Book Reviews and Ideas

I find it nearly impossible to write if I have access to the internet, mostly because of email. I’m surprised anyone gets anything of substance done anymore. I use Freedom to block the internet while I work.

The photo is from the Brooklyn Heights promenade across the East River looking out to Lower Manhattan. It was taken by my wife in 2010 when we lived in Brooklyn for a year. The spot was one of my favourites in the city and it was where I always took friends who came to visit. The view, especially at night, is unparalleled. Helicopters fly overhead, to and from landing pads atop skyscrapers. One gets the iconic sense of Manhattan. Norman Mailer had his apartment around there. I often thought of that and envied him his good fortune. 

I fantasised about putting a bid on the place when it went up for sale, but the gangplanks and the crow’s nest aren’t my thing. Besides, I have two little girls. It’s a different era. I like boxing and camping and all that, but when I think of ladders, parapets, and gangplanks I mostly picture my kids falling off.

I aim for zen. I don’t always hit the mark. ”David’s folder” is a mixture of the mundane (“Admin”, “Resumes”, “Letters”) and folders that relate to my work. There’s one called “Stories” that contains all the stories I have written, published and unpublished, with various drafts thereof. I do some film work and there’s a folder named “Film Related”. Inside are treatments for things that haven’t, and likely, will never get made – mostly ideas for television shows that never got off the ground. There are other folders with the titles of particular film projects. There’s one called “Victoria Day” for the movie I wrote and directed a few years ago. There’s one named “Natasha Movie” for the adaptation of the title story from my first book which I’m writing and directing . There are individual folders for novels: “The Free World” and another for “The Betrayers”, the book I’m working on now. Then there are some more esoteric folders. There’s one called “Crimea 2011 Phonepics”, with photos of Crimea I took with, yes, my cellphone. 

I use Microsoft Word to write novels, stories and essays. I use Final Draft for screenplays. I use a Moleskine notebook when I’m out, but I’m not very conscientious about it unless I’m travelling. I have an iPhone. I’ve long been behind the times and resisted getting one of these things, but I have it now and do use it for the occasional note.

I keep another notebook at my side on my (clutter-free) writing desk and use it, mostly, when I am stuck for a word. Were someone to open it they would find an entry like this: “accommodating, disinclination, drinking, sipping, apportioning, weighing, calibrating, calculating, assessing, absorbing, ingesting, inspire, aduce?” They would also find pages where the chronology of action is worked out and the history, psychology and motivations of the characters are more explicitly spelled out than they would ever be in the book.

The internet has changed my reading habits, but if I get my hands on something good, there’s no internet, no anything, that can draw me away. I’d like to believe that’s the case for other people too. There’s no point worrying about it. We can’t change it. The flow of technology is moving inexorably in one direction.

I don’t really understand Twitter. I have a Twitter page and I even have some 800 followers but they’re not getting much from me. Sometimes, feeling guilty about letting my followers down, I try to come up with something. But I am nearly always at a loss. Most of what I see on the feed is either dull or frivolous. I don’t wish to add to it. And anything really interesting I am inclined to reserve for my real work, or even for my journal. I do follow @NietzscheQuotes. He never disappoints, but how many of us are Nietzsche? 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/21/my-desktop-david-bezmozgis

I used to be suspicious of those poems that rhyme;

1. Selected Poems

2. by

   Sophie Hannah

3. 
   

1. Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book

I felt a snobbish need to sneer, or spurn, or shirk

such verse. To understand it took too little time.

But our easy reading’s actually her damned hard work.

There you go: a little token for Sophie Hannah, as a confectioner might present a cupcake to a master pâtissier. Now let’s have the real thing, addressing a similar concern: “He’s highbrow in a big, big way/But when he sees that I’m/The one, he’ll think that it’s okay/For poetry to rhyme.” That’s from “When a Poet Loves a Composer”, and in the previous stanza she’d confessed to hiding from the beloved her notion that music should have “a tune”.

And if there is room for the haunting melodies of Wallace Stevens, or the teasing near-tunes of John Ashbery, or the sonorous but occasionally baffling organ-notes of Geoffrey Hill, then there is room for the spiky, memorable, catchy tunes of Sophie Hannah.

At some early point in her development, she must have seen a Wendy Cope collection and thought: that’s for me. Isn’t it funny how men don’t write like that? Though sometimes Kingsley Amis did, and even answered that question in “Something Nasty in the Bookshop”: “We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff/Can get by without it./Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;/They write about it.” There may well be a nod towards the bookshop setting of Amis’s poem when Hannah says, in “Before Sherratt Hughes Became Waterstone’s”: “I’ve seen a few customers looking dismayed, /Too British to voice their objection,/But how can I help it? I like to get laid/Just in front of the poetry section.”

If you do not laugh at that then there is little or no hope for you. It is, mind, one of the few poems that doesn’t seem to be cross with men. If you are a swain contemplating the gift of this book to your inamorata, you had better be very confident in the solidity of your character and the strength of your love. Hannah, or her poetic persona, would appear to have a knack for attracting the Wrong Type of Man, and she dissects them forensically. (I gather she is better known as a writer of psychological thrillers.) That her wit, and the very form she writes almost all of her poetry in, give her pronouncements the oracular force of inevitability will not make you feel any easier, however much you want to applaud her for rhyming “Casablanca” with “wanker”.

As Amis said: “And the awful way their poems lay them open/Just doesn’t strike them./Women are really much nicer than men:/No wonder we like them.” Among her parade of Unsuitable Men the poet walks, herself not entirely the most Suitable of Women, but not afraid to say so. In “A Fairly Universal Set” – she is also very good at titles – she lists all the people she is jealous of: “Your enemies, and most of all, your exes,/Everyone you have ever seen or met …” Incidentally, poetics fans, it’s a Shakespearean sonnet, a form she does rather well.

You should by now be getting the idea that what she does, she does very well indeed. And just because the poems tend towards the rumpty-tumpty-tum, this does not mean they cannot cover a wide range of emotion or expression. It is, indeed, the very art of choosing and placing the words that makes the poem go rumpty-tumpty-tum and invites our attention and respect.

“My top-note is frivolity/But beneath, dark passions guide me” – coming from a poem, this is not an assertion we should take purely at face value, but it’s something we should consider. So: love the frivolity – I don’t think I’ve read a more charming poem that takes advantage of a regional linguistic quirk than “Wells-Next-the-Sea” (“I came this little seaside town/And went a pub they call The Crown”, etc) – but also love the passion beneath it. Just because something makes you smile, or laugh out loud, doesn’t mean it isn’t deep.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/21/selected-poems-sophie-hannah-review