Who Ya Gonna Call?
I watched the most recent Ghostbusters film – Ghostbusters: Afterlife. I’d seen some duff reviews of it, but I really enjoyed it. It made no demands on the intellect, it was just good fun. And the young actors were terrific. Recommended if you get the chance.
TV watching has been erratic to nonexistent. I had a recommendation for the Amazon series Reacher and enjoyed the first episode. I’ll be back for more. I almost had second thoughts when I found out that liking meant I came close to agreeing with a Lucy Mangan review in The Guardian – I go by the rule of thumb that I will probably think the opposite of her. My blushes were saved because I didn’t entirely agree with her. A Discovery of Witches season three hasn’t finished yet, so no spoilers, but I did have abstract thoughts arising from it and other TV adaptations of books I’ve enjoyed.
The fashion these days is to condense adapted books into almost pure narrative. But a lot of the reason I enjoy a lot of books – such as the trilogy on which A Discovery of Witches is based – is not only the narrative but also the tone of the book and the authorial voice and all the other things that give richness to the story. By omitting these and going straight for narrative, adaptations will generally cut out the bits that make a book worthwhile for me, or at least the bits that make a book more than plot and story.
La Mangan opined that what book fans, such as Reacher fans, want is the straight story as in the books. And that’s where I disagree with her.
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I wrote a short story on Saturday: I sat down at my 1970s Adler Gabriel 25 typewriter and let the words come. What emerged, though, was pretty much the narrative only, a treatment of what the story will eventually be, more or less as I thought it up when out for a walk. What’s missing is the voice of the narrator and the things that combine to make the bare bones of the story into a piece of writing with, hopefully, some depth and richness.
The key to how I plan to rewrite it came when I listened to an audiobook of an abridged version of Joyce’s Ulysses and got more meaning from hearing it than I ever have from trying to read it. When I do the first rewrite – which I’m having to think about quite carefully, the influence of Joyce (and Virginia Woolf) is likely to be seen. I have the narrative, the plot, but I don’t have a piece of writing of any merit. Were, hypothetically, the story ever to be filmed, I would be disappointed were the work I’m about to put into it to be discarded, just to squeeze the bones of the story into a running time.
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1941 Hermes Baby
The typewriter in the picture is a Hermes Baby, built in Switzerland in 1941. It came cheap from eBay, and buying typewriters on eBay is a chancy business because you can’t try them and, invariably, they aren’t packed properly. This one, however, arrived in near-perfect condition for an 81-year-old machine – all it needed was some routine cleaning. However, when I was using it, every so often some of the letters in a word would squeeze up together (‘piling’) with no obvious rhyme or reason.
There can be a lot of causes of this, so I took the metal casing off and gave its mechanism a deep clean, and applied a tiny touch of sewing machine oil to a couple of strategic spots. The result is a really enjoyable and snappy machine to use. But the letter piling issue hasn’t gone away, or not completely at any rate.
Late this afternoon, I realised that the underlying problem was nothing to do with the typewriter but everything to do with me. I’ve been using computers for 40 years – since I started to use the computer lab at the Law Faculty at Edinburgh University. That was pre-Windows. Prior to that was the occasional game on an Acorn and a Sinclair (I think) that used a cassette recorder as memory. One of the features of computer keyboards is that they are extremely tolerant of poor typing technique: you can be pretty sure that if you touch a key on the keyboard with a minimum of force, it will register the letter. What I eventually worked out is that the Hermes is extremely intolerant of poor typing technique. Once I focused on what I was doing and typed evenly, the problem more or less disappeared – and only reappeared when I rushed certain standard letter combinations – like ‘th’. My plan is to standardise on this machine for a week or two as a means of forcing myself to improve my typing technique.
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Anyway, my pal Steve has been doing much more interesting things. I invite you to sit down with a cuppa and spend fifteen minutes in his company in the video below.
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