs and relationships, over the seas and back again, this book was one of about a hundred I kept close to me.

From time to time I would be moved to pluck it from the tightly packed shelves of my bookcase and return to the yellowing, brittle pages of a long ago paperback edition. More than anything else I returned to the last couple of pages when Ivan Illych was in the final throes of a protracted, painful illness.

His family is arrayed all around him waiting for his inevitable end. To them he is the picture of pathos, crying out in pain and seemingly delirious with it. His perspective is different. Throughout the story we have read as he journies himself through the different stages of his illness. At some point he recognises that he will die, and alternately denies and despairs at it. What is death, what does it mean? It looms dark, mysterious and terrifying.

Then in those last few pages he finds a measure of peace. While he writhes and cries out in seeming pain before the horrified eyes of his family he is actually slowly reconciling himself to the spiritual journey that culminates in his death, and possibly goes beyond it. "Forgive me" he mutters to his wife who, in his weakened state mishears him thinking he is saying "forgo". It matters not.

He passes away and the scenes we read at the very beginning of the story now take place, but he is gone.

Though I cannot put my finger on it those last couple of pages seemed to contain a supernatural wisdom. Each time I read it I find myself pausing, moved in ways I cannot explain.

I go back to it again and again for that reason; and because the story is a masterpiece. I read it appreciating the art and genius of it. I study it trying to learn. Perhaps I can become a better writer by reading it closely I think, and I do, feeling myself fall into the story.

This is a story in full, with every character completely developed, with their flaws exposed in perfectly normal ways, and the story pervaded with a deep sense of humanity that seems very Tolstoy. They are normal, good people living through normal events revealed/exposed benbeath the nib of Tolstoy's pen. He knows these people thoroughly, to the bone, and that is where his wisdom and genius comes from: an eye for human nature, an innate understanding of what motivates and moves us more than any other author. And he expresses that simply and clearly, recording it as it is.

Listening to it this time rather than reading it I was reminded of that. It's a story every literature lover should read at least once in their life.

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For the love of Rigby

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I lay in bed last night reading. As is his custom Rigby lay atop the bedclothes with his head resting upon my knee. He watched me with half closed eyes and already had the slow, heavy breathing of impending sleep. I was reading a story by Stefan Zweig. The story reminded me of another by Ivan Bunin. By association then my mind leapt even as I continued to read, to another story by Bunin that seemed in some way to parallel the relationship between Rigby and I.

Changs Dream's is a marvellous, often tragic, but ultimately life affirming story of a man and his dog and their ongoing relationship as the mans life goes from wrack to ruin. Throughout Chang, the dog - through whose eyes the story is told - remains devoted to his master. He watches the decline sympathetic and protective of his master but powerless to do anything much to help him. He is all love and loyalty, as dogs are.

In the story the tragic life of the man, an ex-sea captain, finally comes to a premature end, but Chang finds another life to go on with. My life is not tragic and gives no indication it might become so, touch wood, but I feel it tied to Rigby much as the captain's life was tied to Chang. Rigby watches me, follows me, he holds tight to my orbit. He likes nothing more than to snuggle and to touch, he shares his devotion, his affection freely. For the most part I am touched by this, though there are times I wish he were more independent.

Like Chang and the captain though we feel like a team, bound tight to each other while we - I particularly - go out into the world to quest for all manner of things. I return from my quests and he is waiting.  I may see all manner of women and bring some of them home, but for now they are transient episodes. Life revolves all around us ever-changing, ever-challenging, but in the still-point at the centre of it is Rigby wanting only to share with me. Rigby is the constant, my wingman if you like, and me his beloved master.

I've said before that if I ever find a woman to love me as Rigby does then I'll be a lucky man. Equally true is that I ever find someone I trust as much as he and who inspires as much casual affection as he does then there is nothing more I could ask for.

 

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Jaws

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I’ve just finished listening to Jaws on audiobook. Everyone knows Jaws, the movie anyway, but it started out as a blockbusting book by Peter Benchley. Though I don’t have any distinct memories the famous cover with a giant shark headed towards an unsuspecting swimmer evokes in me particular sensations: hot sand and the glistening sunscreen, body-surfing and the tang of salt water. It might be the classic airport novel,  but it was read on a lot of beachs, the paperback jammed into the beach bag and read laying on a towel on a sunny beach in the mid-seventies. Someone in my family read it because I recall the dog-eared paperback in the bookcase. London to a brick it was read on one of our Christmas holidays at Blairgowrie over 30 years ago.

I never read it. I’ve seen the movie maybe 4-5 times and think it’s great. It’s an iconic story and an iconic movie. Somehow it’s very emblematic of the time it was written; somewhere between the lines it captures the zeitgeist of the era. Listening to the book it brought back memories of that time, different to now, more innocent in a way, less knowing and polished; and of the place too. A book like this probably resonates more with Australians than it does most of the world. Amity is a fictional town on the east coast of the states, but the beach culture described in it is pretty familiar to Australians. The sensations it evokes in me might well come directly from the pages of the book, and the fear of lurking, unknown killers in the deep is probably more relevant here than it is even in the states. To most Europeans it must seem an abstraction, but to us it is a reality that we are regularly given cause to remember.

I was surprised that the book was different to the movie. I shouldn’t have been I suppose, but that’s what happens when your reference point is not the source material  but something made of it. The book is adapted to the screen and made cinematic, and that’s perfectly normal. What is less normal is that despite the quality of the story-telling I found the movie better than the book.

A story like this seems made for the big screen. It has all the elements that thrill, excite and terrify an audience, as well as the virtue of being well framed by the screen. The book is more rambling and extended and has sub-plots that are dropped in the film version. While the sub-plots might have resonated once they now seem like tedious distractions. The movie has made a cleaner, more streamlined version of the story in the book. Ultimately it’s a simple story and that’s what Spielberg played up: shark terrifies seaside town, panic ensues and recrimination, until in the climax man overcomes beast in a mighty, bloody battle.

This was Spielberg’s first movie hit. Looking back from this distance it seems like a typical Spielberg movie. He has a particular view and is very exacting in representing that vision on screen. A lot of the menace in this movie is almost subliminal. He builds the tension surreptitiously, using our psychology against us. Everyone knows the Jaws theme, and it perfectly encapsulates the lurking, growing, unseen menace. There is something of that in the book – Benchley is a good writer and particularly fine in those scenes. It is made for the screen though and Spielberg uses the tools at his disposal expertly. Like Hitchkok used to do he gives away a part of the story so that we the audience know what the victim to be does not. Despite knowing what is to come we urge the innocent swimmer to swim faster, to turn the other way. All throughout Spielberg plays upon our shadowy fears. We see the swimmer from the perspective of the shark, the feet gently kicking in the dark water before cutting away to the impending victim in all their innocence. All the while the shark circles closer, it’s fins cutting through the sea as it stalks it’s victim, swimming or playing, near to safety, but not near enough.

Another difference in the movie from the book is the characters. They have the same names, they have some of the same paranoia and neurosis, but in stripping away much of the extraneous story key elements of their character and personality has been changed. Hooper, for example, the Marine Biologist played by Richard Dreyfuss in the movie as a bit of a fussy nerd is in the book an irritating, handsome character from the right side of the tracks having an affair with Brody’s wife. Brody as played by Roy Scheider in the movie is high strung and obsessive, in the book he is that and a paranoid boor too, a throwback to less enlightened times. The movie uses the conniving mayor but changes his motives and personality, and drops the organised crime angle. The only character who really transfers completely from book to movie is Quint. In both book and film he is a magnetic, Captain Ahab type character. Listening to the book he was always Robert Shaw in my mind.

In the movie the last act is all about the stalking of the shark. This takes place over three days in the book; in the movie it is one day only. This change compacts the action and creates a greater sense of showdown. Listening to the book I recalled a scene original to the movie where Quint tells the story of how his ship went down in the war and how most of the survivors where savaged by marauding sharks. It is a chilling tale that adds depth to the battle between man and shark, and adds layers to the character of Quint, but is absent from the book.

The last act of the movie is great. Spielberg in the movie ratchets up the tension and tightens the action. It is both more dramatic and more poignant. Hooper, the slightly bumbling enthusiast in the movie somehow survives against the odds when he dies in the book. This adds a sense of uncertainty as the final scenes are played out. And the final scene is literally explosive in the movie, victory snatched from the bloody jaws of defeat; in the book it is almost anti-climactic.

I enjoyed the book and listened to it compulsively, but somehow find myself in the rare position of thinking it less than the movie of it. It’s funny, the book is longer and strays further, but the movie has so much more in it that just adds to the story layer upon layer. The book is a classic for what it is, but the movie is one of the greats.

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Subject and perspective

George Orwell once wrote a famous essay entitled Why I Write. In it he explained the path that led him to becoming a writer, and in a typically clear-headed way went on to describe what he felt were the main reasons that anyone chooses to write. It’s a fine essay and contains much more than I have been able to summarise here.

I’m not a writer like Orwell, nor, as yet, like anyone else you can name. My writings are limited to these erratic scribblings and to the stories that fester in my head before being put down on paper and locked up in my bottom drawer. For me it is largely a surreptitious act, though central to who I am. I don’t set out to write; I write as an outcome of how I live.

Last night as I watched TV my mind wandered of its own accord and took up some of the more recent issues in my life. I probably had a mental grizzle about one thing or another. Shortly my thoughts turned to my thought processes themselves: how I think, and why. It sounds convoluted, like staring into the myriad reflections of facing mirrors – but there’s more. Looking between depthless reflections led me to understand why I write. Between the observed and the observer, subject and perspective, is the mental world I live in. It’s neither a gift nor a particular talent, no more so than Orwell when he describes how he came to write, and why.

I write because I am such a receptive subject. Though I generally segregate the different things happening in my life – to an unreasonable degree often – that doesn’t prevent me from feeling to the fullest extent. I think I am a rare beast. Though I’m heavily rational and intellectually driven I am more in touch with my feelings than most, and plumb the extremes more fully. What I feel is like the changing weather, sunny sometimes, stormy at other times, and in all variations between, and I feel directly as the sun on my skin.

That might normally make me volatile and unpredictable, when in fact I am safe and reliable – much more so than the average Joe. Whether it is by temperament or because I have trained myself the segregation controls things in much the same way the partitions in the hull of the Titanic were supposed to make it unsinkable. I suppose I run the same risk as the Titanic of running into an iceberg that will upset everything, but who doesn’t? So far, by and large, it’s worked fine.

It’s that combination of – qualities? – that make me a writer. I have the insight to understand the psychology and emotional ructions because I have experienced them myself; but I am rational enough that even in the deepest turmoil I can view the ructions with a curious detachment. I think too much, but can’t help it. It is as natural to me as it is for a bird to fly.

This is the experience I carry with me. Having been there and done that I know what it’s like; and knowing that I see more, am more perceptive I think and aware of the deep running currents in others. I find myself as a result often intrigued and led on by my curiosity that then transfigures my imagination. What is left unknown is supplemented by my fantastic speculations.

These are the ingredients for writing. In the end I feel compelled to record some reflection of this onto paper. Much as I enjoy the result it is often hard work – yet it feels something I must do. As I have said many times before, I write to explain the infinite variety of experience and feeling to myself. The act of writing weighs up those experiences and imposes some order upon them: my rational self seeks to explain what I have seen and felt and experienced.  It is a personal journey that plays out in the pages of my stories, refractions of what I know in words that ultimately lead back to me.

Many writers claim to write for themselves, which is something I completely agree with. My stories may never see the light of day and will be no less important for that.

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What would Jane Austen think?

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As we speak bookshops all around the world are being infested by novelty horror novels, rip-offs of classic works of literature that now feature zombies, vampires or monsters. Jane Austen’s great novel Pride and Prejudice is now appended with a and Zombies. (Likewise Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Android Karenina, and so on.) Mediocrities are riding on the coat-tails of genius. They take a classic, they bastardise, sensationalise and basically corrupt it by inserting flesh eating zombies, blood crazed vampires and hungry sea monsters. Clever, huh?

Like it or not they appear a publishing phenomenon that’s not going to go away in a hurry. There’s even some talk of film adaptations for God’s sake. Browsing the shelves of my local book-store earlier I came across about half a dozen of these books littering the shelves. As far as I’m concerned it’s a travesty. Not only are these people exploiting the talent of their betters, their grubby ambitions – to cash-in – fly in the face of what literature is about.

No-one will admit to it of course. If anything they’ll describe it as some post-modern mash-up, as if it pays homage to the original work. That’s bullshit no matter how you spin it.

In the last 20 years say we’ve seen a lot of contemporary musical artists, especially rap, ‘sample’ riffs and melodies from the works of past masters. By and large it has been selective. At its most creative the use of sampling references other times and other music that adds an interesting layer to what we are listening to here and now.

These books cannot aspire to such artistic heights. They do not sample to start with. There’s a long history of writers taking famous literary characters and plonking them into alternate narratives, whether they be in different settings or circumstances or simply positing an extended story-line to the original. I can’t think of a single one of these that has made a lasting impact, but some are interesting at least, and they do show some originality.

Not so these efforts. The authors of this current crop take the characters, the setting and the basic plot-line of the classic novels – essentially the guts of it – to which they make their ridiculous additions. They take the work of someone else, the product of genius as well as blood, sweat and tears, and piggy-back it with their lame contributions and whistle all the way to the bank.

What art is there in this? None. It’s the work of a con-man. The inspiration that begets originality is missing, unless you consider a whoopee cushion original. The worlds and characters they appropriate are the creative outcome of another person's imagination. What was unique in the original is devalued by mass-producing and re-labelling it with a few quirky changes, and putting it under a different name. It has 2010 written all over it.

It’s shabby and it’s wrong and, without getting too precious about it, it shouldn’t be allowed. They haven’t earned it these charlatans, and they don’t deserve it. These writers are the Vanilla Ice of the literary world.

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Bullet in the Brain

By my bathtub at home there is a small wooden container atop which there are about eight paperbacks within easy arm’s reach. As I have expressed before I like to read in the bath, and with the cooler weather approaching bath season is returning. Before you know it I’ll be happily languishing in a hot bath with a good book as the cold closes in outside.

By and large these are books I can easily dip into without needing to read consistently. At the moment there is one book of popular philosophy, a travel book, and two books of short stories.

One of the short story books is the collected works of Tobias Wolff. I’ve probably been reading this for the last 6 months, reading one and maybe two stories each time I sink into the comforting waters of my bath.  I guess by now I am about 2/3’s through.

Last night as I lay in the bath I picked up this book again and opened to the page I had left off. I began reading. Now Wolff is a great short story writer and I’ve stopped to appreciate many of his stories over the period. The tell-tale sign for me is when I read something and feel envious of the talent and wonder if I could ever write like that.  That might sound a bit trite, and the truth of it is that whatever envy I feel is overshadowed normally at the gratitude at having shared in something so fine. That’s a nice feeling, and something I have experienced maybe ten times since picking up his book.

Last night in the bath I read a story that left me with not one bit of that wistful envy. The story was so good that there was no room for anything but a kind of sorrowful joy. Bullet in the Brain is a brilliant story, simple but with all of life in it. The best stories are like that. This had echoes of Citizen Kane in it, and the final enigmatic words in the movie, rosebud...

Here it all made perfect sense, and in the swift recollections of the protagonist and the strange permutations of his mind there was felt the whole weight of a live lived, right to its smallest detail.

Read this story. It’s one of the best.

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