Harry's Place

He’s Dan Brown, the Aryan version!

Remember when Chris tried this in The Sopranos?

“I am loyel to my capo.”

“A sullen sandwich” – genius. Jack London meets Jeffrey Archer.

“Only two rounds left in the magazine.

He dropped the rifle on the floor and reached for the pistol.”

Well, I know if I were at risk from a ravening wolfpack, I’d throw away two chances to even the odds like that…

“These were the descendants of a pack that had once been kept in a wildlife park a few hundreds mile to the East.”

Obviously immigrant wolves. Sneaky and treacherous…

“Beautiful in its way, but he could see the flecks of frozen blood upon its muzzle and the red upon its fangs and talons…”

Talons…?

Better watch a bit more David Attenborough, chum…

The BUF had Henry Williamson and Tarka the Otter; the BNP has Lee Barnes, a dim-witted Jeffrey Archer of the Bone Head generation.

“Mary opened up the draw on her desk…”

?

Oh, drawer…!

Barnes’s semi-literate ravings here are all the proof you need that the man has no skills as a writer. None at all. And the excerpts above show just how multi-delusional he is.

The story is set in the Cairngorns… and yet:

These were the descendants of a pack that had once been kept in a wildlife park a few hundreds mile to the East.

So, having fashioned rafts from fallen pine trees, these wolves set sail across the North Sea from Scandinavia and settled in central Scotland.

Fucking clever, those wolves.

Either that, or Lee has no concept of distance or geography.

Oh – and the plural of mile is miles, Lee.

Presumably the hostile UFO was crewed by little brown men?

Sullen sandwich – very good.

There is currently a competition set up by the wonderful How to Write Badly Well blog for which Lee Barnes’ deathless prose might be in with a chance.

HP fans might like to consider whether the wonderful examples quoted here could be submitted as entries. The opening paragraph and the descriptions of the wolf hitting the snow look likely examples, but a total of 300 words is needed.

The only problem is– does Lee Barnes Write Badly Well, or does he Write Badly Badly? My feeling is he might not Write Badly Well Enough to win the prize, but with the right selection of 300 words helpfully made and submitted by HP readers, he must be in with a shout….

For those of us literary anoraks not quite up to the hassle of the task, there’s joy to be had spotting the best examples of HtWBW techniques Lee Barnes has used….

Forlorn lettuce

Once proud tomato

Depressed anchovy

Scowling chicken soup

Sagging chicken breast

Tumescent carrot.

I’m going downhilll ………………

Abu Faris – LOL! Very acute. Couldn’t you offer to edit Barnes? Though to do him justice about the wolves, they are descendants, aren’t they? A few generations down they might have moved further to the west and south and crossed through the channel tunnel. Or they might have gathered in howling packs near Calais and jumped into the backs of lorries heading to the UK.

Lots of creative writing is disguised fantasy, where the hero kills the baddies though heavily outnumbered by them and gets the most gorgeous girls. This insight into Barnes’s fantasy life shouldn’t be allowed on a Sunday morning.

I find this all rather embarrassing to read. I do find that stylistically there is something wrong with the extract on the wolf. Paragraphs should generally contain not too many sentences, but it is usual for them to contain more than one sentence. To see a list of short sentences separated by line spaces made me think I was reading a shopping list so I could not read it.

But I do not want to join a chorus of catcalls about Lee John Barnes’ literary skills. It seems like a work in progress, and perhaps should not be exposed to the cold light of day until it has progressed a little further.

But then again – he is presenting it to the world. Like a soufflé removed from an oven before completion, it will never rise again properly once subjected to the heat.

If LJB is trying to be a successful published writer, he should have not placed his first drafts (nearly missed out the “r”) online.

It seems like early writing. And most early writing is better locked away. It reminds me of my early execrable forays into poetry:
“Sue’s a cow that’s plain to see
Her udders hang around her knees.
To borrow bread you kiss her arse -
It tastes all right ‘cos cows eat grass.”

That never won me any awards, though it did annoy some Liverpudlian feminists at a Hackney poetry reading, long, long ago.

I think that LJB should concentrate on writing what he knows about. Maybe if he is trying to make some sort of analogy here, where wolves (like UFOs) represent the “enemy”, he should add a bit more first-hand knowledge. He should go into somewhere remote, like Epping Forest, and start killing the pets of dog-walkers.

Then he would be able to describe the dying expressions, sounds and convulsions of a springer spaniel or poodle that has been shot in the face. That sort of research would prove invaluable to a work of this nature. He could also start leaving snares and animal traps in public parks and use a camcorder to record the actions when a passing Yorkshire terrier gets impaled in a pit full of spikes.

More authenticity, LJB, and you will be onto a winner.

I bet the literary executors of William Pierce (author of the ‘Turner Diaries) are quaking in their boots as they witness the rise of a new far right author.

Lee’s creative writing efforts are shit – the poetry is simply awful. He should stick with what he knows best which is ‘err’ law.

Judy – that blog you linked to is brilliant.

>> So, having fashioned rafts from fallen pine trees, these wolves set sail across the North Sea from Scandinavia and settled in central Scotland.

Along with that hammer-throwing, darkness-dwelling, wassail-raping bastard Odin?

Summat tells me that confronted by a wolf, Lee with a hand-gun would be like these fellows:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7158095.stm

Well, wasn’t it a mark of lots of Fascists that they were frustrated artists? Hitler the painter and architect, Mussolini the romantic novelist? Along with the sense of resentment that the group they identify with aren’t getting what they’re entitled to is a personal sense of resentment that they aren’t acknowledged as the creative geniuses that they so obviously are.

Angry banana, bilious beetroot, sulky sultana etc. What is anthropomorphisism as applied to inanimate objects?

Sullen Sandwich is my new username. So funny

melon caulie

Before anyone complains – my suggestions to LJB on how he could add authenticity by doing background research for his descriptions of wolf-killing were intended as IRONY.

I am an animal lover and I condemn any cruelty to animals or people (well, I am not sure about people, but I love animals).

Barnes succeeded well insofar he elicits all our sympathy for the wolves.

Confusion about ‘draw’ – maybe she got the sullen sandwich out of her drawers on the desk. That would be very Barnesian.

I take it no animals were harmed in the writing of this post or any of the comments.

“Sue’s a cow that’s plain to see
Her udders hang around her knees.
To borrow bread you kiss her arse -
It tastes all right ‘cos cows eat grass.”

That never won me any awards, though it did annoy some Liverpudlian feminists at a Hackney poetry reading, long, long ago”

Their annoyance was probably due to the fact that “arse” and “grass” don’t rhyme in Liverpool.

In Part 3 of the UFO story:
http://leejohnbarnes.blogspot.com/2008/12/ufo-story-part-3.html

LJB appears to be expressing himself better. Still full of clichés welded together, and criminal abuse of a thesaurus (”silvern moon?” Gah!), the text nonetheless contains little spots of something – such as this:
“Overhead and slightly to the north he could see a satellite slipping soundlessly across the sky…”

Hmm, Not bad, but ruined by the rest of the sentence:
” a lonely dot of man made light adrift amidst the majestic celestial spectacle of the stars and planet.”

A satellite adrift? Perhaps the UFO knocked it off its orbit.

The rest of the text is ruined by descriptions like these:

“Through his closed eyelids and the gaps between his interlaced fingers he could still see the light flickering across the boat, over the wheelhouse and over the engine at the stern. It seemed to be searching for something he thought.”

That’s a lot to observe through interlaced fingers and closed eyelids.

There is no Part 4 of his UFO story, but I think Lee would have an excuse: “The wolf ate my homework.”

“It was a dark and stormy night…”

I think you may be right, Dave.

But I had already lost their support with lines from another poem I recited that night:
“…so come back home, we’ll switch off the light,
The sheets will bulge and soak tonight
We’ll dine till dawn on lollipops
Washed down with cherryade
And I’ll fill your throat with s****
Until my my w**** bleeds.”

That didn’t rhyme either. Maybe I should have tried some alliteration: “a satellite slipping soundlessly across your thighs”

I understand that there are no documented cases of healthy wild wolves attacking humans. Wild dogs do attack, but not wolves.

I think the sullen sandwich description is brilliant, very well written it conveys perfectly the drudgery involved in preparing, buying and forcing yourself to eat such a miserable thing.

I had one like that a motorway service station recently. I knew it was being some kind of passive aggressive I just thought it had a bad attitude but of course it was sullen, wonderful.

The dialogue about the UFO destroyed village and the emergency services is also rather funny and very very British (which you would imagine is what Lee wants to be).

It reminds me of ‘Shaun of the Dead’ or ‘Hot Fuzz’ and has an intentionally hopeless Brit comedy filmic feel to it.

The Wolf encounter is all wrong though and would have to be a film with Sylvester Stallone where we the audience hate all the characters feel sorry for the animals and want everyone to die as quickly, pointlessly and as horribly as possible.

I am Lee Barnes sworn mortal enemy for his politics I find no reason to sneer at his prose which taken entirely out of context we have no idea exactly what effect he is trying to achieve.

I read some things he writes and I consider that sometimes he is nearly there as a writer but his self sabotage comes from ornate verbosity and an insecurity in his grasp of voice.

My main recommendation for Lee is that he run at least three or four distinct kinds of edit on his prose.

1.spelling

2.grammatical and this must include number, genitive possession, rare subjunctive third person singular (that the committee take etc) plural agreement etc that spell checkers actually make far worse we all do this perfectly spelt word processed gibberish if not careful

3.Vocabulary/verbosity parsimony of meaning and description. I reccommend if he is going to write about nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ as the setting for action he read Jack London and Ernest Hemmingway particularly and all the Maws get re venacularised as gaping snapping mouth slicing fangs etc.

Latinate vocabulary does not place as immediately in the action or the danger, you view the remains of a great conflagration, you run, adrenalin twisting your gut with nausea, from a fire.

And voice: I guess it is Lee Barnes first person impersonage of action hero that lets him down, as his sadism prefers for us the reader to observe the exquisiteness of the howling pain he inflicts, than to fear for his life. As he forces us to hear more pointless pain we begin to hope that his throat will soon be savagely ripped open just to put a stop to it all.

I like his very British voice describing the reluctant and sulky food and people and the combination of spite and cluelessness of emergency officials. Exactly how I can imagine they would respond to a UFO slaughtering entire villages.

He would only need for the fire service to eventually send someone out on a bicycle to look while the engine is fitting a residents smoke alarm 25 miles away for it to be perfect.

Keep it up Lee, though less of you as Kendrick Dragon’s Bane or ‘Biggles has Bad Lupine Luck’ and more of you as the cynical even witty observer.

If you keep this up as a studied practice of observation and reporting speech; actually training yourself to faithfully capture the mannerisms and psychological motivations of your characters, its even possible that true empathy for others can evolve that way.

Whoever photoshopped the cross-hair reticule on the wolf picture knows little of mammalian anatomy and less about hunting. The point of aim is rather too far back for what is colloquially known as the ‘gearbox’ shot…a heart-lung shot; unless of course a gut-shot is the intention.

Has he shot a baboon?

I thought wolves (especially grey wolves) were the Nazis’ best animal friends… and here we have Lee’s hero slaying that fascist pin-up from the animal kingdom. How strange.

Put Lee in for the Booker!

We have all read far far worse! And successful worse at that!

mettakultur is a smart critic and ought to be a full-time teechur of Creative Writing – except that having to read students’ ghastly prose is a torment devised by the Inquisition to a sensitive soul [see ENDERBY and the 2 vols of Burgess' autobio to see what I mean]

When Capote said of Kerouac’s endless streamofconsciousness stuff that ranonandonandon “That’s not writing! It’s typing!”

@Abu

Hitler’s retreat was named the Wolf’s Lair, and back in the early 1990s I read in the Independent on Sunday that a researcher had discovered that Hitler was friendly with descendants of composer Richard Wagner. He would often be friendly with the two boys in the family, and encouraged them to call him “Uncle Wolf”. One night, Uncle Wolf took his role a bit too far and sexually abused young Weiland Wagner in his bed.

Judy must know of this:

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

Actually, writing really dreadfully is hard going.

In the runup to the 1996 presidential election in Russia, a candidate named Vladimir Zhirinovsky was doing quite well, as I recall, until it transpired that his patronymic (middle name) was Wolfovich, indicating that his father’s name was Wolf, which in Russia, so it was said at the time, is almost invariably a Jewish name. He didn’t do so well after that.

So … who are the “wolves” in Barnes’s little parable? Whose “blood” is it that Barnes is so eager to feel squirting over his face?

I don’t believe for one minute that Zhirinovsky’s patronymic was unknown before 1996 (and….as for “doing well” in the election of that year…well there was no chance of him ever coming higher than third, anyway): any official documentation that came about prior to that (e.g. for the 1993 elections) would certainly have included his patronymic as a required formality; indeed any TV debate with him would have, as a matter of course, led to him being addressed by his forename and patronymic.

Mary opened up the draw on her desk and took out the sandwich she had bought earlier from the petrol station down the street, peeled the plastic sheath back and withdrew the sullen sandwich that had been inserted into it. She sniffed it then took a large bite out of it. The taste of cheap cheese and strong onion flooded her mouth, so she took a sip of the terrible coffee and swallowed the mush down

This is comic genius. LJB’s talking about his stinky cock, right?

The Wolfs Lair was Hitlers forward operating HQ in East Prussia and as such not a place where he went to chill out. His chalet in Bertesgarden was called the Eagles Nest. The paedo story vis Richard Wagners sons is a new one to me. Ron Rosenbaum in his book ‘Explaining Hitler’ has a chapter on the Fuhrers sex life – his conclusion is that Hitler was quite conventional in the bedroom but who knows?

I’d say Barnes efforts are less turgid than ‘Mein Kampf’. Goebbels wrote a romantic novel called ‘Michael’. Funnily enough it out of print now so I can’t comment on whether it’s any good or not

“ He says a fucking UFO has hit the village “ she said with a raised voice. The face of her supervisor instantly went bright red with anger.

“ Tell the wanker that we are going to report him to the police and get him prosecuted for stealing Emmerdale scripts”

Oh I have read Goebbel’s novel “Michael”. It is a romantic “bildungsroman” which tries to imitate Goethe and (embarrasingly for both the church and its author) goes absolutely overboard in praise of christianity.

I don’t care much about trite novels that spread mythical bollocks about wolves written by dodgy fascists. But then I don’t even read decent fiction. But I’d love to see European wolves re introduced into Britain, they became extinct here less than 400 years ago.

I thought the only aliens in Emmerdale were folk with genuine Yorkshire accents…

I’m a bit dubious about the physics of knocking a leaping wolf backwards through the air like that with a couple of shots from a handgun, though that sort of thing happens all the time in the sillier action movies. A Also though I’m no expert on wolf society would they really continue an attack if you’d killed their leader?

>> Has he shot a baboon?

How does that feel?

How does that feel?
pretentious food critic AA Gill shot one a couple of weeks back and wrote up the experience if you’re interested. Probably felt very painful for the bab cos Gill got it in the lung.

Nick – there’s been talk about bringing the wolves back to Scotland, though of course sheep farmers aren’t that happy about the idea. I’d like to see them back as well as the beaver that disappeared a few hundred years ago. They could trial packs of wolves in Glasgow and after a few bloody incidents in Sauchiehall Street binge drinkers would realise that if they’re to survive a night out they have to keep sober and alert. Evolution, innit.

Clive Cussler is proof that minimal authorial skills are needed to be a successful thriller writer.

DocMartyn writes:
“I understand that there are no documented cases of healthy wild wolves attacking humans. Wild dogs do attack, but not wolves.”

That is, if they are healthy non-rabid wolves and not hybrids. The Beast of Gevaudan – sometimes linked to werewolves – referred to wolves that terrorised a region of France between 1764 and 1767.

Unlike normal wolves, these had no fear of humans, and young children were among the first victims, with throats ripped out.

It has been theorised that these creatures, that were not rabid, were hybrids with domestic dogs. The two animals were larger than normal and had reddish colouring of fur:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_of_G%C3%A9vaudan

In the end, it’s the story that counts.

Agree with Nick. Maybe the wolves would eat the BNP.

Maybe the wolves would eat the BNP.

Naah, wolves have got taste. They won’t eat any old thing.

Should have used a bigger rifle

Fable

Once upon a time
there was a lonely wolf
lonelier than the angels.

He happened to come to a village.
He fell in love with the first house he saw.

Already he loved its walls
the caresses of its bricklayers.
But the windows stopped him.

In the room sat people.
Apart from God nobody ever
found them so beautiful
as this child-like beast.

So at night he went into the house.
He stopped in the middle of the room
and never moved from there any more.

He stood all through the night, with wide eyes
and on into the morning when he was beaten to death.

Janos Pilinszky

This is not blogworthy.

I still love the verse about the dragon “pissing gold” from his the “syphilitic cock”:
“Books of law, religion, science and materialism,
Are vomited faster from its foul red maw,
Rotting eggs gushed forth in reeking green
Pulsing obscene in their pale shells,
one for every one of us, bestial parasites,
A fetish for every fool to desire”

This is just an excerpt from his magnum opus, “The Chronicles of Albion”: http://thewhitedragonofalbion.blogspot.com/

Barnes describes Ben Macdui as “a horizontal plume of billowing white”. Has he ever seen a mountain?

KB player, there are wolves in Germany and they are returning to France from Northern Italy. Granted, France’s human population density is half the UK’s, though I still think we’d manage…I’ve seen how leopard are almost seamlessly absorbed into the most surprising areas.

Exmoor, Dartmoor, Breacon, Snowdonia, great swathes of Scotland, would be great places to start reintroduction.

Interestingly, the UK’s deer population has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, it’s a bit of an issue, we need a proper apex predator. Wolves would also control foxes and help with the massive blight of grey squirrel.

Wild boar would be good to re introduce too, along with beaver and possibly lynx. Indeed, there are, I understand, a goodly number of feral pigs at large all over Blighty.

Sadly, thanks to so much tosh written about wolves, such as Lee Barnes’ old tripe above; too many folks are paranoid about this sort of thing.

“Wolves would also control foxes”

How? Through the smack of firm government?

“This is not blogworthy.”

This is not a pipe.

I think we should start by reintroducing the Allosaurus…

So whiled the urban foxes rifled through bins, the urban wolves would be handing them out ASBOS.

That should be “while”, not “whiled”, in case anyone thought it was a bad pun. Aaaaaooooh.

Nick (Ex South Africa), I would much prefer the Puma population to be encouraged; perhaps with deliberate introductions. I would much prefer big cats to wolves; wolves would hybridize quite quickly, but the big cats wouldn’t.
You are right about the need for a big predator, the deer are going to suffer come a 1948 style winter.

Gimble

I think we should start by reintroducing the Allosaurus

As a reductio ad absurdum, droll indeed!

But let’s parse this and look at where the absurdity really lies. The Allosaurus is an extinct dinosaur, it became extinct some 145 million years ago. That’s really quite a long time.

If we represent a hundred years as a millimetre, the wolf was hunted to extinction in these islands, on that scale, a distance back represented by a mere 3 millimetres, about the width of a matchstick. The time back to the era when the Allosaurus was extant, on the same scale, is represented by 14.5 kilometres, about the distance from Westminster to Heathrow airport.

Let’s face it, the comparison is indeed absurd!

There is, of course, also the fact that the Allosaurids have only so far been discovered in the fossil record of the Old World in Portugal.

Personally, I would reintroduce the Wooly Rhinoceros and perhaps the Cave Bear, Sabre Toothed Tiger and, for the sake of the exotic, the Giant Land Sloth.

There is no point in even contemplating the restocking of Neanderthal Man, as in the form of Lee Barnes he already stalks the ferny reaches of Britain.

Lee, are you there Lee? You’re awfully quiet.

Sorry for the thread hijack, but on the general topic of natural history, nature, red in tooth and claw; I must confess, that personally, I’d far sooner discus the preservation of the four legged fauna of these Isles than its early hominids.

Indeed, there are, I understand, a goodly number of feral pigs at large all over Blighty.

Considers Nick Griffin joke…..

“Nick (Ex South Africa), I would much prefer the Puma population to be encouraged; perhaps with deliberate introductions.”

Puma aren’t native to these islands, though. Lynx, however, were once.

“Personally, I would reintroduce the Wooly Rhinoceros and perhaps the Cave Bear, Sabre Toothed Tiger and, for the sake of the exotic, the Giant Land Sloth.”

You can’t ‘reintroduce’ the Giant Land Sloth, given that it never existed here in the first place…

OK, Julia M, fair enough about the Giant Land Sloth (it was a native of Patagonia) – however, I rather fancied looking out over the back garden to see a small pack of the same grazing gently on the neighbour’s privet.

A shame that the Giant Sloth should be so designated as an illegal immigrant before my team of experts have completed the delicate task of extracting its DNA from out a mosquito stuck since the Paleocene in amber, and cloning these mighty beasts. Will Argentina want them back?

I take it you have no problem with the Woolly Rhinos?

We should re-introduce Bears too. Czech, Polish or Italian ones would be fine.

Snow Leopards and just Leopards would really be domestic (recently non resident) too as would Lions.

I mean the Christian biting, Daniel in the Lions den type of Lion which means the eurasian Lion now only found in Sind in Pakistan and India.

Wooley Mammoths would be wonderful and by no means impossible, in fact it is only a matter of time before a bit of perma frost Mammoth udder gets cloned and popped into an elephant as surrogate Mummy.

Again I would recommend North Indian Elephants as these are again of Eurasian stock and were the Christian crushing type also used by Hannibal (not the different genus of sub-saharan elephant).

It appears Wooley Mammoths are closer genetically to Indian elephants than african (same might go for Rhinos).

As for neanderthals well I confidently predict that the highest contribution of neanderthal genome (don’t believe the extreme ‘creationist’ genetically ignorant African Eve thesis) lies in Atlantic Iberia and North Western Europe.

I have a supra-orbital ridge and a post orbital constriction a restricted shoulder joint arc ( good with swinging axes and thrusting spears hopeless at throwing javellin) and a funny little bump on my elbow (as well as the receding chin and the huge nose cavity).

I also have 40% greater bone density than your average modern H.Sapiens and about 15-20% greater than Cro Magnon (you would not believe how much Calcium I need a day at least 1,500 mg for my aging skeleton) and the microcephalin B gene (introgressed into human populations 30-40 000 yr ago) all features present in Neanderthals and completely abscent in sub-saharan Africans.

Did you get this Lee? Lee my genes are older than yours nah nah nah nah nah nah yes I might have some miscgenated brown additives too but the bulk of my genome comes from here and from the Upper Palaeolithic so there.

Oh and I am blood group O -ve another paleolithic vestige

I also learned to knapp stone tools from the American Action Archeologist Prof Newcomer.

And Lee for FFS fighting wolves you make human noises like walking and you never see them.

Even Grizzlies you wear bells in Bear Country I have got some rainbow coloured bracelet ones to keep the Bears away.

Just don’t wear them in San Francisco they might attract another kind of Bear.

Lee did you know that in the Gay community you would not be called a Bear or even a Wolf or a Cub?

No you are what is referred to as an Otter.

Again I would recommend North Indian Elephants as these are again of Eurasian stock and were the Christian crushing type also used by Hannibal (not the different genus of sub-saharan elephant).

Not so, I’m afraid. the evidence points to a now extinct North African elephant, together with an equally extinct Syrian variety as the war elephants of Punic and West Asian fame.

lots of crap does get published: After the triumph of Seymour’s book you allude to here, Verso is now peddling Sand’s.

“I take it you have no problem with the Woolly Rhinos?”

As long as they don’t nibble my clematis….

So what, the man can’t write, along with 99% of professional authors out there. Most people also can’t read or think, so it’s no big deal as he is in good company here, he’ll go far (I’m sorry to say).

On a more serious note, is there nothing of substance that you guys can critisise the man with? :(

With enemies like you, who needs friends…

(Remember to wear your dentures before you decide to maul someone *g*)