On Light & Carbon - My 'Next Big Thing'

So ‘The Next Big Thing’ is a chain-letter of sorts, though hopefully one worth reading, were one writer asks another to answer some questions on their current project. The questions are clearly designed for prose-writing folk as everyone knows that the next big thing will most probably not be a book of poetry! That said, I’m very happy to take part and my thanks to Colin Bell for passing the baton to me. Colin discussed his forthcoming novel Stephen Dearsley’s Summer of Love, in his blog last week. It’s both very enter-taining and insightful and has certainly piqued my interest in the novel, which I really look forward to reading. You can find what Colin had to say about it at: 

http://www.wolfiewolfgang.com/2012/12/stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love-my.html

Now for my answers!

1) What is the working title of your next book?

The working title, for the last two years, has been On Light & Carbon. I should say that my first collection had a different title until about a month before it went to print, so things can change! In this case I’m pretty sure this title is a good summary of the concerns of the collection and will be on the cover.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

In a way, by finishing my first collection, which had roughly taken fifteen years to write due to some missteps and misadventures along the way. I recognised, once it was completed, that I had been locked into the sensibility of that book since my late twenties, so I was certain that my next collection would be different, both in terms of imagery and tone. I started this book as I turned forty and naturally that had a bearing. One thing I really like in poetry is the power of the concrete and lucid image. In the new book I employ this strategy again, though I hope the new poems are a little less lyrical and have a more philosophical edge. My first collection drew quite heavily from science – particularly from the natural world with a number of poems about insects, for example – alongside more personal material. While this book does something broadly similar, this time I've tried to push deeper into the science (and bring the reader with me, hopefully) exploring the physics of light, in its many wondrous guises, as well as the carbon of the title: the basis for all life.  Really, what I’m trying to do is connect science to life in some way – and vice versa. It’s also about the role of art and the artist in all this.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

We don’t tend to talk of poetry in terms of genre, though that’s not to say that there aren’t very different traditions and schools within poetry. I hope my work falls somewhere between the metaphysical and the lyrical.

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of the characters in the movie rendition?

Well, this is a tricky one for poetry, isn’t it! It’s almost like asking who I would I like to see play myself! That said, there are a number of portraits in the collection. I’m most proud of the one about the 11^th Century (in what we call now the Common Era) Islamic scientist Ibn al-Haytham, popularly known as Alhazen, who wrote his masterwork on optics while under house-arrest. In real terms, he was the first person to employ the scientific method. And all this happened six centuries before Newton, I should point out. I’d love to see that story told more fully. I’d cast the brilliant actor Saïd Taghmaoui (first seen in La Haine) to play Alhazen. But to twist the question into a more meaningful one: who would I like to read the audio book? John Hurt or Ralph Fiennes would do very nicely!

5) What is a one-line synopsis of your book?

To try to show the deepest aspect of our humanity and curiosity against the canvas and backdrop  that science has provided us with.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agent?

Neither. An agent who took on a poet would have to be one who had taken a vow of poverty. In my experience they are not the kind of people attracted to that particular business. Then again, the absence of agents is perhaps what keeps poetry poor and pure. The book will be published by Ward Wood Publishing (without a go-between) in September 2013.

7) How long did it take you to write a first draft of the manuscript?

Well, I feel I’m nearly there, but a book isn’t finished till it goes to the printer. The book was written in three distinct phases so I could say I had a first draft after about a year, but so much has been cut and added since then it doesn’t seem like a meaningful answer. To get to the point of having what I’d call a good ‘working draft’ has taken about two and half years. By my standards that’s been very quick! Partly this has been down to employing a new approach to writing poetry. I tried (though didn’t always conform) to the idea of writing a decent draft of a poem in one day. This seemed to help keep the general intent behind a piece in a clearer focus, as well as leaving room for unexpected shifts of perspective. That said, writing this way later leads to lots of finessing and rewriting and there is one very long piece based around archaeological artefacts that took months to write... and then more months to revise!

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I’m not sure. There are a number of poets who are scientists or have a background in science. I really admire the work of undoubtedly the most famous of these in Miroslav Holub, though I think I write about science in a very different way, and from a very different tradition. Perhaps a bigger influence would be the work of the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella – particularly his poetry from the  early sixties to the mid-seventies. I hope, in some way, that I have emulated the movement between abstract thought to iron-cast images that you find in his collections such as Downstream and Nightwalker & other poems. I’ve always loved his work, though its presence is felt more in this collection than my first. Having said that, I’d be loathe to even suggest I’m in the same league as the great man.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Partly it was the tenor of the debate around science and religion of recent years. It seems to me that we are creeping towards a notion that science is the only form of reliable knowledge, with Stephen Hawking stating  recently that “science has made philosophy redundant”. I think this is a far more complex and interesting question than such statements suggest, so I wanted to explore the different ways we comprehend the world and put them together to create a bigger picture of ourselves – whether it be through science, art, myth or personal experience.  

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

Well, you will encounter such figures as August Kekulé who is said to have discovered the structure of benzene (the base of all organic life, not just petroleum) in a dream. Then there is the curious figure of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch merchant draper who was one of the key pioneers of the optical microscope. The fact he was a draper isn’t incidental as they were one of the first trades to exploit lenses, here using them to examine the quality of stitching in fabric. Having realised that using two of these lenses would massively increase magnification, van Leeuwenhoek used his new instrument to first peer into water, naturally enough. So excited was he by what he’d seen, he then looked at his own urine and excrement. Never has a trip to the privy been so giddily anticipated, I’ll wager!

                                                      August Kekulé

Having done my best to convince you to check out my collection when it appears, I’m delighted to introduce two fine writers who I have chosen to tag and who will post next Wednesday about their latest work. They are the poet Nessa O’Mahony and fictioner Valerie Sirr. Here’s a little more information about them both.

Nessa O’Mahony was born and lives in Dublin. Her poetry has appeared in a number of Irish, UK, and North American periodicals, has been translated into several European languages. She won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards. Her second poetry collection, Trapping a Ghost, was published by bluechrome publishing in 2005. A verse novel, In Sight of Home, was published by Salmon Poetry in May 2009. She was awarded an Irish Arts Council literature bursary in 2004. She completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Wales, Bangor, in 2007. She was also artist in residence at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at University College Dublin and Assistant Editor of UK literary journal Orbis.  
http://nessaomahony.blogspot.ie/

Valerie Sirr has published short fiction and flash fiction in Ireland, UK, US, Australia and Asia. Publications include The Irish Times, The Sunday Tribune, The New Writer, The Stinging Fly. Some poems are forthcoming in anthologies from Revival Press (Ireland) and Poetry Lostock (UK). Awards include 2007 Hennessy New Irish Writer Award, two Arts Council of Ireland bursaries and other national and international literature prizes, most recently a flash fiction award (2011) from The New Writer Magazine (UK), judged by British poet and writer Catherine Smith. She holds an M. Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin. She teaches creative writing and blogs on writing at: www.valeriesirr.wordpress.com. She hopes to publish her short story collection soon.

Intelligent Artifice - a history of sci-fi cinema

I wrote the following article shortly after I'd written a science fiction screenplay (never made alas) in the philosophical tradition of that genre. The piece was to be published in Film Ireland, in spring 2002, but for purely logistical reasons had to be cut, so never saw the light of day. It goes some way to explaining my interest in the genre. So, here it goes:

*

Intelligent Artifice

Science Fiction and the search for the immaterial

In his book of essays, The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera argues that the famous scene in Don Quixote where Quixote attempts to fight the windmills with his sword, is the first expression in literature of man’s discomfort with his own technology. The Age of Reason had arrived and with it the greatest explosion of technological innovation since the Upper Paleolithic. The universe had become a clockwork, a gargantuan machine governed by fixed and immutable laws and God was, in the end, a logician. When Quixote raises his sword he is waving it as his own insignificance in the shadow of such a world.

Film, more than any other art form, owes its very existence to the advancement of the technological and from the beginning film-makers have had a preoccupation with the dual nature of the medium as the mechanical eye that mirrors the eye of direct experience. It’s no surprise then that the first moving image recorded by the Lumiere brothers was of a locomotive – one of the most potent symbols of the industrial – entering the station at La Ciotat. The shadowplay of light on the cave wall had become something precise and reproducible.

Science Fiction as a genre is, by its very nature, dedicated to the exploration of scientific concepts and their consequences to human life and the life of human society. It’s surprising to find, though, that for a genre so preoccupied by the scientific and the symbols of science the message of science fiction films so often comes out in favour of the imprecise and contradictory world of human emotion over the cold exactitudes of scientific reductionism. Few films within the genre can be seen as pure celebration of scientific discovery (or possible future discoveries) and those that do – such as Contact or 2001 – seem to call for an expanded view of science that takes into account the peculiarities of human experience and its search for extra meaning beyond the measurable and seen. In short, they attempt to reconstitute a context in which scientific knowledge exists in that which is beyond science.

Although science fiction as a rule is not committed to revealing science as it stands but as it might be in the future, more often than not futurist dramas say more about the time they were conceived than they do about the future they predict. From this point of view, Fritz Lang’s seminal masterpiece Metropolis can be seen as a quasi-religious appraisal of the plight of the worker in a mechanized world at a time when the Trade Union movement was growing in power. In the central figure of Maria, Lang presents a symbol of the harmony between the “brain and the hand”, a balancing principle regulating the relationship between the industrialist and his workforce. Of course, the industrialist Fredersen attempts to destroy Maria’s message by replacing her with a robot designed to ferment worker unrest – a clear comment on Communism – but in the end he is reconciled to Maria’s cause through the marriage of his son (his conscience) to Maria.

Although Metropolis had appeared in 1926 science fiction film-making in the proper sense only emerged in the 1950s and then largely as a response to the lingering memory of  the atom bomb and its legacy of fear played out in the politics of the Cold War. In Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) the alien visitor Klaatu warns that humanity’s entry into the atomic age poses a threat to the whole universe. The film’s cautionary, though optimistic, message is also echoed in the Edenic parable Forbidden Planet (1956) were Dr Morbius, confronted with the vast superiority of a now extinct alien civilization, believes that the human race is not ready for such knowledge. In a clever (if not very dramatic) Freudian twist, the film argues that it is our primitive instinct or “unconscious monster” that makes such knowledge perilous. It’s probably the correct conclusion but in reality society rarely withholds its technology for fear of it being abused.

Another rich period for science fiction film-making was the 1970s when a number of films where produced which spoke directly to the issues of the time. In Douglas Thumbull’s ecological drama Silent Running (1971) the Earth’s forests have disappeared and the only remaining vegetation exists on spaceships floating quietly through the void of space. When Bruce Dern’s character Freeman Lowell is ordered to destroy his cargo he refuses and in an act of desperation kills his shipmates and leaves – in one of the most poignant images found in science fiction – two robots Huey and Dewey to tend to the garden as it drifts away into the darkness. Soylent Green (1973), though marred by a wooden performance from Charlton Heston, is another interesting meditation on the problem of over-population and the ecological and social decay resulting from it.

If the notion of a mechanical universe asks a question of philosophy and religion, a mechanized society asks a question of everyone who lives in it. And the ultimate expression of the mechanization of human society is the totalitarian state. In Michael Radford’s suitable grim retelling of Orwell’s 1984 (1984) we are presented with a kind of retro-futurism, Oceania most closely resembling war-time Britain but one were fascism has prevailed over democracy. History is the key to the present as the opening credits declare: “He who controls the Past controls the Future. He who controls the Present controls the Past.”

Under the ever-watchful eye of Big Brother John Hurt’s character, Winston Smith, attempts to conduct a sexual relationship in secret, an act banned as a “thought and sex crime” by the State. Like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, also made in 1984, the film explores the limits of human resistance within such a society and finds – in an outcome not dictated to by the demands of Hollywood – that everyone has a breaking point, the film’s bleak message summarised in the devastatingly simple refrain uttered by Winston about his lover: “Under the spreading chestnut tree/ I sold you and you sold me.” 

Another film that mines dystopian themes, though this time in a completely minimalist futuristic setting, is George Lucas’s excellent and underrated first feature THX1138 (1971). In a twist on the notion of mechanical societies being based entirely on materialistic principles, the leader of this unnamed underground city speaks to the citizens – who are denoted merely by a serial number – via confessional booths from behind a Christ-like image instructing them to “work hard, be more productive, prevent accidents, be happy.” Of course, in a world where everything is regulated and drugs are administered to keep the population permanently sedated, there is no such thing as happiness only perhaps hope. The closing scene where THX1138 (Robert Duvall) escapes from the city and emerges into the idyllic landscape above is a truly lyrical finale to a film that makes no concessions to the terrible nature of such a vision.

Perhaps though the most audacious variation on the subject has been the Wachowski brothers’ film The Matrix with the idea that the ultimate form of subjugation is to not know that you are subjugated – to believe that you are free when you are not. As Morpheus tells Neo, “[you were] born into a prison that you cannot smell, or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.” And metaphorically the most interesting prisons are the ones we cannot see. You can't help but feeling that this prison might be that of material gain above all other values.

The Matrix also expresses one of our deepest fears about our own technology: that it has become so advanced that it can begin to think and out-think us, that our machines may, in the end, make machines of us. Or as Davis Cronenberg would see it in films such as Videodrome (1983) and eXistenZ (1999) our machines are destined to outgrow us and it is the future of mankind to merge in some way with technology by way of some kind of biomechanical interface, and if our computers outsmart us so be it – Darwinian evolution would simply have entered a new and exciting conclusion, though one that may ultimately spell our own extinction.

The most striking symbol of the machine, though, is one that is indistinguishable from us: the android. And the question must be asked: is there anything that truly separates us from such an intelligent machine?

In many ways the image of the android gives rise to our deepest suspicion and fear. In The Terminator (1984), James Cameron gives us a cyborg that embodies our worst nightmare: a machine that is almost indestructible, unwavering in its mission to destroy and totally lacking in empathy. This also serves as a good description of the alien species in Ridley Scott’s landmark film Alien (1979) and perhaps the alien is terrifying precisely because it embodies such machine-like qualities coupled with a kind of brute Darwinian ferocity.  

Alien, of course, also has its own android in Ash (Ian Holm), the science officer on the Nostromo spacecraft. Ash represents another version of our disquiet about intelligent machines: he may look and act like us, but he is by design an extension of corporate enterprise and will always choose what is best for the company, or state, over his fellow workers. In an interesting inversion of this idea the android in Alien Resurrection (1997) Call (Winona Ryder) is programmed to care and is revealed to be an android precisely because of her unwavering empathy. As Ripley points out: “No human is that humane.”

Although the idea of artificial intelligence may be seen as another instance were science fiction might anticipate the scientific outcome, the genre’s ongoing fascination with androids may be have more to with their metaphorical charge as representation of ourselves in a post industrial world, than they do about possible scientific advancements. The power of the film Bladerunner (1982) is not that replicants such as Roy (Rutger Hauer) are androids but that they are androids coming into awareness of their own mortality marking and, as such, making a key transition from something merely mechanical to something that resembles life. When Roy confronts his maker Tyrell he says what we might all say given the chance: “I want more life, father.” And if Roy has come into knowledge of fear he also demonstrates in his death-speech (written as it turns out by Hauer himself) that he has also experienced the very human emotion of awe.

Science fiction, like films in any genre, is often guilty of producing trite and formulaic narratives appealing more to the marketability of the genre than the vast possibilities it offers. At its best though, science fiction has produced some of the most intellectually stimulating stories of any kind about the present nature of our lives as well as the future possibilities they occupy in the imagination. If science fiction is on some level fascinated by the windmills of Cervantes novel, it is also like the book’s central character searching for the meaning beyond that landscape. Like the Monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Solaris - the intelliegent planet that presents us with our own deepest desires, in Tarkovsky’s film of the same title - science fiction often describes an encounter between the known and the unknowable, between what is seen and what is beyond the visible. It may not attempt like science to offer final solutions to its questions, but in their place it often delivers enduring visions of what might be true of the past, the present as well as the future of our society. 

Launch of 'In the Library of Lost Objects'

Just wanted to make a quick post about the launch of my debut poetry collection 'In the Library of Lost Objects' last week in the Damer Hall, Dublin. A very special thanks to Poetry Ireland for hosting the event. A really great crowd turned out for the occasion and Niall MacMonagle made a very thoughtful and generous introduction to the work. I know some of you couldn't make it along but I really appreciated the messages of support I received. A big up also to Shauna Gilligan who helped out on the night with the book stall.

Here are some images from the night. A big thank you to my good friend Brian Walsh for taking the photos.

Niall MacMonagle making his introduction

                                         

Signing a copy of the book for poet Aifric Mac Aodha

                                                   
                                                     

A reflective moment...

Poet Ross Hattaway approaches

                                                                                    

Family and friends...

With Niall MacMonagle and Prof Salah D Hassan

                                                   

Centre: Joseph Woods, Director of Poetry Ireland, 

who hosted the event.

                                                      

With artist Gemma Mc Guigan, who took the beautiful 

cover image for the collection

Finally, the book itself...

                                                      
'In the Library of Lost Objects' is available in Books Upstairs, D'Olier Street, Dublin; The Winding Stair Bookshop & Cafe, Ormond Quay, Dublin; Alan Hanna's Bookshop, Rathmines, Dublin; and the Rathgar Bookshop, Rathgar, Dublin. My thanks to them all for the support.

It can also be ordered directly from the Ward Wood website at: http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-poetry-nd-itlolo.htm

It can also be found at Amazon.co.uk and The Book Depository (who offer free worldwide delivery): http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Library-Lost-Objects-Noel-Duffy/9780956660282

In the Library of Lost Objects - published

Just a quick note to let you all know that my debut poetry collection In the Library of Lost Objects has just been published by Ward Wood Publishing. I'm really delighted with the book and excited to finally have it in my hands. My thanks to Adele Ward for her thoughtful edit of the poems included and Mike Fortune Wood for the cover design and all the other many tasks he fulfils at the press. I'd also like to thank Gemma Mc Guigan for the striking cover image.

The collection can be ordered directly from Ward Wood's website at: http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-poetry-nd-itlolo.htm

It can also be found at the Book Depository: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/-Library-Lost-Objects-Noel-Duffy/9780956660282

The Book Depository are currently offering a 25% discount. Won't last for long.

For members of the Poetry Book Society the collection is also available at the same discount.


The book will be launched by Niall MacMonagle in Dublin on Wednesday, June 22nd. I'll post again closer to the date with more information.