Lawksamussy!

Hi. I’m the serialiser.

This was once the front page of Booszjie. It’s up the back now because I want people to arrive at the most recent stuff…

For the last few months my focus has been on writing. In particular a “children’s” story called The Grey Horse.

There will be new writing. And older things, unfinished.

Music.

Films I’ve made or been involved in making, or am involved in making.

And photos I’ve taken.

And ideas that seem worth sharing.

Booszjie is a work in progress. It may be ramshackle.

Have a wonderful time while you’re here. Please wipe your feet on the way in and close the door on your way out.

I’d suggest you begin with the Introduction below or with the story The Grey Horse, accessible via hamburger at the top of the page, or by clicking on the words underlined earlier in this sentence. The Grey Horse is the thing I’m putting the most work into at the moment, ostensibly a children’s story. If you subscribe to this website I’ll send you an email to let you know when I’ve polished and published a chunk or a chapter so you can come and have a squizz.

INTRODUCTION

On Serialisation

My grandfather was a dapper chap who wore—amongst, under and on top of other things—waistcoats, suspenders and a moustache. Memories of the latter still tickle cheeks he kissed. In later years he walked with one of a selection of ornate-handled canes. Walking sticks, we called them. His legs were fine. His gait was strong. The cane was for show. He spent much of his adult life building railways in India. He was named Charles Dickens in homage to his great great uncle, a famous writer of books. Homage is supposed to be pronounced with a silent h, but like the h inn hotel it bolshies its way back into the mouths of anglos, most of whom look down their noses at the French tongue and that which rolls off it, and with envy at the things that flow like manna into it. Charles Dickens (not the railway engineer but the author (to whom I’m distantly related—in case that hadn’t registered)) wasn’t an overt Francophobe, but being English he harboured a vague animus toward the French, an animus born of pride, insecurity and envy. Charles Dickens was born the year Napoleon invaded Russia. He was nine when Napoleon died. A Tale of Two Cities, one of Charlie’s better books, was about the French Revolution, an event about which the English felt—and still feel in a way that is more ancestral memory than News Of The World—conflicted. The revolution spectacularly and shambolically orchestrated by the French in 1789, decried by the English, was something the English secretly wished they’d had the guts to do first. That they didn’t do such a thing at all is largely down to the fact that the French had. Luckily the English got the Industrial Revolution started before the French Revolution, ameliorating the latter’s sting. The English knew there was a good deal less romance and panache in their revolution, something which grates still.

Charles Dickens was one of the finer documenters of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath. His books depict the squalor and misery, ambition and ingenuity, inequality and fierceness of heart of English people of all castes as they toiled away, doughty of spirit, never totally bereft of cheer, in the shadows of the satanic mills that vomited filth into the skies, pulverising souls, and hammering numb the bodies of millions, making a few very rich, giving birth to the middle class, to Karl Marx, and ultimately, and directly, to the Russian Revolution, and… well, you can take it as far as you like. In April 1836, when the Industrial Revolution was petering out, or metamorphosing into something not entirely different, Charles Dickens published the first instalment of his first novel The Pickwick Papers. It wasn’t the first serialised novel but, by November 1837, 19 monthly instalments later, it had become a zeitgeisty benchmark, defining the cultural times, outlining a category the world has learned to call “entertainment.” If you’re a fan of cliffhanger endings—the hook to haul you back—in books or on telly, you owe some small thanks to Dickens. Every one of his novels was first published in serial form. The man was a rock star from Pickwick’s first instalment, every tongue in London wagged its praise, every pub and coffee shop a clamorous hubbub of gleeful analysis and speculation: What next? Where to? Why for? When the latest instalment of whatever he was writing arrived in Boston or New York, tootling into port in the gizzards of a freighter from Blighty, the kerfuffle of the assembled masses, desperate to get their hands on a copy of the latest chapters was so great that people were jostled off jetties into the sea.

Thenceforth everyone was at it.

To name a few:

The Count of Monte Cristo, Vanity Fair, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Anna Karenina, Treasure Island, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The War of the Worlds, Heart of Darkness, The Hound of the Baskervilles

…were all published a chunk at a time. Serialisation was jiggy. The ball was rolling and though it has slowed, at least when it comes to novels and “literature”, it never stopped. Throughout the 20th century such esteemed keyboard-worriers as Joyce, Hemingway, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson all published books à la Charlie. Stephen King made a bit of a splash “reviving” the genre for the new-fangled World Wide Web when he publish The Green Mile as an on-line serial in 1996. A 1.5 million word story called Worm by someone called Wildbow, serialised between 2011 and 2013 is one of the most successful web series ever. I haven’t read it and don’t suppose I will. Recently lots of zine-y websites have sprouted specifically to publish serialised novels/stories/whatchamacallums.

Serialisation is a large part of what Booszjie is about.

INTRODUCTION - PART 2

On Music, Stories, Films and Photos

This website isn’t here to sell you things. Though there might be vinyl LPs and T-shirts in the offing at some point. Come to think of it I’ve still got CDs of the last two albums I made sitting in the garage gathering courage and rust.

This website is (at the moment) about publishing things no one sees or reads because they’re locked away in the belly of my computer. Things I’m in love with but vaguely afraid of. Things that want to be read by others. Things that want to be allowed to become some version of finished. Stories and screenplays and essays and other things born of winning ideas, started with furious passion. Things which soon get unruly, lose shape and direction. Getting these things over the line as whole, completed, finished works makes the combined 12 tasks of Hercules look like child’s play. Come to think if it, Hercules did come across as child-like. Things which, a few years after they’re started then put aside, don’t ripen but fester, yet still look gorgeous (and, yes, scary) to me. I can see the potential. It’s more than potential. It’s majesty in some cases. I can see where they’re going, though, often, not how they’ll get there.

Perhaps I have to do it this way, a piece at a time, if these words are ever to get out.

I love the words and the words love me but words are fundamentally about sharing so hopefully someone else will get to love them, if not as much as I do.

This is for all you wonderful nutters who’ve told me they want to read the screenplay or the book or the essay or the travel story or the article I’m writing. “But it’s not finished,” is no longer a valid excuse and probably never was. Having a website to point you to takes a take a great weight off. Publish and be, if not apotheosised, at least blessed.

This website is also about music. And pictures, moving and still.

It might even be a CV, an invitation to the universe to offer me a job. I’ve been in the current one for seven years. Itchy, itchy. Three jobs I’m doing, in fact. Well, one and two fifths. Maybe we’ll get to that. Maybe we won’t.

Fiction is where you tell the truth and there’s plenty of fiction in the belly of the computer I’m looking at, lots of it soon to be accessible via the hamburger at the top of your screen, fiction that casts light on all sorts of Strange Goings On in the worlds in which I move (and sometimes galavant). Fiction can be explicit and implicit. Implicit fiction calls itself news and current affairs and doesn’t tell you as much as it claims to. No one believes Rupert Murder has dibs on truth. The novel is perhaps the pinnacle of the explicit variety of fiction. Screenplays, movies, short stories, (jokes, perhaps?) all qualify as explicit fiction. You’ll find implicit fiction here—reviews, travel writing, articles and essays, this introduction—but these are usually written with a target audience in mind, often to a deadline, and thus tend to be more structured, get finished and sometimes make it into print or online. It’s the stories that tell the truth, the explicit fiction that I write for me, or for the Everyman (And I am the Everyman), that I’m flogging here.

Maybe this website will be a confessional, more Augustine than De Quincy.

First and foremost this website is for me. Erm. No, it’s not. I come second. You come third. Art comes first. The words need somewhere to feel comfortable, to feel almost finished. Someone once said a book you’re writing is never finished, only abandoned, so this is where the books I’ve been writing (and the other stuff ) will be abandoned, allowed to make their own way. It may be a graveyard. I’m sure I’ll edit and tinker with things once they’re here. I once took umbrage to people changing things after they were published; not the first and probably not the last jejune position I’ve adopted.

This website reserves the right to change its mind about what it is whenever it wants to. I reserve the right to self-reification and self-flagellation at the same time.

Is it a blog? It’ll probably be a vlog: videos of me pontificating, videos of the new band hitting its straps, videos of me and of the band writing songs and plundering other people’s songs.

The new band is called Mess Coherence, though that might change—I’m leaning toward The Apricators. What do you think? We were going to record an album at MONA’s new recording studio (Frying Pan) in early June—Dave’s imported the mixing console from Abbey Road. It’s probably had a wipe down since the Beatles had their grubby paws on it—but for various reasons I may or may not go into I cancelled the booking. We shall record the record at home instead.