Anyone want a laugh?

If you'd like a slightly peculiar read for the weekend, or for the Christmas break, drop me a line.  Chapter one of "Gold Hawk" (at least, draft version 2 of "Gold Hawk" - further revision may yet occur!) is now available for Reading Group review purposes. 

So - would you like to be in my Reading Group?  Get in touch if so.

It isn't quite that simple, actually.  I need to trust that you aren't some kind of weird, twisted sort who will pinch my magnum opus.  You would need to be seriously weird and twisted, I'll grant you, since this story isn't nearly classy enough to be really worth stealing.  It's fairly frivolous stuff with no pretensions to literary quality - think Avengers/X-men Fan Fiction, filtered through a distorting imagination, and you're close to home.  But I'm allowed a bit of creator-paranoia, I hope. I don't want to be plagiarised; not even of my lightest matter.

Anyway, it pleases me to see chapter one revised and typed up and looking like a real story (instead of looking like a dog-eared A5 notebook filled with my best awful scrawl in black biro). 

Couldn't resist...

Couldn't resist posting this irresistible picture - just as a little celebration of the fact that I am Going On Holiday Tomorrow!! 

Sadly not with Mr Renner, but with my mum; I'm very fond of her too though...

I also couldn't resist this lovely post from Mrs Fox:
http://curiously-fantastic.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/high-hopes.html

Which kind of says it all, really, doesn't it?  May it be so - for me, for Mr Renner, and for all of you out there. I hope we all read some good books and get kissed by someone who thinks we're wonderful.  Soon, and well, and thoroughly, and amen.

Have a good week!

Just finished reading...

I forgot to mention in my last posting that I did one other thing last Saturday; I went into the local park to see what the "Bedford Park Festival" could offer, and spent an hour going through the stock of a fantastic second hand book stall. Bliss. £2.50 later I had a Hornblower I hadn't read before, a Zoe Oldenbourg I hadn't read before, the "Collected Letters" of D H Lawrence (win!) and "The Prestige" by Christopher Priest. Sadly it's the film tie-in edition, with a very silly jacket illustration.

I haven't seen the film, and now am wondering how on earth a novel with such convoluted nuances of unreliability among its several narrators could be filmable in the first place (I'm suspecting heinous simplification was involved).

Anyway, I finished it at 1am last night. VG, & highly recommended.

Dvd warning

I went home yesterday after "The Cunning Little Vixen" (well-played, mostly well-sung, but I thought the production was a bit twee and visually cluttered compared to others I've seen, and over-emphasising the humour at the cost of losing some of the pathos) - anyway, I went home and I saw I'd left the Dvd of "District 9" on top of a loudspeaker. My father would have had fits. So I moved it. Moving it, I found myself reading the back of the box (I've always been inclined to read anything in front of me. Cereal packets, road signs, the back page of someone else's newspaper, you name it. It's as if my brain goes "Ooh look, words; yum..."). Anyway; I read the back of the box, and I noticed this: "Warning; contains scenes of violence and one use of very strong language".

I love these warning notices. First that lovely one for "Mayerling" and now this. One use of strong language? Would that be "one" in the sense of "several thousand instances of strong language, but all of them are of the same word"? Or "one" as in "actually there's so much swearing we think you'll stop counting after a while, and stop noticing it altogether soon after that"?

Now I don't have a problem with foul language (sadly my friends can confirm this) and I'd have to say that, were I in the situations in which Wikus Van Der Merwe finds himself in the film, I would certainly be turning the air blue, too. But I know people who do mind swearing, who might think that "one instance of very strong language" means exactly that - one instance. Whoops.

My guess is that there is a list somewhere of "strong" and "very strong" language; perhaps "f*ck" is only "strong" and other terms are categorised as "very strong". I don't remember, amid the waterfalls of f*cking, f*ckers and f*cks, picking up on any c*nts... but then I wasn't listening out for them, of course...

Who cares? The movie was a thrill-ride anyway, and it gave me back faith in the infinite renewability of the genre. Neill Blomkamp for PM! (Yes, I know he can't be PM, but, face it, the options we do have are so lousy that a talented South African film-maker would probably make a better fist of the job than any of them).

Creative isolation or arrogant self-absorption?

Overheard yesterday evening on the bus: a young woman and a slightly older man, discussing her dreams and hopes. Hard to tell what their relationship was – he was supportive to an indulgent degree, but not old enough to be her father, yet didn’t act or talk like a lover, either. I would normally want to be supportive too – I know what it is like to have dreams and hopes, after all! - yet I found myself increasingly irritated by her.

She was one of these people who think they are already perfect, and who believe they don’t need to pay any attention to the rest of the world. She wanted to be a singer, but said she didn’t listen to other singers “because I don’t like being influenced by other people’s music”. She also thought she had a book in her, but couldn’t tell her companion what sort of book she would write because she didn’t know what kind of book it would be, owing to the fact that she didn’t ever read anything, because “reading is so boring”. I kept thinking the guy would say something gentle about not living in a vacuum; but all he did was tell her how great she was.

Now, I realise I do not suffer fools gladly; it is and always has been one of my big faults in personal relationships. I am also aware that I am intolerant of people who seem to be getting buckets of praise and support for doing absolutely b*gger all; and that is simply pure envy, which is hardly something to be self-congratulatory about either. So I was getting thoroughly irritated - with this lass holding forth and being praised, when it seemed she had very little to offer except a big head and a conviction that so long as you are original that will be enough to make your fortune, and also with myself because I knew my irritation was so characteristically pompous. All in all a rather uncomfortable experience.

But it has made me think. She reminded me of the people I was at Art College with who if taken to an exhibition walked through it as fast as they could so as to get to spend as much time as possible in either Prêt à Manger or the nearest pub. I have no right to be prescriptive, I know, but it shocks me when someone wants to be successful in the creative arts yet has no interest in the continuum within which they are working. I don’t feel that the excuse of protecting one’s originality from contamination will really do; it seems rather a small fig leaf to me, given the scale of what it is being asked to cover. Excuse the mixed metaphor!

How is a would-be writer who doesn’t read ever to learn the first thing about how to write well - how to construct a sentence and a paragraph, how to put across a point or create a believable situation? How is an artist who doesn’t look at anyone else’s art to discover the medium and the technique that most excites them? How is the musician who doesn’t listen to music ever to get beyond singing in the shower? Setting aside the self-indulgence of my irritation for a moment, I simply can’t see how anyone really thinks they will get to be any good at anything if they try to pursue it in a vacuum. Isolation is one thing, and we are all creatively isolated when we start out, trying to find our voice and our way; but this cool refusal to engage with the rest of the world smacks to me of blind arrogance.

Return to work after a week off...

Oh, that was a lovely break. Such peace, such quiet, in rural and unexciting Kent. How much one suddenly appreciates the quietness of a provincial town, which once seemed stiflingly dull, after four years plus of the smelly, preoccupied and traffic-laden hubbub that is west London.

For the last ten days I have been breathing clean air, listening to birdsong, walking in the countryside or by the coast, talking to my family (and to the cat), and sitting in the garden re-reading “Jane Eyre”. Bliss. I even did some sketching and a couple of watercolours. I wish I could attach them here but the lack of either a scanner or a digital camera (other than the one on my phone) is a problem here.

I have been sitting on the shingle at Greatstone, with a sky like blue enamel overhead, full of sandwich terns and tawny young herring gulls, swooping and shrieking, while the tide slowly comes in over miles of glittering wet sands; walking along the front at Broadstairs, where almost nothing seems to have changed in thirty years (& to my delight I found that although the Albion Bookshop has closed the wonderful Albion Second Hand Bookshop is still operating); gathering blackberries and bullaces on the Western Heights and then walking along the cliff top, on springy turf studded with harebells, wild thyme and marjoram.

There was time to sit and do nothing, flopped on the lawn under the old “Frau Dagmar Hartrop” rose (which despite its official status as a Single-flowering Old Rose was covered in a healthy second flush of cinnamon-scented shell-pink blooms). Time to read. Time to lie and blink in the sun, and daydream, dozing on the borders between thought and sleep, like a peaceful cat, only a cat with a cup of tea.

I read “Jane Eyre” and then followed that up with an excellent biography of Pierre Bonnard and then a John Wyndham, “The Chrysalids”, that I read as a teenager and haven’t re-read since. Not surprisingly, “Jane Eyre” stood up well to the rerun treatment. I had forgotten how much I love Jane – how completely I identify with her. Within the framework of a Victorian ideal, her relationship with Rochester is so much nearer to my own ideal than many a more modern one in fiction; their greatest bond is that of like-minded people enjoying and being stimulated by one another’s company, and although the physical attraction between them is made clear it is neither overstated nor made out to be the centre of their relationship. “The Chrysalids” suffered rather by comparison. In the first part, where the narrator is just a child, the directness of the storytelling works well, but once he is meant to be a lad of eighteen or nineteen he begins to seem a cipher. On the other hand, the depiction of a post-nuclear-holocaust world where society is run by religious extremists is far better done – more low-key, and both more disturbing and also far more real – than in many later uses of the same trope.

The Bonnard book simply made me want to paint. >sigh< If only there were more time in the day, and less rubbish having to be done with said time.

And it's Friday again already...

Actually my excuse this time is that I was off work sick (foul 'fluey bug) for several days. Very unwise of me as a new girl to be ill, but there was no way I was coming in to Kew - I could hardly make it as far as the kitchen (one floor down) last weekend. Greatly relieved to feel more or less myself again by today; I know one can take well over a week to recover from 'flu. Good news at work is that Julie has been replaced (well, in so far as the irreplaceable can ever be - oh, dear, no, that sounds as if she snuffed it whereas all she's really done is go to Durham). So when Roxana gets back from her long weekend off we'll have a full team in Visitor Info again.
However, my creative activities over the last week have been limited to sewing, which one can do sitting up in bed fairly easily. I've cannibalised a baggy sweater and made from it a sweater that fits me, and have nearly finished doing the same to a cotton suntop for next year. And I strung some beads. Strenuous stuff. Apart from that I have read a great deal, which is always good even when the circumstances are horrible; a Dorothy L Sayers I picked up for 50 pence at a Lifeboat Station Open Day books-and-junk-stall, a guide to Cuba and a fascinating book by a guy called Phil Cousineau about the philosophy of pilgrimage.
The washing machine still hadn't been fixed when I left for work this morning - that's three and a half weeks now of handwashing my socks and underwear - good thing I'm not squeamish (or leaky). I'm not used to it any more, though I've done plenty of it in my time, mostly many years ago when a student, in digs with no washing machine and no local laundrette.
Have drafted some material for my putative Creativity magazine but am now wondering if I was barking to moot the idea in the first place, as no-one I asked for input or suggestions has got back to me at all. Not even to say "You're barking." Hmmm. Watch this space. I'm sure every creative innovator has moments of terrible self doubt (says she, attempting to aggrandise a very unimportant issue). But after all, it may have been a really silly idea...
Hoping all are well; have a good weekend.