31 March - Blogs & Boring

Forgot to say that on the Swiss excursion I brought with me a 50p charity shop copy of Petite Anglaise. For a while back in the heyday of blogs I wished I were writing a wildly checked one, leading to collation into book form and giving a few interviews and pocketing some cash. But having now read a few books originating this way I am relieved I never had anything remarkable enough to pulp a few trees for. Ok, Belle 1 is the exception.

I skipped back and forth on PA and could not find a single redeeming thing about it. Of course did not read all the words as that would have been a waste of my precious reading time. But it was dire. Maybe in small installment form it had a different bearing on a reader, but in one sitting or two, it was dire. Comment on dit 'dire' en francais je me demande...

Then again maybe am just in impatient/uncharitable moon phase or other. Since I bougth a £5 hardcopy of Margaret Attwood's 'After the Flood', read 30 pages and thought Maggie, you're back on Oryx and Craske territory and indeed she makes no bones about it but it feels a bit like a rehash. With her however I have learnt she has good surprises up her sleeves, so will persevere another 100 or so before giving up if indeed that's what I'll do. Which reminds me, Franzen's Freedom is not even half way through and I like it a lot. It's just impossible to find the time what with bits of TV, lots of going out and the general attention span decline that's befallen me.

15 June - Kabuki and TKAMB

Against my better judgement I get collared into accepting to go with a Japanese colleague to see a Kabuki superstar visiting Sadler's Wells with one of their most popular shows about a Yoshitune character. This is partly because of my 'do everyting at least once' tenet. And despite seeing kabuki on TV I think and finding it excruciatingly boring, I don't remember seeing it live, so I have to go when asked. Plus I like Y. so that part won't be boring. She's older than me by a decade I think and still seems to be fitter than me in our gym classes.

Despite the running commentary on the useful gizmo and having read up on it, am suprised at the simplicity of what we're asking to watch (sort of a parable, you know the fox and the grapes) and though I understand these things were first performed 900 years ago, I think Chaucer was a bit more advanced and nobody in their right mind would go see Chaucer's anything performed now.

I know the japanese have an incredible patience for ceremony and seem to like it when things take forever to take place but... anyway, the play /tableaux gets more interesting during the second part though am still wishing I was watching Italy do very badly against the whatever team they had that night at 20.30. At the underground station we run into another Japanese colleague who had also attended and reveals she cried at the end (moral was about being grateful to your parents for having given you life so am sure resonates with many ungrateful grown ups). I think 'You cried at that??' Bonkers.

Cut to me following morning on the tube readint To Kill a Mockingbird, which for some reason I had missed out during those scool years when you read this book and had also missed out ever seeing the movie. Yessum. I got to page 169 of my edition when little Scout single handedly stops the lynching mob by reminding one of the would be attackers that he has a kid at home much as Atticus has Scout who is in fact at school with said kid. Exit lynch mob.

Clearly, written in 1960 , set in 1935 blah blah, skilled writer who knows which strings she's pulling but similar simple message, walk in someone else's shoes for a while, we're all the same underneath conventions etc etc.

Wonder if Japanese colleague could cry at this. Wonder if the fact that cultural exchanges at least in Europe seem to have the West conceptions as dominating, means that 'they' get our culture more than we can possibly get 'theirs'?
Discuss

15 June - Books & Musings

Am reading a book I like very much. This blog never really does reviews but it should reveal something of its writer’s tastes occasionally. So in the last few months, we’ve liked very much Netherland by Joseph O’Connor , we didn’t like Sense and Sensibility because we’ve encountered versions of its plot so many times, and neither was it that original when Ms Austen used it. We didn’t lucky the Japanese thriller because the writing was just not good enough and the characters not memorable, we’re going to like White Tiger when we mange to go past page 60, we liked the latest Lionel Shriver though super crap title, The Post Birthday World (what??) and we like enormously the Elegance of the Hedgehog (a French bestseller) because it’s just too funny and full of little allusions to all sort of arts and it’s fun to spot them or .. wonder ‘must come back to this one, don’t know what she’s talking about' moments.
And because she’s obsessed by language we love her even more. Must remember never to say can you please bring this to the drycleaner when the correct verb is take to , but then again I don’t think I naturally say bring this to the drycleaner. No, conscience clear. I say ‘take to’.

And because if I had ever found a plot way to link my thoughts that were going into my unwritten novel ‘The Architecture of Modern Living’, (don’t even think about nicking my title, I have notes from 2000 on this and can prove it’s mine mine mine) I’d have ended up covering similar ground to the Hedgehog. Yes indeed, my kind of musings.

There is no time to distil what I jot down on this blog. Most of the time it’s barely edited thoughts. I realise by reading the Hedgehog book that if one had the time, all those thoughts you come up with, could be really worth expanding on. If you expanded for days on end you’d become a philosopher. So the reason why most of us are not philosophers is not because we don’t have the mental capacity for this but because we don’t spend the time mulling it over. There you go, have absolved myself from being trivial and superficial. I just don’t have the time to become profound. I don’t have the necessary room of my own and annuity as well spotted by Ms Virginia Wolf. Glad the Hedgehog writer is a woman. Usually it’s men who have become philosophers as the only ones afforded the time sat on the stele and pondering whilst stroking beard. Think about it. from up there greek guy could easily piss and carry on. Women can't do that. What about Buddha? Would people have brought food and drink to a woman reclining under a tree rather than attempt to rape her whilst she sleep/ponders unprotected? You know, I sleep with men, doesn't mean I can for a second absolve the advantages they've had over women for thousands of years!

20 August - Hellboyo & Cliches'

What is it with me and fantasy? I sort of don’t get it…. Totally fails to register in book or movies.

One thing I get is hype though, or at least I recognise it easily in certain fields, music & books for example. I can’t say I’d recognise a hyped computer. But, yes, for a while had heard of Hellboy and of course Hellboy II is out any day now and eagerly expected. So I did sort of watch H1 on TV the other night but throughout it all, I did read the Sunday papers. I gave it the first 15 minutes or 20, then I switched back and forth and yes, I can understand the ironic/fun central premise and it did have good lines, good effects, good story, maybe even good characters, maybe kids do fall in love with ugly Selma Blair, (though couldn’t tell much difference from some Will Smith movie with humans chasing aliens and here ha ha, funny there’s a monster chasing other monsters and a few cliches' of this kind of storytelling exposed), but it didn’t’ seem that you know, amazing, as the hype suggests. Must have caught some mark Kermode type saying was best movie of the year etc. So you can count me out for H2. It must be a boy thing and a boy thing in a boring rainy summer too coupled with lots of marketing and hype. Maybe they feel the same about SATC, and they would be right by and large.

But I also was thinking how the world over, poor novelists for example can’t simply write a successful book and bring back the hero, shove in some new characters and follow him or her on some new adventures. Sure you have James Bond and Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple doing this and that in various books but by and large you can’t just write Pride & Prejudice 2 or 3. You can mine the same furrow but only in detective stories or some sci-fi it seems. Then again oh hum there’s my answer, you can do sequels of comic based stuff but you don’t do 21 Grams the sequel. Geez am so simultaneously clever and stupid. I go down a road thinking hey am smart with this thought and then come full circle and discover that no, I’m not.

9 March - Lazy, not him, me

Having berated a friend recently for his seemingly pitiful work output, I ought to register a few possible reasons why I’m a little lazy too. In fact, I’m not lazy, just overtly pragmatic.

So, there I was after Vietnam, determined for once to write a top travel article on the place, being able to draw on the differences between my first visit in 2000 and the one 8 years later and checking my facts if need be with my local friends in Hanoi etc etc. All this intended for some top magazine like Sunday Times Travel where I have some contacts. Toph could provide the accompanying artistic eye photos, as I only take regular snapshots in which I star of course. Why waste film on landscapes? But… turns out the STT pays very little for an article, a pittance in fact as it’s a prestigious title and so you know, you get kudos just for having your name there and hoping it leads to something more lucrative. This sort of reminds me of many many years ago when I loved writing about music but it was exactly that, it was done for the love, never for the money or just for the free tickets and the few compliments one received in the age before email, web and so on.

It would appear that were I to sell some crazy crap story to Love It magazine, you know, I woke up one morning and my sister had turned into one of her dogs and bizarrely enough I understand what the dog means when she says ‘yap yap yap. Yaaaap, yappy?’ I’d get paid approximately ten times more than my travel article would fetch. All in all, having sat on my arse so far and not even started the Vietnam article or completed the blog entries on that come to think of it, I’ve sort of only missed out on a hundred quid or so and many, many hours or shaping and drafting it down to the required word count.

Not writing a novel has also not earned me, er, very little in fact. Unless said novel was hotly fought over by publishers, the most I’d get is £20k for a two book deal, which would cover approx two years spent writing each one at least and I can make more than that in six month’s regular work, and without losing any sleep or going spotty from spending too much time indoors. So really, I better hang on to the day job. Fame can wait, especially as I don’t care for that. Unless we’re talking Oprah and Pulitzer (ok am not American but so what) then, why try? There’s no accounting for Oprah’s taste, and she could go for my novel but for sure sure I know it in my bones that it’s not a Pulitzer winner so… I rest my pen.

Talking of books, I can use this platform to warn you never ever to pick up and read the worst book 8 of us have tried to tackle at a recent book club meeting. Normally our categories are ‘buy, borrow or bin it’ but for ‘A Quiet Belief in Angels’ by RJ Ellory, we’ve created a special ‘Burn it’ category as we don’t want any other unsuspecting person to pick it up. The fact that this book is on Richard and Judy’s recommendations and also doing very well in some Waterstone chart, speaks volumes about the fact that you should never trust these people because it’s all marketing and favours in 90% of cases. I actually think RJ Ellory should have your hands chopped off to stop him from adding another volume to his oeuvre. It’s soooo badly written and soooo not a thriller that I’m still fuming over it and so are the other 7 victims. I have been on his website and he has another book coming out this year and we simply have to stop him/this. And god forbid I should hear someone is making a movie out of any of the previous 4 or 5 or I might spontaneously combust myself and I’d rather burn his books. I bet he’s the kind who trawls through the web for his name and he’ll probably find me and get in touch. He seemed to have spent hours reading his good reviews on Amazon. Who are these people??????????? Oh dear, time to pick up something else, ‘Your Brain on Music’ is next on the list, should enjoy that.

4 October - Obits and Obelisks

It’s a good thing that despite not being shy of expressing an opinion, I also don’t desperately wish to express one, especially if in the presence of people I don’t yet know well and who appear to be happy not to say anything when confronted with more dominant personalities. You could say that I’ll debate anything for a while and then sort of let it go, unless I had to cast a vote etc. So it is that recently I went to a book club with assorted women I don’t know (only know the host). I did try to involve another friend but she reminded me of a rule I’d made and she’s adopted which is ‘Don’t need to spend time hanging with any more females’. Fair enough but I know I don’t read outside of my reading patterns and fancied being confronted by different suggestions.

However, I was definitely quick enough to let them know hat I wasn’t interested if all it would be was an excuse to drink more wine and gossip, and with that in mind we’d agreed that chit chat is limited to the time spent waiting for various arrivals, then we talk about the book and then we carry on with personal talk. By which point I’d have left or about to leave.

First month went fine, loved the book choice. Second month also fine but once again had noticed one woman saying zero and thinking to myself maybe she needs the social interaction and fair enough. I also had some opinions that I’m glad I didn’t express ...apart from the sweeping generalisation a propos some characters ‘Russians are melancholic by nature or manic. It’s all that heavy vodka drinking you see’. So said me who’s never been to Russia but has a penchant for Russian writers and was astounded that all present had not read Anna Karenina for example, but that’s the beauty of such a little gathering, new discoveries. This in light of the fact that following day book club host told me that after two of us left shortly after book discussion ended with the 'buy it, borrow it, bin it' vote, the session carried on and turned into a cry-fest fuelled by the wine.

One woman has a manic depressive sister who’s tried to commit suicide and the silent woman was upset because the following day she was going to view (for the first and probably last time) footage of the death of her husband who she’d been with for 30 years and who was blown up in Afghanistan (journalist or cameraman). Which is truly the worst thing I’ve heard in months. So it is with relief that I realise I also did not say the following given that the book discussed is called Death and the Penguin and centres on an obituary writer. I was going to suggest we all try and write each other’s obit as we’d be very surprised about what even people who know us reasonably well would retain in the 500 words required to summarise a non famous/non Nobel prize winner ordinary person. I was also going to say that we should also get someone who doesn’t know us at all to write an obit and see which one comes out best. I don’t think the widow amongst us would have coped very well with my line of thinking. However by that point it had already fallen on me to chose the book for the next meeting and er… it’s 'Music for Torching' by AM Homes and so I’ll have to re-read it for possible, potentially hurtful angles. But that still leaves 3 other women who didn’t break down after the last book club and god knows what nasty things life has done to them. I need to do some research before next time.

17 September - Disasters & Ghost

There you go, I thought I was immune to marketing (not really immune but wise to it) and between reading in a Saturday’s paper an interview with Naomi Klein about her new book on the rise of disaster capitalism and being irresistibly drawn to in on Monday in the bookshop of the Tate… I was toast. I turned it round and it’s a whopping £25 for a ... book with no pictures.

Bear in mind as recently as last week I demurred and avoided spending £25 on a reduced (from £250) gorgeous dress at the Ghost sale on the grounds that it was a bit too ceremony/wedding guest style and I wouldn’t have reasons to wear it any day soon. And I was not in the mood to consider its usefulness next year or the following. Needless to say I have thought about it every day, the fabric alone was worth twice that, I could have shredded it and made window blinds if I didn’t want to wear it, they’d have been a touch of nouvel lace for all I care, and I must have been in a maddening African wind that sends you loco mood to say no to such a bargain. And I had H. urging me to get it from under the weight of her 6 or 7 incredibly cheap but totally beautiful outfits she was carrying about before spending, oh, only £90 or something.

So £25 for a book that will be out in paperback by the time I’ve read any more of it than the first few pages before deciding once again that life is too short to read theory and counter-theory and it will remain a beautiful but frankly useless purchase. Unless, unless I only open it carefully, read a bit of it, and repackage and give to a friend in a month’s time for his b’day. He won’t read it cover to cover either but will hopefully appreciate the gift as he positions it on top of the pile of other books he’s yet to read. Comfort book buying is at least not going to make you fat!. Mmmhh. I can totally blame how interesting Naomi’s interview was, how I envied her years of research and related travel and how young she looks for someone so clever. But mostly it was the bright highlighter yellow cover that I liked looking at. It was a grey lunchtime during which I heard harrowing tales of a friend’s life (more about that later) and yellow was the colour of my … fantasy ife out there, where I contribute something by changing the whole world of baddies who profit from other people’s misfortunes by exposing them and … and what? Simply denouncing shit is perpetrated doesn’t mean they stop doing it. I mean, movies don’t do it, books don’t do it (or maybe I have to skip to the last chapters and see what Naomi recommends), popstars don’t do it. Mhh, yes I will be well informed and more outraged and £25 poorer. I’ve been marketed!

2 August - P Diddy & Gods

We were discussing dirty dawg P Diddy and Penelope Cruz staying the night on his yacht. Am trying to picture it. She could have called a minion to bring her fresh clothes the next morning before leaving in the ones from the night before so she’s either setting it up deliberately or.. she doesn’t care. Or she wanted to spite Bono or something. Anyway.. an email arrives from male colleague who had to listen said inane discussion. He writes that he just brushed past PD but no PC in sight. Takes me a while to work out what he’s on about and remember he left yesterday for hol. In St Tropez ahhh.

Later on the same evening I go to a snazzy book launch by no longer struggling author.
tbc

30 May - Still Nothing, but Hay

Wonder if the sun is shining at the Hay Festival this week. So glad I wasn't going when it started last w/end and the weather was so against it. But even if the sun is shining, the grounds will be soaked and ugly instead of pretty and uhm, well, just looking at the programme this year made me queasy. There's so much on, I would suffer from the stress of choosing the right event to go to and without trusty old P. who gets me backstage without a hitch, then why go as a regular punter. Somehow can't see it. It was just the ticket to be sat across Jane Fonda on a low sofa and able to gaze into her face and checking her clothes very carefully. She knows what colours to wear. These people are always much more minute than you think. Tiny in fact. I didn't say anything as I was only thinking of work outs I did when she made them famous er.. 30 years ago, don't think she needed the reminder. Or go to a party with... oh I must stop name dropping, who cares about Zadie Smith or Louis de Bernieres. They're just people.