Mr Dostoyevsky receives some Rejection Letters

INT:

A small flat in St Petersburg; faded wallpaper, mahogany furniture.  Mr Dostoyevsky sits at his desk, half-way through his tea and toast, crumbs caught in his long beard, when he hears the post arrive.  He rushes like an excited boy to the doormat.   With trembling hands he tears open the envelopes.

_______________________

Dear Fyodor,

Thank you for sending us “The Brothers Kazaromov”.  Our reader found it excellent in places, but inconsistent.  She liked the character of Mitya very much, but felt that Ivan and Alyosha seemed thinly developed in comparison.

I’m afraid it’s not a book for our list.

With best wishes

Fran Danklin

_________________

Dear Mr Dustoyevski,

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work.

We are very sorry to disappoint you, but unfortunately it is not right for us.  
We are taking on very few authors a year and only when we are 100% convinced of their 
potential in today’s competitive market.

Good luck with finding it a suitable home for it elsewhere.

Best wishes

Loretta Belly

______________________

Dear Fyodor Mikhaylovich,

Thank you for sending me an excerpt of your book “The Brothers Karahazov”.  It seems a very literary and studied work, but I am afraid it is not for our list.

By way of constructive criticism, it is a good idea to open with an attention-grabbing scene, such as a murder, which sets the tone of the story from the start.  Our reader found that too much time was spent describing a rather uneventful family gathering in a monastery.

Other than stories which describe murders, we are also looking for romantic novels geared towards ladies.  Perhaps also I could suggest a non-de-plume that is more in keeping with our current list of chick-lit writers – such as ‘Jessica Reid’?

Nevertheless, I wish you every success with your future projects.

Randy Tellspoon

___________________

Dear Theodora Dostoyevsky,

Many thanks for sending me the first chapters of your novel “The Karamozov Brothers”.  It’s an inventive and gritty piece of writing but I’m sorry to say it was rather too literary for my taste and I couldn’t see it as something for the Harvill Secker list.

Thanks nevertheless for the chance  to consider this and best wishes in finding a suitable house for your work.

Stewart Williamson

___________________

Dear Tosspot,

Are you a celebrity?  No.  Please do not send us any more of your dreary and depressing work.  I do hope this marks the end of your doom-laden career.

Up your hole,

Jonathan Penguin

__________________

Mr Dostoyevsky drops the letters into a dwindling fire, wipes a tear from his cold cheek, and fills in an application form to be an accountant.

“Dear Mr Price, Mr Waterhouse, Mr Cooper…”

Under the Volcano

For some reason on this miserable Sunday afternoon, I had become apoplectic with rage.  Perhaps it was the coffee, perhaps it was the alcohol, perhaps it was the malfunctioning Mac computer which refuses to let me see the Apple Support page – I DON’T KNOW!  But I had to drag myself away from the eternally loading blank screen, pour a cup of tea and look at a great big book on Dada while the rain lashed the windows.  Filthy weather.  Then I remembered that I hadn’t seen the DVD that had come through the (delayed) post.  ’Under the Volcano’, directed by John Huston, starring Albert Finney, Jacqueline Bisset, and ‘plummy’ Anthony Andrews.  Not one of my priority titles on LoveFilm, but since I can’t even get the website to load, I get what I’m given and that’s fine by me thank you very much.  Buggers, my friends, can’t be choosers.

I stuffed that on my swag-bag-sized list during that honeymoon period with LoveFilm when you scour around for all the films you never thought you’d see, and which have finally (mostly) suddenly become available.  One tends to look for film adaptations of one’s library.  I haven’t read Malcolm Lowry’s book, but I bought it second hand, and it has a grotesquely fascinating cover.

The film begins with music as disjointed as the dancing skeletons of the Day of the Dead festival.  The first scenes are sumptuous, decadent, surreal.  I adored it.  Albert Finney, resplendently fucked in tuxedo and shades, ambling through scenes worthy of Hieronymous Bosch or Ensor at night.  He wanders into a bar, talking to a thin dog, drinking frantic shots of gin, whisky, tequila with his doctor, while a Peter Lorre film grins and cowers in a darkened cinematic room.  Hooked, I was.

The setting was gorgeous, exotic (to a dead white European male, which I suppose is the point), furious explosions of sunlight and flowers.  And then, of all things, the gorgeous, sparkling Jacqueline Bisset arrives to mix up that heady brew.  At some point during the middle of the film, I wanted to be there.  I wanted to feel the sun on my face, hear the enervating cries of the festival crowd, drink with Albert Finney and the chirpy Anthony ‘Sebastian Flyte’ Andrews, rip open that minx Bisset’s tight dress, and delve into the debauchery.

However, it soon turned nasty when the dwarf pimp shows up and it starts to rain.  A couple of guys dressed as death pick up their scythes and pop into the bar to keep warm.

Mr Finny is on the Mescal.

He speaks to an elderly lady, who explains that the chicken that stands on the table before her is also a donkey.  An over-persuasive gaggle of whores take advantage of Mr Finney, and give him a dose of the clap.  Not that he has much time to enjoy it, as he’s soon being distressingly intimidated by a group of Nazi-funded bandits who take exception to him talking to their horse.

Am I allowed to give away the very ending?  Surely you know?  Well, all I will say is that the film ends in the same manner as that with which the story is told – there is a sense of glorification in the absurdity of the situation.  Not just the situation of being an unemployed, alcoholic dignitary in Mexico, but (dare I say it?) the Human Situation.  We are left feeling that life itself is absurd, and tragedy only helps to re-inforce the fact.  But on what better canvas than to paint that existentialist message?

A hard lesson to learn indeed, but the perfect hang-over cure.

Advice for Young, Urgent, Would-be Artists

So you want to write a book or direct a film; you want your music to achieve the acknowledgement you feel it merits – you want to make a piece of art, do you?

I have compiled some guidelines to help you ‘make it’ in the thriving world of media, based on some similar sites I have found on the internet … on rainy days when the money’s gone.

1. Ask yourself if it’s worth it

Is it really worth it?  Can you really be bothered?  Is your work any good, or is it (as most sites prefer you to believe) a pale or middling crate of rubbish?  We are all mostly failures.

2. No really – are you really any good?

Well, I think we all know the answer to THAT one, Dostoevsky.

3. Have you targeted your audience?

Will your book look good mouldering in the disregarded slush pile of a publisher’s reader?  Will they be able to concentrate on the big words before they are rushed out to a two hour lunch break at a wine bar in Hoxton?  Will they be able to read anything afterwards?  Or would they prefer to listen to your CD?  Does your CD sound like something Simon Cowell would play when he cooks his famous bowel-churning lasagne for that woman he lives with who looks like Sinitta?  Or will he just slip on Dido as usual?  Is Simon Cowell then likely to treat Sinitta to an evening at his local theatre watching your play about the trials and tribulations of a Communist-era Russian dissident  who landed up in a Siberian prison, which is also about the Human Condition.

4. Surely we should all be kept in Proper Jobs?

They begin at 9 and finish at 5.  They like to remind us of our insignificance.  You get a boss who will be less gifted than you.  Humility and humiliation, and you may get to wear a headset like what they do in thuh adverts about money and that.  Glorify in the absurdity of the Human Condition.

5. Are you prepared to spend a lot of money without recompense?

Money for writers:

• some kind of computer or something
• Paper
• Envelopes (big)
• Extortionate stampage

Money for musicians:

• Computer or something with packages (expensive)
• Instruments (Very expensive)
• Hiring of venues (Very very expensive – some chance or recuperating)
• Musicians (Extortionate)

Money for film-makers

• Simply beggars belief.

6. Here’s the moment you may think about giving up.

The market is saturated with people like me, who want to avoid finding a real job, and people like David Beckham, who thinks he’s not earning enough by playing football and feels that he needs to write a book about it.  Times have changed.  If publishers must decide between publishing a cataclysmic novel by the new Tolstoy and a book that’s got something to do with Jordan, who do you think’s going to get the shelf space?  The public like tits.

7. They let anyone write anything on the internet these days.

They really do.  Fight the good fight comrades.

Hastie

Sideburn Observations in Modern Society

There seems to be a covert craze sweeping the land.

The balding, middle-aged man – that DARKEST of horse – has a new style affectation.  His SECRET NEW IDEAL is to fashion a smooth, shining, curved-earth crown on top of his head, cutting the fading hair very short indeed, and, just under the arm of the ubiquitous spectacle, allow the sideburn to grow into – at best – stubble.

Look around you, take a walk through the narrow alleys and wet cobbled streets into the heart of your town.  See the professional family man buying his Telegraph.  Look!  Bald, donning a pair of executive glasses, and under the thick black ear-hookers, what an extravagance of side-burn!

I would, if I could, draw a diagram of intersection, but this computer eludes me, so I have noted it down in one of my many notebooks.  I have based my studies on the head of a magistrate.  Executors, please take time to enjoy these extensive records when I pop my clogs.

The new guard is shameless.  The union of the Jake is on the rise.  I thought the free-masons were pretty sneaky and insidious (they’ve never asked me), but this new breed is deathly silent about its weird cult.

Perhaps it is just a phase.  Perhaps it is dangerous.  Perhaps it will catch on with the youths.

Perhaps Dan Brown will write a book about it in the new year.

Novels and that

If you want to have a look at the (yes, yes) rather slow uploading of my 1st novel “The Boredoms of Bluetts Porth“, it can be found here:

http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=4772#comments

The reason it is so slow – well – I’m trying to write at least 2 more, confound you, and possibly a play.

Hope you’re very well,

Your tired Hastie

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