How popular are integers?
I didn't know, so I wrote a short perl script to find out. I present... the GoogleFunction.
GoogleFunction(n) is defined as the number of results reported by http://www.google.com/search?q=n. Here is what it looks like for integers n between 0 and 100:
And here it is again with the range extended upwards to 1000:
I could go on, I guess, but you get the general idea.
It looks... almost exactly how I would have expected it to look, except that there's a definite and completely counter-intuitive trough at 13 which I can't explain. Spooky, huh?
(Oh, and the first person to suggest I have too much time on my hands gets a slapping.)
[ 1 comment ] ( 5 views ) | permalink | related link
(This is Part 5. You should read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 first. Also, a printable version of the whole story, in PDF format, can be downloaded here.)
Doors are seriously underrated.
Given time, we could probably learn to get by without the wheel, or electricity, or ink. There are cultures without clothes, cultures without fire, cultures without money. But take away its doors, and a society will fall apart in an instant. We are bound together by the very barriers that keep us apart.
The literary world (in cultures that still have writing, of course) wouldn’t get far without them either. A door, see, can be a metaphor for just about anything. Birth, life, death, destiny, challenge, change, constancy, control, anything. Nor are they simply there to open and close. They can swing, slide, rotate, creek, squeak, bang, click — or be bolted, barred, boarded up, broken, barricaded, slammed, jammed, knocked on, left ajar, lent against. If you’re writing a horror story, imagine what you can say using only an open door: or, if you’re writing a romance, a closed one. Surrealists can leave one standing disembodied in the middle of a forest. Magical realists can lure their protagonists into undiscovered realms merely by planting an unexpected door in their path — only to whisk it away again as soon as they turn their backs and leave them trapped there forever. Fleeing criminals can hide behind the left-hand door and leave the right-hand door ajar. (A good private detective, on the other hand, checks behind both doors.) Saloon doors in Westerns come in two halves, or even four quarters, for reasons best known to the pioneers and probably having something to do with horses. Or set your story on a spaceship or a submarine, and you have at your disposal the airlock: the apotheosis of doors, the door to end all doors, mankind’s last line of defence against the cruel, inhospitable darkness of the Outside.
So remember: if your plot’s going to hinge on something — why not make it a door?
The cheesy voice and cheap car-salesman tie of the director of the Fictional Door Marketing Board are the only part of Stan’s dream that he actually remembers when he awakes to find himself on this sofa with one arm hanging down to the floor and a spaniel on his back.
Now this highfalutin artsy handwavy glossy-brochure propaganda is all well and good, but what happens if one of your characters opens a door and you don’t know what’s behind it? Does the FDMB have a special hotline number you can call? More likely, this is the point where you discover that they deal only in generalities, not specifics, and cannot advise on individual cases, so you’re on your own. But, you know, good luck.
Stan’s still curious about what could possibly have been in the spare room. I mean, we’re all grown-ups here. If she’d just told him, or let him see, then it wouldn’t have been a big deal. But instead, she has planted a seed of intrigue in his mind. And a seed is an even more potent metaphor than a door. Or something. He’s not sure; there is still a spaniel on his back, and it’s gently padding the base of his spine in time to Debussy.
Someone is brewing coffee in the kitchen. Carrie knocks and asks how he takes it. “White,” he says, “with half a teaspoon of sugar, and I have a spaniel on my back.” This is, she reassures him, to be expected.
His mind is elsewhere as he spreads butter haphazardly on his toast between swigs of coffee. The seed, thus fed and watered, is sprouting fast and growing in a direction he would never have expected.
“Are you all right?” she asks. “You look a bit... did you sleep OK?”
“Fine,” he says. “I just had an idea. I always get like this when I have an idea.”
Most of Stan’s ideas are short-lived affairs. But this idea stays with him all through a morning of light conversation about anything but doors, and through an enjoyable lunch at a nearby café followed by a friendly but awkward good-bye, and through an afternoon of train journeys and hanging around at railway stations with an empty notebook in one hand and a silver fountain pen in the other. By the end of the day, Stan has realised that this idea is not going to go away. He has a story to write.
And, better yet, he has a deadline.
In the event, it takes him every evening in the whole month of April to put his thought into words. Once or twice he comes close to giving up; some days he just sits and stares at the words on the screen, infuriated and enraged by his own complete inability to say what he means; but, slowly, he pieces his narrative together, and seemingly out of thin air, he brings Miranda Wright to life.
Miranda Wright is an author. A successful one, at that. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama. She writes crime fiction, and she does it very well — so well, in fact, that even high-brow critics from the New York Times who would dearly love to tear her books to shreds are forced to concede that they are complex and compelling and ingenious and never cease to bring fresh ideas to a genre so desperately in need of them. (Believe it or not, he got half-way through writing this before he realised he’d given her a joke name.)
He also brings to life Simon Black, a crime fiction devotee with a perfectly innocent name, and who would absolutely be an author if someone would just publish his novel. Until then, he’s an ordinary writer, hanging out in online forums looking for ideas and advice and opportunities to pick holes in the work of the better-selling. That’s where he meets Miranda. He doesn’t know that’s who she is at first, because she posts using the handle Guilty503, but after he submits a couple of shorts to one site for review she sends him a personal message complimenting him on his originality, and introducing herself. Naturally, Simon is flattered. When Miranda suggests that they should collaborate on something, he is positively blown away. When she invites him to get together for a meal sometime, he jumps straight on a plane.
I’m summarising ruthlessly, here.
Anyway, they meet up in a nice restaurant and hit it off straight away: they like the same wine, they dislike the same shellfish; he notices her shoes, she notices his cufflinks; he has an idea for a novel about a crime writer turned detective who’s investigating the murder of a detective turned crime writer; she says this sounds much better than the silly idea she’s been working on. Then they take a cab back to her house, a great big house out near Lake Purdy with a grand piano in the front room, well one of the front rooms, where he meets her cats, and they sit together on the sofa chatting and drinking beer and gradually getting closer and closer together and everything is looking very promising indeed except for the door. There’s a door, off the hall between the living room and the kitchen, and there’s a clicking sound coming from behind it. Simon wants to know what it is. Miranda laughs and says she has no idea, and will he just come back and drink his beer, but he’s persistent, and next time she goes to the bathroom he tries to sneak a peek inside, but discovers that it’s locked, and then when he turns around she’s behind him holding a rolling pin, and the next thing he knows he’s waking up on the other side of this door, in a cavernous room full of fluorescent light and desks, each with a laptop and a chair, and in the chairs are sitting a dozen young men: all unshaven, bound in leg-irons, with wild, caffeinated eyes, and all typing away at the laptops like their lives depend on it. And on the desk in front of him is a cup of coffee and a laptop, the word processor’s cursor blinking in the top left corner like a heartbeat, and a slightly crumpled Post-It note on the keyboard bearing the message You Know What To Do.
(Of course, I missed out all the in-jokes and parenthetical remarks and authorial commentary and everything else that Stan put in to turn an otherwise unremarkable piece of fiction into a fitting birthday present for the woman he admires.)
(At least, he thinks it will be fitting. He also thinks it’s the thought that counts.)
The third of May is upon him before he’s even decided on a title. Stories need titles, or we don’t know what they’re about, said his primary-school English teacher. Well, he doesn’t know what this one is about, so he just puts a big enigmatic semicolon at the top of the first page instead. The Establishment hates that kind of thing. But he can’t just send Carrie some shapeless untitled document for her birthday: it needs some sort of message to go along with it, and coming up with the words for this proves almost as hard as writing the story in the first place. So after three abortive attempts, he deletes everything and puts, simply:
You made me write this.
And just as he has made up his mind to send it, to be done with it, to dispatch it into the ether, he notices a new message in his inbox. It’s from her, from Carrie. And it’s very short. It says, simply:
Happy Birthday, Stan! Here, look — I wrote you a story.
Excitedly he opens the attachment and starts to read, almost incredulously at first, and after the first couple of pages he’s hit by a vicious wave of adrenaline as if he just walked into a door.
(How many doors must a man walk into, before you can call him a man?)
It’s the same story. She wrote the same story.
And it’s completely different.
He reads on, his own deficient offering all but forgotten, as her flowing words pull him into the world of Jacob Schumann, an artist, a painter, resident of Primrose Hill; not successful, but neither without talent; unattached, but not without charm. Jacob divides his time between studio and gallery, yet while his skill lies in sketching and painting it is sculpture that he seeks out to study wherever he can. And lately he’s been visiting exhibitions all over the country in pursuit of Descabella, a pseudonymous sculptress whose work has enraptured and bewitched Jacob since he first set eyes on it. One day, he promises himself, he will possess one of her pieces for his own, but until then he will be forever wandering down to the Frith Street Gallery to admire the subtle, sinuous lines of Descabella’s Canción del loro, and exchange meaningful glances with the dark-haired young lady he sometimes meets there, who one day breaks the silence and asks him why his hands are so many different colours, which of course he explains, and much to her delight, for while she herself is a sculptress it is most of all in the works of painters that she loves to immerse herself.
Maria Izquierda is her name, or one of them.
And they carry on talking, first over coffee, then over dinner, and then before long they are meandering through the streets together in the falling dusk, back towards her Edwardian house on the edge of the Heath where you can really see the stars from the garden and the corner window of the study looks out over the drowsing city and the trees are full of chattering sparrows, and only as they walk up the drive together and he descries dark, twisting figures of stone and shadow on the twilit front lawn does he realise who she really is. Then, inside, too enchanted to be awestruck, he gladly accepts a glass of wine and they sit watching the daylight retreat and the city sparkle below them, and talk solemnly about past times neither of them knew and futures they may never see, and as they speak he feels as if the world around him is become a picture that is painting itself, the brush strokes falling delicately one after another, and everything has dropped into place and revealed its true meaning except for the door. There’s a door, in between two bookcases in the study, and there is music coming from it. Jacob wants to know what is behind it, and Descabella laughs. “I will show you, if you will do as I ask,” she says. “I will,” he says. So she takes from a drawer a fine scarf of silk, and with it she blinds his eyes, and then taking his hand in hers she opens the door and together they step through it, and the music grows like the wind at dawn, and he feels joy like a fine mist on his face, and a scent of lavender overwhelms him.
Then she reaches up to his face to loosen the blindfold, and he opens his eyes, and the door closes softly behind them.
[ 1 comment ] ( 5 views ) | permalink | related link
(This is Part 4. You should read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 first.)
The train is just sat there at Earl’s Court, and no-one has the faintest idea why. Everyone who wanted to get off has done so. Every so often someone comes dashing up the stairs from the underpass and races towards the open doors, throws themselves into the carriage and sits down panting for breath, then looks briefly annoyed, and slightly embarrassed, as the doors fail to close behind them. Every so often someone gets up from their seat to poke their head out and look up and down the platform for signs of life. Every so often the train makes a sort of hissing sound.
“You could write a novel about this,” says Stan. “The Train to Nowhere.”
Carrie smiles. “Yeah, The Train that Never Left. Or how about The Slow Train to Ealing?”
“Or maybe the train does leave, but the entire novel takes place in the ten minutes when it’s stuck in the station for no reason.”
“It would either be a complete load of cobblers, or it would win the Booker Prize.”
“Or both.”
“The Stopping Train. That could work”
“They Should Have Taken a Taxi.”
“We still can, if you promise to win the Booker Prize so we can afford it.”
“What is the Booker Prize, exactly?”
Carrie looks at him as if he just admitted he never actually learned how to tie his own shoelaces.
“It’s the biggest literary prize you can win, apart from the Nobel Prize, of course: look, surely—”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it,” says Stan. “I mean, what do you get? Is it some sort of trophy, or do you get a big brown envelope full of cash, or what?”
A palpable wave of relief washes over Carrie’s face. “Oh, I see what you mean. Erm... now that you come to mention it, I honestly have no idea. I think the point is that people win it, rather than they actually get anything for winning it. I expect they give you a great big cheque — and nothing else — assuming you’ll probably just frame it and put it on your wall. And then you’re famous.”
The train doors close. Three seconds later they open again. The train hisses like a recalcitrant cat.
“You’re sure this is no trouble? I mean, apart from the obvious.”
“Of course I’m sure. Like I said, we have a spare room. At least, I think it’s a spare room. I don’t think anyone’s actually been in there for about nine months. Maybe Grandad’s been secretly converting it into an aviary or something. But we can’t let you stay in some nasty hotel in King’s Cross for the night, when there’s a perfectly good bed for you in my house. I mean, our house.”
“It’s very kind of you, anyway.”
“Not at all. Anyway, I wanted to say I thought your thing about the insurance guy was really good. I can’t do character portraits. I just get skittish and make them all move around and do things and have conversations. But with yours... well, I really felt like I knew the guy, at the end of it, you know?”
“Thanks. I could say the same thing about yours.”
“Really? The Usha one?”
“Yes, that one. It was captivating. I really, you know, connected with it. And that doesn’t often happen with me.”
“Well, thanks. It’s not my usual sort of subject matter, so I wasn’t quite sure where I was going with it.”
“Then go there. And you’ll find out.”
The carriage jerks forward a few inches and stops, sending Carrie’s head sideways into Stan’s shoulder. Then the lights go off, and come back on, and the doors beep and shut, and the train starts to clank forwards out of the harsh light of the station into the brown darkness ahead. A speaker in the ceiling pops loudly, and the driver’s voice comes crackling wearily through it.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announces, “this is the Slow Train to Ealing.”
Stan and Carrie take one look at each other, and burst out laughing.
“You don’t think...”
“No,” she says, “this is the District Line, not Nineteen Eighty-Four! Spooky, though. Coincidence.”
“Maybe not so unlikely. He’s probably done that joke a hundred times.”
“I suppose. But still, don’t you think coincidences happen more often than they should?”
Stan scratches his ear. “At the risk of sounding like a nerd, there are good mathematical reasons for that. You ever hear of the Birthday Paradox?”
“Erm... not sure. Was that Iain Banks?”
“It’s not a novel, it’s a... thing. It demonstrates how often we perceive stuff to be much more unlikely than it actually is. Shall I carry on being geeky?”
“Ooo, yes please.” Stan can’t quite tell whether the enthusiasm is genuine. He never can.
“All right, you asked for it. So there were, what, ten of us in the bar this evening?”
Carrie nods. “Yup.”
“OK. What do you think are the chances that two of us had the same birthday?”
“Pretty slim, I’d say.”
“One in five?”
“No, much less than that. Like fifty-to-one, at least.”
“Well, I’m telling you, it’s one in five.”
“No way.”
“Yes way. And now you know that, how many people do you reckon we’d need to make it fifty-fifty?”
“I don’t know,” Carrie shrugs. “Sixty? A hundred?”
“Twenty-three. Straight up,” he adds, seeing the reaction of her eyebrows. Turns out, this useless fact has the same effect on almost everyone.
“As it happens, I know that we all have different birthdays. Although Pam’s and Eleanor’s are only one day apart. So it looks like we’re in the four out of five.”
“When’s yours, by the way?”
“May the third.”
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“No. You’re not going to tell me that we were born on the same day.”
“I don’t have to tell you. You already guessed.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Aw, c’mon Carrie, no-one lies about their birthday! It’s way too easy to get found out. I was born on the third of May 1981. I have the documents to prove it, and everything.”
“God, he was born in the eighties,” exclaims Carrie under her breath, staring into space.
“Don’t worry, I won’t ask you for the year. I know I’m kind of socially inept in many ways, but...”
“’77,” she says without thinking. “But I still can’t get over this.”
“A lot of people say I look older than I am.”
“No, not that, silly! The birthday thing. I mean, what are the chances?”
“I told you, one in five.”
“But you said that was when there were ten of us. Now there are only two — me and you. That has to be really unlikely.”
“Well, one in three hundred and sixty-five then. Give or take.”
“I don’t think you can reduce weirdness to a number.”
“Sixty-seven point three percent of the time, you can’t.”
At each stop the carriage is getting steadily emptier. Expectantly the doors spring open, and dejectedly they close again on thin air. The train rolls on, and Stan and Carrie sit there side by side, rocking to and fro with the rhythm of the rails beneath them, watched only by their own warped perspex reflections.
“This sort of thing never happens in books,” Carrie muses.
“I think writers are scared of it.”
“Coincidence?”
“Yeah. The last thing you want is your reader putting down the book in disgust and thinking well, that was all very convenient. So you get all these stories which start off with an intriguing coincidence of events, promptly followed by thirty chapters of explaining why it wasn’t a coincidence at all. Or the author goes to a whole lot of trouble charting the actions of each character in great detail, so that when the coincidence finally does make its grand entrance, everything looks perfectly logical. Everyone has an alibi. Nothing is left up to chance. There is no higher power.”
“Sometimes there’s a higher power. More often than not, I’d say. But convenience is a whole other story. I mean, whenever I’m writing I try to make everything as inconvenient as possible for my characters. Hell, half the time they can’t even get up a flight of stairs without trauma. Because really, who wants to read a book about someone who just had a perfectly normal day? Where’s the fun in that?”
“Maybe you could sell it to one-eyed cross-dressing undercover crime-fighting Formula-1 drivers who fancy a bit of escapism.”
“Ah, so you read JR’s latest, then.”
“Is this our stop?”
It’s not far from the station to Carrie’s place, if you know where you’re going. At each corner they seem to choose the road with the less expensive cars parked on it, until finally they draw alongside Carrie’s grandad’s Ford Escort with the wing mirror held on by gaffer tape, and climb the steps to the porch. The hall is lit, but the rest of the house is dark. The place smells of paint thinners and burned toast.
“Don’t ask,” says Carrie. He doesn’t.
They sit in the kitchen for about half an hour, snacking on crackers and cheese and drinking pineapple juice and chatting about their favourite authors. She has hardly heard of any of his, nor he hers, which Stan finds immensely puzzling. Surely there must be something fundamental they have in common when it comes to writing? But the more they talk, the more he realises what different worlds they inhabit. Except, that is, for the obvious observation that here they are sitting in the same room, discussing books and films and swapping little details about each other’s lives, and making eye contact that seems far too hesitant and meaningful to be dismissed out of hand.
It’s gone midnight before they climb the stairs. Carrie helpfully points out the difference between the bathroom and the airing cupboard in passing as they shuffle along the hallway in the dark.
“And Grandad’s in there, and I’m in there,” she whispers, pushing open the door to the spare room and flicking on the light. “And... oh!”
(You can read Part 5 here.)
[ 3 comments ] ( 10 views ) | permalink | related link
(This is Part 3. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
“I guess that could be fun.”
“Fun, as always, is a relative concept round here.”
“C’mon, it’s fun relative to his last idea!”
“Look, it’s you guys who are always complaining that I don’t use enough of it. You can’t have it both ways.”
“But doesn’t it get confusing?”
“With three, it’s OK. With four, it’s borderline. Any more than that and yeah, it’s like trying to... well, it’s confusing, yeah.”
“I don’t know how long I could keep it up for.”
“Have a go. You’d be surprised.”
“Sounds too much like scriptwriting to me.”
“It’s like, you know when you’re eating a chocolate-covered peanut or something, and you have this temptation to bite into it, but you’re sucking on it instead, just well just because, and damn do you have to concentrate so hard or your teeth will just slip back to autopilot and the next thing you know—”
“...You slip, and suddenly there’s an attribution right there at the end of the line,” says Greg.
“...And at that point, you realise you’ve failed, and it’s not worth carrying on,” adds Eleanor.
“Something like that,” says JR.
“But you can always go back and edit it out, can’t you?” says Eleanor.
“I guess. Or you can just, you know, stick your fingers back in the packet and reach for the next peanut.”
“I’m going to have to try this.”
“Maybe if you suck on a peanut on the same time it’ll help you concentrate.”
“Do they do peanuts here? Because now that you mention it—”
“Hey, are you Stan?”
He is Stan, so he admits as much. An empty seat appears at the table, he is not quite sure from where.
“It’s great to meet you,” say several people in various different ways.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” offer at least two people. He accepts the offer that came from the cute redheaded girl.
“It’s a good job you sent a photo: otherwise I’d never have pegged you for... one of us,” says Liz.
Stan smiles cautiously. “Is it the hair? The shoes?”
“More sort of the way you were born after the Moon landings.”
He glances in the direction of JR and Greg. “So it is the hair?”
“It’s a big part of it, yes,” she giggles. “But at least Carrie won’t have to put up with the jokes any more.”
“Jokes?”
“You know, about how she was being potty-trained while we were all doing our dissertations. Now she’s not the youngest any more, we’ll be picking on you instead. If that’s all right with you.”
“I guess. So are jokes about baldness off-limits then?”
“Oh goodness me no.”
“OK then.”
“JR was just telling us about this passage in his book, where he’s just using dialogue for the whole thing.”
“Wow. Doesn’t that get...”
“Yes, that’s more or less what we all said too.”
Stan wriggles out of his jacket and drops it over the back of his chair. “Nice place,” he enthuses, gesturing in some direction or other. “Why does the barman wear an eye-patch?”
“I don’t know, why does the barman wear an eye-patch?”
“No, he really is. It’s not a joke.”
Liz swivels round and stares at the barman, who waves back.
“I honestly have no idea.”
“Just checking that this wasn’t like a pirate-themed bar or something. Because I left my parrot back in Birmingham.”
“You have a parrot?”
“No,” he admits, “I’m afraid not.”
Carrie returns from the bar with a pint of stout in one hand, a white wine spritzer in the other and two bottles of Stella balanced between the two somehow. She plonks them down on the table without spilling anything. They applaud. She bows. Stan tries to give her money for the beer, but she refuses. It takes her three attempts to get the message across, though, because it’s quite noisy in here.
“So how was it, Greg?”
Greg had been on holiday in Greece for two weeks. He’d sneakily taken his laptop with him, of course: his wife had gone ballistic when the security guards picked it up on the X-ray but at that point it had been too late to do anything about it. He’d had a good time, by all accounts (which is actually just one account, really, Eleanor points out). The hotel had been great, and the weather had been quite co-operative. He’d even found time to squeeze in some writing. In fact, he had written a whole chapter, and edited it, and had felt quite pleased with himself. Then he had shown it to his wife. She’d been perfectly complimentary about it, of course, but still she had felt duty-bound to point out to him that he’d managed to write the whole thing in the pluperfect tense.
“Damn.”
“It happens to the best of us, you know.”
“Are you going to do anything about it?”
Greg sips glumly on his spritzer. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I mean, it kind of reads OK — or at least I think it does — but as soon as someone points that out to you, you can’t see anything but all those ‘hads’ everywhere. It’s like Gordon Brown’s glass eye. You see the man on TV over and over again for years and you never notice it, but once you do, it’s all you see.”
“Gordon Brown doesn’t have a glass eye.”
“Yeah, he does.”
“It’s not, it’s just a regular eye. He lost his retinas in a footballing accident, or something.”
“Ew.”
“Surely he only lost one of his retinas, then? If it’s just the one eye we’re talking about?”
“Nah, they re-attached the other one.”
“Ew ew ew.”
“No but actually, see, I’ve got a friend who works at the Treasury Solicitor’s office who swore to me that he’d seen old Gordon take it out and polish it in a corridor, one time.”
“He was probably winding you up, Pam.”
“Is this the same guy who told you there were nuclear missiles concealed in the Thames Barrier?”
Pam thinks. “Yeah, same guy.”
“He’s half-blind even in his good eye. You can see him squinting at the autocue all the time at press conferences.”
“They should fit him with a bionic laser-beam eye implant thing. Like the Borg. Or the Terminator. I need your clothes and your zero-net-borrowing-over-the-economic-cycle.”
“Don’t give up the day job, JR.”
“Does JR have a day job?”
“I’m getting the munchies here. Can we get some canapés or something?”
“Shhh! Bloody hell, you’re not in Camden now, you know!”
“I said canapés, Liz. Come on, you can’t even smoke tobacco in here.” He stalks off in search of a menu.
“Who wants to read my first ever proper poem?” Pam asks enthusiastically.
At her cue, everyone starts rummaging in their bags and pockets for their oeuvres. Bits of paper are unrolled and unfolded and straightened out and pushed around the table like betting chips. Stan picks up a copy of Pam’s poem. It is, he thinks, rather good. Unlike so much modern poetry, it has both rhythm and rhyme. He cannot stand the amorphous nonsense that so many poets vomit onto the page these days, as a rule.
But then his rule comes very close to breaking point a few minutes later, when Liz hands him a wodge of JR’s recent offerings. I mean. This man seems to have no respect for structure in any of his writing. It’s all over the place. Half the time he doesn’t even stay in the margins. His poetry is more like an exhibition of words he picked out because they sound interesting and pickled for posterity. The literary equivalent of some demented Damien Hirst exhibit. Or is it that Emin woman he’s thinking of? Anyway, his prose is more of the same. Imagine an unmade bed cut in half and preserved in formaldehyde and then turned into a novel. Or like Pynchon, with full stops. But it’s good. It’s really good. You can’t stop reading it. It sucks you in. It’s like nothing else.
The awe-cum-idolatry-cum-jealousy thing is just starting to set in when Stan turns the page and is confronted with something completely different. The papers must have got muddled, because this story is something to do with an elephant keeper. Ah, wait... could it just be some sort of surreal digression, born of JR’s obviously twisted mind? He flicks back to the previous sheet. No, it’s even in a different font. Stan rubs his eyes and starts reading from the top of the neatly-typeset page.
There’s this feeling you get — something like déjà vu — when you see someone walking down the street who looks like your own mirror image, or you come across something you wrote or drew years ago which you had forgotten about, or when you recognise someone on the street but cannot for the life of you remember who they are. It is this supernatural familiarity that Stan is feeling right now, as he reads about Usha and Nina and their life at the zoo. It’s not because he feels like he knows the story, or that he recognises the characters. He feels like he knows the author. Intimately. That is, in other words, he feels like he wrote this story. And that’s just about the strangest thing he ever felt.
“Whose is this?” he asks, wide-eyed, handing the page to Liz.
Liz blinks and adjusts her spectacles. “Ah, it’s Usha. That’s Carrie’s. What do you think?”
“It’s...” he doesn’t quite know what it is. “It’s incredible. I feel... I don’t know, it’s speaking to me somehow.”
He looks up and gazes cautiously around the table. Carrie is absent-mindedly playing with her hair. And she’s looking straight back at him.
(You can read Part 4 here.)
[ 3 comments ] ( 6 views ) | permalink | related link
(This is Part 2. You can read Part 1 here.)
First it was lawnmowers, then it was babies, and now it is pianos. Carrie is finding it extremely hard to concentrate today. It is her own fault for taking time off work on the first dry, sunny Friday of the year. She should have known that everyone else would have the same idea.
Elisabeth Caroline Clarck lives, with her elderly grandfather, in a slightly grand house on a quiet, leafy street in Ealing. Her grandfather does not need her there to look after him at all, but the arrangement suits them both well nonetheless. Carrie knows that most women her age would blanch at the idea, but she likes to think that she is not like most women. And by that, she does not mean to imply that she is any more caring or more compassionate, either. Indeed, it is probably because she and her grandfather are both so care-free that they get along so well.
Most other days, Carrie works for an almost vanishingly insignificant publishing company by the name of Stien & Stein. Her job is not so bad, all things considered. She is, at least according to her contract, a copywriter, although lately she seems to be spending more than her fair share of time correcting the goofs of the layout department, researching obscure nineteenth-century painters, and undertaking other activities that fall well outside her official remit. In front of her colleagues she pretends to accept these nebulous sideshows with resignation, as an unavoidable consequence of working in such a close-knit team. But she finds the variety much to her liking. It gives her ample opportunity for concealing extra-curricular pursuits of her own.
Stien & Stein’s stock-in-trade is the production of leaflets, guide books, prospectuses, fliers and other predominantly glossy items, which their clients — galleries, art-house cinemas and pretentious theatre companies, for the most part — seem to get through so fast that Carrie could swear they must just be burning them to keep their vast buildings warm. And frankly, she could not blame them if they were.
These lawnmowers and babies and pianos, incidentally, would not be half as irritating if only she could identify some sort of thematic connection with which to string them all together. There is not much conflict in Carrie’s life, so she makes her own.
The offices in which the employees of Stien & Stein conduct their altogether unnecessary business are tucked away discreetly in a side-street just off the King’s Road, on the second floor of a beautiful white Georgian terrace. Disembarking from the tube at Sloane Square each morning, Carrie fails quite spectacularly to blend in with the indigenous ladies of leisure, but she pretends not to care. At least, she thinks, as she ascends the escalator in her plain shirts, tired jeans and inexpensive shoes, I am making myself useful. And, in a way, she is.
Elisabeth Caroline Clarck, you must understand, is not only a writer, but also a Writer.
(She knows this to be true, because she carries a chewed Biro and an ageing collection of illegible Post-It notes with her at all times.)
Carrie decided to start studying writing because her friends, who had enthused over the occasional stories she had written, badgered her into it. She discovered that she didn’t enjoy poetry at all, and she positively abhorred anything that felt remotely like scriptwriting, but with fiction she flourished. This was, admittedly, something of a foregone conclusion. It has been a hobby of hers for as long as she can remember. It is, deep down, what she really wants to do, if only she can shake off the debilitating malady that plagues her creative mind.
The piano tuner has now progressed from the middle register of the instrument, which sounds like a piano, all the way down to the very bottom end, whose single-stringed growly-voiced bass notes have so many overtones that they sound more like an ensemble of lawnmowers. Carrie is secretly hoping that the tuning of the high notes will sound like screaming babies, but she knows in her heart that it won’t. That would be far too convenient.
Carrie’s next-door neighbour is an excellent pianist. When he plays, passers-by stop to listen. His beautiful grand piano is almost the only piece of furniture in his front room. Carrie has played on it just once, but she felt silly picking out the simple tunes she remembers from her childhood lessons on so impressive an instrument. So she prefers to remain in her own over-furnished, book-strewn living room, listening thoughtfully as Chopin and Rachmaninoff filter through the wall. He is lucky, she thinks, to have her as a neighbour. Most people these days would not be nearly so accommodating. And she does not merely tolerate the noise: she positively enjoys it. It helps her to focus. It concentrates her thoughts.
Carrie tried to put a pianist in one of her stories, once. But by the third chapter he had already had a mid-life crisis, sold his piano and started writing a novel instead.
This is just one of Carrie’s problems.
She is obsessed with literature.
Just like many other aspiring writers, she cannot bear to imagine that there are people in the world who do not devote their lives to reading, writing, editing, redrafting and refining, reviewing, annotating and critiquing works of fiction. And this world, the only world she truly knows, is the world she endeavours to capture in every chapter of every story she writes.
All her characters, in other words, are writers, or at best the friends and relations of writers.
All her plots, in other words, revolve around writing.
Like an elderly spinster who plants different coloured pansies in her window-boxes every month in the name of variety, Carrie was not even really conscious of this tendency to begin with. She panicked, briefly, when she realised, and started trying to cover it up: first with a few cunning dabs of irony here and there, deploying the reliable smoke-and-mirrors of self-referential humour; and then when that didn’t seem to work she tried the total immersion approach, deluging her readers with so many writers-of-writers and stories-within-stories that they came away from her manuscripts reeling. This month, she is trying a different approach entirely: cold turkey.
At their last meeting, which took place in Greg’s kitchen on Pancake Day, she and her friends from the writing college struck up a pact to support one another in their efforts to better themselves. Carrie has promised to give up writing about writers for Lent. Greg has given up writing about vampires. I gave up writing in the first person. Eleanor, always a paragon of abstemiousness, vowed to stop reaching for her thesaurus for every other word. Liz gave up writing poetry. Pam took up writing poetry. JR gave up using his first name. Stan joined in too, by email; he promised to give up semicolons.
So far, it seems to be working. Carrie has written a whole chapter about a young Bangladeshi elephant keeper working at London Zoo who is allergic to peanuts. She knows that it will probably never develop into a good novel, but that is more or less how she sees all her writing: not as an end in itself, but as necessary preparation for the end that is to come. In any case, Usha the zookeeper should keep her on the straight and narrow for a while. Mind you, after a couple of thousand words she very nearly had Usha writing a warning sign to be pinned up in the elephant enclosure, but she stopped herself just in time. The thin end of the wedge, Carrie, the thin end of the wedge: that way, she is certain, lies ruin.
Nevertheless, her fixation with all things literary has to make itself felt somehow, and right now it is manifesting itself as an unhealthy obsession with meaning and metaphor. The zoo, obviously, represents the sprawling menagerie of the Western world. Nina the elephant represents Usha’s family. The peanuts represent the love and care that she gives freely but cannot bear to receive. The broom with which she sweeps the droppings represents... well, like the pianos and the lawnmowers, she hasn’t quite resolved that yet. But she will.
As she scribbles down the outline of her next scene, a chiming series of alternating major and minor thirds is climbing up and up towards the inaudible upper reaches of the piano. In its own way, it sounds almost like music.
Carrie was hoping to have the second chapter roughed out in time for this evening’s meeting, but it is after five o’clock already so that seems unlikely now. Before long she gives up, closing her spiral-bound notepad and thrusting it into her bag. Perhaps she’ll do a bit more on the tube on the way to the pub. Her grandfather is burning something in the kitchen. She doesn’t stop to check her hair in the mirror on the way out. It looks fine anyway, as it happens.
A middle-aged man wearing dark glasses is emerging from the house next door as she pulls the front door shut. She does not recognise him at first. But when he takes a small white wand from the pocket of his jacket and telescopes it out into a long white stick, she realises straight away who he is. She watches him tapping away down the street. Is it wrong for her to wonder to herself whether he will make a good character for a novel? Shouldn’t she ask his permission first? But no, that’s ridiculous. Nobody would want to read a book about piano tuning anyway.
It’s not until she’s getting off the tube at Embankment that she works it all out. It’s all about preparation. Just like her writing, in fact. Look: the instrument must be tuned before melody and harmony can be coaxed from it. The grass needs to be cut so the family can play on the lawn all summer. The child needs to grow out of being a screaming baby and grow up to be an adult. The lawnmowers and babies and pianos just fell into place.
Well, not literally.
(You can read Part 3 here.)
[ add comment ] | permalink | related link
Whenever he finds himself walking around New Street Station, Stan Shuttleworth is often struck by a queer feeling about the place which he cannot quite put into words. Something about the narrowness of the concourses and the breadth of the forecourts, the strangely varied heights of the great vaulted ceilings, that makes the space seem at once much bigger than it needs to be and yet frustratingly cramped. Are railway stations in cities always like this? Stan has only been to a few — Euston, Kings Cross, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Glasgow — so he feels ill-equipped to generalise. This is the one he knows the best. He could direct a stranger to the correct platform in rush hour better than many of the station staff; indeed, he frequently does. But he wouldn’t dare to instruct them in how to think about a railway station, or what to think of a railway station, or which railway station to think of when someone says “think of a railway station”. He is quite sure that his thoughts on the subject of railway stations are of no interest to anyone.
This is just one of Stan’s problems.
Another of Stan’s problems is the silver fountain pen that just fell out of his pocket and began rolling down the stairs towards Platform 7. And as he is chasing after it, bent almost double with his elbows flailing, straining desperately not to lose sight of the precious glint behind some ill-placed commuter, he briefly wonders whether anyone who’s never been to Birmingham would know that there are stairs down to Platform 7 of New Street Station. Would they doubt his word? Would somebody one day telephone the station-master to ask for confirmation of their existence, or even pay a visit to the place to check for themselves? Or can he simply assert that this staircase exists and, by sheer force of will, bring it into being? If he can manage that, then surely he can also persuade the world that Stan Shuttleworth’s own personal opinion of New Street Station’s peculiar size and shape is the absolute and unquestionable truth. Incredible! What power he wields! Or would wield, if he could only retrieve his pen.
The pen has rolled to a halt under a pushchair belonging to a young blonde woman and her young blonde daughter. Stan will later ponder whether “young” should come before “blonde” and whether there should be a comma between them, but right now he is searching for a word for one of those elongated steps halfway down a staircase, that isn’t really a step at all: sort of like a mezzanine level, a concrete point of inflection, where elderly gentlemen and women with pushchairs pause to catch their breath and get in people’s way. With luck, if he describes it elegantly enough, nobody will realise that he is merely trying to avoid having to call it by name.
Stan absent-mindedly mumbles something apologetic at the young woman, not even quite sure himself what he is saying, and carefully reaches down to pick up his errant pen. The little girl in the pushchair eyes him strangely. The strangest thing about her eying is that she uses only one eye to do it. The other is covered in cotton wool and bandaged with beige sticking-plaster. He tries not to recoil in horror. The girl is sulking. Stan replaces his pen firmly in his pocket and offers to help carry the pushchair up the remaining stairs. The girl’s mother accepts gratefully. He hoists his rucksack onto both shoulders and struggles backwards up the stairs holding the front of the buggy, averting his eyes as best he can from the little girl’s wounded face. Reaching the summit of the staircase, he exchanges a few more unintelligible words with the blonde woman and sets off back down again, hoping that if he ever has to re-tell this incident he could get away with using reported speech since nothing of any importance was said and because the sight of a pair of quotation marks without words in between them makes him slightly queasy.
You see, when he is not sat at his desk in the windowless office of the life insurance company that employs him to fix their computers, Stan Shuttleworth is a Writer.
(He knows this to be true, because he carries a fountain pen and an empty notebook with him at all times.)
Stan has not yet discovered that he is still a writer even while he is sat at his desk, or while wielding a screwdriver at someone else’s desk, or while wedged behind a rack of blinking switchgear trying to work out which one of three dozen identical blue patch cables he has plugged into the wrong socket. From Stan’s employer’s point of view, this is probably a good thing.
At school, although he had excelled at it, Stan had hated studying English. It was all too abstract, too formal, too retrospective, too highbrow. He has a practical mind, not given to learning for learning’s sake. Why should he care what one dead person wrote about another dead person’s writing? Why were his teachers so infatuated with the interpretation, the comprehension, the theoretical? What drove them to force their classes to spend hour after hour listening and reading, instead of talking and writing? It was the same with art, and music. Always the tacit assumption that the child must learn first, and do second. His parents had encouraged him to ignore this attitude wherever he encountered it.
At the bottom of the stairs, he almost trips over a pigeon. The pigeon does not seem to be looking where it is going. It is not obvious to Stan whether a pigeon is even capable of looking where it is going, with its eyes mounted so absurdly on the either side of its head. The pigeon stops to peck crumbs from a discarded crisp packet, until two more people almost trip over it and it scurries off skittishly down the platform, following Stan as he sits himself down on an uncomfortable wooden bench to wait for his train.
Today, Stan is not going home. He is going to London.
About nine months ago, Stan embarked on a correspondance course in creative writing. Prior to that, he had been saving up for a new mountain bike to replace the old worn-out thing he’d had since he was a teenager. But when an advertisement in the weekend paper caught his eye, he decided to postpone his getting back into shape and concentrate on an activity he could pursue in any weather. The university running the course placed him in a tutor group with a dozen other would-be authors, most of whom lived in and around London. A few of them already seemed to know each other, having previous studied courses in poetry and playwriting and goodness knows what else through the same college. They were a friendly and welcoming lot, though, and Stan soon found himself invited to meet up for drinks sometime. And sometime became sometime in March, which became this Friday, which became today.
Stan had been hoping that studying writing would cure him, but it didn’t.
The debilitating condition he suffers from is one common to many aspiring writers, although he doesn’t realise this. His prose is clear, thoughtful, even downright breathtaking at times, when he gets it right, and doesn’t try too hard, or use too much punctuation:— but he has a complete inability to write about any subject that falls outside his direct, personal experience.
All his characters, in other words, are based on himself, or people he knows.
All the things they do, in other words, are things he does himself, or things his friends and relations do.
Sure, he changes a detail here or there. He might choose to have one of his characters sitting on a bench waiting for an aeroplane, for example, because he is quite sure (from what he’s been told, and seen on television) that this is pretty much exactly the same as waiting for a train, only the guards have guns. Or he might substitute wine for beer, or steak for sausages, or ferns for flowers, or the Daily Mail for the Daily Express. But he will never write about spies, or space stations, or high-flying lawyers in New York City, or a Bolivian chef who stows away on a cruise liner to escape the authorities and ends up joining a jazz band in the Canary Islands. He writes what he knows.
The pigeon must think he has some food in his rucksack. It is circling around itself, drawing ever closer to his ankles. (Stan read a story about a pigeon, once, by some German guy. He didn’t think much of it.)
He found the studying very useful, not to mention enjoyable. He did all the exercises and submitted all the assignments to his tutor for assessment, and he did extremely well for all that; but he is still fretting about whether he can get away with writing a short story about a man who works for a car insurance company, when all he knows about is life insurance. If he gets that wrong, he will surely be uncovered as a fraud.
Stan checks his pocket for the sheet of paper with the directions on it. He knows it’s there, but he checks for it again anyway. He is uncharacteristically and inexplicably nervous about the whole thing.
The Euston-bound train is pulling into the station. The people waiting on the benches rise to their feet and the pigeon spreads its bedraggled wings and takes off, flying straight across the tracks in front of the oncoming train and settling eventually on a short-wave radio mast nearby. Stan checks his pocket for his ticket (he knows it’s there, but he checks for it again anyway) and positions himself at the platform’s edge, right next to the spot where he knows the door will be when the train comes to rest.
As the doors close and the train makes its slow, raucous departure, Stan cannot see the pigeon sat there on the aerial, its breast puffed out and shining like a burnished statue in the glow of the sinking sun, as if some alchemy has turned this most base of birds into solid gold. It’s a shame, because if he had, he would probably have used it in a story.
You can read Part 2 here.
[ add comment ] | permalink | related link
Oh midnight hour! Whose shades of night
My sleeping eyes so seldom see:
What cruel sorceries incite
My clocks to spring from one to three?
Who is this thief, whose subtle sleight
Defrauds the steadfast sun and moon
To steal an hour of morning light
And give it to the afternoon?
With bleary eyes and tousled hair
Resplendent in my slobbery
I lie, and curse all those who dare
Condone this daylight robbery!
With grief this parting I must bear -
But when the leaf deserts the tree
And autumn's mist hangs in the air -
Then, midnight hour, come back to me!
[ 1 comment ] ( 4 views ) | permalink | related link
It seemed like quite a coincidence. Every single car on the far side of the road displayed yellow number plates, but every car on the near side had white ones.
Then I looked in the other direction, and every car on the near side now had the yellow plates, and the white ones were on the other side.
(As you might be hoping, it didn't take me long to work it out from there.)
So it turns out that cars in Britain have yellow number plates on the back, and white plates on the front. Now I'm stuck with two questions in my mind.
Firstly, how is it possible to live for three decades in an urbanised country and not notice something as simple and pervasive as the colour of the vehicle registration plates?
Secondly, what is the reason for having a different coloured plate on the front and rear of a car? It's not like it's hard to tell whether you're looking at the front end or the back end of a car without a colour-coded piece of fibreglass to disambiguate them for you. And both styles are designed to be highly visible and readable, as you'd expect. The best excuse I can think of is that it's for the benefit of motorway drivers at night - if you're following the same car for hours on end at a distance of a few metres with your headlights on, perhaps making their back plate yellow rather than bright white is easier on the eyes. But it still seems to me like the system is twice as complicated as it needs to be.
On reflection, I think I prefer it when the fulfillment of my learning-a-new-thing-every-day quota is postponed until after I get into the office.
[ add comment ] | permalink | related link
No, that's not a summary of progress on my novel, it's a lame way of introducing a journal entry in which I admit that I have so little to say that I have to resort to posting photographs.
Still, this new camera is a lot of fun!
A lake near Aberlady Bay
Another tiny lake near Gullane Bay, looking for all the world like a desert oasis
The beach at Gullane - the lens just doesn't do it justice
A robin singing in front of the waxing moon
Freesias (from Valentine's Day)
As full and bright as I am
This light is not my own and
A million light reflections pass over me.
[ add comment ] | permalink | related link
Next
Zodiac 
Calendar
