Every now and then I’ll take some random video I have (in this case from a shuttle between Banff & Canmore) and see how it works as a visual backdrop to one of my songs. Then I add the lyrics because it’s pretty boring without them. There’s actually a second layer of video here, flowers in a field moving in a slow wind. Anyway, “Russell” is one of my favourite songs.
Other videos from Till Light:
This is what I search for, why I read. Books that most publishers won’t touch, that most editors would have nightmares over, that aren’t necessarily great books but reflect something that’s uniquely of the mind of the author. What do they have in common? Ambition? Yes, in the way that a challenge is tackled head on. A strangeness? Yes, oh yes, oh yes yes, these are strange books. Humour? That generally goes with the strangeness. A non-linear structure? Absolutely, absolutely. Tasking language? For me, this is a must: there are lot of unique books out there, but do they have the language – the diction, the rhythm, the metaphor – to match that vision. And they are all moving, affecting, human books. It’s easy to be odd but so much harder to be uncanny. So here are a bunch that have never left me, that are by and large under-read and unknown to the general reading public (which is why some of the other authors whose books have influenced me, such as Pynchon, Beckett, Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, aren’t here). Clicking the images brings to Goodreads links.
Plus, Joseph McElroy
The Stones of Summer, Dow Mossman
The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Kenneth Patchen
The Dead Father, Donald Barthelme
The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien
Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson
JR, William Gaddis
Log the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, Stanley Crawford
I’m sure there are many others I’ve forgotten, such as (thinking):
Hawthorn and Child, Keith Ridgway
Ice, Anna Kavan
Genoa: A Telling of Wonders, Paul Metcalf
Housekeeping, Marilyn Robinson
Les Chants de Maldoror, Comte de Lautréamont
Journey to the End of Night. L. F. Celine
The Crock of Gold, James Stephens
Any recommendations?
Oh, poor neglected blog that no one never reads, what ails thee? Time, time is the sickness… and also the cure. And furthermore, croaked the ravin’ mad lunatic.
What’s new over here? A long story has been started, about an aircrash, another in my Dr. Shabazz collection (a new project). An agent is reading my sheep novel (we think). I’ve read four consecutive books written by women – Double-Blind (Michelle Butler Hallett), Hellgoing (Lynn Coady), The Town that Drowned (Riel Nason), Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel) – and am now reading Keith Ridgway’s Never Love a Gambler. Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child was one of my favourite books last year. Tense, periscopic, and a kind of weirdness that had me smiling ear to toe.
I’ve seen the publication of a book I edited for Boularderie Island Press (Get More Power from Your Brain, Eileen Pease) and added a copy of Becoming Fierce to my publications bookshelf.
I am editing my 13th and 14th books of the year. One of those recently-edited books just became this.
There were two launches of the latest Breach House Anthology, a writing group I’ve been deeply connected to since 2000. This was our third anthology. I also provided music at each launch, including a song based on one of the members’ lyrics (click here for that ditty).
I’ve edited, set-up, and now sent off for publication the revived Galleon.
I want to record another album soon. My reading series needs a new home. I continue to shed pounds (23 since July).
Lastly, it’s been a year since I had an underpaying overworking job, one I apparently left to focus on my writing career (insert raven laughter). And how has that gone, you ask? The twitching has gone, I respond.
A late night rant, that’s what this is. Rant against evil guiding hand. It’s the one thing that drives me bat-shit loony when I see it in published work.
I recently read a local, award-winning novel and was constantly slapped by its guiding hand. Here, let me explain what I’ve just shown you, and in case you didn’t know how to feel, let me explain that too. It’s all innocently done, the reading equivalent of a pat on the back. The book leads to a climactic scene, the author has set it up quite nicely, we’ve inferred what may very well happen next, but hey now let’s have the narrator tell you everything you’ve inferred.
Grrr and shame on the editor who skipped alongside, hand in guiding hand.
Lee, reaching for a New Directions, or a Dalkey Archive to numb the stinging.
I sent off an application to the Canada Council yesterday, a day before their creation grant deadline. This is my fifth time applying, with my first and the last three having been rejected. Last time it stung; I desperately needed the funds, which is the story of the past year.
Perhaps the story of my life.
But I did succeed once and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I’d been living in a house for sale for eight months, paying minimal ‘rent’ and living off donated food and biking everywhere. I was lean, making music for the first time in years, and writing. I’d even let my hair grow. A few months earlier I’d started developing, on a whim, an idea I dreamed up in France in 2003 (where I wrote the first page). Man in hell, talking fish as guide. Silly idea, but the characters worked and then something started to happen as I wrote chapter after chapter. When I sent the application in I was confident.
Months later, when the results were being announced, a friend called and said she was rejected, that all the rejections were in the mail today. So I called my mother, whose address I’d used, talked to my sister and asked if I had mail. I did. Crap. Canada Council, she said. Doublecrap. I wasn’t about to bike across town to get bad news so I said open it, save me the trouble. But she read “Dear Lee Thompson were are pleased to announce…” and I laughed, laughed and nearly cried.
The day prior the house had been sold and I, penniless, given less than a week to vacate.
I moved here, this neighborhood of kidnappings, where I’ve been for the past 7.5 years. A better ending would have the novel being published, but after a flirtation by Anansi, who admired it, it was then ridiculed by Gaspereau (‘from funny to inane in a hurry’), pondered by Coach House (‘wish we could publish everything we like’) and then accepted by Crossing Chaos, but then they more or less ceased operations. So.
So yes, yesterday another application sent. And even if nothing comes of it (I have a good feeling, though?), it led to me creating a new project out of a long story I’d written for another collection but which didn’t fit that collection well. I then drafted five new stories for the synopsis. Ideas I’d had floating around. Today, regardless of Canada Council decisions, I have an exciting collection in the works and for a writer that feels great. It’s like food in the fridge.
Speaking of which, next entry I’ll write more about the granting system.
It’s up now:
It’s only the second time I’ve had a story published online, because I rarely (only twice) submit to online journals. Can’t be denied though the readership is there, waiting, growing, and the story should be available for years to come.
Thanks to NC editor Douglas Glover for liking this story. Loopy, I think, was one of the words he used to describe it.
Fascinating, too, that it’s published on the birthday of the ex girlfriend who inspired Chiara.
Loopy, even.
Douglas Glover’s online oasis Numero Cinq will be publishing a story of mine in the upcoming August issue. I am thrilled. It’s a fine group of people to be with and “A Serpent” is one of my favourite stories (finished last year after returning from a vacation in Elba).
“… Lee D. Thompson pens a strange and charming story —”A Serpent” — about difficult love and a sea monster.”
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2014/07/27/carved-in-stone-the-august-issue-preview/
This makes me feel writerly again. Banff did that too, but what a mess of work and other issues I’ve had since returning.
Must get a collection in print.
Yes, I like to think I’m a musician sometimes, though I’m not always convinced it’s true. Many other things feel more natural to me, but I’ve always had songs and melodies in my head and can hardly have a conversation with someone (I know well) without starting to sing a response. Am I much of a singer? Shoulder shrug. Lyricist? Head nodding side to side. Guitarist? 30 years of strumming casually does pay off a little.
I stopped making music for a spell, started again seven or eight years ago and it does feel a part of me…
I completed a few songs while in Banff, and here are three:
Lunch Date
Dance with the Dead
Long Ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMqt-YrLqGE
It takes me forever to complete a song. Lyrics are the culprit – they always fall short. Having a Banff music hut for two weeks was a boon, certainly.
I’ve been home for three weeks now, editing work that I was contracted to do before leaving for Banff and St. John’s. One must pay the bills and sometimes the work is fascinating, as is the editing process. It does turn a sharper eye toward my own work as well. While in St. John’s, realizing (read worrying) that I was heading home with hardly a cent to my name, I received good news: the provincial arts board had, after all, awarded me a grant for Banff. Why? Unused funds and the fact that the grant had been recommended by the jury the first time through.
So. Great news. Not sure how I would have taken the news, however, had I cancelled Banff. I would have declined the grant, of course. But as it is, after having spent two weeks raising funds through Indiegogo, and being unable to work for the five weeks between Banff and St. John’s, I was broke, and it saved my bacon.
Over 40 people funded my trip to Banff, funds that not only covered immediate expenses in Banff, but left my lights on and rent paid back home. Thank you. That was humbling.
And thank you artsnb.
A killer is on the road and when I leave R.’s place early that morning, half-dream haunted (having slept haltingly under a bay window, shadowed lilacs moving in the wind), a crow swoops down madly squawking. It’s five a.m. and there’s a chill in the morning air and all the way to my apartment, which is only a parenthesis away, the crow follows, swooping when my back is turned and never shutting up. Others have woken, crows and not crows. Is this a message? Has the killer climbed to my second floor balcony and slipped in through the open door? I wasn’t expecting to be out long but when the news of the shots came I stayed over. So who knew where he was. So who knew if he’d slipped through the police noose and made it to the dark park and the path that leads to me. Does the crow know?
I’ve always found it fitting that trauma comes from Traum, the German word for dream. “Es war kein Traum,” Kafka writes early in Die Verwandlung when Gregor wonders what has happened. It was hardly a dream. Read any post-catastrophe interview – after 9/11, for example – and all you see is, ‘It was surreal.’
We live in a safe world. Mostly.
There was no killer hiding in my bathroom shower, nor in the bedroom closet. These things aren’t far-fetched, and yet they are. When I checked my balcony door (chain-locked, right), the crow was out there, on the wires, waiting. “So this crow followed me all the way home,” I told R. later in the day while the killer was still on the road (in the bushes, really). “It was very annoyed with me,” I said, also stating that I thought it might have brain damage. “Maybe it’s the one you chased out of the yard last week,’ R. said, and she was right, I had done that, darted into the driveway in my silver Fusion and leaped from the thing to chase a crow from the torn trash.
A grudge. An obsession. Wronged when the wronging was not what it seemed to be. We’re not so different from crows.
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