Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Books

Stuff I’ve read or helped to write

  • What Jack Handey would say to the Martians

    I’m a huge fan of Jack Handey (bad Flash site alert), whose Deep Thoughts often reduce me to a giggling wreck. If you don’t find the following Deep Thoughts funny, there’s probably not much point in reading the rest of this post.

    One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. “Oh, no,” I said. “Disneyland burned down.” He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.

    I can still recall old Mister Barnslow getting out every morning and nailing a fresh load of tadpoles to the old board of his. Then he’d spin it round and round, like a wheel of fortune, and no matter where it stopped he’d yell out, “Tadpoles! Tadpoles is a winner!” We all thought he was crazy. But then we had some growing up to do.

    Even though he was an enemy of mine, I had to admit that what he had accomplished was a brilliant piece of strategy. First, he punched me, then he kicked me, then he punched me again.

    So I was delighted to discover that he had a newish book out, What I’d Say To The Martians. Unlike Deep Thoughts and Fuzzy Memories, which are collections of one- and two-liners, WISTTM collates Handey’s longer pieces, such as the superb This Is No Game (from the New Yorker).

    When Handey’s good he’s very good, and some of the pieces had me in tears. But the book suffers from the same problem as Handey’s deep thoughts: he’s not consistently funny, and misses as often as he hits. When the next idea is a sentence or two away that’s not a problem, but when an unfunny gag is stretched over several pages it’s much more disappointing.

    Worst of all, entire sections of the book are dedicated to reprinting old Deep Thoughts and Fuzzy Memories. If you’ve never read Handey before you’ll probably damage something internal and important, but if you have read his stuff – or seen it in email sigs, or on the hundreds of websites that reproduce various Deep Thoughts – you’ll know these ones off by heart. They’re essentially Handey’s Greatest Hits or, as a publisher might put it, padding to make a pretty thin book look slightly less thin. You’ll read it in one sitting, and not a very long sitting either.

    Please don’t misunderstand me: WISTTM is very, very funny, and the screenplay for Zombies Versus Bees made me laugh so hard I pulled a muscle. But it’s also very, very patchy.

    This isn’t in the book, but it made me laugh: Handey’s letter to Obama, volunteering to be an ambassador.

  • In my head, I’m Ian Rankin

    The rather sarcastic Stuff Journalists Like website (which, incidentally, would be an awful lot better if the writing was better) sometimes gets a little bit too close for comfort:

    Stuff journalists like: writing a book

    Buried under nearly every journalist’s notebooks, papers and clips is an idea for a book.

    …Unfortunately, a good percentage of these ideas for books will stay just that as journalists are usually burnt out on writing after a full day day of writing for their newspaper, blog, Tumblr and Twitter.

    I was looking for something this morning and stumbled across my Book Ideas folder, where I’ve written outlines and in some cases several chapters of four or five different novels. They’re pretty good, I think, largely because only one of them is about a journalist – and he’s only a journalist because it gives me a chance to have him mutilated by gangsters, which is always good. Unless you’re writing a children’s book. But every single one of them has run out of steam, sometimes at the outline stage, sometimes after five or six chapters. The enthusiasm flags and they become Great Big Scary Things That You’ll Never Finish.

    Stuff Journalists Like nails the problem: you get brain-dead when you’ve spent all day working, and when you’ve been stuck in front of a screen all day the last thing you want to do after dinner is sit back down in front of a computer again. There are episodes of The Wire to watch! Partners to talk to! Videogames you still haven’t got round to playing! Exercising to do! Magazines to read!

    You’d think that the natural ebb and flow of freelancing would be ideal for fiction writing, but it isn’t. That’s partly because work expands to fill the time available, so if you’ve got a spare day then the job you’re doing will magically expand to fill that time, and it’s partly because the time you don’t spend working is spent doing admin, hiding from the taxman, pitching for new work or dicking about on the internet and pretending it’s research.

    Which makes me wonder, how do other people do it? Not necessarily writing, but doing anything creative when you’ve got a full time job, a family to feed and a very short block of time before you fall asleep on the sofa? Is it just about determination and willpower, or do you need to manage your “spare” time as ruthlessly as you do your work time? I’d love to hear other people’s experiences.

  • George Saunders: The brain-dead megaphone

    “…the nightly news may soon consist entirely of tirades by men so angry that all they can do is sputter while punching themselves in the face, punctuated by videos of dogs blowing up after eating firecrackers, and dog-explosion experts rating the funniness of the videos…”

    I think I’m going to enjoy this book.

  • New Sony Reader e-book: better, still not perfect

    According to Mobile Tech Review, the new PRS-700 is better than the previous Reader:

    Sony has worked a near miracle with their touch screen and touch-centric user interface. The Reader is simply a joy to use in terms of ergonomics, control and navigation. This is by far the most natural way to manage, navigate and read books we’ve seen so far. Alas, its lesser contrast doesn’t warm our bookish hearts, and for those in love with e-ink’s paper-like look, that’s a tough one to swallow. For those new to eBook readers or those who don’t mind reading from matte notebook displays, the PRS-700 has greater appeal. As always, the Reader is a great way to carry around a huge library of books and avoid the storage issues of traditional books.

    I was actually playing with the current model yesterday, and while it’s a lovely wee gadget it’s still not the right reader for me. What I want is the Reader’s form factor with the iPhone’s wireless and two apps: NetNewsWire and Instapaper. That’d work.

    As Engadget says:

    with no wireless of any sort you’re stuck filling this one via USB, SD, or MS Duo. In other words there’s still no perfect choice in the world of the e-ink reader — but it is awfully hard to ignore the Reader’s sleek exterior when compared to the Kindle’s distinctively sci-fi doorstop look.

  • The lost years and last days of David Foster Wallace

    A superb (and very sad) bit of journalism from Rolling Stone.

    His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California’s Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.

  • Three good things and one bad one

    Good: The new Christopher Brookmyre, James Lee Burke and Ian Rankin novels.

    Bad: The new Girls Aloud single.

  • Better e-book readers are coming

    Excellent news. We’re not quite at the point where I’d want to dump my daily paper for a digital Daily Me, but we’re getting closer.

    The iRex Reader 1000 offers a 10.2-inch diagonal E-Inkscreen, far larger than Kindle’s 6-inch screen or even iRex’s own 8.1-inch diagonal iLiad, its last e-book model. That stretched display is designed to work with any file format, be it an e-book, a full-sized PDF, a Word document or HTML. Like earlier iRex devices, it sports a stylus and touch screen for taking notes and marking documents.

    …Business-targeted readers also come with business-sized price tags. Though Plastic Logic won’t yet reveal the price for its device, iRex says its basic reader will start at $650. (By contrast, Kindle sells for $360.) Adding a writable screen to the iRex reader will cost another $100, and equipping it with wi-fi, Bluetooth and a 3G cell connection for downloading documents will raise the price to $850.

    But nonbusiness consumers, take heart: Cheaper, book-focused e-readers are also likely to be revamped soon.

  • Why let an author’s death put an end to a series?

    Following on from the news that Eoin Colfer, best known for the Artemis Fowl books, will be writing the next book in the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, I have my own announcement: I’ve been commissioned to write the sequel to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Obviously I can’t say too much about it, but I can promise that it’ll feature more car chases than the original.