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literary blog - writer's blog |
by Hugh Cook |
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Section 147 Entry 0001. Date: 2005 May 22 Sunday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) I found an article about a writer who got cancer and who, as a consequence, was motivated to push ahead and write his next novel. Potentially interesting stuff, but all the details were missing. What kind of cancer? What was his initial prognosis? What hospital? What treatment? What drugs? Did he get chemotherapy? Radiation? Surgery? We're not told any of that. Rather, the article is written as if being a writer is more interesting than being a cancer patient. Which I suppose might be the case, for some readers. The article, by Hannah Sperber, is on pages 26-27 of the Canvas supplement to the Weekend Herald dated May 21, 2005. It's about New Zealand novelist Nigel Cox, author of Tarzan Presley, who was diagnosed with cancer in 1997, an event which motivated him to buy a new computer and write another novel, Skylark Lounge, published in 2000. We learn a little about Cox's mortality shock and subsequent productivity, but I would have preferred to have learnt more. Still, it's an interesting article, and Cox's new novel, Tarzan Presley, sounds as if it contains some interesting things. Apparently it involves, amongst other things, "Tarzan battling giant weta in the Wairarapa, before travelling to Memphis and becoming Elvis." (Weta: an extremely large and ferocious-looking insect found in New Zealand, looking a bit like a nightmarish locust from outer space.)It seems from the article that the publishing house, the Victoria University Press, thought that it would be okay to publish this Tarzan book in New Zealand because (according to someone quoted from the VUP in the article) the Tarzan books are all out of copyright in New Zealand. Regardless of whether this "out of copyright" claim is true or not, an entity named as "Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc." apparently made threatening legal noises, with the outcome being that Tarzan Presley will not be reprinted. Apparently the guy speaking for the VUP still believes that Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. is "not in the right legally" but does not have the money to indulge in an expensive and unpredictable legal battle. I suppose I could theoretically be expected to feel sympathetic for both writer and publisher - offshore entity tramples dream of Kiwi author and publishing house - but in fact I don't. In fact, to tell the truth I feel heartlessly indifferent. My own take on copyright law is that (from a strictly utilitarian viewpoint) it's smart to ask yourself not just the question "In terms of the strict letter of the law, what do I technically have the right to do?" but also the question "Who is likely to threaten me with legal action even if the law is technically on my side?" Also, I think that on principle it's smarter to work with your own original characters - Wairarapa Boy, for example, the radioactive nanotechnologically evolved chocolate weta from the sticks - rather than recycling fragments of someone else's fictions (however originally inventive the recycling). Because then, if you get a big hit, there is all this stuff (movie rights and the like) that you can sell internationally. That said, however, the notion of a book featuring "Tarzan battling giant weta in the Wairarapa, before travelling to Memphis and becoming Elvis" seems intrinsically brilliant to me, and inspires me with the notion of writing a freewheeling piece of fiction possessed of the same kind of loopiness. Unfortunately, I can't immediately think of any starting point. What I've been doing recently is plowing ahead with my novel BAMBOO HORSES, which, despite its fantasy elements, is pretty conventional, in that it's a crime novel: the hero, Ken Udamana, is in danger of being murdered, and, being in danger of becoming the victim, has to figure out who the murderer is. I've also been putting in quite a bit of work on my poetry, which is something I've found myself capable of working on while stranded in a hospital bed. Some of the poetry pieces I've been working on recently have been quite ambitious, but others have been extremely modest, for example this simple piece about separation:- |
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My daughter's smile Is twelve hours distant But home Is as close as the doors of sleep. There is grass in my Japan Because I planted it: Not for the passing day But for a life. In the catalog of futures We are three. |
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A poem about living separate from my wife and daugher, who are in Japan, twelve hours away by air.
This poem is about as personal as poetry gets, in the sense that the image of my grass isn't likely to resonate with anyone else. The grass I planted to familiarize a world which, by and large, doesn't feature anything much in the way of private lawns. The image resonated with my wife. She, after all, participatec in the whole grass saga. The initial decision, for example: grass or gravel? The expedition to the big garden center, which sold not just turf but also (though we didn't buy any of them) extremely rare and expensive animals such as hedgehogs. The Great Dying of the first winter, when the grass inexplicably turned brown and died off - it turned out that it wasn't really dead, just hibernating. My wife wrote to me that:- Your grass in our garden has been growing. It's now green. When I came back to Japan, it was brown and covered with wild grasses. So I pulled them out for your grass. Now your grass is cheerful and vivid.And my mind is full of thoughts of my grass, which is suddenly vivid for me. Thematically, this Twelve Hours Distant poem is very humble material, ignoring God's private opinion of copyright law and saying nothing about the destiny of human civilization or the heat death of the universe. But, recently, I've started to think that maybe I shouldn't underrate the simple, humble, modest poem, the poem which focuses on the quotidian rather than sallying out to do battle with the cosmically important. This came home to me recently after I took a simple poem that first got published back in 1980 and posted it online, a poem called Out Fishing:- |
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The muscular tide, Gleaming with phosphorescence. Each oar a varnished shin-bone. Surgical steel Questions the gut of the night. The wet flap of fins; The slime of an eel Hauled up to gape at torchlight. My hand Fumbles with bait and fish scales. A numb wind Blows through the chasm beneath the stars. Up anchor: Link upon link, the chain Folds on the floor, Shattering the stars in the bilge water. My father rows, The granite moon Rumbles from thunder clouds, And the electric light Beads on the aluminium. |
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I really had reservations about this, thinking, it's too simple, too concrete, too direct. Too open and obvious. But the feedback changed my mind.
I never get much feedback from my poetry, and often got none, but I pretty soon got two e-mails about Out Fishing, one asking for permission to post it, suitably acknowledged, on another website (granted), and another (I was flattered) asking for permission to read it aloud at the funeral of a man who, all his life, had been a very keen fisherman. So ... yesterday I was very much immersed in my own private world, thinking about my grass, involved with my very modest personal poetry ... and then in the newspaper I read about the evolving situation in Uzbekistan, where the government has stuck the "Islamic radical" label on its political enemies and has massacred several hundred of them. And I felt a semi-automatic "you have a duty to react" mechanism clicking into action, and made a few tentative notes for a possible poem, Beyond My Green Grass, which, if it were ever to be written, could stand as a kind of reaction, the notes being as follows:- |
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Beyond my green grass There are people dying on barbed wire .... The jar of peanut butter Denounces nothing .... Living on an ice cube .... On the barbecue The purple shreds of liver .... Writing with sledgehammers |
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But the fact is I have no stomach for writing with sledgehammers. I've pulled back, for the moment, to the borders of my own experience, my own world. The wider universe will have to bury its dead without me.
Of all the messages that have come my way recently, the one that has made the most impact on me is the most humble, this being simply an account of my daughter's meal schedule at the Beloved Children Daycare Center in Japan: about 9:30 tea time - small snack and green tea - for example biscuit or rice crackerAnd, if baby Cornucopia (now aged one) is still at the nursery school at 17:30 then she will get a small snack, for example a cup of tea and a cracker. Welcome to my universe. Section 147 Entry 0002. Date: 2005 May 23 Monday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Yesterday I phoned Japan and had a conversation with my daughter. She was watching sumo when I called, but came to the phone, walking rather than crawling (though she still often crawls) and chewing on her plastic hippopotamus (an animal which I haven't yet seen) as she approached. In the course of the conversation, she said three things, these being "hello" and "hi" and "ya-ya". I asked her mother what "ya-ya" means but her mother didn't know. It's not English and it's not Japanese either, so maybe it's Cornucopian. Baby Cornucopia, then, is walking and talking (in two or three languages) at the age of about thirteen months. She currently stands about 72 centimeters tall and weighs in at 9.2 kilograms. On the phone, she sounded happy and confident and definitely knows what she wants. What she wanted was to monopolize the telephone conversation: she got upset and started to cry after her mother took over the telephone. I don't recall having telephone conversations when I was thirteen months old, but it was a different world back then. I imagine that by the time baby Cornucopia is five years old she'll have her own cellphone with seven hundred numbers in the database. Yesterday's big event, then, was the phone call. Today I continued my literary life: drinking cups of tea, eating two corned beef sandwiches, sleeping, working a bit on the editing of the BAMBOO HORSES novel. I also read some of the poems in an anthology my mother happened to have got out of the library, Poems to Last a Lifetime, chosen by Daisy Goodwin, who is blurbed as being "a television producer and writer" and the editor of several poetry anthologies. Having flicked through some of the offerings of Poems to Last a Lifetime I'd characterize it as a book of poems which have succeeded in being popular and accessible without being anything less than they should be. For example, The Lake Isle Of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats, a very simple poem, and one that I've known (partly, not completely) by heart for years. I'll probably read right through this anthology over the next few days. And maybe sometime I'll find time to check out the editor's website, which apparently is www.daisygoodwin.co.uk (I don't have an Internet connection where I'm staying, so I end up going online erratically, on an occasional basis, to check e-mail, upload stuff to the website and click the occasional potentially interesting link.) (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) |
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