ah
mr cst coach himself a travel writer
has coughed up a load of canadian dollars
(with a nice pic of her majesty on them all)
and has asked me to write about writing
well ryan my boy, its a pleasure
so i was outside doing yoga yessaday
and thinking how to go about this
and thinking about my favourite writers
of whom i will now make something of a list
in no particular order
lewis carroll
cs lewis
jrr tolkien
michael moorcock
china mieville
andre breton
dylan thomas
appollinaire
homer
mervyn peake
shakespeare
huxley
bill burroughs
paramahansa yogananda
artaud
and a whole lotta others escape my fuddled brain
whom i shall think of
the moment ive posted this
and go
oh no
i cant believe ive forgotten….
(insert forgotten authors name here)
the first book i ever read or had read to me
was alice in wonderland
which
i guess
started me off on my never ending quest for something “marvellous”
in all forms of art, writing no less
i am searching for something fucking “marvellous”
i’m not really interested in something real or factual
nor something informative or useful
i wanna read about the weird
the strange
the magical
the otherworldly
if i want real life i got …um..real life
so that eliminates lots of books for a start
i hate westerns
i hate murder mysteries
i hate crime or cops n robbers n political malarkey
i hate spies
i dont mind bio n autobiographies
(if theyre about someone “marvellous” natch)
and ive come to be quite fond of bobby luries
retelling of my own fab story (complete with un-marvellous bits)
and ive wolfed down many bios on
dylan the beatles the stones bowie bolan etc (a predictable bunch)
i used to enjoy rock writers back in the golden age
eg nick kent, charles shaar murray, lester bangs, ian mcdonald
(all who wrote in the seventies mainly about that aforementioned crowd)
i guess its hard to be a great writer about nickleback or britney etc
so you cant be too hard on modern writers considering the paucity
of interesting musicians…..
anyway
one thought that always pops into my mind is :
if you really wanna influence people get em young!
get em while theyre still impressionable
get em when their minds n hearts are still open
i have read a million good books
since finishing the chronicles of narnia
loads of weird n wonderful sci fi n fantasy novels
but i cant seem to remember any of em much
even tho they blew my socks off at the time
(sigh)
they go in one eye n out the other, i suppose
ah but narnia
oh narnia….
so solid it seemed…
so well did lewis weave his spell
(a very christian spell as it turns out
but that still didnt ruin it!)
oh cs lewis had everything i wanted
fauns and sorcery and battles and
children from this mundane world…
i’m still looking for my wardrobe
i’m still looking for the portal out of this world
i used to drive the fambley up to the cliffs at watsons bay
and i look out over the stormy sea
and i swear i could see narnia somewhere out there
so many times i been as close as this to narnia
my own portal
my own way out of this world
(steady on there seiogh!)
cs lewis was my haven
my sanctuary
my place to go to hide from this boring world
no film could ever do what the books did
i see theyre making a film outta” where the wild things are”
ive seen the shorts and its fucking awful
because it foists its own version all over yer imagination
thats why i almost choked when the wolves in narnia
spoke with american accents…
anyway
lewis not only wrote about marvellous things
but he was a marvellous writer
with many unique stylistic devices
and a really cosy familiar way of telling a story
even tho i go back n read em now
and disagree with some of his stuff
(he bags vegetarians, he extolls pipe-smoking
and the constant christian carry-on)
lewis captured my imagination at age 10
and i never really got him out again
you see greek mythology and narnia n marc bolan
are all mixed up in my mind
and oh
that is the world i yearn for most of all
somewhere deep in my heart
i have lived through the may days of arcadia
i have seen the vegetal n water spirits
n i have gotten drunk with pan…
may lewis long be read by children all over this world
and may it continue to inspire children
to seek the unordinary!
i read many marvellous books as a kid
before the narnia books
i read ” little grey men” by HH
and i read 2 great books about a black cat
whose titles ive now forgotten
and i read all the myths rewritten for kids
i devoured the norse myths too
that also seemed strangely familiar to me
and i quickly identified with the troublemaker “loki”
at school we were forced to read one boring writer n poet
after another
and i hardly enjoyed any of it
i can only ironically remember a book i didnt read
but was supposed to
it was called “green for danger”
and i hated the look n sound of it so much
i couldnt read it at all
and i learned for the first time
to “fake” having read a book or seen a film
(who hasnt lied about that n then been caught out
when someone asks you for a specific opinion ie
what did you think of the ending??)
eventually i found tolkiens lord of the rings
(which i entered via more kid friendly “the hobbit”)
tolkiens scope and his majestic language
was right on for me
having raised myself on the myths n histories of ancient times
and wow!
what a story…..
what an achievement
to imagine the entire history and languages of a whole world
tolkien has the lot : romance, sorrow, valour, evil, magic
a more grown up lewis
a much huger n more detailed scale
not much after this
i stumbled across mervyn peakes gormenghast trilogy
and i set lewis tolkien n peake
as the dylan beatles n stones of modern english fantasy
mervyn peake
oh my god
the richness of his language
the weirdness of his characters
the tiniest murkiest details
the warped nightmarish feeling
oh i was smitten with these stories
much much more idiosyncratic than the other 2
peake was surreal n dark n used the most scrumptious words
he could spend pages n pages just dwelling on a characters reveries
he could suspend time
he could make you believe the unbelievable
youve never read anything like it
so if you aint read it
get thee to a bookstore now
titus groan
gormenghast
titus alone
its a trilogy
beware tho
titus alone was written by peake
in an advanced stage of parkinsons disease
and was partially completed by others
it is a truly strange twilit world
which moves away completely from the first two
robert smith n sting
also fell under the spell of gormenghast
if youve seen the tv series
please dont judge the books on that
nothing visual could ever do these books justice
oh i ran outta time
guess thisll be a 2 part blogge then
see you tomorrow for some more lit
sk