The House of Writers
Page 1
© 2016 by M.J. Nicholls
Book design © 2016 by Sagging Meniscus Press
All Rights Reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Set in Williams Caslon Text with LATEX.
ISBN: 978-1-944697-06-8 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-944697-07-5 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936259
Sagging Meniscus Press
web: http://www.saggingmeniscus.com/
email: info@saggingmeniscus.com
For Nicola
Table of Contents
The Corridor of Opening Lines
This Lexicographically Limber Universe
The Vertical Victor
Cal’s Tour: High-Quality Literary Fiction
This: 1
The Trauma Rooms: 1
Books no longer in print
Mhairi: 1
A Better Life: 1
The Farewell, Author! Conference: 1
Cal’s Tour: Middlebrow Fiction
Puff: The Unloved Son: 1
This: 2
The Trauma Rooms: 2
A Commission Gone Awry
Mhairi: 2
A Better Life: 2
The Farewell, Author! Conference: 2
A Blast of Kirsty
Writer Portraits: The Great(est) Opaquist
Cal’s Tour: Scottish Interest Books
This: 3
The Trauma Rooms: 3
Puff: The Unloved Son: 2
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Mhairi: 3
The Jesus Memos
A Better Life: 3
The Farewell, Author! Conference: 3
I opened the wrong door
This: 4
The Trauma Rooms: 4
The Basement
Mhairi: 4
Cal’s Tour: Science Fiction
A Better Life: 4
The Farewell, Author! Conference: 4
Things to do before writing the next paragraph
Puff: The Unloved Son: 3
Mhairi: 5
Writer Portraits: The New Writer
This: 5
The Trauma Rooms: 5
The Corridor of Cheap Commodities
A Better Life: 5
The Farewell, Author! Conference: 5
Mhairi: 6
I said thanks Mum
Cal’s Tour: Romance
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Your idea of literature
This: 6
The Trauma Rooms: 6
Puff: The Unloved Son: 4
A Better Life: 6
The Farewell, Author! Conference: 6
Mhairi: 7
Alice: A Fictional Serviette
Cal’s Tour: Toilet Books
This: 7
The Trauma Rooms: 7
Writer Portraits: Movements
A Better Life: 7
The Farewell, Author! Conference: 7
Mhairi: 8
Writing into the future
This: 8
The Trauma Rooms: 8
C.M. Horvath’s Almost Girlfriend
A Better Life: 8
The Farewell, Author! Conference: 8
Bizarro Tim
Mhairi: 9
This: 9
The Trauma Rooms: 9
A Better Life: 9
The Farewell, Author! Conference: 9
The Two Poems of Archie Dennissss
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This: 10
The Trauma Rooms: 10
Writer Portraits: The Beekeeper
A Better Life: 10
The Farewell, Author! Conference: 10
The Corridor of Closing Lines
THE
HOUSE
OF
WRITERS
The Corridor of Opening Lines
This Lexicographically Limber Universe
ARE you skilled with words in an age when words are sqaunderously piddled down so many unthinking drains? Are you a spinner of yarns, a whirler of sagas, a rotator of epics? Do you take pride in the sibilant syllable, the luxuriant noun, the plosively placed preposition, in sentences that sing like angels in a cosmic opera? Does your heartbeat dance to the flick of the cursor? Can you fill a blank page with enough razzle-dazzle, fuzzbox, and too-rah-rah-ray to make the everyday reader spurn his duncehood? Perhaps your parents have praised your spooky fictions about inventive slashers and cunning killers, loved your vivid descriptions of sleazy cities, sorry tinkers, hoary winters, or smiled at the way you make your people hum with life using only twenty-six squigs. Perhaps you’re an inveterate artist with forty unseen novels fraying and yellow in your drawer, lonesome for the light, or an amateur hobbyist ready to party with the professionals, or a defeatist who cynically smote his penman’s dreams for a cushy deadheaded life as a ScotCall phone monkey. You dudes, in all your multitude, have reached The House of Writers. We strip the sorrow from screams and send you spinning into dreams in ecstatic and awfully inky twirls. Who, and wherefore, art us? Here we are—we are here! We are a forty-storey structure situated in the peaceful Crarsix wilds, twenty minutes off the Aldercrux sliproad past the Gibson Museum, only forty minutes from the secluded marshes of the former ComFuPlex (now a stock-dump farm). We promise every employee the means and motivation to take on the challenge of making it as a writer in the genres available, to survive in this hostile climate, in this lexicographically limber universe presided over by call centres, fast-food futures, and the realistically near threat of a deoxygenated atmosphere slowly extinguishing the human race. By browsing our prospectus, we hope you will find many boons and booms to bring you closer to our face, and when you arrive, ready for the fresh intake of change, you will find everything you ever believed unimaginable will manifestly overtake your so-deeply entrenched cynicism. Still not convinced? Perhaps these parting lines from J. Frank Glazo, author of over three thousand novels, will convince? “The House has turned me into a totally different person—a successful one.” Say howdy to your future. Say bienvenue to the new you. The House of Writers.
The Vertical Victor
THE House of Writers has undergone several structural metamorphoses, firebombing mishaps, and mismanagement disasters before becoming the vertical victor of today and tomorrow. The building was opened on Nov 3rd 1989 and designed by Anglo-Norwegian architects Portia Entwittle and Limber Alsöö who, in their own words, were “after a sort of filthy pigsty aesthetic.” Originally a housing scheme designed to accommodate rehabbed paedophiles and pederasts and keep them at remove from Aldercrux town, the building became a popular spot for—to quote Limber— “acts of fragrant and abundant rear-ward fucking.” A group of activists, Paedofinder General, singled out the tower block for a firebomb attack during the media “nonce-bashing” campaign of 1999, and the building fell into disuse over the new millennium when the residents were relocated or buried. In 2008, the computer manufacturing firm ComFuPlex opened their largest warehouse in the UK on Crarsix farmland, and the tower block was renovated for use as a separate office facility (costing almost twice to renovate than erecting a new one—we’re happy the accountant was drunk). A relatively uneventful thirty years (in Crarsix) passed. By Jan 2038, ComFuPlex had become the UK’s leading manufacturer of computer software—Apple and Microsoft the main contractors—until a short-sighted engineer made a mass-mistake resulting in a mass-meltdown. In a Microsoft CEO’s words: “The squinty-eyed preening vanity refused to wear specs while engineering and missed a crucial screw and screwed up crucially, sending the West back to the Palaeolithic period, or 1972—same thing.” In other words, a design flaw was replicated in every machine made after 2035, and complications with the internal cooling mechanism (or “fan”) and various far-too-techni
cal-to-explain motherboard hiccups and crackles led to every computer in the country uniformly exploding after four years, forcing every business to revert back to arcane filing systems and telephone use. ComFuPlex dumped their useless stock in the surrounding fields upon bankruptcy, and local inventors occasionally “farm” through the rubbish to create new contraptions. In the wider world, over the last fifty years literature became an increasingly niche pursuit—the public nibbled on narratives via film-phones, TV-lenses, and other technologically implausible means to force youngsters away from digesting texts. By 2040, writers were perceived in society as intellectual snobs and treated with casual contempt by the public. To clamp down on hate crime, the Tories introduced Artists’ Licenses, whereby every work was made to conform to two rigid dicta: 1) Make it wholly understandable to even the dumbest, most bumbling alien. 2) Make it funny and light and utterly unthreatening to even the most delicate flowers. Literature went underground, forcing literary artists and experimenters into the wilderness (in some cases, literally roaming forests writing their seditious works under trees), until two redundant husband-and-wife entrepreneurs (Marilyn Volt and James Teaver) leased the building and opened House to straggling writers desperate to ply their craft. Soon, exiles from the country signed up to head our diverse range of genre-programs, accommodating the needs of a select but loyal readership throughout the country. Thanks to an agreement with the local government, The House is exempt from the Artists’ legislation, since our readers are private, and we provide an essential service in rounding up straggling scribblers who would otherwise be criminals or suicides.
Cal’s Tour
High-Quality Literary Fiction
MY upbringing in a council house in the knobbly bits of Aldercrux, with a sister keen on stapling my slacks to the desk, pouring cream down my collar, and ritually tongue-lashing me every time I sat down to write, prepared me for life in The House. The First Floor is a hearty face-slap for those tied to utilities like three square meals, water, electricity, and a moss-free place to urinate. All dolled-up like a decaying aesthete’s mansion (think Des Esseintes), the writing space is a Victorian drawing room with dusty chaise longues (feat. lion’s head armrests), high-backed demithrones, Arthurian tables rakishly ravaged by ink-smeared papers, and bowls of rotting fruit (mostly yellow-blue kumquats). Beside the bookcase, packed with every grandisonant hack who ever tortured the semicolon, one finds the staff—four louche fops sprawled in chairs wearing double-breasted dinner coats talking excitedly in accents that hop between affected RP, Anglo-American, and Indo-Greek. As Elgar says: “Four destitutes posing for a Cruikshank etching.”
Henri Plover, or the “Indominatable,” as he styles himself, is unofficially in charge, but the philosophy on this floor is loaf before you leap—sit down and sink in think before you sit up and sink in ink—so no one is really the boss, proper. Henri is a recklessly smiley fellow with weedy centre-parted black hair, bibulous cheeks, and a belly like pork suet—the über-uncle—while London is the grandpa: a plump senior with stately grey prickles and oddly pink lips, always willing to raise his tankard to show off his shiny Proust-faced cufflinks. Marco is skinny and swarthy and says very little (I never spoke to him once, but you may find the key to unlock his quietude), while Elgar is pale and blonde and all about the cheekbones and startling heft of shoulder-to-finger Victorian bling. “We’re thoroughly decent chaps,” London says, “unless you happen to interrupt us.” I made this mistake on my first day and they’ve never forgiven me.
A typical day in the department? Typically untypical. Early morning is time for the “entrapment of ipsissima verba,” i.e. to reflect on the correct words, eating Madeira off the plated face of Alice, sipping sherry from the head of Queen Elizabeth I, and flicking through Burton and Cervantes to absorb their essence. Be prepared for nutritional hell. My first, and only, meal was servings of rock-hard Madeira, my mornings spent pounding fistfuls of crumbs into shape for my lunch and dinner, chugging back belly-burning sherry to keep myself hydra-intoxicated enough to blot out a few notions. Around eleven, the chaps retreat to wax their particulars and buff their non-specifics (don’t ask), and you will have some time to read (to impress—À la recherche du temps perdu) and dream of healthier meals. “A memory of things repast,” as Henri says. In the afternoon, you will learn to “napalm the locus communis,” i.e. to write HQLF sentences (see Henri’s Master’s Class). The evenings are yours. If you can find the House’s caretaker Mhiari, try to blag a block of cheese or lamb, because life expectancy on this floor is limited until you can trick your body to tolerate the S&M diet.
The department is in disrepair. When you step out the lift (at the time of writing the lifts are functioning—but prone to plummets and floods), you will step onto a damp red carpet, strewn with half-smoked briar pipes, tubs of moustache wax, unread back issues of The Lancet, burst blazer buttons and farmyard cufflinks, into a corridor sweating through a layer of florally offensive wallpaper, where a tacky pyrite dado rail runs along the wall, forming a sort of tributary for the sweat as it puddles onto the carpet in a shiny hue of beige. Tacky chandeliers filled with moth carcasses, old couscous and socks hang precariously from the ceilings, several weeks off an extravagant accident, while untarnished portraits of the usual suspects hang crookedly on the walls: Henry James, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann. Never walk anywhere in your socks unless you like the squelch of sweat or icky toes. As the smallest department, they make the least money and have the narrowest readership, so can’t afford maintenance or edible food or running water. As to your sleeping quarters (“fourths of sleep,” as Marco says): a four-poster Victorian bed with an oaky brown canopy patterned with sleeping lions and snakes, framed by ruby-coloured curtains with furry hems and tassels with sheets of purple silk. (Slick with damp, usually, with several strategic buckets placed round the bed to catch falling drips.) As to interior décor: a tatty leather couch with an obese Manx named Madeleine lying sprawled over a throw rug with phoney Egyptian hieroglyphs, dreaming of days when its kind prowled the world as kings, and all manner of pseudo-spiritual clutter on the shelves and mantelpieces—purple gourds stuffed with potpourri; candles scented like lentils; dream-catchers, thought-trappers, soundbiters, and mindlickers; Zodiac calendars with pencilled Latin exclamations (salvum me fac! cunctis nos adjuvet!); and stacks of paperbacks from Henry James, all broken-spined and underlined.
Observant recruits will spot the many oil paintings of a stern-looking bald man with ruddy cheeks. This is Paul Andrew Donall, the single benefactor (reader) of HQLF works—a retired mineral magnate who made millions in the Persian Gulf War selling oil to both sides at twice the price. As a seventy-nine-year-old dandy of private means, he has sought to improve himself by reading “brullunt books” and has kindly patronised the dept. with one-fiftieth of his fortune. The writers take guidance on their content from Mr. Donall and tailor their prose style to meet his requirements— fortunately, he favours the long convoluted sentence, lively with many digressive clauses and semicolons, that over the course of three pages ceases to have any parsable meaning, like the late Henry James. He demands a “sturry fur ma pur wee brain tae fulla” (a followable story) but also wants sentences that reach beyond his intellectual powers, while flattering his intelligence by seeming to have a meaning only he can understand. He favours sentences whose meaning is almost entirely cryptic, as though a private Donall lexicon, not unlike the works of Gertrude Stein, only less odious. A man of changeable moods, he once fired the entire dept. minus me, hiring them back a week later! He’s easy to see: a shrivelled prune in a chequered beige blazer and tartan breeks, sporting a cane and miners’ bunnet, with a cravat and pocket hankie horribly prominent. His accent is brusque salaried Glaswegian, his speech the frenzied Gatling of a man no longer required to make himself understood. The writers dance around him like tinkle-toed toadies, fussing with plates of Madeira and sherry and pre-softened Edam! (Best policy: keep shtum when near.)
My first we
ek was a steep learning curve, fraught with smudgy first drafts, damp rooms and vitamin deficiency. At nights, I lay under my heat-insensitive mattress shivering while Marco (my roommate) stayed up until 3am cooing over his early novels, lulling me to sleep with theatrical renditions of Butler Fortescue’s most outrageous admonitions, punctuated by startling cries of “Peerless!” or “Magnifique!” whenever sleep dared to interrupt the programme. Every morning I dozed on a chaise longue, hallucinating water and roast dinners, nodding along as the fops commented on my work so far, reading the worst passages with patronising chortles and my strongest with solemn gravity. “Such ribald ravings of masterful magniloquency!” London said. “These sentences are thick with the clichéd indecision and a recherché juvenescence of Flaubert!” Edgar said. “What outrageously precocious attempts to unite the psychopathomaniacal interzones of Turgenev with the cacopornoformalogical hinterlands of Dostoevsky!” Marco said. I massaged my migraine. Learning to please these chaps is something you will have to teach yourself.
What of the books? Consult the following categories:
1.Novels about princes reflecting on their affairs with servants and prostitutes.
2.Death-bed reflections about princes and their affairs with servants and prostitutes.
3.Monologues about privileged childhoods in Monte Carlo and the impossibility of reuniting the 1920s Kammerspielfilm movement with neo-German Expressionist aesthetics.
4.Unpunctuated confessions from dying poets about their unholy lapse from pure formalism into the grubby intellectual mire of vorticism.
5.Books where characters fetishise their furniture for hundreds of pages in homage to Des Esseintes’ decadence.
6.Pompous, pseudo-philosophical tracts written by sexually tormented hermits who asphyxiate themselves in plastic bags.
A short list of their recent novels: Four Score & Seven Dreams, The Manners of Manny’s Manor, Rendezvous of the Baden-Baden Butlers, The Duke of Bliss, Who Stole My Kites?, Prince Heimlickt’s Adventures in Angioplasty, etc.