Short Stories by Etgar Keret and Robert Shearman

I got books for Christmas, mostly things that Adam Marek recommended during the reading he gave in Bridport in November. So far I’ve read Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical by Robert Shearman, Etgar Keret’s The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, I’m nearly finished The Girl on the Fridge by the same author, and I’ve read Apples by Richard Milward (this one wasn’t a Marek recommendation). What lead me to put Milward on my list was seeing this video of him doing a reading of his latest book. I liked that he transformed his head into a block of flats before doing the reading.

Both Shearman and Keret are amazing writers. I think Shearman is the better of the two; his stories are subtle and pack a lot more punch because I know there’s a lot going on in them.

Many of Keret’s stories are amazing. I think the stories in The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God are generally stronger than those in The Girl on the Fridge. I love Good Intentions, wherein a pro-assassin is hired to kill off the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, “the only good man I’d ever known”, a man who saved the assassin from orphanage beatings in his youth. He can’t do it, despite his 100% success rate in previous jobs. The ending is particularly strong, but I won’t go into it here. Keret’s endings tend to be very open. I think his stories demonstrate how it’s fine to leave everything hanging and unsaid, stories don’t always need a neat bow to round everything off.  

What I really, really like about Keret’s style is that his writing is so minimalist and bare, yet so vivid. The last story in The Bus Driver.. is Kneller’s Happy Campers. This was adapted into a film called Wristcutters, a Love Story. (See trailer below) The story is by far the longest in the book and is divided into twenty-six chapters, each about 300-600 words (his usual story length). The entire thing is forty pages. Any other writer would need five times that to tell this story – it’s enough to fill a feature length film. I think Keret is what I’d call a Conceptual Writer, by which I mean his stories are not really driven by character, plot or beautiful language, they are driven by an idea. The beauty of his prose is in its concise nature. Less is more, and there certainly is less in Keret’s work.

Keret manages to make stories out of anything and everything. Sometimes I’m not sure he succeeds. Perhaps I’ve just missed the point, but I’ve tried hard to delve deeper into some of the weaker ones, and still haven’t managed to figure it out. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy his stories, I like them for being little vignettes. I think what I’m trying to say is that I feel I could write a (weaker) Keret story without breaking into too much sweat, but Shearman is totally beyond me.

Shearman’s work is so multi-faceted. The collection I read were all love stories, yet not a single one could be described as clichéd or soppy. Most of them left me with a raw sadness (in a good way). They are simultaneously uplifting and crushing. In the story Be of Good Cheer, Gillian is allergic to other people’s happiness. “I’d take her to the cinema, making sure that the film was suitably depressing first. But it wasn’t enough to see films about depressing subjects, about heroin addicts or holocaust victims. Good films, no matter how dour, were still curiously uplifting, sent a ripple of unity around the audience that quite made Gillian gnash her teeth in distress.” I think some of Shearman’s stories are like that; though none of them could be described as dour, they’re all too light-hearted in their tone for that.

As for Milward’s Apples, it doesn’t really belong in this discussion because it’s from a different genre. Apples is well written, but I couldn’t connect to the characters, they were all too far from me and my life. I might talk about this in greater depth sometime soon because it did interest me in regards to teen fiction and reluctant readers. More on that later.

More on these authors:

Sample Keret’s work here: http://electricliterature.com/blog/2011/12/21/happy-holidays-from-electric-literature-and-etgar-keret/

and here with a story I read a while ago, before I knew who Keret was:http://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/1479/second_chance/

Shearman is best known for writing the Doctor Who episode that re-introduced the Daleks. Here’s a clip from that episode: 

Iron Pour

Stephen Coles is a sculptor with an MFA from Alfred, New York State, and now has a studio on his dad's Dorset farm. A couple of weekends ago Mr Kite and I went over to help him with an iron pour. My role was pretty safe and easy: take photos. Everyone else was kitted out in full leathers and visors; sand and water easy at hand. 

  The moulds ready for molten iron

  Pouring. 

Exciting stuff! I think the next pour will be bronze; casting a mince pie among more practical things. More on that later. 

Photographic Update

Okay, so I realise that I've been pretty slap-dash about updating what's what over the past few months. So here's some pictures describing the last two months of stuff that's been happening, late october-november's adventures not yet uploaded/ included. 

Cuthays Farm, near Axminster. Mary was interested in buying this dilapidated farmhouse and 28 acres of beautiful land. But it was falling down a little bit too much, and she wants more acres to plant her nut crops and forest garden. Still, it was very interesting to view it. The place wasn't connected into mains water, only having a well, it was all really well set up in an old fashioned and very sensible manner that we'd label permaculture nowadays, but then it was just good old normal common sense. 

Cuthays fields with plenty of wild food. 

Less wild food from Mr Kite's greenhouse, tomatoes grown by my fair hand.  Still cropping right into late October. 

Tay from Cherry Wood with puppy Kaia, ours for such a brief flash of time. 

Kaia's dad is Pippin, and her mum is Mooty of Cherry Wood. Perfect parentage! 

Kaia

Kaia lived with us for two lovely weeks before going on to a new home. We miss her! But I don't miss her mess. 

This is the cabin before Kaia came:

 And here it is during her stay. Very different:



My veg garden back in September. Love it!!




Walking near Mr Kite's place.

The River Stour. 

My allotment in september

Volunteer

For me 2011 has been a year of volunteering for things, getting involved in the community etc. I unintentionally found myself as the president of my local WI; on the WI committee; a co-organiser of Storyslingers, my writing group; a member of two other writing groups, plus a writers’ network; a member of a Local Action Group for a funding body; a voluntary press officer; a member of a reading group, and a few one off things.

Out of all these things, the only group that has given anything positive back to me has been Storyslingers, and the writing network. The others have simply piled stress onto me, demanded more than I am capable of, and even insulted me.

I now realise why a lot of young people don't get involved in community things; life is in too much of a delicate balance while you're trying to establish a career, not living in your own house and with more money going out than in. These community things are better for retired people who have security, have already ploughed all their effort into their own lives and careers and can comfortably give something back. I'm not there yet! 

And if you ever come across some gullible youngish person willing to volunteer their time to help the community, please consider the fact that they are still learning, they are likely to be struggling financially, and the last thing you should do is to rant your discontent at them. 

2012 is going to be a year for me, for focusing 100% on my career, on spending some time with people of my own generation. 

Web Serial Story

I’ve started a new online story that’s available for all to read. The format is in a blog style, about a girl just starting Uni (art school). Eventually I’d like to have it as an interactive story, with guest writers, illustrators, photographers etc. But for now it’s just me on my lonesome.

The idea behind the project is that it’s in real time, so the story is unfolding in parallel to real life timings. All the writing is raw and unedited. It’s a project to encourage me to write something very regularly and get it out there without hanging onto it for years rewriting it and getting bogged down in perfecting it.

I’m 4 blog posts into the story. Here is post (chapter) 1: http://uni-diaries.blogspot.com/2011/09/freshers-week.html

2: http://uni-diaries.blogspot.com/2011/09/kitchen-stories.html

3: http://uni-diaries.blogspot.com/2011/09/clubs-and-societies.html

4: http://uni-diaries.blogspot.com/2011/10/climb-club.html

Find out about Yves Klein at Artsy www.artsy.net/artist/yves-klein
- a great resource including a biography, pictures, articles and exhibition listings.

Intersection

A new short story of mine has been published by the most excellent Pygmy Giant. You can read it by going here: http://thepygmygiant.com/2011/09/12/intersection/
It's less of a story and more of an intersection between two narratives that haven't been written, with some philosophy thrown in. I hope you like it!


You can read another story I wrote a few years ago that I also got published at the Pygmy Giant: http://thepygmygiant.com/2008/12/05/elder/