orbific weblog – Page 83 – Strange stories and interesting things

New story at Are You Sitting Comfortably Brighton, Wednesday 13th October

A new short story of mine, Lockcharmer, is being read at Are You Sitting Comfortably, a Brighton short fiction night where the stories are read by actors. I went to their previous Brighton event in June and had a great time so I'm really looking forward to this. The night is held at the Basement in Brighton with doors at 7:30pm. Tickets are £6, or £4 for concessions.

I'm very excited about hearing this story read out. It is one of two stories that I wrote during my holiday to India. The initial idea is one I had a long time ago, about a girl who has a strange relationship with locks:

I'd been having a bad time of it when I locked myself out of the flat. I couldn't afford a locksmith, and the friend who had my spare key was away. All I could do was phone my friend Rory and ask if I could stay a few nights.

-Actually, I've got a friend who can help, he said.

-What, he's a locksmith?

-She's a she. And sort of. I'll give her a call and see if she can come round.

One Sentence at a Time (Brighton Creative Writing Sessions No. 4)

Someone once asked Raymond Carver how he wrote his stories. Carver replied "I write the first sentence, and then I write the next sentence and then the next."

On Saturday, we held the fourth and final session in this season's Brighton Creative Writing Sessions events. People worked throughout the day on writing stories, starting with first sentences and building on them until a story was completed.

The first part of the day was spent coming up with first lines. Ellen and I provided prompts, as well as a 'magic box' filled with inspiring objects. We heard some strange and provocative ideas. Selecting the most promising from these, people then produced first paragraphs.

In the afternoon, everyone took their favourite opening and developed it into a finished piece. The session was intensive, with lots of writing, so Ellen and I provided distractions to give people a chance to relax, including party poppers, fortune telling fish and sweets. Despite the hard work, everyone seemed to have a great time, and we heard some fascinating stories.

Running the four sessions in this season has been fun. We've met some fantastic people and enjoyed leading the groups. We were particularly excited when one of the students arrived for the session with home-made cake. Thanks, Sandy!

We have one more session planned for the year, about the Tarot and Writing which we should be announcing soon. We are also going to be involved with something exciting for White Night. Details to follow…

The Beats (Brighton Creative Writing Sessions No. 3)

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

(from Jack Kerouac's Rules of Spontaneous Prose)

The theme of the third Brighton Creative Writing Sessions workshop was the Beats, and we had various activities based around the work of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. To set the mood, Ellen and I started with a reading of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl. We read the whole of part one, taking turns with the lines. Howl is a powerful poem, and an amazing thing to read out loud.

We warmed up by writing about morning routines, capturing those little details of life that are easily overlooked and forgotten. This was followed by discussing the impressions of the beats we came to the workshop with, and an outline of the group's history.

We then picked the most mundane objects we could think of and wrote pieces casting them as Great Things, just as Ginsberg did with a soot-covered flower in Sunflower Sutra. We also looked at the Ginsberg and Kerouac's transformation of the rules of Haiku into English, and played with producing examples.

In the first part of the afternoon, everyone experimented with William Burrough's cut-up method. To set the mood I showed an excerpt from Towers Open Fire, an experimental film produced by Burroughs and Antony Balch. The group cut up newspapers and stories, making new texts from them. Some of the results were amusing, including a text made by slicing up the lonely-hearts ads from the Argus.

Ellen and I did a lot of work to prepare this session, including finding audio samples of Ginsberg and Burroughs discussing their working methods. Everyone was encouraged to consider writing in new styles and responded in interesting ways. I was pleased with how it went.

We have one more session in this season, One Sentence at a Time (tickets available here). We also have a very exciting workshop planned for December – more news soon!

Thanks to Jake Spicer and Tom Hume for providing photos (Tom's flickr set from the day can be seen here).

Some things I love about twitter….

I've been on twitter since February 2007, although it took a while for me to get it. I even closed my account for a time, but restored it just before the six-month change-your-mind period ended. Twitter has introduced me to some amazing people, found me work, and helped me discover events and books that I might otherwise have missed.

I always find it hard to explain exactly what I love about twitter. I'm not sure whether it's the protocol, the service, or the other users, but somehow I have gathered a timeline of people that are always interesting and friendly. For me, there is no obvious separation between twitter and the 'real world' – the two fuse together in fascinating ways.

Here are some specific things I love about twitter:

One of the problems with small-talk in the real world is that it requires you to stand next to someone. Often there is not time to build friendships and relationships before you both wander off. The almost-passive communication of Twitter means that small talk can continue for weeks or months, allowing relationships to develop slowly.
Twitter is not pointless chat, despite what some critics claim. It is a great example of phatic communication, but without the need to be in the same geographical location as the people you're communicating with.
I love the latency of twitter. It works well with a mixture of occasional posters and regular posters, even with people disappearing for a few days then coming back – a little like persistent IRC, perhaps.
Hannah Donovan gave a talk on improvisation at dConstruct 2010 which used the banter on twitter as an example of improvisation. There are definite 'rules' to Twitter banter, but they are all implicit. They also seem very localised to specific groups.
Something Tom has pointed out is the power of constraints. The 140-character limit often produces something close to haiku, or at least close to the variations invented by Ginsberg/Kerouac. 140 characters forces people to be precise in describing images – the #foundwhilewalking tag often provides good examples of this.

Total for this post: 2074 characters.

First signs of winter in Brighton

The weather has definitely grown colder over the last week. Summer is long gone and the first hints of the coming winter are visible. Down on the seafront last night they were packing away the carousel. I had a couple of memorable rides on the roundabout this summer.

Spring seems a long way off.

Writing and Wabi-Sabi (Brighton Creative Writing Sessions No. 2)

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic based around the imperfect, impermanet and incomplete. It is something that fascinates Ellen and I, and was the basis of our second Brighon Creative Writing Sessions workshop on Sunday.

Wabi-sabi focuses on the ephemeral and neglected, and their charm: 'where ugliness begins to crack and shows beauty'. One of the morning exercises was to write about something ugly. This produced some grotesque and striking language. We were then encouraged to write about the same thing, but describing it as beautiful.

Ellen explained how she wanted everyone to learn a new way of looking at the world, of appreciating things that are often overlooked. Wabi-sabi might sound depressing, but I also find it life-affirming, a way of enjoying things for what they are, not for what one thinks they should be.

Other exercises looked at memories of places and things in the past. Ellen set the mood with video, poems and music, including Into the Great Silence,and Amanda Palmer's ukulele cover of Fake Plastic Trees.

Over lunch, everyone collected small items they found it town: scraps of paper abandoned on the street, feathers, small stones and leaves. These were then stuck into booklets alongside snippets of writing produced during the day. Some of these booklets can be seen in the photograph at the top of the page.

Thanks once again to Jake Spicer for providing the venue. We have two more events in this season. On Saturday 2nd we're doing a workshop inspired by the Beats, and on the 9th we have a short story workshop. We also have a free flash-fiction writing workshop in October.

Abbie Hoffman and Levitating the Pentagon

A few months ago, I read an oral biography of Abbie Hoffman, Steal this Dream. Hoffman's story is a sad one. After his deliriously creative period in the sixties, Hoffman's life fell apart. He moved into drug dealing, a career he had little talent for, resulting in a bust. He spent several years on the run, where his bipolar condition worsened. By the end of his life, Hoffman was a sad, broken figure.

But during the sixties, Abbie Hoffman was incandescent. He was central figure in the Yippies, and one of the 'leaders' of the 1968 Chicago protests. He brought a manic freshness to protest, including an attempt to levitate the Pentagon. Hoffman was able to use the media, producing spectacles such as throwing dollar bills onto the floor of the stock exchange. These protests also demonstrated publicly that there were other ways of looking at things to the conventional. The attempt to levitate the Pentagon was absurd, but part of its success was that it was taken seriously in some quarters:

"Sal Gianetta: The two meetings I knew of, one in New York, and one in Washington, were probably the best examples of Abbie's brilliance. There were some Washington representatives and there were two military representatives. It started out that no way in the world was there going to be any activity anywhere around the Pentagon, which was the fucking Basilica of the United States, no fucking way. Right away, Abs says "Fuck you, we'll levitate the fucking thing high enough you won't be able to get in. Then what're you going to do with your fucking Pentagon?" They actually responded. That was the first inkling he had that he might be able to suck them into this…

At the other meeting I was at Ab threw the levitation on the table, right for openers. Ab was adamant that the building was going to go up twenty-two feet- because someone had told him except for fire-ladders, you can't get a ladder that's twenty-two feet. So he was willing to negotiate. If the fucking building went up twenty-two feet the foundations were going to crack, so there was discussion about foundations and cracks, it was fucking unbelievable. That meeting was two and a half hours or so and probably 20 per cent of that meeting was devoted to this fucking serious talk about levitating the Pentagon. This is our military, right? I swear to you, Ab came down from twenty-two feet to three feet, the military agreed to three feet and they sealed it with a handshake. That's how Ab was, he could capture you in that fucking bizarreness. Oh, it was joyful!

Looking back, the Sixties seem like a crazy time, when things could have changed forever. Imagine the scene at the Pentagon: American Indians, shamans and people burning yarrow, all gathered to exorcise demons from the building (with Kenneth Anger sneaking into the building to lay curses). I wish that same craziness and possibility was around today.

Lives as a single day: Kurt Cobain and William Burroughs

Imagine human lives considered as a single day, all those events compressed into the hours between rising at 7 and sleeping at 11. 16 hours of wakefulness.

Take Kurt Cobain: each hour was twenty months, the time sweeping past. Nirvana formed at 6pm, and released their first record almost an hour later. At 8pm Cobain met Courtney Love. It was almost 9:30 by the time Smells Like Teen Spirit was a hit. Kurt and Courtney married just before ten pm, when the day was almost over. At eleven, Cobain put an end to his life.

William Burroughs died at 83. Each hour of his life was more than five years. At 2pm he shot his wife Joan Vollmer, when Cobain was 11 years old. He released his first book, Junky, at 2:30pm. Kerouac died at 5:30. At almost 8pm, Burroughs lost his son. His final novel, the Western Lands, was published at 9pm.

Cobain and Burroughs met in October 1993. Years of real time separated the two, but if you consider their lives as a single day, it was 10:40pm for Cobain and 10:12pm for Burroughs.

Imagine a world where you knew how long you had left. What time is it now? What do you still need to do?

No sleeping in the Pavilion Gardens

From A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander: "It is a mark of success in a park, public lobby or a porch, when people can come there and fall asleep."

This sign, in Brighton's Pavilion Gardens, makes me sad. 'No Cycling, No Littering, No Sleeping…'

Writing From Life (Brighton Creative Writing Sessions No. 1)

How can your writing be influenced by what you see? How do you use images in your work?

On Saturday, Ellen de Vries and I held the first of our Brighton Creative Writing Sessions events. These are a series of playful, experimental creative writing sessions held in Jake Spicer's studio (also home to the Brighton Life Drawing Sessions). The studio proved to be a fantastic home, providing a more inspiring environment than a classroom-style venue.

Ellen and I did a lot of planning but were a little nervous before the start. How would people respond to what we were trying to do? It turned out that we had no reason to worry. The attendees were enthusiastic and both Ellen and I had a fantastic day.

The session started with a clip from Wild At Heart: "My dog barks some. Mentally you picture my dog, but I have not told you the type of dog which I have. Perhaps you even picture Toto, from 'The Wizard of Oz.'". This set the tone of the session.

We had a number of exercises and discussions examining the relationship between words and the visual world. We gave everyone blank paper to write on, urging them to think beyond writing in neat lines. As a warm up we used some timed visual prompts, similar to what we do for the our Not for the Faint-Hearted sessions, but using Jake's paintings:

Jake joined in with the exercises, and hearing him respond in writing to his own paintings was fascinating. In another exercise, people wrote about their non-dominant hand, producing some tremendous self-portraits. We also had some discussions, including Jake talking about drawing as a visual language.

For me the most interesting part was when we introuced a life model as a prompt. She made a series of three costumed poses.

For the final two poses we used easels to hold the paper. Obviously everyone had to stand for this and we all found that writing while standing gave the act a different energy.

It was this exercise that I found most valuable, and I produced one of the most exciting pieces of writing I've done in years. Jake's recent Catalyst Club talk urged people to experiment with drawing, and I tried mixing my (admittedly poor) drawing skills with writing. I tried to capture the shape of Frankie's hair with the shape of my text, adding a few lines to suggest her face and outfit. While the prose was not perfect, I found the experiment inspiring. I can't wait to try building on this.

For me, it was a rewarding afternoon. The attendees were friendly and gave the session a lovely relaxed mood. The next session is on Sunday 26th, on Wabi-Sabi (tickets available here):

This is a miracle-worker for writer’s block and for loosening up to generate new ideas. Wabi Sabi is a Japanese tradition which celebrates broken and fragmented things, things coming into life and dying things. It lends itself well to writing from landscape; it’s a new way of looking into the cracks in the world around you. "Just lean into the crack / and it will tremble ever so nicely. Notice how it sparkles down there". Bjork.

Thanks to Jake Spicer for providing the venue. Below is a postcard he produced in response to one of the exercises. I love this piece!