yes I said yes I will Yes

I admit, it wasn’t my idea.

But it’s sooo cool!

The other day, I came across the most elegant mix of science and art. In his preface, the editor of a collection of scientific presentations summarized the contents with one single image: a word cloud of the most frequent words that appeared in all the articles.

Beautiful, and clever.

Because it’s never easy, at least to over-analytical people like me, to describe the contents of a piece of writing. When people ask me what my book is about, my heart sinks. I did write a 300-word synopsis and duly sent it to a literary agent. How bad must it have been for even the literary agent (notice I didn’t say publisher) to not grace my efforts with a polite “thanks but no thanks”?

I know now what I’m going to do. I’m going to generate a word cloud. And send it to those rude agents out there. When I’m asked what my book is about, instead of humming and hawing, I’ll be able to say: well, it’s about X, and Y, and Z. In 300 words.

But I’m a bit nervous. What if all these bad words that I used come out in screaming bold letter? What if no words come out apart from the boring little filler words? Word clouds don’t lie.

So I’m going to start with Joyce’s Ulysses.

I used http://www.wordle.net, like that inventive scientific editor I mentioned. And here are the results: Chap. 18 (Molly Bloom's soliloquy) , the one that ends with "yes I said yes I will Yes", and Chap. 4 (Leopold Bloom’s first appearance), the one that starts with "Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." I selected the same font and colour scheme for both word clouds, only changing “rounder edges” for Molly to “straighter edges” for Leopold.

Fascinating no?

Molly’s big huge like, dwarfing all other words. And the famous yes that closes the book is there too, in what looks like second place. Men apparently are less single-minded - who would have known? More anchored in time too, with their thoughts consumed with day, morning, now, back, old and time. Although the pleasures of the flesh are not too far away, with tea, and kidney…

So now dear readers, stay tuned for the word cloud of my novel!

Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director: a victory for feminism? I disagree.

Before I go on, I have to disclose that I haven’t seen any of her movies. No, this isn’t laziness: this is Ireland. Only the blockbusters in the Hollywood blockbuster list make it to the big screen or the bins of Xtra vision. I will not comment on her style, but only on the genre of movies she has chosen to direct. And if her directing is truly ground-breaking within the chosen genres, I apologise.

Fighting movies, biker movies, detective movies, and finally war movies, culminating with her award-winning The Hurt Locker. Apparently, there was only a bum note in her action-movie career, her 2000 film The Weight of Water, a portrait of two women trapped in suffocating relationships.

So Kathryn Bigelow can do men flicks, as well or better than men. So film has moved to the stage where women don’t have to take “George Elliot” as their nom de plume to write Victorian novels – sorry, Hollywood blockbusters. It’s good. It’s great, it’s certainly an advance. There are some who might ask “did Katherine Bigelow win the Oscar for Best Director because she was the best, or because she was a woman?” but as I said, having not seen her movies, I am not in a position to comment.

This shows however that film, unlike literature, has not moved beyond the phallocentric Victorian novel. Or at least that mainstream recognition has not yet been given to “feminine writing” in film. By this I don’t mean chick flicks. I mean revolutionising the form of film, like James Joyce revolutionised the novel with "stream-of-consciousness" narrative. As Bigelow said in 2009: “I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what my aptitude is, and I really think it's to explore and push the medium. It's not about breaking gender roles or genre traditions. ”

Atomised

Driving back from training the other night, I turned on the radio, which is something I almost never do. I don’t listen to the radio, read the papers or watch TV. Rather irresponsible behaviour for a writer, but. I figure that the truly momentous events, the wars, tsunami, gangland murders in Limerick and sex scandals of the rich and famous, will somehow filter through me by word of mouth. It’s a pretty good system.

A novel. It was recognisably a novel. Was it fiction? I caught it in the middle. I was hypnotised. Waiting outside the house for the reading to finish, in the cold car. 11:30 pm on a weekday. What if they were reading the whole book, what if it lasted all night? Yet I couldn’t leave. Who was this man, this writer? French words thrown in. But not in the awkward, fake way than an English writer would. Yet not a translation. Too good to be a translation. A man talking about his life, his innermost, womanmost thoughts. Analysing. Talking to his brother, this was the narrative device. Not a very effective device, but the language, the voice, was amazing. How can one write so much, and so well, about nothing. I fell in love. Then found out it was Michel Houellebecq(yes, French. And yes, a translation). The book: Les Particules Elementaires (Atomised). Wow. What do I do now? Do I throw everyting away? Do I start again? Is there any point? Can I write after this? Why did I have to listen to it?

e-lit

Funny thing about e-books. I mean there is huge potential there, for a writer that is. But reading an e-book? Not me. I don’t want to read books on a screen. God, this is the last thing I don’t have to read on a screen. I’m in front of a screen all day. I don’t want to bring a screen to bed with me. Reading an e-book? No way. But writing one? Tempting.

E-novels? One struggles to see the point of it. People don’t want video links to tell them how the characters look like, sound like. They want to use their imagination – so they say. Still, they sense that once the technology, the ecological niche, the humus is there, things will grow out of it. From the bottom-up. Vaguely, people understand that it’s not about adapting existing literature. A new literature will emerge.

I know what kind of e-novels will be written. It will be these “experimental” books that writers have struggled, lost their sanity or their lives to bring out. It will be B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo. Loose chapters unbound in a box, to be read randomly. A publisher’s, a librarian’s nightmare. But imagine the ease of it in e-book format? Hit the scramble button again: read another book on your return plane journey. Imagine even, further, personalised, unique versions of Albert Angelo. Hit the scramble button once, and not only will chapters arrange themselves in a given order, but all alternative versions will be lost for you, reader lambda. Or, further. A book that will evolve differently, depending on choices you make, or random dice-throwing, at given crisis points.

A bit like life really. The choices you make, for whatever reasons. Good reasons, bad reasons. Because you were angry. Because you were hungry. Or even the minor choices you make, the non-choices, the randomness of life. Getting up five minutes later and meeting your future life mate, or being hit by that bus. And your life is changed forever, alternative versions inaccessible, like parallel universes.

Life: thoughts and action. Film is a better medium than literature for certain things. What’s the point in doing action-lit? So many words to describe what one image can do in a fraction of a second. On the other hand, internal monologue isn’t great on film. It can be transcribed with subtitles, voice-overs, but it doesn’t “sound” natural. Mixing film and book? Film for the action sequences, book for the introspection.

And further again. Writing like one thinks: James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness. Not only do people think in words or in pictures or with all their senses, but thoughts don’t follow a storyline. It is not that thoughts are multidimensional, or web-like: they are still linear, because time is linear. But consciousness jumps from idea to idea, snippets of conversation to impressions, randomly, a bit like following the clicks of an internet surfer. Thoughts might take any route depending on the inclination, what catches one’s fancy or what one sees at any given moment. Imagine Molly Bloom’s soliloquy written in hyperlink blue, the whole 40 pages and eight gargantuan sentences of it, and follow your thoughts.

(Photo by Lonan)