Camp NaNoWriMo isn't only held in April, you can also take part in July. Which feels weird, because July has 31 days to November's and April's 30, so you get an extra day to accomplish the same feat. But who am I to complain?
So this July, I will head back to Camp. Although, can you call it 'going back to' when you're not actually talking about a physical place, but a website with reshuffled cabins? Not sure, but the image works, also because I will be returning to the story I wrote for the April camp (which is the rewrite of my 2015 NaNo novel). I put down the main storyline in April, and now I will be adding the background chapters for each main character, which will hopefully fit in between. And if they don't, I will try not to fiddle with the stuff I already wrote in April, because that will not get me more words, just a more fluent story. And as we all know, the purpose of NaNoWriMo in any form is just output, not a pretty story.
I've set my aim at 20,000 again, not because July will be a busy month (unlike April) but because I've never written in the height of summer. At the moment, the weather is 13 degrees and rainy, but that will probably turn to warm and sunny by the end of the week. Let's see if I'll keep up with my writing when I can also be sitting outside, in the sun, enjoying a novel someone else wrote!
Sunday 24 June 2018
Saturday 9 June 2018
Penelopiad
Margaret Atwood is a great author. I may have mentioned this before, but my admiration seems to be developing in the direction of a full-on literary girl-crush.
So I've been reading Mythos by Stephen Fry, his retelling of the Greek myths. And while mr Fry is great, and his writing style is light and humorous, I seem to be unable to get through the book at any speed. It's more a series of leaps and bounds, with long periods of reading-something-else in between. These thousand year old stories remain a bit dry and dusty, even in the hands of modern writers.
Then I came across The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, a retelling of the Illiad/Odyssey from Penelope's (Odysseus's wife) perspective. Aparently Canongate does a myth-retelling series, in which they ask a couple of great authors (including Phillip Pullman, Ali Smith, A.S. Byatt) to retell a myth from a contemporary perspective. So far, they're at 9 stories, but the aim is to get to 100 in the end.
They were smart enough to ask Margaret Atwood to do one right in the beginning, which gave the whole series a boost. And Atwood wouldn't be Atwood if she didn't give the whole thing a truly feminist twist (although she disagrees with that classification, saying that it was just written from the point of view of a woman). So Penelope is the main character, telling us the story from the realm of Hades, which is firmly set in the 21st century.
Now I hadn't gotten to the Odyssey bit in Mythos, but the story is well-known: it took Odysseus quite a while to get home from Troy, fighting monsters and sleeping with goddesses, while in the meantime his wife waited faithfully, surrounded by dozens of suitors trying to claim Odysseus's kingdom. Or, in other versions of the story, Penelope went all-out with these suitors. In The Penelopiad, she explains that she was just trying to survive the best she could. She is neither sinner nor saint, she doesn't want to be put on a pedestal like Odysseus and his big stories (the cyclops was just a one-eyed guy in a drunken bar fight, according to her), she was just a woman trying to get by.
Another element to the story are the twelve maids hanged by Odysseus upon his return. In the 'official' version, these maids were working together with the suitors and had to be hanged for their treason. In this version, Penelope reveals she asked the maids to spy on the suitors and work with her to help her get by. She never gets a chance to explain this to Odysseus before he hangs the girls. However, Penelope's chapters are interspersed by 'chorus' chapters in which the maids give their point of view, which throws yet another light on the story. But still the double standards are clearly there: the maids sleeping with the suitors earns them a hanging, while Odysseus sleeping with a goddess earns him praise.
Finally, Penelope has some beef with her cousin Helen, who of course started the whole Trojan war by running off with Paris. Helen continuous to haunt her in the underworld, showing up with throngs of suitors still following her. What it comes down to, is Penelope being jealous at Helen for being more beautiful and revered than herself. Given both their back stories, this is completely recognisable and it makes me like Penelope more as a character. She did her best trying to keep Odysseus's kingdom together while he was away, but in the end, she doesn't feel as good about herself as Helen, who does nothing but play men against each other. It should be the other way around, but as with so many relationships, things are not that logical.
The Penelopiad took me about two days of reading to get through. It is not dry, it is not dusty. It is the story of a woman trying to explain why she did what she did, firmly set in our time but describing events of three thousand years ago. And it is completely recognisable; this is a human character, with human actions and flaws. Maybe that is what makes these Greek myths slow reading; all these super-human characters who get away with everything gets boring after a while. We like superheroes best if they show some sort of flaw, some weak point that makes them more human. This is what Margaret Atwood did; she gave a human perspective on a non-human situation. And I tend to agree with her; that doesn't make the story feminist, it just gives another point of view. Something we could use more often, in classical literature. I hope the rest of the Canongate series is as good as this, for these stories, dusted and renewed, still deserve to be retold for many years to come.
So I've been reading Mythos by Stephen Fry, his retelling of the Greek myths. And while mr Fry is great, and his writing style is light and humorous, I seem to be unable to get through the book at any speed. It's more a series of leaps and bounds, with long periods of reading-something-else in between. These thousand year old stories remain a bit dry and dusty, even in the hands of modern writers.
Then I came across The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, a retelling of the Illiad/Odyssey from Penelope's (Odysseus's wife) perspective. Aparently Canongate does a myth-retelling series, in which they ask a couple of great authors (including Phillip Pullman, Ali Smith, A.S. Byatt) to retell a myth from a contemporary perspective. So far, they're at 9 stories, but the aim is to get to 100 in the end.
They were smart enough to ask Margaret Atwood to do one right in the beginning, which gave the whole series a boost. And Atwood wouldn't be Atwood if she didn't give the whole thing a truly feminist twist (although she disagrees with that classification, saying that it was just written from the point of view of a woman). So Penelope is the main character, telling us the story from the realm of Hades, which is firmly set in the 21st century.
Now I hadn't gotten to the Odyssey bit in Mythos, but the story is well-known: it took Odysseus quite a while to get home from Troy, fighting monsters and sleeping with goddesses, while in the meantime his wife waited faithfully, surrounded by dozens of suitors trying to claim Odysseus's kingdom. Or, in other versions of the story, Penelope went all-out with these suitors. In The Penelopiad, she explains that she was just trying to survive the best she could. She is neither sinner nor saint, she doesn't want to be put on a pedestal like Odysseus and his big stories (the cyclops was just a one-eyed guy in a drunken bar fight, according to her), she was just a woman trying to get by.
Another element to the story are the twelve maids hanged by Odysseus upon his return. In the 'official' version, these maids were working together with the suitors and had to be hanged for their treason. In this version, Penelope reveals she asked the maids to spy on the suitors and work with her to help her get by. She never gets a chance to explain this to Odysseus before he hangs the girls. However, Penelope's chapters are interspersed by 'chorus' chapters in which the maids give their point of view, which throws yet another light on the story. But still the double standards are clearly there: the maids sleeping with the suitors earns them a hanging, while Odysseus sleeping with a goddess earns him praise.
Finally, Penelope has some beef with her cousin Helen, who of course started the whole Trojan war by running off with Paris. Helen continuous to haunt her in the underworld, showing up with throngs of suitors still following her. What it comes down to, is Penelope being jealous at Helen for being more beautiful and revered than herself. Given both their back stories, this is completely recognisable and it makes me like Penelope more as a character. She did her best trying to keep Odysseus's kingdom together while he was away, but in the end, she doesn't feel as good about herself as Helen, who does nothing but play men against each other. It should be the other way around, but as with so many relationships, things are not that logical.
The Penelopiad took me about two days of reading to get through. It is not dry, it is not dusty. It is the story of a woman trying to explain why she did what she did, firmly set in our time but describing events of three thousand years ago. And it is completely recognisable; this is a human character, with human actions and flaws. Maybe that is what makes these Greek myths slow reading; all these super-human characters who get away with everything gets boring after a while. We like superheroes best if they show some sort of flaw, some weak point that makes them more human. This is what Margaret Atwood did; she gave a human perspective on a non-human situation. And I tend to agree with her; that doesn't make the story feminist, it just gives another point of view. Something we could use more often, in classical literature. I hope the rest of the Canongate series is as good as this, for these stories, dusted and renewed, still deserve to be retold for many years to come.
Saturday 2 June 2018
Fahrenheit 451
Sometimes you come across a book, a Work of Literature, that has changed the world significantly, and did so quite a while ago, and you'd never heard of it before. And you can't imagine how that happened.
In the case of Fahrenheit 451, Neil Gaiman mentioned it in his non-fiction collection The View from the Cheap Seats. In fact, he mentioned it several times, and with high praise. If Neil Gaiman likes something, and I like the things Neil Gaiman likes, then by all common logic I should also like the thing Neil Gaiman likes. So when I had a three hour lay-over on Istanbul Airport on my way back from Israel, I tried to find the novel. Oddly enough, the airport bookshop put it on number 3 of their books top 10. Not bad, for a book that came out in 1953. Also, it made me want to read it even more. Luckily I was smart enough to check it before I bought it, as the books that were in the top 10 were also all in Turkish. So I bought it when I got home.
Now I'd read enough about the genre (speculative fiction), size (just 50,000 words), title (the temperature at which paper burns), writing process (Ray Bradbury sat in a basement of the university at a typewriter you had to feed 10 cents for half an hour of typing and wrote the whole thing in 9 days) and plot (the protagonist's job is to burn books) of the novel to assume I knew quite a bit about it. Also, in hindsight, Fahrenheit 451 explains the very strange title of Michael Moore's documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, which I never quite got. Things were falling into place before I even read it.
And then I read it. This is a novel written in just 9 days, and it took me three bouts of 1-2 hours of reading to get through it. I think there is no other way to read it but fast; you can feel the speed, the urgency with which it was written, and you feel the same urgency to get through it. Not because of the plot, which is, as in any great Literary Work, not the main thing. Because of the ideas, the feeling, the atmosphere the book breathes. This not just about a guy (aptly named Guy) burning books for a living and realising that this is not right. This is about the society he lives in, a future society (the future of 1953) in which people are kept dumb and inactive through government propaganda and excessive home entertainment systems.
As Neil Gaiman writes, this book tells just as much about Ray Bradbury's vision of the future, as it does about the time he wrote it in. Some people believe in 'the death of the author', but this is one novel that cannot be seen separate from the time it was written. It was a warning, a warning against government oppression (the McCarthy trials were in full swing), against fear, against the dumbing down of the population, against the rise of television, against individualism as people isolate themselves through ear buds (Seashells) and live in a world of their own while in the middle of a crowded street. Of course, Bradbury couldn't predict things like the Internet, and in some respect his technologies seem sweetly outdated, but I think he would see his worst fears having become reality if he could see the world today.
Looking back, it is of course ironic that this novel is such a best-seller in Turkey at the moment. It is right up there with 1984 and all those other dystopian novels, the ones that seem to predict the world we find ourselves in more and more. But in contrast to many others, the main point of Fahrenheit 451 is that it's not the government doing these things to people. It's people doing them to themselves. People choosing to be entertained, to isolate themselves, to loose contact with the people that surround them. In that sense, it is closer to Dave Eggers The Circle, although there is no sense of a commercial goal in Fahrenheit.
Bradbury described himself as "not a predictor, but a preventor of futures", and it is sad to see that it did not quite work out that way. The book is on many reading lists in the US, although ironically the book is also sometimes heavily censored because of its 'foul language' and portrayal of Christians. Those who censor a book like this must not have read it for what it is.
I cannot imagine why I've never come across it before, but now that I've read it, I can see its influence on so many other works. I will have to read it again, in a couple of years or so, for all the things I missed when I went through it full speed. This is a book with layers, with subtexts, with themes that will only become apparent on rereading. Luckily for us, the book-burning prediction has not (yet) come true, so it will be waiting for me when I decide to return to it.
In the case of Fahrenheit 451, Neil Gaiman mentioned it in his non-fiction collection The View from the Cheap Seats. In fact, he mentioned it several times, and with high praise. If Neil Gaiman likes something, and I like the things Neil Gaiman likes, then by all common logic I should also like the thing Neil Gaiman likes. So when I had a three hour lay-over on Istanbul Airport on my way back from Israel, I tried to find the novel. Oddly enough, the airport bookshop put it on number 3 of their books top 10. Not bad, for a book that came out in 1953. Also, it made me want to read it even more. Luckily I was smart enough to check it before I bought it, as the books that were in the top 10 were also all in Turkish. So I bought it when I got home.
Now I'd read enough about the genre (speculative fiction), size (just 50,000 words), title (the temperature at which paper burns), writing process (Ray Bradbury sat in a basement of the university at a typewriter you had to feed 10 cents for half an hour of typing and wrote the whole thing in 9 days) and plot (the protagonist's job is to burn books) of the novel to assume I knew quite a bit about it. Also, in hindsight, Fahrenheit 451 explains the very strange title of Michael Moore's documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, which I never quite got. Things were falling into place before I even read it.
And then I read it. This is a novel written in just 9 days, and it took me three bouts of 1-2 hours of reading to get through it. I think there is no other way to read it but fast; you can feel the speed, the urgency with which it was written, and you feel the same urgency to get through it. Not because of the plot, which is, as in any great Literary Work, not the main thing. Because of the ideas, the feeling, the atmosphere the book breathes. This not just about a guy (aptly named Guy) burning books for a living and realising that this is not right. This is about the society he lives in, a future society (the future of 1953) in which people are kept dumb and inactive through government propaganda and excessive home entertainment systems.
As Neil Gaiman writes, this book tells just as much about Ray Bradbury's vision of the future, as it does about the time he wrote it in. Some people believe in 'the death of the author', but this is one novel that cannot be seen separate from the time it was written. It was a warning, a warning against government oppression (the McCarthy trials were in full swing), against fear, against the dumbing down of the population, against the rise of television, against individualism as people isolate themselves through ear buds (Seashells) and live in a world of their own while in the middle of a crowded street. Of course, Bradbury couldn't predict things like the Internet, and in some respect his technologies seem sweetly outdated, but I think he would see his worst fears having become reality if he could see the world today.
Looking back, it is of course ironic that this novel is such a best-seller in Turkey at the moment. It is right up there with 1984 and all those other dystopian novels, the ones that seem to predict the world we find ourselves in more and more. But in contrast to many others, the main point of Fahrenheit 451 is that it's not the government doing these things to people. It's people doing them to themselves. People choosing to be entertained, to isolate themselves, to loose contact with the people that surround them. In that sense, it is closer to Dave Eggers The Circle, although there is no sense of a commercial goal in Fahrenheit.
Bradbury described himself as "not a predictor, but a preventor of futures", and it is sad to see that it did not quite work out that way. The book is on many reading lists in the US, although ironically the book is also sometimes heavily censored because of its 'foul language' and portrayal of Christians. Those who censor a book like this must not have read it for what it is.
I cannot imagine why I've never come across it before, but now that I've read it, I can see its influence on so many other works. I will have to read it again, in a couple of years or so, for all the things I missed when I went through it full speed. This is a book with layers, with subtexts, with themes that will only become apparent on rereading. Luckily for us, the book-burning prediction has not (yet) come true, so it will be waiting for me when I decide to return to it.
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