I'm glad now that I chickened out of blogging the whole novel as I went along. The fact is that a lot of it is very rough, and I'm scattering mental post-it notes freely as I go along with instructions to polish up or rewrite all the crap bits to make them more interesting, more accurately detailed, and more fun.
Plus there's the whole business of suddenly requiring a character for the plot who needed to be introduced two chapters previously that is part of the whole novel writing process, but which would be a mite confusing to anyone reading the work in progress. At this stage also almost everyone has the same bland voice until suddenly you find that one of them is speaking with an irish lilt and another talks in a very precise, careful way and never uses contractions (always handy when you have a constant eye on the word counter).
And anyway, since nobody has commented in over a week I guess you don't really care about my novelling adventures, so I'm glad I saved myself the additional stress of placing my work in front of an audience that wasn't interested in supporting it.
I'll talk about Kate Bush instead.
I find with Kate's later albums that they take a while to grow on me. Hounds of Love is my favourite and the only one that doesn't seem flawed in some way, containing at least one song that comes across as amateurish on some level - usually because it has an interesting and unusual subject which she has written from the heart, based on some half-remembered experience and then not bothered to research in order to get the facts straight. See my piece on Babooshka for further information.
With that said, my first impression of the new double album Ariel is not great. There's one song whose chorus seems to consist of numbers rather than words, which is interesting and unusual. Do the numbers mean anything? I don't know. There's also what I think may be the first song I've ever heard about washing machines. A quite reasonable and underused metaphor in song, but once you are past the initial oddity, it seems to be just another love song with a peculiar central image.
Don't consider this a review, though. I haven't even listened to the second disk yet. Maybe it will grow on me.
Word count so far: 15,981
2 comments:
Welcome to the world of anorak-wearing math geeks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi
IMHO, the brilliance of the song "Pi" is how Kate brings us into the mind of a mathematician -- though of course she's not one herself -- investing an infinite string of numbers with the beauty of the melody so we can all appreciate how beautiful and harmonious the numbers seem to him.
And "Mrs. Bartolozzi" is not a love song; it's at least partly about cherishing a mundane experience, and partly about how the mind can wander into an unexpected reverie while doing said mundane task.
I'd turn "How To Be Invisible" into a comic book, but Grant Morrison seems to have gotten there already.
As I said, first impressions. Nothing's leapt out at me so far the way Nine Million Bicycles or Halfway up the Hindu Kush did the first time I listened to Katie Melua's album Piece by Piece, to name the last album I really enjoyed.
And yes, I noticed that the track was called Pi just now, which explained the numbers thing.
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