Radio | Fiction | Mr. Pipes Will See You Now. Mr. Pipes WILL SEE EVERYONE NOW.

See no evil, hear no - oh, no, shit, hang on, I can see it.

ANNOUNCER: The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Words.



[Music]

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen: the director of the Mercury Theatre and star of these broadcasts, Orson Welles.


ORSON WELLES: We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, man had created an artistic medium that was capable of creating a wider variety of illusions than had ever been attempted. We know now that as one loquacious Mid-Western gentleman would attempt to adapt a classic of the burgeoning science-fiction genre, a novel which was patently unreal, dealing in possibilities which required an incredible suspension of disbelief, for this same medium, that this same gentleman's vast, cool, and unsympathetic intellect would lead him to play a prank upon his audience. An experiment in creative adaptation which highlighted the clear difference between the slow stateliness of the old art and the immediacy of the new.


(Music)


ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our programme of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from Orson Welles.

ORSON WELLES: Afterwards Mr Welles specifically labelled the play as a prank - as a method of, as he put it, saying 'Boo' to a million people, no different from the April Fool's jokes newspapers play on their customers every year to this day. And certainly the fact remains that newspapers, through the written word, are capable of distorting reality to the same extent (as they did when they exaggerated the extent of the 'chaos' caused by the famous broadcast). But when we look at radio as the first medium in which fiction and reality could be presented together, side by side - potentially with no clear delineation between the two. Indeed, the very limitations of radio - the fact that it inhabits only an audio-space - means that the repeated assertions that War of the Worlds was fake went unnoticed by those who tuned in to a particular point. Imagination had its part to play. You can hardly imagine such a prank being so successful on television, where - no matter how large the budget, how jerky the camerawork or how magnificent the special effects - the cracks would begin to show.


PARKINSON: Except for Ghostwatch.


ORSON WELLES: Well, yes. But that played brazenly off the credibility of your non-fiction persona. It was also more of an ingenious attempt to manipulate viewers - is it really true that the writer wanted to play a silent, high-pitched frequency during the show's recording that would cause the audience's pet dogs to howl in distress in their own homes? You'd have caused a riot. Additionally...ah, godfuck it, you're right, aren't you?


MICHAEL PARKINSON: I think the issue you're trying to drive at, Orson, is actually one of the nature of our media. Both War of the Worlds and Ghostwatch did clearly state that they were fictitious. Hell, Ghostwatch was even on a drama channel. It had Craig Charles in it. I got possessed at the end! As an entire programme, it clearly didn't hold up to scrutiny. But with television and radio, unlike books - unlike films at the cinema - we switch on, and we start watching, in medias res, without any context. You would not dip in to the novel of War of the Worlds as a 'casual reader' and accept without question that it was a true story, would you?


ORSON WELLES: Whereas in order for both of our 'pranks' to function, context had to be removed - phone lines that were down for my broadcast, a BBC helpline that was oversubcribed for yours...yes, I see. Whereas novels simply aren't fast enough to create in ordinary, non-delusional people the impression that obvious absurdities are real. They can fake history, but not the present - and you'd need a fantastic string of coincidences in order to remove the possibility of context.


MR. PIPES: I actually disagree with that one. Reports of people actually going out to try and buy copies of the parapsychologist's book from Ghostwatch, in spite of all the newspaper headlines discussing the hoax the next day, suggest that there's actually a problem with word-of-mouth context (families calling each other up) trumping the dominant narrative, or even just an issue with people refusing to listen to any sort of logic when their emotional experience has been so powerful. Hell, I even knew someone who thought the Blair Witch Project was real, and the slightest amount of research would disprove that fact. Or what about the reports of the man phoning the BBC switchboard afterwards who insisted than Sarah Greene really had died during Ghostwatch and that it was now being covered up?
MICHAEL PARKINSON: Thank you, Orson. Now, we're lucky enough to have two quotations by famous fictional people on the show with us tonight. Marilyn Monroe and Homer Simpson.


MARILYN MONROE: I didn't have nothing on. I had the radio on.


HOMER SIMPSON: It isn't actually a quotation by me - it's a quotation by a nameless couple who discuss the fact that I attempt to cover the smell of my own flatulence by turning on the radio.


MARILYN MONROE: Both jokes concerned with the idea of radio occupying a very real space in the other senses beyond the audible. Yes.


MICHAEL PARKINSON: But we already know this, don't we? When we talk about the idea that horror is at its most frightening when little is seen, we're actually not going far enough - horror is at its most frightening when we see nothing at all. And while you were right, Orson, to accept that my prank worked successfully despite being on television, how much of Ghostwatch was actually a radio experience? The voices caught on tape, the howling cat-sounds, the phone-ins later on when viewers report their own hauntings caused by Mr. Pipes' manipulation of the televisual medium...it may be a truism to say that the imaginative space for sound is more convincing than that of the written word, but nevertheless, the failure of much of modern visual horror as a whole to take the possibilities shown by radio and use sound more effectively, to use voices more effectively...


MR. PIPES: Yes. Not just as that old professor reciting the Necronomicon or the ravings of madmen in Bioshock. To create the illusion of a present, not just the past...


MICHAEL PARKINSON: But hang on...wasn't Ghostwatch based around the true story of the Enfield Poltergeist? And didn't it take place ON THIS VERY BLOG?


[MR. PIPES possesses the internet through Silkworms Ink. Blogs all over the web are covered in nothing but manic repetitions of old nursery rhymes. Lights up.]


ORSON WELLES: This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that this article had no further significance than to riff on old beloved hoaxes. So goodbye, everyone, and remember - there's no such thing as a radio play any more, and if you should encounter in your back garden a disembodied voice speaking words that create a unique atmosphere of dread imagination...then you're probably watching a television drama in which the characters encounter an audio recording.

[Music.]

Name | Fiction | The Co-Authoring Fiasco

An intriguing paradox this week; a man in Oregon had his name legally changed to Captain Awesome, which, logically speaking, means that he cannot possibly be Captain Awesome. But as I Googled this peculiar news item, I found more and more results cropping up for ‘Man changes name’. ‘Man changes name to Buzz Lightyear’. ‘Man changes name to Optimus Prime’. ‘Man changes name to Monster Munch’. ‘Man changes name to Chev Chelios’. ‘Man changes name to God’. I tried doing the same thing with ‘Woman changes name’, and you know what I got? A bunch of results about maiden names. Okay, and one that said ‘Woman changes name to Princess Rainbow’. And another that said ‘Woman changes name to I Hate Thomas Cook.’ But still, there were less of them.



The obvious common denominator here is ‘awesome’. Names which are silly enough for the person taking them to claim that they’re obviously light-hearted and not to be taken seriously, but which are at the same time very, very calculatedly badass. Buzz, Optimus, Chev and the good Captain are all superheroes of a sort. I mean, even though it’s obviously light-hearted and not to be taken seriously, you’d never find anyone changing their name to Shit Shithead (you really don’t. I Googled it.)


Or what about Heath and Deborah Campbell, the New Jersey residents who kicked up a fuss last year because a store wouldn’t provide personalised icing for their three-year-old, Adolf Hitler Campbell, arguing that “Yeah, the Nazis were bad people back then. But my kids are little. They’re not going to grow up like that.” I don’t believe, I’m afraid, that Mr Campbell really was outraged. You don’t give your child that name without weighing the implications and expecting to get a reaction. Incidentally, Wal-Mart later agreed to ice the cake for little Adolf. Birds of a feather…


My point is, names have the greatest associative weight of any word (although I’d rather not get too deep into the semantics of it, seeing as…y’know, words are names). A man who feels he really isn’t all that awesome will call himself Captain Awesome. A man who wants to piss every vaguely intelligent person off and then accuse them of being irrational and unfair will call his child Adolf Hitler. A man who desperately craves attention will call his child Spiderman if 100,000 people notice he exists.


In the fiction world, of course, this leads to dubious advertising.

See this? This is the cover of The Moscow Vector by Robert Ludlum. Another classic thriller by the man who wouldn’t do anything that didn’t have ‘the’ in front of it.


…Wait a second. No, it isn’t. This book was published in 2005, four years after Ludlum’s death. It claims in the smaller print that it’s by “Robert Ludlum and Patrick Larkin.” In which case, it’s not really ‘Robert Ludlum’s The Moscow Vector’, is it? It’s more like ‘Robert Ludlum and Patrick Larkin’s The Moscow Vector’. And anyhow, how did Robert Ludlum co-author a book when he was dead? (Short answer: he didn’t. The novel uses his characters and setting) And if Ludlum didn’t really write it, why is there a critical blurb from the New Yorker on the front saying that he “transcends the genre”? I mean, if Ludlum didn’t write it, then it’s really just an unrelated opinion, right?


It may seem like a cheap trick to you; you may also think that it’s easily seen through. But, on Amazon, there’s at least one customer reviewer saying cheerfully that he thinks it’s “written in a much better tone than the other book of Ludlum’s I’ve read.” Because the eye is drawn to that name, to that damned familiar name. It doesn’t help, either, that the Kindle edition doesn’t mention Mr Larkin’s name as well.


I like to think I’m worldly enough to understand that the airport-thriller publishing business is not necessarily full of martyrs to artistic integrity, but…well, I mean, even Hollywood wouldn’t stoop to this sort of appalling cheating of their own customers. Giving your big name cameo third billing is one thing, but this? Just imagine if – God forbid – Clint Eastwood were to pass away, and a few years later, I directed and produced Gran Torino 2: The Legend of Walt’s Gold, and called it Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino 2: The Legend of Walt’s Gold. And I put underneath it, ‘“Eastwood is a genius!” Time Out’. It wouldn’t work. Partly because Clint himself would almost certainly rise from the grave in protest and put a bullet between my eyes, possibly while playing some mean jazz piano.

Now seeing as how this is Ravel's 'Gaspard de la Nuit', the most difficult piece of piano music in the world, I just got one question.

But also because there’d be a public outcry. People would be well aware that Clint was dead, because he’s famous not in the sense that a novelist can be famous, but really famous. He’s a constant visual presence in the media. Whereas with even an internationally-renowned writer like Ludlum, his name – his brand - is always around, but he has no real public identity himself to speak of. Fran Lebowitz was speaking of this condition when she joked that “the best fame is a writer’s fame. It’s enough to get you a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted while you eat.” It isn’t as pithy, of course, but I would posit that she’s wrong to put the levels of fame on a straightforward sliding scale like that. The writer can get a table by using their name; but they pass through life unnoticed by people who may have read their books because they have no face. Even a cover photo may not be enough.

And I’d argue, too, that increasingly this may not be the best sort of fame. A name can be usurped in a way that a face cannot (Well, maybe apart from that science-fiction film that recycled clips of Orson Welles as a character. But that was dreadful, and it’s been quickly forgotten.). More and more big-name authors who are very much alive – Bernard Cornwell and Clive Cussler, to name a few – are cashing in on this ‘co-authored’ thing. How long before the author’s name really does become the publisher’s brand?

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor

Wider Reading | Fiction | The Unbearable Meaningfulness of Being Overweight (In Fiction)

I mentioned to one of my fellow editors over the weekend that London is a city full of intimidatingly beautiful people. Well, in the summer, it gets worse. All of the models who pass for female inhabitants start wearing astounding dress-things for walks in the park; all of the men slip into white T-shirts that are too small for them, solely for the purpose of oppressing me with the size of their biceps. In London, I feel so ugly I keep thinking a policeman’s going to come up to me and ask me if I have a licence for that face.

Joyce's Bloom.

It was always my plan, this week, to write about ‘wider reading’ by discussing the role of the overweight hero or heroine in fiction. (Phil Brown’s splendid Wikipedia piece has managed to make this interpretation of the theme seem not only flippant and tasteless, but also bland.) But there is, I think, something there. Beth Carswell’s written an interesting piece about how a character can never simply be overweight; there will always be significance in that, usually the implication that the character is greedy or idle. And I think there’s a lot of truth in that, even if it’s used sympathetically. Leopold Bloom’s stoutness, at least in part, represents that he is a man driven by his desires and his appetites, setting him up for his famous day in which he is consistently led astray. Many female readers identified with Bridget Jones’ eternal drive to get her life together, as exemplified by her attempts to lose weight. Even Rumpole of the Bailey’s girth spoke to his jolly sense of mischief and his Falstaffian ebullience. Carswell argues, too, that fat children in fiction are almost always divided into two specific groups; bullies, and victims of bullies, to be hated for their size, or to be pitied for it, which is a good point - the Piggies and the Dursleys, for example.



We discussed this for a while, and couldn’t really come up with any characters in fiction who are overweight without their weight being used in any way to typify them. In TV, however, and in film, there’s quite a few – Charlie Kane being the most famous of all. And that’s got to be partly because of the immense talent of actors like Orson Welles, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and James Gandolfini, to name a few, who have never been willing to play ‘the fat guy’ (as many lazy comedians do). So the visual arts do win out over prose there, I’m afraid, though it isn’t an absolute victory – could an overweight actress really get serious dramatic roles, or would she be more likely to end up in these sorts of films?

But there’s another reason, too, for this sort of thing. In the movies, a cigar can just be a cigar, because there are a great many people working on them, and some of those people are employed to fill in the little set details that don’t actually matter. Prose, the vast majority of the time, isn’t like that. There’s just one person, all by themselves, trying to create a world out of syllables – and, whether they know it/like it or not, every syllable is significant, because you’re using it to show your reader a little more (even if all you’re showing them is that you’re a bland, unimaginative douche). Every detail is a prop in the theatrical sense, not the cinematic – it’s there as a tool to give a sense of a world where there shouldn’t be a world at all.



So I’m issuing a challenge myself, though this is less a call to arms than a tentative cry of,

“Shall we just have a quiet night in, then?” Writers; come up with a story featuring a character with unusual physical qualities. They might be overweight, or have a hunchback, or be very short, or even be entirely disabled. But this characteristic must have no bearing on their personality or the themes of the story whatsoever. Neither may the story be an earnest and signposted attempt to show that obese/disabled/in-any-way-different people are just like ‘us’ ‘normal’ types; that, in my opinion, is cheating (not to mention patronising).



Or, if you prefer, I’ll even widen the field; the challenge is to write a story, a sentence, a word, that has no significance, no meaning to it, no intent behind it, whatsoever. Harder than you think, I think.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor