1476 – Vlad III Dracula defeats Basarab Laiota (great, great, great, great uncle of Ray Liotta,) with the help of Stephen the Great and Stephen V Bathory, becoming the ruler of Wallachia for the third time. (Wallachia is Romanian for “All the cheese”.)
1901 – Hubert Cecil Booth patents the vacuum cleaner. The machine is powered by a team of skinks locked inside and forced to share the same oxygen tube.
1922 – Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon become the first people to enter the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in over 3000 years, despite the glyphic saying ‘Do Not Make Up My Room’.
1948 — Addressing an audience at Harvard, Albert Einstein claims that he's so complex that only 3 women in the world can understand him.
1977 – 'Vrillon', claiming to be the representative of the 'Ashtar Galactic Command', takes over Britain's Southern Television for six minutes at 5:12 PM. It’s true …
ON THIS DAY, THURSDAY NOVEMBER 26th
Advice For Aspiring Novelists (2)
This is National Novel Writing Month, the month in which people try to write a 50,000+ word novel in 30 days. I made my own attempt, and wrote in a previous post about the sheer volume of (mostly pointless) advice for a aspiring novelists. But Cees Nooteboom, the deliciously quirky Dutch novelist, sums it up best:
"Try the next five things: try to get a little bit of asthma [like Proust], lay down in bed half-suffocated, line your room with cork, and write Remembrance of Things Past. As soon as you see that it doesn't work for you, try a lectern and smoke a pipe, or then again, before you commit suicide, go big game hunting [like Hemingway] and then from time to time write a novel about life. Or, well, whatever, do like Nooteboom: go to Spain, buy notebooks, and write 500 words a day with a fountain pen, Mont Blanc, of course. This happens to be my way of doing it.”
Here's Eleanor Watchtel's interview with Nooteboom.
A La Recherche De Tweets Perdu
I’m currently working on a Twitter novel: A La Recherche De Tweets Perdu, A Rememberance of Twats Past.
In Search of Lost Tweets recounts, through sensory experience, my privileged but troubled childhood in an age where children were seen and not heard, and even then were only allowed to speak 140 characters at a time.
Please follow me on Twitter, if you have the inclination.
@suddain
Excerpts:
Swann's Way. “I would go to bed early. Sometimes my eyes would close so quickly that I hadn't even time to say ‘Good morning, Henry’”
“… But before I knew it I would wake to the smell of fresh butter, the kind mother used to make me dab before church."
"... 'Wear your butter, always,' she used to say. 'Then you will be too slippery for the priests.' That buttery smell takes me waaaaaaaaaay back."
"The beach, winter, a strange time to go. Mother's strongman boyfriend, Krutz, would hoist me on his shoulders. He smelled of hocks."
"Once I sprained my ankle on a ham. Oh, how I bawled as I clutched that ham. Those were happy times."
"I recall at Easter we'd each get a ham. Not directly, but blindfolded we would search with our jambon de sensibilisation, our 'ham-sense.'"
"It might seem that many of my "recherches" are about ham. This is untrue. As a small boy I loved all God's meats, even the ungodly meats."
"There were bad times, too, like when Mother left me at the cat circus. At night I still hear cats, but that’s normal in a residential area.”
"But though acrid, the cat circus incident reminds me of my own lost cat, Nigel, and it begs me to continue … a la recherche du chats perdu."
Guest Science Blogger: The Parasitic Nematode
We are the parasitic nematode. We are small worms, but also so much more. Four out of five of us here on earth are nematodes. We are EVERYWHERE: in pastures, dunes, beneath the ocean floor, on cutlery, iPods, in Emma Bunting’s eyes. Where there's organic material, we are present in an abundance you can scarcely imagine, even with your complicated brains and “female’s intuition”. A handful of dirt contains at least 50 different species of nematodes, yet we never feel crowded.
“If all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable,” your nematologist Nathan Augustus Cobb wrote in 1914, “and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes and oceans represented by a film of nematodes. The location of towns would be decipherable, since for every massing of human beings there would be a corresponding massing of certain nematodes." To which his wife replied, “I am leaving you, Nathan, and I shan’t be back.” We know. We were there. We have always been there. We see what you do … in the night.
Anyway. The way you have chosen to spread your genetic material is strange, but it is nothing compared to what we have come up with. Behold.
Our mermithid nematode has a particular problem. Mayfly nymphs eat their eggs and then carry them until their deaths. When the nematode infects a female fly it waits until the fly returns to the water, then bursts out of her guts, a la John Hurt in Alien. But what if they’re eaten by a male? How do they get out? Well, the mermithid simply turns the males into females, a la Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society.
When the ant cephalotes atratus is infected with a parasitic nematode, its normally black abdomen becomes red and swollen, resembling the many red berries in the tropical forest canopy, thereby attracting the birds that normally feed on the berries, thereby distributing our eggs high and wide across the land, thereby blowing your freakin’ mind.
Now, most human people fall into two groups: those who believe that our curious behaviour came about through countless billions of micro-adaptations to our DNA over the ages, and others who believe that we could not possibly have come about through natural changes, that we could only have been intentionally designed. These people will describe at length how a magical sky-wizard created the earth in a ballistic seven day freakout, and then said, “You know what this place really needs? An organism that distributes its eggs by making ants’ arses glow red,” before taking another long draw on his skull-shaped, Jupiter-sized, cosmic love-bong.
Myself, I have no idea.
Now bow to us!
Find out more about the wonderful world of parasites here.
Advice For Aspiring Novelists
This is National Novel Writing Month. Across the world, thousands of people are furiously scribbling their tween-fang love epic, or their crime thriller about an attractive young body-language expert hired by MI5 to track a 21st Century Jack the Ripper copycat who targets promiscuous women in dance clubs, or their thriller about a young hacker fleeing for his life from a newly sentient Internet, or their retelling of Dune from the sand-worms’ perspective. I did my novel-in-a-month experiment last month and ended up with a first draft of a steampunk adventure for young adults that I am now too scared to read. But it was an enriching learning experience.
The volume of advice available on the web for aspiring novelists is quietly chilling. No, wait, I mean noisily chilling. The web provides a white hum of information on everything from plot development to naming your characters. Did any successful novelist ever need to subscribe to an ebook about naming their characters? How would Roald Dahl actually have responded to the spam-o-gram I got the other day?
“Uncover the Secrets of Writing a Kid's Classic QUICKLY!
Matt
Have you ever dreamed of writing a BEST-SELLING CHILDREN'S BOOK?
Imagine strolling into your local bookstore, and seeing your children's books lining the shelves. Children are reading, their imaginations sparkling. Your pride is bulging. And so is your bank balance! You're following in the footsteps of J.K.Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Roald Dahl, and many other popular children's authors.”
Imagine. You could spend a lot of time imagining. The industry that tells us how to write has now ballooned to compete in size with the industry that gives us things to read. Based on all the advice available, the secret to writing a breakthrough novel seems to be about keeping to a strict daily schedule: Rise early, collate your notes, name all of your characters, devise spreadsheet profiles for each, figure out where they went to school, or what they had for breakfast, re-arrange your desk, download an e-book on creating believable characters, colour-code your pens, Google “novel+structure,” stop the oven clock from blinking, get the temperature in the room to exactly 23 degrees, and plan a “brain-food” diet to optimise creativity. That way you can conceivably get to the end of the working day without having written a single thing.
National Novel Writing Month site
ON THIS DAY
NOVEMBER 4th
1677 – The future Mary II of England marries William, Prince of Orange. They will later ascend the throne of England together under the stage-name Tango & Cash.
1922 – British archaeologist Howard Carter and his men find the entrance to King Tut’s, a VIP only casino located in the Valley of the Kings.
1942 – World War II: Second Battle of El Alamein – Disobeying a direct order from Adolf Hitler, Rommel takes his officers on a 5 month retreat in the Swiss Alps.
1959 — The first Barbie doll is seen in America. People will criticise her for her “impossible body” and Mattel will reluctantly agree to remove her penis.
1967 — President John F. Kennedy appears on the cover of Playboy, giving America a first glimpse of his ‘Man-Hussy’ tattoo.
2008 — Barrack Obama is elected President of the United States. Doesn’t time fly.
Haiku: Prince (2)
[More extracts from ‘Hallucination Rain’, the collected haiku of Prince.]
Temple
Love come quick
Love come in a hurry
There are thieves in the temple tonight
Snowman I
Snowman, snowman
Another Christmas gone
I got a chess game this time
Moon II
Did we remember 2 water the plants 2day?
Eye forgot to look up at the moon because
Eye was too busy
Graffiti Bridge
The love that comes
From a warm heart in a cold, cold world
Everybody wants 2 find Graffiti Bridge
Trouble Winds
Lady, don't ask questions
I promise I'll tell U no lies
Trouble winds are blowin'
Water
Wendy?
Yes Lisa
Is the water warm enough?
Animals
Animals strike curious poses
They feel the heat
The heat between me and U
Oh, Face
It's only mountains (oh yeah) and the sea
(And the girls say)
There's nothing greater (oh), U and me
April Snow
I know that he has found another friend
Maybe he's found the answer
2 all the April snow
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