…shall I start forcing Reed to post daily again?
(She’s writing poetry in bed at the moment. For God’s sake).
Archive for July, 2006
Tell you what…
Monday, July 31st, 2006Holding pattern
Thursday, July 27th, 2006I apologise for this continued interruption of normal service. Reed’s current excuse is that she dropped a box of books on her toes at work today. Though what the hell her feet have to do with her typing abilities I don’t know.
Meanwhile, here are two miniscule fragments of verse to be getting on with:
Mirror
I cannot wash this face
So early in the morning.
Sleep still needs it back.
Hymn for a Workday Morning
Dressed, shod, aching with breakfast,
The radio still picking fights in the kitchen,
The kitchen itself reproachful with crumbs,
The rain now lurking outside,
Wrong coat, wrong shoes, to face it,
And no still small voice of calm
To take me back,
Or send me forth.
Now wash your hands
Sunday, July 23rd, 2006Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. – Robert A. Heinlein
I was in a pub the other night (it happens. I was drinking Hoegaarden. I don’t think that helps). We were having a hugely satisfactory high-brow discussion on the way different languages shape the thought-processes and psychology of their practitioners, and the concomitant influences on history and politics (This was not just the beer talking. Languages spoken fluently by the three individuals in discussion, six. I’m bilingual. So bite me). And in the course of this, I’m sure deeply-tedious-to-onlookers conversation, I am pretty sure I mentioned the fact that I write [Attempt to write - Ed] twice, possibly three times [That WAS the beer talking - Ed] (No it wasn’t. I was trying to make a point about different ways of understanding poetic idiom… Oh, never mind).
And no one so much as batted an eyelid.
Possibly it was because they were all unnecessarily well-read graduates and used to writery types. Or possibly they couldn’t hear me clearly over the baying of young professionals at the bar. Nevertheless felt as if I had luckily gotten away with some social gaffe, such as managing to fart silently, or fake a convincing sneeze to cover an unstifleable yawn. I was far to busy yammering to think about it much at the time, of course, but I woke up at six am this morning. As you invariably do on a Sunday, rather than on a Thursday, when it might come in quite useful. I lay there and mulled. I am patently unable to shut up about the writing thing completely despite several quite soul-crushing incidents – I have posted before on the things people say to budding writers. Every time I am hijacked by my inner show-off [There is no inner show-off. Deal with it - Ed] I flinch, expecting to be ignored, belittled, questioned relentlessly, teased, or (somehow worse, because deep down I like it, and this gives me heartburn) hero-worshipped just a little bit. Why was I so relieved to have had my ‘I write, I do,’ remarks treated so casually? I know some writers who would have been lying awake at dawn indulging in a wailing and gnashing of teeth at it.
And then I saw it. I had been, for possibly the second or third time only in my life, taken seriously. I wrote. It was relevant to the discussion. I was not a freak or a show-off or a neurasthenic wreck, and because what I wrote wasn’t really relevant at the time, it wasn’t discussed. I had not taken over the conversation. Reed writes. So-and-so speaks four languages. Other-chap has travelled a great deal. All equally relevant. All taken seriously. No one even so much as glanced at the state of my fingernails [Bitten to the quick, by the way. Again - Ed].
I went back to sleep.
Your obedient servant
Monday, July 17th, 2006It’s been a week. Reed has posted every day for six consecutive days. It was jolly well was going to be seven, but we had that hiccup last night when the wonders of technology went all unwonderful for a few hours. I think she was vaguely planning on posting a long whinge about how bloody irritating the hot weather is getting. Clearly the Internet ran away in self defence. Aren’t you lucky?
And so, what, if anything, have we learnt from this little experiment?
1) If Reed has a deadline, she will meet it. She will procrastinate, bitch, snivel and stay up til gone midnight, but she will meet it. This is good.
2) Nevertheless, no coffee after 6pm.
3) As far as I can tell, she hasn’t bored anyone to tears yet. Either that, or you are being very nice out of an overdeveloped sense of pity. In any case, it is having a positive effect on her self-esteem. I am now on 24-hour bombast alert.
4) Reed is really, really, regretting letting her poetry-writing slide. I can’t even blame you guys for this – while she was merely carefully typing out Humanities she was getting all fired up with a desire to write an entire series of ‘place’ poems. You have been warned. Also, she now wants to finish that sestina that has been driving us BOTH nuts since May.
5) Blogging per se may not be quite as addictive as tobacco, but checking to see if there are any new comments definitely is.
6) Reed thinks that she is short-changing her public with any post shorter than 300 words. God help us.
Even I agree that the rest of this week will be frantically busy and that she has a lot to do in ‘real life’. So I am dropping the draconian ‘every day or I will make your life hell’ stance. Temporarily. On the understanding that if she takes to going a week in silence again, I will indeed box her ears.
A big boy broke it and ran away
Monday, July 17th, 2006The Internet vanished last night. I duly and with my best professional demeanor on, faffed for ten minutes and then went and dragged my husband away from whatever-it-was he was doing and demanded the return of the Internet right this minute. And then stood in the background wailing: ‘But we have broadband!’ while he tried to explain we still did have broadband, and there must be some glitch with the server. So I turned to wailing: ‘But I haven’t posted yet!’ Husband wisely said nothing as to the fact I had spent the entire afternoon not posting and we did have the Internet then. But then he didn’t have to. The Editor was by this point being acrimonious.
It’s quite early in the morning for me. See how much I love you guys? I’ll come back later and write about something interesting.
Leaving a Trace by Alexandra Johnson
Saturday, July 15th, 2006I brought up the subject of diaries last night. Tell you what, let’s be madly original and actually stick to the subject. I actually own a book about diary keeping. It’ll suffer the enormity of being the first book I review on this site. I’d always meant to review books, at some point, when I got around to it, and so on. Gosh, this posting every day come hell or high water seems to be working [No comment - Ed].
Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal by Alexandra Johnson
I bought my copy at the British Library. It was actually a sort of panic-buy, an ‘I’m so bored I’m so bored I’m so bored must read book must read book cannot face lunch without one,’ thing. Am I the only person who does that by the way? Thought so. It’s a nice little hard-back, and wonder of wonders, has sewn signatures rather than a perfect binding [We spit on perfect bindings - Ed]. I flicked through it idly, not hugely interested. After all, I’ve been journal keeping since I was eight. What could I need a book about it for? Though, possibly, despite the absence of gin in my system, I was feeling uneasy about the unmitigated blandness of my recent efforts. And I suddenly saw an alarming description of an Editor (though Ms Johnson calls hers a Censor):
It’s that tight muscle of perfectionism. That dark, icy whisper. That confidence thief. I’ve never met a person who didn’t believe theirs was the most demanding on the planet. p. 46
Obviously I had to have it. I was only IN the British Library in the first place because the Editor was running me ragged, forcing me to research corset fastenings of the early 1900s before she’d let me write even so much as a word of the Historical Epistolary. [And does she thank me for it?]
The book is divided into three sections, ‘The Successful Journal: Practical Inspiration’, ‘Transforming a Life: Patterns and Meaning’, and ‘Crossover: Moving a Journal into Creative Work’. Each chapter within these sections is an elegant little collection of anecdotage, examples and suggestions, and ends with a list of exercises to get you started. I haven’t done any of the exercises. I am unbelievably lazy after all. But the very first chapter, on why people write journals at all, inspired me to dig my old ones out. I’m not entirely sure how grateful I am for that – as I said, it was a mildly traumatic experience. On the other hand, here I am, turning it into fodder for the Blog. I feel that this book is sneaking up on me.
The second chapter got stuck in on the subject of inner censors, with a list of ways to hush the bitch up so you can get on and actually write. Now, I am one of the few people I know who thinks this is counterproductive in the long run. I mentioned the ‘Oopsie LOLs’ yesterday. Don’t you wish just a little that their censors had a few more teeth and grammar lessons? I wish it just a lot. Few blogosphere experiences bug me more than following a link to something promising only to sink up to the haunches in a morass of unpunctuated, vowel-free txt-spk. I like my promises kept. Where was I? Oh yes. I read through the list of censor-silencers, feeling vaguely short-changed, until I cam across this suggestion: ‘Give the Censor a voice’ (p. 49). Ah, I thought. Rumbled. And read on:
‘Expose the nonsense. Like a vampire, the voice withers in direct light. Transcribe the whispers. It will read like a bizarre ticker tape.’ Two pages on, she continues: ‘The Censor, fat as a tick with pride, hates not being taken seriously. Humour is the sharpest weapon. Whenever his internal voices make him self-conscious, a man I know transcribes them immediately – but as the Marx brothers. One diarist, parodying how the rules left over from high school creep into a journal, wrote: ‘I (no, not I, never use I)… Well, (Don’t use that either! Too casual. I have to impress with big words.)”
The Editor and I looked at each other. You seem remarkably unwithered, I remarked. [Too busy being fat as a tick, obviously]. Do I take you seriously? [Do I take you seriously?]. Good point. And if I try to ‘impress with big words’, you’re the one who gives me such a spanking. [Natch]. By now I was feeling a little uncomfortable. Because I do suffer from almost paralysing self-consciousness, and it is preventing me from writing, my journal, my novels, letters to friends. And yet here, there would be no blog, and certainly no daily post extravaganza, without the Editor [I think I am deeply misunderstood, you know. Also, we are getting off the subject. Review the book].
There’s not much more to say. There are many, many useful practical suggestions on starting a journal, keeping a journal going, indexing a journal, revising, using a journal as a creative tool, ’single-purpose’ journals such as travelogues or nature logs, using a journal as therapy, sharing a journal, bearing witness to hard times or momentous events. There are even descriptions of new note-book addictions very like my own – I have half a dozen untouched ones, bought, really, because they were all shiny and new and blank. Apparantly, I am not a weirdo at all. And here I am, on this blog, doing a great deal of what Alexandra Johnson has suggested. And, in the process, hotly determined to prove her wrong about censors.
In gin, veritas. Damn.
Friday, July 14th, 2006Caveat: It’s Friday night. There is a large and heady G&T next to the computer. I could get even less coherent than usual. So, I am staying firmly away from deep and meaningful subjects. Anyway, I think we’ve just about done deep and meaningful for this week, don’t you?
So. Does anyone else keep a diary? That should be nice and harmless and on-topic. By diary, or journal, if you prefer, I mean a traditional – I nearly said ‘proper’ – one, on paper, in notebook. Or even, heck, on a hard disk somewhere. Blogs do not count. Oh, well, yes, they DO count, very much. Why am I here? What is this I am wasting booze on, after all? But it is precisely because blogs have a purpose, an intended audience and (a somewhat different thing, this) an actual audience, that they don’t count as diaries. Even the ‘Oopsie LOL’ brigades that litter the blogosphere thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks In Vallombrosa are SHOWING OFF. I know I am.
The sad thing is, I think I show off even in my private diary. I didn’t used to. I reread my adolescent ones recently, and the frank, sad angry blurtage made me feel quite shaken. Hideously embarrassed and longing to give myself a good slap, too, but decidedly shaken. I used to record every mean, sneaking, envious, spiteful and whining thought, every stupid row, every foul-up, every shameful crush, every fumble, zit and tampon. It makes for horrible reading, admittedly, but Lordy, it’s interesting. When did my personal diary become so decorous? Rows (and we do have some humdingers. Doesn’t everyone?) are passed over in a few words or, worse, left out; embarrassment and raging curiously absent. The weather is admittedly beautifully described, the book reviews are good, and the sarcastic remarks on the News of the Day are always amusing. But nothing ever seems to happen to me any more. Not since I left University. Not since I took to living with someone.
Oh.
Well, you see where boozy posting gets you? Sozzled enough to let cats out of bags, too sozzled to work out which cat. Which bag for that matter.
Same thing happened to George Eliot
Some few needless words
Thursday, July 13th, 2006I’d prefer not to write about world events and politics. There’s the most fantabulous amount of snarking, bitching, whining, ranting, begging, rightousness and spleen already packaged for your delectation at Daily Kos, Eurotrib, and associates (see their blogrolls. My knuckles hurt just thinking about typing them all out). Need I join in? Didn’t think so. Anyway, I’m not sure I drink quite enough coffee to keep up with the big boys.
Sometimes, though, something happens that a) makes me very cross indeed and b) is vaguely relevant to this my purpose in life – language, that flower of evolution, creation and creator of intelligence, signifier of the self-aware mind. And given a pearl of great price, this ability to conjour up realities within another brain, and alter another being’s thoughts, this is what some people do with it:
On Tuesday, 11th of July, seven bombs exploded on packed commuter trains in Mumbai. This morning, I heard someone call this disaster ‘even comparable to the July 7th bombings in London.’
Can any of you think what this man might have meant? He can’t have been referring to the death toll – we lost 52, Mumbai has lost at least 200 and counting. I could charitably assume that he meant that both London and Mumbai have been bombed by terrorists before. The IRA killed less than 100 Londoners over 20-odd years of bombing. Mumbai has lost over 300 to Islamic militants since 1993. Is this ‘comparable’? And this is my point. There are some of us, here in Britain, who cannot conceive of any tragedy greater than our own tragedies, any losses more devastating than our loss. An attempt to describe another’s devastation will be restricted to its relation to us, ours, here. How it affects us, compares to ours, mindlessly accepting the (horribly, not-uncommon) British bias in which one of ‘us’ is worth four of ‘them’. Only because we have language, we can relive our own sorrows, while a thousand miles away a vaster sorrow is compressed into ‘even comparable’. And so we diminish others’ suffering, so as not to take the edge off ours.
In praise of the purposeful silence
Wednesday, July 12th, 2006I think I can safely assure you that the Editor and I will not be on speaking terms for quite a few days yet. Even so, here I sit, bellowing ‘post! post! It’s nearly midnight!’ at myself in very nearly her tones. Possibly she hypnotised me during our last Hard Stare Stand-Off.
But as it is, I’ve had a long day and am fresh out of creativity. So we’ll go Dumpster Diving again, shall we? Oh yes, here’s something. How about a blank verse extravaganza?
Humanities – the British Library
High above the walls and tiers of scholars
Where ceiling meets the windows, there is blue
In streaks along the blanker surface, sun
In golden squares that stretch through afternoons
So dizzyingly out of reach. The sky
Beyond the soaring architectured space,
The reachless sky unreachable, is echoed,
As in deep water, under the white sweep,
Much as the cliffs of Dover, of the walls,
By scattered flakes of light, the reading lamps.
In one part of the Room the ceiling’s low
And glowing under a whole new Room of desks;
The pillars and the skylights are their walls,
They hang beneath the tent-like curve of ours.
The doubled hum of half a hundred people
All up at once and trailing through the reefs
Of desks, the ranks of blond and studious wood,
Becomes the hush, a peace inhabited.
The moist and bookish air in which we work
Is climate fit for paper and not us,
As sea is fit for fishes and we swim
At our own risk, exhalted by the cold
Of diving in the archive of this Earth,
A swaying mine of salt, the sunlight shafts
The only struts, and our deep thoughts as close
To heaven as horizons are, mountains
No higher nor no lower than the sea.
Chills, thrills and retching
Tuesday, July 11th, 2006The two hardest things to write are comedy and terror. Some, perhaps many, people assume the Hard Crown goes to tragedy, what with the need to twangle the old heartstrings lest the whole thing slides into bathos and we all get deeply embarrassed. But, my dears, I have read some of the most unmitigated tosh, poorly plotted, unattractively characterised, that still made me tear up and sniff like a hayfever victim. The human heart is susceptible to twangling, and even a most sorrily written heroine can move me to pity. We can all identify with grief, and loss, and loneliness.
Comedy, on the other hand, is a bitch. And a mystery. You’ve all no doubt had the pretty mitigated pleasure of watching a serious actor try his or her hand at sitcom. Painful, yes, all that mugging and carrying on and taking it all rather too seriously? Well, quite. Ditto for writing. In spades. Or possibly truckloads.
And then there’s terror.
Did I mention that I’m currently writing a ghost story? Yes? Good. I have just finished the first draft. It consists of an extremely rough gallop through the plot, almost completely devoid of characterisation or atmosphere. The pacing is all over the place, the dialogue clunky, the typos innumerable, and the Editor hates it. And it’s about as scary as a toddler in a pumpkin outfit. And I am looking at how much work it’s all going to take and feeling rather annoyed with myself for even starting on what surely will be the road to Ballsup. For what scares the bejaysus out of me, will make you laugh. My fascinating CSI episode is someone else’s barfathon, and when I am hiding in the bathroom until the ad-break, someone else is eating crisps in a less-than-agitated manner. And I am so used to, and sick of, frankly, this story at the moment that I couldn’t spot a chilling resolution if it took to lurking on the bedside table.
And then there’s my loathing of Horror as a genre. Yes, it gives one pause for thought, doesn’t it? I love ghost stories. But I can’t stand horror stories. It’s the difference between the cold shivering fear of the nameless, formless, numinous presence of the Other, and gagging. Even the great master of the gut-wrench himself knows what I mean:
The closest I want to come to definition or rationalization is to suggest that the genre exists on three more or less separate levels, each one a little less fine than the one before it….
So: terror on top, horror below it, and lowest of all, the gag reflex of revulsion… I recognize terror as the finest emotion… and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud. Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, pages 36-40.
Like he says, he’s not proud. And I for one will never forgive him for the eyeball and paper-clip thing in The Dark Half
