Time is a jet plane, it just moves too fast (10/12/15)

I'll be honest shall I? I'm just popping in briefly to try and write myself clear of a bit of a block. I'm in the middle of this novel - writing not reading, I'm in the middle of reading loads of novels. Current record is the thirty three years that I've been in the middle of reading 'God Emperor Of Dune'. Started reading it in the month I spent in Walton Hospital in 1982 with a medical condition that only afflicts the under tens or the over seventies. Just to defy medical expertise I managed to get it at eighteen. Appalling month only alleviated by the fact that Radio One still played good music (ABC, Haircut One Hundred, The Associates) and the presence of a very attractive nurse from Dundee.

J reckons that being in the middle of a book for 33 years doesn't count as 'being in the middle of', she reckons that it means I've actually stopped reading it. The fact that the bookmark - dirty faded MPTE bus ticket - is still in place apparently counts for nothing.

The book that I'm in the middle of though - the book that I'm in the middle of writing, that is - has just hit a bump. The bit I'm working on - and let's bear in mind that it's a first draft so anything could change - is a beat of development for the character and it's needed and it needs to be paced a little slowly and I've got a bit bored of writing the detail and researching actual facts and bored of the fact that there's honest to god actual genuine maths involved. There's also far better punctuation than that last sentence involves. There's one other problem; the main character, who had been so positive and ambitious and energised has suddenly become a whiny little sod. This might be something to do with the bout of flu - not manflu, actual FLU - that I've been wandering through for the last week; the physical hangover from the virus infecting the fictional work. Or it might be that I'm a whiny little sod myself.

Whichever. Stuck is stuck. So I'm breaking state by coming here to ramble/mumble bit. As ever, I've been accompanied in all this by a musical soundtrack trying to find a way trough to the right mood. I tried U2 Achtung Baby for a bit of warped energy but all that made me think of was that when the advance play cassette (it's that long ago, old technologies) turned up at the shop (Leeds Trinity at the the time, not there now, patch of waste ground next to the big new shopping centre, got a great photo of our Tom from summer before last when we went to look at Leeds Uni - he's stood in this space that only I know used to be the front counter. Ish.) I rang product at head office to say the tape was faulty as it was all muffled and distorted. No, sorry, that's how Zoo Station sounds and it's about to revolutionise live music. Genuinely, look back, Zoo TV changes everything; I was watching Bowie's Glass Spider tour the other week, not shocked by the terrible quality of the show but amazed by the absolute lack of screens. Couple of years later and everyone has screens and it's Zoo TV that changes it all.

U2 didn't work. Scrolled on the iPod (now old technology in itself) came across the one Tori Amos album that I have on the old machine: 'Strange Little Girls'. It's the one where Tori does cover versions but of course, Tori being Tori, she can't just 'do' covers, there has to be a reason, a theme, an ideal, a concept. All the covers are songs about women written by and performed by men, Tori's reclaiming the women in those songs. Or something like that. It's pretty bloody great to be honest. She does 'Strange Little Girl' by The Stranglers, 'Rattlesnakes' by Lloyd Cole, 'New Age' by The Velvets, 'I'm Not In Love' by 10CC and then she does this song that's hushed and quiet and piano led and romantic and you can hear how close she is to the microphone and the words are gorgeous and they go like this:

Well the smart money's on Harlow
And the moon is in the street
The shadow boys are breaking all the laws
And you're east of East St. Louis
And the wind is making speeches
And the rain sounds like a round of applause
Napoleon is weeping in the Carnival saloon
His invisible fiance is in the mirror
The band is going home
It's raining hammers, it's raining nails
Yes, it's true, there's nothin' left for him down here

And they all pretend they're Orphans
And their memory's like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can't remember
Tell the things you can't forget that
History puts a saint in every dream

Well she said she'd stick around
Until the bandages came off
But these mamas boys just don't know when to quit
And Matilda asks the sailors are those dreams
Or are those prayers?'
So just close your eyes, son
And this won't hurt a bit

Well, things are pretty lousy for a calendar girl
The boys just dive right off the cars
And splash into the street
And when she's on a roll she pulls a razor
From her boot and a thousand
Pigeons fall around her feet
So put a candle in the window
And a kiss upon his lips
Till the dish outside the window fills with rain
Just like a stranger with the weeds in your heart
And pay the fiddler off till I come back again



It's 'Time' by Tom Waits. It's the only track that she doesn't distort or alter in any way. She can't because it's perfect. It's from Rain Dogs, the album that I've now been sent straight back to, the album where Tom famously 'discovered the cow bell as an instrument of torture'. It's the album that builds the bridge from the bruised balladeer that he once was to the odder, darker figure that he became. From the prematurely aged old soak that Heath Ledger based his whole Joker performance on (check it on YouTube, search Tom Waits Joker and realise that it was all Tom) to the folk devil that some time later will enquire 'What's He Building In There?'.

It's beautiful. It's simple and stately and desperately sad and says everything that it needs to in less than four minutes and like all the best of his early work there's an entire world in four verses. I've no idea who any of these characters are but they have all the vivid life of any of Dylan's post 65 constructs. Napoleon and his invisible fiancee? No idea but there's a long story of loss and heartbreak in that solitary saloon figure. Matilda asking the sailors if those are dreams or prayers? Is she the Matilda that appeared in 'Tom Traubert's Blues'? (You know the song, you don't think you do but you do you may not know Tom's but you've heard Rod Stewart's pretty okay really version of it.) There's a sense of humanity and a sense of place. You may have never been 'East of East St Louis' but you feel it, you know where it is you know the sound of a wind that's making speeches and a rain that sounds like applause. And it contains the line 'their memory's like a train, you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away' which at this moment may be one of the greatest things ever written.

It's everything in four verses. It's a world filled with reality and humanity and character and we may not know anything about the people we've spent this time with - and least of all the narrator - but we can feel them and they'll stay with us. It's what he does with 'Downtown Train' and 'Small Change (Got Rained On With His Own .38) and 'Diamonds On My Windshield' and 'Martha' and everything, EVERYTHING else. Somewhere, sometime, someone needs - and I mean NEEDS to pull together a Tom Waits musical; a 'Streetcar Named Desire' with a beat poet sensibility and sensitivity. Might get on it next. For the moment though, I'm writing this to try and clean out a character's mind by taking a break from him and I'm looking at this song for the millionth time and standing in awe of every second of every song and knowing that this isn't the mood I need to write the thing I need to write but I'm going to have a hard time leaving it and I know what I'm aiming for in everything I do, I'm aiming to create a universe as complete and beautiful and broken and distraught and destroyed as this. Genuine, simple, casual genius.