Wyeth continued...

Michael Palin's BBC4 programme about Andrew Wyeth inevitably touched on his father, N C Wyeth.  Michael Palin was keen to show his eccentricities and influence on the young Andrew, but he did not seem to be very interested in his work.  He pointed out that he was a very successful illustrator, but he did not point out that he was also a brilliant one.

Father and son are very different as artists and it may be that Palin just did not like N C Wyeth's work.  But it is also true that he is not as well known in the UK as he is in the US.  I've always loved his work.    Very few illustrators get into the business of modelling to the degree that N C Wyeth did - line and wash still dominates (even if the 'wash' may now be done on Photoshop).  N C's illustrations are all about modelling.  They have a depth and weight to them that sets them apart from much of the European illustration output of that era, full of big, muscular, square-jawed men, solid as oak trees.

N C Wyeth's illustrations to R L Stevenson's KIDNAPPED and TREASURE ISLAND are fantastic - although  the locations in both seem to look remarkably like Maine.

Wyeth

It was nice to see a programme about Andrew Wyeth pop up in the listings over the Christmas break.  Unfortunately the programme was fronted by Michael Palin, who is a very nice chap and everything, but did not seem to have much in the way of any particularly fresh or revealing insight into the work.  I assume he admires Andrew Wyeth's paintings and came up with the notion himself, otherwise he was a very odd choice indeed.

That said, few art historians or critics would have done it.  Wyeth rarely gets that kind of attention.  And it is true that some - maybe even a lot - of his output was simply well crafted and nothing more, but the best of it is wonderful, I think.  I love the intensity of the temperas - they have such a haunting atmosphere.  He slowed the world right down to the speed at which he painted it

The ghost story returns

The BBC gave many of us a wonderful Christmas present this year in bringing back to life - if that's quite the right expression - the much loved Ghost Story for Christmas.

I have blogged about these programmes from the 1970s many times before, stating what an influence they were on me - and many others, I'm sure.  I have also been lucky enough to meet Lawrence Gordon Clark, the man who brought those stories to our screens, at the Halifax Ghost Story Festival.

Mark Gatiss was at the helm this time and I'm sure that it is his personal enthusiasm for the project that has resulted in these programmes being revived.  He deserves a medal.  Or some sort of dusty amulet.

Having said all that, I was little bit underwhelmed by THE TRACTATE MIDDOTH - his choice for the film.  As with most of the Lawrence Gordon Clark adaptations, it was an M R James story.  Unfortunately, I don't think it is M R James' strongest.  It relies on a coincidence of such unbelievable proportions it undermines the whole tale.

It is a mistake to think that because a ghost story is inherently fantastical, you do not need to follow the normal rules of logic outside of that part of the story.  The more believable the details of the story are, the more the reader (or viewer) will be pulled in.  I think Gatiss should have shown a bit less respect to the story and given it a tweak.  He did after all move it forward in time a few decades.

But I can't be too hard on it, because I am so pleased to have the Ghost Story strand back.  I just wonder whether its time - as Gordon Clark did with Dickens' THE SIGNALMAN - to leave M R James in peace and go elsewhere for stories.  A version of W W Jacobs THE MONKEY'S PAW perhaps....?

Or...ahem...some other, more recent, purveyor of creepy fiction....

Twinned

The BBC showed an adaptation of THE THIRTEENTH TALE over Christmas.  I haven't read Diane Setterfield's book - though my wife has and was full of praise - but I really enjoyed the film.

The acting was first rate - from all concerned, but especially from Vanessa Redgrave, Olivia Coleman and Madeleine Power who played the younger version of both twins. The locations were excellent too, and it was beautifully shot.  So often these things are shot under incongruous blue skies, but they weren't afraid to film under leaden clouds and it made it all the more atmospheric.

I can say almost nothing about the plot without spoiling it for anyone watching so I will just say that it had a lovely fairy tale feel to it whilst still clinging to the possible (just).  It had some genuinely creepy moments too.

Lets have a bit more of this kind of thing, BBC

Hammer's Hill

I finally got round to watching the recent Hammer adaptation of Susan Hill's THE WOMAN IN BLACK over Christmas.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK is, in my opinion, one of the very few novels that manages to make a ghost story work at that length.  There are many great creepy short stories and the odd novella, but it is a very hard trick to pull off in a novel.  Even Susan Hill herself has found it difficult to repeat.

There was a very good - or I remember it as very good - television adaptation many years ago, and there has of course been a very successful stage version in the meantime.  This adaptation seems to have divided critics and my own friends - some love it, some not so much.  I saw it on DVD and by all accounts, it was much better at the cinema.

It is as hard to make a genuinely creepy movie as it is to write a genuinely creepy novel - so most directors don't try, they simply try to make you jump.  I loved the opening few minutes.  The three girls silently walking to the window and throwing themselves out was wonderfully unsettling and dreamlike, but there weren't enough moments like that.  The Woman in Black herself glimpsed fleetingly in the shadows and a spectral boy climbing out of the mud to approach the house were nice and creepy - and the look of the whole was nice - muted colours and nice locations, but it fell into the trap of going from one 'Boo!' moment to the next.  The problem with that is that by the time you reach the end it will almost always appear a bit weak.  As it did here.

Unlike the ending of the novel, which is every bit as strong as the premise.  And that's a hard trick to pull off.

It wasn't a bad movie - and it did have a real Hammer feel about it (and I mean that in a good way) and it was so much better than many of its kind - simply by dint of being rooted in such a good story - but it could have been much better.  It could have been troubling.  The television adaptation has clung to me ever since like a bad memory.  I will have forgotten this one in a few weeks.

Hopefully not

On Halloween evening I took part in a Reading Agency panel event at Swiss Cottage library with Susan Cooper, Sally Gardner and Geraldine McCaughrean, chaired by Clive Barnes of IBBY UK. I had been looking forward to this event for a long time as I am a great admirer of all three writers and Susan Cooper rarely visits the UK. All three turned out to be very good company.

I read Susan Cooper's THE DARK IS RISING to my son years ago. I hadn't read it until then, but had had it recommended to me by a friend and fellow writer. It is wonderful, magical book – beautifully written and dreamlike in the way it moves between the various worlds of her story. My son loved it and I was full of awe whilst reading it.

Susan's new book is GHOST HAWK, a handsomely packaged book, that tells the story of the Mayflower landing in America, but from the point of view of a native American.  The early passages of the boy going hunting are beautifully observed and I have a fascination with the woodland tribes, going back to THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS.

Geraldine McCaughrean has also featured strongly in my son's childhood reading because he owns several of her retellings of myths. In fact, she was in many ways the first and main point of contact for him, particularly when it came to Greek myths. Retelling is difficult – particularly when you are retelling complex material for a younger audience. Geraldine makes it look easy.

I recently read Sally Gardner's MAGGOT MOON.

(and here I am giving up on Nuance DragonDictate for Mac because it has decided to take off the last letter of the last word when I type a new word.  Very, very annoying....)

MAGGOT MOON unnerved me a little because it was a little like a thing I'd been working on, although it became less and less so as the story moved on.  I was seeing it as Kafkaesque but I realised quite quickly that this wasn't so.  Sally's points of reference are very different.  The great thing about reading it was that despite winning the Costa and the Carnegie I had somehow managed to come to it without the faintest notion of what the book was about - or more to the point, what it was like.  It is a really beautifully written, strange and thought-provoking book and I can see why it won the Carnegie.

It is always a pleasure to meet other writers and with the rise in popularity of panel events, it is becoming more common.  I like panel events - there is less preparation needed and less pressure.  The responsibility is shared and they tend to throw up genuinely surprising angles on things.

Having said all that, I'm not sure we quite rose to the occasion on this occasion.  I think it should - given the quality of the panel - been better.  I'm not sure why that was.  It was OK and I think the audience enjoyed it, but it just did not seem to ever really take off in the way it hoped.  Geraldine carried us a bit.  I particularly liked her rants about the BBC's ATLANTIS and the editorial censoring when it came to retelling folk tales.  She has a very dry delivery.  Very funny.

One thing that came up was the issue of responsibility when it came to writing for children.  Did we feel a sense of obligation to provide a happy ending - or at least, as Geraldine put it - a hopeful ending. It's an interesting question…

I've heard it said on more than one occasion, by people connected to children's publishing, that books for children should have a happy ending. As Geraldine was setting out the case for providing hope at the end of the story I found myself nodding in agreement, and yet I'm all too aware that this is hardly a feature of much of my work. So why do I write stories that don't have a happy or hopeful ending?

Partly I think this has to do with the age of the reader. I think I agree with Geraldine when it comes to younger readers – particularly very young readers. But I don't write for very young readers. In the main, I am writing for 10+ and often my readers are in their teens.  So do I have a duty of care towards my teenage readers?

I think the important thing with all writing – with all art – is that it should be honest. It should feel true to the writer and to the reader. As children grow older they see that the world is not a place where good always triumphs or where everything is neatly resolved. It is a function of fiction to look into the dark as well as the light. It always has been, even in folk tales and myths.

This is not to say that I think teenagers have no need for books with happy endings, or books that inspire hope. Far from it. I think there are far too few genuinely funny books for teenage boys, for instance. Teenagers have as much need for happiness and hope as anyone else – maybe more so. But, they also need choice.

Books for teenagers need to reflect the huge diversity of teenagers. No two teenagers are alike, and yet in discussions about teenagers, adults do have a tendency to talk as though they were specific templates for a teenage boy and a teenage girl. Teenagers vary hugely – not just from each other, but from hour to hour.

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, there weren't really books for teenagers as such. Once we had exhausted the libraries supply of books for older children, we moved onto short adult fiction, led by the exploration of adult fiction (with child protagonists) at school. We dived into the world of adult fiction pretty much without guidance or restraint. Mostly, we were reading genre fiction – crime, sci-fi, fantasy. I read John Wyndham, Robert E Howard, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and others. I read a lot of short stories in compilations like the Pan Book of Horror. I read a lot of comics too - and non-fiction.

Because these books were not intended for my age group, there was no concession made to it – neither in terms of content, nor of language level. Nor for that matter, in concept level. The writers took the stories where the stories needed to go. And so should we.  Within limits of course - but it's the publisher, and to some extent the reader, who decides those.

Does 1984 have a happy ending? Does FRANKENSTEIN? Does LORD OF THE FLIES have a hopeful ending? I'm sure we would be happy to see any teenager reading any of these books, so why worry about the supposedly dark content of teen fiction today?

I think hope comes in many forms; not just in the resolution of the story, but in the act of reading itself. Reading is an essentially hopeful activity, I think. And sometimes – I think this was true for me when I was a teenager – it is the discovery that those strange notions and weird ideas you've been having are not yours alone, but have been dreamed before, by others. That crushing sense of estrangement and isolation that many teenagers feel can be eased by finding a kindred spirit in the pages of a book, or a feeling part of a community of other readers of a particular book, series or genre.

After all, isn't that the most hopeful message of all – to realise that you are not alone?

Dragon

 this is just a quick test to see how blogger copes with DragonDictate. As you can see, it decided to begin the sentence without a capital letter for reasons best known to itself. This ought to be very easy to put right, but in fact, it can result in the unravelling of the entire passage.

The software's ability to accurately transcribe what I'm saying is astonishing. It gets quite obscure words absolutely perfect first time – even the names of towns and foreign words. But of course, it can never be perfect all the time. Editing will always be necessary. This is where the problem lies.

The software will behave itself for quite long periods of time, but then will start to behave very strangely. The most common glitch that I have encountered so far, is the random insertion of a rogue letter after any punctuation. So when you say comma or full stop a letter A or O or D will suddenly appear after it.

But not always.

But far more disconcerting than this, is when you ask it to do some seemingly simple piece editing, and it goes crazy – the cursor suddenly whizzing about drunkenly through the text until it alights on some word or part of the word which it then deletes or replaces with seemingly random letters. O

 I'm leaving that O where it is, to show what I mean. That is just appeared as I typed. In fact there is another O moving one space ahead of the cursor as I continue. How Nuance can release this in such a state and – as it did with me during a telephone conversation – deny that this problem exists, despite many references to it in forums, I just don't know. O

May be Nuance would try to persuade me that I am doing something to cause this. But I don't see what I'm doing that anyway veers from their prescribed commands. In fact, on the subject of commands – although I can summon up their recognition window, which lists possible alternative spellings – I can't make it go away. They say that the command is "hide recognition window". I know that the software is understanding what I say, because it writes it out accurately – and yet it will not obey that command.

I thought long and hard before buying the software. I have used Dragon before on a PC and became frustrated with it. The software has improved enormously in terms of recognition, but the general opinion seems to be that it works much better in Windows than it does on a Mac. Although their representative tried very hard to persuade me otherwise, I think that's probably the case.

However, having said all that, it is amazing to be able to simply speak and have your speech instantly converted into type. I have been suffering with RSI for some time and I think this will be enormous help in that regard. I type quickly, but not properly, and although I don't think that typing is the cause of my RSI, it certainly doesn't help.

My problems have been caused by mouse clicking and so it is important to me that the editing process works because otherwise I will be clicking away during the training process, which will be a bit counter-productive.

It's early days though and I hope that as the software learns about my speech patterns and sloppy diction, the whole experience will improve. I'll let you know how I get on.

Any mistakes in this blog post I'm going to blame on DragonDictate.