Syrup, by Max Barry
It somehow seems important simply to keep up entries here. Let this be the direction, if any, that my thought takes.
I have finished reading Jennifer Government and have lent it to a friend. Rotten Guatemalan from Alabama USofA on Amazon.com says "Read it and lend it to a friend. They'll appreciate it." so I guess I've done the right thing. =P I liked it so much that I also bought and have started reading Syrup, his one other novel. It's gooood. In some ways, I like it better than Government, just because he seems wittier when not engaging in fantastic speculation. The focus goes more on his satire then, which is his strong point. He has a keen sense of the absurd, and is full of witty and inventive digs at his subject matter of expertise, marketing.
In some ways, I would like to be an author of fiction. At least, I always thought that, if only I could do it, it would be such an easy way for me to make a living. I'm always writing. But I have no intrinsic interest in writing fiction except the puerile desire to be famous, which is probably not going to be very rewarding. Even if you publish something, it's still very touch-and-go. Most first novels simply disappear into oblivion in a "sea of new releases"1, including Barry's. Sales were disappointing, and his publisher said they weren't interested in publishing him anymore. Fortunately, George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh decided they wanted the movie rights. That was enough to get him a new publisher. But were it not for that fortunate intervention, he might have had go back to Hewlett-Packard2.
Yet the desire for fame was what interested me in Barry in the first place. I noted from his website that the first sentence of Syrup is "I want to be famous." I thought that it would give me some kind of vicarious relief from the emotion. And if that doesn't work, there's always Status Anxiety, by Alain de Botton.
However, I am really enjoying Max Barry anyway. I liked many things about Jennifer Government. First, it was related to an interest of mine from my non-fiction reading, Jihad vs. McWorld, on the downside of globalisation. Second, it had a Douglas-Adamsy sort of sense of humour: quirky, with a sense of the absurd, and overlaying a great deal of social commentary. Unlike Adams, however, the writing also had a edge, as the death scene of the teenage girl revealed. It made me realise that these were all things that I liked. It made me interested in other witty and/or edgy fiction. To this end, I have also ordered Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer from Amazon.com. It's based on the urban legend about the coerced kidney removal, and customers who bought Syrup also bought it. It's out of print now, so I have had to order it secondhand from a third-party through Amazon.com, but I should hopefully get it within about ten days.
Well, you have identified a sense of the absurd as one thing that you like in fiction. Richard Dawkins commented on Douglas Adams's sense of the absurd in his eulogy: "The whole world was one big Monty Python sketch". I thought that that really nailled Adams's non-fictional work Last Chance to See on the head. I was actually delighted to discover from that book that his sense of the absurd was just as powerful in real life as it was in his fictional worlds of Arthur Dent and Dirk Gently. The same can be said of Max Barry's ingenious blog entries. They read like Monty Python sketches, despite the fact that he is only describing real events that he has seen or lived through. If you like this, then you would do well to cultivate a similar sense of the absurd in your own writing. Your entries are always so damned serious!
As entertaining as I may otherwise find them to read about, I don't like to look for problems, thanks. I think that thoughts create reality in all sorts of subtle ways. Life is not one big Monty Python sketch to me for perfectly logical reasons. I begin by assuming that life makes sense, at least on its own terms, and am highly sensitised to exactly what those terms are. This, after all, is what I actually spent eight years doing in philosophy! Life's inner logic is not always the way I would like it to be, but that it is there seems hard to deny. I just think that if you want the world to make sense, then it will make sense to you. If you want the world to be absurd, then it will be absurd for you. But it hardly sounds like it is in my best interests to try to make life into a Monty Python sketch just to write entertaining blog entries.
But you should be looking for things in life that would make a good story. That seems to me to be the main thing that Barry does in his blog entries. He often writes down something he has seen or heard that he thinks would make great throwaway dialogue, or a comic scene in a book. You could let this blog be a similar writer's notebook. Ideas come from life, but you have to be sensitised to those things in your life that would make good books/scenes/dialogue/etc.
1James from Maryland on Amazon.com, from his review of Jennifer Government, June 6, 2004.
2From his page of Trivia on Jennifer Government, in the section titled "George Clooney & Changing Publishers".
I have finished reading Jennifer Government and have lent it to a friend. Rotten Guatemalan from Alabama USofA on Amazon.com says "Read it and lend it to a friend. They'll appreciate it." so I guess I've done the right thing. =P I liked it so much that I also bought and have started reading Syrup, his one other novel. It's gooood. In some ways, I like it better than Government, just because he seems wittier when not engaging in fantastic speculation. The focus goes more on his satire then, which is his strong point. He has a keen sense of the absurd, and is full of witty and inventive digs at his subject matter of expertise, marketing.
In some ways, I would like to be an author of fiction. At least, I always thought that, if only I could do it, it would be such an easy way for me to make a living. I'm always writing. But I have no intrinsic interest in writing fiction except the puerile desire to be famous, which is probably not going to be very rewarding. Even if you publish something, it's still very touch-and-go. Most first novels simply disappear into oblivion in a "sea of new releases"1, including Barry's. Sales were disappointing, and his publisher said they weren't interested in publishing him anymore. Fortunately, George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh decided they wanted the movie rights. That was enough to get him a new publisher. But were it not for that fortunate intervention, he might have had go back to Hewlett-Packard2.
Yet the desire for fame was what interested me in Barry in the first place. I noted from his website that the first sentence of Syrup is "I want to be famous." I thought that it would give me some kind of vicarious relief from the emotion. And if that doesn't work, there's always Status Anxiety, by Alain de Botton.
However, I am really enjoying Max Barry anyway. I liked many things about Jennifer Government. First, it was related to an interest of mine from my non-fiction reading, Jihad vs. McWorld, on the downside of globalisation. Second, it had a Douglas-Adamsy sort of sense of humour: quirky, with a sense of the absurd, and overlaying a great deal of social commentary. Unlike Adams, however, the writing also had a edge, as the death scene of the teenage girl revealed. It made me realise that these were all things that I liked. It made me interested in other witty and/or edgy fiction. To this end, I have also ordered Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer from Amazon.com. It's based on the urban legend about the coerced kidney removal, and customers who bought Syrup also bought it. It's out of print now, so I have had to order it secondhand from a third-party through Amazon.com, but I should hopefully get it within about ten days.
Well, you have identified a sense of the absurd as one thing that you like in fiction. Richard Dawkins commented on Douglas Adams's sense of the absurd in his eulogy: "The whole world was one big Monty Python sketch". I thought that that really nailled Adams's non-fictional work Last Chance to See on the head. I was actually delighted to discover from that book that his sense of the absurd was just as powerful in real life as it was in his fictional worlds of Arthur Dent and Dirk Gently. The same can be said of Max Barry's ingenious blog entries. They read like Monty Python sketches, despite the fact that he is only describing real events that he has seen or lived through. If you like this, then you would do well to cultivate a similar sense of the absurd in your own writing. Your entries are always so damned serious!
As entertaining as I may otherwise find them to read about, I don't like to look for problems, thanks. I think that thoughts create reality in all sorts of subtle ways. Life is not one big Monty Python sketch to me for perfectly logical reasons. I begin by assuming that life makes sense, at least on its own terms, and am highly sensitised to exactly what those terms are. This, after all, is what I actually spent eight years doing in philosophy! Life's inner logic is not always the way I would like it to be, but that it is there seems hard to deny. I just think that if you want the world to make sense, then it will make sense to you. If you want the world to be absurd, then it will be absurd for you. But it hardly sounds like it is in my best interests to try to make life into a Monty Python sketch just to write entertaining blog entries.
But you should be looking for things in life that would make a good story. That seems to me to be the main thing that Barry does in his blog entries. He often writes down something he has seen or heard that he thinks would make great throwaway dialogue, or a comic scene in a book. You could let this blog be a similar writer's notebook. Ideas come from life, but you have to be sensitised to those things in your life that would make good books/scenes/dialogue/etc.
1James from Maryland on Amazon.com, from his review of Jennifer Government, June 6, 2004.
2From his page of Trivia on Jennifer Government, in the section titled "George Clooney & Changing Publishers".
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