Willie Maugham…No writers’ block here

I envy the fact that Somerset Maugham was such a fluid and prolific writer. He seems so modern, no non-sense, just get the job done. He would take a short story and turn it into a play and if that didn’t work he would take the plot and characters from the play and turn them into another short story or novel.

He said he loved to write stories because on the page he had total control of what happens as opposed to real life.

He was a disciplined writer, blocking out the hours in the morning to write. But then he had Gerald to run his life for him. We all need a Gerald…a good wife…a person to make sure our life runs smoothly so we have time to write or create and dinner is always on the table promptly.

“It’s hard to be a writer and a gentleman” WS Maugham

Maugham did have a bad…or lazy…but I don’t think he was lazy… habit of including real people in his stories. I was surprised to learn the character Sadie Thompson from the short story Rain was based on a woman named… Sadie Thompson. You’d think he might have changed one of her names.

Maugham admits to a friend that the Marla character in Of Human Bondage is based on a young man he had known and the obsessive/destructive relationship described in the novel is something Maugham experienced years before.

His stories are all about relationships... usually marriage. Why and how they work or usually don’t work.

Maugham was an incredibly successful writer. He was Double Day's. the American publisher's, best selling author. During the 1930’s, the depression, magazine’s paid him $1.00 per word. Amazing. So why don’t we read him more today?

In the group last Friday the question was asked, who today has the celebrity and talent Maugham had in his lifetime? Any suggestions…

Melmotte: would you give this man your money?

So how should we feel about Augustus Melmotte?

When Paul Montague and Hamilton Fisker first come to Melmotte with the plan to build a railroad in America and sell shares in London, he gets it. He recognizes the “game”. He’s played it before.

“ …the appetite for such stocks as theirs, which might certainly be produced in the speculating world by a proper manipulation of the affairs.”

He appoints young men with titles and no business sense to the board. He let’s them buy shares but not sell them while the price is going up.

He takes the money from the sale of shares to rebuild a country home, entertain the Emperor of China and buy a seat in the House of Parliament.

Unfortunately he is too greedy and does too much too soon.

So why do we admire the guys who can get away with it?

Even Trollope admires the man who can pull it off:

“…but he for a few moments looking up at the bright stars. If he could be there, in one of those unknown distant worlds, with all his present intellect and none of his present burdens, he would, he thought, do better than he had done on earth. If he could even now put himself down nameless, fameless, and without possessions in some distant corner of the world, he could, he thought, do better.”

More than a human being, a life force.

Laddy Carbury, just a 19th century blogger?

After spending just a little time "researching" blogging in order to bring the Brookside Blog up to "industry standards" I've come to believe Lady Carbury was way ahead of her time. She was a blogger.

Her book "Criminal Queens" is lightly researched. It is written for mass, uncritical readers. When she asks for professional "editorial criticism" it is from her favorite collection of London's writers/editors. There's lots of professional payback going on. If you review my book and say nice things, I'll review your book and say nice things.

She would have loved Facebook.

Lady Carbury also likes to combine/confuse her social life with her professional literary contacts.

The introduction to my copy of The Way We Live Now explains that the main plot for the book was going to be exposing and satirizing the London literay scene. Perhaps Mr Trollope wasn't good at smoozing with other writer/editors. He just wasn't getting the good reviews he thought he deserved.

I'm certainly glad he decided to add the Mexican train swindle plot to the story otherwise it would have been The Way Some of Us Who Write Novels Live Now. Lacks punch...

Not sure if this blog will ever be up to "standard". It's more of a rant than a blog.

Next: Melmotte, the big wonderful, tragic "hero"??

Search engine tags: Blogging history: 19th Century Bloggers: Anthony Trollope: Lady Carbury, pioneer blogger

the game's the thing

Choosing to read The Way We Live Now while fresh from The Big Short was a fortunate decision.

Trollope's Mexico railroad scandel is a lot less complicated than our recent financial meltdown but the fundamentals are the same. Greed.

"Men reconcile themselves to swindling. Though they themselves mean to be honest, dishonesty of itself is no longer odious to them. Then there comes the jealousy that others should be growing rich with the approval of all the world - and the natural aptitude to do what all the world approves."

There was not much romance in the Big Short. TWWLN is like one very long Jane Austen marriage marketplace but with "teeth". The ladies are only out for a husband who will provide the house in London and financial security. For some love is not a priority, more a luxury.

I want a mood organ...

Phili K. Dick comes up with some great creations in this book.

I love the mood organ. In the morning it wakes you and gives you the attitude you need to get that day going.

"If you set the surge up high enough, you'll be glad you're awake."

Don't we all need one of these?

Then there's kipple.

"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders...When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself."

The empathy box and Wilbur Mercer.

The surviving humans on earth need a way to commune with each other so they use an empathy box. By holding the handles and watching the video of Wilbur Mercer climbing his hill in the wilderness Isidore merges with the old man and others watching him on his climb. The experience includes bleeding when stones are thrown and cut Mercer's arm. Not sure how this is achieved.

"He had crossed in the usual perplexing fashion; physical merging-accompanied by mental and spitual identification - with Wilbur Mercer had reocurred. As it did for everyone who at this moment clutched the handles, either here on earth or on one of the colony planets. He experienced them, the others, incorporated the babble of their thoughts, heard in his own brain the noise of many individual existences. They- and he -cared about one thing; this fusion of their mentalities oriented their attention on the hill, the climb, the need to ascend".

Climbing the hill to the Stanford Dish will never be the same for me again. I'll be looking for Wilbur Mercer.

Phili K. Dick, just a local writer

Our September title is Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" The movie Blade Runner was adapted from this novel.

It was a surprise to me that this story is set in San Francisco and that Philip K. Dick is considered to be a local writer. He went to high school and college in Berkeley in the 1940's.

This novel takes place after the humans have done a good destroying their world so most people have moved to Mars. Dick was in high school when the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan so I can understand where the the image of a world filled with empty apartment buildings and kipple might come from. Post apocalyptic stories are a favorite theme for science fiction writers. They get to create their new world from the rubble or fly off to another planet.

After reading this book I have a new, wonderful appreciation for spiders. The scene where the android, Pris, cuts off the legs of a spider one, by one is right up there with any other torture scene. Because the earth is such a mess real animals have died off. Caring for the few animals left has become a religion. It's miracle Isidore has found a living spider in his decaying apartment building only to have it cruelly disasembled by an android.

More to come...

You call this a blog?

After months of blogging I have finally read a description of a good blog. They are "frequency, brevity and personality". I fail the first two but I think "personality" shows through. I'll work on the other two, oh lucky reader.

I have fallen behind. In the last installment I was sorting through our light, summer read, Michael Lewis's "The Big Short". At our July meeting Jeannie L. used a quote from the book to sum up the financial mess :

"The upper class of this country raped this country. You fucked people. You built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a crisis of conscience. Nobody ever said, 'This is wrong.' " Page 232

I think that says it all.

Our August Title was George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London." Another "light " read.

I find this book really uneven. The first half when he is working in Paris as a "plongeur" is lively and interesting. The people and situations are vivid. He's really working and making an effort.

In the London half of the book he borrows old clothes so he can be a tramp to see how the out of work survive in England. I guess it's more of an expose of the life of the British unemplyed and how the system doesn't work.

My copy of the book lists it as fiction. It reads more like "gonzo journalism". Perhaps Orwell was just ahead of his time. Thank you Hunter S. Thompson.