Hail to the Chief…

Today is, I think, the inauguration – or if not the inauguration, then something very close to it, of President-Elect Barack Obama.  Let me say at once that, like most of my compatriots, I am as much  in favour of this man becoming president as I was disgusted by Bush slithering into the post all those years ago – ie, very.  To elect a black (or even half-black) President is amazing – to elect a black President who is also left-wing, is nothing short of miraculous.

So.  We hope – and we wait.  If he shuts Guantanamo and brings troops home from Iraq I will be happy.  And I’m not even American.

All of which led me to thinking about past US presidents and then to past British Prime Ministers.  I wonder how many Americans could name more than, say, one – OK let’s be generous, two British Prime Ministers (not including Churchill)?  Which led me with an elegant inevitability to asking myself the same question.

Umm.

Well, way back in the past we have Pitt the Elder, Pitt the Younger and Pitt the Infant (no, wait, I think that was an invention of “Blackadder).  (Incidentally, if you’re wondering why I’m not putting links up any more, it’s because they don’t work.  I have yet to master what are technically known as the “twiddly bits” of blogging.  I still don’t know what a “ping” is.)

GNEEEEEAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!

This ejaculation inserted because, having written several paragraphs of elegant, musical, elegiac and, though I say it myself, thoroughly entertaining prose on the subject of British Prime Ministers, I have done something imponderable with my little finger and erased the whole lot.  Microsoft may have its faults but I would give said little finger for an “undo” button on this blog.

*Sigh*

Good luck Obama

Good luck America

God bless – erm, how does it go again?

I’ll leave you with a quote from “Not the Nine o’clock News”, a scene where they are singing a soppy song about believing in fairies and Father Christmas and all manner of improbable things, and which culminates in the couplet:

I believe that the devil is ready to repent

- but I can’t believe Ron Reagan’s president.

(I still don’t believe it.)

TT!

.

A Christmas Tale

(this is the blindest part of an utterly blind novel I wrote when I was in my early thirties. I was compelled to write it, but I have no idea what it means. Perhaps you can tell me.)

(Scene: winter. A barren snowscape.)

Characters: Jack, Jill (late twenties), Father Christmas, traditionally dressed.

Jack and Jill are sitting on a bench, Father Christmas is standing a little way off.

JACK: I spy with my little eye

JILL: What?

JACK : I spy with my little eye, something beginning with…

Jill: With what?

Jack (looks around) With T!

Jill: Idiot!

Jack: What?

Jill: Idiot!

Jack: Who?

Jill: What do you mean, who? You!

(Jack looks down and begins to brush imaginary specks of dirt off his trousers. He whistles a few notes of something unrecognisable, then stops. Jill looks at him briefly, then looks away. Her gaze settles on the middle distance. After a moment, she closes her eyes wearily.)

Father Christmas (approaching): A tree!

Jack: What?

FC: A tree! It’s a tree!

Jill: Where?

FC What he spied with his little eye.

Jack: How did you know?

FC: I didn’t know. I guessed.

Jack: Oh. (pause) Isn’t it lovely?

FC: What?

Jack: The tree

FC: Hmm.

Jack (in a false tone) Look at the pattern the branches make against the sky

FC The what?

Jack: The sky

FC: Oh. Hmm.

Jack: Of course, it’s cloudy now…

Jill (snorts. jack ignores her)

Jack: If it was sunny

FC: Hmmm?

Jack: It would be… (he searches for a word and brings it out without mucn conviction) lovely!

(pause)

Jack: Don’t you think?

FC: Hmm.

(another pause, during which Jack again tries to whistle a tune and fails. Jill stares straight ahead, and Father Christmas, seeming to come to life a little, comes nearer and stands by the bench)

FC: But don’t you think?

Jack: Hmmm?

FC Dont’ you think we’re forgetting something?

Jill: (Snorts)

Jack: What?

FC: Well – we’re forgetting – something important.

Jill: What kind of something?

FC: Well – it’s time for – (he attempts a dramatic build-up in his voice but fails, and makes a half-hearted gesture instead as he opens the sack) presents!

Jack and Jill: (groan) We had presents yesterday!

FC (looks in the sack) Oh yes, so we did. (He takes off his outfit to reveal a convict suit complete with arrows pointing upwards.) Well, that’s that then.

Jack: I didn’t know you were a convict.

FC: (only half-listening, putting the Father Christmas costume in the sack) Didn’t you?

Jack: No. What did you do?

FC: (reddens) Oh, nothing much.

Jack: But what?

FC: Just – a small thing, really. I’ll tell you all about it later. Now – what did I give you both for Christmas?

Jack: Snow.

Jill: And ice. And it melted.

Jack: We weren’t very satisfied.

FC: People never are, these days. Too materialistic. Now, in my day, people were grateful for anything at all: snow, ice, icicles, windstorms – anything really. I remember I once gave someone an avalanche – that was in a good year, of course. There haven’t been so many of those.

(Jill is looking at him curiously, but says nothing)

Jack: (sarcastically) So – if you were so good to people, what did they put you away for?

FC: (gives a bitter laugh). They? That’s a laugh. “They” put me up to it. (Looks hard at them both). That shook you, didn’t it? Oh, yes – they put me up to it. But who takes the rap? Yours truly – that’s who. Not that there’s any of them left – still, you never know – they might have go away in time. Thy might all be down there somewhere. Isn’t that a horrible thought?  All down there, sipping their sherry, waiting. (Jack is thunderstruck, unable to speak, gazing at the convict in fury).

Jill: But who did you talk to? Who hired you?

FC: Ah, well that’s just it, isn’t it? You never know. Some faceless bureaucrat, some pen-pusher. Probably wasn’t even the one in charge. Probably doesn’t even know who’s in charge.

(Jack is gazing from one to the other, unable to believe his ears.)

FC: Anyway, they tell me it’s just a little job, no manual work involved – well hardly any, only pressing a button, and you could hardly call that “manual work”, can you?

Jill: Hardly.

FC: No questions asked, and then the pay-off. Then transportation to (he looks around him) safe quarters.

Jill: I see.

Jack: (He has just recovered his voice) But – didn’t you – I mean, what were you, what did you… (he falls silent as, looking at the convict, the possiblility occurs to him that he knew all along what he was doing. Finally, he finds his tongue again, and does something which seems at the time the wittiest thing he has ever done. He gos up to the convict, stares at him and says:

Ho, ho ho!

(well that’s it. When I wrote that possibly not even god knew what it meant.)

Something for the rest of your life, sir?

The last couple of days, I’ve been working in the library, hence no blogging.  I have reached a firm decision, which is to write my novel and get it published.  Enough messing around!  Yesterday I imagined what I would do if I had only 4 months to live.  Of course, it is impossible to “live as though” you are going to die soon, but it is essential to make the most of your time, since we don’t know how much of it is left.  I fondly imagine I may have 40 years if I’m lucky (51 now) – but even if that’s so, those 40 years will disappear more and more quickly and seem like 10 in my childhood.  So I’d better get a move-on.

I have also decided to read Proust in French.  This may well take me the rest of my life, hence the title.  This was originally a joke:

Mark – I think barber’s ought to do operations, like they used to.

Me- what sort of operations?

Mark – well, they could offer vasectomies

Me – so after the haircut, they could say, “Something for the rest of your life, sir?”

PS in case you don’t get this, barbers always used to sell condoms, swinging from tree to tree (sorry, a different sketch got in there by mistake) and they would ask, “something for the weekend, sir?”

PPS Maybe I’ll enter the All-England Summarise Proust Contest next year

Poem for Today

H-BOS

O!

Bugger

Our

End

Sunk

- HOBOES

(no more hoboes any more)

On Demons

(Some Proustian thoughts)

When we moved into our chalet, my little hut in the woods, I experienced a total freedom from my demons.  But then one by one they arrived – and it was as if they had woken up belatedly to the fact that I was gone, smelled out my whereabouts (like Jack’s giant) and taken a series of later trains to find me.  I see them hanging out of the train in the attitude of a cowboy riding shotgun, looking a little like Blake’s Ghost of a Flea

www.phespirit.info/pictures/patchwork/p008.htm

or an evil spirit from “Spirited Away”,

www.imdb.com/title/tt0245429/

intent on hunting me down.  I barricade myself in, but to no avail.  All I can do is try to pick them off one by one.

This experience does at least have the advantage of allowing you to recognise what demons you have, and seeing them as separate from yourself.

Now I am thinking that when I move on my demons must come with me.  Because this is about all of us.

Some Vague Book Reviews

The Botswana novels of Alexander McCall Smith ie “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency”.  I woudl review those I have read, as the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reviewed planet earth,  in two words: “Slightly Charming.”  I was disappointed to find from a reading of the biographical notes, that the author seemed to have no connection with Botswana: I had had him down as an ex-civil servant perhaps.  But it seemed he was merely looking for a different location.  Anything wrong with that?  Umm – no, I guess not.  But it seems less authentic.

John Berger, The Foot of Clive.

In an L-shaped ward named after Clive of India, some men are convalescing and the novel tracks their consciousness.  This was not my favourite Berger novel:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_BergerI

first came across him when teacher training, and realised that if anyone looked over at the page I was reading in the staff room they would see a fairly explicit diagram of male genitalia.  It shocked me at that moment to realise that this might be a problem: I ought to have left then and there.  That novel was called “G” and I don’t remember much else about it.  Berger also wrote “Ways of Seeing” about looking at art and about how much of it is to do with people showing off their possessions.

www.johnberger.org/

He also wrote (with Jean Mohr) “A Seventh Man” which was about migrant workers in (mainland) Europe which at the time numbered one in seven: it was a study of dispossession in words and photographs.  Then in the nineties he went to live in rural France and wrote a series of novels called “Pig Earth”.  I like Berger not because I think he’s a great novelist but because he is a one-off: he has no time for the zeitgeist and follows his own voice.  As readers of my C****n-related nightmares will know, this is a quality I value in a writer, perhaps above all others.

On Obscurity

This was my thought at 4.30 am this morning:

In medias race. In the middle of life’s race I am in darkness. But it is only in darkness that I can write. Let but one person switch on a light, look at me attentively, I am lost. I start to look back at that person, think what they would like to read, write for them – and then my own voice os lost. Utterly uttered. Mutterly muttered. So it is when I try to write “a story” or “a novel”. I can just about write a poem because nobody knows what a poem is. I mean, it can be anything. Anything at all: the drip-drop of two tiny words like a presage of rain; a stately or lovely sonnet, a drill of rhyming couplets marching up and down; a wild wind of longing. It could be anything.

So, there is a reluctance to be known.

I have been reading “The Time Traveller’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Traveler’s_Wife

Two thoughts immediately – I may be treading on some kind of political correctness here but if my name was Niffenegger I would probably change it for the purposes of publication. No offence, but it’s a little unwieldy. The second thought is that I Anglicised (or perhaps Briticised) the spelling of Traveller. Single “l”s upset me unreasonably like a loss – I am wedded to our diphthongs, our excessive Greek vowel clusters, our double consonants and I feel their simplification as a loss.

Anyway, the Time Traveller’s Wife is about someone who travels in time and can’t control it, and his relationship with his wife, whom he meets at various stages of their lives, as well as in “real time”. It has a difficult, because dislocated beginning, but then I got into it and couldn’t put it down. The thought that struck me today was this: that the time travel is the perfect metaphor for creative thought. You can’t control it; it makes ordinary life practically impossible, and, whilst interesting, seems to give you nothing in return. You certainly can’t hold down a proper job.

This has been my experience. It is certainly impossible for me to work full-time and now that I’m being very creative, “work” has dwindled to a minimum. And yet it still seems impossible to derive any “benefit” (in the worldly sense ie money, recognition) from writing. Well, duh! Given my comments above, that’s obvious. What’s not obvious is what to do about it.

I will have to save this for another post.

On time travel

It seemed to me that this was my life; and that from the age of eight I had to keep constant watch on myself or else I would disappear, my consciousness would simply disappear from that time and place and go walkabout – and this would get me in a lot of trouble, particularly at school.

And now look!  I’ve gotten (see?  I’m not against all Americanisms) myself into a situation.  I have a family, I have responsibilities.  How can I be a time traveller now?

And it seems to me that life is like this: just as Proust had to tell all his separate selves that Albertine was dead, so I have to gather up all my separate selves and somehow get them, like an unruly crowd, together in the same space (this is hell – there are so many of them and they keep wandering off) and then we can all move on together.  Not to mention my family.  As they say in “Chicken Run”, “this is about all of us”.

www.imdb.com/title/tt0120630/

And I’m experiencing my life as a chicken run at the moment – the things that I used to enjoy, to find nourishing, now seem to me like chicken feed: this broad highway with so mny avenues to explore now seems like a chicken run, and the avenues have all turned out to be stalls where chickens sleep and lay their eggs, waiting for death.  I see traps everywhere.

I guess I’m lucky I don’t have some kind of multiple personality disorder.

Mmm.  I feel another post coming on.

It took me eight years to read Proust…

Tried to post a comment on Reading Proust in Foxborough but got embroiled in password difficulties.   Life is just too complicated and some time I shall post some thoughts on the insanity of trying to keep up with the many passwords and pin numbers that we are now supposed to keep in our heads.  Anyway, this person seemed t think I was trying to read Proust in 3 weeks and that if I succeedd I would put her to shame.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!!!!

I don’t really know where to start.  Perhaps it’s just as well my comment didn’t get through as it was a bit of a rant and I don’t really want to rant at anyone who thinks Proust is worth reading.  But oh god why

WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY (I could go on but won’t)

would anyone wish to rush such a sublime experience?  Why, when we are living longer than ever before, do we insist on getting through everything in the shortest possible time?  Proust took me eight years to read – not only to read, but much more important, to think about and digest.  what is the point of reading if you don’t digest?  It would be my eternal shame if I were able to read Proust in 3 weeks (even if that were physically possible) because I wouldn’t have understood or taken in a single word, except on a superficial level.  TS Eliot (I think it was he) said that Dante is a writer you have to live with: read him in your youth and let him seep into every pore (I’m paraphrasing here) then come back and understand him in a more mature way – keep coming back.

Som dear “Reading Proust in Foxborough” – please don’t take my comments as directed against you personally.  I know I’ve been somewhat forthright in my opinions, but it really does drive me crazy that in our society we value speed so much.  So my suggestion would be, take as much time as you need and be proud of taking time.  Don’t berate yourself for not “achieving your goals” – after all

The tick inside

A goal

is a box

with a tick inside

it burrows into your brain

and sucks

……….

If I can do anything about this overwhelming culture of speed and achievement – and speedy achievement – I will.  If not, I will just carry on in my own sweet way.

Thanks for linking here.  Enjoy Proust.  Oh, and there’s a really interesting book called “The Year Fo Reading Proust ” by Phyllis Rose.  She gives up almost everything else for a year to read him, for she has discovered that he is a “voracious writer”.(my phrase, of which I was quite proud).

www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/09/reviews/971109.09brombet.html

Incidentally, another relevant thought I had this morning was about how many features modern gadgets have – all except one – longevity.  So that I thought they had many dimensions but barely existed in the fourth.

I am alos reading and enjoying very much “The Time Traveller’s Wife”.  It is not particularly intellectual but surprising (so far at least).  Mark was very grumpy about how ideas that have been current in Science Fiction for decades are now achieving prominence “as though they’re something new” in teh mainstream.  If I were him I would take it as a compliment.

Mark is very keen on SF and has written some stories in the genre.  Sadly he refuses to read Proust.  But like Marcel himself, this is such a momentous thought that I must save it for another post.

Pip pip!

Thoughts for the day

This one is worthy of the Reader’s Digest, I think:

Take care

as an ego trip

can often result

in a Fall

…

Proust is a voracious writer. He demands all your time, not just a few minutes before sleep.

I like this one.

I caught this morning…

…fishing for poems and I caught this.  Doing a lot of writing this morning, mostly prose but some poems are breaking the surface as well.  Lots of lovely Proustian memories coming up – and some nasty ones lurking beneath the waters.

This is an attempt to do a Wendy Cope (I posted the link before, to I am a Poet and I am very fond of bananas)

on a couple of lines.

Certainty

I know what I think

about the poems

…..

I think I know

what

the poem’s about

……….

the poem’s about

think, know

I, I,

- what?

………

I know, I think about

the poem’s what

…..

What – I? I?

think?  Know?

about the poems?

….

Poems about

I think, I know

- what the – ?

….

The thing starts with certainty and finishes with a suitable degree of bewilderment.  A nice antidote to the previous ego poem – you start by thinking you know what you’re going to say, what the poem’s about, and end by realising that you (“You” meaning the ego, the conscious, rational self) don’t have a clue.

“Without a clue” – there’s an echo of an Earl Birney poem – oh, yes

“Poet-trees lack any clue

they just need me

and maybe you”

people.zeelandnet.nl/henklensen/birney.htm

Read and enjoy!

Here I am

This is the poem that ego wrote.  An idea comes to you, and the ego bustles in  like Rabbit and says, Right!  I see where we are going with this.  Al you other chaps get out of the way: you’re not qualified.  I  alone  am qualified to do this.  You can sit there and watch.  But be quiet.  so this is it.  The  poem that ego wrote.  Please post comments saying how brilliant it is.

Cogito Ego Sum

One and one is me

two and two is you

(and me is three)

four and four’s a mint

eight and eight is sweet

sixteen thrity-two

was it Peterloo?

now I’m sixty-four

still need to feed the poor

one hundred twenty-eight

too late: here lies

my fate.

…

See?  See how ego imposed a pattern and made the whole thing lame?  The only thing that matters is to listen to the voice.  The voice of your voice.

Still I thought the title was quite good.  If I were more inclined towards the eighteenth century I could put in something about leaving out Reason and what’s left is ego.  Still I don’t believe this.  Or not quite.

Enjoy your day!

If you can’t enjoy it, accept it

if you can’t accept it, change it

If you can’t change it

don’t ask me

I don’t know what

I’m supposed to be.