Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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25.8.06 Crimes to Passion

"Romance has been mugged by convenience
And lies bleeding in a ditch
Everyone's searching for someone
But they don't want to take any risks"

The second part of my Newsarama interview is up. The above isn't from it. That's a blues song I'm noodling around with.

It's taken me a long time - almost a year - to get back into rhyme. It's tough as hell when you haven't done it in a while. Now I'm starting to stay up late and fill notebooks again. I suppose the first effort was The Artist and the Showgirl, a 40-verse ballad I spontaneously wrote while feeling especially romantic last September. Lee O'Connor is eventually going to illustrate it, once I rewrite it (some of the verses are... cringe-making, in retrospect) and bother to find a publisher for it.

Then came Nil, the sprawling Ulysses-esque novel which I will probably never finish: for reasons obscure even to me, it has a Greek chorus of three magpies who speak in a sonnet. They pop up every few chapters and argue in iambic pentameter on what's going on. The sonnets are Shakespearean, but organised in Petrarchian style: turn, counter-turn and stand - four lines per magpie - with the final couplet being an omnes. ("How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin, She taught me turn, and counter-turn, and stand..." ...ah, one of my favourite love poems.) There's also an amnesiac girl in a bear costume, a boy who hasn't slept since his 16th birthday despite the best efforts of doctors ("and these are pills that were my eyes"), a Parliament of Mice, and a talking cancerous tumour in a jar. And lots of references to The Waste Land and Greek tragedy.

In a perfect world, I will finish Nil someday, send the manuscript to Brendan McCarthy, he'll draw all over it and design it, and then we'll publish it as this full colour book/art object, a bit like Tom Phillips' illustrated Inferno or Humument. When I have Very Bad Days, I fantasise about running back to America, moving in monastic solitude to an island in Maine, and writing Nil. Although the likely result would be insanity... But still, it's good to have an Innisfree - as per Chamfort, "Someone asked a bishop to lend him his house in the country, to which he never went himself. The bishop said, 'Don't you know that we must always have a place where we never go,but where we think we'd be happy if we did?"

I do adore Chamfort. "Weak people are the light infantry of the army of the wicked..."

"You called for Eumenides and all that came were magpies." I also love the great and flashing magpie, who flies as artists might. They strut London's parks in their natty black and white long-tailed coats, like they're in on some great conspiracy we leaden humans barely suspect. Like we are the passing birds in their garden.

Now, a year after my first fumbling verses, the rhymes are coming easily. More importantly their rhythm is starting to be right... and unexpectedly, I find myself writing snatches of blues songs. The one above is turning into a cynical re-telling of various Disney fables, where Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White et al have considerably more... real-world ends to their stories, than the ones they fed us as little girls. Ah well. Yet another pointless creative endeavour by yours truly. Perhaps someone will eventually take an interest in the things I do and pay me enough to survive.

It's 1:30am, I've been wittering on about rubbish, and I have pressing business with a circus tomorrow. Good night, gentle stranger. May you dream of amazing things.

( 11:18 PM )

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