Eyes of the Sphinx
Given the tremendous success of SPHINX in the UK, I thought I’d shared some insights into my writing/research process for my UK and Australian readers. In terms of thriller writers some of my favourites would be John Le Carre, Robert Harris and Alan Furst. So I guess I fall more into that kind of muscular, historically rigorous narrative camp – or at least aspire toward it!
Coming from a historical fiction (as well as erotic fiction but that’s a whole other conversation) background, as well as my experience as a playwright, I am very aware of the balance between plot drive, characterisation, atmosphere/location and suspense. Not an easy juggling act but worth aiming for. But, as a reader, I like to both have time to empathise with the characters, lock into their psychology, yet be excited enough to turn the next page and learn something factual or historical along the way.
As a playwright you learn a lot about the importance of individual voice as well as dialogue but you also learn about the fickle nature of audience and the importance of engaging them quickly in moral dilemmas that are both authentic and emotionally moving. To be frank I’ve never been interested in thriller writers that are simply all plot drive – or in screen writer’s parlance - big print (action directions) and there are many highly successful thriller writers who fall into this category.
To try and achieve the craft I dream of, I usually arrive at the original idea of the book through a kind of fermentation. There will be odd pieces of information, images, historical eras that resonate, (it helps having a magpie’s mind) that I will then start to weave together. In the case of SPHINX it begin with an article (I think it was The Times) about an ancient Egyptian Naos inscribed with both ancient Egyptian and more contemporary astrological markings being pulled out of sea by Archaeologist and impressio Frank Goddio (if you’re German you might have seen his extraordinary travelling show of Ancient Egyptian artefacts found off the Alexandrian coast). I then started to think about what my personal emotional connection with Egypt might be – remember writers have to live with their books for a number of years, it’s a little like choosing a lover so you really have to be careful at this point. And I remembered how Sadat’s assassination really moved and shocked me. Sadat was most famous (amongst other things) for his visit to the Knesset in 1977 – an act of great courage. So now I was beginning to paly with three possible starting points – 1977, Sadat’s visit to the Knesset, an ancient artefact with astrological significance. You begin to see how these elements can ignite both imagination and a research quest of my own.
Writers also often have identifiable themes that kind of run through their work like a personal DNA – or an unconscious baseplate underpinning the plot. In my case it is often the rational Newtonian ‘scientific’ protagonist who is thrown into an odyssey that undermines his/her belief system and opens him to more inexplicable paradigms of life. This has an overlay, which can be simplified to determinism versus free will. So again you might be able to see how I arrived at the notion of the Astrarium and it’s ability to set one’s death date.
I always interview people both for character and expertise. So I spoke to a number of Egyptologists, geophysicists and oil guys (including the man who ran Amcol in the 70’s in Egypt) as well as spending time in Alexandria (two months) interviewing members of the various communities depicted in the book. I also had to access old photos and footage of Alexandria in the 1970’s (The city has had much development, and back then people were far more western in their dress than now – particularly women) Many thanks to you all. It was very early on in my research that one Egyptologist suggested I should look at the Antikythera mechanism for my research. It was one of those eureka moments in which it’s hard not to think of God as some benevolent librarian who has just steered you into exactly the right corner of hi/her vast library - to place my own fictional astrarium as an early predecessor of the Antikythera mechanism, although audacious (but hey, I write fiction!) suddenly gave me a way of weaving real fact into the storyline in an incredibly exciting way.
For further info on the Antikythera mechanism : www.nature.com/nature/videoarchive/antikythera
FLYING TIME
Flying Time
I can’t believe it’s been a decade since 2000, I’m not sure whether it’s the number of noughts in these last ten years or whether the significant events (and I would count amongst these – the emergence of the climax debate, rise of fundamentalism, the massive acceleration of internet related info and commerce and the recession) feel less significant bracketed by the emptiness of those digitals. One thing for sure time ain’t linear, it seems to be dictated by one’s own subjective experience of it. There was a fantastic article on this is the New Scientist (24.10.09 – The Time machine inside your head) and I’ve heard various brain experts talk on this on the radio since – it appears that the more new experiences you crammed into your day the longer that day feels – basically as your brain gives the illusion of ‘slowing time down’ to allow you to learn and absorb new information. Which is why, in a nutshell, sometimes when you’re travelling it can often feel like months by the time the sunsets. It’s also why one’s childhood might feel as if it went on a lot longer than a mere twelve years of one’s life. Discovery slows time and intensifies the experience of time. So does intense experiences like falling in love, sudden accidents, etc, yet some intense experiences like being fully intellectually engaged by someone or an activity can have the opposite affect of speeding up time. Fun makes time fly.
Certainly I can remember a few times of being with someone I had fallen in love with (usually unrequited) and experiencing that intense sensation of time slowing down, and everything magnifying slightly, even colour taking on an new intensity. As if you could almost see the pores of his skin, the slight gesture of a finger, the twitch f a lip, the way his shoe was angled etc – all deeply engraved on the memory banks ready to sum up at a moment’s notice. Distress and pain is another way of slowing down time and I have a strong memory of a car accident I had decades ago. Routine is another interestingly phenomenon; work days can crawl along, yet when you think back on the week each day blends into another. Apparently one way to intensify time is to simulate your brain by swapping hands used for menial jobs – left hand to brush teeth instead of right, you get the picture. Jolting the brain out of a dull automatic observation. Frankly I’d rather crowd my day with fantastic new experiences, like travel, new skills, and lateral observation – and yet it’s impossible to achieve anything without a certain amount of tedium and repletion. Therein lies the human condition.
In my prose I’ve experimented with trying to depict the subjective acceleration or slowing down of time. Shifting into present tense in emotional (or sometimes sexual) climaxes in the plot – staccato sentences to accelerate into action…When a character sees someone for the first time and is deeply struck to go into the minutia of that character’s appearance depicting the protagonist’s experience of him/her.
Onto a more festive note, for my UK readers, if you can go and see Alan Bennett’s new play: The Habit of Art at the National theatre, South Bank.– a fantastically witty depiction of a fictional encounter between the poet W.H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten set in Auden’s rooms in the early 1970’s. Auden and Britten were apparently associates/lovers when they were young, but this takes places at the twilight of both their careers. It’s a very funny and moving depiction of the paradoxes of both homosexuality in the 1950s (their milieu as younger men) and what functions as muse at the later end of one’s artistic career. Bennet has also very cleverly set the core of the piece as a play within a play – so the two central characters are actually National theatre actors rehearsing a play about Auden and Britten. Immediately the theme widens to experience of the playwright I the rehearsal room, actors struggling with both psychological and historical accuracy and integrity and what is deemed as Art or high culture. Bennet is cheeky enough to throw a very grounded working class rent boy in as Auden’s muse that leads to a poignant reminder of the strictures of Class in British society and the great intellectual divide. A populist play with transgressive themes, loved it! Merry Xmas to all who celebrate it from me!
Discovery
I have to apologise profusely to my regular blog readers, I have been out with chronic bronchitis for eight weeks and only just got my personality and brain back sometime last week. Meanwhile in between dealing with absolutely zero energy I have been working on a commissioned radio play for ABC (Australian broadcasting Corporation). Set on one of the convict ships Lady Penrhyn that was part of the First Fleet to sail out to Botany Bay; it focuses on the true-life love story between a young Jewish convict and a young Scottish lieutenant. Esther Abrahms was merely 16 with a young baby when she was transported for stealing about five yards of lace. Britain at the time was a place of huge social inequality and had already had a record of transporting ‘criminals’ to America (then after the war of Independence the Americans naturally said enough with the criminals) so they had to find an alternative destination. Initially they tried the African coast (to great disaster, most of the men and convicts were killed by the local or died of disease). Cook had already suggested Australia and by 1787 there was already a colony of male convicts, the Brits then decided on a policy of deliberating transporting women (for relatively minor offences) to boost the female population (which, frankly, apart from abducted local indigenous women was next to nothing). It was a grim prospect and Esther (who lied about her age and said she was twenty) must have been both incredibly precocious and strong willed to have both psychologically survived the trip (it took about nine months on a ship the size of a Sydney ferry) and strategic. George Johnston, who was then 23, was already a war veteran having served in the navy since he was 12! He fought against the Americans in the War of Independence and against the French in India and was, from all accounts, blonde, handsome and tall and well respected amongst his fellow officers and sailors. Despite strict orders about the female convicts having anything to do with the men on board both emotionally and sexually, liaisons happened (nine months at sea, what did they expect!) and Esther was one of the youngest and physically striking. Even so, this must have been a love story for once they arrived in Botany Bay the two went onto have eight children, prestigious lives and eventually married. The Sydney suburb Annandale was named after their large mansion Annandale House (named for the small Scottish town George Johnston grew up in) and at one point George Johnston was Lieutenant Governor of NSW. (Well know to my Australian readers). In executing my research I came across the complete log of the ships journey written by the ship’s Sturgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth. Written almost in plot points, it is the description of some of the day to day life on aboard but is also a fantastic record of the experience of both wonder and adventure of the actual journey from Plymouth 1787 to Botany Bay 1789 – through ports such as Teneriffe, Rio de Janeiro, Cape of Good Hope (Africa). There is one extraordinary account of hearing Africa slaves singing at dawn moored in the harbour of Rio de Janeiro (Portuguese colony and big slave trading post), with the beautiful singing drifting across the water as the Sun rises. Smyth casually explains to us that it is known that the slaves sing when about to go to auction or to execution! This in-passing-casualness is a graphic illustration of how accepted slavery was – the convict ship’s route crosses the slave trading route and there are several references to passing slave traders – sometimes flying English flags, sometimes Portuguese.
I have also been reading an excellent non-fiction book I recommend to anyone interested in late 18th century literature, science and philosophy. It’s one of those great books where you can join the dots between the great romantic poets, the emergence of science and it’s split with religion but also glean an understanding of the kind of utopia romanticism that drove those early British explorers. The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. Coincidentally it covers the young Joseph Banks’s experience of The Endeavour’s journey through to Australia (Captain Cook’s journey 1770 -) that ironically, I guess, was the precursor to the first fleet of convict ships seventeen years later (find Paradise, must send convicts.). Bank’s very courageous, idealistic (and extremely privileged – the guy was a serious trust fund baby) enthusiasm and open-mindedness is inspirational.
For anyone in Sydney –
I have a new short play opening, see below! It’s a darkly funny short piece – a ghost story set in Mortuary Station (a quirky mock-Gothic 19th century building attached to Central Station) which used to be the loading point for coffin train heading out to the main cemetery, heavily used in times like when Plague hit Sydney in 1900.
Under rain,sun and dust
I am currently in Sydney, after a whirlwind visits to both Brisbane and Melbourne. As some readers might know I attended the Brisbane Writers Festival as a guest on several panels – most of which came under the bracket of ‘female writers of erotica or sexy historical fiction’. Quiver, my first book and first collection of ‘erotic’ short stories was published over ten years ago in Australia, and sold extremely well and in some ways it continues to both haunt and define me in this particular market. Not that some of the historical fiction isn’t a little raunchy, but frankly often I feel, with many other more literary and historical fiction writers now crashing through the bedroom wall, the times have just caught up with me. Writers I find are usually prickly singular creatures, they are not collective creatures and it’s always interesting watching and eavesdropping on the various groupings that form themselves in the Green room of such events.
Brisbane itself is now very much of the 22nd Century – the C.B.D (although small) has fantastic and quite futuristic development, all located on and around the banks of the broad brown-green river. It was late winter, early Spring and the evening I was leaving was the start of the Riverfire festival –one of the biggest night of the year there - which began with a military flyby. It was balmy, the air blood-temperature, the atmosphere a wonderful combination of laid-back Australian with a slight rural big-town ambience married with state of the art development and energetic youth. I watch dozens of young families; the men in shorts and tee shirts pushing strollers, the women in brightly patterned cotton dress stroll toward the banks of the river to watch the flyby and fireworks. For a moment I was reminded of those late 1960’s illustrations of cities of the future – relaxed, casually dressed young people strolling around a Jetson’s like cityscape – non-violent user-friendly utopia. Some projection on my behalf but it is extraordinary to think how this city has evolved since the very repressive days of the ‘liberal’ (think Tory/Republican) Premier Joh Bijelke-Peterson state government. (The Aussies will know what I mean). It is a very young and very can-do city – and, to my eyes, seemed to lack the cultural cynicism of some of the larger cities I know.
There was an interesting set of statistics in last week’s issue of the New Scientist’ – contained within an article about population growth. Apparently in the last day that the world population ended less in the evening than in the morning was the 26th of December the tsunami of 2004 with 250,000 dying in that tragedy and another 160,000 dying of natural causes (total 410,00) – that days total births was 370,000. The last huge disaster that killed more people then was born was the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 but the biggest impact on population growth in the 20th century was not the 2nd or 1st World Wars (I would have most certainly assumed this) but the flu pandemic of 1918-1920, which killed 50 million people roughly. An extraordinary fact, the journalist (Alison George) equates this massive fatality with the impact on population caused by the Black Death, the plague years of the 14th century which transformed huge swathes of populated Europe into empty wasteland – somehow reminiscent of the landscape in Cormack McCarthy’s The Road. Paradoxically it got me thinking about the absurdities of re-incarnation and how, mathematically, there would be an awful lot of new souls being born to justify the figures. More optimistically they have calculated the world’s population will start decreasing after 2050.
Work-wise I have embarked on a series of new projects post the epic process of writing Sphinx. I’ve noticed there’s always this beat of introspection/depression after finishing a big book. Usually a great time to allow the unconscious to begin the fermentation of new ideas/storylines/images – whatever fires the imagination. I’ve also noticed how for me (and I suspect other writers) books are like relationships – when you involved you’re deeply committed and myopic and in love, but once they leave you, you go through a process of initially hating them, then indifference, then a couple of years later you start to recognise what it was that made you fall in love in the first place.
Gender Bender
It’s been a big month for gender – with the globally publicised scandal of gender testing of Caster Semenya, the South African runner and the humiliating trails she has had to undergo to confirm her sex. Regardless of the outcome and regardless of the surrounding ethical debate and constructs around this particular case I think it has, avertedly, illuminated the fact that gender can be more ambiguous that we like to think. Like so many things, it is somewhat of a grey area - a rainbow terrain with two poles at either end - uber male, uber female and a thousand nuances betwixt them. The novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is a beautiful illustration of this, the story of a person born with Gender dysphoria – initially pushed into a female identity by her parents (apparently as many as one in two thousand children are born with some kind of gender dysphoria that either need surgical or genetic ‘correction’) and whom ends up living as a man – compelled psychologically. This is a far more complex issue that society will admit and I suspect, for obvious reasons, still finds disturbing. (for reference there is a great article in The Independent, Science 21/8/09)
One of my very close friends (now tragically deceased) was, when I met him was a 19 year old transvestite who had undergone hormonal treatment so was living as a woman (with a penis and breasts). A year later he’d changed his mind and had shaved his head, stopped the hormonal treatment and was living as a bi-sexual man. I’ve never known such a maverick as he – and certainly he was most anarchistic in the way he would throw up (with a great deal of wit and humour) our (heterosexual) prejudices and assumptions. He still traces a path through many of my books, and for my readers, you would recognise the shadow of him in some of my characters.
¬_Okay, reasons to be cheerful – the artificial trees they are thinking of constructing along the freeways to absorb carbon dioxide. Have you seen these? They kind of look like a cross between a cheap fan and a triffid – and do not resemble trees in any way except for their ability to absorb the culprit emission. However, as an admirer of the single propeller wind farm prototype (there’s a great example in California driving towards Joshua tree – set against the desert horizon, they loom up like a field of fantastic sculptures and somehow, the way they rotate imbues them with a strange intelligence) I’m all for the artificial algae screen tree. If you painted them sky blue they would look surreally beautiful against forest or bush, or seashore. And given how ugly most freeways are it can only be an improvement, not to mention the huge ecological gains. Bring them on, and fast!
On Aliens and Men
I’m about to head down to perform at the Brisbane Writers festival in a few weeks, but in the interim I have been brainstorming a couple of theatre projects and possible screenplay between the next big novel idea. Fertile time. It’s always liberating to come from under the yoke of a big epic commitment like Sphinx and let the imagination play for a couple of months before diving underwater again into the initial research and the psychological hijacking that seems to incur when immersed in writing a big fat novel.
But in between all this seed planting and gathering a couple of other works have grabbed me. The first is a history book – written by an economist, which tracks the cycles – feast, famine and population of Europe (and related colonies) from the 13th century through to the 19th century – ‘The Great Wave’ by David Hackett Fischer. For many this book will read like a shopping list of woes (with graphs) – harvest failure, plague, starvation and revolution. But if you’re a fast reader like myself it is extraordinary documentation that joins the dots in terms of culture, economic and climate for the layperson like myself. What becomes apparent is how horribly resonant some of the cycles are – i.e.: periods of posterity when the rich get very rich and the poor begin to literally starve then top this off with a few bad crops due to climatic change and you have the perfect recipe for bloody revolution. Or the collapse of the Italian banking boom in Siena in 1298 when they had overextended borrowing to the great merchants, nobles and kings (then the equivalent of world banks) which lead to a hike in food prices and commodities, topped by horrible weather and failed crops in early 13th century – leaving most people starving then introduce the black plague, and you have the catastrophe of 1315 and the following years. Not an era I would have like to lived through.
I’ve always thought history should be compulsory at school and reading this book only confirms this. Foresight is to be forewarned, and although the tools are different - the rules, greed and fallout appear completely contemporary. The Great Wave also has great footnotes and clear global references, great read for the amateur historian or fact collector. I mean who would have known that Eskimos kayaking off the coast of Scotland were sighted during the ‘mini Ice Age’. Or that J.S Bach’s lifespan mirrors almost exactly the economic equilibrium of the Enlightenment. It was certainly a revelation to me that humanity has always been at the mercy of climate change.
The other work that has really blown me away was the movie District 9 (yet to open in UK and Australia). I don’t think I’ve seen intelligent sci-fi like this for decades (maybe ever). For the squeamish, or haters of alien movies don’t be put off. This is a moving treatise on racism, the internment of refugees, a condemnation of the weapons industry and a friggin’ glorious celebration of independent film making that has Hollywood jittery. Although made for 30mUS it was made outside of the studio system (Sony picked it up for distribution after it was made) with the visionary Peter Jackson at the helm as midwife/producer. Directed by South African 29-year-old Neill Blomkamp (who has a background in special effects) and written by Terri Tatchell and Blomkamp it is by far the cleverest film of this genre I’m seen. And as the stepmother of three teenage boys I get to see a lot. Blomkamp manages to subvert the traditional demonization of Crustacean-like aliens (avoiding the schmaltzy isn’t he cute Spielberg trap) in a beautifully paced arch as his everyman hero Sharlto Copley (who hadn’t even acted in a feature before) ends up avertedly fighting for his own ‘humanity’ and battling an insidiously (and utterly believable) global weapons company. The fact that it is set in a real shantytown in Jo-burg (with the huge alien craft eerily hanging over the city like some futuristic abandoned Noah’s Arc) is genius and gives extraordinary resonance and insight into the poor bastards that live in places like these all over the globe. Go see it. It haunts.
For Brisbane readers and anyone else interest – info on my appearances at the Brisbane Writers festival go to www.Brisbanewritersfestival.com.au and hit on my name – under L for Learner.
Criminal Muse
There was an interesting article a few weeks ago in the Australian papers citing a legal case in Western Australian wherein the Western Australian State government had frozen the bank account of an author who had co-written a book with an ex SAS soldier who had previously served time for a series of bank robberies he’d executed to fund the Karen Liberation front (a movement fighting Burma’s current military junta). The book told the SAS guy’s story, so one assumes it’s based in fact. The bank account of the co-author - Kingsley Flett - contained his publishing income and the West Australian Director of public prosecutions froze the account because the state was claiming the account contain monies that were proceedings of a criminal activities – in other words money made from telling the story of real bank robberies.
Extraordinary – apparently there is a clause in Western Australia (differing from the rest of Australia) that gives the state government a freezing order if there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that property is crime-used or crime-deprived. I guess this now applies to intellectual property – the case has opened up a whole can of worms and threatens other writers of crime (based on actual events) as well as the surrounding publishers/production houses that profit off such series – this is only if it gets through the Australian Supreme Court. The publishing director of Penguin, Australia (hello Bob) has made a direct appeal to the Premier of Western Australia as he should, but it did make me think about the ethics of such masterpieces as Capote’s In Cold Blood as well as a plethora of other excellent movies, books and TV series all based on actual crime stories.
Personally, I never knowingly write something based on someone’s experience – and, somehow, the notion is too limiting as a fiction writer. But that doesn’t mean the government has the right to prevent others from doing so. Is this just another sideways step toward censorship as driven by the Christian Right? Ironically Australia has a literary history based on the glorification of maverick bank robber/revolutionary figures – Ned Kelly withstanding and the extremely morally ambivalent figure of the Australian hit man Chopper Read comes to mind – God knows how much money his book, movie, TV, appearances and spin generated, not to mention launching the career of one outstanding film director.
I suspect it is both absurd and impossible to control the muse wherever it may spring from, but the move does indicate a worrying trend of government attempting to control artistic expression. I’m thinking about the Bill Henson controversy last year, when Kevin Rudd announced that he had found the veteran and internationally renown photographer’s work pornographic (the Australian Henson does hauntingly beautiful depictions of pubescent sexuality – that are not pornographic in my opinion – more dreamlike and strangely reminiscent of one’s own awakening in a metaphoric way). Next to the latest wave of New British Art - Emin, Hirst etc, Henson is positively conservative, but hey, this is the country that banned D.H. Lawrence up until the 1950’s – which is why the trend is worrying.
The notion of an artist gleaning inspiration from real life events whether they are violent, criminal, or violence legitimised by politics (i.e. war) has existed ever since cave men scratched depictions of hunting on the cave wall. I’m thinking of the National Theatre’s wonderful production of Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (written in 1585 and based on Virgil’s play) I’ve seen recently, in which Aeneas the central character (an Trojan) gives an graphic and totally compelling eye-witness account of the siege of Troy – a monologue which was actually inspired by the French Saint Bartholomew’s massacre - the massacre of the Protestants by the Catholics in Paris (as depicted in the movie Queen Margot). This was an event of his times that fired Marlowe’s imagination enabling him to create a totally believable experience of war – still moving people today. I would argue that Marlowe’s monologue is ethical because in no way does it encourage violence or war- but instead operates as a graphic warning about the horrors and senselessness of such events….
Castrating our own
This week I’m posting a dialogue between the Australian writer of erotic fiction Linda Jaivin (Eat Me, A most Immoral woman) and myself, which is a humorous, but not outraged response to the statement released a few weeks ago by Kate Copstick, the new female editor of the Erotic Review (UK) in which she claims women cannot write erotic literature.
TL: I have to say that I found Kate Copstick’s statement about how women can’t write good erotica more than a little extraordinary –
LJ: I’d call it more than a little ordinary myself. Gordon Ramsey said ‘British women can’t cook to save their lives’. Then hired Clare Smyth to be the head chef at his flagship restaurant in Chelsea.
TL: What’s more, she’s not just talking from the perspective of a writer of erotica but also as a reader of such materials. It seems a regressive and strangely dated argument, a rehashing of that old chestnut of what is the difference between pornography and erotica? For me it has always been that pornography was objective and that erotica was subjective. What do you think, Linda?
LJ: I’m with Woody Allen, who said the difference was that with erotica, you use a feather and with porn, the whole chicken. There are dozens of theories. Some people say that erotica is literary and porn visual. But really, it comes down to semantics, an attempt to valorise one’s own preferences as classier: what I like is erotica, what you like is porn.
TL: The extension of this debate is the widely held belief that women, being the emotional soft creatures that they are, are incapable of having sex for the sake of having sex, do not enjoy visual depictions of sex and now – thanks to Ms Copstick’s declaration - now incapable of writing good sex without letting the soft focus of romance get in the way. What a load of c—, or should I say -what a load of ‘I felt his manhood hardening like a defiant iron rod against my belly, swooning I….
LJ: Stop, Tobsha, you’re making me faint. But seriously, I’ve never understood that whole automatic pairing of women and romance and men and sex. Or the related notion that women prefer chocolate to sex – I’ve always found chocolate a lot harder to wash out of the sheets the next morning. Some of the biggest romantics are men and there are loads of women who enjoy no-strings sex. It’s curious that the editor of the Erotic Review holds such clichéd views of sexuality and gender.
TL: Apart from the plethora of great female writers of erotica I would argue that social/sexual morales are evolving faster than the time it would take Ms Copstick to reach for her Rabbit.
LJ: Perhaps we should challenge her to a duel. Or a tri-el. Rabbits at twenty paces. One, two, three, bzzzzz. Do you think she’d come at that idea?
TL: And most of this is directly linked to the economic independence of women, a phenomena that is increasingly taken for granted by many women under the age of forty and their behaviour reflects this. In fact there have been several recent editorials as sensationalist as Ms Copstick’s, which have argued that women are the new men; vicarious in our sexual appetites, wavering in our fidelity and newly fickle in our aesthete demands of muscular gender. How else do you explain the Coyote, David Beckham’s Versace ads and Madonna’s barely legal boy toys? Maybe now that we are the new men we have all, as a collective gender, suddenly forgotten how to engage in foreplay? Didn’t women invent foreplay? Are we not the seductive sex?
LJ: The sexual monoculture first popularised by Hugh Hefner and Playboy in the 1950s, with its predatory ethos, has become mainstream. Except where Hefner posited men as the desiring sex and women as objects to be desired, now women flip the idea on its head to do the same thing to men – and other women. But it’s all about physical stereotypes of sexiness, and rarely about the expression or fulfilment of female desire. I thought Ariel Levy nailed it in Female Chauvinist Pigs. There’s little difference between men drooling over big breasts and women salivating over a washboard stomach. That said, at least a girl can launder her chocolate-stained sheets on perfect abs… sorry, where were we?
TL: Of course, in the real world, gender difference and taste in erotica, pornography and whatever turns you on is never that polarised. I know women who watch and enjoy pornography and men who find it too psychologically cold. And you’d been amazed how many closet male Anais Nin readers there are – Personally I always found Nin too vague in her descriptions of the actual act and, as an erotic writer, I’ve always tried to walk a line between her and Henry Miller.
LJ: I like different models and writers of erotica depending on my mood: Anais Nin, John Cleland, Pat(rick) Califia to name a few… Califia rather confounds the question of which gender writes better erotica as he has been both.
TL: As for the actual writing process and the visualisation involved in the creation of good sex writing it’s really a question of imagination, research and practise.
LJ: You can never do enough research, I find.
TL: You have to emotionally engage the reader enough so that he or she wants to climax with the characters – the nuts and bolts of this should be explicit enough so that the least imaginative reader can put her or himself into the bed, swimming pool, elevator or, in the case of one of my stories, deep freeze, and still track what piston is pumping and if the engine is dripping with the right amount of lubrication. But, car mechanic metaphors aside, I remain utterly unconvinced that this craft is gender specific.
LJ: Deep freeze?
TL: I had the honour of meeting with the legendary Pauline Regan (real name Dominic Aury) a few years before her death. Interestingly when her novel, The Story of O, was published anonymously many people assumed it must have been a male writing because there was no way a woman could envisage such sexual explicitness.
LJ: At least she’d get a gig with Copstick’s Erotic Review.
TL: Admittedly this was in the 1950’s before the clitoris, G spot and the Bermuda triangle had been officially discovered (and endorsed by the sexual revolution). But in some ways Ms Copstick’s declamatory spin is a continuation of the same regressive thinking. But then again she is in the unenviable position of running a paper that has to compete with free Internet porn, the massive acceleration of literary sexy novels and raunchy Mills and Boons. I guess she had to think of something to get a rise.
LJ: Well, she got one out of us, didn’t she? I suspect that despite her fear of being ‘drowned in estrogen’ she’ll be gagging on a flood of testosterone before too long. If she’s not, her readers may be. Then who’s she gonna call?
Queen Warrior
This week I had one of those bizarre encounters with Nature an urbanite like myself rarely experiences. Our neighbour in the US had told us about an incidence a couple of weeks ago where bees started swarming around an old china cabinet he was installing. Fascinated he’d watched as ten bees became a swirling mass of ten thousand, and, thankfully, instead of calling the bug exterminator he’d remembered a retiree he knew who was a part-time apiarist. In a few hours the bee charmer had smoked and incited the new queen out of the centre of the hive and into his own high-rise transportable hive decked out with honeycomb trays and state of the art amenities no doubt. He then whisked them off to their new home at the edge of a lemon and lime orchard – from wild bees to working bees. After that the bee charmer walked our neighbours property looking for the source of the new queen (apparently US hives spilt from Feb. to May releasing a new queen ready to establish her own hive and always within a short radius). He could find no evidence of the source hive.
Listening to this anecdote over Margaritas I thought no more of it, except I have had a big interest in bees and their hive mentality for years. There has always being something fascinating about the notion of the collective consciousness, the idea that an individual creature could sacrifice itself – even it’s biological reproductive abilities – for the greater good of the hive (I’ve written about the Naked Mole rat in this context in this blog previously). Perhaps this fascination stems from an admiration for a collective psychology which appears to be the antithesis of the self-seeking individualism that seems to defines what it is to be human – at least from my own Western cultural perspective. Too often the hive mind-set is seen in a negative, frightening light – machine-like. I’m reminded of the Borg in Star trek movie First Contact, also featured throughout Next generation series whose queen (sort of Wicked Witch of the West meets discipline Mistress meets Cyberman) seduces Captain Picard, annexing his individuality so that he’s hooked into the ultimate mind melt/union/climax. The loss of independent thinking, individual identity and the notion of the hero maverick capable of autonomous decision and action are depicted here as no only un-human-like but also, by inference, un-American. But the hive is an extraordinarily efficient and successful (in evolutionary terms) entity. As confirmed by the global spread of the super colony of Brazilian ants recently observed – whose abilities to communicate internationally will shortly rival that of the internet! Bees have been around for about 120 million years - lot longer than humans. Which was another reason why I took the worldwide reports of the mysterious deaths of bees extremely seriously. It felt like some biblical prophesy ‘…And the sky will become as black as sackcloth and the bees will stop buzzing…’ Another close friend of mine is the son of an Almond Farmer in Southern California and they were extremely worried about the falling American Bees population as almonds are entirely pollinated by bees. No bees, no almonds - you can imagine the potential devastation as it ripples down the food chain.
Anyhow, a day after listening to my neighbour’s story I suddenly noticed several bees entering and exiting an underground utilities box in our driveway. Immediately I called the bee charmer who turned up half an hour later with smoker, transportable hive and face veil. Blithely I told him that the bees had only been there a couple of days thinking they were the spill off from the neighbours hive. He lifted up the lid of the utilities box and began pulling honeycomb after honey box out each crawling with hundreds of bees. The hive had been there for about a year and a half and the bee charmer told me it was almost certain that the queen who had tried to set up a mew colony next door was from this wild hive on our property. He laid his own empty wooden hive next to the utility box/hive and, after smoking the queen out, enticed the rest into the wooden transportable hive.
He finished in the afternoon and told me he would collect his hive at seven that night, giving the forty thousand bees or so who were still out in ‘the field’ time to wing their way home and crawl into the safety of their new hive before it got taken away to its new location miles away. Before he left I asked him about whether he’d noticed the fall-off of the bee population in the United States generally. The good news is that he told me that compared to a couple of years ago he’d noticed that the size of swarms had started to double, and he’d felt convinced that they were recovering. Wow, another piece of economic optimism.
When we returned later that night the hive was gone and there were only a few forlorn bees buzzing aimlessly around the now blocked entrance to the old hive. But then, to my horror, the next day there were a few more lost bees buzzing over the abandoned ‘vacant’ lot. After about three days there were a small pile of about fifty or so dead bees all lying sadly on top of the utility box, the location of their old, now empty, hive, the entrance of which had been blocked. Foot soldiers who had returned home to find it didn’t existed anymore and who, confused, had flown around in circles until dying of exhaustion. And I know I’m anthropomorphizing like crazy, but I’m telling there was something undeniably heroic about the sight.
Note for my Australian readers I shall be appearing at the Brisbane Writers Festival 9th of September until the 13th of September.
The Black Glove
First of all apologies to regular readers for the late posting, I have been overwhelmed with rewrites (which are now finished) and was uncharacteristically existentially exhausted afterwards. Could be a sign of the times with the strange sense of finiteness (is there such a word? – There is now) with the absolutely tragic (and totally surreal) passing of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett-Major all on the same day. Both icons, both embodying realms that were fantastical in their own ways. The outpouring of grief for the Peter Pan of Pop is both extraordinary, pliable and even I, hard-bitten well-lived cynic, have found myself deeply saddened. Sort of like when Princess Di died - pointless deaths that becomes this huge metaphor for us all. I suspect it lies in the vulnerability of these icons when living, and in Mr. Jackson’s case, the tragedy of talent lost. Every shop, building and even my hair dressers (there for the tri-annual visit) seems to be pumping out Thriller and Billie Jean and I suspect this is the case in every major city in the world, to the point that if there was an alien craft passing by in the galaxy and they tuned in, it would be forgivable if they assumed Michael Jackson hit songs were the Linga Franca for humanity. What was almost as fascinating was the manner in which news of his death ringed the world in minutes. I actually coped it cruising the Australian papers on line, in London, which at that time of night (early Australian morning) was among the first to have it up on site. At that point the word ‘Death’ was in inverted commas, yes, just like that, as it hadn’t yet been confirmed officially, so there was a strange free-fall of disbelief as I frantically searched all the links I could find (Google hadn’t crashed yet) to confirm the poor bugger’s demise. Amazing what a couple of commas can do and how we cling onto that moment of possible misinformation – what if it’s the wrong body, etc? That it might be just an ugly rumour. I have vivid memories as a 16 year old receiving news of my father’s accidental death from the police and cross questioning them about how they had identified him (details in his wallet) desperately wanting them to be wrong. The deaths of the great become ours because they remind us of our own losses: Memory and Myth.
Speaking of which, a chapter in one of my coffee table books –Curiosities of Literature by John Sutherland, entitled First-Night Nerves, got me thinking about how we remember then fictionalise our own adolescence and sexual awakening. Mr. Sutherland was writing about Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (please note: I am a huge fan of McEwan’s, just not of that particular book) and commented on how his experience of the early 60’s was certainly not the clumsy, emotional and sexually frigid landscape McEwan’s describes in the utter inability of his young English suburban couple to consummate their honeymoon. Not my era but my parents – however I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Sutherland, after all John Updike’s accounts of love, infidelity and scandal, most of which was set in American suburbia in the same years (early 60’s) were far more salacious. Each to their own, you might say, except it’s interesting how such descriptions of historical zeitgeists become immortalised in literature and then set in the concrete of quasi-fact then quoted as the finite description of that era – ergo – all Victorians were puritans, no-one had sex before 1968, homosexuality didn’t exist before the 1890’s (thank you Oscar) and there was no economic migration before the 1920’s.
One piece of fascinating news was the arrest of the Sri Lankan astrologer this week due to his prediction of the downfall of his current President, who apparently, takes his astrology very seriously indeed. Actually, so do I, within limits. I did, however have an amusing incident in Oct 08 when two weeks before the US stock market, Merrill Lynch and Washington Mutual went down, I phoned a close (and internationally published) astrologer mate asking her whether I should sell my US portfolio as I’d read (not on her site) that my sign was in for a very rough ride financially. She reassured me that there was no correlation between astrology and the stock market. Cut to a week later and I was losing value by the second. A lesson in trusting one’s gut – which is, according to author Malcolm Gladwell of Blink – really is an unconscious accumulation of information and sharpened assessment skills -. Intelligence appears not to be necessarily a slow rational process, an observation I find consoling, and the challenge is to have the courage to act on that first instinct.