On Essay Writing

The most important piece of advice for the would-be essayist is this: always make a plan. You will save yourself an enormous amount of time and effort if you know from the start that what you're going to write is shit.

52 for 2010 #1

Being a tireless practitioner of the art of self-improvement, I’ve set myself the task of reading a book a week in 2010. Such ambition! Such vision! Furthermore, I’ve decided that I’m finally going to make the effort to read some of those heavyweight authors that I’ve been putting off for so long: Cervantes, Tolstoy, Joyce et cetera. That ought to help rack up some humanity points; maybe I’ll even get into poetry?

It goes without saying that this is a project of no interest to anyone other than me, but regardless of that, I’m going to be posting regular updates on my progress, plus some hackneyed, third-rate meditations on what I’ve read.

So, without further ado, I present instalment one of 52 for 2010 (I’ll change the title as soon as I think of something good). Don’t enjoy it! Don’t even read it!

52 for 2012 – Part One

This week I finished reading Lincoln by Gore Vidal. It’s an 859 page historical novel following the United States’ 16th President from his inauguration in March 1861 to his assassination in April 1865. Mercifully, there are no bombastic accounts of Civil War battles; Vidal is more interested in the dealings of the political elite, not least the President himself, who lies at the heart of the book like an amiable sphinx. Despite the best efforts of his opponents (some of whom are senior members of his administration) Honest Abe manages to cling to power during one of the most volatile periods in US history by repeatedly outmanoeuvring everyone who stands against him, even as he cultivates his image as a vacillating dilettante. (As Vidal loves to remind us, the President’s hair is forever unkempt.)

Not surprisingly, the era’s ideologues come in for less favourable treatment. Radical abolitionists and would-be Confederate heroes alike are depicted as deluded poseurs, insulated from the reality of the political situation by an aura of self-regard. John Wilkes Booth and his allies appear to be motivated by nothing more than hackneyed dreams of glory; their ultimate fate is reported second hand by a former presidential secretary as he chats up a European princess. Those who loiter in the margins of history are forever at risk of being scribbled on.

Vidal strikes me as a slippery political commentator: it’s always perfectly clear where his sympathies lie, but the why is often more difficult to fathom. Is Lincoln a good president because he holds together the Union at a time of crisis or because he’s the most expert manipulator in Washington DC? Is the duplicitous Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P Chase, bad because of his relentless ambition or because he fails to fulfil it? Ah well, at least there are some jokes.

Confusing Definitions

Is it just me, or is the first of these definitions poorly phrased?

Other things I used to like that are now an embarrassment

I guess it makes perfect sense that there would be a publishing company dedicated to Warhammer fiction. It just never occurred to me before (don't ask how I came across it).

"The autocannon roared. ‘Fall back!’ Vertain cried, wrenching his control sticks. His walker reversed, the backwards-jointed legs protesting with a hiss of angry pistons. Solid rounds pinged and clanged from the pod’s sloped armour, while the Sentinel’s underslung cannon replied in a percussive burst of thunderclap after thunderclap."

[Cadian Blood: An Imperial Guard novel by Aaron Dembski-Bowden]

The main character is called Parmenion Thade, which is a reference to Alexander the Great's top general and the word 'thade'. (I know this because of a fantasy novel I read in high school, so it's not like I'm an arbiter of Cool or whatever.)

Anyway, there's nothing that I can say about this. Except to note that the text in the PDF excerpt seems to be about size 20.

Improve the paragraph below

And but so I was in Stockport College t'other day, checking out my friend R's* graduating exhibition while he printed a joke T-shirt. In order to do this (print the T-shirt) he had to photocopy the designs onto transparencies...and what should he find in the photocopier but a Literacy Worksheet.

"Improve the paragraph below:

The boy was alone in the cemetery. It was dark. It was gloomy. The boy saw something. He was scared. It was a vampire.*1 The vampire was chasing him. He was scared. The vampire caught him. The vampire bit him. He was dead."

Now, I think that's pretty good to begin with. It clearly belongs to the literary sub-genre identified by David Foster Wallace (in an article of 1987) as "ultra-minimalism"; meaning that it uses a superficial, fact-heavy mode with highly fragmented syntax as a means of breaking down its story into a set of cold, hard narrative objects. So far, so stylized.

But I like rising to challenges once in a while (the more banal the better), and so I've determined to set off on a Raymond Queneau-type quest to render this passage in as many different ways as I can think of. If anyone else fancies it (who am I kidding?), they can contribute too.

Number I (in the style of Edward Bulwer-Lytton)

It was a dark and gloomy night; the boy was alone in the cemetery (for it is here that our scene lies), looking about himself with great anxiety, fearing at every moment the impending transplantation of those dread figures of his imagination into yet more terrible corporeality. And though he was desperate to be out of the place, he found himself, as if by some fiendish hex, unable to move his feet; he was (in the parlance of the great unwashed) rooted to the spot.

All at once, his vision was blighted by a most foul aspect, a terrifying spectre of nightmare; in short, a vampire! The beast, though resembling a man in shape and dress, betrayed its inhumanity by its protrusive fangs, which dripped copiously with the blood of its last victim. It leapt at the boy, who, finding himself at last unbound, took to his heels with tremendous vigour.

The chase that ensued was most panic stricken. The boy, lacking the keen nighttime vision of his predator, stood little chance; he crashed from one tombstone into another, as though those already dead were conspiring to welcome him to their fold. Finally, he fell to the ground, cowering in the filthy undergrowth like a mere animal. The vampire loomed over him, blotting out what little of the moon's light there was to be cast upon the terrible scene; a dread cry rang out as he finally descended upon his prey.

His neck pierced, his life's blood drained, the boy succumbed to the dark and the gloom. He was alone once more.


*I.e. Roland. Roland Le Good. I have nothing to hide.
*1 There's an accompanying picture of a cutesy little-boy vampire. Bizarrely, he has no mouth.