Diary from a week of delirium

Rust coloured phlegm

This week I’ve been as sick as a dog. Taken to town by some bug, which induced the full range of works. Extreme heat followed by extreme cold. Shivers. Muscle fatigue. A head that felt like a baby’s rattle thrown in the tumble dryer. 

I have spent so much time prone on the sofa with a hot water bottle and blanket, that there is a crevice now where my buttocks have rested. A permanent memorial embedded in the sofa.  

But being forcibly prone has not been entirely a bad thing. I soon became very bored of checking and re-checking Twitter for no reason other than to feel stimulus, that I began to doze, half waking half-sleeping. In this nether region of consciousness all sorts of funny  thoughts came to mind, and maybe in this weird state, I followed the strand of these thoughts more easily than I usually would. 

When I’m well and facing free time, I am often dominated by the manager in my head who says I should be doing this, and I should be doing that. But when you’re cognitive and physical function has been so epically reduced by illness, shoulds become a bygone memory. Guilt free mind meanderings the norm. A bit like a child gazing out of the classroom window in imaginative rapture. 

Films 

I’ve watched two films, both from this fantastic thread from Ed William:

Memories of Murder

Directed by Bong Joon-ho and released in 2017. A pervert serial killer strikes in a rural Korean province, where the local constabulary tasked with tracking them down, can only be accurately described as dipshits. An amusingly broody and mysterious detective comes down from Seoul to help out these rural goofs.

The films constantly moves between grim realism; violated corpses dumped in secluded fields (Seven vibes); and unbridled farce - the downright silly tension between the rural cops and city detective. It is pleasingly discordant, like the feeling of freezing cold ice cream against warm chocolate sauce. 

Above all though, despite the beautiful and harrowing shots, what I loved about this film was that the story telling had real heart. I’ve become a bit of a storytelling evangelist of late. I’m over abstract moody shots that lead to nowhere. Good characters that go on journeys, and this has that in abundance

Godland

This was a bit of a mental choice. An austere Lutheran priest from Denmark is sent on a mission to establish a church in rural nowhere on an island in Iceland, braving a treacherous and beguiling landscape to get there. 

Shivering on a sofa in a state of delirium while watching the Danish priest undergo something similar was a bold choice. This film was wonderfully shot. It starts by telling us that it was inspired by a series of wet-plate photographs found in Iceland - a myth it turns out. But even so, there is a sense that we are moving in deep time, as we get shot after shot of strange and inert nature. 

Occasionally I felt the story slacken, choosing to linger on ephemera, but in the end it came good for me. Really good. I’m not sure I loved this film so much as responded viscerally to its characters and what they do. Which is surely a barometer of its success in getting under my fevered skin?

The Wire (Spoilers)

Okay so I finished The Wire (again). I think my main learning from this is that  great characters make great stories. The Wire constantly muddies the waters of morality. Good guys do bad things, bad guys do good things. There are rarely genuinely malevolent actors. Some are simply stupid, and leave chaos in their wake. Others think that the ends justify the means, and so on. 

If you want to make good characters, make them hated, and then loved. Be taken right to the brink, and then pulled from going over the edge. McNulty was one of these characters in Season 5. The Baltimore Police are under a huge funding squeeze, meanwhile McNulty is becoming enraged that Marlo Stanfield, the next generation of more ruthless hood gangster, is out on the streets wreaking havoc. 

He invents a serial killer off the back of some homeless person deaths to syphon off overtime hours for his colleagues to takedown Marlo. McNulty ends up doing some sick and twisted shit to keep this lie going. But by the end of the series, this visceral dislike of McNulty has been replaced by something more warm. 

Then there’s the infamous Omar Little. On the rampage after his old friend Butch has been tortured and murdered by Marlo’s lieutenants - Snoop and Chris. He never gets his revenge, taken out by a young hopper, who shoots him in the head, while he buys a pack of smokes. The legend of Omar, disappears in the crack of a gunshot, and he becomes a bag of meat, with nothing to say for his code of honour.      

Books

I’m re-reading Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions. This was the first of his novels that I ever read, and coming back to it is mega, although it doesn’t pack as much of a punch this time round, I’m able to notice some of the extraordinary techniques he deploys. 

In my delirious state this week, one of the insights I keep returning to as I read on, is that every observation in a good novel is an opportunity to tell a story. It doesn’t mean you have to, but a new object or place or person, even if seemingly incidental, will have a beginning, a middle and an end, even if the story you are writing does not concern all of that thing’s story for now.  

I noticed this while reading Brothers Karamazov as well. The trance like sensation you have when you’re deeply absorbed by what you’re reading, and then you stop, and ponder on where the story has taken you versus just a few moments ago, and you can’t even imagine how you got there. 

AI Preoccupations

I’ve been using ChatGPT a bit to bounce ideas off of in the planning stage before redrafting my novel. It’s actually really good at surfacing ‘the basic bitch’ idea for a scene or plot point. If I feed it a scenario or situation and the barebones sketch of a character’s attributes, it’ll spit out a fairly lukewarm series of ideas, but these are a good jumping off point - to be made more engaging or interesting through inversion or casting them as some sort of red herring.  

I’m not sure what to make of this frankly mad and sorcerous technology. With respect to creative pursuits like storytelling and film, AI nerds can shout until the cows come home about where we’ll end up. About how one day we’ll live in AI entertainment world, where our merest whim will be used to orchestrate an AI film magicked into existence, to scratch that current fleeting itch. 

Nope. Don’t care. It’ll be derivative crap, the formulaic drivel the film industry is currently pumping out into the culture like putrid waste. It’s like when the tech bros suddenly started going wild about NFTs, and their unique shitty photorealistic wolf hound JPEGs. Nope. Nope. Nope. Your interest in art literally appeared ten seconds ago, and you don’t know diddly. You don’t really care.

It makes me sad that AI will make craft defunct to some extent. I really think that friction is important to creating great art. You have to go to the well time and time again to figure out the subtlety and nuance to creating resonance with another, across the span of consciousness. Maybe machines could create a simulacrum of that act, but I know the real thing when I see it.   

See below the great Hayao Miyazaki telling it how it is: