On Writing Books

Quill (Photo credit: campra)

There you are, head thoroughly in the clouds. You're in the middle of a rainy day in Thurles, Co. Tipperary. It's cold and there's a wind - what they call in Ireland a 'lazy wind', the type that can't be bothered to go around you but goes straight through you. The thud of a car door sounds and footsteps scrunch on the wet tarmac. A man pulls his coat around himself and then you get a Man From Porlock.

It's like being torn out of your life and jettisoned instantly to another time and place, suddenly finding yourself in the 25th century in a massive space station, surrounded by little bald naked green men making strange inquisitive hooting noises and poking you. It's a moment of almost existential discontinuity.

Can't you see? You want to scream. I'm writing!

British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge it was, feverishly jotting down the vision he'd experienced during a particularly vivid opium binge, who was apparently interrupted by a knock on the door. It was the Man From Porlock, the nearby village. Coleridge dealt with his visitor and returned to his poetic vision only to find he'd forgotten the rest of it. The poem (It's the one that starts 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately pleasure dome decree, where Alph the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea'. You can tell the years of being beasted by increasingly frustrated teachers weren't entirely wasted, can't you?) stands as one of the great creations of poesy, a fragmentary, brilliant thing. But it ends badly.

Sometimes it goes well and the words cascade off your fingertips like flicked butterflies. Sometimes you just sit staring at the screen and drooling. More often you wander off to Twitter, making some awful excuse about 'taking a break' or 'building one's author profile'. I might be lying about the latter, only a complete arse would think of Twitter as being any good for that.

But the worst thing in the world is when you're in your other world and the words are tumbling and someone thinks the scandalous price of broccoli is something that you need brought to your attention RIGHT NOW.

Apart from that, it's all going very smoothly, thank you. Taking a bit more research than I'd reckoned on, the story twisting in my hands like an over-excited anaconda with a sparkler up its bottom, but that's okay, that's how it goes.

All of which is my way of saying sorry for not posting very much, as if anyone cared whether or not I did anyway. And now, if you'll forgive me, I'm off back to a cold day in Tipp...

Groundhog Day

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been one of those weeks. First we had the tremor from the Qeshm earthquake and then Google's Driverless Car.

The link?

Well, those few weird moments of seeming terrestrial liquefaction having been enjoyed, I then got to watch Gulf News tweeting that it was going to report on the thing I had just experienced as the rest of Twitter shared its rainbow reaction. As if I'm going to put my life on hold to wait for GN's report. The next day, almost 24 hours after I had watched friends and Twitter in general record their reactions to the event, I get to see news stories about the thing I had lived through the day before.

I had sort of moved on, actually. Including a wander around the internet to research a blog post in which I learned more about the incident and the factors behind it than the Gulf News story - that I hadn't been waiting for, funnily enough - eventually told me. Context and analysis? Don't make me laugh, cocky...

And then yesterday opened with news reports about Google's driverless car, a project most of the people I know had been aware of for some months. Things had moved on and Google had released pictures of its prototype 'level four' car - no steering wheel at all for you, matey. The news online had broken the day before, Google's release went out on the 27th May (Tuesday) and most online outlets led with the story yesterday first thing. So listening to the Business Breakfast on Dubai Eye Radio this morning, it was odd to hear some shouty Americans on Bloomberg being played out. A sort of strange, layered iterative experience - the presenters played a recording of Bloomberg playing a recording of an interview with Sergei Brin.

So I get to hear a recording of a recording of a person talking about the news I knew and saw the day before.

This sort of thing is happening so frequently now, I'm losing track of what day it is. I keep looking to the future only to find mainstream media dragging me back to the past.

Odd.

Deferred Anticipation

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This apropos nothing...

I had an English teacher by the name of Fitch, DM Fitch if I recall. He was the absolute spitting image of Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels. I kid you not. It was bloody eerie. Although clearly he didn't wear the wig to work.

I'm sure he kept one at home so he could pay literary 'games'.

He was 'fussy', almost camp. A little owlish occasionally.

Like most of the masters at school, he was easily distracted. The feared and gargantuan figure of Thomas Edward Carrington ('TEC' to those who suffered alongside me) loomed over all, but if you caught even the monstrous TEC at the right moment, you could get him talking about The War so a double history lesson would pass peaceably and in relative enjoyment.

The War was always a winner. And so it proved one day with DM Fitch. And I'll never forget it.

DM, channelling his forebear JS, tended to pudgy. And so, he assured us, it was as a youth. But there Was A War On, and so the chocolate ration was limited. I can't remember to how much, a precious ounce or two per week.

His mother would return with the shopping and DM's craved square of mellifluous sweetness. It was then he would proceed to grate it into fine slivers of chocolate, curled like little brown toenails and collected into a piece of tinfoil. I am quite sure his memory failed him at this point in his anecdote, because any available tinfoil was being used to boil down into Spitfires, so it may well have been a piece of greaseproof he had embellished with the years.

He would then fold the gratings and place them carefully under the leg of his chair. And proceed to sit upon said chair to read a chapter, never less but always a full chapter, of the book he was devouring. He was obviously a bookworm as a child, evidently looking even then Swiftian and destined to become an English Master replete with tweed and leather elbows, a failed marriage to a gorgeous woman widely considered to be galaxies beyond him and now host to a Particularly Nasty Break-time Gin Habit.

Christ, if he's still alive I'm SO in court, aren't I?

Anyway. He would read his chapter and then - and only then - remove the compressed wodge of chocolate from beneath the chair leg where it had been squeezed, not unlike a diamond formed of carbon by volcanic forces, into a square of chocolate. And he would proceed to demolish it with Bunteresque greed.

"This, boys," he explained to us - utterly mystified - oiks, "is Deferred Anticipation".

Frabjous!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.


I Skype chat with my mum nightly and the conversation invariably starts with 'How are you?'. Last night I answered 'frabjous, thank you', which got me a spirited 'What kind of word is that?' - I find strong-minded 87 year-olds can at times be a tad sharp.

It's this kind of word, made up by Lewis Carroll, whose real name was the luscious Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (he had an uncle called Skeffington, which is a brilliant name by any standard). Like many words in his celebrated poem, Jabberwocky, frabjous is a 'nonce word' - a maketty uppity. It's a remarkable work, not only in that it isn't even a standalone piece, but a poem written as a prop in a book (it's from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) - and some of the nonsense in it (chortle and galumph in particular) has passed into the English language. You can discuss beamish and whiffle in your own time.

 Anyway, today I am once again frabjous, thank you for asking.

The Last Telegraph. Stop.

Major telegraph lines in 1891 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today there is actually less chatter in the world. The last telegraph has been sent and now the old machines are officially museum pieces. The last message over a telegraph network was sent by Indian state operator BNSL - Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd - from Pune's telegraph office, in fact Saturday saw something of a rush for the outmoded service, with something like 150 telegrams commemorating the end of a service that has been connecting the world for 160 years.

Although Samuel Morse gets all the credit (his telegraph was patented in 1847), there were a number of pioneers developing wireline communications systems - it was Morse, fuelled by having missed his wife's death as the message she was ill came too late, who defined the telegraph and whose famous code allowed the first telegram to be send in 1938.

The story was carried last month by Business Insider, where I stumbled upon it and took it along with me to Dubai Eye radio. The National's done quite a nice piece on it today.

As I've mentioned before, the UAE has its own little piece of telegraph history, with Musandam's Telegraph Island, a tiny islet in an inlet out by the Straits of Hormuz in what is apparently called the Elphinstone Inlet. The telegraph station there was built in the 1860s, but was only actually occupied and in use for two years or so around 1865-1868, before the cable was re-routed.

Apparently in that time, two men were lost to the appalling heat - the legend is the island is the origin of the phrase 'going round the bend' because the hapless, over-heated Brits would go potty waiting for the next supply ship. A gunboat had to be maintained for the safety of the crew on the island, apparently, because of the 'piratical nature' of the locals. As the excellent 'The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf' by HH Dr Sheikh Sultan Al Qassimi points out, they were a feisty lot back in the day.

The cable, part of the London-Karachi link, meant that a message could travel from London to India in just five days. Advances in technology meant that just seventy years later, a man could fly from London to Sharjah in just four days.

How we move on, eh?