Did I realise that I didn’t write a chart post for July? Nope. Is that because I’m frantically working through the sequel to Reality Testing? Yes, indeed it is. Good guess.
It’s a funny time, revising a novel. Everything else goes out the window. The short story/essay mill grinds to a halt. The promotion for other books dries up. The vague idea of writing something for the website that isn’t a chart evaporates. The writing day becomes a battle of desire vs exhaustion, i.e. getting a passable draft down before becoming so sick of the novel’s world and the characters who populate it that I go off the boil well before the end, leading me to write such timeless sentences as “He looked through his eyes at the man who was looking at him” or “She had been trained to do it and it alone, like a train that is on rails and can’t go anywhere else because it is a train”. That kind of gold. One third still to go, and then I’ll start crafting something beautifully elegiac to submit to The Paris Review come wintertime.
News: Oh, I’m also working on a sci fi TV project. But it’s confidential so that’s all I can say. Sounds grand, doesn’t it? It most certainly is.
Film of the month: Forbidden Planet. We had a comic store called Forbidden Planet in Plymouth. Of the five or so years I spent there total, going into FP was the coolest thing to do with my time on a Saturday. Robocop dolls, Judge Dredd collections, mogwai-sized mogwai, the smell of weed and dust in the air. The eponymous film naturally has none of that, though there would likely be no Murphy without Robby the Robot. And who needs weed when you have Leslie Nielson playing a straight man? I came away from this 1956 extraplanetary extravaganza with one question on my mind: Who would win in a fight between the girder-carrying, bench-pressing Robby and the psychopathic, glamtastic Box from Logan’s Run? Both could take ED-209 in an instant, I reckon.
Book of the month: I have been reading the same book for the past six weeks and that book is American Gods by everyone’s favourite Gaiman. I like it and also I do not like it. The story is serpentine, but doesn’t seem to make much sense, and the writing veers from smart to clunky as hell within the space of a paragraph. By accident, I bought Gaiman’s “preferred” version, which contains 12,000 extra words his editor wisely cut out. That puts the word count at around 200,000, which seems excessive for “the adventures of a guy named Shadow and all the driving he did that time through snowy Americana”. I would really like to get it finished, because I have a bunch of other books waiting, but - like Shadow’s coin tricks - it never seems to end.
Album of the month: In a nice coincidence, it is a dead heat between punky upstarts The Chats with their sophomore effort GET FUCKED and post-hardcore heroes Chat Pile, who conjure up a series of nihilistic mechanical soundscapes in GOD’S COUNTRY. A very chatty month.
Music to mark a catastrophic rise in sea levels:
