Tag: fiction

Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

If there’s one thing I’m good at it’s being distracted from the current book I’m reading with another. I envy these fast readers who can sit down and complete a book in a few days. I’m more of a few weeks to a few months depending on the distractions around me type of person. There’s one book I’ve been reading for nearly a year now, I really enjoy reading it too so it’s not as simple as it may seem at first. I wonder if I’m a victim of how we process entertainment these days. I’m not sure I like calling myself a victim but more I’ve allowed myself to get caught up in the culture of short bitesize moments of pleasure.

I love a website called Aeon – which I’ve written a piece on here about before – that has some incredibly interesting articles. They’re not always a light read, not difficult but sometimes they require more effort than something on a website devoted to football. The articles on there are usually about three to four thousand words and despite knowing they’re interesting and that I can learn from them; a combination of the effort involved in the length and with the mental effort required slightly above minimum, I’ll not always bother. I prefer fiction books to non-fiction even if the topic in the non-fiction is potentially really interesting. Partly this is because I genuinely enjoy stories and the way meaning and message can evolve in this style.

The more I write about this I suspect I’m just lazy and ill disciplined. Aeon requires a bit more effort than football news and non-fiction potentially more than a story to follow and get into. I am leaping from one extreme to the other though, this is never a black and white argument unless I generalise which I seem to have been doing. This piece today was going to be another review and as seems to be a bit of a trend it was going to be a play. Dario Fo‘s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay to be precise. I’ve mentioned Dario Fo in a previous review of one of his plays, Accidental Death Of An Anarchist. He wrote political and social plays on the whole and this is a large part of what has drawn me to him. Take into consideration everything I have mentioned and you can see what leads me to a play. Something that’ll take me one to two hours to read followed by that rosy sense of accomplishment.

Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay is the story of two couples caught up in different situations in which people push the boundaries of stealing. The prices in the supermarket increase once more so the women riot and take what they want, only paying a minimum compensation to the shop. “I paid half price for half my goods”. While the husbands get caught up in similar as the canteen at work increases the prices and the workers simply serve themselves. Unlike the wives though the husbands take a stance against this seeing it as stealing. What ensues is a comedy involving fake pregnancies, avoiding the law and hypocrisy, all as Fo dissects the moral arguments behind whether there can be such a thing as justifiable theft.

The varying levels of hidden meaning in stories is what draws me to fiction. We can analyse what the playwright or the author intended with certain bits. I may not have appreciated it much at school but it is something I certainly enjoy now. For example, despite not having the most flamboyant of styles, I enjoy Sartre’s fiction far more than his non-fiction, even though they’re both variants of his philosophical discourse. Maybe lazy and ill disciplined is in itself a lazy understanding of something which as I’ve already mentioned is not a black and white issue. Interpretation for me is everything, and can’t pay won’t pay, I suspect I know what I would do.

The Elusive Secrets Of Writing

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Writing really is an art form once you get into it and understand it’s intricacies. What I am doing now is writing, that is surely obvious and it is one particular style of writing. I’m not entirely sure what style and while I hope that isn’t me exposing how little I understand of writing intricacies, I’m going to go with it being hard to explain and label your own style. That is probably just me making excuses of course as I’m self-conscious of describing my writing, especially if I get it wrong in the eyes of those who know. The reason I go into this is that I have started reading For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. I mentioned a few days ago when finishing The Old Man & The Sea that his writing style is very simple but that he manages to purvey a deeper meaning and understanding. While some write in technically complicated and convoluted ways he manages to get an equally deeper understanding across without turning the reader in circles first.

This is an art form in itself. For anyone who has ever written anything or appreciated others writing, getting deeper meaning and mood across is a challenging art. As I read this latest book though it does make me think of authors who write in similar simple prose yet write really badly. His writing is so simple but he does in it such a way that it is both accessible and with depth in the same moment. I’m not entirely sure how he does it though, it can’t just be short sentences. It is one of those books they teach children in school and it is clear to see why. Deeper meaning and accessible is a winner. There is a reason he won the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Fiction after all.

I mentioned earlier about long and convoluted sentences. Here I must hold my hands up and confess my guilt. In my defence I learnt how to write like this when studying part of my philosophy degree in that you need to make sure every angle of meaning is covered. The problem here is that it doesn’t allow the reader to form any interpretation for themselves and such long sentences can be both hard to follow and boring. There’s a website called The Hemingway App in which you can upload your work and see what reading age and grade it would be. It also gives advice on shortening sentences, whether sentences are hard or very hard to read and such things like excessive use of adverbs, passive voice or when simpler words would be better suited. I use too many adverbs for example and too many of my sentences are ‘hard’ or ‘very hard’ to read. My ego would like to think hard or very hard to read simply means they are written to a very high standard and level but my ego can miss the point sometimes. Up to this moment this piece is a Grade Nine which would be 14-15 year old’s. I rarely use this app but when I first discovered it did check out a few of my pieces for curiosity’s sake. I had a Grade Fourteen which I was very happy with myself over but generally they vary between Grades Eight to Eleven. Apparently we should aim for eight to nine if we want maximum reach. I don’t really know whether I want maximum reach but a fool would dismiss the importance of such knowledge. I hope not to be a fool forever.

Final Mark – Grade Eight

Teach Me O Wise Leader

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

There once was a man called William T. Riker. He was a fictional character in Star Trek, quite a popular and well known one apparently. There was also another man called William E. Riker, he was less fictional and created his own city called ‘Holy City’. He was a cult leader who also happened to be a conman and a white supremacist. Now is not the time for his story, I recommend either you check out his wikipedia page if you’re boring or listen to the latest episode of ‘The Dollop’ if you have a spare one hundred and two minutes and like jokes. In short though the city itself was at it’s height in and around the 1920s, 30s and 40s. It became a white supremacist theme park of sorts, people gave up their wives to him and he seemed to thrive on people’s attention. It was based upon his teachings of God, his love of Cadillacs and the ability to make money from selling fuel and access to peep shows. He also ran for political office multiple times and failed miserably each time. To put it simply he was a total character and he died a grumpy old man at the age of ninety-six. The land still contains one of the original buildings and was sold recently to Robert and Patricia Duggan for six million dollars. Robert Duggan recently made three and a half billion dollars selling an oncology drug and is a very wealthy man. He also donated twenty million dollars to The Church of Scientology making him their largest financial donor.

What I don’t understand, amongst many things, is how someone can look at that land and it’s history, I assume recognise it was once owned by a crazy cult and then turn around without one iota of irony and give twenty million anything to what is also clearly a crazy cult. The Church Of Scientology is based upon a science fiction novel, my brain does not understand the complexities of the human mind sufficiently to understand what it is that allows people to ignore that overwhelming fact. At least the Bible has fear built into it and large enough numbers to give it credibility in the minds of pack animals. When people started believing in the Bible we barely had science and still believed the world was flat…he says with a hint of irony. It also tells you that while money might be useful it’s clearly not the answer as people embrace whatever it is that Scientology has to offer. Do people living in the niche bubble of the super wealthy really have such lives devoid of the reality that we know, they see truth in a cult like Scientology? All the money in the world and they’re still searching for answers and happiness. Saying that we can’t dismiss the possibility that Scientology actually is the answer and that they allow themselves to appear to anyone who wasn’t denied the contact of a mother as a baby as crazies to keep the riff raff out. It’s a possibility but I’m sticking to the laws of probability here. I’m sure were I to give myself more time and read some psychology papers, if anyone has any please email them to me, that point out the everyday things I most likely do that are comparative to the offerings in a cult. Money, celebrity, power would probably feature but I would love to know the things I’m completely unaware of, the things I’ve been brainwashed not only into believing but so brainwashed I am unaware they are even things. Isn’t the mind wonderful. Now believe in mine for it is God. And give me your wife if you have one.