Herbie the Hedgehog Phd giving a lecture on sedimentary petrology, whilst perched on a mound of oolitic limestone, with the able assistance of Ian Fairchild and Carol Bamsey
Yesterday I promised Tracy that I really would start producing photographs and written work suitable for submission to 3rd parties at some point in the nearish future. Or else look for a proper job. Given that I spent a few weeks pacing around London earlier in the year in search of its hidden geometry (there's something going on here I promise you) she suggested that I take the style and genre of something like the incredibly successful Da Vinci Code as a starting point.
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I acquired an ebook version of the Da Vinci Code and started reading it under the duvet on my palm pilot last night.
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It’s not very well written is it?
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One particular segment struck me as being especially excruciating …
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'He could taste the familiar tang of museum air - an arid, deionised essence that carried a faint hint of carbon - the product of industrial coal-filter dehumidifiers than ran around the clock to counter the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by the visitors.'
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'He could taste the familiar tang of museum air - an arid, deionised essence that carried a faint hint of carbon - the product of industrial coal-filter dehumidifiers than ran around the clock to counter the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by the visitors.'
Ouch! They don’t write entertaining prose like that any more, no sireeee Jimbob.
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Throughout the book characters are described as 'sallow' or possessing 'an arrow-like widow's peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship'. Every time characters approach a building you are treated to a description of its height, number of window panes and year of construction. This particular author's writing technique is laid bare for all to see in every paragraph; write a sentence, chuck in two lines of gratuitous, pompous adjectives then four sentences stolen from a guide book or the Internet. Send to your publishers, who will hype up your tosh with great skill, then sit back and count the royalties.
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I'm probably infringing copyright by quoting chunks of this schlock but the entire book itself is a flagrant rip off of other, much better written books.
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Sallow? Sallow? Who describes people as sallow these days? Does anyone out there still think its clever to use words just because they sound literary? We should all amandate such cynicocratical crocitation and cagastric aporrhea. It's not big and it's not clever.
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But, as Tracy would point out, the book sold by the warehouseful. Quite literally. I've seen piles of copies of the Da Vinci Code on sale next to the latest issues of 'What Big Red Truck?' and 'Practical Lynching' in centres of literary erudition such as Walmarts in Mississippi and Alabama and The Warehouse in New Zealand. This book sold big.
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If that's what the public wants, or at least is told it wants, who am I to disagree?
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So, it was practice time for old Stef. 'I know' I thought 'I'll take a children's nursery rhyme at random and rewrite it in the style of the Da Vinci Code' …
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A tremulous and ashen face Jack turned to Jill, her long, thin flamingo legs looked pale in the cool of the evening breeze. He picked up the bucket; its rigid exoskeleton injection moulded in translucent, ruby red, high impact plastic. The galvanised handle rose in an arc from its rim catching the rays of the dying sun which glinted off its iridescent exterior. Together they stood side by side and stared up the hill. It was an ancient hill. Extruded from the womb of Mother Earth 400 million years ago in the Carboniferous era, it was composed of a grey, nodular oolitic limestone. Jack smiled, a crooked sardonic smile. Did the countless millions of creatures that died to form the fabric of this mound realise that their lifeless shells would one day aggregate to become the stage upon which one of the great secrets of mankind be finally revealed. There, upon the crest of the hill, squat and weather-beaten like a brooding, old and arthritic Albanian fisherman with a pipe, sat the well. Built in the early 1800's in Georgian style from 550 hard-glazed concave bricks by somebody called Eric it waited for them. In the wind Jack was sure he could hear it laughing.
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… at which point I gave up, bored, before they even started up the hill. One thought that did strike me whilst writing this is what were Jack and Jill doing going up a hill to fetch a pail of water anyway? You don't drill wells on top of hills. Water flows down. If the water table lay above Jack and Jill's heads there would be a spring somewhere nearby. Looking back, I think I may have been subconsciously searching for displacement thoughts to take my mind off the fact that if I want to write for a living I'm going to have to write toss and then come up with a cynical scheme to publicise that toss regardless of its merits.
A tremulous and ashen face Jack turned to Jill, her long, thin flamingo legs looked pale in the cool of the evening breeze. He picked up the bucket; its rigid exoskeleton injection moulded in translucent, ruby red, high impact plastic. The galvanised handle rose in an arc from its rim catching the rays of the dying sun which glinted off its iridescent exterior. Together they stood side by side and stared up the hill. It was an ancient hill. Extruded from the womb of Mother Earth 400 million years ago in the Carboniferous era, it was composed of a grey, nodular oolitic limestone. Jack smiled, a crooked sardonic smile. Did the countless millions of creatures that died to form the fabric of this mound realise that their lifeless shells would one day aggregate to become the stage upon which one of the great secrets of mankind be finally revealed. There, upon the crest of the hill, squat and weather-beaten like a brooding, old and arthritic Albanian fisherman with a pipe, sat the well. Built in the early 1800's in Georgian style from 550 hard-glazed concave bricks by somebody called Eric it waited for them. In the wind Jack was sure he could hear it laughing.
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I'm in despair. What am I going to do?
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