The best way to think of Nietzsche is as a blogger.
Most of his books are made up of bite-sized sections which are not obviously tied to each other, and which offer no general argument. Sometimes he’s talking about something he saw the other day, sometimes he’s giving his opinion on the world in general, sometimes he’s just ranting. (Like I say, a blogger.) Topics range from the nature of truth to the unattractiveness of small women, and the style is free and personal, full of rhetorical questions and idiosyncratic punctuation. Of all great philosophers, he is surely the king of exclamation marks.
While I write my first novel I often find myself thinking about my second one, a mad habit but one I can’t break (it makes me feel there’s life after number one). I was reading The Gay Spirit and saw this “blogpost”:
I believe that artists often do not know what they can do best because they are too vain and have set their minds on something prouder. Here is a musician who is master at the very small. But he doesn’t want to be! His character likes great walls and bold frescoes! It escapes him that his spirit has a different taste and disposition and likes best of all to sit quietly in the corners of collapsed houses – there, hidden, hidden from himself, he paints his real masterpieces, which are all very short, often only a bar long – only there does he become wholly good, great, and perfect, perhaps only there – But he doesn’t know it! He is too vain to know it.
For me, this describes Ian McEwan perfectly.
The Artist is a film on this topic.
But how do you know what you do best? How can you see yourself except through you character?
ps. While we’re on the subject, here’s a good Nietzsche blog.
Tony Parsons thinks so:
Shakespeare would have loved Twitter. So would Groucho Marx. So would Karl Marx. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.” “Religion is the opiate of the people.”
All under 140 characters – all will be burned into the human heart for as long as mankind loves, laughs and dreams of change.
And Moses would have loved iPads. So handy for divine notations!
It’s often asserted that writers must love Twitter. But in my experience this – from a Paris Review interview with the American novelist E. L. Doctorow – is much more typical:
INTERVIEWER: You once told me that the most difficult thing for a writer to write was a simple household note to someone coming to collect the laundry, or instructions to a cook.
E. L. DOCTOROW: What I was thinking of was a note I had to write to the teacher when one of my children missed a day of school. It was my daughter, Caroline, who was then in the second or third grade. I was having my breakfast one morning when she appeared with her lunch box, her rain slicker, and everything, and she said, “I need an absence note for the teacher and the bus is coming in a few minutes.” She gave me a pad and a pencil; even as a child she was very thoughtful. So I wrote down the date and I started, Dear Mrs. So-and-so, my daughter Caroline . . . and then I thought, No, that’s not right, obviously it’s my daughter Caroline. I tore that sheet off, and started again. Yesterday, my child . . . No, that wasn’t right either. Too much like a deposition. This went on until I heard a horn blowing outside. The child was in a state of panic. There was a pile of crumpled pages on the floor, and my wife was saying, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this.” She took the pad and pencil and dashed something off. I had been trying to write the perfect absence note. It was a very illuminating experience. Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
Oh yeah. Read the whole thing here.
Issue 8 of Meat Magazine is out now in high-quality newsagents and Borders nationwide. It’s got a short story from yours truly illustrated by the ingenious Richard Merrick (that’s his penis below those are his pants below; the penis is here, along with Merrick’s other illustrations. I’d like to thank my legal team for their hard work on my behalf).
The story’s called The Birds and The Beasts and it’s a comic recounting of a filth-ridden night out, with reflections on The Game and evolutionary psychology. To tempt you, here’s the first paragraph:
A bird is a chick is a doll is a babe is a girl (although never a woman). And the beasts? We are the beasts. Come to eat you up like so many late-night kebabs.
How can you resist?
UPDATE: Looks like Merrick’s got a blog. Regular updates on his anatomy there, for those who just can’t get enough.
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