Grammatical Gripe

Image by Horia Varlan

Grammar, like the picture above, is a bloody jigsaw puzzle. Despite having a higher than average reading ability when I started high school, I was rather a late bloomer with regards to spelling. Even now I class myself as homonymically challenged (I find it hard too know witch ones two use) with a propensity for whiz-deletion and comma splicing. 

I owe much of my hard-earned ability with grammar to learning to type in the days when spell-checkers simply beeped at you when you got it wrong. I spent hours going back and trying again.

Contrary to many people's opinion, you don't have to be brilliant at spelling and grammar to be an engaging writer or a great storyteller. After all, the very art of storytelling has its beginnings in the spoken, not the written, word.

Bill Bryson's brilliant examination of Shakespeare throws up the case in point:

Spelling was luxuriantly variable...You could write 'St Paul's' or 'St Powles', and no one seemed to notice or care....People could be extrordinarily casual even with their own names...Philip Henslowe, the empresario, indifferently wrote 'Henslowe' or 'Hensley' when signing his own name, and others made it Hinshley, Hinchlow, Hensclow, Hynchlowes, Inclow, Hinchloe and half a dozen more. More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare's name have been recorded...the Oxford English Dictionary...prefers Shakspere. Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled 'words' two ways on the title page.

Even today, there are two schools of thought. I shall defer to those more articulate than myself. In the corner for strict spelling regulations, we have David Mitchell:

In the other corner stands his comedy partner, Robert Webb, pushing the argument that it's all about communication, rather than rules:

This entire argument has me in turmoil. If you believe that language is an art, then the chances are that you will put in the time and effort to learn it well. But, as Mitchell points out, it's usually those of us who consider ourselves proficient who suddenly make the worst mistakes - usually after writing an officious piece pointing out where someone else has gone wrong.

I admit it. It drives me up the wall when I see were instead of we're, its instead of it's and there instead of their. The basics. But however harshly I judge others, I judge myself far harder - I'm a repeat perpetrator of a number of grammatical and homonymical offenses. My heart leaps to hear Webb's rebuke, and delights in the Shakespearean freedom of it all.

But I doubt that I could honestly live like that.

However much we don't want it to be true - we are judged on our proficiency of the written word. Nothing spells it out clearer than this article by Sean Coughlan of the BBC, published in July:

Spelling mistakes 'cost millions' in lost online sales

...an analysis of website figures shows a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half... Sales figures suggest misspellings put off consumers who could have concerns about a website's credibility...

Now, I did say that it's not necessary to be a great speller or grammarian in order to write engaging stories. That's true - to an extent. It's true in other fields, too. For instance, I made a living out of number crunching statistical data having completely flunked mathematics at GCSE.

The point is - I understood statistics. I got the relationship between patterns of numbers. I don't understand how to divide two numbers, or how to find their square root in my head.

But then, to be fair, I really don't need to. Because some clever soul invented calculators. I can't even draw a pie chart - but that's okay, Excel can.

Similarly, you may not understand the rules of grammar and spelling, but you may understand perfectly well what makes a really good story or a fascinating character.

As Mitchell pointed out, with an online dictionary - or even one in tree format - you can always look up what you don't know. Google's full of wonderful little tools such as 'define <word>', which instantly gives you the definition for anything you're uncertain about.

It doesn't really matter if you're not grammatically gifted. What matters is that you recognise your weakness and find the right tools for the job.

As one of the greatest minds that ever lived put it:

Never memorize what you can look up in books. - Albert Einstein

The thinking there being that the brain is more than a receptacle for facts. It's the tool used for taking two pieces of information and making something greater out of them.

With that in mind, don't let a fear of grammar and spelling deter you from writing. But do invest in making use of tools that can compensate for that lack of knowledge. There are plenty of them: dictionaries, spell-checkers, thesauruses, proofreaders etc. That's not lazy, that's ingenuity in problem solving.

Dreamflesh

In light of the recent apocalyptic scenes on the streets of Britain, I thought I'd pull out an interview from 2008 with Gyrus, the self-publishing whirlwind behind Towards 2012.

The interview centres around his latest release at the time: Dreamflesh. Another good reason for posting this is that there's rumours of another project in the pipeline, due out next year. Look forward to bringing you more about that.

Dreamflesh, in its own words, is:

... a florid and protean collection of ideas, investigations and experiments weaving together altered states, ecology, healing, mythology, magic and prehistory.

With an introduction like that, who could resist?

It has also sold enormously well due, in no small part, to the impressive line-up of contributors. From Chaos Magician Dave Lee, to the apocalyptic Michael Ortiz Hill, and the truly talented ayahuascarian artist Pablo Amaringo.

In short, a treasure trove for the expanding consciousness, brought into being by a self-publisher who was also responsible for bringing you Towards 2012. 

We journey down into the luminescent dark of his mind to find out... well, what on earth were goin' on there, then?

Without further ado...

Gyrus.

***

What inspired Dreamflesh, why compile it?

I just wanted to get back to creating something tangible. After publishing Towards 2012 and other things in the late '90s, I moved to London and started working, building websites. I had a lot of enthusiasm for the web, but after a while it was clear that the act of reading was qualitatively different in front of a screen. The presence of so many other things to read, do, or interact with via the same interface, the textureless sheen of the reading surface, the hum and buzz of machine components, the restriction to a specific physical posture (laptops notwithstanding)... All these things seemed to make the web fine for receiving and creating information (and, of course, non-textual media); but it seemed to lack something vital when it came to the sustained digestion of knowledge.

Even though historically, the written word is associated with a withering away of some of the very things I'm interested in (animism, magical consciousness, decentred spirituality), it's unavoidably important for absorbing knowledge and nurturing imagination in this slice of history we've landed in. Books may be relics one day, but not in my lifetime I feel.

The other impetus was awareness of our ecological crisis. This is a slow-motion catastrophe that we've been unconsciously gestating in our connections to (and disconnections from) the biosphere for the last few millennia at least. It's not a bunch of guys running at you with guns and bombs (though these things are happening as a consequence), so it's harder to conceptualize and react to. Ecology is complex enough, and mass media simplistic enough, that it's always going to be an uphill struggle to foster effective action until truly large-scale disasters strike.

What can I do? Well, there's a lot of obvious personal choices (some easier than others). Past that, what I've been able to do well in the past is create inspiring small-scale publications. A drop in the ocean next to the work of some activists or developers of green tech; but you have to do what you can. Certainly, I couldn't devote this much time to creating something that didn't address this issue in some way.

It's a little off mainstream, what sort of readership did you envision?

I've never been much for assessing the market and so on. I generally create things that I want to exist, in the faith that no man is an island, and someone else will want them to exist too. But I've realized in doing Dreamflesh Journal that the kind of ideas I was pushing in the 90s have spread out since then. Maybe the enthusiasm is spread a little thin, but the interest is still there. There's a less clear sense of this stuff being hip as it was fifteen years ago; but as Bruce Sterling observed, going for "hip" is an admission that you're not in it for the long haul. We need sustainability, and fashion is the antithesis of sustainability.

Still, I'm lucky enough to pay my way with other things and have time left for this. I consider it both a duty and a pleasure to make good use of this opportunity: creating something that's highly valued by some people, which might not have seen the light of day if it was subjected to market forces as they function today. I hope my readership is as eclectic as the journal's contents: curious (in both senses), smart, sensual and compassionate.

What's been the response to DF1. Has it surprised you?

The response has been warm, though I didn't feel I quite achieved my vision with the first one. It's sometimes hard when you don't pay for contributions to pin people down, of course. And I've been out of the self-publishing loop for a while, so even though I wasn't back to square one, I have had to rekindle certain fires. The only thing that's surprised me is how long it's taken me to get back to all this again.

When is DF2 coming out and what's in it?

It's due before the end of 2008, but the usual self-publishing caveats apply! There's a great selection of interviews (one of my favourite forms): media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, ecopsychologist David Kidner, and Patrick Harpur (the elusive author of the wonderful Daimonic Reality and The Philosopher's Secret Fire). Animals figure largely: Mark Pilkington (editor of sibling journal, Strange Attractor) is writing about animal intelligence, and hopefully Bitsy Broughton will be discussing animals & ancestors in dreamwork. There's a piece by a Louisiana psychotherapist on Hurricane Katrina, and more delectable art & miscellanea. It's even possible that my current writing project might make it in there, looking at the heart as an imaginal reality, panic attacks & the divine...

Tell us a bit about yourself, who is Gyrus? What's your main interest at the moment?

Well, Gyrus is a writing name that's also become my day-to-day name for most people I know. More than a nickname, but a little less than a changed name. It probably makes me seem weirder or more grandiosely esoteric than I actually am; I've learned to live with that.

As I just mentioned, the psychological aspect of the heart is a strong current interest, heavily inspired by James Hillman and Robert Romanyshyn's writings. I'm currently delving into Corbin's work on Sufi mysticism, which seems to be a crucial source for conceptions of the heart that are neither the literal fleshy pump nor the sentimental symbol of love. It's pretty dense stuff; I'm hoping I can distill some of it into tasty but nutritious "starters" to give to people, to help nurture our appetite for this marginalized vision.

Jung once said that "the gods have become diseases", meaning that in banishing the polytheist world of the soul (first through monotheism, then through scientism), we have forced this reality to manifest as strange symptoms, bodily dysfunctions - maybe even ecosystemic imbalance, too. Naturally we stumble when rediscovering this lost world, "like invalids who have forgotten how to walk", as Jim Morrison said. So we have drug wars and psychosis as well as entheogenic rapture, quack cures as well as unorthodox healing, overpriced "lifestyle spirituality" as well as friends helping each other explore themselves. The stumbling is used to further argue against the idea of walking, because we've lost our patience. But I think we all know from experience where patience comes from. Occasionally, we slow ourselves down and try to accept the things we're rushing to avoid; usually, something hits us in the face and we're forced to stop. I'm interested in fostering the former and learning to deal with the latter.

Have any of the articles you've collected profoundly changed the way you look at things - without picking favourites, are there any that you're particularly proud of?

Well, I "test-drove" most of the material in the first volume; many of the contributors are friends. I was "embalmed" by Orryelle and Giselle from Australia, in the process they describe in their article, which was intense. This catalyzed a very potent dream which, via Rebirthing breathwork (a variant of which I'd studied a while ago with Dave Lee, who contributed a piece on breathwork), led me to try ayahuasca, which my friend Donal Ruane discusses in an interview. Michael Ortiz Hill, when I met him in California, performed a dream ceremony and read the I Ching for me; and I've been getting into Santeria practices with Stephen Grasso. All of these things contributed directly to a slow-burning but hugely important transformation I've been going through over the past few years. I'm a very "hands-on" editor!

If you could meet anyone alive or dead, who would it be and what would you ask them?

I would have loved to meet Alan Watts, the great popularizer of Eastern spirituality (a description which belies his tremendous intellectual rigour). I would have asked him for a cup of tea.

---

Dreamflesh is currently out of stock, but keep an eye on the order page for more info.

Pan Gu

I've always rather liked this passage. I first came across it in Sukie Colegrave's The Spirit of the Valley. It gives a little perspective to life.

…Pan Gu (P’an Ku). Born from the original Yin-Yang polarity, this primordial giant grew ten feet each day for eighteen thousand years, pushing the heavens away from the earth. When he died the various parts of his body were transformed into the world. His breath became the wind and the clouds, his voice the thunder and his sweat the rain. His left eye became the sun and his right eye the moon. From his body issued the great mountains. His blood and bodily fluids became the rivers and the seas, and his nervous and venous systems became the layers of the earth. The fields were the transformation of his flesh and the stars and planets developed from the hairs on his head. Metals and stones were the produce of his teeth and bones. His semen became the pearls and his bone marrow turned into jade. The human race developed from the fleas of his body.

Enraptured

Rapture by Duncan Long

In case you didn't know, the world is ending today. Again.

I was reminded - as I do tend to forget these things - when a friend posted on FaceBook:

Still here? Don't worry - apparently the Rapture is not until 6pm folks. Make sure you have clean pants on, don't want to spend Eternity on a cloud with skanky kegs on now do you?

Since then I've taken a shower and made a nice cup of tea. Even if the world is ending, allow the English their tea. There's nothing that a good cuppa can't fix.

It's all down to an evangelical preacher, predictably in the US, called Harold Camping.

According to an article on the Atheists' planned celebration post-rapture parties:

Mr Camping has predicted an apocalypse once before, in 1994...

Given his track record, do you really think he's the best prophet for the job?

You'd kind of assume that an apocalypse is the sort of thing that can only happen once, really.

However, it has spawned an awful lot of merriment online. Here's some of the most notable:

So, Your Parents Think the Rapture's Here  - a guide for disaffected American youth (original article gone, but see this):

"My mom has told me directly that I’m not going to get into heaven," said their daughter Grace to the Times. "At first it was really upsetting, but it’s what she honestly believes." Their 14 year-old son Robert, was more blunt: "People look at my family and think I’m like that...I keep my friends as far away from them as possible."

Isn't that psychological abuse? Apparently not - it's parenting.

Eternal Earth-Bound Pets - want someone to look after the mortal souls of your beloved pets whilst your immortal self flies heavenward to rapture? No problem.

You've committed your life to Jesus. You know you're saved. But when the Rapture comes what's to become of your loving pets who are left behind? Eternal Earth-Bound Pets takes that burden off your mind.

They don't give refunds.

Whilst looking for suitable artwork to accompany this post, I discovered The Apocalyptic Artwork of Duncan Long, which proves an interesting article on his influences:

Long believes that the Rapture shall take place on Rosh Hashanah because on this holiday, a trumpet was blown at the end of the feast to signify the raising of the dead and the beginning of a new year.

An entertaining person, and apparently (according to Booky Wook II):

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself. - Charles Baudelaire

There's a Facebook event posted:

Lay down and pretend to be 'Raptured' at 6pm to freak the religionists!

Naturally, I will be attending.

I'm kind of in two minds about this. I think I'd be extremely hacked off if the world ended at 6pm. I've got so much going on at the moment that I want to see through, and I've just booked a spa day for the week after next. At the same time, I'm also filling out my HMRC self-assessment tax forms, and I would be quite happy for them, as an organisation, to be raptured into a parallel reality.

Six and two threes, really.

Besides, if we're all still alive tomorrow, we can always look forward to 2012. There's a really nice journal called Towards 2012 with lots of extremely funky articles in, compiled by our friend Gyrus of Dreamflesh fame (which also contains an article on Apocalyptic Dreaming by Michael Ortiz Hill). Now's the time to buy. Well, maybe give it 'til 6:15.

[NB: This was reposted from my old blog on 29th Dec. 2011 because #RaptureNYE (Rapture New Year's Eve) was trending on Twitter.]

Cheltenham Literature Festival 2010

Yesterday was extremely exciting. I went along to Cheltenham Literature Festival with family.

The highlight was Lionel Shriver, author of - most famously - We Need to Talk About Kevin. I have to admit to being rather a little star struck. She has phenomenal stage presence, and comes across as one of the most self-assured public speakers that I have ever seen.

Her latest book is called So Much for That, a reproachful and personally charged look at how the American health service holds people to ransom during their darkest hours. The story was inspired by her own experience of the death of a close friend from cancer, at the cost of a two million dollar personal investment in treatment, despite having medical insurance. Apparently, in America, medical treatment is the highest cause of bankruptcy amongst individuals.

The book explores how this is possible in one of the most advanced countries in the world, and what price you can put on life. Are three more pain-filled months worth two million dollars of treatment?

The blurb reads:

Shep Knacker has been saving all his working life for a one way ticket to a cheaper, more restful escape from the daily grind. When he sells his handyman business in New York for $1 million, 'The Afterlife' seems tantalisingly within reach. Yet his wife has concocted countless reasons why now isn't the time to go. Realizing that Glynis has never been serious about taking the plunge, Shep announces that he is leaving for a remote island off the coast of Tanzania, with or without her. However, Glynis has an announcement of her own: she needs his health insurance.

Because his insurance only partially covers the staggering cost of her treatment, Shep's nest egg for his foreign idyll soon cracks under the strain. Illustrating how a marriage is both stressed and strengthened by medical crisis, So Much for That puts the uncomfortable fiscal question: how much is one life worth?

Enlivened by Shriver's signature acerbity and political outrage, it's surely the funniest and most entertaining novel about illness and death one's ever likely to read.

It was clear from the questions and answers session that the book has given Shriver pause for thought about the importance of her own health. She spoke of how she takes time now and then to appreciate what it's like to be able to walk down the street without being in pain, or to be able to think about other things because your energy isn't solely invested in getting through the day. It certainly gave everyone a reminder that health is your most important asset.

On a more humorous note, when asked why she was inspired to write Kevin, she replied that she was in her early 40s and wondering whether she would ever have children. She wrote the book to consider the 'worst case scenario'. She doesn't have children. But, as her friend told her, she did rather weight the deck.

It was an absolute pleasure to listen to her read from her work and speak about her life and interests. She creates an energy around her that charges the room.

It was also interesting, whilst talking to a lady sitting next to me, to note that the overwhelming majority of the audience were female. As one woman told Shriver, with Kevin she had broken the taboo for many mothers: that it was possible for mothers not to like their sons. And although not to such an extreme as Kevin, mothers do see negative behaviour in their sons from time to time. The impact of Kevin on many parenting forums was to open up the subject for mothers (and as Shriver pointed out, fathers also) to discuss these issues without feeling abnormal.

Quite an impressive feat. Let's hope that her work on the health service staves off the ConDem government's plans to open up the arena to American-style private health insurers.

Naturally I ran to the Waterstones tent afterwards to get my copy of So Much for That signed. Certainly a memorable afternoon.

Lionel Shriver

Next, we headed over to see Ann Cleeves and Andrea Maria Schenkel, both highly acclaimed crime writers, being interviewed by The Observer's crime fiction critic, Peter Gutteridge.

Again, a thoroughly entertaining hour. Cleeves talked of her love of Shetland and how she set out to write Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope as a real woman, someone who isn't glamorous or single by choice, but believable. Brenda Blethyn will play Vera in a TV adaptation early in 2011.

Schenkel spoke of the inspiration for her latest novel Bunker, coming from a trip to an underground bunker in her native Bavaria where it was so black that you couldn't see anything at all, causing her to panic. She also spoke of the strange acquisition of a human skull which she keeps at home, found by her husband in a mound of building dirt. Well, what would you expect from a crime writer?

I really found myself identifying with Cleeves as she spoke of her horror at being asked to produce synopses for a quartet of books. Her natural writing style is to sit down and start typing. The story comes as she writes. In the BBC interview Five Minutes with Ian McEwan, he also describes this method of working, stating that:

"My stories tell themselves in the writing, it's only by writing them that I discover them."

It's nice to hear other people talk about their writing in this way, because it's the same way that I write. There seem to be people who plan meticulously, and people who just sit down and write - both produce novels, it's just a different process of working.

Cleeves also described genre fiction, specifically traditional crime novels, as being like a 'vampire'. Once you've written one, you have to keep writing them to feed your audience. She praised the work of current writers from other countries, as well as Schenkel herself, for writing crime in different, imaginative ways that allowed native British writers to break away from set, traditionalist crime structures.

Listening to both Shriver and Cleeves talk about how hard they found it to get published, and having bumped along the bottom of the 'mid-listers' for so long before gaining serious recognition, was reassuring. But Shriver in particular gave me courage. I write literary fiction, rather than commercial fiction. I was told by one agent when submitting a piece of work that:

I believe 10 years ago my response would probably have been different, but I'm afraid I am regretfully going to say no to representing the book. The market for literary fiction has contracted alarmingly over the past few years and it has really become very difficult to find good publishers for fiction like this, the reason being that the publishers find it so hard to sell.

But you see, it's a 50/50 game. Sure, you may be far more likely to find representation and a publisher for commercial fiction - your crime series, rom coms, and mystery trilogies. But once you do, you're stuck in your genre.

With literary fiction, you only have to hit it lucky once, and you still retain your freedom.

          Ann Cleeves &  Andrea Maria Schenkel

Finally, we rounded off the night with Conjure Tales, two of Britain's greatest Afro-Caribbean storytellers: Jan Blake and TUUP. They're part of the UK Storytellers circle called the Crick Crack Club, and they are outstanding. The event was billed as:

...a thunderous exploration of sorcery and shapeshifting. Working with the magic of contraries, these are disturbing, terrifying, humorous and poignant tales of the ghosts, duppies and conjure folk that haunt the Caribbean and the Americas.

It was indeed stonkingly good fun. Two hours of the finest ghost stories and cautionary tales, accompanied by traditional instruments and plenty of memorable facial expressions.

It was also really touching that, amongst the piles of signed copies and reading tents, homage was being paid to the oral traditions from whence all of this began.

Check the above website for events. If you get the chance, go see them!

A crick!

A crack!

Ay Mr. Crick!

Ay Mr. Crack!

Jan Blake