The Write Advice 202: ALEXEI SAYLE

 

To be a successful comedy writer you have to have a continually fertile imagination, that's what stops you from being a here today, Bros tomorrow, flash in the pan.  Unfortunately, imagination is not something that you can turn on and off like a tap.  Nor is it something that you can direct with pinpoint accuracy, unlike 12% of the missiles produced by the British Aerospace Industry.  No, the same powers of imagination that make you think up exquisite jests and apposite drolleries are exactly the same powers of imagination that make you think that a dollop of egg mayonnaise left over from lunch that has fallen on your arm is in fact skin cancer.  The same qualities of invention which help one to create this hilarious comedy are the same qualities of invention that induce in me the paranoid feeling that my pets are conspiring against me.  In fact, I know they are because whenever I come in the room, they stop talking...

 

Interview [Source unspecified]

 

 

 

Use the link below to listen to the podcast of British comedian, actor, writer and astute social commentator ALEXEI SAYLE:

 

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-alexei-sayle-podcast/id1540500007

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 143: IRIS MURDOCH

 

The bad writer gives way to personal obsession and exalts some characters and demeans others without any concern for truth or justice, that is without any suitable aesthetic ‘explanation’. It is clear here how the idea of reality enters into literary judgement. The good writer is the just, intelligent judge. He justifies his placing of his characters by some sort of work which he does in the book. A literary fault such as sentimentality results from idealisation without work. This work of course may be of different kinds, and all sorts of methods of placing characters, or relation of characters to plot or theme, may produce good art. Criticism is much concerned with the techniques by which this is done. A great writer can combine form and character in a felicitous way (think how Shakespeare does it) so as to produce a large space in which the characters can exist freely and yet at the same time serve the purposes of the tale. A great work of art gives one a sense of space, as if one had been invited into some large hall of reflection.

Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (1997)

Use the link below to read about the life and work of British novelist and philosopher IRIS MURDOCH (1919–1999):

 

 

https://www.famousphilosophers.org/iris-murdoch/

 

 

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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable.  We might believe we were not ridiculous.  We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.  We could age respectably, get used to our privileges and think we understood what was going on.  We might disappear into numbers and words alone.  It is sex that creates a necessary havoc in the ordinary hierarchies of power, status, money and intelligence… We might even embrace the pain sex causes us, for without it we wouldn’t know art and music quite so well… When every contemptuous but fair thing has been said about our infernal sexual desires, we can still celebrate them for not allowing us to forget for more than a few days at a time what is really involved in living an embodied, chemical and largely insane human life.

How To Think More About Sex (2012)


 

Use the link below to visit the website of Swiss-born British writer and philosopher ALAIN DE BOTTON:

 

https://www.alaindebotton.com/

 

 

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Think About It 047: ALEXEI SAYLE

Because capitalism has won the battle of competing economic systems, we never really question it's nature.  Now in many ways it's a wonderful thing.  Nanotechnology, reasonably priced socks, and Ed Sheeran.  Wow, it's amazing.  The only problem is it depends on constant endlessly expanding consumption, and that's destroying the planet.  There are efforts to ameliorate defects, windpower, recycling, but as a child of left wing parents I know an empty gesture when I see one!  One has a feeling, born out of experience, that things are better run in Europe than they are here, the roads are better, the trains aren't run on some nightmarish scheme devised by Hieronymous Bosch PLC, food is better and healthier, government at local and state level seems to have more sense and competence.  The reason for this, perhaps more than every other: every nation in Europe lost the war.  Either they were defeated by the Allies like Germany and Italy, or they were defeated and invaded by the Germans.  One way or another this defeat led to them getting a Fresh Start, a catastrophe on such a scale inevitably led to these countries having to reassess all their government structures and ways of doing things, from top to bottom a clean sweep introducing a new mode of things not affected by attitudes unchanged since the nineteenth century.  Those structures and individuals that had brought their countries to defeat were removed and replaced with more efficient ones. Whereas in Britain, because we won, we were left with the sense that the way we did things, ran our factories and cities, managed our Health Service, was with all its snobberies, massive inefficiencies and sheer stupidness, the correct way to do this.  Who won the war in Europe?  Us and Russia, says it all.  If we ever want to experience happiness and prosperity, what we need to do is lose a war to somebody.  And quick.

 

Interview [Source unspecified]


 

 

 

Use the link below to hear the podcast of British comedian, actor, writer and astute social commentator ALEXEI SAYLE:

 

 

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-alexei-sayle-podcast/id1540500007

 

 

 

 

 

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Think About It 046: IRIS MURDOCH

There is always more bad art around than good art, and more people like bad art than like good art… Good art is good for people precisely because it is not fantasy but imagination.  It breaks the grip of our own dull fantasy life and stirs us to the effort of true vision.  Most of the time we fail to see the big wide real world at all because we are blinded by obsession, anxiety, envy, resentment, fear.  We make a small personal world in which we remain enclosed.  Great art is liberating, it enables us to see and take pleasure in what is not ourselves.  Literature stirs and satisfies our curiosity, it interests us in other people and other scenes, and helps us to be tolerant and generous.  Art is informative.  And even mediocre art can tell us something, for instance about how other people live.  But to say this is not to hold a utilitarian or didactic view of art.  Art is larger than such narrow ideas.

Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (1997)


 

Use the link below to read more about the life and work of British novelist and philosopher IRIS MURDOCH (1919–1999):

 

https://philosophynow.org/issues/139/Iris_Murdoch_1919-1999

 

 

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