justtesting

Tuffnells' Toffee's for Buttery Fingers

2011-12-10T04:32:00.000-08:00

I read Tuffnell's Toffees for Buttery Fingers at Word Soup on the 27 October 2011. Now that I've come to terms with my adenoidal Lancashire accent & nervous stuttering I kind-of think it went okay... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ABLRawErfc

Quickies: short stories for adults

2011-10-12T08:35:00.000-07:00

If you like to raise a little laugh, try dressing as a elderly lady and reading (out loud) a story containing the term, ‘buttery fuck’ - comedy gold.

I know I don’t keep this blog anymore but I need to tell my other reader (if you are still alive) that I’ve done a reading without being sick in a bucket and I’m in print!

On Wednesday 28 September 2011, I read a story called Tuffnell's Toffees at the launch of a book.
Quickies: short stories for adults is an anthology of flash fiction produced by the Flashtag writing collective as part of the Didsbury Arts Festival. The launch was glittery with lollies, wit and innuendo.

The Flashtag writers are Sarah-Clare Conlon, Fat Roland, Dave Hartley, Tom Mason and Benjamin Judge and and the Quickies stories are written by them and by their invited writerly chums. My virtual friend Ben Judge (now my actual friend, I think, as we met at said glittering event) asked me to contribute a smutty story. I was very pleased and very scared by this prospect. I was scared for two reasons:

1). There was a word limit of 400 words and, as my other reader will know; (alive or dead) my name is not a byword for brevity.

2). I didn’t want Ben to be the only Flashtagger with a duff chum.

With this in mind I wrote Tuffnell’s Toffeees then tinkered, meddled, redrafted, redrafted, got constructive feedback from Sarah Schofield, Valerie O'Riordan and Jenn Ashworth, (thank you folks) tinkered, meddled, redrafted, redrafted. I’m tinkering and meddling still (buttery fuck doesn’t appear in the book, it says buttery fingers in print) - donkey bolted/gate bolted; all that stuff.
Never were 400 words so tinkered and meddled with.
I hope Ben isn’t ashamed (of me, that is - he should certainly be embarrassed by the out and out rudeness of his own stories - one memorable line from his mucky reading was, ‘I tease the length of your dolphinhood…’!)

The glittering launch was grand – Sarah-Clare Conlon provided additional glamour (and a naughty story), Fat Roland snapped on Marigolds to handle the goods and I met many illustrious members of the (I mean this fondly) Manchester Blackwell literary mafia.
I have followed Dave Hartley’s story telling for years and he read a Quickie about Scouts and Guides (a comedy platinum combo).
Thanks to Valerie O’Riordan’s (I hope that doesn’t count as a spoiler) laugh out loud coming of age/aeroplane-sex tale I know how to avoid a kidney infection.
Adrian Slatcher wrote about a club I’d like to visit, just to see; and the word anus in Socrates Adams reading prompted a storm-out by an audience member. Ah, the heady allure of glittering launches.

Some of my other favourites were LJ Spillane, ‘He blinks and inhales like a man who if dressed and unbound, would be placing his hands in his pockets to steady a tremble.’ Daniel Carpenter’s Fetish Collector and Kinga Burger’s unreliable narrator enumerating past liaisons, ‘…therefore, according to the five-second rule, [he] doesn’t count.’
I got a forearm tattoo that said smut! in big puffy letters; sadly it was only a temporary tattoo and had faded to a lovebitey exclamation mark by morning, which was sad, but I’ve come to terms with the disappointment.
The anthology is very, very good and contains amazing stories by Adrian Slatcher, Benjamin Judge, Chris Killen, Claire Massey, Claire Symonds, Clare Kirwan, Daniel Carpenter, Dave Hartley, David Gaffney, Dom Conlon, Emma Jane Unsworth, Fat Roland, Gavin White, Jane Bradley, John Macky, Kim McGowan (me!), Kinga Burger, Laura Maley, LJ Spillane, Lynsey May, Matthew Carson, Nick Garrard, Red Newsom, Sarah-Clare Conlon, Sarah Hilary, Shirley Kernan, Socrates Adams, Tania Hershman, Tom Mason, and Valerie O’Riordan.

It is worth £3.50/£5 of anyone’s lolly fund.

It is available for Kindle and to purchase from Mancheter Blackwell (ignore the Tommy guns, they're mostly harmless) and also from here.

The Post Last-post Post

2011-01-16T08:43:00.000-08:00

Almost a year ago in ‘A public display of ineptitude’, first open mic slot, being sick in a bucket and Edith Bouvier Beale (see here) I blogged about reading an extract at a Word Soup live lit evening.
I read The Musical Mobile, a story about an unmarried mother in the 1970s trying to stop the adoption of her baby. I made a spectacle of myself by being moved to tears by my own made-up words.
I did not blog about my second try at public performance at Lancaster Spotlight in Spring. It was soon after my hip replacement operation. I was on crutches, coked-up on painkillers and not answerable for my actions.
Needless to say, exactly the same broken crackly, croaky voice-thing happened in exactly the same place in the same story, only worse – and in front of a far larger audience.
My fine friend, David, and my daughter attended. By good fortune David was busy doing musician-prep things when it came to my slot. He said later that someone told him I’d acted out the piece with emotion. ACTED? Me acted? I’m a librarian for goodness sake. What drugged-up cripple of a librarian in their right mind chooses to act out an emotional story in front of an aghast and squirming audience?
As I hobbled from the Spotlight dais the compere said softly,
‘Emotional stuff.’
Back at seat I put my face flat on the table. A sort-of friend came by and roused me. She said,
‘That was brave.’
See, I can be dim but I know brave doesn’t mean brave in that context. I can’t quite put my finger on what it does mean. Pitiable maybe? Fool-hardy perhaps? Stark staring bonkers? Probably. But, it doesn’t mean brave, that’s for sure.
My daughter asked me, not unkindly, if I was sure I hadn’t given a baby up for adoption when I was a girl, and I’d forgotten.

Anyway. The purpose of this post last-post post is to say I’m at it again. On the advice of said daughter I’m going for something a little more upbeat this time. I’m reading an extract I’ve called Chester Blott Tells a Smutty Story here at Paul Sockett’s Outspoken at Clitheroe Castle on 21 January 2001.

Paul is being interviewed on Radio Lancashire at 3 o’clock on the same day and Jim Turner and I might be reading some work on air.
However, my radio reading can’t be from the Chester Blott extract because it is a bit rude.
I might have to read from the (honest to God made up) adoption story. Just one more time.

So, if you like that sort of spectacle - public displays of ineptitude - you know what to do.

The Last Post: How it felt on the day I discovered that I did not have a distinction…

2010-12-04T05:13:00.000-08:00

I’d started to believe I would never know my MA marks; and a bit of me preferred it that way – with Schrödinger's Cat and the flask of cyanide snugly boxed up I could imagine whatever I like.

And what I like to imagine is that I’ve been awarded a distinction.

I could have tried to discover the marks – I could have contacted the person who will know or the administrators who frighten me – but that was daunting, and a bit like temping providence.
Then – one Tuesday afternoon five weeks ago – I was in the library and I happened upon the person who will know.
I have been in a dark funk since that day. I saw the term ‘dark funk’ in an article and it is a perfect description of the way I feel; a sad mix of gloom and craven passivity.

One darkening Tuesday afternoon, five weeks ago, I meet the person who will know my MA marks in the library.

It is impossible (for me at least) to ignore the bulky cat-box on the floor between us. So, when we have established how well we both look, I ask the question. I ask the person who will know when we might find out about our marks.

‘The Board met last week,’ the person who will know says, ‘your dissertation is with the administrators who frighten you and ready to collect.’ (she doesn’t actually call them that – I’ve never admitted to the person who will know that I am afraid of the administrators, although she might easily have guessed).

So I walk - limping slightly; the limp returns for the walk - very, very slowly, across the winter concourse that separates the library and the student centre, where the dissertation is ready to collect. The distance is about two hundred yards and the journey takes at least two hundred years. The student centre is jolly with light. Students and tutors, bathed in radiance from the windows, crisscross my path. They are chatting, and frowning and smiling and behaving as if nothing is odd.

I am waiting for the dissertation to be retrieved and there is a tap on my shoulder. It is the person who will know, again.

‘I just thought I would come across and tell you…’

I nod.

‘…we discussed your mark profile at the Board…’

I watch her mouth.

‘…and we decided to award you…’

I wait. It is like the ticking tense pause they do to be cruel on talent shows.

‘…a merit…’

And the cat is on its sad side at our feet. Its eyes are part open but milky-glazed and its body is a stiff as a branch.

‘…well done!’

‘Thank you.’

She speaks on, saying encouraging things about not letting the writing go and about not being disheartened by rejections.
I wonder – 'Is merit what they call a distinction at this university?' I wonder if the cat is merely in a black catty-funk, which would be understandable after being closed up in that nasty box for all those months.
The administrator who frightens me hands me the dissertation and I dare to touch the cat lightly with the toe of my shoe.

‘erm… So – does it go Pass, Merit, Distinction?’ I ask the person who will know.
‘That’s right.’
And there was really no need to check, we all already knew that the poor catty-sod had gone - you have been weighed and proclaimed kind-of ordinary.
I take the dissertation and sit in the disabled toilet and I look at my mark and I try to read the comments. 70%. I clawed my way to a 70% with the dissertation but it wasn’t enough to raise the mark profile.
70% is good. I have done nicely. I should be proud.
I stare at the comments with milky glazed eyes and I ask my self what did I expect.

What did you expect?

A spectacular dissertation mark to raise your mark profile?

An invite from the external examiner to meet his literary agent?

A handwritten request to join a prestigious writers' group?

A special prize?

A big clock?

Well no. Well yes. I don’t know – not the clock anyway, that’d just be ridiculous.

Aren’t you grateful to have passed? To start with you didn’t even know if you would pass.

I was being disingenuous when I thought that - I always knew I’d pass, I always knew I could get a distinction.

And how wrong you were. Why did you think you’d deserve such an accolade, why did you think you’d earned a distinction?

Because I worked a lot, because I tried so hard, because I wanted it – very much.

Ah! So. How do you think it all went wrong? Why do you think you weren’t awarded a distinction?

I don’t know. Maybe because I make fun of people to get cheap laughs?
Maybe because I don’t recycle plastic bottles if they’re oily and difficult to wash out?
Maybe because I added an espresso to my latte without telling the lady at the till?

It’s none of those things, is it?

No.

What about you weren’t awarded a distinction because of these things:
You didn’t make yourself write when you reckoned you were in pain; too weary; you needed to tidy drawers out, urgently?
You sometimes wrote lazy self-indulgent drivel rather than answering the question?
You sometimes cited smartass paragraphs from hard books pretending you’d read the whole smartass book?
Well?

Could be... But still, I really did want it – very much.

The person who will know makes such a point of how nicely I have done that, after a day or two, I am able to bask in the assurance that at least no one will have a better mark profile than mine.
Then – I meet the friend whose dissertation mark is so spectacular that it qualifies her for the big clock (were such a thing not ridiculous). And, with a sickening sickness, I realise that there are people with much better mark profiles than mine; that the person who will know followed me from the library to the student centre to save me from myself, to save me from my own stubborn delusions.
The person who will know knows me too well. She realised that when I saw my 70% dissertation mark I would continue to nurse vain hope until the official results were posted. The person who will know opened the cat box and showed me the merit to stop me making any more of a fool of myself. Better for me to be in a dark funk than for students and tutors to see me cutting a confident swath across the light-drenched concourse between the student centre and the library pulling a branch-stiff dead cat lashed to a set of old pram wheels.

I have friends with distinctions and I must be glad for them. I am glad for them, but I wish it was me. And it will always be this other thing now – on the record, on the lips, in the mind, until I am gone. No, even after when I am gone.

So, 70% for the dissertation is good. I have done nicely. I should be proud of myself.

But that is not how it felt on the day that I discovered that I didn’t have a distinction.

ps my friend, Valerie, did her MA at Manchester was awarded a distinction and I am very, very proud and pleased for her!
pps The official results have just been posted and my overall average (by my calculation) is 69.11111111 (the 1s go on for ever). A number that has a spectacular quality all of its own.

Throttling darlings & it's all over bar the recriminations...

2010-09-19T06:28:00.000-07:00

Throttling children or killing babies or strangling darlings (I can't remember the proper term but you get the picture) is when you have to get rid of marvellous bits of your story because they don't work; sometimes because, *little voice* on reflection, they are rubbish. It is very hard and I have not got the hang of it yet.

In the early drafts of my loomidob, The Shoes, (it's called something else now but I'll come to that in the moment) I have my female protagonist, Joan, winsomely swinging her tennis racket as she strides down the hill in the warm evening sunshine after a steamy summer's day. A few weeks later in the story my male character, Senny, attends a testosterone and lager fuelled FA Cup party at his mate Little-Al's house.

When I set out my timeline and desultorily checked a few facts I discovered that FA cup finals are played in mid to late-May. I changed Joan's winsome-walking conditions to a balmy spring evening.

Then, I found out that in 1975 (the year the story opens) the FA cup final was played on 3 May. A few weeks before that Joan would probably have had to feel her way down the hill into town, with tennis rackets lashed to her feet like snow shoes. So that scene had to go, as did several other lovelies.

In my last post I mentioned that I was sick to death of my title, The Shoes. Sick to death to the extent that I wished the title harm. I have renamed my story Doing Without. The term doing without is used by Senny when he is thinking about whether he would have sex with Tabard-Joyce on the cafe table; regardless of her pop-sox and despite the fact that she picks up discarded cold baked-beans with her bare fingers (See? You want to read it now, don't you?)

"Tabard-Joyce unpacks our order from her tray to the table and retreats behind the tall glass counter. Ted follows her form. He is wondering if he can overlook the knee-length nylons and the baked-bean fingers enough to fuck her over one of the tables. I know this because I’ve wondered it myself and we’ve discussed the matter.

I decided it came down to how long you’ve been doing without, but on balance and given the opportunity, yes I would. Ted thinks he’s still undecided, but he definitely would too."

So. There it is. My story is sort-of finished. It also has a form at last; it grew to over 36,000 words so it is no longer a loomidob and now qualifies as a novella. I was quite sad to leave to loomidob behind but that's what happens.

I polished (as they say) 12,000 words and I wrote a 3,000 critical commentary on my writing process and I gave it all in, in duplicate, on Friday 13 August 2010. I have been in stark-staring shock since; I don't know when the results are due and I dare not ask.

I declined an invitation to attend the MA graduation because I am too superstitious. I told the lovely lady who is in charge of Ceremonies that I could not arrange to attend a graduation until I know if I’ve passed the degree. Unfortunately the truth is (and this is shameful) I can't arrange to attend a graduation until I know *miniscule voice* if I have a distinction. There. I've said it. Shameful.

This blog was for recording the progress of my MA in Creative Writing and it is finished now so the blog is finished. Thank you, my other reader, you’ve been lovely, supportive company x

Redraft Eleven as a Rubik's Cube and Setting Fire to Stupid Titles

2010-05-17T10:36:00.000-07:00

I am hauling myself bucking and bellowing into redraft eleven of the dissertation story. I’ve circled it warily for weeks.

I think it’s reached a sort of Rubik’s Cube stage; the impression that it might be nearing completion is illusory. This story needs to be pitilessly undone before it can be put together nicely. I am trying to resist the temptation to just rip the little coloured squares off and stick them back (all curling at the edges) where I think they should go.

To recap for my other reader, the story is called The Shoes and is about a relationship over forty years told from alternating male and female points of view (POV). Initially, it was to be 2,000 words long. An earlier post about the process is here.

The story is an indeterminate form; too long for a short story, too short for a novella. I've termed it a Loomidob for now.

I have written a large chunk of backstory for my female character. It relates to a time when the girl is trying to prevent the adoption of the child she is expecting. The extract became a short story called The Musical Mobile (as if I haven’t told you that already).

My supervisor, The Author who is Writing about Neanderthals, said it is fine for me to write about events that have influenced characters but, to be fair, I should do something similar for my man character.

What I have been advised that I need to do:

See what techniques real authors use to get around the problems I am experiencing.

Signal temporal and narrative shifts more effectively.

Give my man more substance, more backstory - even if it is never used.

Sort out continuity and cohesion problems and research facts instead of guessing stuff.

During the wasted weeks when I’ve felt shitty and I haven’t felt able to write nicely I’ve been:

reading;

speaking to real authors by email;

thinking about my male character and trying to work out why he doesn’t seen authentic.

What I’ve read:
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro (a get-better present from a really good friend)
Black Rock by Amanda Smyth

The Leaping by Tom Fletcher

Housekeeping, Gilead and Home by Marilynne Robinson

The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler

What I’ve learnt:

Real authors make themselves write however shitty they feel because they can edit and redraft weak work but they cannot edit no work. Real authors write a lot of stuff that never sees the light of day in its original form.

That I have to stop being resistant to signalling narrative shifts. In The Leaping, Tom Fletcher alternates between two narrative voices and he signposts each change with the narrators name. It works very well.

I have to stop being resistant to naming my characters; it isn’t enigmatic, it’s pretentious and irritating.

I am going to have to write a lot of backstory for both of my characters and then jettison most of it; the piece is now over 17,000 words long and my word limit for assessment is 12,000. 17,000 (and growing) is really unwieldy; I forget where stuff is and my style has evolved as I’ve been writing so there are big discrepancies in technique.

I need to avoid sentimentality and cliché by recalling my own honest emotions rather than writing what I imagine a pretend person (who is inevitably more sophisticated than me) might do and feel. A line from Anne Tyler’s book The Amateur Marriage brought me up short.

The extract is set in the US in the1960s. A mother has just discovered that her runaway daughter is in hospital in San Francisco, which is thousands of miles away from where she and her husband live. She telephones her husband at work:

‘We have to go, you have to come home, how will we get there? …… We have to buy airplane tickets, how do people do that?’

Which I think is exactly how a real person might respond in the circumstance. That is how I would respond.

I need a timeline to give me an overview of the structure of the story and to highlight irregularities or sloppiness. For example, I realise that I've written about a Harvest Moon in May, and I refer to a general election in 1974 that didn’t happen until 1976.

Also I’ve made the male character’s father a socialist refugee. Because my grasp of history is poor I don’t know which European countries generated socialist refugees around the time of WW2, or whether they were likely to arrive before, during or after the war.

Part of me thinks that this is my made up world and it doesn’t matter what I make up. Part of me knows that if I were an examiner I’d throw a script across the room for slapdash fact-finding.

What has happened:

I am sick to death of the title, The Shoes. If I could set fire to that stupid title, I would. If I could hang it, draw it, quarter it and put its head on a stake outside the city walls, I would.

I have given my characters names, Joan and Senny (short for Senacerib).

I signal narrative shifts CLEARLY.

My characters have more substance; transpires a high proportion of them were bed wetters (really!) No idea this has happened and I might have to rethink it - but what can I do? Maybe noctural enuretics do clump clammily together for comfort.

I am still finding it much harder to write the male point of view than to write the female point of view.

I listened to Michael Portillo’s Democracy on Trial on Radio 4. Michael’s father is Spanish, a Labour voter who came to the UK just before WW2 as a refugee. Hurrah!! Senny’s dad is that thing too!

What is still to do:

Ensure that the characters’ POV are distinctive, consistent and emotionally honest.

Ensure that the characters’ POV change and age as they do.

Write, edit, write, edit, stop being a wuss, write, edit.

Thank you to David Wright for my photograph of a wistful Rubik’s Cube (I knew David would had a Rubik’s Cube to photograph for me because he can do them very quickly!)
David and his band The New Zealand Story are at Spotlight on Friday 21 May 2010, as are many other splendid people. Look Here for details.

I’ve got these books still to read:

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis (a get-better present from someone Very Fine)

Antwerp by Nicholas Royle

Not So Perfect by Nik Perring (both get-better presents from myself)

Interview with Tom Fletcher

2010-05-09T09:18:00.000-07:00

There is an interview with Tom Fletcher, author of The Leaping, on the Lancashire Writing Hub blog
here

(it is a very good new novel)

More information about and links to interviews with Tom here

Bleeping and Clicking, Not Being Able to Write and a Nice Prize

2010-04-27T03:02:00.000-07:00

I've had a break from writing because I've been off colour. I want to write stuff. I spent whole bleeping, clicking nights in hospital (bleeping and clicking are not coy swear-word replacements; hospital nights do come furnished with a bleeping and clicking sound track).

I spent whole bleeping, clicking nights in hospital mentally composing a piece on how I feel about an arrangement that often seems to strive, 'officiously to keep alive'*.

Time and again I have witnessed ordinarily aging people who have had their chassis-life extended with replacement body parts and chemical tinkering. They live on, but often they live on to become broken, muddled old shells of human beings who survive into a shitty and undignified great age.

The piece I was mentally composing had a testing extra facet because I have recently and unwittingly become part of that arrangement. Last Autumn I developed a ridiculous, sore limp and it turned out that, if I wanted to walk painlessly and (sort of) normally again, a surgeon would need to strive and replace my knackered hip with a new version.

Whatever gruesome things happened to me in hospital they were not conducive to getting mentally composed-words down on paper in an engaging order. The piece I was composing is too difficult for me to write (I keep editing the last three paragraphs but they continue to sound like muddled old crap).

All I want to do at the moment is read. Mostly, what I do do is stare into space and drop asleep with my glasses skewed across my face and my neck in a cricked position.

I was quite subdued and sad when I was admitted into hospital. I was plagued with grave doubts about my writing abilites - see previous post. Actually, see most of my previous posts. And, although I pretend to be fearless I was witless with terror about what was going to be done to me in the name of officious striving.

During the bleeping, clicking second post-operative day I received an email from the Writer with the Writerly Name telling me that my short story, The Musical Mobile, has won the 2010 Helen Clark Award for prose.

The news could not have come at a better time and it made me very, very glad.

The Musical Mobile is an extract from my MA dissertation and is a redrafted version of the piece I read so badly at my first open mic.

That's all. That's a start.

* from The Last Decalogue by Arthur Hugh Clough

‘A public display of ineptitude’, first open mic slot, being sick in a bucket and Edith Bouvier Beale

2010-03-03T03:35:00.000-08:00

I have read a piece of work at an open mic slot. It was my first try and I will just tell you why it was not my finest hour.

In November I attended the excellent Ann (The Poet) Wilson’s Performance Workshop hosted by Lancaster Spotlight. I thought I would have a try at reading some of my own writing at a lit evening.

Ann is a great poet, performer and compere and, it turns out, brilliant teacher.

We were a small group and we good-naturedly watched each other reading and perform and gave constructive feedback. Ann provided particularly bespoke advice and showed us how our posture and body language influenced how we sound and how we are perceived. She took us through a whole series of warm-up exercises, breathing and relaxation methods and showed us how to use a microphone (which is a lot more complicated than it sounds).

We were all conspicuously better at performing by the time we had our second bash at delivering our work.

I am never going to be a ‘Ta-Dah!’ kind of a performer but Ann assured us that the conspiratorial ‘Come and listen to this,’ type of delivery is equally as valid.

Between November and now I nearly had a try at an open mic slot several times - but lost my nerve on every occasion.

Finally, I decided I had to do it. I have no idea where the compulsion to read my own writing out loud in front of strangers came from. An obligatory karaoke evening is way beyond what my vision of what hell might be like - and karaoke-ers are at least performing words written by professionals.

I opted to read an extract from my dissertation long-short story. The extract is a first person flashback to the mid-1970s in which my female narrator unsuccessfully resolves to stop the planned adoption of her baby. I wrote it with a detached and calculating heart.

The evening before the lit night I practiced the piece in front of my benevolent writing group friends. The extract was overly-long – almost five minutes and, ridiculously, my voice cracked as if I was about to cry, when I got to the section where the baby is being taken.

The writing friends were kind. I don’t know, maybe I should have been more explicit about my intentions,

‘I plan to read this extract in a big room. In front of people. Strangers, who do not know me...’

and then my writing friends might have been more candid.

Deluded as ever I pressed on; I cut the extract down by removing the first paragraph and a slew of adjectives.

The extract was still over three minutes long but, I hoped, not long enough to trigger the klaxon.

I tinkered with the ending to make it a more self contained narrative.

I practiced reading the narrative out loud to myself one thousand three hundred and ninety seven times; until there was no scrap of emotion left about my person.

At the lit evening I hummed along the corridors until my lips vibrated. I swung my arms vigorously in the toilets. I squatted gingerly when I imagined no one was looking to get the tension out of my legs (this latter exercise was an error as I have a very painful limp at the moment). I inhaled huge lungsful of air with each breath until there were shimmering black shapes in front of my eyes. All to little avail.

When I stood, eschewing the microphone because I couldn’t remember what Ann had said about how to use a microphone, my heart was booming against my ribs, I was anoxic and shrill. Mentally I was being sick in a bucket in the corner of the room. In reality, I was standing in front of my first audience.

As I read I couldn’t believe how long and silly the piece sounded. At the same time I felt sure I was accidentally missing out whole critical paragraphs.

There was one perceptible response from the audience, a man laughed – appropriately - when I mentioned the Uncle Bulgaria slippers; I wish now that I had paused, glanced up and thanked him – but I was in a hurry.

Even before I came to the section where the Fictional Baby is being taken my voice started to wobble dangerously. By the time I got to where the poor sod is being carted off in his Moses basket I was gulping audibly. The tinkered-with ending was lost in mangled emotion.

It is hard to say who was more embarrassed, me or the audience. I was so affected by the reading that even I came away suspecting that the events in the story were autobiographical. It would have felt like disloyalty to my Fictional Character to say,

‘I’m okay, I never had a baby adopted, you know…’

As if I am suggesting that my Fictional Character has done something shameful.

'Anyway...' (this is me addressing my Fictional Character).

'Anyway, my Fictional Character, it is me who should be ashamed, not you. You did what you considered to be the best thing in the circumstances. I, on the other hand, inflicted an overly-long, sentimental, ridiculously read, possibly inaudible extract on a blameless audience.'

After the reading I felt as if I was in a slow-motion/fast-motion trick photography film. In this film I can be seen sitting quite still and anonymous whilst a speeded-up world continues dizzily around me.

As I said at the beginning, my first open mic was not my finest hour. More accurately; it was not my finest more-than-three-minutes-but-less-than-five-minutes (if you don’t include my starring role in the subsequent trick photography slow-mo/fast-mo motion picture). Actually, not finest hour was probably a fair description.

Did any one else see the non-trick photography film, Grey Gardens? Apparently the subject of the film, Edith Bouvier Beale (a first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) attempted to launch a cabaret career when she was 60. The New York Times called her act:

‘A public display of ineptitude.’

Oh poor Edie. Oh poor me. There. I’ve said it. We will not speak of my first open mic slot again. Least said soonest mended…

The Dissertation, Narrative Mode and Being Jealous of Margaret Atwood.

2010-02-10T09:35:00.000-08:00

My supervisor, the Author who is Writing about Neanderthals, has spent hours forensically reading my shitty first/fifth/seventh drafts and I have had the first two of my six dissertation meetings.

The project will be 12,000 words in my chosen genre and 3,000 words of critical commentary.

Initially I planned to write six 2,000 word pieces because I am a blatherer who needs discipline and because I find it so difficult to make longer stories cohesive. The first three story ideas started out as:
The Shoes: a love story over forty years told from alternating male and female points of view;
The Wrong Baby: a story about the social changes wrought by a transfer from a mobile forager/hunter existence to sedentism and food production;
I Was A Nurse: a story about the impact of dementia;

Two of the stories feature dead or lost babies and the third features an infantile parent. I am always losing babies in my stories.

I am about to blather about point of view (POV) or narrative voice and tense so here is a scanty summary of POV and narrative mode - as I understand it:

First person: Uses the ‘I’ voice. The first person narrator is often unreliable because they are presenting events from their perspective.
Second person: Uses the ‘You’ voice.
Third person: Uses the ‘She’ voice. The third person narrator can be:
Third person objective, that is the narrator describes events but not the thoughts of the characters.

Third person subjective (also known as third person restricted (or limited) omniscient) that is the narrator describes events and the thoughts of one main character. Some stories are a series of third person subjective narratives that focus on alternating or different characters.
Third person omniscient: the narrator who sees all and knows the mind of all the characters.
Past tense: 'I was at'; ‘She was at’.
Present tense: 'I am at'; ‘She is at’.

POV and tense can be used in every permutation. To add confusion I am going to talk about a story in which I use a first person, present tense narrative mode to write about a memory. I like present tense because events are unfolding for the reader as they happen.

My love story started out being told by two alternating (unnamed) protagonists. Both were narrated from the first person, past tense POV.

This is a small extract from the first draft (it was well-slated in workshop). Usually the alternating sections are longer but these two just happen to be very short. The girl narrates first then the bloke:

"I was one of May’s bridesmaids. After the reception a group of us went on to Charlie’s. The dress wasn’t one of those dreadful satin carry-ons; we chose a nice maxi-dress from Dorothy Perkins so I could get some use out of it afterwards. I wore ballet pumps with mine. When he saw me he said.
‘Don’t you have any proper shoes?’

Houghton Sue wasn't at Charlie’s this week but she was. She was drunk and looked a bit of a mess, long flowery dress and stupid shoes. Still I took her home and got my end away."

At the first dissertation meeting my supervisor recommended that I read:
Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace to see how a writer can shift between narrators; in this instance between an first person unreliable narrator and a third person subjective (or restricted) narrator;
Postcards by Annie Proulx as an example of how a writer tells one man's story as a series third person restricted narratives; each section present events from the point of view of different characters in turn over many decades;
Burning Bright by Helen Dunmore to see how I might convey how devotion or obsession can blind a character to reality. Burning Bright is written from shifting POV but in the perpetual present tense.

Over a few weeks I found all of the titles except Burning Bright at various Oxfam Books (I found loads of others besides and I did get a bit carried away.... )

I redrafted The Shoes first because, despite it being slated, it is the story that engages me most. It still is not finished and had grown to 7,000 words before my second dissertation meeting so I suggested to my supervisor that I might concentrate on this tale and let it expand into a 12,000 word long-short story, if such a thing exists.

The initial drafts of The Shoes were written colloquially with contractions - weren't, should've, I'd, can't - which I was unhappy about but which I felt were appropriate to the first person voice. One of the books I found in Oxfam was When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishguro's story is a first person narrative that eschews contractions other than in direct speech and I decided to copy his approach in my next iteration.

So, in the redrafting I removed contractions, added a present tense (and present day), first person prologue which describes the woman catching a glimpse of the man after the passage of many years:

"I see you today.
I am driving down the hill into the city. It is late morning and the sun is shining in my eyes as I turn a bend. I am about to ask Edie to retrieve my sunglasses from the glove compartment but she is speaking and I think I will wait until she has finished this bit of what she is saying.
I am concentrating on Edie’s words. Or rather, I am alert for a natural break. And then there you are…"

I changed the man's POV sections to third person restricted narrator; I made this change because it allowed me to include details and descriptions that my male character would not necessarily have noted.

I altered both narrative POV to the perpetual present tense so they are not memories or flashbacks but unfolding events. The narrators and the reader does not know what will happen (although the prologue has obviously hinted against a happy-ever ending).

I'm impressed that proper writers are able to let slip early on that all will not be well - that the narrator will be dead by Tuesday for example - but it is done so skilfully that that the reader allows herself to hope against hope that all may turn out nicely. I hope this every time I see Hamlet.

This is extract from above, redrafted:

“I am a bridesmaid at May’s wedding. After the reception some of us travel on to Charlie’s for a dance. My dress is not one of those dreadful satin creations; we chose a flower print maxi-dress from Dorothy Perkins so I can wear it again afterwards. I found some pink ballet pumps that match it exactly. When Tom sees me he says.

‘Haven’t you got any proper shoes?’

Tom cannot find Houghton Sue at Charlie’s this week, but that girl with the frizzy hair is here; the one that seems to be following him around. She is drunk and she looks a bit of a mess in a long, flowery, hippy-dress and stupid shoes. Tom considers for a while, but he does not get any better offers and so he takes her home; and this time it is worth it. He gets his end away.”

I also gave my male character a name, Tom, and the female character became a nurse.
I nursed in the olden days; I know about thermometers and myocardial infarctions and gallows humour and getting bladdered - I have access to credible detail. I'm not sure why I am reluctant to name my main protagonists. It is clear from creative writing blogs and books that not naming a character in an attempt to be 'mysterious' irritates readers. I think I am partly guilty of trying to be mysterious but my reluctance is also based on my prejudice about how a person called, Tom, for example might behave. It is probably time for another trip to a graveyard to harvest some pre-used names.
The Author who is Writing about Neanderthals was happy for me to concentrate on one long-short story and gave me some interesting guidelines for how many words constitute what form:

12,000 is more than a short story; it bites back, it trusts (her words).

20,000 is a long story (a US form she said) which often reflects upon the social morays of a particular time.

35,000 is a novella, like The Great Gatsby or The Turn of the Screw.

50,000-60,000 is a short novel.

So my piece doesn't really have a form. I might call it a Loomidob, or I might get a better idea.

My supervisor said that the new prologue framed the narrative (!), it is set further in the future than the main body of the story and is the point from which the writer can look backward and even forward.

She is happy with the redrafting so far and feels that the removal of contractions has changed the tone of the piece and consequently the impact on the reader. She suggests that the new formality slows the narrative and that the piece has acquired a tenderness that was missing previously. She suggested I read:
Colm Tobin; for tenderness that works very well.

Bakhtin on Dostoevsky's work and the representation of polyphony, many voices. The Shoes has two voices, although I think Bakhtin would say that there is a third voice; the woman who relates the prologue is a decades older version of the nurse and therefore an ‘other’ or changed person.

The Author who is Writing about Neanderthals is a candid and critical reader but she already knows my characters, what I am aiming for and how the piece has developed. I recently attended some intermediate writing workshops and I took an opening extract from The Shoes to get some fresh and cold-eyed feedback...

The counsel I received in this forum was invaluable and (I hope) encouraged me to stop deluding myself. I was advised that:

My shifts between points of view need to be more clearly signposted.

I need to orient my characters in a place and time with each shift.

I had already made a decision not to signpost shifts in narrative voice by changing font or by other type of formatting (other than by defined line breaks) because I felt it was patronising the reader, but it is obviously pointless to muddle the reader too.
It was suggested at the workshop that I could date sections like diary entries. Again, I'm not keen but I am not sure why. Maybe it is because I am a lazy writer, or maybe it is because I am prepared to be a hard working reader and figure out what is happening in the books I read (those written by proper writers); but I realise that that is not a good-enough reason and that I can't depend on reader-loyalty from MA markers.

I came away from the workshops with some more reading suggestions:
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood; for effective use of present tense memories or flashbacks and for technically accomplished tense shifts.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell; for a portrayal of interlocking lives.
Morven Callar by Alan Warner for a self contained female narrative voice.
Lorrie Moore.
Ann Beatty.
Miranda July

Cat's Eye is my favourite so far, it features a motif that is familiar to me and, I expect, to my other reader. That is, how a child can be terrorised by a bully who is ultimately revealed to be feeble and pitiable. For my part, that syndrome is not limited to childhood; I spent whole swathes of my adult life not getting or being afraid of people I saw regularly - other parents, people at evening classes, work colleagues - only to eventually realise that it wasn't necessarily me who was stupid or out of kilter.

In Cat’s Eye, Atwood keeps her child narrator in the eternal present, which contrasts with the nebulous and disjointed childhood memories of the her same character as a grown woman.

I am very jealous of Atwood because she manages time shifts between forty years ago and now that are mostly in first person present tense and occasionally in first person past tense without clunky signposting; italics or diary dates. That is what I am trying to do. The difference is Atwood is a skilled technician and I am not.

My first person narrator presents information in an immediate, simplistic way:

"I am a bridesmaid at May's wedding. After the reception..."

Although Atwood is writing in the present tense as a child her voice is more lyrical and knowing and her scope is broader:

"The snow erodes, leaving the pot-holes in the roads near our house filled with muddy water. The bubbles of ice form across these puddles overnight; we shatter them with the heels of our boots."
Atwood's narration feels like an adult looking through a child's eyes but, as I said, the adult narrator does not remember the childhood events with clarity or order.

My story is not complete yet. I know what happens but I am not sure how it happens. I think I just need to get it finished using the current narrative modes and then work on trying to make it accessible without being patronising.

Is Hull a Real Place?

2010-02-02T06:26:00.000-08:00

I recently read a newspaper article suggesting that Hull might become The Venice of the North and was reminded of the time we had our Youngest Grandson and his cornet to stay.

They were only with us for a few days; he is a most affable child (and the cornet is generally well behaved).

If I cooked food that our Youngest Grandson wasn't sure about he didn't pull sick faces or make gagging noises, he tried his best.

This is an exchange we had when I gave him some salty spaghetti bolognaise. I could tell it was too salty because he was laughing like a loon at Ian's daft jokes and shifting food from one plate-zone to another in an attempt to wear it out; and also because it tasted too salty.
'Are you okay with that, or is it a bit salty for you?'
'It's fine, thanks. Oh, ho ho! Grandad, you're well-sad!'
He makes a small realignment of some bolognaise and lifts a couple of dangles of unadulterated pasta to his lips.
'Are you sure, is it perhaps not what you're used to at home and would you prefer to just have some pasta with grated cheese?'
Short pause. He shakes his head, sage-like, at Ian's infantile banter and appraises his plate.
'This is very nice Grandma, but it's not what I'm used to at home and maybe I would prefer to just have some pasta with grated cheese.'

In just a few days we managed to lose all his clothes and most of his homework. The majority of his clobber disappeared into the black hole that is After School Club. Turns out you're not meant to believe children when they say,
'It's in my bag.'
or
'It's okay, I left it in the drawer.'
or
'I didn't wear it today.'
Because what they're really saying is:
'Will you give it a rest, Grandma, with your inane interrogating, I've got important things to think about.'
We felt quite smug when we returned him to his mother because he was wearing his PE kit. It transpires the PE kit wasn't even his own; school had dressed him in that after he slipped on the field playing Tag (or was it Tig?).
'I thought the field was out of bounds in the winter?'
'Oh yes. It is.'
'Why...?'
'My foot just caught the edge.'
'Ah.'

He was no trouble at all. He let me read to him from his mother's 1970s Thomas the Tank Engine books and his uncle's Calvin and Hobbes and 1980s Beano Annuals.  He pretended (for my sake) that playing Consequences is riotously hilarious fun.

Our Youngest Grandson couldn't believe how much we like to sleep, we do like to be in bed for 9.00 but we were extra exhausted when he was staying.  I had completely forgotten how physically and emotionally draining small children are; you live in constant fear that some nameless, terrifying harm will befall them.

When my Other Middlest Child drove him and the cornet to school on the final day he said.
'Auntie Ali?'
'Yes, Chick?
'I've been wondering.'
'Oh yes?'
'I've been wondering for a while now.'
'Ye-e-es....?' (this might be one for your mummy)
'Is Hull a real place?'
My Other Middlest Child, a brainbox who knows a thing or two about the East Coast, admits that this question caught her on the hop and made her doubt herself. The thing is, she said, when someone thinks you are omnipotent you don't want to ruin your reputation with an ill-considered response. She knew she knew but caught herself wondering.
'Is it a real place?'

Well, Auntie Ali, Hull must be a real place, because I've seen it in the newspaper and it might be destined to become The Venice of the North.

ps did you know that he cornet was originally derived from the post horn ? Golly!
pps Proud Hullesians, we all do know that Hull is a real and very fine place, it's just that the strain of omnipotence gets to us, sometimes.

The Shire Horse Rides Again - and how many trees the (vulgar) other half have.

2010-01-05T09:29:00.000-08:00

You are short of money in the run-up to Christmas. In these circumstances convention dictates that you spend judiciously until around the 22 December.

When 22 December dawns a red mist descends (or this year - a white blizzard descends) and instantly it becomes acceptable to purchase anything you see - the more overpriced, the better.

You do not even need a big Christmas tree. You are poor, your children are grown and a tree only drops and make a mess anyway. A modest Christmas tree will be adequate. You will pity-purchase a wonky, economy tree nearer to the date. You favour wonkers, a tree with a bald bit or a list or a double top or *gulps* an amputation, because you feel sorry for them.

Due to the snow you can't even get to the Christmas tree shop prior to the 22 December. By dawn on the 22 December obtaining a tree (the bigger, the wonkier, the better) is your only ambition.

It is snowing hard but Ian shovels the drive clear for three hours. In the process he liberates the Postman, which gives everyone a warm-fuzzy feeling. Ian spreads ashes to aid his return journey (note: these were not the Postman's ashes).

Ian and the Other Middlest child and the Postman set off up the blizzard-blinded lane in a stately 5mph conga in the direction of the Christmas tree shop.

Twenty minutes after their snowy departure the Youngest child draws up, her arrival aided by the thoughtfully scattered ashes. She slept away from home last night and has brought you a huge surprise.

'I've brought you a huge surprise - a Christmas tree!'

You speed dial Ian and his mobile telephone rings in the dining room.

You speed dial the Other Middlest child and her Elvis Costello ringtone sounds tinnily from upstairs.

The arctic adventurers return with the (second) flake-laden tree. They report that as they slewed to a halt at the Christmas tree shop the nice lady, sensible in her extreme-weather outfit, had clapped her gloved hands together gleefully. As they departed she'd said.

'I didn't expect to sell any trees today - and I've just sold two!'

Yes. Both of them to you. Both of them fiendishly expensive. Both of them major wonkers; one of them has two heads, two heads.

There is the mostly red/gold tree (aka The Dropper) - please note the Christmas chair decoration and the pink Christmas rabbit decoration. One visitor saw fit to comment on the oddness of these particular decorations. What is there to say, doesn't everyone have a Christmas chair? There is also a wonker Christmas cricketer decoration hanging around at the back of the red/gold tree.

And there is the mostly silver/blue tree (aka The Two-headed Sticker) -Yes, the coding guidelines have been loosely interpreted. Well, breeched. It's Christmas; and not really the time to get precious about colour-rules; and it transpires there aren't many blue decorations in the loot under the stairs.

Also just visible, next to the silver/blue tree (The Two-headed Sticker) is the cake, baked by the Youngest child, decorated by the Youngest child and the Other Middlest child, eaten by me.

My other reader will observe that the Shire Horse rides again.

Our approach to Christmas cake characters is much the same as it is to Christmas trees and to Christmas tree decorations. Bring us your wonkers and they are assured a place in our royal icing blizzard.

The cake tableau was a royal icing blizzard-conga to church featuring: an improbably compact church; a Shire horse; three Father Christmases; two polar bears, one able bodied and one alternatively abled (3-legged); an assortment of candle-head angels, some able bodied, some with wings missing, a King-Kong killer robin red-breast and a King-Kong killer robin brown-breast (the latter's red breast has washed off).

There is no Collie Dog for scale; I cannot explain this grave omission, except to say that the compact church and the King-Kong killer robins just chortle in the face of scale anyway.

The cake appears commendably inclusive - and so it is.  But I am about to highlight a hitherto overlooked environmental hazard. If it wasn't for royal icing none of these seasonal characters would have sustained severe leg and wing injuries in the first place.

Over the years it has been scientifically demonstrated that royal icing is the primary source of polar bear and angel mutilations.  It is almost certainly behind many other nasty disasters. Royal icing should probably be banned.

On Sunday I attended my excellent friend Steve's 60th birthday party in Windermere. This photograph was taken during his wintery birthday boat trip.
Happy Birthday (very) Old Fruit

And Happy New Year.

A Memorial, the Transit of Venus and Not Planning Ahead Nicely - like Olden Day Masons.

2009-12-12T04:15:00.000-08:00

A post ago I wrote about the death of a friend. His memorial service was held at St Michael's in Hoole near to Preston. It would have been insensitive and intrusive to take camera to the service but there are particular features of the day that stayed with me and I returned to the tiny church at the weekend to photograph some parts of the memories. My Other Middlest child came along with me for company.

I was taken by the heart-shaped motifs picked out in the brickwork of the building, and by a strange and elaborate doorway in the north wall - when you are inside the church there is no sign of an entrance - just blank plaster; it's a door that leads to nowhere.

The heart seems such a modern and frivolous emblem but St Michael’s is very old and I would like to understand why the shapes were incorporated by the bricklayers. There are diamonds too - but no spades or clubs - so it isn’t that the workmen were borrowing playing card symbols.

(Some people think playing cards are sinister.
'based on the blipish Satanism of the Cabala,'
(see Playing Cards on this rather unsettling site). I don't think the lovely priest who conducted my friend's memorial subscribes to the belief that cards are inherently evil though)

St Michael's at Hoole is (a bit) famous because of its association with an extraordinary astronomer, Jeremiah Horrocks, who died in 1641 aged 22.

Jeremiah Horrocks was the first person to accurately predict and observe the transit of Venus; a phenomenon during which Venus moves between the Earth and the Sun and is visible on the solar face.

The transit of Venus occurs in a massive 243 year cycle and then happens twice within a decade. Young Horrocks witnessed the event in November 1639. The last time it occurred was on the 8 June 2004. During the eulogy the lovely priest mentioned how my friend, a bespoke jeweller, made commemorative transit of Venus pieces for St Michael's.

There were three particular aspects of the memorial service that I couldn’t recapture with a camera after the event.

The first is the reading the eulogy. It laid out the frame of my friend’s life before us and it touched upon the lives he himself influenced: He was born in Hoxton but was evacuated to a manor house in Devon for the duration of the war. His life and his deeds seem to have reflected that dichotomous start to his existence; he was a jeweller, a singer, a boxer, a stuntman (I didn’t know that!) a father, a writer, a promoter of sport for all, a politician, and much else. He was funny and he was irreverent.

He pretended to be a Tory - but he was far more complicated than a description of his activities suggests; all his instincts were to redress social iniquities, not to perpetuate them (he stopped eating meat after a programme about how transported livestock suffer). To put it charitably, I'm a fuzzy-wuzzy, well-meaning liberal; an atheist who views boxing with aghast bewilderment - but I do nowt. My friend was a properly kind and committed person and he actually did stuff that made the world around him more fair.

The second picture I would have taken is of all the boxers my friend trained over the years, bursting from the joints of the gated choir stalls. Young lives and young men that have realigned themselves within the space they occupy because of what he taught them about self-discipline and self-respect. They clattered up to the gallery at the back of the church; the heeled shoes of their girls muffled by the red-ribbed stair carpet. If my friend had been able he’d have reminded them that they have as much right to the prominent seats as anyone else and he’d have ushered them to the front pews, budging up the officials to accommodate them. I like to imagine him introducing his latest protégée to a startled Mayor.

The third image I didn’t get, because it would have been intrusive to take it, is of grown men shouldering a coffin. I hadn’t realised before but it’s an act as visceral and as concentrated as giving birth. Three broad sons and a brother, arms linked over each others shoulders, baring his weight; awkward but peculiarly graceful, their faces waxed with effort of baring one of their own on his very last journey.

I started this post not really knowing what I was going to write or how I was going to finish it – and the bother is, I still don’t know.

As we were leaving the churchyard my Other Middlest child noticed this gravestone beside the rustic gate that leads between the grounds and the car park. I am impressed with how cavalier masons used to be about spelling and hyphenation but this is a particularly spectacular example of not planning ahead nicely; with this post I am continuing a noble tradition...

(Incidentally, the next transit will be in 2012. I live in Preston and (cloud cover permitting) I'll be able to see Venus crossing in front of the Sun at dawn on 6 June 2012. You can check if and when you'll be able to see it here.

We're really lucky-duffers to be living through a time when we can witness the transit of Venus; after 2012, the next events won't be until December 2117 and 2125).

Phil Morsman and Civilisation

2009-11-26T01:23:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I wrote a post wondering, Would we put another human person in a zoo? I blathered that civilisation can't be so very civilised when it's predicated on enforced labour.

After publishing the post I saw an exhibition of Phil Morsman's work in The Gateway at the University of Cumbria (it's there until tomorrow - you'll need to be quick).

Phil's pictures neatly convey what I was struggling to say.

More of Phil's work is exhibited in Selected Obsessions the Alexandra Gallery - also at the University. The very poor photograph below is of a mixed media picture entitled Fissure.

To my simple mind Phils obsessions - in particular slavery, deserts, borders and geological features - reflect my own preoccupations.

I took a photograph of another mixed media picture called Fault but it is a Very Bad photograph. The gallery lights (and me!) are hideously reflected in the glass and it'd be a profound injustice to Phil to publish it here. However, Fault is my new best obsession.

Some Important Things - two weddings, a properly sad event, a twenty-first birthday & the real size of a Shire Horse.

2009-11-20T02:33:00.000-08:00

Since the last post a some Important Things have happened. I'm setting these events down in order of chronology not magnitude.

My son married. If I'd been set to design the Just Right wife for him I wouldn't have known where to start. Luckily, he found her, and she found him. Congratulations! I could not be gladder.

My middle child and I visited a dressmaker in Blackburn to talk about bridesmaids dresses for her wedding and to purchase ladybird wings and antenna from Blackburn Market (for Halloween, not bridal wear). The next day we visited my other middle child in Newcastle. On our amble, between tea and buns at Fenwicks and tea and buns at the Baltic Arts Centre across the Tyne, we saw steeplejacks abseiling along the roof of the Sage. We’ve no idea why.
Repairs?
A dare?
Window cleaning?
For the view?
Whatever they were up to, they were especially intrepid.

My old friend and neighbour, Peter, died. He's been ill and in pain for a long time and I'm glad he isn't suffering anymore, but it is almost incomprehensible to me that I will never see him, speak to him or listen to him talk, ever again. I miss him just not being there. He was as complex and as interesting as any of us (well, more remarkable than most - but that's his story, not mine). I think he is best summed up by what he said when a Bad Thing happened at our house.

‘We have no arrangement that can’t be changed if you need us.’

And he was true to his word.

Finally, my youngest child turned twenty-one at five minutes past midnight on Sunday 15 November. I put fairy lights in the window, assembled a bare-bottomed baby photo montage and decorated a cake with a heart filled with dolly-mixtures.

Her boyfriend lovingly made her the blue cake below; the one with hand painted Shire Horses and a Collie Dog. My youngest child isn’t particularly partial to Shire Horses or Collie Dogs, but he explained.
'Shire Horses are my favourite - the Collie Dog is for scale. Most people don't appreciate just how massive Shire Horses are.'

Well, there you have it; Shire Horses are considerably bigger than a Collie Dog but a little bit smaller than a birthday candle.

The terribly sad story of not getting an Award...

2009-10-23T03:51:00.001-07:00

You were delighted and grateful to be nominated for the Award and overjoyed to find yourself on the Best Personal (blog) category shortlist.

Then you start to ask yourself.
‘Why Best Personal category? Why not the Best Writing category?’
Because that’s how ridiculous and deluded you can be.

You are afraid to attend the Glittering Awards ceremony because you feel a fraud mixing with proper writers and also because you know you’ll be irrationally jealous of the (justly deserving) winners. Your friend prevails upon you.
‘If you’re going to submit yourself to scrutiny - you have to be prepared for rejection.’

And your youngest child indulgently pretends she'd like to attend with you; so you purchase Glittering Awards ceremony tickets.

You are virtual friends with some of the other shortlisted writers. Your virtual friends, the Nice Man and the Writer Who Will Win, are on the same shortlist as you. The Amusing Man and Prolific Short and Story Writer are on a different shortlist. Prior to the Glittering Awards ceremony you realise that other shortlisters are preparing readings for the evening. You’re not sure if it’s an axiom that shortlisters read and you’re the only one who isn’t aware of this protocol - but you’re afraid of ridicule and not brave enough to simply ask someone who will know.

You tentatively prepare several readings; a three-minuter, and five-minuter and a ten-minuter – just in case, like a little boy going to a important football match with his cleaned boots in a carrier bag.

Then you realise your behaviour is preposterous and you contact your virtual friend, the Nice Man, to see if he’s planning to read. He isn’t. And he isn’t sure how shortlisters know they are expected to read at the Glittering Awards or what the selection criteria are. You speculate that it might be writers on the Best Writing category shortlist who are asked to read. He suggests that your Best Personal (blog) category might be interpreted as a Best at ‘colouring-in without going over the lines’ category, and you both have a hearty virtual laugh over that.

On the day of the Glittering Awards you paint stuff on your nails (writer blood-red on your toes, nervous-neutral on your fingers); have a hairdo in a shop; put on a dress - with legging, because that's how edgy you writers can be.

You stash your the three readings in your big bag - just in case.

On the evening of the Glittering Awards you are sick with nerves. You down some Beechams Flu Plus Caplets because you feel a bit queer, and because you want to dull your anxiety.

The Amusing Man, the Prolific Short Story Writer and the Writer Who Will Win read their engaging and hilarious pieces.

At nine o’clock the Lady Who Has Worked So Hard to ensure all this happens takes her place on the stage to make the announcements. She says.
‘First I’ll read out the shortlist for each category.’
And your youngest child nods at you in excitement, her eyes saying.
‘This is your moment!’
You nod back, still more queasy with anxiety.
Then, the Lady Who Has Worked So Hard to ensure all this happens says.
‘Oh. I don't have a copy of the shortlisted nominations. I’ll go straight to announcing the winners and runners-up in each category.

And your moment has gone.

The Writer Who Will Win has won and the Amusing Man, the Prolific Short Story Writer and the Nice Man are all runners-up.

All your virtual friends get a mention and you fail.

On the walk back to the car park your youngest child gives you a cuddle because you look bereft. Your chest is full of tightly compressed tears but you can’t cry. Your youngest child doesn’t understand.
‘I don’t understand - why are you sadder about this than you are about sad things?’
And you can only reply with a rigid little shake of your head, because you don’t understand either.

During the drive home Michael Bubley, the affable Canadian popular singer, is treating Radio 2 listeners to an easy listening concert. This is galling but your hand is too sad to turn him off. Then Michael Bubley, the affable Canadian popular singer, starts to sing the song Home, and the tears start to roll down your face and there are even more of them than you thought and your youngest child is watching your face in the reflection of the rhythmic motorway lights and she doesn’t know what she can do to make it better.

And she can’t make it better can she? Because it’s all down to you. You have to stop thinking you’re a splendid scribe one moment and that you’re an insignificant incompetent the next moment. You need to grow a carapace and put more energy into what you actually write instead of worrying about what others think about you and what you write. Until you’ve done those things, you need to avoid Glittering Awards ceremonies; especially if you’ve been shortlisted.

This terribly sad sequence of events isn’t what happened to me; but it might have happened to someone like me if their personality were a charmless combination of misplaced confidence and hobbling insecurity.

Coincidentally, I didn’t win at the Manchester Blog Awards but these talented people did and I extend my super-congratulations to them. I also am very grateful to Kate Feld of Manchizzle who manifestly does work incredible hard to ensure that North West bloggers get such a fantastic event and such lovely acknowledgement for what they do.
There is a nice Guardian review of the Glittering Awards too.
Lost in Manchester
The Manchester Zedders
My Shitty Twenties
Cynical Ben
Words and Fixtures
Songs from Under the Floorboards
I thought I told you to wait in the car
Dave Hartley’s Weblog
Run Paint Run Run
The Manchester Hermit

This terribly sad sequence of events, written in the second person, didn’t happen to me but if I were ever called upon to cry to order - unlikely, I know – but if I’m offered a starring part in a weepy film say, or I find employment as a professional mourner, I know a tune that will set me off nicely.

Would we put another human person in a zoo?

2009-10-17T07:43:00.000-07:00

When I believed in a God I looked forward to a time, after my death, when I could see the world as it was in the olden-times. Homo sapiens (modern humans, like us) are unusual because we’re the only living representatives of our taxon left. I wanted to witness an era when there were several human species alive all at the same time.

I had a fond hope that He (if He resembled anyone in my anticipatory imaginings He looks a bit like David Attenborough) would have a special screening room where I could watch the planet at any given point in history. With eternity to play with I’d happily watch all eons.
'Where's Kim?'
'In the screening room watching the Pre-Cambrian on fast-forward.'
'Again?'
'Oh yes.'
But to begin with I’d choose to view a time around 90,000 years ago. A time when modern humans were still mostly based in Africa, H erectus (go on, have a good laugh, get it out of the way… Are you done? Sure?) Right. Erectus lived in Indonesia, H neanderthalensis ruled Europe and the dwarf human species, H floresiensis occupied parts of East Asia.

I don’t believe in the supernatural anymore and it makes me sad to realise I’ll never see that scratchy video replay.

Floresiensis has been nicknamed The Hobbit. I will not refer to Floresiensis as The Hobbit. That is to trivialise the human who lived and breathed and made a living - and it’s not particularly fair on Bilbo either. That will be my last mention of The Hobbit in this post.

I recently attended a weekend conference on human evolution in Oxford. Here are some astonishing things I learned at the conference:

Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives; we share 99% of our DNA.

Chimps are as evolved as Sapiens but we've developed along separate trajectories for over five million years. Less than two million years of evolution separates Sapiens from Floresiensis and less than 700,000 years of evolution separates Sapiens and Neanderthalensis.

We are more closely related to chimps than a horse is to a zebra, and a horse and zebra can interbreed.

Neanderthals lived between 250,000 and 30,000 years ago. They were top predators and consummate hunters; more carnivorous than lions or hyenas. Neanderthals are our evolutionary cousins but definitely not our ancestors. They were a bit like us; they made complicated stone tools, cared for their sick and buried their dead. And they were a bit unlike us; in their anatomy and in their cognitive organisation - they had bigger brains than many modern humans but probably less elaborate powers of abstraction.

We (modern humans) evolved in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago; we were the first human species to colonise Australia - over 60,000 years ago. In human history Australia has never been visible from Indonesia and the journey to Australia always entailed a treacherous sea crossing. When we first set out on that peril filled trip we had no idea where we were going to end up (Indonesia is tectonically volatile and it may be that those first Australians made a choice between Vulcan and the deep blue).

We (modern humans) were established in Europe by 45,000 years ago.

The dwarf human species, Floresiensis, survived on the island of Flores until 18,000 years ago. Their ancestors were also competent seafarers.

And here is some sad stuff that those astonishing things made me think about:

The conference was about hominin evolution. From six million years ago until the extinction of Neanderthals 30,000 years ago. Most of the other people at the conference were thoughtful and clever; interested dilettantes like myself - keen to learn more. A few were Eurocentric xenophobes.

When, as happens a lot, someone tells me society is deteriorating I think about the enforced labour that buttressed great civilisations; Egypt, Greece; the Roman Empire. I think about Africans packed in slave ships and about exhausted Victorian seven year olds strapped to mill machinery, strapped to machinery - and I respond that we’ve been capable of the unthinkable for a long time, (yes, I am very popular on the Clapham Omnibus).

At the conference, I didn’t need to reflect on slave ships or seven year olds to wonder what we’re capable of doing to our closest relatives. I only had to sit in the lecture theatre and listen to queries from the floor. Questions raised by some of the delegates showed that they'd spectacularly missed the point of the whole event.

After one lecture an elderly lady with a very posh voice asked.
‘If modern humans arrived in Europe 45,000 years ago, why did they take so long to become civilised?’
I squirmed in my seat; embarrassed for her; embarrassed that she was airing her chauvinistic assumption - that sedentary classical culture represents the pinnacle of human achievement.

At university a lecturer told me it was impossible for him to understand or express the complexity of indigenous Australian tradition because it wasn’t a matter of merely describing a belief system or a material culture. It was impossible for him to describe Aboriginal systems because Australians don’t just do things differently from people with a western mindset, they think things differently too. He likened their cognition to an ability to think and see around corners.

During coffee, another posh lady assured me that, despite what we'd learned about genetic and anthropological evidence to the contrary, she still thought Australians were from far more primitive stock than Europeans.

Matthew Pope spoke about Neanderthal adaptations to Ice Age conditions. At the end of his lecture the lady in the seat next to mine puts her hand up. She’s a perfectly nice posh-spoken lady and we chatted amiably before the talk started. I smile and nod at her encouragingly as she makes to ask her question. I should know better…
‘Has anyone commented on the similarities between Eskimos and Neanderthals?’
What? What?! Because they can cope with inclement weather and they eat a lot of protein?
I swivel with my knees facing away from the lady, in a cowardly attempt to disassociate myself from her views. Matthew Pope is silent for a moment; dumbstruck I assume. My flattened hands are clamped between my knees; I hope beyond hope that no one will think I’m with this lady; think that she’s my friend, or my mother, or my sister.
Matthew clears his throat.
‘Eskimos - the Inuit - are modern humans.’
My knees are crushing my knuckles; my shoulders hunched, my eyes squeezed tight closed - and something is emitting a tiny high-pitch humming sound, I think it’s me.
‘Yes, but has anyone properly done any research…?’
Stop! You can't talk like...
I don’t know what else was said. I might have blacked out.

Another speaker, Chris Stringer, wondered aloud how we would behave if Floresiensis were alive today. He suspected, Badly, and I concur.

The small-brained humans were still going about their Flores-business 18,000 years ago; that’s yesterday in evolutionary terms. If I’d timed my birth and arranged my geography a bit better I could easily have met Floresiensis and not had to hang about for the post-mortem Betamax screening (I imagine Heaven to be like a green-painted church hall; to be a little bit old fashioned and a little bit out of step with the rest of… erm, the Cosmos).

And if Floresiensis had clung on in Indonesia for another few thousand years, what would have happened to them? If civilised Egyptians got hold of the little folk first they could’ve been set to work on the fiddly bits of pyramid construction, down those long shafts that were sealed after completion. Floresiensis would have slotted very nicely into plantation jobs and they’d have been just the right size for mill and mine duties. If eco-friendly Westerners found a colony of Floresiensis today, I think we'd put them in a conservation zoo along with our other closest living relatives. In an Indonesian enclosure maybe, with a concrete wave pool so they could keep their hand in, launching rafts (the posh conference ladies might be persuaded to donate funds for an Outback enclosure and an Arctic enclosure if approached).

This time last year I was doing The Poet’s poetry module. As my other reader knows, I never really got the hang of poetry but I did develop a taste for writing pantoums; I’m a bad finisher and with a pantoum if you’ve got your first line you got your final line. I wrote a pantoum about how it would feel to see another kind of human being. When I was small and very ill I was treated by an Indian doctor; that was the first time I’d ever seen anyone who wasn’t white and European; I wondered if it would feel like I felt when I saw him. I was concerned that a reader of the pantoum would consider my poem to be racist but the sentiments in the piece tie in with this post so I’ve (very tentatively) put that poem on my other blog, Another Human Being.

Ranty, blethery, blathery, rant. What on earth am I trying to say? I’m trying to say that I was shocked by the casual racism and I suppose, speciesism, shown by my sophisticated colleagues. That I don’t think civilisation is all that civilised. And that I worry about my own craven responses – in Oxford I was more concerned to disassociate myself from misguided posh ladies than I was to make an effort to change their views. I worry at the contradiction that I think it’s dubious to keep fellow creatures in captivity but that if there was a Floresiensis to see in a wild life park (see below) I’d be there with my camera, like a shot. I’m saying that if David Attenborough could organise for me to look into the eyes of another kind of human person before I die, I’d be very grateful. And I am saying that I tried to write a poem about similar thoughts this time last year.

The drawings are by James Fraser; thanks yet again, James. I saw some captive meerkats at the Bowland Wild Boar Park. I felt sad for them because they belong in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana - but they were lively and enchanting and I watched them for ages; they really do take turns at keeping watch.

The Bowland Wild Boar Park is great, by the way. A proper farm with no use for nancy gaffer tape or No More Nails (because baler-twine is the farm-mender stuff of choice for everything). This is my youngest grandson on the recycled oil-drum ride; yes he is being chased by the tractor – fabulous!

I usually end a blog post with a cohesive upbeaty quip but it seems out of place in this instance. My youngest grandson is seven; the same age as the exhausted Victorian mill workers I think about sometimes.

Heysham, Lemn Sissay & The Manchester Blog Awards (again)

2009-10-09T03:36:00.000-07:00

I've cheated in my task of viewing the everyday for revelations of truth and beauty. That I'm a cheat is the first disclosure.

On a Sunday in September I travelled with my youngest child to register at university. After the queuing and form filling we drove to Heysham, an old village on the bottom corner of Morecambe Bay. The area is dominated by two advanced gas-cooled nuclear reactors; structures so implausibly big that they are almost certainly visible from everywhere on the planet.

We parked and walked for (about) half an hour and came to the ruins St Patrick’s where we photographed this group of rock-cut graves. The chapel was in use 1200 years ago; it seems very close to the water now but I suspect erosion has brought the sea a lot nearer.

St Patrick's Chapel

The two of us scrambled down to the beach and chanced on a man and a boy dabbling in a rock pool with a net. We chatted for a while. My youngest child has helped at an environmental centre and knows a bit about nature and stuff, and I like facts to be straight. The father was telling us the (incorrect) names for some of the tiny swimming things with great assurance but we didn’t contradict him. We tacitly agreed that it’s fine for that little boy to believe his super-dad is omniscient – at least for a little while longer.

I photographed this coastal rock formation because I believe it shows an unconformity; probably at least two unconformities. An unconformity is a buried erosion surface dividing two periods of deposition which may have been separated by millions and most probably billions of years. The underlying sedimentary rocks in the photograph are thinly-bedded siltstones, sandstones and mudstones which have been folded over by heat and tectonic activity deep underground. Over time those rocks have been exposed at the earth’s surface by a process of attrition. I think the top layer of sediments under the turf will have been deposited in relatively recent times, at the end of the last ice age, as little as 12000 years ago; virtually within living memory.

We had a go at skimming stones but the pebbles are mostly hearty chunks of Millstone Grit and not very bouncy. But then, I would say that.

'They're the wrong sort of stones...'

'Yes Mum, that'll be what the problem is...'

On the way back to the car we visited the most peculiar shop. The lady sews dog coats and peg bags on a machine, on the counter. There are the oddest assortment of things for sale; used buttons, medals and improbable jewellery and CDs that come free with the Mail on Sunday. I was tempted to ask for a packet of pea-flavoured crisps, just on the off-chance. I’m only sorry I didn’t think to photograph her emporium.

A perfect day; my youngest child going to learn more stuff, a deity dad, 1200 year old rock-cut graves, 12000 year old glacial deposits, sediments so old and folded it hurts my eyes to think about them – and a curious shop.

This piece of writing first appeared at The Culture Cheese and Pineapple an arts discussion blog I've recently joined . The remit was to leave the house, walk for about an hour in an unfamiliar direction, take pictures and notice things. Apparently, it is based on the idea of le quotidien; that the everyday can reveal truth and beauty.

As observed, what it initially revealed is my tendency to bilk. But I was pleased with the result. I'm always trying to be as candid as I can but somehow this writing seems more gentle and honest than my usual stuff, Maybe it's because I'm not striving so hard to try to be funny or clever. I'm more calm.

A friend sent me this link to Global Poetry System an idea that began with Lemn Sissay. Poetry isn't quite my thing. I've only really written one poem; and that was an accident, but I love the idea of poetry revealed in the everyday - along with truth and beauty.

As I've repeated to death, I'm on the 2009 Manchester Blog Awards shortlist. My youngest child will attend The Event with me; even though I've warned her I'm likely to collapse in grief, beating my fists on the carpet and wailing,
'It's not fair! You've let talented people in!' when I don't win.
I'm not sure she believes me...

Manchester Blog Awards shortlist

2009-10-02T04:08:00.000-07:00

For anyone who was visiting Mars yesterday: I'm on the 2009 Manchester Blog Awards shortlist
This has made me very, very happy.

I'm glad that some of the blogs I read regularly are also shorlisted:
Cynical Ben
Forgetting the Time
My Shitty Twenties (twice!)
Dave Hartley’s Weblog
I thought I told you to wait in the car
Big city, little girl

Congratulations everyone!

Thank you to my other reader for nominating me. Thank you to the shortlisters.

This is a photograph of me not being able to skim stones because they are the wrong sort of rock (Millstone Grit). But fate will have to work harder than that to get me down today; I'm on a shortlist and when I've stopped messing I'm going to get ready to travel to Oxford to attend a Continuing Education weekend course called Neaderthals in the 21st Century. It's my birthday and Christmas presents until forever - and that's fine.

The Birthday Neanderthal, half an MA and Time

2009-09-12T04:13:00.001-07:00

I was given this Neanderthal for my birthday, and those fossils and that terrifying stuff from the stygian crevices of my head. James Fraser made this picture for me. James, you are officially the King of being able to judge a person.

I might have half an MA Creative Writing. A 'M' I suppose, or more properly an 'A'; I’m certainly not a Master - but then I hardly qualify as an Art either.

Whatever, the taught year of the degree is over and when I met the Author who is Writing about Neanderthals for my first dissertation tutorial she intimated I'd passed the last two modules; the exam board meets in October. Schrodinger's cat is completely out of the box – the marks aren’t confirmed - but I’m never, ever going to average 70% or over for the year. Oh well, I don’t exactly want to top myself. Although actually, a bit I do…

The dissertation is to be twelve thousand words with a three thousand word commentary. I’ve form for being ungovernable regarding word count guidelines; the short-story I wrote for the fiction module grew to be over eight thousand words long and was a nightmare to edit and make coherent because I couldn’t actually read it all in one go (grim to mark too I imagine). Consequently I’m planning to write six, two thousand word pieces, a mixture of fiction and creative nonfiction, based on some of the statements from my 20+ Things about me-meme; me, me, me, me. I'm hoping some unifying theme will emerge.

When I spoke about the three short-story ideas I've got so far:

Alternating male and female perspectives of an affair over forty years;
Changes wrought by a transfer from a mobile forager/hunter existence to sedentism and food production;
The impact of dementia;

the Author who is Writing about Neanderthals suggested Time as a theme. I dunno why I didn’t think of that because I am already a Time-Nerd.

In an earlier post, That’ll be different, I referred to shifting perceptions of time through moment and culture. For example, during the 1940s an anthropologist, Evans-Prichard, lived amongst the Nuer, a pastoralist people of Southern Sudan.

Evans-Prichard reports that Nuer don’t have Time; that is they don’t have any expression equivalent to Time which means that they can’t speak of Time as if it is something actual, it doesn’t pass, can’t be wasted, can’t be saved and can't be made up. It pleases me to think of people who live without Time; of Time as an artificial construct.

How I feel about time is - in the short term everything matters but in the long term, geological time, nothing matters.

If my infant mother hadn't survived diphtheria in an era before antibiotics I would never have been born.
'No great loss!' My other reader might reasonably exclaim. 'You're a narcissist, you produce ungovernably long short-stories and you're morbidly attached to Neanderthals.'

Okay, that is all true - but, what if Charles Darwin's mother had died of diphtheria or Alan Bennett's mother? And anyway, if I wasn't born who would my childrens’ partners be marrying at those pretty damn special weddings I've written about; the weddings that are going to happen in the near future? And who would be here to submit bridesmaid gowns to the YMCA test? Unsettling thoughts.

Yet in terms of geological time, nothing is really significant, not whales, not poor darling infants choking to death, not the threat of redundancy, nothing.

I think to be kind and attentive are the most essential human characteristics. I try to occupy the moment and believe that everything equates. But mostly I live in a geological-time mindset; a mindset where nothing matters; except maybe MA marks and interesting facts about Neanderthals (my favourite hominin, thanks again, James).
Yes, I know I’ve used stygian twice recently. Stygian has taken over from trope as a word I bandy in an attempt to appear clever.

ps I've borrowed the 'What if my mother hadn't survived? None of this would have happened,' motif from Kathleen Jamie (Findings p. 112). Jamie's mother survived pneumonia and my mother really did survive diphtheria.

The Syphilitic Nature of Blogging (Part Two)

2009-09-06T02:12:00.000-07:00

I’ve just had the curious experience of stalking a stalker.

A while ago a friend gave my blog a nice plug on her blog. Afterwards she asked if I'd noticed an increase in traffic. I explained that, unless someone left a blog comment or emailed me, I'd absolutely no idea if there's been any traffic at all.
Following said friend's advice I installed a Statcounter.

On the first day I was astonished to see I’d had twenty-nine visitors to my blog, that's twenty-nine.

Statistic counters tell you a lot more than how many visits your site has received. You can learn where in the universe the visitor was when they viewed pages, the IP address of their computer, which pages they viewed, how long they lingered and what in particular they did whilst they were visiting (in terms of searching, downloading images and leaving comments, I mean; not what they were actually doing whilst they were looking).

When I investigated the visitor paths it was obvious that all my visitors were, sadly, me.

I’d logged in to correct spelling mistakes, I’d logged in to adjust paragraph spacing, I’d logged in because I’d decided, after long deliberation, to replace obtained with got, to be more faithful to my roots, and so on…

To begin with, checking your visitor numbers is a little bit addictive.

‘One visitor! From Plano, Texas! Yay!’

‘How did they find you?’

‘They did a Google search for ‘Doktor Hotfingers’.’

'Great Cripes*! That's Smashing.'

'I know.'

‘And how long did they linger?’

‘Well, only 0 seconds, but they came, and they saw. It’s A Start.’

'It certainly is just that, A Start.'

Last night I check the Statcounter – sure enough, I’ve visited myself aplenty. I’ve also currently got another visitor; someone on a computer in Glasgow.

Gratified, I take a few moments to look at the visitor number(s) for my other, newer blog. The blog where I’m keeping pieces of my (proper) writing; when I say pieces, I mean piece. There’s one (Joint) award winning poem there at the moment, and a self-important meme and something my daughter pointed out to me that still makes me laugh.

When I return to the statistics for this blog there are several more page loads showing…

It’s that same Glasgow visitor; still looking. Page to page, He (I’m picturing a He) loiters over postings and moves on. He follows the link to my (Joint) award winning poem then returns to my Second person and research post and downloads a photograph. That photograph of Ellie fancy-dressed up as the Tin Man. Already disorientated, I start to wonder if I should feel uneasy.

This is absurd. For months I’ve been effectively saying.

‘Here! Over here. Listen, listen to this!’

‘You, yes you - look at this! I’m dead funny, me.’

And here I am feeling uncomfortable because somebody is doing as they’re told, He’s reading my words, checking out my poem and He's downloading a photo of my twenty year old dressed in silver leggings.

For thirty minutes I watch in snowballing horror as (in my head) the drug-addled pervert in his seedy tenement riffles through my stuff. I want to shout at him.

‘Oi you! Yes you - Deviant-Dougal with your swivelly-eyes and your bagpipes. What do you think you're playing at looking at my pictures? Don't think you can get away with this. I’ve got your (Temporary IP) address you know!’

But, as I’ve written before, blogging is such a queasy paradox.

On the one hand I’m self-effacing and I don’t want people to think I’m vulgar or pushy; on the other hand I’d sell my foot to a transplant surgeon if I thought it would encourage a readership.

Vulgar and pushy wins out every time, of course.

I start to rationalise that it probably isn’t a pervy druggie who is working His way through the pages. It’s most likely a nice lady who is interested in poems; She, Fragrant-Fiona, is doubtless a Kelvindale matron searching for fancy dress ideas for her own grown daughter.

In light of this edifying insight I’ve started to wonder if it might be a good idea to use Ellie in her Tim Man outfit as my blog banner. If that’s what people demand, scantily dressed... no, I mean fancy dress outfit tips, so be it.

Incidentally, I don't really think blogging is like syphilis, have a look at The Syphilitic Nature of Blogging (Part One) for how I arrived at the title. In the comments for that post my reader suggests that the dysphemism 'self abuse' is a more accurate analogy and, naturally, she is right.

Thank you AGAIN, James Fraser, for the Tin Man image. The soundtrack accompanying the slideshow of his doodles at that link are James and David Wright playing Anouman by Django Reinhardt. Incidently, David and his band, New Zealand Story, have a new album called Show Your Workings.

Check out the witty Madeleine York at Déjà view: television reviews & analysis, I like her blog.

*My new favourite expletive comes from Flann O' Brien. I've been listening to Jim Norton reading The Third Policeman. Listening to The Third Policeman half makes me want to give up writing altogether and half makes me want to plagiarise all his best phrases. Three guesses which I'll choose.

The YMCA Test for Bridesmaids' Gowns and being a Creep

2009-09-03T06:03:00.000-07:00

There are going to be some pretty damn special weddings in the near future. My youngest child has been asked to be a bridesmaid, which is grand, and frocks are under discussion. One suggested dress is an asymmetrical style. It has rose petals or foliage all around the top and clambering over a single strap.

My youngest child is hesitant about this style.
‘What’s going to be under those petals climbing over the shoulder?'

'I'm not sure.'

'Will it be a shoe-string strap?'

'It could be.'

'You know what'll happen if it is don't you?'

'Will it dig in?'

'No.'

‘Will it be annoying because it’s not equal and balanced?'
'Not that.'
'Will the other shoulder feel left out?’

'No, not left out.'

'What then?'

'The second I start doing the YMCA it’ll snap. There'll be petals flying everywhere.’

I’m not sure how to put it to her that this celebration might not be a YMCA kind of a do. It might not even be a

(brace yourself) Oops Upside Your Head kind of a wedding-do either.

I'm not going to let on just yet. It's going to be much more fun shopping for bridesmaids’ outfits if we're assuming we have to submit each gown to the YMCA test.

I discovered yesterday that the Author who is Writing about Neanderthals (my favourite hominin) will supervise my MA project. This is a very good thing but I’m also a little bit sad that it isn’t going to be the Writer with the Writerly Name.

At least I can now write sycophantic comments on the Writer with the Writerly Name's blog posts without appearing to be a creep. But then, what is the point of writing creepy comments, if it’s not going to get me better marks? Only kidding. Oh man, I think I’m only kidding, I hope I'm only kidding.

Had two mentions and very fine link-ups in the last week.
Valerie O'Roirdan at not exactly true is about to start an MA in creative writing at the University of Manchester (she's keen to hear from others doing the same or similar). There are links to some of Valerie's smashing stories from her blog.

Kate Feld at Manchizzle is hard at work adding blogs nominated for the Manchester Blog Awards to her blogroll.

And on the topic of the Manchester Blog Awards Dave Hartley has written a story a week for the last twelve months (just two to go). If you haven't read his tales yet you're set for a lovely treat.

Thank you, James Fraser, for my YMCA bridesmaid.

It’s body snatching and it’s not nice but it’s not robbing… and the Top Secret Bunker

2009-08-27T01:24:00.000-07:00

I was finding all about grave-robbing baddies on my recent trip to Crail.

Crail is a tiny seaside town in Fife in Scotland. As I’ve mentioned before; it probably isn’t there when you’re not looking.

Grave-robbers securing specimens for anatomists were considered a bit of a nuisance in Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. The real life characters, Burke and Hare, have been described as grave-robbers but they were in fact slayers and snatchers not robbers. They murdered outliers of society and sold their bodies to anatomists and they claimed the cadavers of people who weren’t really their relatives, so they could do the same. But they didn’t go to the trouble of digging up fresh bodies, not towards the end of their careers anyway.

However, real Resurrectionists, as they were nicknamed, did rob people out of graves. Scots parishioners devised a series of increasingly cunning devices to foil the nefarious grave-robbing baddies. They used metal hoops that secured a body into the coffin; ton-weight temporary mortstones to position across the grave; mortsafes and morthouses where the body would be tenable prior to burial and watch houses where a sentinel would guard newly occupied plots.

The nice man at the Crail bed and breakfast told me told me these things whilst I was eating my tea. And he added,

‘There’s a morthouse at the parish church, just along the road.’

I am incandescent with excitement. After tea I start to get ready to go out. Ian eyes me warily.
‘What are you doing?’
I am pulling on my tartan holiday socks.
'Just popping out for a little walk.’
‘It’s going dark.’
I am hoping towards the door, tying my shoelace as I go; did you ever see Wilson, Keppel and Betty performing the Sand Dance? It is very like that.
‘I won’t be long.’
‘You’re going to the graveyard, aren’t you?’
As my reader knows, I do have form where graveyards are concerned.
‘Only to see if the masons here ever use Shap Granite...’
You may also remember that Shap Granite is my current favourite rock.
‘You’re going to look for the morthouse, aren’t you?’
‘...and to look for the morthouse, I was going to say that.’
‘You know you’re a little bit Not Right in the Head, don’t you?’

He is probably correct, but I don’t care. I’m afraid of living people not dead people; I’m afraid of living people and loud bangs; loud bangs terrify me, every time.

It was twilight when I arrived at the gated church. Huge crows hunkered blackly on the church roof and supplied mournful and atmospheric cawing.

The churchyard at Crail is an enchanted necropolis. Built into a tall shadowy wall to the west of the church are a series of mural monuments. These architectural structures date back to the 17th century and are gratifyingly decorated with emblems of mutability and decay, the hourglass, skulls, crossbones, grave digging tools.
The carvings range in quality, from a detailed deaths head like the one above from James Lumsden’s tomb to almost childishly incised representations of skulls and femurs.
Death’s heads have crossed bones behind them whereas the skull and crossbones have the bones underneath. I’m calling the one above a death’s head because I suspect that those gaps where the face joins the cornice once held stone-bones; I have no other evidence for my theory. But I do like it.

A number of of the skulls resemble turnip heads, which, in the twilight, was somehow even more chilling than the more meticulous work.

The mason’s inscriptions are as forthright as their symbolism, although I concede that forthright symbolism is a contradiction.
‘Here lyes interred before this tomb

The corpse of Bailie Thomas Young’

No nancying around with euphemism; ‘there’s a rotting dead person under here’.

A particularly rewarding mural monument to the south of the church appears at first sight to be to the memory of a Dr Who character. The headless suit of armour is an effigy of William Bruce of Symbister.
The Christian convention is for dead people to be buried with their head in the west and their feet in the east; on judgement day the deceased wants to be able to sit up and face the rising sun. As a consequence, the posh people of Crail are interred along the, literally, monumental west wall.

Although Bruce of Symbister’s tomb looks archaic I wondered if it postdated the time when the west wall became full of memorials. Apparently this isn’t the case, he was buried in 1630. I’d be interested to learn why he was placed in the (lower status) south; maybe he just liked sunshine.

So, Bruce of Symbister was clearly posh but when the trumpet sounds his headless armour is going to have to sit up rustily and turn to the right as he does so to get the benefit of the sunrise. He was 80 when he died and has been dead almost four hundred years. Well, I do Pilates. I’m still alive and I’m only fiftyodd and I can assure you he’s going to find that exercise veeery tricky. Trust me. I would like to be here on the day of judgement to see his resurrection though.

As the stygian dusk deepened, the distant clock in Crail Marketgate sounded, the desolate cries of the corvids intensified (thanks, Sound Effect Guys) and I came across the neo-gothic morthouse with its inscription:

ERECTED for securing the DEAD:
AD 1826.

So this is where bodies were locked-up until they were too decomposed to be of value to the anatomist or medical student.

There are morthouses all over Fife but it seems the parishioners’ response to the threat of grave-robbing baddies was hugely disproportionate to the scale of the problem. It’s a long haul for a grave-robber to cart a corpse from Crail to St Andrews or Edinburgh and graves were not routinely robbed in the area. In any case by 1832, in response to the Burke and Hare murders, an Anatomy Act was passed, which secured a legal supply of unclaimed bodies from hospitals, poorhouses and workhouses.

Morthouses were an inexplicable fashion, a bit like animal print leggings.

I take my last photograph in the gloom, nod to the Sound Effect Guys and return to Ian, delighted with my first mural monument and my first morthouse. I start to explain to him about watch houses.
‘Relatives, or more likely, lackeys, had to stay in a little house in the graveyard, watching.’ There’s a pause.

‘A proper house?’

‘A little house, with a window and a fire.’

‘Nice.’

He’s listening to the radio, it sounds like athletics. I try to hook him with mans’ stuff.

‘Some watch houses have gun embrasures and the watchers were armed so they could fire at the grave-robbing baddies.’

‘hmmmm?’

He lifts the radio up to his ear.

‘Or they set up tripwire gun-traps.’

There’s a pause whilst something crucial happens in a race or whatever, then he speaks.

‘You wouldn’t have lasted long then.’

He’s right; I am always lurking around in graveyards looking shifty. Maybe I was a Resurrectionist in a previous incarnation and I got shot. That would explain a great deal.

In my last post I wrote about Padre George Smith being buried in Preston Cemetery. It says on the Rorke’s Drift website that his headstone is light red marble. Well I’ve found it and his headstone is Shap Granite; I knew it would be; Fools.
See, the thing is, marble is metamorphosed limestone and granite is… oh, never mind.

On a lighter note, there’s also a labyrinthine Top Secret Bunker by Crail; it’s where central government and military commanders would retreat in the event of a nuclear attack. Obviously, the parishioners of Fife don’t want the trouble of a lot of Johnny Foreigner types hanging around the golf course in spy wear asking directions in broken English (and not understanding the reply because it’s in Scottish English) so the helpful authorities have supplied a sign.

I was allowed to go to Crail as a prize for handing in my MA assignments nicely. I’ve also had my first rejection; I wasn’t selected for the Flax creative non-fiction anthology; I wasn’t surprised but I was sad. I understand it’ll get easier.

ps nominations are now open for the the Manchester Blog Awards. You can nominate yourself and you only have to be nominated once to enter (my friend's done me). Good Luck. (No. Really!)

Zulus fighting in the flowerbed

2009-08-13T13:29:00.001-07:00

This post is mostly about Preston and South Africa and Crail and some dead people who were once alive in those places.

Last week I finished the last two first year portfolios for my MA; the Writer with the Writerly Name’s Creative Writing Workshop portfolio, and the Agreeable Doctor’s Creativity and Marginality in Contemporary Writing portfolio. There’s a dissertation to write now; and a year to complete it in. As ever, I was just one day short of having enough time to finish those last two pieces nicely and I was up until three on Friday morning compiling them.

A few hours later Ian hefted me weightily into the car, folding my legs and arms in after like an inexpertly doubled deckchair and we set off for Crail, via the Humanities Office to hand in the assignments. The Humanities Office was locked and deserted; but I can’t talk about that yet. It’s enough to testify that the kind lady from the Ceremonies Office took the portfolios from me and gave me a receipt, and a hug.

There is an assignment drop box but how I feel about assignment drop boxes is: what about the bad person with the lighter fuel and the lit match? That’s all I’m saying.

On the way to Scotland the Radio 4 play was Ken Blakeson's Bearing the Cross which tells the story of Rorke’s Drift. This is an Amazing Coincidence because there’s a flower bed in Avenham Park in Preston that’s designed to mark the 130^th anniversary of Rorkes Drift (*thinks* 'maybe that’s why Ken wrote the play too').

The 1964 film, Zulu, depicts the Battle of Rorke's Drift. It was a terrible fight between the British Army and Zulu warriors. Preston are observing the event because the padre, George Smith, became the chaplain at Fulwood Barracks, here in Preston, on his return from South Africa and is buried in New Hall Lane cemetery (that was after he died, obviously).

Apparently one hundred and thirty-nine British soldiers successfully defended the garrison at Rorke’s Drift against several thousand Zulu warriors (reported numbers vary). Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded to the defending soldiers; the largest number of VCs conferred to a regiment for one action. George Smith received the Zululand medal and clasp for gallantry; only soldiers can receive the VC.

I felt ill at ease when I saw first saw the Avenham Park flowerbed a few weeks ago. I know the soldiers were brave and doing what they were employed to do, but it somehow seems out of place to be commemorating the defeat of native people who were defending their stolen land; just as Victorian Prestonian warriors would have defended Avenham Park, armed with fettlers and yard-brushes, if Zulu pastoralists had rolled up and set about grazing their cattle on the sward. Ken Blakeson's play reinforced my disquiet.

Crail is in Fife, across the Tay from Dundee. I tipped my hat groggily to Kathleen Jamie as I was driven by Newburgh. Jamie wrote Findings which was one of the Agreeable Doctor’s set texts. She also wrote the poem Arraheids in which arrowheads in museums,

‘thon raws o flint arraheids
in oor gret museums o antiquities’

are likened to the sharp tongues of Grannies who cannot stop themselves from putting you back in your place;

'ye arenae here tae wonder,
whae dae ye think ye ur?'

We’ve all met one of those Grandmas.

Crail is a picturesque fishing town (see above) fixed in another time and place. Like the Isle of Man, I suspect it isn't there if you’re not looking.

As you know, I spend a lot of time in graveyards, stealing names, admiring Shap Granite headstones, looking for dead babies; I can add looking for the headstone of an Army padre to that list now.

The graveyard at Crail Parish Church is the best yet. It has the oldest and most elaborate range of monuments I’ve ever seen. Tombs that would temp one to be buried alive (as was said of the mausoleum at Castle Howard, I forget who by).

I’m tired and emotional now, thinking about assignment drop boxes, kind administrators and displaced Zulu warriors who're reduced to fighting in a flowerbed. I’ll tell the tale of mural memorials, body snatchers and mort houses next time.

The Syphilitic Nature of Blogging (Part One)

2009-07-13T13:19:00.000-07:00

Writing things in the hope that other people will read them on the internet is such a schizophrenic experience.

Is it acceptable to use mental illness metaphors? I think it might be, even if I’m not being postmodern, but that’s not exactly fair is it? It would hardly be acceptable for me to say blogging is like having Duchenne muscular dystrophy or Down’s syndrome or syphilis. Saying any of those things would be insensitive and incorrect and yet a bipolar person doesn’t make a choice to be out of kilter anymore than a victim of muscular dystrophy does.

Curiously, saying blogging is like having syphilis might be just about acceptable (although inaccurate). I wonder if that’s because syphilis is a STD and therefore inherently comical or because it’s treatable with antibiotics?

I digress; promoting a blog is fraught with conflicts and contradictions. At first I though I was writing for myself but that’s not really true. I write a new blog-post and I’d like people to read it. To advertise the new post I tweet a sheepish link on Twitter to people I’ve mostly never met. From what I can make out a fair number of my Twitter Followers are actually pretend people; some of them sell solutions; storage-solutions (boxes, I think) and communications-solutions (computer-shit). Judging by their friendly and outgoing photographs, some ladies who follow me are promoting relief-solutions, I tend to block them - unless I know them - obviously.

Because of the slightly impersonal nature of twittering I queer-like sort of don’t mind if Twitter Followers pity me, that’d just be Twitter Pity.

As I’ve become bolder I’ve tried to make the promotional tweet a hook, writing lines like, ‘I’ve been looking at ladies legs.’ or name-checking characters that people obsess about, Myra Hindley or Carol Ann Duffy or Hairdresser Ladies; (it might only be me who obsesses about hairdresser ladies - but somehow I Don’t Think So).

To begin with I cravenly tweeted a link to my blog-post in the middle of the night; a quiet time when people are asleep and when my tweet could get buried under the getting up tweets-rush and never be seen again.

However, my Twitter tweet now updates my Facebook status (sorry if that makes no sense at all).

I have met (just about) all of my Facebook friends – I see a fair number of my Facebook friends most days. I don’t mind too much if the storage-solution thinks I’m vain and deluded but it’s a bit different to rub your Facebook friends’ faces in the facts.

In earlier days of Twitter/Facebook synchronisation I’d nervously post a blog link via Twitter, wait a few nail-biting minutes, and then I’d hysterically logon to Facebook and delete the synchronised status update before it could be seen by too many of my (23 plus) Facebook friends.

I was cured of this lunacy (there I go again with my mental illness metaphor) when I deleted a Facebook status update blog link just as someone added the comment, ‘I loved this post! :)’ Of course, the complimentary comment disappeared with the deleted original Facebook status update:

Noooooooo! Your first blog-approval and you deleted it! You were frantic. Yet again it was time to calm down, and weigh up the options, and decide what to do.

Nothing?
Too vain and deluded for that.

Print off the email alert and carry it everywhere with you so it’s handy if it ever crops up in conversation?
Goes without saying.

ReTweet the link and ask your Facebook friend to write his comment again?
Pathetic, are you a complete moron?

ReTweet the link and copy and paste your Facebook friend’s comment from the alert email you received when he posted it?
The reply would still have your name on it, Stupid; how would that look? Think about what you’re considering (and You, stop using learning difficulty-allegory whilst you’re at it).

What I did do was to ReTweet the link in the hope that my Facebook friend was a sympathetic mind-reader who understood about deranged wannabe writers and would write the same comment again. Sadly, not. (I've have got a copy of the comment in my pocket if you want to see it though).

On the topic of deranged wannabe writers I received two disappointing MA Creative Writing marks on the same day several weeks ago. On the strength of my disappointment (in myself) I decided I was going to complete the last two taught modules of my MA and then drop out of the programme without starting the dissertation.

‘That,’ I thought grimly as I bloodily sawed at my nose,’ will show me.’

The marks weren’t awful but they were comparatively low and, worse, I deserved them. I knew I was floundering when I put my Stylistics portfolio together. In the end I felt as if I resorted to writing bottomfishbanana a thousand million times because I just didn’t really get it or know what else to do.

I went to see the programme leader to discuss my decision. She, predictably, told me my marks were creditable. That’s another one of Those Terms isn’t it? Like ‘salt of the earth’ (common) and ‘friendly and outgoing’ (fast) ‘lively writing’ (self conscious, verbose, first draft-type writing). Creditable is kindly meant but it hurts.

But she said something else that did make me reconsider my decision. She said that she could see me submitting work for publication in two or three years time. My reflex reaction was that if I’m not good enough now I don’t want to know. Before I came away I’d realised that I couldn’t expect any greater compliment than what she said; of course it won’t happen overnight. And I’m grateful for her honestly, and her sagacity.

So, if you see me with nasty awkwardly sewn-back nose - horrible black thread and oversized needle-holes (I can never find the right needle) don’t worry; its just my ~~schizophrenia~~, I mean syphilis, playing up again.

The photograph is of The Minotaur and the Hare by Sophie Ryder in the centre of Cheltenham. Frankie said the Minotaur looks like a nice boyfriend, and despite the fact he’s as friendly and outgoing in his dress sense as some of my relief-solutions Twitter Followers, she right, he does look like nice boyfriend doesn’t he?

Juno the Headless Chicken and Fathers Day. Wednesday 27 May 2009

2009-05-30T08:03:00.000-07:00

This year Jim will receive his card in time for Fathers Day; not on Tuesday the week after Fathers Day not on Wednesday the week after Fathers Day.You find an excellent card in the nice things cupboard; a card using an E. H. Shepard illustration of the avuncular Mr Toad. Toad is reading the newspaper with his feet up next to his caravan. Jim has never expressed any fondness for caravans, or for toads, but Jim is the funniest and most humane person you’ve ever known and the character of Toad of Toad Hall conveys a fine air of wit and benevolence.
You have the wisdom to steal a stamp from Ian as you leave the house. You also lift a two pound coin and a couple of twenty pence pieces. You’re going to a Poetry Reading this evening and you’ll need some spends. Ian won’t miss the change so you slip them in your jacket pocket. Then you have to shuffle up to him for a goodbye kiss, with every muscle tensed, so you don’t chink.

You’re on the way to work. It’s 8.15 am and you career to a halt when you spy a parking space right outside the sub-Post Office; what a coup! You rummage in the bag and there’s a blue ballpoint pen; it’s all going swimmingly. You give your hands a swab with a Fresh’n’Nice wipe; you don’t want any grubby fingerprints on this one.
Jim’s Fathers Day card isn’t going to be sloppy or rushed. You lean on a firm, flat surface. That big grey folded plastic wallet thingie from the glove compartment, the one that would tell you how to change the clock to British Summer Time in twenty three different languages, if you had the time to read it. You write the envelope very carefully and there are no major issues. You still remember the address. Well, you should do; you lived there for sixteen years. No postcode; they didn’t hold with postcodes in the olden days and Jim doesn’t hold with them now.
On to the card; date in the top right hand corner, ‘June 2009’ (a nice writerly touch). Make sure it’s still good and flat and that you’re not going to do wobble-writing as you go over the wallet press-stud. You're at the top of your game; best lettering now:
‘to Dad happy birthda…’
Bum.
You weigh up the options.
Ditch the card and buy another?
That card cost a lot of money and Jim loathes waste. The sub-Post Office is closed and you need to send the card and get to work. The sub-Post Office only sell cards with wheelbarrows and bottles of red wine as illustrations; not tasteful Toads. And, you’ve only got two pounds forty to your name.
Cross out ‘birthda’ and make a joke of your incompetence?
It’s hardly funny. Is this really the occasion to confirm to Jim that he's fathered a spanner?
Remove the front unmarked Toad of Toad Hall picture-half of the card and write on the back of that; pretend it’s the modern thing?
No scissors and it’s manifestly the cheapskate thing. For all Jim knows you could be reusing a card you’d received yourself for Caravan Day or Toad Day.
Overwrite 'birthda' to convert it into 'father'?
What have you got to lose?
On reflection, your writing is a bit scribbly. The tip of the blue ballpoint had gathered fluff in the bag so some bits of the lettering are missing anyway; it shouldn’t be too difficult to disguise the partial word. Imagine, if you hadn’t realised in nick of time and you’d written the final ‘y’ of birthday; you would never have been able to recover from that. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
Easy enough to transform the ‘bi’ into a cosy ‘fa’.
The ‘r’ is fine as it is; just go over it again so it’s as dark as the ‘fa’ (you can match-up the ‘happy’ in a minute).
‘th’ belongs anyway, that is a piece of good fortune.
This is the tricky bit; the round part of the ‘d’ is converted into an ‘e’. then you draw a little cap on the upright of the ‘d’ which creates an (admitted rather tall and slightly curly) ‘r’.
Just add a slightly larger than life-size ‘s’ so that the 'r' doesn't feel left out.
No need for an apostrophe - because fathers don’t own the day.
There, nobody would know any different.

What is it about words you’ve carefully corrected? Why do they always look a little bit Not Quite Right?
A Fathers Day cards advertisement in the sub-Post Office window catches your eye and you see that there isn’t an ‘r’ after ‘fa’ in father.
No. Bum.

So you concede defeat on the posting front and you take the card to work. You can post it at the real-Post Office when you go down into town later. When you go down into to town to find out where the correct Entry Door and the correct Standing Place is for the Poetry Reading this evening. The card will be safer posted at the real-Post Office anyway and it’ll probably still get there tomorrow.

At work you find a piece of funny shiny cream paper in the recycling bin and you fashion it to the right size to cover the incorrect writing. You cut it nicely with the guillotine and everything; although the guillotine guidelines have worn patchy with use, so the paper is still a bit wonky.
You glue the parallelogram of shiny cream paper carefully in the card over the incorrect writing. The incorrect writing is completely covered and only slightly visible. The shiny cream paper makes the card look like one of those hand-made efforts that you buy at a craft fair because you feel sorry for the person who made it.
You write the correct and beautifully spelt message in broad black Staedtler Permanent (Dry Safe) Lumocolor overhead marker pen. This doesn’t match the blue ballpoint date, ‘June 2009’ in the top right hand corner, but it does bleed slightly into the shiny cream paper, thereby helping to conceal the incorrect writing underneath.
Sadly, the funny shiny cream paper doesn’t seem to agree with the (Dry Safe) pen and, after five minutes, the lettering is still a bit smudgy if you catch the edges. So you anchor the card with a mug and point the fan at it for the morning.
When you realise that the lettering is as dried up as it’s going to get this century you remove the mug.
You resist the temptation to rub at the nasty ring mark with your finger; you know from harsh experience that only makes it worse. And with a bit of luck Jim won’t be able to find his spectacles when he opens the card anyway.
You fold the card carefully and slide it into the nicely addressed envelope and lean it in a prominent position against your monitor until you set off for town.

You haven’t been to a Poetry Reading at this venue before. You get very anxious in new situations so you intend to spend your dinnertime wisely by establishing:
Where The Building is.
Which Entry Door you’re meant to enter The Building by.
Where the special Poetry Reading Room is in relation to the Entry Door.
Where you’re allowed to stand in the special Poetry Reading room.
The Poetry Reading reconnaissance isn’t as successful as you might have hoped. You discover The Building easily enough; it’s where it was meant to be. But when you go inside The Building to the Information Place the helper-man is stern and intimidating. He tells you to,
‘Speak up!’ when you ask about the venue for this evening’s Poetry Reading. You repeat your primary query.
‘Where will I get in to come to the Poetry Reading this evening?’
He shakes his head.
‘It’ll probably be the entrance ‘round the side'.'
‘Side? What Side?’
This is the first indication you’ve had that The Building has anything other than a front, and possibly a back.
He waves airily in the direction of nowhere.
‘The Side. Sometimes they use that way, but they change their minds. I never know what’s going on.’
So, the helper-man doesn’t really know what’s going on.
Because you're disoriented you forget to ask to see the special Poetry Reading room so you can select a likely looking standing place.
This is your worst nightmare. Not only an unknowable standing place but an ill-defined Side Entrance too. You go out on the street and look for The Side Entrance. You locate a Side but, from where you’re standing on the pavement, there’s no trace of an Entrance. You walk up along what you take to be a building Side and locate a probable Entrance in a recess in the putative Side wall. You return to work, badly shaken.
You start to tell your patient friend about your disagreeable experience and your fears for the Poetry Reading this evening. Then you notice the nicely addressed Fathers Day card envelope leant in a prominent position against your monitor.
Your patient friend soothes you. She seats you on the best office chair and administers tea and three funny foreign-looking Balocco (cacao) wafer biscuits. The foreign-looking wafer biscuits have crouched morosely by the kettle since January, when people brought their unwanted Christmas fare to work. They are actually quite agreeable and they deliver a remedial shot of chemicals and sugar.
With your reason restored you decide you will post the Fathers Day card this evening, on the way home, after the Poetry Reading. That way, at least Jim should receive it by Monday.
And, looking on the bright side, you’ve probably worked out the origin of the term ‘guidelines’.

I trained as an archaeologist but I usually prefer messy prehistoric people to Romans.
Romans always give the impression of being obsessively and compulsively organised. However, I’ve just visited the site of the Vindolanda Roman fort in Northumberland; actually the location is a palimpsest of many forts and civilian settlements superimposed on each other over the centuries. It is a wonderful place to visit. Mainly because the thoughtful Birley family, who maintain and run Vindolanda, use anthropological remains to interpret the messy everyday lives of all the individuals associated with the forts and settlements over time, the everyday lives of the bakers, babies, farmers, poorly soldiers, prostitutes and wives; not just the military organisers. This photograph is of Juno, a reproduction statue at Vindolanda. Juno is the nearest thing to a headless chicken I have to illustrate my Fathers Day story.

The story is written in second person. When I began writing seriously I couldn’t imagine finding any use for a second person narrative but gradually I grew fond of the point of view, I find it quite chummy. I was reminded of how much I've grown to appreciate second person when I read the short story entitled 'Colour Fractions' by Mollie Baxter in Before the Rain.

In my case second person allows me to use humour to confront repressed truth. The truth behind my Fathers Day story is my need to insure against social opprobrium. I imagine that if I’m more Roman-like in my obsessive compulsive organisation I’ll avoid feeling inept and uncomfortable in new situations. To write about that in first person would be tedious and self-obsessed but to wrap it up in a narrative makes it less indulgent.

As my other reader may remember, my second favourite rock is orthoclase feldspar-pink Shap Granite. This is a photograph of a swing-bin at Vindolanda; the swing-bin has been fashioned from faux Granite (with its creamy-grey colouration the swing bin is more akin to Dartmoor Granite than to Shap Granite). I'm guessing the granite-like swing-bin was purchased by the Birley family in deference to the fact that the site is of historical significance. I call that another very thoughtful thing to do.

Scary hairdressing-ladies and workshopping creative non-fiction. Wednesday 20 May 2009.

2009-05-29T07:58:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I compiled a self-important list of 25 things about myself; a sort of Facebook meme. Number 8 on my list is:
8). I always feel intimidated in libraries. And hospitals. And most shops. I never know where the proper standing-place is.

I was fresh from an awkward experience in the library in town when I wrote the list. I was waiting in the improper standing-place to return an Audio CD. Library-people could see me waiting in the improper standing-place clutching my Audio CD looking as if I'd finished with it, but no one told me I was muddled. They smell your fear you know.

I am, incidentally, a librarian, but it doesn’t help. Or maybe it does help; I just wouldn’t even be able to set foot inside a library if I wasn’t actually one of the cognoscenti. And understanding informatics (which I don’t) wouldn’t help me to know where the proper standing-place is in an alien library.

Anyway, there’s somewhere more intimidating than libraries, hospitals and shops. Hairdressing places.

I have Winnie Madikizela-Mandela-type hair, not that I’m black you understand. I just have big hair. I was born in Liverpool. When I was nineteen I nursed a West Indian lady who said one of my great-granddads definitely came off the banana boats. I’m pretty sure I can say that – it’s my hair and my great-grandad so I’m not being unacceptable I’m being self-aware and ironic; post-modern (more of which next week).

For about five months in the early 1970s, when posters for Hair: the American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, were everywhere, I was temporarily stylish. Since then I haven’t been hip at all and I’ve never really known what to do, so I keep the hair short lest I put people in mind of Paul Breitner.

Recently, I’ve decided I’d like to experience that giddy sense of being a hair-do leader once again.

For months I’ve tramped the rounds of hairdressing shops. I’m working on the assumption that if the shop charges a lot of money their hairdresser-ladies must be well trained and kind and full of ideas. I want someone to advise me and then style my hair so that it suites me and makes me modern (or Mod, as Auntie Pam would say).

True enough, expensive hairdressers do provide a consultation. But what good is that when the hairdresser-lady’s a flaxen moppet with a silky-do like Minxie Geldoff’s. She seats you in a black vinyl chair; already you’re pasted to it with sweat; apologising.
‘What do you want?’ Minxie chafes your raspy head with the pointy-end of a pointy-ended comb.
‘Dunno, I want to look nice.’
‘Mmmmmm… we’re a bit limited with short hair,’ she pokes tentatively again (did you see her lip curl?).
‘I’m sorry.’
(Don’t state the bleeding obvious Minxie. Do you know how hard it was for me to come in here in the first place?)
‘Shall I just tidy it up?
‘Okay, just tidy it up.’
So, she tidies it up, rasp, rasp, raspy-rasp. In a belated attempt at styling she glues wispy bits forward onto your face, a bit like Liza Minnelli.

Why do young pretty hairdressers with hair like Minxie Geldof imagine that middle-aged women are enchanted by wispy bits or crappy kiss-curls? Would you choose to look like Liza Minnelli, Minxie? Wispy bits scare me. That’s something else for the list.

Then, you’ve tipped Minxie a tenner because you want her to like you (why?) and you’re scared of her and the receptionist thinks you’re ecstatic with your liza-look and you’ll need another appointment in four weeks time. You can’t go back to the same hairdressers and ask for someone else. You can’t say,
‘No, not scary Minxie, give me a hairdresser-lady who understands about afro hair.’ You can’t because that would be unacceptable rather than post-modern; and because the receptionist is terrifying too. So you make a ruddy appointment and have to get your friend at work to phone up and cancel for you. Then you have to avoid that street for a year or two. There’s barely a street I can venture along now without the aid of camouflage. In the end I might to have to grow my own fright-wig disguise.

What is wrong with me? Why can’t I march into a hairdresser shop and demand to know who can style my curly hair and not leave me looking like a 1970s footballer or a legendary singing star?

When they start with their raspy-rasp poking and excuses why can’t I say,
‘Don’t look at me pityingly. Don’t ask me what I want or tell me there’s not much you can do. You’re the trained expert; expertly help me. And, while we’re on the subject of experts, stop making me feel stupid – you’re a hairdresser-lady, I’ve got a science degree (first class hons)’.

Why can’t I do that? Because I’m scared and intimidated, that’s why. And a little bit because it’d be rude too.

I submitted a blog post for workshopping as a creative nonfiction piece. It hasn’t been workshopped yet but the Writer with the Writerly Name was very encouraging and suggested I enter the Flax competition.
I was very touched and I will enter, but this time I won’t be thinking.
’What’ll I do if I don’t win?’
I won’t be thinking that because I can sit here and touch a dozen blistering-blogs without even stretching, for example: Every Day I Lie a Little , My Shitty Twenties , Mollie Baxter, Dave Hartley and I Thought I Told You To Wait In The Car.

Thank you to James Fraser for my little bit scary and intimidating kisscurl drawing.

Carol Ann Duffy, Myra Hindley and the Prize. Wednesday 13 May 2009.

2009-05-16T05:07:00.000-07:00

This week we looked at Carol Ann Duffy’s World’s Wife. The Agreeable Doctor pointed out some other bits of knowledge that should have been bleeding obvious, even to me; titles matter and collections of poetry have a form. Duffy’s collection seems so proceed from her girlhood through to her feeling about her own daughter.

Duffy based a poem on Little Red Riding Hood and called it Little Red Cap – I’d thought, ‘that’s funny,’ and left it at that. I might have thought, ‘maybe that’s what Americans call the story.’ The girl character in the animation Hoodwinked! was called Red after all.

(I’ve just looked at Hoodwinked! on IMBd and found out about the Rashomon effect; boundless potential for me to waffle with that).

But of course Red Cap has been named for a purpose. One friend suggested it’s an updating; nobody wears riding hoods anymore but the hepcats do wear caps.

Little Red Cap acknowledges sexuality in adolescent girls (which just made me think of another thing the title might allude to). The line,

‘what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?’

reminded me of a recent episode of Coronation Street. A grown-up character speaks about being seduced by a friend’s father at 14. She admits that she liked him; looked forward to seeing him when she came to the house. I was impressed with the courage of the scriptwriters for including such candid dialogue.

As mentioned I entered two creative writing competitions. I was a sickly-mix crippled by self-doubt and plagued by what I’d do if I didn’t win. Worse still - how I’d cope if someone from my class won.

I was awarded joint first in the Andrea Pendlebury poetry award and joint second in the Helen Clark prose award. Book tokens and wine (artfully arranged above); very nice. The last time I receive a wrtiting prize was in 1968.

(THIS is being said in a surly, mean-spirited, little inner voice, not for consumption by the polite, generous spirited reader. Still reading? Right. I didn’t really want to be a joint winner. I know that makes me a peevish person – despite my claims to the contrary. And I didn’t want to be awarded joint second; as my so-called friends pointed out, ‘If the prose award had joint firsts too, then joint second is like fourth. And maybe there were only four entries.’) Well.

I know, I know, even just thinking that in my nasty little inner voice is bad karma – even if you don’t believe in crap. And this time next year I’ll be wishing I could get a mention never mind a half-second; I know that.

Oh, and it was someone from my class who was awarded joint first for the poetry award. Well done, I actually am pleased for you, because you are a proper poet who can write proper poetry. I still don’t really get it; sometime I catch myself - wondering if it isn’t actually all a hoax…

My poem is the one about the dead baby, the first poem I wrote, and is called Long line of times, if I can figure out a way of making a link to it I will. (I've done it but not sure if it's a good way.) I still feel hesitant about this poem, because it seems exploitative and calculating, but it is sad, and it was sad

The friend who presented on a genre this week focused particularly on Duffy’s The Devil’s Wife, a poem about Myra Hindley. She was brave because it’s an uncomfortable poem – but one that I keep being drawn back to as well. Duffy never mentions her subject but the reader immediately senses who is being written about. It feels as if the screenplay for the recent television drama about Hindley was taken straight from the poem.

A couple of photos of the bad squirrel who would eat all the bird nuts as a snack, and wreck the feeder, if I didn’t hang them on the pricky monkey puzzle tree. Here he is being shifty, first looking one way then the other way before he tries to scamper up the tree wearing some quilted mittens (just kidding about the mitts).

Controlling idea, premise, subject and theme, a love-sick finch and tractors in macs. Wednesday 6 May 2009.

2009-05-10T06:19:00.000-07:00

Before workshopping our writing we thought again about what we were writing about; controlling idea, premise, subject and theme or world view. Nancy Kress and Robert McKee are the bods for this stuff and I’m seeing it in context now that I’ve tried to write a short story.
It seems so obvious, of course, but identifying your theme makes writing easier because you can choose scenes, events and imagery that reflect that word view. Oh yes.

I know it is obvious when Kress and McKee say it but most obvious things are a revelation to me. For a long time I couldn't understand why skirting-boards in other peoples' houses weren't like mine; defined by a ridged detail of sooty dust. One day I caught a friend at work with a bowl of soapy water and a scrubby cloth.

'Does everyone do that?'

'Think so'

'Do they? How often? Christ it’s all slotting into place now. Oh my goodness! Is that why other people have tidy bathroom windowsills too?'

Why is there this conspiracy of silence over helpful information just because it’s obvious?

With the Writer with the Writerly Name we workshopped our stories. No one was harshly criticised but we were palpably subdued by the end. I think we’ve realised that having the story is only the start; now we have to make that story believable and alive, and all before the end of May.

My office has recently acquired solar reflecting glass which is a bit mirrory from the outside. There were a pair of chaffinches out on the cement ledge a few days ago; a plain brown-job hen and a rosy cock (yes, yes, very funny). The male was peck, peck pecking at the window, level with our ankles, all day.

At first I though he was pecking at tiny insects. I couldn’t see any but I imagined they were only visible to the naked finch-eye, or maybe he was locating them by ultrasound or smell or radar or some other finchian special-power. Sometimes though, he really launched himself at the glass. A man visited the office for referencing advice and said the little cock wasn’t eating; he was defending his territory against his own reflection. Sure enough the little brown hen hadn’t pecked at the glass all day – I suppose I imagined she wasn’t hungry or she’d eaten a cracker-bread the day before.

The little brown hen hopped around on the ledge patiently all day whilst the battle raged. Around 4 o’clock she disappeared. The cock was still having it out with himself when I left work; his poor little face surely must have been sore and he can only have been exhausted. Eventually he’s going to have to concede his territory to his own reflection but it won’t matter by then because he was so busy scrapping that he didn’t notice his missus gone. The event felt like a parable but I’m not sure what the moral of the story is.

I know the photo is of a Blue Tit. I didn’t have my camera at work. I hang the bird nuts on my primeval looking monkey puzzle tree to deter squirrels who steal all of them (and demolish the bird feeder) in one go. But I feel a bit ambivalent about doing that because squirrels are only being squirrels, they didn’t be born and then think, ‘I’m going to be a pest and wreck bird feeders.’ They are just helping themselves to a yummy snack. But then blue bottles are just being blue bottles and I generally don’t feel undecided about whacking them with a rolled up copy of the Daily Mirror.

The other two photographs are of tractors wearing macs on the shore at Lytham. Very nice, very nice.

Creativity & Marginality, exploiting your family and being a pretend writer. Wednesday 29 April 2009.

2009-04-30T06:24:00.000-07:00

First session of Creativity and Marginality in Contemporary British and Irish Writing with the Agreeable Doctor. We’ll 'look at key trends and tropes in diverse generic forms; and consider different ways of reading contemporary literature.'

If it wasn’t for heft which is at present featuring in everything I write, trope would be my favourite word. Trope is like paradigm and meme; I want to use them but I’m not exactly sure what they denote and I don’t want anyone to laugh. For a long time I thought scatological meant messy; which I suppose it does - but not in the way I was using it. My friend struggles to remember what phlegmatic means; I don’t use phlegmatic, it sound green-spitty.

Each week of the new module one of us will deliver a presentation looking at different genre: life writing; poetry; short story; novel; creative nonfiction of place. My friend and I are presenting on contemporary place writing on 8 July; a date so reassuringly distant that’ll it’ll probably never happen; what with the credit crunch and other badstuff.

This week we looked at Julie Myerson’s Lost Child. Because of the press furore I would neither have bought nor read Lost Child if it hadn't been required reading (and it’s still in hardback and it's only on order at the library!). I didn’t find much to detain me in the book; it felt rushed and sloppily edited and I was only really interested in sections about Myerson’s son, Jake, and his drug use. I was scarcely caught up in her research into the life of a young woman who died in 1838 at all (and I like old things). I did feel infinite pity for Jake’s cat though; left imprisoned without food and water in his flat after one of Jake's unsuccessful attempts at independence. Myerson’s son accuses her of writing ‘short snappy sentences,’ and the book feels journalistic and self obsessed. I’m preoccupied by trying to be truthful (as apposed to accurate) when I write. The Lost Child feels explicit but disingenuous.

In contrast the other life writing title we looked at is John Burnside’s A Lie About My Father which is so fine I’ll feel denuded when it’s finished. I'm rationing myself so I don’t get to the end too quickly. Burnside examines an uneasy parent-child relationship without sensation or self-pitying censure. To be fair Myerson is still living in her bad time and Burnside’s father is dead; I could see that detachment would make it easier to be reflective.

I tend towards Myerson-type short sentences and fact marshalling but I aspire to write thoughtfully like John Burnside.

One unsettling aspect of the new module is that the Agreeable Doctor defers to us saying he’s ‘not a writer’ which causes a sort of almost audible cog-shifting inside my head; like the realigning staircases in the Harry Potter films. The inference of ‘I’m not a writer’ is that we are writers. Whoa AD! I’ll need to see the certificate before I'm able to presume like that

Had a very poignant mention in Preston's Poppies on Every Day I Lie a Little this week. Thanks Jenn.

Left hand down a bit, First Creative Writing workshop, Naming Names and the Competition... Wednesday 22 April 2009.

2009-04-22T07:09:00.000-07:00

I do get out of sorts when I’m trying to reverse into a parking space and a dapper bystander wearing a shorty-mac taps eagerly on my car window with his knuckles and proceeds to give me instructions.

‘Left hand down a bit.’
‘What?’
‘Left hand down a bit, and you’ll be sorted’
The thing is, I have absolutely no idea what ‘left hand down a bit’ means. Now and then I’d quite like to punch that dapper man in his shorty-mac when he taps eagerly on my car window with his knuckles and says that thing. I’m not a bad person but sometimes I might come across as a being a bit insolent.

This Wednesday was the first week of the Writer with the Writerly Name’s Creative Writing Workshop module. We’re going to be doing a lot of peer appraisal in this unit. Peer appraisal is what happens when we take in turns to offer feedback and suggestions on each other’s work. The convention is that each group member says what they consider to be admirable about the piece. Then they each comment on what doesn’t work so well and, if they can, offer advice suggesting what might make the piece more effective.
My daughter is using a similar approach with her primary pupils and terms it ‘three stars and a wish’. My writer friend uses what she calls a sandwich – commendation-suggestion-commendation. What’s important is not to descend to platitudes, just saying ‘I like it’ or ‘it’s good’ with being specific about what exactly does work and why it works.
When my children were little I tried to say at least three positive things for every negative pronouncement. Similarly I tried not to resort to inanity such as ‘you’ve tied your shoe laces very nicely’. Being a mother who is forever blurring the boundaries between roles the children were soon party to my approach. It has become a family joke that if one of us does something regrettable, say comes downstairs in an irredeemably grim outfit, we say: ‘Well, your shoes are tied very nicely’.
The MA group have critiqued each other work since the start of the course but now the process is to be more rigorous and we’ll each have the opportunity to chair a discussion.
In The Poet’s module I received very poor feedback for a poem. Well deserved on reflection, but I thought I’d die of grief at the time. The experience triggered another poem; Dead on the Table.

They comedian and singer, Isy Suttie was asked to make a face out of edible stuff for a weekend magazine and found some bits quite tricky. Peer appraisal, like making ears out of ham, is harder than people make out. Last term I think someone suggested that half an hour was enough time to spend on preparing feedback on a colleague’s work. Well. Like Suttie’s ham-ears it takes me a lot longer that that, about a day a person I reckon.

I’ve been thinking about naming names. During the Life Writing module I was writing about characters from my childhood. I discovered I couldn’t give my people fictional names (to protect the not-so innocent) until the very end of the process because individuals with a pseudonym name immediately stopped being who they were and started to behave inappropriately.

During the Fiction module I found the apportioning original names to characters thorny. I've called someone Bette Benn and it sounds contrived. All my made-up names sound risible; improbable.
In the book That Old Ace in the Hole each character Annie Proulx introduces has a more ingenious name: Bob Dollar has an uncle called Tambourine Bapp (Uncle Tam) who has a boyfriend named Bromo Redpoll. Bob visits a town called Woolybucket where he meets Sheriff Hugh Dough; Ponola Dough; LaVon Fronk; Orlando Bunnel; Ribeye Cluke; Ruhama Bustard; Parmenia Boyce; Ruby Loving (an ancient haggard Country Singer); Ace and Tater Crouch. He also spends some time helping out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Café. I like the names in That Old Ace in the Hole very well. But then I think, people in America do have interesting names anyway.

There’s a vast disused county lunatic asylum at Lancaster; you can see the vernacular quadripartite tower looming above the trees from the M6 on your drive up to the Lake District.

As an aside, the world record for enduring ‘total’ sense deprivation – staying alive, conscious and sane without appreciably seeing, hearing or feeling anything - is three days and twenty hours, recorded in 1962 at Lancaster Moor Hospital. The perceptual isolation research was conducted on volunteer nurses and patients and was an attempt to see if schizophrenics and ‘normals’ differed in their tolerance levels. I first read about the feat in the Guinness Book of Records forty years ago and understood at the time that the subjects were submerged in sound proofed tanks of body temperature liquid. Reading about the experiments now it seems that there weren’t the resources for such sophisticated techniques, so the subjects were wrapped in cladding and placed in sound proofed rooms. The deprivation wasn’t total because they still had to eat and go to the loo. I think I imagined that they’d be tube-fed and have astronaut-type toilet arrangements. Common sense dictates that the Lancaster Moor Hospital wouldn’t have had the benefit of Nasa technology. I find myself bizarrely disappointed by the researchers’ lack of rigour. Disappointed and bemused and then saddened. I feel saddened by the poignant image of a sightless schizophrenic volunteer being bundled along hospital-green tiled corridors to the lavatory in the name of scientific research.

On the city-side of the asylum is a cemetery. The Lancaster liberal peer and linoleum giant, James Williamson, and three of his wives (and others) are buried under a modest monument in this enormous graveyard.

Little Jimmy, as he was nicknamed, commissioned the Ashton Memorial in Williamson Park in remembrance of his second wife, Jessy. Jessy’s monument is also visible from the M6.

The colossal dome of the Ashton Memorial is copper and in the 1960s it was cleaned and burnished. The monument looked very strange for a while but soon reverted back to the more recognisable verdigre-ed state. When Jimmy, Lord Ashton, died in 1930 he was worth ten million pounds; which would have been be worth an almost unimaginable sum at today’s standards.

However, the point is I went to the cemetery to look at names. Here’s a small selection: John Shadrach Slinger; Alice Maude Wolfall; Charles Purdon Silly; Rimmon Clayton; Dolly Salliss; Oliver Speddy; Harold Muckalt; Bindloss Smith; Nellie Bell; Peregrine John Smart; Ninian Smart; Isabella Row; Jane Bailie. And some nice alliteration: Alice Arkle; Ernest Ellershaw; Clara Ann Airey; Henry Homer; Herbert and Harriet Hall and Maria Marriott.

So you see; people do have diverting names in Britain too - Shadrach Slinger and Ninian Smart; half of my characters will be named Shadrach or Ninian from this time on. What strikes me is that, although those names are uncommon they don’t sound contrived like my Bette Benn does. Maybe a name has to be lived in to sound authentic.

All students in our group have been urged to enter the writing competition (entries to be submitted by 1 May). I assumed that the fact that I’m busy on the presentation night would exclude me. Apparently not; the Author who is Writing about Neanderthals (my favourite hominin) said I could still submit a piece. Sadly my first thought on learning this was:
'What if I don't win?'
There I've said it. Now if I do enter and I do tell people I've entered and I don't win everyone'll know why I'm doing deluxe sulking.

I'm including the photograph of Mary Jane Minnie Davis because her name is fine and because her headstone is made from Shap Granite which is currently my second favourite rock.

Shap Granite forms in batholiths when magma is contained underground rather than escaping through volcanic vents. Batholiths can be miles in circumference so the magma cools very slowly allowing large mineral crystals to form (in contrast volcanic rock like basalt cools very quickly as it leaves the earth so there is no time for large mineral crystals to form and the rock has a fine texture). Shap Granite probably formed when the tectonic plates carrying Scotland and England collided about four hundred million years ago. It contains high levels of orthoclase feldspar which gives it its glorious distinctive pink colour, prized by monumental masons. I like the idea that the granite owes its existence to the colliding of two continents; I like the idea of something crystallising under the ground for millions of years and the earth being eroded down to expose it; and I’m enchanted by the notion it is located just up the road; it’s our Shap Granite.

What have I learned this week? Well, just look at those last two images; John Shadrack Slinger and Mary Jane Minnie Davis. I’ve l learned that I need to do right-hand down a bit when I'm taking photographs. This is a doubly significant realisation in light of my opening remarks. I’ve also learned from Eric Partridges Dictionary of Catch Phrases that the expression ‘left hand down a bit’ is a standard piece of Navalese. It caught on when the dapper actor Leslie Phillips used it regularly in a 1950s radio programme called The Navy Lark. So, to all you spruce and eager bystanders with shorty-macs and tappy knuckles; now, at last, I can see where you were coming from. So thanks, and I’m really sorry if I came across as a being a bit insolent, as I say I’m not a bad person.

Unexciting email; Final Fiction session with the Writer with the Writerly Name. Wednesday 1 April 2009.

2009-04-08T13:15:00.000-07:00

I’m obscenely happy that I (kind-of) own a posh phone but these are a few of emithers I didn't particularly want to be alerted had arrived:

Asos style update.
Bounty Produce: We supply fresh vegetables /seafood in and around Metro Manila.
Facebook Shelley Buske Partridge sent you a message on Facebook...
Subject: Queenswood Heights?
"I am looking for Kim McGowan who lived in Queenswood Heights, Orleans back in the 70's" (no - but that just makes me feel dull and provincial because living in Queenswood Heights, Orleans sounds way more interesting than Glasson Dock - which is where I was).
figleaves.com.
John Lewis Hottest News (somehow I doubt it).
ബൌന്ടി പ്രോടുസ്: വെ സപ്ലൈ ഫ്രെഷ് വെങേടബ്ലെസ് /സീഫൂദ് ഇന്‍ ആന്‍ഡ് അരൌന്ദ് മെട്രോ മനില.
Johnnie Boden: a great offer! (see JL above).
Ticketline Ticket Talk Camp Bestival 2009.
Waterstone’s Team Stop press! New J K Rowling available to pre-order.
Marks & Spencer Summer favourites (unlikely).

I just want to hear from real people.

Came out of the Writer with the Writerly Name's final fiction session a different person. Now, not only do I know that the way you unmake a shitty first draft is to redraft it until it sounds agreeable, I also know how to start the process. Credit goes to Kaplan’s Laundry List of Stylistic Glitches, I think from chapter 9 in a book called Rewriting: A Creative Approach to Writing Fiction by DM Kaplan.

I’ve got to ditch a lot of stuff but mostly I have to rid myself of unnecessary adjectives, adverbs and stop overusing the conditional or past perfect tense. That is would and had as in ‘he would make himself a novelty Easter hat and he would leave glue and feathers all over the kitchen’, or ‘he had made himself a novelty Easter hat and he had left the glue and feathers everywhere’. Better to write he made an Easter hat and left glue and feathers everywhere. Betterer still, I suppose, hide the glue and feathers and Bob’s your uncle.

And I’ve got to watch how I use a big list of Weasel words, for example - about, actually, eventually, really, somehow, truly – and a lot more. I use them all excessively with the praiseworthy exception of ‘basically’ which I've avoided for a long time because it grates.

A person from work emailed to say she enjoyed a review I'd had published (should that be I published? Nah! sounds far too pompous and as if I did it myself). A review I wrote that was used in a library periodical. She described my writing style as lively. I know it was meant kindly but that jaunty lively disturbs me. Is it euphemistic? Like ‘salt of the earth’ (common) and ‘friendly and outgoing’ (fast). Doesn’t lively imply shitty self conscious verbose first draft-type writing?

My blog got a nice heads-up at Preston Writing Network . Thank you PWN!

The sculpture is part of a war memorial in a St Annes park. It makes me infinitely sad because the big lady is too bereft to cuddle her baby.

In between testimony to Jim

2009-04-07T05:38:00.000-07:00

Jim's hip replacement has dislocated again. It keeps happening and I'm sure it's every bit as agonising as it sounds (he can see the ball of the femur up by his waist when it displaces). I took dominoes to play during a hospital visit. It's best to keep him occupied with a crossword or a game otherwise he has a tendency to keep a loud running commentary going on the relative ailments of the other patients and the ethnicity of the staff and visitors. I announced the fixture on Facebook and Frankie asked me if I won. Well I did, twice. But to be fair he is 85 and he was still coming around from the relocating anaesthetic. She commented that even under those circumstances she'd lose to him in at dominoes and she'd probably choose to challenge him to a running race; she’s a speedy sprinter and still a tad keen on winning. I suggested she might want to reconsider given that in the war in the olden days he was a Royal Marine and, for the moment, his hip joint is back in situ. She concurred but suggested that surely dragging along one of those liquid canister thingies was going to impede him a bit. This is indeed true, on reflection the intravenous tube did also keep knocking his dominoes over. That toppling, added to the effect of the drugs, was probably what gave me the competitive edge, for once. Back to a level playing field tomorrow I suppose.

Good mark, book launch, shame and 'Tis. Wednesday 25 March 2009.

2009-04-05T13:54:00.000-07:00

I am pitifully driven by marks and this week I clawed up to my first proper result for a pre-portfolio (non-assessed piece). Yay! As I’ve learnt to say. The module is stylistics so it’s a commentary rather than the story that’s being measured – I’m far too shallow to mind what I got a good mark for.

In the commentary I’d fretted over structure at the level of whether to use ‘an’ or ‘his’ in the text - and then finished off by saying that, despite several iterations, the story still felt like a shitty first draft to me. One friend said he’d felt a bit mad with me when he read the commentary; wondered if I pretended to be tough on myself. I know just what he means and I do agonise over whether I’m being disingenuous in what I say or write, as in: “oh this is so awful”, so everyone will assure me: “no it’s not – you’re great you”. And of course there’s a big-bit of that because doing an MA in creative writing and giving people your stuff to read is hubris. I told one of my daughters how he’d felt and she said she thought that about me too; so that’s three of us. I'm really glad he dared to suggest it because it feels less like a shifty secret now.

Attended Jenn’s Manchester book launch; Blackwell’s were selling A Kind of Intimacy and Jenn signed copies and read an extract. I was so giddy and thrilled that I left my spectacles in the car. It seems my camera was on the take-a-baby-picture-without-startling-it setting. Consequently the photos of her reading are all enigmatic silhouettes; well, at least she wasn’t startled. Emily the good-blogger (author of My Shitty Twenties) set my camera back to Auto so I’ve got that one good photo of her left signing a book.

Stevie Davies reviewed A Kind of Intimacy in Saturday’s Guardian.

Also Saw Ray Robinson, author of the excellent novel Electricity, at the launch. But of course, because he didn't have his name rubber-stamped on his head I didn't know it was him until afterwards. Here's his back.

My blog was intended to track my MA progress but I feel it’s become a bit lightweight lately; partly I’m losing steam, partly because stylistics is hard. Stylistics suites me because my thinking is pretty jelloid and I appreciate being taught order; but it can be a bit dull to write about - so I’ve cravenly resorted to fancy dress outfits and Morris dancers and the like. When I first wrote about the Morris dancers I joked about fertility rituals; adding that the display was a grand example of the triumph of hope over experience. Then I took that out. For several reasons; many of the women were actually young and clearly fecund and (as I know) being over fifty isn’t something you have any choice about. It was great fun to watch the dancing and the dancers were happy and uninhibited and doing something crazyplucky and I was just cynically taking photos and writing about them so I could make a joke. And I’ve don't believe in the supernatural but I’m so quick to mock people that I’m starting to worry a bit about my karma. So, if you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody come and sit by me – well, not any more.

Transpires we have to submit 3 genres with our stylistics commentary; fiction, poetry and a dramatic piece. Thought I’d drawn a line under poetry. I’m trying to relate everything to the short story I’m writing for fiction so my poem’s based on a studio photo of my grandma and grandad and some other relatives taken around the time of the First World War. They’re very young and not yet married, my grandma has exactly the same eyes as my daughter. Nobody in the photo is beaming; in fact all the others in the assembly look positively glum. My grandparents are on the left end of the group; she seated, him standing behind her with his hand resting on her shoulder. They both have little faint half-smiles - as if they know a secret. I’ve been asking my dad Jim about them. My grandad was a slater’s mate and hefted a handcart with iron-rimmed wheels around cobbled streets in Liverpool. My grandma soldered cans in the Fray Bentos factory; the factory girls worked with rags wrapped around their fingers because of all the cuts and burns they sustained. The couple went on to have six children; first out best dressed. Jim was their youngest son and he never remembers not feeling hungry when he was growing up. My grandma was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis when she was still young. The skinny young Jimmy had to heft his mother’s wheelchair across those same Liverpool cobbles that his dad manhandled the cart over; he still feels ashamed of how mortified he felt doing that. She was in pain a long time; I remember her sitting in a wheelchair crying with agony when I was a small child. The girl in the photograph with my daughter’s eyes has no idea of what she had coming. As my grandma was dying my dad was at one side of her bed and her neighbour, Mrs Cowan, at the other. Mrs Cowan said: “she’s gone Jimmy” and he was glad, because she’d had such a hard life. So that’s going to be my poem; sounds queasily 'Tis-ish when outlined here.

All my stories are about Jim in one way or another. I want him to tell me stories about heavy handcarts. A handcart with iron-rimmed wheels for goodness sake, not and olde worlde cart festooned with ribbons or piled with chutney, but a beast of a heavy duty handcart that weighed a ton to push up and down steep roads in the Vale. I want him to tell me about Warehouse men with pockets full of Brazil nuts from the docks and poor-sod shoeless children who were sent home from school because they weren’t allowed in school without something on their feet and about the time he was mocked because he pronounced each ‘eee atch’. But I drift off when he starts telling me that he thinks someone is siphoning off his heating oil or his take on immigration or that he doesn’t understand the letter from United Utilities. And I feel ashamed now.

Revision and Lytham (and Doktor Hotfingers). Wednesday 18 March 2009.

2009-03-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

Mother’s day poem from Ellie:

My mum is so great
I could eat her on a plate
Please don’t be late
Or I might be deflate
You make me laugh
when you’re in the bath
So glad you didn’t call me Kath
There are lots of things I could say…..
but we would be here all day.

Easy to see where my literary genes came to rest more or less unadulterated.

I'm brassed-off because my first drafts sound childish. My writer friend tells me that they wouldn’t sound any less juvenile if they’d been written by an older me; they sound like infantile shitty first drafts because that's just what they are. And the only way I’ll get them to sound any more mature is to redraft them twenty times, or more. I really think she was trying to cheer me up.

Motored to Lytham St Annes for Saturday afternoon Whelan's fish and chips . Lytham was the hanger-around-staring-at-stuff-person's dream. First there were clog-clad morris ladies.

Then there were exuberant hankie-waving, bumper-boot wearing morris men (that last was a heavily premodified noun phrase).

Then, outside Clifton Walk shopping tunnel, there was Doktor Hotfingers - tricked out in a red-spangled top hat and playing an electronic keyboard. I didn’t get a photograph of him because by the time I’d been into the watchstrap shop, bought and had fitted a new watchstrap, and come back out into the light, he’d packed-up and buggered-off; dammit.

I've faffed and fannied around with these pictures trying to get them in the right place and they just won't conform; they'll have to stay where they are.

Process and Development - and twitting protocol. Wednesday 11 March 2009.

2009-03-15T12:32:00.000-07:00

This day we was starting to learn about crafting scenes, dialogue, plotting and back story. All that.

For practice the Writer with the Writerly Name set us an in-class exercise to write about two interesting characters in an interesting place doing something interesting. In addition we had to disclose a third character; divulge a bit of back story; reveal something of the characters of the people in the scene; feature moments with no dialogue; introduce a crisis. I had a vicar and a tart dry stone walling up Beacon Fell, the third character (of course) was a Bishop. However, in an attempt at wit and originality I made the vicar female and the tart male.

I have been researching to amass some back story for the fiction I’m properly trying to write. The story is set in the 1970s but the back story is set in the 1940s and 1950s and involves seedy things. I quickly discovered t’internet isn’t the place to research prostitution in the 1950s. Luckily I’ve found a library with lots of out of date social science books and I’ve hoarded a few bits of ‘credible detail’ which was what I was after. Still sounds pretty shite though; like a pretentious 15 year-old’s essay.

The stuff set more recently is even worse. Great platform-boots of clunky 1970s iconery fish-sliced in: Crimplene, Players Number 6, Brian Cant, Cortina mk 3, BBC 2, Bryan Ferry, Play School, uncut moquette and Hamble. It makes me cringe to read it; it’d be a whole lot more subtle to do an information drop: “It was 1976”.

Watched Red Riding to see how to invoke period in a more restrained manner but got caught up in the story, again, and forgot to notice. Think they did it with flares and spectacles.

Ali asked me what I’d like for mother’s day so I sent her the link to three bits of loot I’m after: Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel, Why Evolution is True Jerry A. Coyne and Darwin's Lost World: The Hidden History of Life on Earth by Martin Brasier. Obviously, there’s a bit of a theme going but she said she couldn’t possibly order any of those; Amazon’d keep contacting her with all sorts of ludicrous titles that people like her buy; it would, she continued, “be the sci-fi thing all over again”. Miniature hydrangea in a decorative pot it is then.

What's the protocol when a (very agreeable seeming) stranger twits you? Anthony twitted to me: "yay Preston :D" (we were both twitting from Preston). Do I: ignore it (rude); twit back "Preston yay :)" (bit trying too hard to be hepcat); follow him (creepy, he's literally less than a quarter of my age); twit back "hello Anthony, do you enjoy living in Cottam? (stupid). So, I followed him; then instantly unfollowed him in case he told his mum. Although maybe grannys are fine to makeup numbers - I don't know. Then I replied but tried to to achieve that that exact right mix of self aware and witty. I spare the details.

Happy Birthday Frankie

Second person and research. Wednesday 4 March 2009.

2009-03-09T04:42:00.000-07:00

It is exhausting trying to write fiction; you can never relax. All the time you’re driving Stuart Maconie, or Andrew Marr or Alan Bennett reading an audio book or Terry Wogan are inundating you with nicely turned phrases or agreeable expressions – just when you’re least able to jot them down with a view to stealing/borrowing them.

On Friday you had to drive thirty miles in rush-hour traffic repeating the phrase “reserve that hides the hurt” (courtesy of Anita Shreeve) over and over so you didn’t forget it before you arrived home. And now it doesn’t seem that special out of context; you’ll still find a slot for it though.

All that last bit was written in second person. I used to think that second person had little to recommend it but now I find it quite chummy (back to first person).

this is Ellie managing to look lovely as the Tinman (and David as Colonel Harland Sanders).

to be continued....

Good night cohesion and bad tooth. Wednesday 25 February 2009.

2009-02-27T10:09:00.000-08:00

Drove home feeling idiotically happy after last night's lesson, even despite seriously losing my glasses, twice, during the day. A Serious Lose is when I clear out the car and then rationalise that I must have had the glasses almost two and a half years and, although they cost as much as a small second hand car, at price per wear they represent good value for the money. And they’re dated. And I start to concoct a cock and bull story about what’s happened to them to tell to Ian.

We seemed to get on well during the lesson and we all said confident stuff about each others (conjunction conscious) work in relation to the cohesion created by reference chains, lexical continuity and ellipsis. This despite (if I'm representative), feeling like frauds because we were making it all up.

Fiction writing is hard. I like my ideas but when I write them they sound juvenile, earnest and crawling with cliché. I’m reading Ernest Hemingway, Ali Smith and Susan Hill short stories so I can copy how real writers make words sound grown-up. But it’s like learning to drive again. I start out thinking narrative stylistics and next thing I know I’m thinking: “that was a good sto…Shit!" and I’ve finished the story and I completely forgot to look out for incongruity discourse (or whatever). I've just finished reading Career Move by Martin Amis and it might be better if I just content myself with being a mediocre academic librarian and pretend-proper kind person. Or maybe I should forget about writing grown-up sounding fiction and work on my looking-interested expression for when people are telling me about animals; that might be more managable and it certainly needs working on.

Last week the Writer with the Writerly Name read extracts from each of us to the whole group to see if we could identify the writer (there was quite a bit of sneaky bluffing going on). We guessed every one of us correctly. Then we wrote in a disguised voice, mine was wearing short white socks, and Writer with the Writerly Name repeated the exercise. This time it was much more difficult to identify the author but I was rumbled immediately – me dratted tricky-tinker verbiage again I think.

I had a 56 inch nerve taken out of a tooth today. It wasn’t the most agreeable 45 minutes; but by far the worst bit is at the end when the Dentist says: “chatter your teeth together hard until I say stop”. My coordination is bad enough at the best of times but with a head full of anaesthetic it’s none-existent. I feel like one of those sets of clockwork false-teeth that isn’t going nicely. And then I was spaced out on novocaine all afternoon, the Dentist tells me it’s only local anaesthetic and it won’t make me think I’m a Womble. But it does, every time. Rather look forward to it now.

The marks and unacceptable use of determiners. Wednesday 18 February 2009.

2009-02-24T04:10:00.000-08:00

It was very like Jenny Diski’s cat in the box motif. Until you open the box there might be a cat in the box or their might not be a cat in the box or both things might be true. Right up to getting the two portfolios back and turning them over to look at the marks it might have been possible for me to get 70% or over for all my MA modules. But now I’ve seen the marks and it can never happen. I’d clawed my way up with one submission and but I didn’t with the other. I know they’re what I’ve earned but I’m still sad about the poetry, sad that I never really got it.

My feedback sheet had gone astray so I was convinced that the poetry mark reflected the effort I put into the commentary rather than the poems. But the Poet emailed me my feedback the day after and he used lovely terms like powerful and fine; who could ask for better than powerful and fine? Me, I’m deluded and I wanted 70. The criticism relates to my overuse of verbiage, too many adjectives and adverbs. And to the way I allow obsession with form (villanelle, I think rather than my best-sort pantoum) to interfere with what the poem is saying.

How true, how frustrated I am with myself, and who the hell do I think I am to deserve 70 for me peavey poems, Rimbaud? My sage friend urged me to fail better next time.

If I’d calmed down at the time I’d have stopped trying to make a villanelle out of my eldritch list - hedgehogs, giant clockwork, ziggurats, labyrinths, migraine, warts, Poll na bPeist, all that scary stuff, and just done something else with the words, insread of overwritting ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ with my verbiage and hoping it might work.

Jenn Ashworth has been picked by Waterstone's as one of 12 new writers predicted to dominate the literary landscape in the years to come. Bloody Hell Jenn! How Wonderful.

Now Flo has been poorly too. Get well soon my mother-in-law Flo.

This week’s homework is to submit a stylistic analysis of the impact of language and grammatical decisions through a series of drafts. It is very difficult - but I’m enchanted by the notion that:
‘Unlike adjectival modifiers, determiners in the narrower sense are mutually exclusive, (really - no wonder I’m muddled!) ie they cannot co-occur with each other therefore, “The my new car”, is unacceptable in English.

Maybe unacceptable but I'm thinking powerful and fine and now I can’t stop trying to formulate other unacceptable phrases,
‘a your glass of tizer’,
‘that his tartan jacket’.
Perfect displacement activity.

So now I’ve seen the marks and it can never happen – unless of course, one of them was a mistake.

Premodified noun phrases and Martin Amis. Wednesday 11 February 2009.

2009-02-16T01:18:00.000-08:00

Right. I’m starting to get the hang of premodified noun phrases. It was a bit like Ali once said in reference to never losing any weight: “When I though about it - it’s because I’ve never dieted.” (She went on to add that she didn’t wish she was anorexic exactly (obviously) but occasionally some anorexic leanings would be welcome; or at least the tendency to be a Little Bit Picky).

So, instead of continuing to say: “that’s rubbish - with all those messy sentences; it’s too hard”, I looked at the coursebook (Wright and Hope), did the exercises and read the answers (called solutions in the book but I’m allergic to the term solutions) and I got it, it’s not bad.

Now for postmodified noun phrases. I suspect it’ll be like learning to drive. You think you deserve a Mexican wave and a dedication on Steve Wright Sunday Love Songs for getting up to third gear, and then the Man tells you to check your mirror, signal right, brake, move down to second gear and change position on the carriageway. “What?! Can't you see I'm driving (reading)? I can’t do all that at the same time. Can’t we just go to where this road is leading?”

I wrote 25 things about myself for an egotistical Facebook exercise (a meme I believe; maybe I could say the greenstone leilira blades are meme conduits too). The only thing that excited any comment was my hint that, despite Martin Amis not having his own teeth, I still would. What an over reaction, Ali telephoned El to discuss what they might be best to do, both my friends were appalled. It’s not as if I’d said I’d do it with Gary Barlow.

Just discovered that a conference review I wrote in the Summer is published online. It was written before I started the creative writing MA and I'm a bit ashamed of it now, Allis Conference: Engaging your Community .

I nabbed the library's Guardian/ Observer dinosaur posters. Only one undignified scuffle with a mother of two small dinosaur-mad sons; soon cleared up, she was gracious when I explained I needed them.

I am practicing my non-belligerentthankyoufortheconstructivefeedback-face for this Wednesday's session because we might get our assessed portfolios back. I've got form and tend towards sullen in feedback situations. I'm mostly very anxious about the poetry. Al cried when she read the dead baby poem, but a day ago she was completely bewildered by my hominin pantoum (sounds a perfectly reasonable response when I say it like that). My hominin pantoum was my absolute favourite, I used to think it was great. Maybe I've been deluded in my pantoum and my hominin devotion. Oh God oh God.

Fiction Writer with the very writerly name. Wednesday 4 February 2009.

2009-02-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

Started the fiction module led by a short story writer with a very writerly name. There was an almost instant ulrika moment. When I redrafted my life writing piece from first to third person I was annoyed at myself because of all the: 'she recalled's and 'she remembered's, I managed to splatter around the text. Well. Transpires I was needlessly filtering the images through the observing consciousness, as in: “she had imagined that he was ancient”, when “he seemed ancient” presents the thing seen and removes the filter between the character and reader; I’m glad I know that now.

We were cautioned to avoid abstraction and generalisation and to include specific detail to increase credibility – in yesterday’s Guardian Review John Mullan writes: “such details are there to win the reader’s confidence”. When I was thinking about my poetry portfolio commentary I remembered how much I liked the precise geological and medical references in Robert Browning’s poetry.

We wrote a bit of credible detail so that we could introduce an impossible thing, for example a talking dog, and make it seem plausible.

Then we chose a photograph each and started to construct a character for our photo-person. What was remarkable how proprietorial people became about their characters immediately. And how much detail they could instantly produce about someone that doesn't really exist; surgical procedures, dodgy spouses, all kinds of stuff. My photo is a lady who looks like what I’d look like if I wasn’t on a perma-diet and I still smoked and drank to incontinent excess. The photograph was taken in a 1950s-looking front parlour; she is staring straight at the camera and has a broad, fleshy face and a serious gaze. She has curlers in her hair above her forehead but not the hair at the sides. I think she’s clever but has never had the opportunity to develop her intelligence. She’s a hospital cleaner called Betty. I recounted how Betty refused to shake the hand of Princess Diana when she visited the hospital she cleans at because she was appalled that the mother to the heir to the throne had just been on her third skiing holiday of that year and children were sleeping rough on the streets. The story is true, my mother in law did and said just that when she was the Lady Provost of Dundee.

Now my photo-lady, Betty, is going to feature in a short story if I can make one up, I think she might have been a prostitute in her teens and twenties.

Over time my sentences have shrunk because I want to avoid ambiguity. I’ve noticed that when doing the artist’s sketchbook field work exercise - recording still life and movement I am going to have to come to terms with longer sentence structure again – like the long messy sentences in the Stylistics coursebook.

Most of the children were home over Christmas and I was reminded about remembering rememberings and Jenny Diski and the Australian greenstone leilira blades; (the blades are produced in a sequence of ceremonial steps and exchanged with distant groups but never used or curated. Robert Paton believes the blades aren’t utilitarian items at all but are the vehicle of information transmission. At each ritualised stage of their production and circulation the Aboriginals involved get stories straight). Over Christmas my daughters rehearsed childhood accounts: Convincing the youngest that the plug-end of the communal bath was the pole position and the competitions to see who could get a sodden flannel from the bath into the loo. The stories have their own energy now and the retelling and reordering of them is more animated if there is an audience.

When made the final redraft of the Funeral for my life writing portfolio I misremembered the chronology of some relatively recent events. It was only when I reread an earlier commentary that I realised that I had been dishonest. I though I was becoming much more cavalier about the permeable borders between fact and fiction; but it transpires I’ve always been that way.

Back with Stylistics and the Pantoum is Queen. Wednesday 28 February 2009

2009-02-01T06:45:00.000-08:00

I’ve learnt about syllabic metre and iamb iamb iamb – but I’m still not sure how to hear the difference between iamb and trochee. I’ve become entirely addicted to pantoums I’ve gained weight, mostly because I’ve been so engaged writing piss-poor pantoums that I haven’t moved around at all. I like pantoums because I’m a rubbish rounder-offer and with the pantoum form once you’ve written your first line you’re sorted with your final line. And I enjoy the way that unexpected collocations of lines seem to make the poem say something profound that you’ve only just realised that you think.

I’ve delivered a ‘poetry’ workshop. I had to give a 30 minute presentation at the culmination of a library orientated Training and Learning course. I’d every intention of reviving my web evaluation set-piece but an evil shoulder-demon was whispering: “pantoum” in my ear when I was sleeping. Once the idea was planted there was no hope of shifting it; setting myself up for maximum humiliation and I was powerless to intervene. We’re British librarians; generally speaking we’d rather eat own nasty liver than participate in the most innocuous of ice-breaking exercises, let alone render our soul. I went into a session promising 12 librarians, well 11 librarians and a conservator, that in 30 minutes they’d leave with the first draft of a poem (a pantoum). I didn’t give any prior warning as I presumed I’d fail automatically if no one turned up; at least if everyone just fainted I’d get marks for trying.

We did it in three stages (and I gamely modelled each stage as we went along, wot a trooper):
First: a childhood remembering, a room, a teacher, a den, anything, and the senses and emotions associated with the memory – scary carpet, fingerless gloves, cheesy wotsits, muddy smell. Then they talked that memory to just one other person (essential that it was as discreet as possible) for one minute;
Second: they noted down 8, 4/5 syllable phrases used in their description. This was the bit I was most terrified of; I reasoned that if they’d spoken about a topic for a whole minute they’d easily have 8 phrases but I’d absolutely no proof of that or contingency plan if they didn’t; but they were a match for me and they’d plenty to say;
Third: they reordered the 8 phrases in pantoum form. Two people allowed me to read theirs out, bloody fantastic – two tightly coiled memory-bombs, really moving. So now the Pantoum Appreciation Club has 13 members – 14, if you count my tutor’s 10 year old daughter; my tutor took the notes home for her to use. She’s like me – ideas, but a weak finisher – not any more.
The irony of me, Tin-ear Tamara with a portfolio of piss-poor pantoums and a whiney piece about not being understood, isn’t wasted on me. But 11 British librarians and a conservator and the tutor’s little girl came out happy and I’m happy.

Stylistics is very hard; metalanguage encompassing language. It seems ok – identify the adjective, adverb and noun premodifiers in a noun phrase. For example in: “my new friend from Mars”, ‘new’ is the premodifier.
Then there’s a test. Identify the premodifiers in the noun phrases in a given text. And the text contains phrases like: “was furnished with voluptuous grandeur in approximations of various styles, predominantly those of several Louis, with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century additions”. Well. I’m sorry, that's just messy, you can’t write that. You’ll just have to make do with one or two simple premodifiers – otherwise it’s just going to make me cry and probably faint.

We’re going to start fieldwork; keeping an artist’s sketchbook to record still-life and movement in language. I’m very taken with the idea of sitting outside Bruciani’s recording life with my gimlet eye and my Moleskine. I’m a bit concerned I’m going to look a just a tad shifty and risible and I suspect I’ll keep catching myself writing my birthday wish-list, but I’m off uptown as soon as I’ve posted this.

Bad week badder week. Wednesday 10 December 2008

2008-12-14T05:40:00.000-08:00

How to write about this without sounding surly and malevolent? When I told my proper writer friend that what I am aiming for is candid she suggested choosing the most truthful or relevant details and leaving the rest of it out.

Last week of first semester, poetry week; we started with a workshop led by Jeremy Over on compiling poems with words and phases cut out from other pieces of text as in William Burroughs of the Beat Generation. This was fine.

Then on to discussing our poems from last week; I thought I’d heard an Oscar Wilde quotation to the effect that, ‘no friend is as good as a new friend’. The premise being that when you take up with someone at work or a class or wherever - initially you imagine you’ve lots in common. As you get to know each other better, and maybe in different contexts disparities become evident. I wrote a poem called New friends are the best friends, using four examples of this breakdown; it included the person you only meet at the pub so you think you’re both really witty and entertaining until you meet in the sober light of day and realise how dull you both are, and the friend you imagine you’ve everything in common with until you meet her partner (who she is devoted to) and find he’s a vile tyrant and a bit of a racist. In essence friends don’t always travel well; and I’m not even talking about going on holiday with people - that’d be a epic not a poem.

I joked to Jenn last week that I couldn’t comment on Skating to Antarctica having a novel's structure and tricks because I’ve only done life writing and poetry this far.

The way feedback works in the Poet’s class is you listen, everyone says what they like about your poem, and then they say what they might change and then you can respond. Frankie uses a similar system (nice things then a criticism) in her primary school and terms it 3 stars and a wish. I’ve genuinely never known what to expect in terms of feedback but I really didn’t see this one coming. We stood around the poem and stared at it like it’s a huge washed-up jellyfish, mostly dead but still capable of nipping. People poked it with their sticks, listlessly turning over the edges but not saying much. Two people mention they had first though it was about our group; it wasn’t but I understand why they might infer that. Then the itdoesn’tdoitforme person enumerated what didn’t do it for them – Oh, we skipping the 3 stars and capering straight to the wish then? This clears the way; the poem needs structure, imagery and inventive language and it raised issues around Is a poem a poem because the person says it is. I reel, eyes stinging, pride stinging. Really? All of that? Something I’ve thought about and messed with for days has less merit than an arrangement of cuttings compiled in an hour? Except I didn’t say anything because I’m craven. I was obdurate and sullen and as we discussed other peoples work I thought indecorous things, which I’ll not list because I’m only aiming at candid not at confirming how shifty and unpleasant I am. I am leaving the rest out.

I’ve done life writing and and I've done poetry. I’ve been back and poked at me poem with the stick a hundred times and still don’t understand why it wasn’t even worthy of one star. To borrow from Jenny Diski, now wish I hadn’t dicked around during poetry and deprived myself of answers to most of the questions.

Good week bad week. Wednesday 3 December 2008

2008-12-07T13:56:00.000-08:00

First you bond then you don’t; seemed to spend a lot of time talking about my life writing Funeral piece (as it were - I suppose death writing funeral piece even). It made me feel guilty and overbearing for monopolising the time and actually just emphasised my deficiencies. Not so much my inability to write, but my incapacity to understand what’s the sod's going on; stylistics I suppose. Anyway I’ve bought the book by Laura Wright and Jonathan Hope; now I just have to osmosis in the understanding. And I was mildly brassed-off that I’d spent loads of, well - minutes, writing feedback to give to the others; and no one had written any feedback to give to me. Don’t think I mean you Joe! And I’m over it, and I know it’s hard – hell, not so over it then.

I was driving home very unsafely on 1 December because I couldn’t stop looking at the moon and Venus and Jupiter; although I didn’t know that was what I was looking at until I got home and looked it up. Well I recognised the moon, obviously.
Gareth Edwards from Cardiff took this picture.

Ali and I went to meet Frankie in Birmingham to shop and eat Bratwurst. We went inside a sports shop which was hard on us all, and then we went with Ali into an out-of-doors shop because Al needed to buy some four seasons socks for John. Transpires it‘s also possible to purchase three seasons socks, which set us wondering, which season aren’t you supposed to wear three seasons socks for? And what’ll happen if you do?

When I had my hair cut, not the last time but the time before, I tuned into a conversation without realising. What caught my attention was, “that milk float’s the ideal cover”. I had to overhear extra hard to get this into context. Transpires some flags have gone missing from the back of premises somewhere at Lostock Hall. Flappy flags or sandstone flags I can only speculate, but I like the idea of the getaway milk float. Ideal wouldn’t be the description that would spring to my mind, overlooking its obvious limitations as a vehicle for hurried departure, the back of a milk float strikes me as a tad exposed for transporting swag.

I've preordered a book written by my friend, Jenn Ashworth from Amazon; it's called A Kind of Intimacy (that isn't going to be the cover). I can't read Jenn's blog at the moment because I just copy what she writes, word for word. When I did go on to it a few days ago to check out what the real cover will be I was reminded that Jenny Diski has reviewed her book, very positively. (And I did start to copy and I'm not actually having any problems with my internet provider).