Glom of Nit Newsletter #issue 6
Buy the acclaimed biography: The Magic of Terry Pratchett for a discounted price here. Special offer includes bonus content book.
Dear friends (and acquaintances, the politely curious, the morbidly fascinated and, I suppose, the people who genuinely just like my work – my Mum, for example).
I'm writing on the final day of February and it's difficult not to have some sprightly spark of hope echoing around in my otherwise jaded soul*, there's a blue sky flooding the view out of my window, March is about to be deployed on a willing public. The air seems, well ... just that tiny bit fresher. Also, I had the COVID-19 vaccine this week. It left me with renewed optimism, the symptoms of a medium-strength hangover and a strange desire to upgrade to Windows 10. Possibly though, it's just that it's payday today which is probably the main source of my good mood. This is all nice because for various personal reasons this month has been tough – I won't go into it here, but I've talked about it a lot over on my Twitter account.
Anyway, we find ourselves teetering on the edge of Spring, almost a year to the day since I was sent home from work and told to not come back (and later told that I did, as a matter of fact, still have to keep working, just not in the office, and there had been a terrible misunderstanding). We're still not allowed in our office. It's still lockdown of sorts. But this strange tunnel – which as tunnels go is more like the one from Willy Wonka's factory than Brunel's one under the Thames – is curving toward the surface and there is a light, somewhere out there. It's a nice feeling. I hope you've got some sense of that too. Anyway – onward ...
STUFF I'VE WRITTEN THIS MONTH
Actually, quite a lot, all things considered. These are all for HeyUGuys.Com
A deep dive into BBC America's controversial TV take on Terry Pratchett's The Watch
Movie reviews: Malcolm & Marie (Netflix), Shook (Shudder), I Care A Lot (Amazon Prime) and Stewart Lee's brilliant King Rocker (Sky/NowTV). I'm really enjoying writing about movies at the minute, probably because it's such a welcome remove from writing about music, which can be a bit of a busman's holiday. This is more Holiday on the Buses.
MAGIC OF TERRY PRATCHETT UPDATES
I am OVER THE MOON that the book has been included in Locus magazine's Best of 2020 non-fiction list. As a no-name writer, working with a pretty small publisher, to be included among the great and the good in what is pretty much the US's most important sci-fi literature magazine is pretty overwhelming. I'm in there with the $200 official Star Wars Archive for feck's sake. Here's a snippet from Alvaro Zinos-Amaro's very kind review, which appears in the same issue:
"Burrow’s buoyant, pun-peppered, and aptly footnote-flecked style ... helpfully marries his subject matter, propelling us through decade after decade of a heavily writing-centric life while illuminating Pratchett’s complexities and contradictions without any drag in the tempo."
You can also vote for the book in the annual Locus Poll Awards here. It's a bit of a pain, but I would really appreciate it.
MONTHLY MUSINGS
I wrote in Magic of Terry Pratchett about how Sir Terry was often in the beginning stages of writing a book while editing a second and promoting a third. I sound impressed by this in the book, but I don't think I fully appreciated how impressive his juggling abilities were. I get it now: I'm currently doing the same thing. My upcoming double-biography-meets-sociological-deep-dive The London Boys: The Teenage Dreams of David Bowie and Marc Bolan is consuming most of my brain space. I'm still wading through the research: so many articles and interviews, so many biographies and documentaries. At the same time I've been editing another project I pitched to White Owl Books, Manic Street Preachers: Album by Album, which sees a dozen or so writers each submitting an essay based on a different Manics album (I'm writing about Rewind The Film, mostly because nobody else wanted to). Reading the pieces has been an absolute joy, though their takes on the work (and indeed the assignment) vary wildly. Finally, of course, I've been promoting The Magic of ...
All of which has gotten me thinking a lot about versions. Last month I reviewed Stardust, an unauthorised film about Bowie's first US tour. At the same time I was watching The Watch, the ground-up re-working of Pratchett's Discworld sub-series of City Watch novels, and reading these essays about Manics albums and tons and tons of Bowie/Bolan pieces. What becomes very clear is that absolute truth is a hard concept to pin down. I found that a lot in my Pratchett book – many of Terry's anecdotes, spun out time after time in fan Q&As and press interviews, simply weren't true. They were exaggerations, polishes and rewrites. It's the same with Bolan and Bowie. Both men (all three men actually – as I've said before, jumping from nerdy old Pratchett to androgynous glam pioneers isn't quite the leap you might thing) were expert in self-mythology. They wanted to create their own stories. Bolan would often tell what amounts to his super-hero origin story about meeting a wizard while living in Paris. It became the subject of his first single. He never lived in Paris. There was no "wizard". The truth is that he went to France for the weekend with a mate. Bowie's past is full of "versions" and remixes of his anecdotes, too. When Todd Haynes made Velvet Goldmine in the late 90s he was inspired by two other *versions* of David Bowie's story, those written by Angie Bowie in her tea-spilling, bitchy memoir Backstage Passes, and Stardust: The Life And Times of David Bowie, the scandalous and scabrous biography written by Bowie- associates Tony "Zee" Zanetta and Henry Edwards. The two sources contradicted each other and they both wildly contradicted some of Bowie's takes. The finished movie (which is entirely fictional and recasts its star after Bowie himself threatened to sue) resembles both and neither. Where is the truth? Did Bolan really do black magic in the glowing Parisian sunset?** Did Bowie really perform an exorcism to remove satan from an indoor swimming pool?*** Did Pratchett really see a dead body on his first day as a journalist?**** More to the point does it matter? Well, clearly, as a biography writer, yes it does. Print the legend? Absolutely, but print the facts too, as you can find them, and let people decide for themselves. These men wanted to create their stories (Bowie went to great pains to maintain his mystique, right up to the end) and somehow, somewhere, each of those versions is true and valid. There are dozens of versions of 'Louis Louis', which is the definitive one? Which one is true? Bob Dylan wrote 'All Along The Watchtower', but Hendrix defined it. Which is the true take? Which one counts? Which version of Marc or David, or Terry, or you, or me, or your Mum, do we listen to? It's all of them. Each reinforcing and contradicting one another. Somewhere in the centre of all of that is a, if not necessarily the, "truth", or at least the shape of the lie that hides it. The joy of all of these projects is in the journey.
Or maybe this is just a way for me to explain my inaccuracies.
SOUND AND VISION
Recommendations for this month:
Erica Buist - This Party is Dead
Erica's brilliantly readable, immaculately researched, sad, happy, funny, fascinating look at death culture, and the traditions around the end of life around the world.
Penfriend - Exotic Monster
The new track (and album title) from the artist-formerly-known-as-She-Makes-War-but-officially-known-as-Laura-Kidd returns with an electrojampop lemonade dazzler.
Dogs Might Fly
Bear with me here ... I've really been a dog person, and besides, we've not got room for one, but while looking for cute, untaxing and innocent telly to watch when things have gotten stressful, my wife and I have been turning to cute animals. Dogs Might Fly is *literally* a series about teaching dogs to fly planes. Weirdly addictive.
Right - that's me done for this month.
Stay safer, and do drop me a Tweet, and email or some form of hello if you ever fancy it. It's always nice.
Cheers
Marc x
* Okay, "jaded is a patently absurd claim; I am famous among the rest of my band and my family for naive optimism and blind trust. If you want to sell me some car insurance or need a bank account to temporarily home $6 million for a Ugandan prince in hiding, then I'm your man. The amount of tat I've bought from Instagram ads in the last year alone should be adequate proof.
** No.
***Maybe.
**** Probably not.