Progress of the Novel

Image – ElephantEars Press

The novel has seen so many developments on so fronts through its long history in many languages and periods of history. It began with Cervantes and still is going strong. ElephantEars Press through its Facebook group Progress of the Novel, wants to learn of innovative novels, ‘gems’ published in recent years.

(posting for ElephantEars Press)

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=199000248124&ref=mf

Being a Film Critic (in Cannes)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2009/may/22/cannes-film-festival

Watching the video of the Guardian’s group of UK film critics on their annual junket to Cannes, sitting around a half empty glass of blanche, un bicchiere di bianco, mezza affogata nell’alcol doing the Guardian’s wrap up video Cannes film festival roundup: ‘A year of Prophets and Basterds, scandals and stars’, watching them get it so completely and utterly and horribly wrong on what and who would win, with at least one expert exhibiting an ‘Oh oh I’m gedding a liddle tipthsy’ half giggle, was one of the best laughs at Cannes 2009 in a year that seemed notably spare of the real thing up on screen.

The film hardheads guarding our take and hold on the fourth dimensional art form, displayed zero-none insight into the Cannes Festival Jury’s collective mind or political process of selection. It had me wondering if they ever got out of the UK film village at all over the two weeks. They weren’t idiots, don’t get me wrong. Intelligent, personable, likable almost – they just didn’t know anymore than you or me, their comments about as good as yours or mine on any given film at any given glassy-eyed moment. I mean who really knows what’s good or not in cinema? God only knows why or how anyone wins awards at these events – what really does go on behind those draped windows? Can you imagine the jury, sorry, The Jury, sitting around seriously trying to be serious about their role. I mean it’s a junket, an annual film publicity junket in a lovely breezy May-warm part of the French Mediterranean. Time to get the sunglasses and floppy linen out and the dingly-dangly things and say words from romance languages almost as the French do…okay, simulate the French.

But after being there and getting back and seeing the Guardian get it horribly, no, miserably, wrong, I thought I’ll have a go at being a film critic too. I went and sat through Synecdoche at the Rio Cinema and here’s my review:

It was an interesting film, an interesting two hours plus of my time spent indoors on a warmish rainless spring afternoon in London. I left the cinema thinking: real life aint so bad after all.

For me Charlie Kaufman is a genius, or the closest thing to true genius that film, well, the closest thing to true genius that American film… well, there’s also Woody Allen, an influence on him and his work Kaufman said. So who’s first and who’s better? Well…See it all gets very silly, very quickly, not just the genius tagging bit but film criticism all round.

Synecdoche is an uncompromising portrait of a human being doing everything but slip down the toilet before your eyes, all written and directed by someone who wrote Being John M, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine – we are talking serious film writing ability here. But Synecdoche is tough to watch. Not impossible, not horrible or miserable, well yes it is miserable – and between Woody Allen’s division of the world, “miserable” or “horrible”, this is Kaufman’s “miserable”.

It brought Woody Allen to mind, it brought Fellini back to me, Coppola, really anyone who made a film that was tough ask, a tough sit, at least once, in their hey or other days. Bring on the heh heh days I say. Because there seems to be a moment in many famous filmmaking careers when the auteur inside says screw the audience, screw entertainment, screw the laughs I’m going to give them a piece of my art, one from the heart ART.

It also brought to mind a scene in Woody Allen’s Anything Else, David Dobel (Woody Allen) and his protege Jerry Falk (Jason Biggs) walking, nutty Dobel giving Falk some more sage advice.

DOBEL What goals.. wh-what are these goals?

FALK I want to write a novel, Dobel, a novel about man’s fate in the empty universe, no god, no hope, just human suffering and loneliness.

DOBEL Yeah well I’d stick to the jokes if I were you, that’s where the money is.

….Okay I’m a philistine, so what else is new.

Open Letter To Google on Plagiarism

Google, Inc.
Google Legal Support,

AdSense DMCA Complaints
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

U.S.A.

19 May, 2009

Dear Sirs,

I am writing to point out Google’s association – inadvertent association, I accept – with the blatant theft of my copyrighted material by a site It’ s Entertainment, blazoned with Google Ads. The offending site is set up using DoshDosh.com powered WordPress software and can be found at: http://entertainment.uwant2know.info/cannes-film-festival-2009-the-big-time/

It’s Entertainment is engaging in unauthorised holus bolus copy-theft of my original material from a post I wrote, based on a research trip I made to Cannes last week for my new novel. My original post can be found on my blog at:

http://swimanog.wordpress.com I put the post up on 18th May, 2009. It was barely up one hour before It’s Entertainment began using it illegally for commercial purposes with Google Ads.

I received no request by It’s Entertainment for its use and there was no attempt to properly acknowledge the original. There is no way to contact the site owners to register my disquiet or complaint. From my research, this site is a serial offender of this kind of copy-theft.

I am a novelist and I put up my blog posts up for public awareness of my writing and for the public’s and my own enjoyment. It’s Entertainment is stealing copyrighted material placed in good faith on the World Wide Web. Google, inadvertently and unfortunately, is aiding and abetting It’s Entertainment by giving it sustenance to survive, so the offending site can carry out copy-theft.

Please help stop this abuse by withdrawing the site’s ability to use Google Ads. The site’s unauthorised use of my writing is unlawful, unfair and wrong. Google should prevent sites like this one from acting like this. Your company will be doing a great service to everyone and will win wide respect if it does. At the very least sites like this should be forced to negotiate legal use of copy. I am not against the use of Google Ads on any site per se but have not investigated it. I am not against commercial activity, only against illegal copyright activity carried out for commercial exploitation.

The use of my copyrighted materials as described above is not authorized by me, or the law. I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. My thanks for your consideration of this matter.

Yours faithfully,

Louisiana Alba

Cannes Film Festival 2009 – the Big Time

You’re in the south of France.

You arrive on the TGV, in a bit of a blur…

Right, where’s your place then. Christ, you hope you haven’t been conned. You walk out of the station, get lost in two minutes. How do you get lost in Cannes when you’ve been there ten times. You just do. But up the hill you go, eventually, get there, find the place…believe you me, well away from the hoy palloy.

Not bad, you think, for something off the Internet, okay, away from the action, on the other side of the train line, but it has a beautiful garden…

A bit Graham Greenish, even. But you are here to work, not to sit in a garden deck chair, sip pink gins, complain about being an Anglophone abroad all day long. You are here to take photos. You get started right away..

Get the writing tools set up…

Right then, down to the Croisette..

To do what? Gawk at the stars…

Where are the stars anyway? Up on bill boards or hiding in hotels. Maybe the key is to be a star yourself…get yourself somehow onto one of these bill boards even…but how do you do that?

You could simulate the process..

Or take a leaf out of the books of others, mix in with the media..

Wait, maybe you don’t look the part. Do  you need a special pair of shoes, a hat even?

At these prices, forget it. But you know how to climb all over the competition, get head and shoulders above the crowd.

But what are you looking for anyway, or at, what do you hope to see?

Is cinema just another empty business?

Or is that all just a bit too serious.

What to do? You could dress up, give someone a laugh, at least..

Or get drunk…

…or find yourself an empty chair.

Stare at the scenery..

…yr mind all out to sea.

The content on this site is copyright.  I added this extra last image just now 8.15pm.

With one hour of this going up this morning 18/05/09 someone using DoshDosh.com wordpress powered software plagiarised both the images and text and pasted it into a blog using advertising called – It’s Entertainment.

Now I wouldn’t mind if they or it were half-way decent but this DoshDosh.com encouraged plagiarist is an uncaring serial plagiarist and needs to be stopped.

Credit where, all hail to..

It is, I assure you, an infuriating mess, a refuge, a joy to behold, an acrimonious cesspool of computerisable angst, an endless checklist of outso(u)rcerized disputes – a hole in the wall for all the world’s minds to filter down onto damaged DVDs. They will in time. And this you will find will be their final resting place.

The staff are miraculous, critically underpaid, limitlessly incompetent, irritatingly profound, delightfully empty, lazified beyond imagining, utterly perfect in their rhombus like cartoon feature creatures silicon graphic simulatoring carnival spirit. They sit there one at a time in that hell’s kitchen like Camusian sentences in utter knowing decrepitude.

If I could ever find the title I crave, the one I have up here, I will throw a week long party for all of you (send me yr contact). As a photocopier – though – to be honest – let’s be fair – my local is the soul of efficiency. As a printer of documents it is besmirchless –

….any fault the computer hard-drives at you is not down to the poor beleaguered impoverished centre.

It is a meeting, as it were or was – point by point – planned, for the perfect silence of minds, brought to life ONLY by murmuring mobile phonies and at least one hundred SE-a-MLESS dialects.

Not a letter I know is transferrable in order to patronise misapplication by default (if you know how to approach it). So…All hail to my local

….– library.

In.. The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

My review

This is a taut moving beautifully realised post-apocalypse narrative. The beauty of it ameliorates the subject. It is a tale filled with almost unbearable tension, a tiny thin thread of hope throughout. Someone wrote that it is not particularly American, but I thought it very American, almost at times a touch too cowboyish in parts. But looking back now I see no flaws in this now. At first I thought: this is a searing tale right up until the end but McCarthy wandered off into Hollywood territory with an (almost) all’s wells that ends well roundup, even in a post-apocalyptic hell on earth, and this is some hell on earth.. At first I thought: has McCarthy snatched literary defeat from the jaws of victory? Did he dismantle 300 odd pages of narrative perfection ..Does he want to wipe the slate clean? I thought: maybe it’s his irony on the myth, ingrained it seems in the American psyche, the good guys and bad guys stuff ..but I realise, thinking again, I was wrong.

The Road is too spare and taut for happy endings. It does end better than it could have … It doesn’t matter that the hope comes from and to the boy..there is much left of the road still to go for him..

I put it alongside the bittersweet end to Nam Le’s The Boat…Both tales are about that thin thread of human hope in so much despair. Even if at times I find myself asking why does Cormac McCarthy gives us this cowboy stuff every now and again…..Maybe, I wanted to say: I would prefer a bet each way on human nature…….but looking again I realised it is the hope in that upside-down burned-out world throughtout, the tiny impossibly thin thread of it, so beautifully captured and centred in the boy, that tense last thread that truly resonated with me throughout the telling of the tale, and it still resonates with me long after I finished reading..

‘Uncorrected Proof’ – Review by LiteraryMinded

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/literaryminded/2008/11/07/uncorrected-proof-louisiana-alba/

Uncorrected Proof – Louisiana Alba November 7, 2008 – 7:54 am, by LiteraryMinded http://blogs.crikey.com.au/literaryminded/

ElephantEars Press, 9780955867606, 2008 (UK)

Can something be playfully and overtly postmodern and still be readable – driving you through a compelling plot? Louisiana Alba proves it can be done. Uncorrected Proof is a postmodern novel that entertainingly riffs on form, style, character, tense, person – but with an overall thriller/quest type plot appropriation, it folds you into its delicious bizarro metascapes and humorous oft-satirical, oft-homagical visions.

Somehow Alba (if that’s who she really is… death of the author etc.) incorporates stylistic elements of hard-boiled fiction, screenplays, cookbooks, metafiction, the spy novel, cyberpunk, the literary novel, A Clockwork Orange, Gaelic, intertextuality, memoir and so much more in a book that self-consciously satirises the entire book and publishing industry – authors, editors, publishers – literary celebrity, literary delusions, literary snobbery, literary stupidity and so on.

So what’s it ‘about’? Archie’s novel manuscript has been pilfered and plagiarized by Martyn Varginas, prolific mystery writer. Archie and his friend Cal plot a convoluted revenge through Archie getting work as an editor, and employing a re-plagiarisation of the book by a young hired-gun (or pen, as it were). What follows are kidnappings, political intrigues, sex, jaunts to New York and Paris (from London), Stake-outs, party crashings, a couple of book launches, boardroom drunkenness, author cameo appearances, mean streets, cop/spy banter, and a few disturbing murders.

I was completely absorbed in this book – somehow Alba makes it so easy to read, despite the switcheroos in style, and shifts in narrative drive and character motivation. The book’s title Uncorrected Proof displays irony – those not in bookselling or publishing may be unfamiliar with a ‘proof copy’ or ‘uncorrected proof’ – books that become available before release, oft-unedited versions of the final with spacing, grammatical and typing errors. This ‘published’ book, has a few (tongue-in-cheek) placed throughout.

Alba has worked in publishing, and is actually avoiding traditional distribution methods for the book, keeping in the uber-hip underground spirit of the novel – with a well-handled guerilla internet and out-of-hand distribution system. I came across the author through Facebook.

This book proves to me that extraordinary talent can be represented through shunning traditional publishing methods. This book is inventive, imaginative, and inspiring. It is a unique publication. If you enjoy Italo Calvino or John Fowles, or if you also work or have worked in the book industry, even on the fringes, you would get a great kick out of this novel.

There’s an amazing offer at the moment on the ElephantEars Press website. Postage on Uncorrected Proof FREE to any destination! http://elephantearspress.com/uncorrectedproof.html

Small versus Big, and small must win

ElephantEars Press, my publisher in Hackney, a small, new and independent publishing press dedicated to bringing you good literature, fiction and non-fiction, at fair prices, is now offering FREE post and packing to ANYWHERE in the world.

These holidays ElephantEars Press wants to give readers a real and true deal.

Lately, I have been following Amazon’s attempt to monopolize Print On Demand, to force independent publishers to accept Amazon on terms designed to crush the life out of the independent publishers and booksellers. It’s a disgrace – Amazon only got where it is because readers like you and me helped them become a force. We supported them in the early days because we wanted diversity, because we believed they were for us. Not anymore they aint!

Amazon wants to monopolize bookselling and print on demand publishing. They want to to kill off publishing independents and consumer independence. Don’t let them. Buy from small independent presses like ElephantEars. Support small and ignore the big homogenizers of creative output.

For this holiday, for your gifts – Buy from the small dedicated publishers like ElephantEars Press determined to bring to you reading quality for your pound, dollar, and euro

SUPPORT SMALL against BIG.

Where we are

London Fields outdoor Pool - The Guardian. Photo by Linda Nylind

I was doing my 1500 metres in the pool yesterday, lap, swim, turn, lap, roll, stretch, concentrating on my breathing, thinking of what novelist, inventor, academic, Eric Willmot said to me on the phone the other day, talking of his recently written essay on human and planetary survival. I had read the pages he sent me, describing our progress of us all, the twenty third species of human on this planet..the story aint all pretty. Well, I think we know that, but where do we go from here? We seem to be running out of time. Eric is convinced that the global warming we are experiencing is a prelude to another ice age.

Ice Age (with a black hole in it as well!)

Our nearest refuge, that is, nearest to our earthly conditions in toto, is Venus, but that planet is a green house gaseous inferno. So that’s out. Another solar system like our little ‘Goldilocks zone’ around the sun, surrounds the star Gliese 581, but that is twenty light years away, beyond our capacity to reach in all our lifetimes. Without some sort of quantum leap in our capacity to travel, our interplanetary air bus is going to run out of gas, if not time.

And even if we get there Gliese 581 may not be quite for us. It hasn’t sent us any kind of signal, let alone a welcome email they want us over for any holiday coming. We better find out then. We could send the executives of Fanny Mae and Freddi Mac and a few bank presidents, the whole of Wall Street in fact, on ahead to check it out, investigate the real estate and other markets and set up for us. In the meantime, we’ll sit it out and wait down here, glued to the telly for messages, filling our neighbourhoods (and the silent universe) with the sounds of humanity, eating, drinking and getting inordinately merry, all those goings on, as we use up the planet we’re whizzing around on.

Eric has some ideas on what we can and can’t do. Are we facing extinction? Are we staring into the abyss, not so blissfully un-a-ware as impotently more-than-scared? Rabbits in the headlights of some rogue comet or asteroid heading relentlessly our way? What should we do? Recycle our rubbish, turn off our appliances, walk to work, invest in nuclear reactors using Thorium (pronounced /ˈθɔːriəm/ wikipedia tells me).

Well, I think the first thing we should do is get up to speed on the actual conditions, educate ourselves. Get to know our options (even if the picture aint pretty). We’ve faced threats before – Hitler, the Cold War, the nuclear holcaust. Let’s face this one, form neighbourhood groups to discuss intra and interplanetary survival.

Well..okay…let’s do nothing then..just sit and wait and watch it happen. Let’s climb into the warming pot we call this world and boil slowly and then when the fuel burns out, slowly descend down into that big freeze.

Art, commerce and the dizzying world of artifice

I have been trying to get a blogger of note to become a reviewer of note, that is, get to her to do a notice on my book. Or should I say write a note, postice me, no, well notice me in her..well I think you get what I mean by now.

The problem is or was she was taken up with blogging the Hirst thing as he was selling 111 million or whatever pounds worth of what, we don’t really know yet, in the middle of what we’re not sure yet is the second worst (or just the worst) finance mess of all. I fear the financial bang down on economies and hell only knows what else, all that money stuff that holds us all up in the first and last place has much yet to say.

That Hirst Thing - SuperTouch

My own hazy memory of other memories tells me that 1929 was the first big stock market etc crash, but 1931-4 was the real pain that the ordinary bloke felt so keenly, pain the world felt all over. Ditto for 1987, which became 1991-3, when the real ordinary mess that was house values falling down around people’s ears really hit home.

I remember 1987 very well. I was in Sydney and was about to try to sell my apartment, and, a few days before the crash, went to a property auction in the suburb of Bondi Beach to see what I could possibly do, auction or straight sell. That auction day was a scene from Fellini. It was dizzying mad, like nothing I had seen, people shouting over each other to buy huts and hovels for double and treble their one day prior worth. Perhaps I exaggerate the doubling and trebling but that was what it felt like being packed into that auction house room on that day.

Bondi Beach - by Pio Carlone

At that time the king of all things money down under, particularly the market gambling sort, was a one Robert Holmes a’ Court, greenmailer and white knighter extraordinaire, who became Oz’s first billionaire. He was richest but still unofficially vying for the title of most wealthy man in Oz , fighting with two redoubtable dark nights and media moguls, Rupert Mudoch and Kerry Packer, for the privilege, probably because he came from the West not the East. But all up before the 1987 crash Holmes a’ Court was worth 2 billion, a tidy sum even today, and from reports of his worth, enough to buy Hirst out twice over.

And Robert Holmes a’ Court – like that other Robert from Oz, Robert Hughes, the bloke that Hirst doesn’t too much like – was a lover, no, a connoisseur of Art. I say Art with a capital, because Robert Holmes a’ Court was into ART in a big way. A horse lover, a stocks gambler, he also bought into the big and small art stables. He bought and supported big and small names. And one of his stable of small names was a one Paula, of whom I knew in passing. Paula created holograms, was a pioneer of minor reputation in that part of the world that by geography alone diminishes the adjective minor to very very small in the world of art. She told me about Robert, what she knew of him.

Those who know what happened in 1987 will remember the face of Robert Holmes a’ Court standing at the glass wall of an upper floor overlooking the Sydney Stock Exchange that day his fortunes went a little too far south for his liver to digest. His face was a newsprint picture, financial grief of power disappearing faster through him than a bad curry. Post crash, when the bits stopped falling, when the exchange chit dust cleared (long weeks on after much gnashing of teeth, wringing of hands, and of course, horse trading), he was worth 600 million, not too bad either even for a mogul today. He devoted himself to other matters thereafter, his horse stud, his art and perhaps some charity if I remember well.

Paula told me how he arranged to see her work that she had been doing under his patronage, some days after (for him) a catastrophic crash – he was dead in three years, at 53. She described how this distracted figure walked into her studio and stood trying to get his head around what she was doing, tried to fathom what she was telling him (and Paula could tell you). Perhaps unable to control the big he put his mind to gripping the tiny. Robert Holmes a’ Court stared at one of her projections stuck out in thin air. ‘But it’s so small,’ is all he said. He left without another word. And that was the last Australian dollar she saw from him.

Paula in her studio - COFA

Now no one could say that Hirst’s work is small in the way that Paula’s experiments were back then, what with that artistic industry of so many hands, the massified repetitive manufacture of tanked animals in preservative, but somehow Holmes a’ Court’s newsprinted face comes to mind, an apparition staring at the tanked cow, and turning to the assembled art gamblers, the multitude, I see him trying to say something. Only I can’t hear him against all the clamour of bidding. Was it: what’s next Damien, the white elephant? No, that’s what I would say. Was it something about it all being so small? No, that cash cow aint tiny. Anyway I can’t read his lips anymore disappearing as he has into thin air. He and that auction room moment are ethereal elements gone, along with a good part of the world’s financial infrastructure, not to mention that review of my book, so I guess we’ll never know.