I’ve been reading about New York during prohibition, thinking about Stanley Kubrick, and writing in the Edwardian mode.
This blog is what I do instead of starting yet another Substack newsletter.
You can subscribe to this blog (enter an email address, get updates when I post) using the widget at the bottom of the screen.
Or, if you use an RSS reader like Feedly or Readwise Reader, you can add this blog there.
This particular post is the third in an ongoing series inspired by someone saying: “I don’t really want to read writing advice from authors… I just want to know what they are reading and thinking and doing.”
If you follow me on Bluesky, you already have a pretty good idea of what I’m reading, thinking and doing at all times. These are some edited highlights.
Reading John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8
The entire premise of this post is a fib, by the way, because what I’ve really been thinking is “Ugh, I’m so ill”, and what I’ve been doing is sleeping, coughing, and generally feeling run down.
But I couldn’t lead with that because other people’s illnesses are utterly tedious.
When the flu was at its height, I couldn’t even read. I spent two days mostly lying in bed with my eyes closed, only half listening to podcasts and audio dramas. In a low key way, this made me somewhat anxious, because I knew I had a yearly reading target to achieve.
That target is a very manageable 50 books. It’s just challenging enough to make me take a book from the shelf and read it rather than looking at my phone, but not so tough that it becomes a chore. As the end of November came around, I’d read 47 books, and needed to stay on track.
When the flu began to lift, I grabbed almost the first thing I saw with an interesting cover, and that was John O’Hara’s 1935 novel BUtterfield 8.
It’s a startlingly frank, sexy novel, with an undercurrent of sexual sickness. Gloria Wandrous is a flapper (although that term had gone out of fashion by the time the book is set, in around 1931) with many boyfriends, and dark memories of being abused by a family friend when she was eleven.
Her latest boyfriend, Weston Liggett, is a married man unhappy with his wife and overcome with lust for the 18-year-old Gloria. When he unwisely takes her to the family apartment after a day of drinking, she steals his wife’s mink coat, which careless act brings everything crashing down around them.
I didn’t realise until after I’d finished it that it was based loosely on a true story, that of a woman with the equally unlikely name Starr Faithfull, born Marian Wyman in 1906. The truth is even more grim and sad than O’Hara’s reinvention.
What O’Hara does brilliantly is to capture the whirl of conflicting feelings and emotions in the mind of a young person who has not been well cared for. She’s sexually uninhibited, she’s socially conservative; she wants a platonic friendship, she is offended that her one platonic friend doesn’t want to have sex with her; she feels dirty, she knows she is the most beautiful woman in New York City. The most important thing is never to stand still, or be alone, or think even for a moment.
For the beer blog I’ve been writing with my partner since 2007 I wrote a post highlighting O’Hara’s depiction of the New York speakeasy – an incidental but not unimportant aspect of the book.
Stanley Kubrick
One of my favourite podcasts, Pure Cinema, recently ran a pair of epic episodes considering the complete films of Stanley Kubrick.
It’s just a podcast, not a documentary or an academic text, but within those bounds it was a great primer on the films I haven’t seen, and a reminder of what’s interesting about those I have.
It made me think I need to prioritise seeing Lolita, which I’ve put off until now because, well, I’m basically a prude, and even the basic premise of the book/film made me feel uneasy.
It also made me want to watch Eyes Wide Shut again, having not seen it since it was released in cinemas in 1999. Back then, I was bewildered and bored by it. Now, with a bit more life behind me and more patience, I suspect I’d get more out of it.
I should say that Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This seeded this idea. That’s less of a podcast and more like a documentary and in a series from a couple of years ago, Erotic Nineties, Longworth made a strong case for Eyes Wide Shut over the course of two long episodes.
As you might know, one of my particular obsessions is the way cities are recreated on studio backlots, like London in Los Angeles. One of the features accompanying the new Criterion Collection release of Eyes Wide Shut is a documentary about how Kubrick went about recreating New York in London, commissioning Lisa Leone, a friend of his daughter’s, to photograph the real New York in intense detail to inform the design of the set.
This feels like a fascinating creative project in its own right and there’s something fascinating about seeing photos of rubbish bins (sorry, trash cans) and shop fascias presented like evidence in a trial, or as if intended to communicate the concept of America to an alien from another world.
It’s also given me an idea for a project of my own. Watch this space.
Writing like an Edwardian
One of the principles behind my next collection of weird stories is to try to avoid nostalgia and retro pastiche. At the same time, I’ve written quite a bit of that over the years, and might put out a separate collection of only Victorian-Edwardian-style stories at some point.
As I have done for a few years in a row, now, I want to share a ghost story for Christmas on this blog. This time, I weakened, and decided to write something vaguely in the style of M.R. James or one of his contemporaries. It’s a long way from Municipal Gothic but what the hell, it’ll be free. The important thing, really, is that I enjoy writing it.
With that in mind, I’ve spent three evenings after work to get to a finished draft of about 2,800 words. What’s particularly enjoyable about writing in this mode is learning little historical details on the way. For example, you know those all-in-one underwear suits with a little flap on the bum? Those were known as ‘union suits’ in the US and as ‘combinations’, ‘woolly combinations’ or ‘woolly comms’ in the UK.
The story needs an edit and will be out in time for Christmas. Hopefully it’ll offer at least a little of the thrill of the real thing.
Broadcasts
I’m recording a podcast tonight, another episode of CinéClub with Joe Tindall, talking about the BBC ghost stories for Christmas and similar. That’ll be out before Christmas too, I hope.
A few weeks ago, with my professional hat on, I was the guest on another podcast talking about content design in healthcare. You can listen to that now.
Here on the blog, I wrote about AI art and how it stinks up anything it’s part of, even if it’s only used incidentally or for minor aspects of a larger work. It seemed to resonate with people.
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 