At the reference library today

Definitely need to think of some snappier titles for these posts.  Back to working at the library today as Mark seems to be better.  had an email from Artichoke, the people who ran the Plinth project, asking me if I would like to talk to some women’s magazines about my experience.  I said I would.

Working on my stories today.  Some of them seem very lame indeed, and all of them need lots of work.  The radio play is stuck at the moment – but when things are going well I get a real sense that it all works together.  Not feeling terribly inspired today tho.  Tired.

Have you ever noticed how few indoor seats there are?  If you want to sit and have a packed lunch without getting rained on, there are not too many options.

Reading a book called “Mezzanine” by Nicholson Baker.  It is something I read years ago and nearly bought for Mark, even though at that time we weren’t together.  It concerns the minutiae of life, the things we all notice on a subliminal level but don’t pay attention to, such as the nature of the hole in which you insert your straw in a cup of take-away coffee; and what happens to plastic straws when inserted in a cup of fizzy pop (not a problem I ever have to contend with) and how they have designed them to fit exactly into the lid so the straw doesn’t bob up and out of the drink.

I call it Proust for shoppers.

I am also reading Proust again, first in the English, then in the French.  I only have one volume in the French – in fact, it turned out to be the second part of  volume 5, La Prisonniere – and it starts, bizarrely, in the middle of a paragraph.  Took me ages to find it.

Took Mark ages to find the book, too.  It was my Xmas present last year.

I love Proust.  If I had a second life running alongside the first, I’d use it to read Proust, and write all my responses to him.  And  write down all the quotable stuff.  Actually, I’ve found you begin by writing the odd sentence and end by copying it all.

That’s all folks!  See you next time on the Muppet Show.

And a short time was had by all…

Rather truncated evening at the ill-fated Pump and Tap in Leicester.  Present: Noel, Peter, Andy, Liz.

Apologies: Noel (for buggering off), Peter (for smoking)

Matters arising:  imminent destruction of a much-loved pub

All of this reminds me of IPAS.  What was IPAS? I hear you cry.  Well, IPAS was a loose collection of individuals led by Scoutmaster Bob.  I have written a short story about him which I am currently revising.  It all started in the pub with what I thought was a joke about setting up an India Pale Ale Society (a sort of reconstructed CAMRA) and before I knew what was going on Bob had produced an agenda, minutes and elections for officers, as well as turning up in a very nice woggle.  Bob was also very keen on buses.  I was familiar with train-spotters, but a bus-spotter (apart from one standing fed-up at a bus stop) was a new one on me.

We had a car this week, which has now gone back – consequently I was at the chalet every day.

Here’s a recent poem:

Onion

Peel placenta

nothing there

cup the stillness

fry the air

…..

Plans for the weekend:  Oh!  Don’t know if i told this joke before:

Mark was always banging on about barbers and how they used to offer all manner of dodgy surgical procedures, and how (in a much more controlled way) he would like to go back to this, and have them offer, say, vasectomies while you wait.

So I said, after the haircut the barber would turn to the customer and say:

Something for the rest of your life, sir?

You’ll probably only get that if you’re in Britain.  And maybe not even then

TTFN

Liz

A disappointment

Oh yeah – forgot to blog about a literary group which was a great disappointment.  leicester Casuals or something.  Sounded like there was oing to be lots of debate and people reading stuff out – the challenge was to write an encounter between someone of no faith and a person of faith, and I already had something written (ie part of The God Illusion).  Wel, there was a small group of perfectly pleasant young women who welcomed us nicely – but no-one else read, there was no debate and they didn’t seem to know what to make of my reading.

*sigh!*

Think once, think twice…

Here’s the thing: deep in my core, down in the place where my soul would be if I had one (only joking! I’m not a vampire – or is it reflections they don’t have?) – anyway, deep in that place, I felt the earth move. You know how they say it does? Except not in that way. This was more like a landslide, or an earthquake. Scary. Well, I tracked it down to something that probably happened when I was a baby – and then I came to a stop, as you do when both parents are dead and nobody else is around to tell you what happened. Well, that was the first thing I felt on waking – and the second was this. The second was the realisation – no, the memory – of what daily life is like. Like a prisoner waking from a sweet dream and seeing the walls around her, the echo of the gibbet on the floor, all the memories of long incarceration coming back. So. The prison of my life. What’s that like? Tell the truth, I feel bad complaining: I mean, we don’t starve, we’re not homeless – nothing like that. Oh, shit – now I feel like a total wimp. It’s just that –

OK let me tell it like this. Imagine you have a problem. You spend time thinking about the problem; you come up with a solution, you spend time and energy on the solution – and there! Problem solved. And for about two seconds you sit back and relax, before the same bloody thing surfaces again, like giving you the old one-two. You duck the first, but the second hits you square in the jaw. You know? And so you deal with that and then, bugger me, something else comes along. And so it goes. It’s like a plague. Sometimes in my darker moments I think – you know these blue plaques they put up for people? Famous people, when they’re dead? Well, instead of a plaque, I’ll have a plague. Sarada Gray died here of the plague which, although she was cured seven times, never left her alone. That’s my life. Same bloody problems, over and over. Karma. I guess.

Take head lice. These tiny black hyphens in your hair that can ruin your life if you don’t get rid of them: they proliferate like plague germs and then you’re crawling and depressed and nobody will sit with you. So you get rid of them, by combing and washing and disinfecting and boiling bedclothes and then, for about two seconds, you’re free before one tiny unseen egg, nestling in a burrow so close to your scalp, breaks open and starts to lay its own eggs. And so on. There’s no solution. Except, go back in time and don’t get the bloody things in the first place. That’s it. So that’s my life. You get the picture?

I know these aren’t real problems. They aren’t real – but they are. I’ll regret saying this, but I’d swap for a real problem, like being in a war or something. No, that’s rubbish – of course I wouldn’t. That’s an idiotic thing to say – don’t write in! It’s just…

I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like being a sink with a huge plughole and no taps. Or a field with hungry crops where the sun never shines and the rain never rains and there’s no fertiliser. It’s like being Africa. I know, I know – it’s an insult even to think of it. But it’s how I feel. You have to express how you feel – no? Even if it’s pathetic. So every morning I go down and look at the mat where the post should be and when it eventually comes bringing us demands for bills we have already paid or else have established through phone calls and letters and visits that we don’t owe in the first place and we are starting to think about threatening them with a solicitor – when these items come in the post, the post which never brings even one letter containing the words: We are pleased to say, or We are happy to accept your story; letters which contain somewhere in them the word publication, that miraculous word not preceded by the phrase not suitable for; I leave the post undressed on the hall table and heave a sigh which is an echo of yesterday’s sigh, postponing my hopes for another twenty-four hours, climbing the stairs to work on my next story.

My manuscript sinks with a sigh

my hopes echo

That was the start of a poem I wrote about it. So that’s my life. Want to swap? Huh? Well, you can’t. You think you could step into this? Huh? You couldn’t hack this in a million years. It’s my life, baby, and I’m holding onto it! So go live your own!

Now, where’s my bike?

The god Illusion

The story has been writ.  I’m quite pleased with it so far:  Mark thinks it’s great.  Here’s a taste.

The God Illusion

Saul Bellamy smoothed down the hair at the back of his head as he waited in the Green Room for his third interview that day. He was dressed, as always, in a suit and tie, not ostentatious but impeccably tailored: it was his fifth TV appearance that week to promote his latest book, Who Does God Think He Is? His interviewers were generally unsurprised when they gained little insight into the mind of God, but a great deal into that of Saul Bellamy – God did not exist, therefore His thoughts counted for little, whilst Saul Bellamy manifestly did exist; and his theories were the hottest, the most talked-about, the most dogmatic and scurrilous or the most sane and enlightened, depending on the view you took. Rarely had a book on anthropology received such publicity: even more rarely had it been the subject of so much conversation amongst non-academics: Bellamy had the gift of communicating with intellectuals and people in the street alike. His views were accessible equally to men and women (he did not make the mistake, like some, of adopting a “cave-man” approach to biology) and his arguments were compelling. Even the most committed (and dismayed) priests couldn’t put the book down.

W at the Y

Word tonight at the Y theatre Leicester. I shall be reading a couple I sent off for the Mslexia poetry comp, judged by Ruth Padel. She is apparently a descendant of Darwin – which brings me beautifully to a short story I’m going to write about Richard Dawkins, in which he is going to have a road-to-Damascus conversion and become a born-again Christian. It could happen! In fact I think it’s more likely that people who cling tightly to dogmatic views can turn around and embrace the exact opposite view. And I tell you this: Richard Dawkins the evangelical Christian is going to be ten times the pain in the arse that R D the atheist ever was.

If you haven’t read The God Delusion, it’s an interesting rant – I mean, read. I can’t argue with anything he says about religion: it’s the things he doesn’t say that I object to. Yes, religions have been guilty of corruption – but so has politics and business. Yes, religions are guilty of indoctrination – but so is politics – and no, there isn’t any evidence for the existence of God – but how could there be? As Mary Midgely points out in her article, A Plague on Both Your Houses, science does not and cannot concern itself with metaphysics. To say there is no scientific evidence for God is like – like – like an octopus saying there is no sky. Which reminds me of Blake’s Newton, trying to measure the world with compasses, which in turn reminds me that some time in April Peter and I (and possibly the daughter) are going to London to see the Picasso exhibition. Can’t ask the daughter at the mo’, because she is still in Wales. If she ever comes back, I’ll talk to her. Or if she reads this blog…

Ho ho ho.

An email has flooded in..

..demanding to see some of my most successful short story.  OK here’s a taste.

For two days she kept to the house, moving quietly and keeping away from the windows, while she made preparations to leave. On the third day, going downstairs to make tea, the first thing she saw on opening the kitchen door was a milk saucepan bobbing along the floor. She snatched it up, thinking of using it to bale out the water – but opening the back window, saw that there was nowhere to bale out to – the water was several feet deep already. She checked the cupboard and fridge (opening the fridge door with difficulty) and saw that, though some food in the bottom had been contaminated, what was left constituted about two days’ worth. Government leaflets had stressed the dangers of eating food contaminated with flood water, and although most of what these leaflets claimed was utter rubbish, it was clear that this made sense: who knew what the flood water had been in contact with? Trying not to think too hard about this, she evacuated the fridge and turned off the electricity. It was time to go. By now probably the whole town had left; she imagined the soldiers herding people onto buses, trains, trucks – whatever the army and police could commandeer – and driving up into the hills where they had set up camps, reportedly along the Pennine way. God only knew what that must be like – a picture came into her mind of back-packers on a ridge, silhouetted against the sky, bent double against the wind and rain. There had been a positive deluge of government leaflets in recent weeks, warning that those who resisted would drown, though the reality, according to rumour, was that resisters were being rounded up and shot. It was this last dreadful aspect of the disaster that had decided Anna; not all she had heard about the camps, rife with cold, insufficient food and disease, had galvanized her as much as this one fact: they were not giving people a choice. And in Anna’s world, you had to have the choice: it was a fundamental human right, deciding how to live your life. Deciding how to end it.

As she stood in wellington boots in the kitchen, deciding what to take, a flash of silver caught her eye: the radio. It would be useless without electricity, but fortunately had a handle to wind it as well as a lead. She wrapped it in a carrier bag and stowed it deep in the rucksack. Not that there would be anything to listen to besides the regular, oft-repeated Ministry broadcasts – the government had taken over all radio stations and their broadcasts alternated between various health warnings about contaminated food and water; and somewhat Churchillian exhortations about the hill camps and how the “Backbone of England” could “never be submerged.” When she heard these, Anna had a vision of Churchill on the deck of a sinking ship, giving a two-fingered salute as it disappeared beneath the waves.

Greetings to all in the blogosphere

Haven’t blogged for a while. How y’all doing? I have been having a short story frenzy and I now have a total of 21 stories on the go. Themes are as follows:

Crime – “Safe”, “Tea”(poisoning seems to be a favourite.) The fact that this keeps cropping up is a little disturbing – but I guess all crime writers are fascinated with the same idea: what if we were to act on the hostile impulses we all experience? As a practitioner of yoga I’m supposed to be wking on eradicating these impulses but they seem to keep resurfacing. I wonder if putting them in a story will help them to diminish?

Homelessness/work and unemployment (“One day in Paradise”, “Marcie Proust’s Doughnut”)

Teaching (“Groundhog Day”)

Religion (“Jesus Won’t Let me Go”, “Samadhi”)

Science fiction (“Tuesday”, “A Saturday Afternoon in the Museum of thought”)

Myth and fable (“Three Sisters”, “The Griffin”)

Global warming (“The Flood”, “Ratae Coritanorum”)

Abortion (“the Red Dress”)

…and others. I am now researching outlets for crime stories and planning to send off the first two, which I think are the best. I don’t read a lot of crime fiction, but I do admire Ian Rankin. I have read all the Rebus novels and any plot I might construct wouldn’t hold a candle to these – but in any case what interests me are the psychological and symbolic aspects of crime rather than the logistics. I don’t plan to write a lot of crime stories – but then, I didn’t plan to write these two – I just started something and then it turned into a murder. I guess I just got carried away. Your honour.

On the yoga front, you’ll be happy to know I’ve been successfully Verified. That’s Ver-ified. In other words, my teacher training course is running to the national standard.

For this relief, much thanks!

Goodbye, dear reader. I’ll try to post more often – I know I’ve been neglecting you.

PS Ratae Coritanorum, in case you’re wondering, was the Roman name for Leicester. Except that now they think it was something else, but I can’t remember what. The theme of the story is discovering modern Leicester a few hundred years in the future after a flood has wiped us all out. A companion piece to “The Flood”, which, narrative-wise, is I think the best thing I’ve written. But then I always struggle with narration. Bit of a handicap for a writer, don’t you think?

* Sigh! *

Depressed today

Feeling low. When I woke up I didn’t remember anything about myself or my life – I didn’t know who or where I was, whether married or single, where I live – anything. It was disturbing but also interesting and in a way, liberating – for those few moments it took to reconstruct myself, I could have been anyone.

Still feeling very blocked in my writing. I have plenty of ideas but still can’t get a novel together or write even a decent length short story.

Latest idea – seven people stuck in a lift. Each takes it in turn to tell a story. A sort of modern, very much shorter Canterbury tales. Who would there be? A manager who can’t handle not being in charge, not being able to control the situation; someone who is a fish out of water (me); a young Icelandic man who is there on an exchange or work experience or something… and then I’m suck. I mean, stuck (like the letter t on the keyboard!) I have all this stuff inside me – I just can’t seem to get it out.

Anyway, I’m reading and doing some of the exercises in a book called “A Novel in a Year” by Louise Doughty.

www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/a-novel-in-a-year-by-louise-doughty-450628.htmlIt’s quite useful, I think. So far I’ve written about being trapped and not able to leave home; the day my periods started, and the story of a young Icelandic girl whose house has been destroyed by a volcano.  (See yesterday’s post)  Here’s the account of an accident (this is a true story).

Coming On

I remember this: I was 12.  Or maybe 13: we used to stay at my aunt’s house in the summer, at the top of a hill.  This hill had perhaps once had grass and trees on it but now housed a regiment of West Byfleet commuters and their families.  I borrowed my aunt’s bike, which was slightly too big for me, and set off down the hill.  Three, four times I went down without incident, but then on the fifth time I lost control, bumped up a high kerb and ploughed into some rose bushes.  Instantly, I knew what had happened.  Not really hurt, I rescued the bike and walked gingerly back up to the house.  As bad luck would have it, only my father and uncle were t home.  I locked myself in the toilet, removed my pants and waited.  Waited for my mother to come.

And this one, about being trapped:

It was the third time I had tried to leave home; and this time, I almost managed it.  I stayed away more than a year before limping back, wounded nd bleeding, to shut myself up in the long narrow dressing-room and practise banging my head on the wall.  It was probably thanks to my parents’ religious beliefs that I wasn’t sectioned then and there, but since it was prtly due to these same beliefs that I was suffering at all, I figured that fair was fair.  This time it was two years before I could get away.  For someone who prided herself on independence, it was a strange way to behave.

Didn’t get very far with that – memories are too complex.

I have also written a fairly detailed description of the house where my sister and I grew up.

Saga

Here’s a beginning for a short story. It might even turn into a novel.

My name is Brunnhilde. Last week our family’s house was destroyed by a volcano. My father said that he would never move to Reykjavik – “city of sin” he called it, just as if it were Sodom or Gomorrha (see? I know about these places, even though I’m just a fisherman’s daughter! You think we don’t have books here in the village? I’ve read all the Sagas, plus I know all about my namesake and I can tell you I was well-named! But I’m getting ahead of myself.) Volcanoes aren’t as bad as you think. Mostly we know when they’re going to happen, so all the fishing boats are standing by: we had all our stuff packed for days. Of course you can’t take furniture and my mother wept over the pine table and dresser which had been brought over the sea from Norway and had been, so she said, in our family for generations – though I think they only came from my grandmother. She was always saying things like that.  Anyway, as soon as the first seismic shocks were felt, we all had to leave. We were bundled onto boats, quick as you like, and I nearly missed the spectacle because I had to look after Johannes who kept getting away from me. He didn’t want to leave and kept trying to jump ship. Five is too young to understand.

Have you ever seen your house destroyed? Even if you have: even if it has been bulldozed because it was too old or bombed in the war or flooded out because of global warming (see how up-to-date I am?) I bet you’ve never seen anything like this. A huge fiery rocket explodes out of the sea, like an enormous dragon, and suddenly your house is in its mouth, its roof ripped off, the walls being devoured by tongues of flame. I was so excited I forgot to be upset; I forgot it was our house I was watching – it could have been a film. (Yes, of course I know what films are! You think we don’t have TV?) It was only later, when we had been a few days at my aunt’s house in Reykjavik, that it dawned on me: our house, our street, our whole village, was gone for ever.

That’s what life is like for us. One minute you are living on the earth; the next, you are swallowed up in fire and water. We are salamanders. We are fish. We are Icelanders.