AssistanceIf you’re looking for real assistance, this section won’t help. We don’t give out money – although some of the links in ALK LINKS will mean that you can - and we have little or no useful advice or wise saws to offer. We do have some handsaws. And some hawks. Given that A.L.Kennedy is largely a fictional construct this page is here to guide you along some of the more popular routes to a deeper understanding of that construct. Should you have to write about A.L.Kennedy for professional reasons, you may find the following examples of use. Or not.
A.L.Kennedy – A brief biography.
Albigensis Luwak Kennedy was born in a wicker prop basket placed, by mischievous vaudevillians, aboard a tramp steamer en route for Varna. Details of her early life are sketchy, but for a period of several years she was undoubtedly raised by a colony of lemmings, or a colony of lepers, or a colony of lemons, somewhere in the Carpathian Basin.
Unable to speak and with many personal hygiene issues Kennedy began writing sonnets as a relief from the tedium and shame of her position as an insurance loss adjuster. She also worked as a charcoal burner and flange burnisher before being published in a number of slim volumes with almost no success. She raised funds during the completion of her first three novels by selling her long bones.
She now lives in Sark with a number of Africanised bees and a small Otter called Frank.
A.L.Kennedy – A Typical Day
I rise at 5am when Juan sounds the crystal waking bell next to my vast, gondola bed. The bed was a gift from an especially pleased reader, is made of mammoth ivory and lined in mink.
Juan lifts me into my silk carrying case and then transports me to my thirty-foot bathroom where I am lowered gently into my pearl-handled bath which will have been previously filled with warm cat’s milk and rose water.
I dictate my mail from the bath while listening to Classic FM or Tibetan Funeral music – should the llamas be visiting me to share in my wisdom and tell me more about my previous lives.
After a small lunch of coddled sheep’s head – Juan is a fabulous cook – I am able to walk along the highly-polished floors of my extensive apartment until I reach my writing room. The room extends upwards for three stories and is almost airy enough, although I may enlarge the cupola next year. The French windows look out on to the East garden and often the peacocks will be fighting and convulsing on the camomile lawn – poor, rabid creatures, I haven’t the heart to shoot them.
I write a few paragraphs - weep at their beauty - answer a bushel or so of my fan letters – weep at the beauty of my replies – and then nap in my kidskin napping hammock until it’s time for another delightful meal and perhaps a trip to the opera, the ballet, a West End show, or another outing with friends to an exclusive club or restaurant we will have had closed and given over to our pleasure. After our pleasure the premises will be burned to avoid exposing the staff to the disappointment of our absence.
By 2am Juan lifts me into bed again, performs our little relaxation rituals and I sleep with all the beauty and heart-snapping innocence of a child.
A. L. Kennedy is Scottish –
we soft Southern fools can’t even begin to understand just how Scottish. She’s gritty. She writes about death and sex and murder and grit – grit we can never understand. Post-industrial malaise – that’s her middle name. She probably sits at home and takes heroine and stares at things a lot – stares until they burn because of their Capitalist guilt and their post-Colonial interior rancidness. She is a plucky underdog and may have rickets, or at least a squint. Her comments should be sought whenever anyone wants to know about Robert Burns, Edinburgh or whatever is on the minds of the Scottish people – given that, like all minorities, the Scots have a hive mind and each of them always knows what they are thinking en masse. She undoubtedly swears constantly and carries a knife. This article will be accompanied by a picture of the author under a crane, or in an abandoned building, or in front of a vandalised wall. It will be raining.
A.L.Kennedy is a woman –
she writes like a woman, she spells like a woman, the way she uses commas is essentially female. No one without a vagina could string paragraphs together the way that A.L.Kennedy does. Every word is a reaction to the oppressive patriarchal dead hand of penis waving which has for so long clouded our thoughts, throttled our voices and caused the silvery sugar ball bearings to drop off our gingerbread. In the few moments when A.L.Kennedy is not obsessing about her femaleness, being aware of her monthly cycle and bonding with all breast-wearing and courageous souls everywhere she is meditating on the fact that having a penis would render any author incapable of sensitivity, truth or loveliness. Those occasions when her work does not fit the ideal model of a female writer’s writingness are simply due to the oppressive masculine society in which she is trapped, screaming in her flower-like soul, or the fact that she received a head injury when she was a child.
A.L.Kennedy can’t be trusted.
We all thought she was a man and then it turned out she’s woman – she’s not even a gay woman, just a boring, average womany woman. First she was plucky regional underdog and now she’s much less foreign and not as under, or even doggy. She used to be an acting student – you know what they’re like. She’s had three or four hairstyles in the last twenty years – and she’s got older - what’s that all about ?What is she hiding ? Private life – now why should she want that to be private – something else to hide there, surely. What normal person wouldn’t confide everything to a total stranger they meet for an hour in a café, secure in the knowledge that all they say may be subsequently printed – with or without errors – in a national newspaper ? I mean, it’s not we don’t have hang-ups and problems and that we didn’t spend at least half an hour telling her about them – share and share alike, that’s the rule. And why didn’t she dress up when we came to see her – we dressed up… its just not fair.
Genius, the word doesn’t even cover it –
A.L.Kennedy is a God. Or a Goddess – she just transcends all categories. We were honoured by her presence for a few moments and they will glitter in our memories forever – more splendid and jewelled than the day our first born was first born, or – we don’t doubt – the day the Big Bang banged, or Pythagoras discovered that God is triangular. Her every utterance was beguiling and her favourite colour is pumice – isn’t that just darling ? Her books have touched us in very special places – some of which we wanted to show her, although she wouldn’t let us. She is multi-media, multi-talented and something else multi – you need a list of three, really don’t you ? She’d know the last thing on the list. She knows everything.
It is impossible to emphasise the complexity of A.L. Kennedy’s work or her approaches to that work. While keeping in mind her place in the ranks of Scottish, British and European writers, she carefully reflects upon those who have influenced her – Wittgenstein, Popper, Fermat, J. Michael Straczynski and Mel Blank. She has obviously modelled her work on the Icelandic Sagas, the Mayan Codices, Proust and Lobby Dosser. No one without a firm grasp of modernism, post-modernism, post-post modernism, pillar-to-post modernism and semiotics can put one word after another and it is easy to see that Kennedy has read widely and drunk deep of the academic well. She has, in fact, dangled herself headfirst into the well while suspended by the strong ropes of the Sympathetic Fallacy and the Omniscient Trope and is gurgling insights that would render Foucault silent. It is clear that she believes in the fundamental non-existence of character, the inability of language – qua language - to communicate and the Glorious Pointlessness of story. These subtleties would, of course, escape the notice of anyone possessing only average intelligence.
