Tidiness
In which Mike apologises for his
absence
I have been tidy of late, wherefore I know not, and
have therefore no entries made. But I
have
been to Sweden and Amsterdam and New York, I'm going back there next week, and
then to Madrid, oh, and I've been to Edinburgh twice as well to see T, who is
well and says "Hi!" to everyone. Whether she knows them or not. I have also
refactored a component, cooked dinner for G which didn't end in total disaster
(though there was some unfortunate train-and-bus-based jiggery-pokery and been
to a lovely party in Northampton. I've mentioned Loughborough already, haven't
I? And I went to an outdoor James Taylor concert at Blicking with the parentals,
R and C, and D's mum, who I haven't seen for years but who it was terribly nice
to see again. I've sent letters to D and his mum at two separate wrong addresses
and people have managed to forward them on to their correct recipients, which
warms the cockles, so to speak. I've also read (finally)
A Canticle for
Leibowitz, which was better (and bleaker)
than I thought it was going to be after the first ten pages. And I've finished
the Jasper ffordes as well, which is good, because they're amusing; and I reread
the Road Less
Travelled, because I was feeling sappy-ish at
the time (and
Sybil
by Flora Rheta Schreiber, which I still recommend to anyone who owns or operates
a brain). Still haven't polished off
Fierce
People,
The Man in the High
Castle,
Dead Air, Weathercock, One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest, On the Road, The Rule of Four, Quicksilver, The Count of
Monte Cristo or
Oryx and
Crake, which is a little disappointing, but W
did give me a copy of Simon Gray's The
Smoking Diaries when she left work, which was
very thoughtful and a darn good read. Gray's one of those people who knocks off
little, charmingly vague paragraphs which still manage to be substantial. Only
regret is that not more brain power is available to process that kind of thing
properly. And then when I went to Aylesbury to see M and V, I found Michael
Hamburger's Poems of Paul
Celan which I'm tackling gradually in both
languages (and wishing for a better dictionary, and knowledge of German). Though
Marcela Serrano's L'albergo delle donne
tristi was good in Italian; should try reading
it in English and see if I like it as much - suspect it's a touch sappy and has
a slightly less dreamlike quality in English. Was definitely overinvolved with
it when I first went to see T, though -- kept interrupting her on our tour of
Auld Reekie to say, "But Floreana's going to give up! I can't believe it! Get on
with it, woman! It's so frustrating! 'I touched his hand' is all she manages and
it's PATHETIC!", which was hardly appropriate for halfway up to the Castle. But
do go to Plaisir du Chocolat and have some of their cake and tea. I recommend
the light-and-dark chocolate cheesecake with the rose tea, because that's what I
had and I wouldn't really know about anything else except that the whole place
looked to be 87% cocoa and it made me drool. Oh, and I haven't finished
The Rules of
Attraction yet, but then that might be because
I derived a sort of bitter satisfaction from getting through
Less Than
Zero without therapeutic assistance and I'm
less confident of my ability to resist the transformation into a dribbling wreck
halfway through. And I missed out Salt:
A World History, which I bought in Aylesbury
too (at the same time as the Hamburger Celan) and was one of those things that
make you glad it's other people who write books, because they see things
differently (in this case, in a completely perpendicular way to me) and make you
be interested in things you thought were good if they were a) cheap in Tesco and
b) in the dishwasher rather than hyperprocessed food-analogue. Oh, and I read
that John Clute thing,
Appleseed,
which was good because it was using language honestly to indicate that things
were incomprehensible. Though I suppose you could write it off as simply a bit
of sustained stylism.... but who else could get away with calling an alien
"Mamselle Cunning Earth Link"? Oh, and William Gibson's
All Tomorrow's
Parties, which I liked again, though I have
yet to put my finger on quite why. Chapter headings consisted of notable bits of
phrasing from the chapter itself, which felt a bit "If you write something you
think particularly fine, be sure to strike it out at once" to start off, but
grew on me. Still reading Doris Lessing's
Love,
Again, another one with that odd little
subtitle "A Novel", as if someone needs convincing (who? People who might have
thought, "Oh, look -- Doris Lessing's written another ocelot. Oh no, my mistake,
it's a novel!"?)(or perhaps more treacherously the author? Do we need version
control systems for books? Formalise the dusty scholar's comparison of quarto
Hamlet
to first folio
Hamlet
in search of the ur-text to a diff between revisions 1.1.6.5 and 1.98.5.6.8.7?
I'm thinking this because I wonder if she starts off with a nice clean A4
notebook, a biro and a title (say, "Love, Again") and writes down "Love, Again",
and that kind of gets the idea out of her, it's a running away a bit now and
needs to be hunted down a little, pegged back to the page, so she writes in a
nice clean hand, "A Novel", gives it the weight of a little self-importance,
just enough to start the words falling onto the page nicely, and then whoosh!
it's 18 months later and she's returned the galley proofs and seen the cover
designs and approved the list of people who will be asked to burble on about it,
and then just as the presses start rolling in distant Taiwan, sits bolt upright
in bed and thinks, "'A Novel'! Arse! I meant to get them to cut that out! Greer
will have it for breakfast!" and then pulls lovely linen sheets, crisp and
ironed, back over her head and drifts off into a calm sleep?) And James Frey's
A Million Little
Pieces, which is quite honest, but oddly
popped out of the self-help section at me -- this may be valid if your idea of
self-help is reading about someone having root canal work without anaesthesia...
but then I suppose that's a small part of why I enjoyed reading it, simply
thinking "What a relief that that's not me" at fifteen-minute intervals. A good
read nonetheless. It's not that I usually hang around the self-help section - I
always think it's a bit odd to read books about self-help
that other people have
written, because then all you're getting is
(at best) How I Helped Myself (and You Can Too, If You Have The Same Problems
For The Same Reasons And Are Essentially In An Identical Situation, In Fact
Stuff It This Is Good For Me Because I'm Making A Packet But It's Irrelevant To
You) -- but I was looking to see if they had a copy of
Getting Things
Done, which sounded like a good read and a
sensible sort of a thing to get to grips with for a person like me -- that is, a
chronic procrastinator who carries around todo lists a mile long which never get
any shorter in his head. But then again I read a summary and it seemed to be
quite familiar territory: have a tickle file if you've got a lot of
time-critical stuff happening, empty your inbox at the end of every day, if it's
a two minute job do it now and then you never have to worry about it or remember
to do it or get tempted to merge it with three other two-minute jobs and have it
take thirty-five minutes, make definite decisions about things that get on your
to do list -- do, delegate or defer and fill your bin once a day, and thought I
could probably do that just with a bit of self-discipline. I do sound a bit
daft, muttering "It's only a two minute job, do it NOW" to myself, but it seems
to be keeping the flat a bit cleaner and my inbox a bit emptier, and friends a
bit more communicated with, which is splendid. Must ring J as I promised, and
mail S, come to think of it. Oh, and I spent a Saturday in a jacuzziful of
lesbians and have just spent a Saturday night watching mates do live-action
Elephant Polo. Nice.
Posted: Mon - September 13, 2004 at 08:15 PM