Book World

Me again

When I'm in another country, or on holiday,  I feel that I can be someone else.  Or at least believe that I could be someone else.  If I can physically get to another place, why not psychologically or spiritually as well?

And then there's the return home.   The pleasure of being in one's own space again.  And then everything is just the same as ever and it seems that nothing can change.  And the fact that, for a few days, I thought it could just makes it more cruel.  Yes.  Its the post-holiday blues. 

And I am so behind on my Don Quixote reading.

Just home from Paris

Children, being children, are never content to look at things from ground level.  If it can be climbed; it has to be climbed.  So up to the top of Notre Dame we went.

Guess which one is me...

We're all pretty tired but had a lovely time.  I've been through the bedrooms of both Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust as well as filling ten pages of my notebook with late night ramblings from the hotel bar. 

There wasn't much time for reading, but I have enjoyed dipping into Ghosts by John Fuller and continuing Stolen Love Behaviour by John Stammers.  Scenes from Comus returns untouched.  And if I had a Euro for every time I've wished I'd kept my French up to scratch, then I'd probably be able to afford sufficient cafe creme to keep myself awake for quite a while. 

Twenty books you should read at school

The Independent's education section looks at the debate on the teaching of English in secondary schools and suggests a list of 20 books that all children should read.  My school scores quite well having got me through Shakespeare, Donne, the romantic poets, Great Expectations, The Great Gatsby, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird.  Makes me feel about a hundred years old to see that several of the books hadn't even been published when I was at school!

Tesco (the UK supermarket chain) tell us about our, and our children's, reading habits in The Telegraph.  Adults typically spend 3.5 hours a week reading.  That's a light day for some lit bloggers. 

The Telegraph also heaps yet more praise on Geoffrey Hill

Got 20 pages into Stolen Love Behaviour last night; John Stammers definitely has a distinctive voice: sexy and sly.  Two of the poems I read are available here

I found from the blurb that he was born and brought up in Islington and still lives there so hid the book in case he happened to be on the next table!  His website reproduces an interesting interview he gave to the Independent a few years ago. 

Lucky Dip

I love it when the Poetry Book Society's choice plops daintily onto the doormat with the post each quarter.  Its sort of a lucky dip for me because many of the volumes are ones that I would have been unlikely to have bought for myself.  Today's is no exception: John Stammers Stolen Love Behaviour. 

Sometimes its a bit dispiriting;  I feel that  its virtually impossible to keep up with contemporary poetry, I'm forever discovering new recommended, commended and award laden poets who I have not only not read, but of whom I've never even heard.  But sometimes its very exciting when you find a new voice.

Anyway, I am having dinner with my friend C tonight so have popped the book into my handbag for the train journey; its short enough to get through on the way to and from deepest darkest Islington. 

Sorts of readers

Dipping into Coleridge's notebooks today (aka no attention span!) I found this:

"Sorts of Readers. 

1.  Spunges that suck up every thing and, when pressed give it out in the same state, only perhaps somewhat dirtier -

2.  Sand Glasses - or rather the upper Half of the Sand Glass, which in a brief hour assuredly lets out what it has received - & whose reading is only a profitless measurement & dozing away of Time -

3.  Straining Bags, who get rid of whatever is good & pure, and retain the Dregs. - and this Straining-bag Class is again subdivided into the Species of the Sensual, who retain evil for the gratification of their own base Imaginations, & the calumnious, who judge only by defects, & to whose envy a beauty is an eye-sore, a fervent praise respecting an other an ear-grievance; and the more virulent in its action because the miserable man does not dare confess the Truth to his own Heart -

4.  and lastly, the Great-Moguls' Diamond Sieves - which is perhaps going farther for a Simile than its superior Dignity can repay, inasmuch as a common Cullender would have been equally symbolic but imperial or culinary, these are the only good, & I fear the least numerous, who assuredly retain the good, while the superfluous or impure passes away & leaves no trace"

Sadly I think I'm fit only to be a Sand Glass today.

Was it worth staying up until midnight?

Stayed up way past my bedtime last night to watch an interview with Ian McEwan on the South Bank Show (sigh, Melvyn really is looking a bit baggy nowadays). 

The main focus was on Saturday and I do sort of admire the premise as McEwan explained it: the attempt to get inside the mind of someone whose life is happy, who has a successful career and home life, who basically has nothing wrong in his immediate life and then see what there is left to worry about.  To tune in to what McEwan called the 'white noise of anxiety' generated in everyone's heads after September 11.  Although I haven't read the book, there were copious extracts read in the programme and for me, they just ended up sounding smug.  I know that that is what most of the people round middle class dinner tables sound like (me included) but I suppose we hope we don't.  I don't think McEwan sets out to challenge the viewpoint or to criticise it, just to look at it and to consider where it leaves such an individual in our present society. 

Melvin Bragg gave McEwan a pretty easy time. On the war in Iraq, McEwan was ambiguous ('contradictory feelings', '55% against it').  Asked if he'd actually been on the anti-war march he said he'd been 'around it' (probably in Oxford watching the news!)  Parts of the discussion were risible.  Does he really believe that setting the action around the boutique shops of Marylebone makes the point that supporting and maintaining the commercial well being of national life is the most effective antidote to terrorism?  Did I really hear him say that shopping will overcome the zealots?  Really I can't have.

But the more interesting parts of the interview, for me, were about his earlier work which is much more weird and macabre and where that writing came from. His explanation was that it was basically a reaction against his repressed childhood (his father was an obsessive regimental sergeant major) and the early writing was the equivalent of a shy person getting drunk, deciding to be bold like other people and then going way too far.

Although I always love to hear authors talking about their work, what inspires them, what they're trying to achieve, I can't say that this interview inspired me to dash off to the book shop (and heaven knows I need little enough provocation).  Something about McEwan leaves me cold.  And all those images of dead fish lying on marble slabs or of grey slimy brain during neurosurgery didn't really help either.

Too much Enid Blyton

The temperature here is about 3 degrees Celsius; there is a sharp North wind and snow is forecast for the beginning of next week.  A few flakes have already fallen today.

All of which makes it rather amazing that my two soft seven year old girlie girls have been in the garden now for over five hours.  I think it is an acute case of too much Enid Blyton.

They rushed home from ballet and straight into the garden but re-appeared after 30 minutes outside. I assumed that they were in for the rest of the day.  But no, they announced that they were going out to explore the garden (we've only lived here three years!)

They disappeared upstairs and returned having made their plans and written the following list of essntial items for the intrepid journey to the end of garden:

1. Jumper or cardigan (warm)
2. Warm tee-shirt
3. Jeans
4. Not ballet tops
5. Fleece
6. Notebook and pencil each
7. Gloves
8. Bikes somewhere we can ge to them easly
9. Emergency kit in a rucksack
10. Book to read
11. Coulered pencils
12. Activaty books
13. A twig each
14. Rulers
15. Umberella in case it rains
16. Some spare tissues
17. Packed lunch
18. Sutible socks
19. No ballet socks
20. Vest
21. Trainers

Sadly we had no lashings of ginger beer but apple juice seemed an acceptable substitute.  They packed a red rucksack and off they went.

Leaving me to read the papers and listen to Joni Mitchell.  Too good to be true!

The Man Booker International List of Contenders

The list of contenders has been announced.  Interesting.  I have read works by 8 of the authors, heard of (but not read) 5 more and (woe is me) never even heard of the remaining 5.  Am I really such a cultural village idiot?  I really am not worthy of my Moleskines. 

I succumb to other people's blog madness

Somewhere in my meanderings amongst other people's blogs I found myself reading entries about notebooks.  And then blogs about notebooks.  I barely believed it possible that anyone would write, at length, about notebooks (rather than in them) but for some reason I read on.  Ignoramus that I am, I had never heard of Moleskine notebooks. Nope.  Meant nothing to me.  But it means a lot to these people.  So obviously, having read all that and this, I was forced (yes, forced I tell you) to order a large ruled and small plain Moleskine. 

From my reading I had somehow formed the idea that it went without saying that these notebooks would be hand delivered by the spirit of Bruce Chatwin,  be fashioned from real moles personally hunted in the great beyond by Ernest Hemingway and come filled with ghostly sketches by Picasso. 

The Moleskines arrived today.  All I can say is that the afterlife has not been kind to Bruce Chatwin and he looks awfully like our postman Rod.  Never mind.  And unfortunately it seems that only the plastic moles make it to heaven.  And Picasso was busy. 

All this fuss about a notebook?? 

And then I opened them.   Oooh.  The paper is so smooth.  So silky.  Slips so deliciously under one's fingers.  And the dinky little expanding pocket at the back! 

I have apologised to both of them that they are not destined for stardom and that they are probably doomed to endless lists of the 'bread (1 loaf), milk (1 pint), red wine (20 bottles)' variety.  They are looking accusingly at me, as if they have been lured here under false pretences.  I should probably copy out some impenetrable quotes from Derrida onto the first page but frankly, I'm far too intimidated. 

A short walking tour of London

Today was my day off in recompense for working last Friday, so I decided not to stay in and do house chores but to go out and re-charge the mental batteries.  The fact that I came back with nine slim volumes of poetry and essays is just a happy side effect.

So, after dropping the children at school I took myself off to the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House.  Lots of delicious Impressionists (Seurat's buxom lady powdering herself, his misty river scene, Van Gogh in the aftermath of the ear debacle, Renoir's gorgeous La Loge, Degas' dancers and bronzes, Manets, Monets, Sisleys, Matisses.  Goodness, the place is an absolute chocolate box).  Downstairs are glowing altar pieces and on the second floor, lots that was new to me.  I had no idea Wyndham Lewis was a painter as well as a writer.  His portrait of his wife (Red Portrait) is really unsettling when seen close up, but also fascinating.  Unfortunately I can't find it online but I keep wondering, what was he thinking about her as he painted that image?  She looks so angular and ghostly and well, red.

Also new to me were the Kandinskys.  A whole room of them.  They were full of abstract, geometric and yet organic shapes.  They look like an occult code waiting to be cracked: Egyptian eyes, crescent moons and lines like spears.

There's no wonder that writers and poets are often inspired by paintings, to make up the back story or follow the characters out of the frame.  Two that were crying out for stories were a landscape (Capriccio by Francesco Guardi).  The ruined arch, the temple in the background and what are they looking for in the river? And Three Girls with a Dog in Front of a Garden Gate.  What is through the gate?  Who's in the tower?  The commentary next to the picture quoted the artist: "even in the game of children, even in the hat of a cocotte, in our joy at a sunny day, invisible ideas gently assume material form".

After soaking all that up, I walked over Waterloo Bridge down to the Royal Festival Hall and up to the Poetry Library.  All the current poetry magazines you could want (and about 200 more!),  all poetry published in English since 1912.  For free!  Amazing.  And a complete nuisance that it will be closed as part of the RFH refurbishment from April this year to January 2007. 

Unfortunately, they enforce a four item limit on one's greed and it was very tricky to choose.  I eventually settled on Ghosts by John Fuller (still on the wants list from the end of last year), Speech! Speech! by Geoffrey Hill (because everyone seems to agree, for this week at least, that he is the leading English poet and shamefully, I haven't read him), The Hellbox by Greg Delanty (because he was recommended by Christopher Ricks in this article) and John Ashbery in conversation with Mark Ford because I like reading what poets have to say about their lives and work.  And because it has pictures of Ashbery aged three on the beach in an old fashioned bathing suit.  So cute!

I read some magazines and then went down to the telepathic branch of Books Etc in the RFH foyer.  I don't know how he does it, but the manager in there knows exactly which books I'm looking for; even the ones I haven't heard of yet.  There's a really excellent poetry section (yes, even though they are competing with the 80,000 volumes upstairs) and I ended up with Geoffrey Hill's Scenes from Comus (well you can never have too many poems from "the best poet working in the English language"), Dart by Alice Oswald ("If you never read poetry, make an exception for this" - The Times), Selected Prose by John Ashbery (lots of art reviews as well as poetry), Coleridge's Notebooks: A Selection (amazing.  Are they spying on me? I've never seen it anywhere else) and finally a book sized magazine called Pretext from the University of East Anglia which sold itself to me on the basis of an interview with J G Ballard, an essay by Jim Crace and an article on W G Sebald by Geoff Dyer.

And then, sadly it was time to go home.  (I did toy with the idea of 'forgetting' to collect the children after school in order to have time to get up to the British Museum but concluded it should wait for another day.)  Although it had turned damp I enjoyed the brisk walk back over the bridge and then on to the station.  One happy book magpie carrying her new and shiny trinkets back home to line her nest with.