Authors Electric

  It’s highly probable that only older readers will remember the success of The Goon Show . In school, the day after the latest adventures of Harry Seagoon, Eccles, Bluebottle and the rest had been broadcast, we repeated them to one another, quoting the best bits (of which there were unfailingly many), doing the voices, and laughing all over again at the genius Spike Milligan’s imaginings. A quarter of a century later most of those same readers would probably have been part of the audience demographic for Monty Python’s Flying Circus , and joined by thousands of adherents less advanced in years. There were predecessors, of course, all bringing a world view that was mildly anarchic, certainly surreal, and whose principal aim was to entertain or, put more crudely, to provoke unreasoning, energising laughter. Then, later, when I’d fooled enough people enough of the time to get a job in a university, part of my good fortune was to give lectures and tutorials on, among other thing...

For this blog to make sense I need first of all to set out my religious or spiritual beliefs.  That's easy.  I don't have any. I care about people but I have no time for the artificial systems they’ve created. I'm not knocking any specific religion but anything which peddles the idea of delayed gratification makes me angry.  When people are suffering in this life, why make it even worse by promising that the next one will be better? I realize that most people reading this will disagree with such a position and probably not even have read this far.  But, however it appears, it's not my intention to alienate them or get into religious debate.  I recognize their right to their own opinions, and that their beliefs are as valid for them as my absence of belief is for me.  This is just the background for the main point I want to make. This is an absurd triangle. It’s said to be an ‘Illustration of a mathematical proof by contradiction’. Don’t worry, I’m n...

I usually prefer my monthly blogs to be fresh but, very occasionally, there’s so little ‘freshness’ discernible in the daily antics of the appalling people who govern our destinies and nothing in everyday life that’s not thoroughly depressing that I resort to revisiting some ancient topic I covered in my own blog. Quite frequently, it’s the seemingly inescapable evidence of absurdity  that provokes the piece. This month, however, rather than the bleak absurdity of the cynically mendacious and immoral Johnston, Trump et al’s words and deeds, which confirm the fundamental, philosophical inescapability of the absurd, it’s the version embraced by Jarry, Ionesco The Goons and others who step back from reality and recreate their own version of it for comic effect. Theirs is a sort of harmless absurdity, an expression of amused but extreme disbelief at the charades we all live. So many of the ways we behave must make God sorry he didn’t choose a different species, such...

Mtpaley at English Wikipedia. - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Furado., CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12143691 We’re all indebted to Sir David Attenborough for continually adding to our knowledge of the natural world over the many years of his broadcasting career. There is, however, one question (perhaps the most important) which I’ve never heard him answer – or, worse still, ask. It was brought home to me again by his BBC series last month,  Dynasties . It was magnificent, enthralling, and all the other adjectives one usually applies to his revelations, but it was the second in the series that provoked these bloggy musings. As a species, we humans (especially the advantaged ones in Europe, the Americas and, for all I know, Australasia) have to tolerate incomprehensible phenomena such as politicians and existential angst, but imagine being an Emperor penguin... To begin with, they all look exactly the same – males, fema...

Five years ago, I wrote a blog entitled Vitamin pills, toilet rolls and philosophy . It was simply to offer light relief amongst the specific miseries of that period and give a loose idea of the strangeness of the world I inhabit. I’m repeating it here because of two recent events. First, there was a fascinating, informative (and very long) article in The Guardian . Then came the opening of Tom Stoppard's latest play, The Hard Problem , which examines the issue of  the coexistence of 'brain' and 'mind'. Thanks to those events,  I now see that, far from being the ravings of a disturbed psyche, my absurd confessions were part of an ongoing philosophical argument about consciousness  and may qualify me for the role of a modern Brahan Seer . The Guardian article examined the mystery of awareness. Its arguments were too complex for my tiny brain to summarise here but it seems that philosophers, neuroscientists, poets, religious people and all sorts of others have...

by Bill Kirton (I know I used this book cover on last month's blog but it's relevant this time, too. Anyway, I've also messed around with the image and added the official accolades it's gathered - spoiling Sessha Batto's lovely cover design in the process. Sorry Sessha. It's another of my feeble attempts at marketing.) Sometimes, in workshops or talks to writing groups, I remind people that you don’t ‘write a novel’, you write some words, then some more words, then some more – and eventually there’s a substantial pile of paper on the desk and you realise you actually have written something that’s a lot longer than a short story. I then add that, although that makes it sound easy and unstructured, it’s not, and I have great respect for the form and conventions of novel-writing. But it was a realisation that dawned on me as I was writing my first novel, which, after several years and many rewrites, became The Sparrow Conundrum . It’s also a reminder of th...