Lord Byron learned to love despair. I wish I could

Van Morrison talked to Ian Rankin about songwriting and Edna O'Brien read Madame George in a special event at London's Lyric Theatre

Van Morrison was celebrated in a night of words and music at London's Lyric Theatre, featuring Edna O'Brien (far right)

Irish poet Michael Longley promised a unique night, and "Van Morrison presents an evening of words & music" was certainly that, not least because we heard Edna O'Brien reading Madame George as a poem.

The event, at London's Lyric Theatre, was to mark a new book brought out by Faber, Lit Up Inside, which contains the lyrics to nearly 200 Morrison songs, presented as poems.

So was Van the Man lit up? At times, definitely, but there were also moments of vintage deadpan Morrison. The second half of the evening was a concert. He introduced Foreign Window by saying: "This was partly based on a documentary about Lord Byron in which he said 'I have learned to love despair'. I wish I could."

It was mainly chatty Van rather than grumpy Van treading the boards, though, and novelist Ian Rankin did a good job of drawing out anecdotes during a 25-minute question-and-answer session. We had listened to Dr Eamonn Hughes talking about Morrison and watched film footage of Morrison singing with Bob Dylan, and when Rankin asked him how many people have had Dylan as an accompanist, Morrison said: "Harry Belafonte, for one." Asked by Rankin about shows like the X Factor, and whether they were for people "selling their souls", Morrison replied: "Nothing has changed. I wish it had."

The thing about Morrison is that he adores music. Old jazz musicians who know him will tell you that he is passionate about the music of his youth – Morrison is 69 – and he was fulsome in his praise of blues musicians such as Sonny Boy Williamson, Leroy Carr and Lightnin' Hopkins. "It's difficult to understand how people supposed to be so uneducated, like Lightnin', were coming up with Elizabethan language and imagery in songs that were like poetry," Morrison said. He talked here with real fondness about the jazz and blues he had heard as a boy, both from his father's record collection and by listening to AFN radio. "Ray Charles, Sidney Bechet, Mahalia Jackson singing the Lord's Prayer. It was only years later I realised that wasn't normal. I heard Lenny Bruce doing a sketch about Stars of Jazz when he was an in-thing."

Longley, 75, told the audience that what he and Morrison talked about most was jazz: Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith – "where it began" – and the man known as Dr Jazz of Belfast, the late Solly Lipsitz, who ran the Atlantic Records shop on Belfast High Street.

If there was a point to the evening, and to the book, it seemed to be to place Morrison among the literary figures of Ireland. Morrison compared himself to William Blake (he had London, I had East Belfast seemed to be the gist) and used the term 'Blake-ian' three times. But it wasn't all portentous. Morrison has a funny side (he is a fan of Spike Milligan and The Goons and is good at impersonations) and this came across in a few replies to Rankin. After Morrison said that "I wrote poems before I ever picked up a guitar", Rankin asked if a young boy in Belfast would have had to hide his poetry writing for fear of being beaten up. "My first poem was about a shipyard and you wouldn't have been beaten up for that," Morrison joked. He was also witty when Rankin listed the writers Morrison had name-checked in a song (Beckett, Joyce and Wilde), with the singer saying: "Yes, and George Best and Alex Higgins, too."

But both Longley and O'Brien repeatedly described the songs they were reading as poems. O'Brien admitted that she has always been "a little stuck on him" and said she thought he was "in the business of making magic". The 83-year-old author of The Country Girls read his Astral Weeks song Madame George particularly well – and it would be easy to trip up over the lines:

'And the love that loves to love,
That loves the love that loves,
The love that loves to love,
The love that loves to love,
The love that loves.'

Morrison, dressed in his John Lee Hooker outfit (dark hat, dark suit, sunglasses), had already left the stage at that point to prepare for his concert.

^{Edna O'Brien said: "Like everyone, I was a little bit stuck on Van Morrison." REX}

^FEATURES

So what did we learn?

• That he connects with Samuel Beckett, especially in a love of repetition of words and an agreement about having to go on despite a "sense of despair and futility".

• That the song Moondance started as an instrumental, which he had been playing as far back as 1965, when he used to jam on saxophone in Notting Hill with Mick Fleetwood on conga drums. Have I Told You Lately (that I love you) also started as an instrumental.

• That Tore Down a la Rimbaud took eight years to finish – the longest it's ever taken him to complete a song.

• That part of his early song Mystic Eyes was inspired by the scene in Dickens's Great Expectations in which Pip meets Magwitch.

• That he was a big fan of Sixties English folk singer and guitarist Steve Benbow.

The concert, just under an hour, was enjoyable. This was gentle Van with a tight, acoustic, four-piece backing band (piano, double bass, drums, guitar) featuring brief, chatty explanations of the songs he played, including Alan Watt Blues, Wonderful Remark and Why Must I Always Explain. There was a jazzy version of Into the Mystic.

 ^{Van Morrison in 1965 REX FEATURES}

The highlight, showing Morrison at his PLAYFUL best, was a version of Coney Island. In the foreword to the book, Rankin says of Morrison's music: "There was a search for the spiritual in the commonplace . . . But there are also stories teeming with incidents and characters and grand travelogues, and extolling of life's simple pleasures."

That's true of the spoken song Coney Island, which Morrison said had a significance because as a boy, around 1959, he helped deliver bread in the van for Stewart's bakery in East Belfast and he would have to get up at 5am to make deliveries at the beach in Coney Island. Belfast, of that time, resonates in some of his best songs about Orangefield, which was still almost a village with cobbled streets when he was growing up.

 ^{Van Morrison inscribed a copy of Lit Up Inside to writer Ian Rankin, who wrote the foreword PHOTO COURTESY OF IAN RANKIN}

Although Coney Island had been read out earlier by Longley, Morrison played around with the composition, telling the affluent audience that "jam jar" was "Cockney rhyming slang for car" and, with a grin, changing the emotional end to the song, which is about a car journey across the glorious countryside of Northern Ireland, to include the joke:

'And all the time going to Coney Island I'm thinking,
Shall I drop you off at the next corner?'

For Morrison fans the book is interesting (although for the £500 deluxe version you might want your own Van the Man house concert), not least because you can finally learn some of the lines to songs such as Bulbs, in which I now know he sings about someone called Ada:

'Now Ada was a straight clear case of,
Havin' taken in too much juice.'

You also get a sense of the range of his writing and some of the bleakness in lesser known compositions such as Not Supposed to Break Down:

'Fifteen families starving,
All around the corner block.
Here we're standing so alone,
Just like Gibraltar Rock.'

But Longley was right. This was a unique event, right down to Morrison, no isolated rock for once, exiting stage left, whispering like a revivalist preacher, as he sang a line about crossing a river.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/11237541/Van-Morrison-Lord-Byron-learned-to-love-despair.-I-wish-I-could.html#

What is Creative Writing?

Creative writing is anything where the purpose is to express thoughts, feelings and emotions rather than to simply convey information.

I’ll be focusing on creative fiction in this post (mainly short stories and novels), but poetry, (auto)biography and creative non-fiction are all other forms of creative writing. Here’s a couple of definitions:

Creative writing is writing that expresses the writer’s thoughts and feelings in an imaginative, often unique, and poetic way.
(Sil.org – What is Creative Writing?)

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.
(Don DeLillo)

Writing of any sort is hard, but rewarding work – you’ll gain a huge amount of satisfaction from a finished piece. Being creative can also be difficult and challenging at times, but immensely fun.

How to get started

Many people think that just because they’ve read a lot of stories (or even if they haven’t!) they should be able to write one. But as Nigel Watts writes:

There is a common belief that because most of us are literate and fluent, there is no need to serve an apprenticeship if we want to become a successful wordsmith. … That’s what I thought until I tried to write my first novel. I soon learnt that a novel, like a piece of furniture, has its own set of requirements, laws of construction that have to be learnt. Just because I had read plenty of novels didn’t mean I could write one, any more than I could make a chair because I had sat on enough of them.
(Nigel Watts, Teach Yourself Writing a Novel)

By all means, if you’re keen, jump straight in and have a go: but don’t be too disappointed if your first efforts aren’t as good as you’d hoped. To extend Watts’ metaphor, you may find that these early attempts have wonky legs and an unsteady seat. There are lots of great books aimed at new fiction writers, and I’d strongly recommend buying or borrowing one of these:

• Wannabe a Writer? (Jane Wenham-Jones)
• Teach Yourself … Writing a Novel (Nigel Watts)
• How to Write Fiction (and Think About It) (Robert Graham)
• On Writing (Stephen King)

I’d also recommend starting small. Rather than beginning with an epic fantasy trilogy, a family saga spanning five generations, or an entire adventure series … have a go at a short story or a poem.

And if you end up chewing your pen and staring at a sheet of paper, or gazing at a blank screen for hours, try kickstarting your writing with a short exercise. Don’t stop to think too much about it … just get going, without worrying about the quality of the work you produce.

Tips and tricks for beginners

• Do some short exercises to stretch your writing muscles – if you’re short of ideas, read the Daily Writing Tips article on “Writing Bursts”. Many new creative writers find that doing the washing up or weeding the garden suddenly looks appealing, compared to the effort of sitting down and putting words onto the page. Force yourself to get through these early doubts, and it really will get easier. Try to get into the habit of writing every day, even if it’s just for ten minutes.
• If you’re stuck for ideas, carry a notebook everywhere and write down your observations. You’ll get some great lines of dialogue by keeping your ears open on the bus or in cafes, and an unusual phrase may be prompted by something you see or smell.
• Work out the time of day when you’re at your most creative. For many writers, this is first thing in the morning – before all the demands of the day jostle for attention. Others write well late at night, after the rest of the family have gone to bed. Don’t be afraid to experiment!
• Don’t agonize over getting it right. All writers have to revise and edit their work – it’s rare that a story, scene or even a sentence comes out perfectly the first time. Once you’ve completed the initial draft, leave the piece for a few days – then come back to it fresh, with a red pen in hand. If you know there are problems with your story but can’t pinpoint them, ask a fellow writer to read through it and give feedback.
• HAVE FUN! Sometimes, we writers can end up feeling that our writing is a chore, something that “must” be done, or something to procrastinate over for as long as possible. If your plot seems wildly far-fetched, your characters bore you to tears and you’re convinced that a five-year old with a crayon could write better prose … take a break. Start a completely new project, something which is purely for fun. Write a poem or a 60-word “mini saga”. Just completing a small finished piece can help if you’re bogged down in a longer story.

Online resources

NaNoWriMo
Every November, hundreds of thousands of people just like you do something extraordinary: they write a novel in just thirty days. Want to be part of the coffee-fueled, manic-typing, adrenaline-rush that is National Novel Writing Month? (NaNoWriMo for short). Make sure you sign up by October 31st. The “rules” state that you can’t start writing Chapter 1 until 00.01am on November 1st but you can spend as long as you like before that planning…

Authors’ websites and blogs
I read lots of websites and blogs written by authors and these give real (sometimes harsh) insights into what it’s like to write professionally. One which has been a strong favourite of mine for many years is Holly Lisle’s. Check out her
advice for writers and her weblog. She also has an excellent newsletter which I subscribe to, and some very thorough and helpful e-books on various aspects of writing available for purchase.

Competitions listings
Having a theme and a deadline can make a startling difference to a writer’s motivation! If you’re in the UK, Sally Quilford’s competition listings are a comprehensive and regularly-updated list.

I Should Be Writing podcast
This is a practical and inspiring podcast: I Should Be Writing by Mur Lafferty. She describes the podcast as “For wanna-be fiction writers, by a wanna-be fiction writer” (though since starting it several years ago, she’s had considerable success selling her short stories) and focuses on science fiction and fantasy.

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/creative-writing-101/

Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer

Gregory Currie, a professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, recently argued in the New York Times that we ought not to claim that literature improves us as people, because there is no “compelling evidence that suggests that people are morally or socially better for reading Tolstoy” or other great books.

Actually, there is such evidence. Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, and Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, reported instudies published in 2006 and 2009 that individuals who often read fiction appear to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and view the world from their perspective. This link persisted even after the researchers factored in the possibility that more empathetic individuals might choose to read more novels. A 2010 study by Mar found a similar result in young children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their “theory of mind,” or mental model of other people’s intentions.

“Deep reading” — as opposed to the often superficial reading we do on the Web — is an endangered practice, one we ought to take steps to preserve as we would a historic building or a significant work of art. Its disappearance would imperil the intellectual and emotional development of generations growing up online, as well as the perpetuation of a critical part of our culture: the novels, poems and other kinds of literature that can be appreciated only by readers whose brains, quite literally, have been trained to apprehend them.

(MORE: Oprah as Harvard’s Commencement Speaker Is an Endorsement of Phony Science)

Recent research in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that deep reading — slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity — is a distinctive experience, different in kind from the mere decoding of words. Although deep reading does not, strictly speaking, require a conventional book, the built-in limits of the printed page are uniquely conducive to the deep reading experience. A book’s lack of hyperlinks, for example, frees the reader from making decisions — Should I click on this link or not? — allowing her to remain fully immersed in the narrative.

That immersion is supported by the way the brain handles language rich in detail, allusion and metaphor: by creating a mental representation that draws on the same brain regions that would be active if the scene were unfolding in real life. The emotional situations and moral dilemmas that are the stuff of literature are also vigorous exercise for the brain, propelling us inside the heads of fictional characters and even, studies suggest, increasing our real-life capacity for empathy.

None of this is likely to happen when we’re scrolling through TMZ. Although we call the activity by the same name, the deep reading of books and the information-driven reading we do on the Web are very different, both in the experience they produce and in the capacities they develop. A growing body of evidence suggests that online reading may be less engaging and less satisfying, even for the “digital natives” for whom it is so familiar. Last month, for example, Britain’s National Literacy Trust released the results of a study of 34,910 young people aged 8 to 16. Researchers reported that 39% of children and teens read daily using electronic devices, but only 28% read printed materials every day. Those who read only onscreen were three times less likely to say they enjoy reading very much and a third less likely to have a favorite book. The study also found that young people who read daily only onscreen were nearly two times less likely to be above-average readers than those who read daily in print or both in print and onscreen.

(MORE: Why Americans Need Spelling Bees and Vocabulary Tests)

To understand why we should be concerned about how young people read, and not just whether they’re reading at all, it helps to know something about the way the ability to read evolved. “Human beings were never born to read,” notes Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and authorof Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Unlike the ability to understand and produce spoken language, which under normal circumstances will unfold according to a program dictated by our genes, the ability to read must be painstakingly acquired by each individual. The “reading circuits” we construct are recruited from structures in the brain that evolved for other purposes — and these circuits can be feeble or they can be robust, depending on how often and how vigorously we use them.

The deep reader, protected from distractions and attuned to the nuances of language, enters a state that psychologist Victor Nell, in a study of the psychology of pleasure reading, likens to a hypnotic trance. Nell found that when readers are enjoying the experience the most, the pace of their reading actually slows. The combination of fast, fluent decoding of words and slow, unhurried progress on the page gives deep readers time to enrich their reading with reflection, analysis, and their own memories and opinions. It gives them time to establish an intimate relationship with the author, the two of them engaged in an extended and ardent conversation like people falling in love.

(PHOTOS: Peter Hapak’s Portraits of Authors)

This is not reading as many young people are coming to know it. Their reading is pragmatic and instrumental: the difference between what literary critic Frank Kermode calls “carnal reading” and “spiritual reading.” If we allow our offspring to believe carnal reading is all there is — if we don’t open the door to spiritual reading, through an early insistence on discipline and practice — we will have cheated them of an enjoyable, even ecstatic experience they would not otherwise encounter. And we will have deprived them of an elevating and enlightening experience that will enlarge them as people. Observing young people’s attachment to digital devices, some progressive educators and permissive parents talk about needing to “meet kids where they are,” molding instruction around their onscreen habits. This is mistaken. We need, rather, to show them someplace they’ve never been, a place only deep reading can take them.

MORE: Why E-Reading With Your Kid Can Impede Learning

This article is from the Brilliant Report, a weekly newsletter written by Murphy Paul

Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer