Obiter Dicta

27^th September 2011

I’ve just put the finishing touches to the redraft of my novel, ‘Wyndford’. Now it’s been whizzed through the virtual ether to Stan, my agent. He can work a few magic passes over it with his wand and start a massive bidding war amongst the richest publishers in the land.

I’ve always wanted to write something about the shale mining industry. Historically, the first major oil-producing industry in the world, it rose and fell in West Lothian in the space of about a hundred years. It started in the 1860s and the last pit, Westwood, closed in 1962. I feel that not enough people in the world know about it. So I wrote a novel with a mining village in 1946 as its setting.

It lay dormant in my mind for eight years. I made a few tentative notes and jottings in the year 2003, including some historical research and a list of character names and street names. I knew at that time that I wanted it to be tragic; my central characters to be the women of the village, and my main character to be a young woman called Nan Cochrane. Then I put it aside. A conversation with Stan in February 2011 blew the grey embers alive again and I wrote it – 98,000 words - in a little less than two months. Nan is still the main character and her tragedy is a personal one, but played out against a larger, historical tragedy. I rather like it.

The story, ‘Grand Guignol’, that I submitted to the Manchester prize, has taken on a life of its own this week too, and I’ve almost doubled the length of it as I develop the themes already there. I am equally fond of this piece of writing. Something different, I like to think.

Glad to see, among all the bunting and frippery surrounding the impending bicentenary of Dickens’s birth, that people are returning to the novels. Or reading them for the first time. As a child, I knew of  his works, but I suspect I hadn’t read them. From this distant remove, it’s hard to remember accurately, but I think I may only have gleaned the narratives of some of them from Classic Comics. But, like many, my mind was stocked with his characters – Fagin, Pip, Micawber, Sairey Gamp – and his phrases. ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’ ‘Barkis is Willin’.’ ‘I’m so very ‘umble.’

It was only when I got to uni in Edinburgh that I read the actual novels: ‘Bleak House’ in first year and several, including ‘Great Expectations’ in third. Thereafter, I bought them all in the orange Penguin English Library series of the time, and devoured them, one by one in chronological order. Now, I can’t imagine a time when I didn’t know these exceptional novels or revere Dickens as one of the finest writers of the age – and one of the finest humorists of any age.

Happy two-hundredth birthday, when it comes, Chuck.

Obiter Dicta

20th September 2011

Much has happened since last I scattered my thoughts in this little thought-bed. I reached my  sixtieth birthday and spent a great deal of extremely pleasurable time in the company of my family. As a consequence of my 60^th, I now possess a Kindle, which makes me feel like Captain Spock. I intend to beam myself aboard several literary starships before too long. My first purchases for it were The Complete Works of Shakespeare, the ditto of Charles Dickens, ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce and the Booker shortlisted Julian Barnes one, ‘The Sense of an Ending’. The first three selections I cannot be without, especially the Shakespeare and the Joyce; the last I intend to read when I am in Bath next month, voicing The Locked Ward for BBC Audio Books.

I am looking forward to Bath very much. It is a city I love and I relish the prospect of being back in it. I will be staying at a hotel very near the Crescent and I will drink in the beauty of the architecture at every opportunity. I may even pretend I am Captain Wentworth in the evenings and see how many Annes I can find.

As to the reading of my book – I am uncommonly excited about that prospect too. It’s time my manly Caledonian tones were heard ringing out in living-rooms and cars around the country, not to mention the fact that it will provide another audience for the book. And there are a hundred characters I’ll enjoy voicing – accents, dialects, moods … Who knows, if I do this well, I may get the gig for other Scottish works.

I have been working on short stories mainly this week. Three of them were submitted for the Manchester Metropolitan University Prize: ‘Night, the Beloved’, ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’ and my favourite, ‘Grand Guignol’. A fourth was entered for the Bridport: ‘The End of Things’. They form part of a collection I am putting together on the theme of night and nightmare. This week’s work has been a long piece, tentatively entitled ‘The Dreamtown Sex Play’, but most likely to be renamed before it is finished. It is a swirling dream piece, in the style of Flaubert’s ‘Temptation of St. Antony’ and Joyce’s ‘Circe’. I have great hopes for it.

I have been looking at some philosophy in the last few days, the result of a Twitter friendship with a guy called Roman Tsivkin, who is deeply interested in matters philosophical. To my delight, I found a piece I had written many years ago ( ), in which I reflected on my experience of Philosophy at university. And here it is:

Wittgenstein said “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Unlike many philosophical gems, this is a sound apothegm, and one that the good burghers of my home town have taken to heart and use as an everyday watchword. Except they translate the original German as “Shut yer face an’ nae cunt’ll ken yer daft.”…

Philosophers know what they can do with their Logic, Ethics and Metaphysics, with their Epistemology and their Ontology; with their a priori reasoning (argument from cause to effect) and their a posteriori (talking out of their arses.) It has never helped me understand what anything is about…

One good thing about philosophers, though, is that some of them have died in spectacularly silly ways.

Heraclitus, for example, was eaten by dogs because he was covered in dung – something he had considered was a good way of treating his dropsy. Epicurus died on the loo. (Mother was right – don’t push too hard on the john, or you’ll do yourself a mischief.) Empedocles died by jumping into Mount Etna to prove he was a god. He wasn’t. Socrates poisoned himself with hemlock; Pythagoras died because he was a vegetarian. Pursued by an angry mob into a beanfield, he stopped running, not wanting to harm the beans, and was battered to death by the crowd. Diogenes (who, like Huck Finn, sometimes lived in a barrel) died of eating raw octopus and St. Thomas Aquinas died on the pan, like Epicurus. Perhaps his last thought was “It’s all a load of shite.”

And so, finally …

This is what it’s all about, my friends, and say I said it: You’re born; you grow old; you die. The time in between birth and death might be bonecreakingly long or heartbreakingly brief, but that’s it, all the same: you’re born; you grow old; you die. Spend as much time as you can with the people you love before you go, or before they do. Try to pass on any wisdom you may have acquired. And always check over your answers before you hand in the paper.

Obiter Dicta

11th September 2011

I find myself approaching my 60^th birthday this week with a piquant blend of emotions. Part of me is flabbergasted that I’ve got this far. How can a sprite be 60? I look back over the years and find that I’ve been a lucky sod all my life: cherished by parents, doted on by grandparents and wider family; and, most of all, lucky in love. I found the Gold Ticket in Love’s lottery really early on. I married my soulmate and we have a daughter who has been a source of happiness all her life and who has presented us with two beautiful granddaughters who bid fair to be likewise.

And I’ll stop the goo there, so that the reader can  inject with insulin before continuing.

What I don’t have is what I half expected. A feeling of having fallen into the ‘sere, the yellow leaf’. There are no gathering swallows twittering in my skies. And this is a man who knows gathering and twittering when he sees it. In  my youth, sixty was the age of my grandfather and his cronies: bent old men (bent physically, not morally) who walked with sticks and whose eyes purged amber and plum-tree gum. I don’t feel like that at all. Maybe 60 is the new mellow.

I have been working on the - hopefully - final proofs of my memoir, ‘The Locked Ward’. In these here times, seeing a book from the PC screen to publication still requires a great deal of scanning intermediate versions. Even though the days of hot metal are gone. Scrutinising the flat proofs in June was a hell of a task. I read the damned things ten times in two weeks. I’ll probably never read it again, once it comes out. At least I wasn’t like one of my literary heroes. Joyce must have driven compositors and typesetters daft when proofreading ‘Ulysses’. He added so much that the novel grew by a third at the proofreading stage. Rather, I cut out a few sections that I felt were impeding the flow and I think the book is better for it.

And finally, now that I have almost certainly reached old fogeydom, what the hell happened to commas? I have been aware of this for a long time, but publishers tend not to like them any more. For whatever reason. I’ve lost count of the number of occasions on which I have had to pause in the reading of a sentence to go back and pick up a lost thread, the fault of a missing comma. Commas exist to prevent ambiguity. Let them be used. I provide, free of charge, a gross for you to use whenever your reading material is deficient in them.

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Welcome to my blog, although I feel like Emperor Candrax from the planet Tron even using the phrase. ‘Blog’ is a vile word. (‘That’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase’). We all know the derivation of it – ‘web log’ (OMG!, that’s so neat!) But it’s such a clunky word. And there are so many more beautiful ones that could have been created, with a little imagination. How about, for example, ‘Ethechron’: an Ether Chronicle? Particularly appropriate as ‘ether’ can be defined as ‘the space between particles’. There has to be a joke in there about the space between articles. I wish I could think of one.

I also like ‘ViDi’: a Virtual Diary, and not at all a sexually transmitted infection. A ‘Journet’ or ‘Journal on the Net’ has a French and faux sophistique ring to it. ‘Orbital Dicta’ – oh, now, I like that! Thinking with gas, there! In fact, now I do think of it, I’m going to have a page somewhere on this bleedin’ blog called ‘Obiter Dicta’. Space age technology maybe, but we should never lose touch with the classics. O tempora, O mores!

πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει καὶ δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης

Onyhoo, hard hats are recommended – not only because this site is still under construction, but also because some of my ideas are not predigested, mindless pap regurgitated from some execrable TV show or Celeb magazine. (Did you see what I did there? ‘Not only… but also’, not only as in the Pete and Dud show of the 60s, but also a translation of the Latin ‘non modo … sed etiam’ – just after some classical tags. This isn’t just thrown together you know.) Weapons grade readers are welcome here; as are people with liberal values.

(The Latin phrase means ‘O what times! O what customs!’ and was first said by Cicero. He was not a Brazilian footballer. The Greek sentence is pronounced ‘Panta chōrei kai ouden menei kai dis es ton auton potamon ouk an embaies’. It means ‘”Everything changes and nothing remains and you cannot step twice into the same stream”. Said by Heraclitus of Ephesus. (It’s on his Greatest Hits compilation, ‘Now That’s What I Call Metaphysics, 29.’) It is also pretty much the central tenet of Buddhism. I’m not really a Buddhist, but I may have achieved enlightenment. Through a mixture of spirituous liquors, loving the same woman for over 40 years and daydreaming a lot. Rather than working a lot. I can recommend it. If you don’t end up thinking like the Buddha, you certainly end up looking like him.

Will you join me in a think?

The Life and Times ….
(short version, nicked from my literary agent’s website. Or should I say ‘bsite’?)

My name is Dennis O’Donnell and I was born in Bathgate, West Lothian in 1951. I still live in the West Lothian hinterland. I am very married – in fact, since 1972.

I have been a teacher, a joiner’s labourer and, in my youth, a chicken catcher. Nowadays I’m too old to catch chickens and too wise to be a teacher. I have also been a columnist for The Scotsman. Most recently, I’ve been in psychiatry – on the nursing side.

I have had two collections of poetry published by Curly Snake Press – ‘Two Clocks Ticking’ (Winner of the Saltire First Book Award 1997); and ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ (2003). Nobody has yet agreed to publish my next collection, ‘The Last Ostrich in Shotts’.

A memoir of my time as an orderly in a secure psychiatric unit, ‘The Locked Ward’, will be published by Jonathan Cape in January 2012.