Dangerous Novels for Aspiring Authors

Any young person who wants to be a novelist should of course be a reader as well. But some novels can be more hazard than inspiration. They are often well-written, but their effects have generally been disastrous: they inspired younger writers to imitate them, they created awful new genres that debased readers' tastes, or they promoted literary or social values that we could very much do without.

Among the authors Crawford Kilian lists on The Tyee website are Tolkein, Rand, and Hemingway.  And I have myself just been reading the work of a Kerouac-wannabe who would do so much better trusting his own voice. (Pic of the author left.) Rushdie has a hell of a lot to answer for too.  Any more you can think of?

Also listed are those authors who might be dangerous to newer writers - simply because they are so  good they leave us dumbfounded!

Posthumous Novels

The author's dead but the books keep coming :

Keroac's (left) "lost" first novel My Brother, The Sea is to be published for the first time.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide last September , but two hundred pages of a new novel, The Pale King, were discovered by his wife, and the book due to be published next year.

Then there's Roberto Bolano ... whose 2666 was published posthumously. Two more novels were found among his papers.

And now, it seems, there are two more Michael Crichton (right) novels set to appear! One is apparently an historical adventure story and the other a techno-thriller.

Being dead shouldn't be considered a handicap at all!

Postscript :

Leave dead authors work alone, says Stephen Moss on The Guardian blog.

Another 50th Anniversary

Malaysia isn't the only one celebrating her golden jubilee this year!

It's fifty years since Jack Keroac's On the Road, was published. An immediate best-seller, it tells the story of Keroac and his friend "Dean Moriaty" (actually Neal Cassady) as they travel across the US. It was an immediate best-seller, and is the book which best defined the "Beat Generation" which challenged the conformist and materialist values of post-war America. Another Beat novelist, William S. Burroughs, once said that the book "sent countless kids on the road".

Admirers of the novel celebrated with a marathon 12 hour cover-to-cover reading in Boulder, Colorado to kick off the university's inaugural Kerouac Festival.

Keroac taped together sheets of semi-translucent paper so that the flow through his typewriter would be uninterrupted, and the resulting manuscript was 120 feet long (and written breathlessly in a single paragraph)!

Now the "scroll" on which the novel was typed (bought for $2.4 million at auction last year) has gone on show in the the author's hometown, Lowell, Massachusetts, and will be displayed around the country.

And a new edition of the book has been released by Penguin classics, with all the original names restored as well as scenes that got edited out for fear of charges of obscenity. George Mouratidis in the Age describes his own involvement with the project in a piece which captures the spirit and the atmosphere of the original.

This goes on my wish list!

Crazy Dumbsaints Unite!

I lift my writing mantra from Jack Keroac's "Belief & Techniques for Modern Prose - List of Essentials". Take from it what you will ...

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, listening
3. Try never to get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable vision of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust, be an old teapot of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel centre of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement of yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont [sic] think of words when yous top but to see picture better
23. Keep track of everyday the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

As ever, Jack