bigmagpie

Just impulse and illusion

I'm making my way quite nicely through 'Ringolevio', even without a snow day to speed me along. Already this is proving to be an interesting exercise, trying to more closely examine what it is that I love about my favourites. I think there will be quite a few common threads for me to follow at the end of it.

At first, delving into 'Ringolevio' again, I wasn't quite sure. There is a lot about it that is irritating. It was published in 1972 and the prose style is gushy and just this side of over-stylised. Grogan references Beat poets constantly as 'switching him on' and at times the tone feels a little too close to teenage Beat fan-boy fiction for comfort. But gradually, that's where the charm comes from too as the whole thing is just so completely, wildly enthusiastic about itself. By half-way through the book, the author purports to have become a junkie aged thirteen, done six months in adult prison, gone through cold-turkey, won a scholarship to a posh school, become a successful burglar of the elite classes, run away to Europe to escape the Mob, built a church in the Italian Alps, become a Eurotrash playboy, won a prize for film-directing in Italy, worked with the IRA in Dublin, worked with a porn ring in London, been drafted and discharged from the army in San Francisco. In the midst of January, when I'm feeling like I do nothing else but steer my car through the same dark roads day after day, this could be depressing reading.

Each of these adventures could be a novel in their own right, but Grogan rattles through them all at frightening speed, writing in third person about himself as 'Kenny Wisdom', occasionally dropping out of the narrator role to comment on himself, as himself (he remarks 'To this day, Kenny Wisdom's parents believe that he stole the small, diamond-studded silver band which his father had given to his mother on their wedding day. And it's a drag.')

But even at this speed Grogan manages some lovely touches of writing. There's a lot of heavy handed, drug-addled crap too, but some occasional moments of beauty. A boy nick-named 'Clearhead O'Keefe' is called 'Clearhead' because 'his skull contained no sense of cause and effect, just impulse and illusion.'

The book is mad. The author was probably mad. The plot is mad. I'm wondering if this madness, this lack of structure and rush to narrate, is something that will turn out to be a strand running through a lot of my choices this year.

Ringolevio

Ok, so I procrastinated all of this week while I finished reading ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit’. I also procrastinated a little further today and spent some time making this very sweet desk pad for my nice, new (old) desk. I was worried it was a bit too girly but the colours and the fabric look perfect with the dark and chunky wood. When I was cleaning it out I found receipts and paperwork suggesting it belonged to a farmer previously (and Sarah from Otto found a leaflet for penis extensions stuck in the roll-top!) so I think this is the most feminine the desk has ever looked. Hurrah.

 
 

Now I’ve got nothing else to distract myself with and as I’ve been without a book to read for a few days, I’m ready to make my first choice of my ten favourite books and more than ready to start re-reading it.

I was going to cheat and have as my first choice for January an old classic that I’m currently teaching at school, but as the weather forecast is suggesting I may be at home a lot next week (or, if in school, just babysitting Key Stage Three students whilst Year 11s go sledging) I’m going to make an ambitious start and choose ‘Ringolevio’ by Emmett Grogan.

This is a tricky one. It’s long, at six-hundred and twenty-four pages. And it’s not really fiction. The Rebel Inc Classic version I have in front of me now describes it as ‘manifesto, memoir and high adventure all rolled into one.’ Obviously to write a book like Emmett Grogan’s I would probably have to go and live a life like Emmett Grogan’s and that ain’t going to happen. But there’s plenty about the book that is enviable and brilliant and though it’s a big, flawed, slightly insane beast of a book, it’s my pick for January. Here’s hoping I’ll have enough snow days on the sofa to get through it all.

Ten for 2010 - a predictable New Year's Day post

It wouldn’t be New Year without some new project to kick-start the year. I have been half-heartedly blogging about gardening on and off for a couple of years, until really this spring I realised that gardening was just something I wanted to do, not necessarily something I wanted to write about. I have lots of pretty pictures to show for my gardening efforts and no doubt I’ll post lots more here throughout the year, for no other reason than they look nice.

 So I shied away from the idea of starting up my garden blog again as I knew I’d be doing it just for the sake of something to write, to keep my pen moving and the ink flowing - avoiding clots. But without enthusiasm behind it, the whole process would be doomed to failure.

 Better to start something completely afresh, something else to chip away at for the next decade.

 I’m going to write a novel. I have written one before. Three, actually. Only two of them were completely awful. One is okay, in fact. But all three of them were written kind of like experiments – could I force myself to sit down and just write a novel? Could I just make it happen?

 It turned out I could, but without the painstaking thought and attention to detail and planning and revision that you associate with the craft of novel writing. Really, those three novels were an exercise in discipline. And it was a surprise to me that I could muster the discipline from somewhere to get the job done. My next novel then, I want to be about more than discipline. It needs to be more than just an endurance test.

 So I’m committing most of this year to exploring what it is I really want to write and how I want to write it. It may be an naïve, English-teacherish approach, but I’m going to do this by re-reading my favourite ten books of all time. I’ll re-read one each month for the next ten months and then see where I’m at. I’m hoping I’ll discover, and blog about here, what it is I really admire in writing, what themes and ideas really grab me. By the end of the year, I hope to be ready with a novel idea of my own that I can spend 2011 writing.

 Now, even though it’s January 1^st and a few hours ago I said I was done with drinking, I’m hankering after a glass of wine.