Category: postmodernist novel

Posted on

Writing OUT OF COMPETITION – part two: the prophecy

In the spirit of James Joyce’s explanation of how he wrote Ulysses, I’ll explain some of the writing markers I used in the writing of Out of Competition.

Out of Competition is my own private reversal of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Out of Competition foresees unfolding history in the 21st century.

Fortuitously, my novel is prophetic of 21st century events and cultural happenings on multi-levels.  If anyone doubts my prophecy claims, written in shorthand here, I have digital-copy demonstrating what I’m saying.

In 2010, after reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, I decided on a Russian invasion of a French Film Festival as the story basis for a novel.

Instead of a monumentally-misguided Napoleon in the summer, fall, winter of 1812 blundering his way into and around Russia for six months, Out of Competition’s Russian characters invade/blunder into a Riviera film festival one fortnight in spring in the near future.

My mind unconsciously led me to the subject of democracy. Even while writing up this subject I never consciously thought or believed that Democracy, its processes and institutions, were truly at risk in a developed country like the United States.

The Prophecies:

In 2014 and in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Writing Out of Competition descriptions of marchers and street violence appeared early, and were mirrored by later Black Lives Matter marches. I had no conscious idea these protests would explode during Trump 1. I didn’t know there would be gilet jaune protests in France either. I didn’t foresee the current protest anger against the French government.

While writing this novel I never thought the United States could be so fragile. Yet, we have witnessed American democracy disintegrate in the hands of an unqualified president, with disqualifying insurrection charges against him suppressed by the Supreme Court’s deliberate ignoring of section 3 of the 14th Amendment in the American Constitution.

In 2019-20, I completed the first-draft of a storyline based on my proposition that democracy is fundamental to the operation of an enlightened film festival, because in my view, if a culture, at all levels, does not meaningfully support democracy then democratic principles and processes are undermined throughout a nation.

The prophetic nature of my novel culminates in the denouement. Writing in 2021, one character, Merryl, manages an extraordinary 2 billion dollar box-office success after her written/directed Reinvasion of the Body Snatchers goes worldwide. In 2021, I hadn’t even heard of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie’s plans for making Barbie. The first I knew of their film was in 2023.

Posted on

OUT OF COMPETITION

Kenneth Patchen Award for the innovative novel

‘Laugh out loud funny’

Carla M. Wilson

5 OUT OF 5 STARS

Intelligent, provocative and fun

Cherry Jam UK, October 16, 2024 Review

Humorously subversive. It goes so fast I read it in two days. A must for anyone with a love of cinema and its festivals. And the most irreverent novel written about the South of France

5 OUT OF 5 STARS

Ten Years is Enough!

Read-fest UK, 9 September 2025

A sharp satire about democracy set in a Riviera Film Festival facing collapse as young cineastes demonstrate against privilege and lack of transparency in the annual voting shakedown, the novel opening with the kidnap off the streets of a desperate bankrupt Hollywood producer cadging money wherever he can

Out of Competition Ingram distributing, found at:

JEF Books

https://www.experimentalfiction.com/products/out-of-competition

Bookshop.org, bricks & mortar bookstores and online booksellers

Posted on

“Was Life Simpler Back Then?” Vol. 2. Opening arguments.

Novelists don’t write alone. The unconscious does the heavy lifting. While conscious, many writers can be like stenographers with a flair for editing.

What we say about ourselves consciously in any life writing or self histories has always to be viewed sceptically. An insight that seemed to me profound hearing it many, many years ago: it’s not what we put in diaries that counts. It’s what we leave out.

Does the unsaid in life writing count for more than the said? Some people are remarkably honest about themselves, but would I consciously leave out things in any life writing? Yes.

Autobiography is too self-aggrandizing. Fiction is more fun to do. Fiction frees up writers to find and tell truths he/she wouldn’t admit to when writing about themselves.

January 1979, while Safa, my best boss ever, and Noushi were packing to leave Hong Kong, I was busy writing letters to find new work. I had received one offer from NBC’s American office manager in their Hong Kong office. He had seen my work. NBC meant to me prestige, but assembling footage shot by someone else seemed a backward step.

I received a reply to my letter to Radio Television Hong Kong and went out to meet Stuart W., a former UK Nationwide daily editor. He heard me out and liked my experience. I got the job and became the director/producer of a Monday night ten minute aired film for a program called, Here in Hong Kong.

I was over the moon. After meeting an affable freedom-giving executive producer, Chris H., I felt at home. The choice of a film each week was mine, well mostly.

I soon found subjects, some better than others. Most of my early films were reasonable, some quite good. One on an opaque (at least to me) Chinese festival was absolutely awful. Making a ten-minute film every week was a treadmill but I learnt very fast, that as researcher, writer, director and producer of my own program I had little room for error. Choice of subject was crucial. Monday and Tuesday initially I would be setting up a film, Wednesday, Thursday I was out filming and if I were lucky Friday after film stock processing I would begin editing the film. Most Saturdays I was editing, often Sunday, me in a tiny cubicle with a film editor, then Monday morning, I would take the film for telecine transfer for the Monday night program at 6.45pm. It was never easy.

To put this in an international television producing perspective, BBC’s Newsnight, Panorama or even Nationwide would assign a researcher and a producer to a subject for three months. Late in the process a director and reporter would come on board. Meanwhile, I did everything alone all inside a week. BBC’s programs were longer, maybe a full hour, which I later did as well, but I never had a luxury of three months – maximum, three weeks.

Of course, the key is to find a subject in a single location and do it in one day. I wasn’t so good at that. And I wasn’t a trained reporter. I made films and to do that for me who prized the visuals above all else it meant multiple locations.

Occasionally though I had no say in what I was doing. One such project involved Chinese refugees pouring across the border. The Hong Kong Government wanted to tell the world what was happening. Stuart wrote the text to my film. I was sent with my film crew to meet a Colonel at a British army barracks near the Chinese border. During the afternoon we filmed general parade ground organisation, then after dinner with the Gurkha soldiers under command of a very affable Colonel of the regiment, we drove out to the border.

My crew and I had to document this all at night – if we found any refugees climbing the wire fence into Hong Kong New Territories, the land that adjoined China. We had one go at this. We sat nervously in the pitch-black night in a gully yards from the fence, where the soldiers said was a major crossing point, watching the motionless Gurkha with his nightscope. Except for the Colonel snoring, we had heard nothing. He was woken when a spotter began raising finger after finger. A few seconds afterwards we were told to get going!

My film crew was brilliant, camera shots sharp as portable lights lit up the night. We filmed a terrified group of young Chinese, sixteen to mid-twenties, dressed in traditional dark-blue Mao era outfits.

After having just climbed the wire, the images of their startled faces that night are etched into my brain. One or two held the fence to an iron pole as the others climbed silently up and down a fence that was at least twenty feet high. Stuart W. wrote the piece and Visnews sent the night’s filmwork of ‘the capture’ around the world.

It was my second international news scoop.

Posted on

Out of Competition and Democracy

Grifters, sharks, wannabes, liars, creativors cruise the seaside Promenade as an enfranchising of an entire festival grows out of protest, taking voting from annual juries and giving it to the fans, without whom the festival would not be.

When I was writing this the second invasion of Ukraine hadn’t happened. When I was in the the final draft oligarchs lived only in Russia. Now they’re hard at gaming America. When I was in the final draft, political sycophancy was in its infancy now it’s fully grown.

When I was in the final draft there was still an operational Democratic Party, now a couple State governors are performing CPR on its seemingly lifeless body. When I began writing this most of America believed in habeas corpus, personal and civil rights, accountability and independence of the judiciary.

When I was writing this novel it wasn’t clear how much damage the right wing of the Supreme Court could inflict on America.

Is American democracy at death’s door …..

The No Kings Protest, and then what happens..

Posted on

Narratorial Unreliability

Christian Mihai discusses his ideas on unreliable narrators, something he likes to see writers use, and a technique he says he uses himself. Still, he misses a fundamental point – all narrators, storytellers, dramatists, poets, are unreliable. From Homer, Shakespeare to Sartre, no writer tells, gets close to ‘the truth’, even if he or she is prepared to die in the process of collecting all the observable details of a factually based fiction.

Catherine Lacey

Do we trust Tolstoy’s account of Napoleon in War and Peace? Perhaps… if we are Russian.

Narrator unreliability doesn’t have to be a first person account, though the most obvious modernist exploitations of narrator unreliability in fiction use that form. The best approach – for this writer at least – is when the writer sets out to deceive us, and by convincing us that he or she has told the truth, transfers any doubt on narratorial reliability to a reader’s interpretation of the tale.

Posted on

Uncorrected Proof Review by Kristin Johannesson

Uncorrected Proof – Louisiana Alba


A review by Kristin Johannesson.“… the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion.” Fredric Jameson.ʻUncorrected Proof’ could be seen as a labyrinthically shaped many-dimensional map, pointing above and beyond itself by showing mirrored images of other places in literary time and space. And that’s one reason why you do not feel trapped by the, also present, postmodern paranoia. In this book as in real life. Painting pictures pointing beyond themselves out into a vast literary universe, you may feel lost in a labyrinth but it can, and for me does, feel like an opening, or a broad road, in it’s freedom to play out and stay away from an apparent order of themes according to fit the forms in the styles of the past, and norms or ideas of originality and individuality. The text stretches out of and becomes wider than the thickening plot, which is something I think can be inferred if employing multiple perspectives on the puzzle pieces presented – which, to use the map metaphor again, can be viewed from a distance at the same time as you are caught up in it/them.

In other words it does, in my opinion and to my appreciation, knit parodies and parallells into something in which it is possible to discern a pattern, in and through the somehow accented spy novel style, making the pictures and scenes full rather than fragmented in relation to the substratum one can sense somewhere in the heart of the text. To try and concentrate my impressions in one sentence I would describe it as confusion in association with the flexibility of not being one and itself. I have personally become deeply involved in this hectic story, and though I have read it over and over from cover to cover I still do not feel I am done with it. I use the word hectic as at many points there is a bit of a stressful atmosphere with the characters and the ones who in parts in their turn play the characters, as with the authors from various times and places who file past. Others such as the fishing scenes and the pasta recipes are a bit of a break, through being a bit more worldly.

Alba’s work in itself is in my view an original one. To pick but a few illustrative
quotes which echo my impressions when reading:

“It is not just a runaway relentless river of words following mental storms or unauthorized brainwaves”,

“Themes do not overflow story into labyrinths of uncertainty, ruthlessly impoverishing if not demolishing, exactitude”.Who in the book in the end is the one or ones who has/have done wrong, if there is such a one in the story, is hard for a non-literary person like myself to express. As for picking the parodies, who has written what may not be the (only) point of interest. Hopefully. I for one am unable to identify most of the over a hundred authors said to figure in the text. To try and espy one final conclusion, a main paradox may be that the novel builds a lot on parody/pastisch as technique and in turn plagiarism as a theme, which could lead to some interesting questions on where the line can/should be drawn, for what kinds of creators, and what you have the right to do what with/with what.Notes from the diary of the reviewer’s work
raw thoughts which c(sh)ould be refined. the truth may be purer in this version than in the next. i’ll go with the next one.

The first copy I read was from the library. I saw some review, got curious, and made a suggestion for the library to buy it (which is my normal way of getting many of the books I read). I read this first, borrowed, copy of the book, among other contexts, while washing clothes and while watching clothes wash.

—

1: Excerpt Six; Inside the plot (UP, Acknowledgements)
2: Excerpt Four; Archie thinks it through (UP, p 65)
3: Excerpt Five; Alessandro gets on the case (UP, p 71)
4: Excerpt Three; Archie & Cal try to sort it out (UP, p 81)
5: Excerpt One; Ellen Spartan contemplates her fate (UP, p 86)
6: Excerpt Two; Chaos at Folio (UP, p 109)

And later, through X months’ hard labour, resulting in the above, I won my own copy. Fair enough. And fair and square. “[I] found the order (or found the copy on Google Book Search 🙂 Either way, [I] did it.”

“Hi Kristin, the copy will be sent to you on Monday.”

I re-read it when on a flight to New York. And back. I might not have concentrated as hard as I should. At this moment a clarinet played by a neighbour is mixed with birds singing through the open window mixed in turn with relatively silent electroacoustic music from my computer. The temperature is very/too high. And in addition coffeepipyng hoot out of the glede. I also made my own correspondences between style, theme and reading. For example, eating haggis when I read the part on scots. “And yer nae even scottish”. I made the pasta in the recipes in the book when I read those. Following the instructions I did use olive oil. And then I didn’t. (But to use another one of my jotted down quotes from the book “every author lies in every case”, you shouldn’t take my word(s) for this. As for haggis, I’m a vegetarian.) I have also been pondering on the author. One personal (but still quite unoriginal, I have read this opinion in other places) guess on the subject of the author Louisiana Alba, is that this is not a non-fictional character. But I would not swear on that either. “Because I know nothing about this guy.” But I am a “friend” of “his” on Facebook. Some other intriguing passages are for example the equations describing how the book (the book(s) in the book/the actual book) was written, the question “Is that Heidegger quoting Kundera or Kundera quoting Heidegger or Homer Simpson misquoting both?”, and speaking of Homer; blurbs by Homer and Brontë, the pictures of authors on the cover, the thank yous to many more in the preface. The familiarity of them seem to cover and cushion some of the literary tumbles of the eponymous author, the implicit author, the fictional author and the reader.

As at the moment being involved in library and information science, I also at points in my reviewing progress saw parallels to knowledge organization and cataloging, as well as some kind of hyper- or at least intertextuality, in the alphabetical list of authors and artist in the preface, pictures of some of them quite neatly organised on the cover, and and as mentioned reminds me of a map – which a catalogue can be as well, often concerning documents such as literature and often interesting in itself in what has been chosen for representing and how it is represented, making new stories out of, as well as new relations and associations, between older works. Some of the charm of this book lies in it waking curiosity and associations, and some of the challenge with the book lies in it making you want to solve some of its riddles, such as where allusions are, to whom, and what this in turn might imply if interpreted “correctly.”

The Paste Land
“Lou maintains you have look through the prism of Duchamp’s Mona Lisa..the mustache on the most famous woman in art..Everything is a comment, a value add on, a parodic piece of fun, a slide off the original text into something else..built inside text which itself is built inside text and so on..Foucault’s comment in ‘What is an author’, an author is only a collection of statements that have come before, comes into play. Writers often play with borrowed stories (Shakespeare mercilessly so)..Lou referenced over 100 styles. T.S. Eliot borrowed from the whole of the literary world. The Waste Land could be The Paste Land. (You are quite free to use our emails as well if you like – Uncorrected Proof is an open book published by an open press)”

– Geoff Berry… ElephantEars Press – e-mail correspondence June 2010
http://elephantearspress.com