Werewolf Porn

I am currently rereading Tom Fletcher’s The Leaping, largely as counterpoint to the previous two novels I’ve read (The Road and The Hunger Games), but mostly because at a recent party, somebody referred to it as “werewolf porn” and I love the implied subgenre there.

My current opinion is that it stands better for the rereading, especially knowing certain aspects of specific locations and foreshadowings, and the characters still stand true (in my opinion, better realised as a whole than Fletcher’s follow-up, The Thing on the Shore). I love the multiple aspects of the characters, and their clashing idiosyncrasies: I especially enjoy Graham’s quasi-scientific party-planning. Indeed, it makes me want to host a houseparty.

Another character, Erin, writes stories that she doesn’t ever hope to publish, but instead she forms them and memorises them in order to recount them to her friends. I think that this is a beautiful idea, and the rereading has inspired me to do something similar, though exactly where I’ll fit that into my writing schedule of the Irgard novel, my steampunk Macbeth and the forthcoming NaNoWriMo project I do not know.

Last night, I lie awake (it’s a fairly common pre-school affliction) and was thinking about oral tradition.

Being (largely) a medievalist, I obviously feel a certain affinity for the tradition – after all, my dissertation was written largely as an attack on the critics of Sir Orfeo who weren’t accepting that the poem is a product of the oral tradition.

It would be interesting for aspects of it to come back, though exactly how that will work I’m unsure. I can only think of a few things where this kind of passing-on of tales still exists: sometimes in ghost stories, but most often in jokes.

That said, my colleague apparently recently recounted the story another of my colleague’s had explained about their holidays to great effect, so maybe there are more examples than surface to mind immediately. Still, even that I repeated somebody else’s description of the book is suggestive of the tradition too.

Re: Reading

This past Thursday, I didn’t turn twenty-four.

Now, this happens on quite a regular basis, but there was something notable about this Thursday’s occurrence in that we celebrated it at school. Within my department, we have a kind of Secret Santa birthday rota system to ensure a steady supply of cake throughout the academic year. Unfortunately, my birthday* lies within the summer holiday (always has, always will) and so we would not be able to celebrate it. Instead, not unlike the Queen, three of us now have “official birthdays.”

I only realised on the day itself that it was my official birthday, having naturally forgotten it, but pleasingly also realised that I now shared my official birthday with the mastre of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe.

In addition to the cake that we all enjoyed, I received a token birthday present – as always, under the monetary value of five pounds. Part of this present was a book of pomes on London, and the other half was Derren Brown’s Confessions of a Conjuror. I declined to tell the eventually not-Secret not-Santa that I already possessed this book, although the edition is different.

Since, I have started to reread the book, and am again unsure if I really like the ranging tangential stream of conciousness narration or if I find it an unnecessary contrivance. I like to think that perhaps it reads like a one-sided transcript of a conversation with the man himself.

However, the idea of rereading is an interesting one. There are quite a few books that I have reread a number of times**, and I often look forward to rereadings whilst on my first range through a book, even if I don’t get round to it for a good long time. Usually, I don’t find myself identifying new subtleties that I had missed on the first trek even if I might pick up more fully on obvious foreshadowing. I like to think of the reread as a familiar and much loved nostalgic walk.

I don’t know how many people usually reread. My exposure to people’s answers are skewed massively, both ways. A lot of my close friends are compulsive readers, and so for us it is natural to reread a favourite book. On the other hand, my dad will never reread a book – he considers it a waste of effort because he already knows the contents – much the same reason many of the children I teach will never reread anything. This can be frustrating when we are studying something in much depth, particularly Of Mice and Men which seems to be covered in most syllabuses as often as basic punctuation is. Interestingly enough, the “I know the story” argument never seems to apply to films. Perhaps it is a case of the length of the task?

Either way, I really enjoy rereading texts; quite possibly to the same extent that I enjoy reading new ones. I would recommend everybody to do so at least once this year – and in fact I might enforce that my children do so to!

…

* July the Twenty-Fourth, as my best stalkers know.

** Yes, that reads correctly.

Shortness

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Hemingway has often been extolled as the master of brevity, either through his style or his lexicon. Above is his shortest story, one that he believed to be his best work.

I’m not sure I agree, but I love the concision.*

So it seems does (did) Wired who commissioned this raft of genre versions of the six word story. I’m not sure what my favourite is, but I somehow feel that time machines are cheating a little, and lose effect on rereading.**

I’d like to liken the form to flash fiction, which my friend Ardie Collins*** talks about here, but for me the forms are quite different. To my mind, flash fiction is all about the splurge – getting a story out literally <em>in a flash</em>, with minimal post-production. With these six word stories (and also with a lot of very short stories on Twitter), a lot of dedication and craft has to go into their sculpting. Because of the massive restriction in terms of length, a lot has to be said with a very, very little.

To be honest, that’s quite exciting.

I wrote yesterday that there’s a dearth of short stories in the national curriculum. Today I bring good news. First is that the AQA English Literature syllabus now features exclusively short stories in its Sunlight on the Grass anthology. Second is that I’ve chosen to teach my Year 9s a unit on short stories; by the end of the week I hope that we’ll have each constructed some six word stories.

Tough call.

…

* Still not convinced concision is a real word.

** A whole other topic, that.

*** Remind me to read his debut novel.