Hashish, Wine, Opium

Not my methods for getting through convalescence, sadly, but an excellent book published by Oneworld Classics and which they were kind enough to send to me.

I’ve said before that Charles Baudelaire has a strange place in my heart, having been both my introduction to French literature and my introduction to the complexities of a truly comprehensive French/English dictionary. So to find a single, terse and somewhat stringent essay on the evils of hashish (although also on the glories of wine) from him in this small book was a delight. The translation is very good and Maurice Stang has, as far as I can assess, been fair to and sensitive about the language and period in question.

Baudelaire and Gautier wrote in an age that was no gentler than our own, but that perhaps had a more optimistic view of drugs of all kinds. Gautier, in particular, writes with a sprightly style and a jolly insouciance about taking hashish and opium that probably wouldn’t get past a sub-editor’s pen now, as it would be too ‘naïve’ and ‘biased towards the positive attributes of recreational drugs’, but it’s quite delicious to be taken back to an era where such experimentation was seen as a literary duty, and cataloguing your hallucinogenic experiences was a craft task, like hitting your word count or editing your first draft. And it’s equally palatable to be reminded that journalism once had frontiers in the individual, rather than the mass, and that exploring the inside of a person’s head and heart was once as important as exploring the ‘concerns of the audience demographic’. Gautier, in fact, is a ‘discovery’ for me – and his writing deserves to be better known if these three examples are indicative, because stylistically he’s very attractive indeed.

For writers in particular, this kind of classic is invaluable because it exposes us to some of those bits of literature that are indicative of a period, but that aren’t the ponderous outgrowth of it: Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal is considerably leavened by reading his diatribe against hashish, and I wish I’d has this tiny essay to hand the first time I read that song of praise to drunkenness. The very economy of the essay recommends it to the reader, and it does reveal more of the man than the biography I once read, which depressed me unutterably (and in two languages to boot!).

I do have one complaint though – the cover. I finally worked out that it shows a drunk (in a cowboy hat?) with a bottle (and maybe a glass?) in front of him. But it took me a long time to ‘get’ it, and if I’d taken the book off the shelf, rather than being generously supplied with it by the publisher, that cover could have caused me to put it back. A quick look at the Oneworld website shows that this cover may be a blip (or a nadir) rather than a habitual behaviour, which is good to know, as bad covers can damn a good book and that would be a shame in the case of Hashish, Wine, Opium.

Entering Contests (a cautionary tale written in the second person)

You had always known better. You grew up in a pub, where the late night drunken phone call was a regular joke. At first it was the call made to the pub’s payphone and, woken by the ringing, you would creep down in your dressing gown to answer it, before going behind the bar to tell your father: drunk and deafened by the jukebox, who was wanted. He would yell out the name of the girl, always a girl, who would get up and walk to the cubbyhole where the grey phone lurked, accompanied by catcalls and people miming sad violin music. Tough girls put the phone down after a couple of seconds, average girls took a couple of minutes and soppy bitches would end up with mascara to their chins, mopping their red faces with great flowering handfuls of tissues, and agreeing to meet the drunken reject and give him a second chance.

Mobile phones made the payphone call obsolete – now the drunk could call their lost one direct, and women got into the act much more. You would hear them, bar manager yourself now, refusing the call if they were tough, or, if they were hellish tough, putting it on speakerphone and holding out the phone so their girlfriends could stuff tissues or hands in their mouths to muffle their laughter as the drunk wept and wailed and begged for a second chance. Soppy bitches took the phone outside to listen. Men were always nicer – either not taking the call or taking it outside - but never using it as a cheap joke.

So why, knowing all this, did you do it? Why, when you saw that The Weekend Guardian had a summer fiction contest, did you indulge in the literary equivalent of the drunken phone call? Was it because Dave Eggers broke your heart several years ago when he admitted that he’d given top place to a story about a pig called Marmite just because he liked the idea? Was it because second place in that contest burned your soul? So when you saw the judges were Julie Myerson and (be still my beating heart) William Boyd, and that they wanted a gripping, well-crafted story under 2000 words, why did you send them a crime romp set in Brighton and featuring a heavyweight boxer … a female heavyweight boxer at that?

You weren’t even drunk.

So if anybody else has a story that fits the criteria better than mine, send it in before 10 July …

Why blog?

It’s a long time since I started blogging. I’m in awe of those people who remember writing anniversaries and notice their hundredth or five hundredth post or whatever. I don’t. I think I would go insane if I knew how long it took me to write a novel or thought about how many blog posts I’ve written since 2005 – although given that I blog six days a week, writing about three blogs a day professionally, as well as my own blog and doing some ghost blogging for folk who aren’t good at ‘soshul meedja’ stuff, it must be in the thousands at least.

But I do remember why I started blogging. It was fear. Fear that this new thing was going to snatch the writing world away from me. Books were dead, the websites and literary mavens trumpeted, we’d all blog everything in the brave new world.

Ho ho ho.

Paid-for content is still a rarity and nobody seems to know why the business model hasn’t taken off. But still I blog.

Why?

It’s a question I’d forgotten to ask myself until a lovely client asked me this week for some blogging tips and I had to sit and face the fact that I don’t have any. Or not any useful ones, anyway,

I used to make a list of things that I was going to blog about every month – that lasted for … oh, about a month! Now I blog about whatever comes into my head when I sit down and decide it’s time to blog. I get sent books to review quite often, and I don’t review all of them, which may mean I’m making some enemies in the industry, but I don’t write negative reviews so silence is my only recourse if work doesn’t seem work praising. I also buy and review books by authors I love, because if you can’t share your pleasures you’re a sad soul indeed.

But I do have key themes for my own blog, which are probably keeping writing sustainable and keeping yourself sane.

Professionally speaking, I love those clients who give me a clear brief. I don’t care whether I have to write about white T-shirts or suitable plants for winter hanging baskets, knowing what they want makes my life wonderfully easy. Some other blogs I am paid to write are more ‘open’ and for them I tend to have developed areas that I hope are specific to me and valuable to a readership. In environmental politics blogging, for example, I focus on food security, environmental protest and the relationship between animals, environment and development. They are areas that I’ve studied in the past or areas that I think are neglected in modern discourse. Gosh, pretentious, moi?

Back to the point - why do I blog? Partly because all things become habitual if you discipline yourself. So writing a novel is easier when you’ve written six previously, writing every day, or every week, or reflecting on your own writing, or reading with discrimination and commenting on what you’ve read are all skills. All writing skills contribute to success, in my view, so blogging is one such skill that I like to keep developing. I blog because reflecting on my writing life helps keep me sane. I blog because I’ve met an awful lot of writers in the past six years and while I’m not hubristic enough to think they read my blog, I know that I read many of theirs, so it’s a way of being accessible to people with whom one might not have enough in common to engage in email or telephone relationships. Because it may help to build that nebulous thing called platform, although probably you have to be a more controversial and committed blogger than I am for that to happen. Because I don’t keep a diary. Because it’s addictive.

Do I have any advice? Enjoy yourself or there’s no point doing it. Make a list of all the things you want to write about – it’s useful in the first month. Be honest but never frank; protect the innocent and allow them their privacy, especially those closest to you. Enjoy yourself. Don’t think of it as writing, think of it as online thinking. Read other blogs. Enjoy yourself.

The present moves into the past, carrying us with it

This week has seen the departure of two icons of my youth: Farrah Fawcett with her improbable hair, and Michael Jackson with his improbable life. They both shone out of television sets across a Britain struggling to compete with the shiny glamour of all things American, and convinced us to wear stars and stripes T-shirts and spend hours (if we were female) with our hair wrapped around curling tongs, praying that it wouldn’t rain and wipe out our efforts.

To be honest, I find myself splifficated (as Top Cat might have said, at around the same period of the seventies, although he appeared in the States in 1962, which says something about why we seventies kids felt ourselves to be always a step behind the beat, in relation to the USA) by facing the demise of these two, at a time when I am writing about the long hot summer of 1976. It was the year the Jackson 5 became the Jacksons, apart from anything else, the year that Michael and his siblings liberated themselves from their first record label and the process of reinvention began: Jackson 5 to Jacksons is minor, but for Michael that process was to continue through race and gender to produce the androgynous creature we became used to, if never comfortable with.

I’m splifficated too, because the novel I’m working on is about a young black musical genius, although mine dies much earlier, in his sixteenth year. And mine has autism, to the extent that his engagement with reality is peripheral and he exists in a world where mutual misunderstanding is constant and his ability to construct a viable life is limited to his family and a tiny circle of people who are willing to tolerate his eccentricities. Does that sound familiar?

So, oddly, I’m trying to excise the whole MJ media circus: no TV, no radio, no papers, ignoring #MJ tweets and so on, because I don’t want to be influenced by that sad prodigy in writing about my invented one. Life is stranger than fiction, by far, and I don’t want it seeping into my imagination just now.

Stars and Stripes courtesy of BL1961 at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Not a Writing Neurosis but a Writing Indulgence

For years I resisted the Moleskine notebook, believing it to be the preserve of the poseur writer (and I’m not wrong about that, but it’s not the SOLE preserve of the poseur writer, that’s the point) but a clever friend gave me a Moleskine and immediately I was hooked. Thank you, clever friend.

Hemingway used them, which cuts no ice with me. Papa and I would not get on. But Bruce Chatwin used them, which slices a fair number of icebergs, as I do believe Utz is one of the finest short novels I’ve ever read. Above all though, once I’d started writing in my Moleskine, I knew I would never, from choice, use another notebook.

And today I closed Moleskine #3 for the last but one time. Its pages are full of novel – written from front to back, and short stories – written from back to front and they’ve met in the middle, with just a half page of blank space and lots of notes and telephone numbers and thoughts jotted down with weird little chapter break markers that I love drawing because they make me feel like a publisher, or at least a type-setter, although such lovely creatures don’t really exist any more.

Moleskine #3 has a star drawn on its top edge to remind me not to open it upside down, #1 had a moon and #2 had a heart. Moleskine #4 has a leaf. I’m not a visual person, or not very much so, but I spend quite a bit of time thinking about that little doodle and what it says about the novel that’s being written inside the book. #4 will bridge finishing the current contemporary novel and starting one about World War I: the latter features an orchard, so the leaf is symbolic of my desire to get to that work. The star on #3 reminded me that one of the characters in the novel I was writing then would probably have been a musical success, if he hadn’t died tragically young.

And I will open #3 once more, to copy over to #4 all the story ideas and fragments that didn’t get used up in that notebook’s life. It’s bittersweet, but satisfying, and having the old notebooks stacked up under my desk reminds me that I am a real writer, after all.

Honesty in Writing

There are things we’d all rather not remember, and certainly don’t want to find ourselves writing about: our sad childhoods or pathetic teenage years, our failed marriages or disastrous career experiences. And there’s no reason, unless we particularly desire to produce a misery memoir, or are writing for self-development purposes, that we should go into those murky, painful areas.

On the other hand, there’s something profoundly dishonest about turning our backs on public, rather than private, history. And something that a contemporary recently mentioned to me in an email made me think about this in a very specific way. Having a couple of weeks of doctor prescribed ‘not doing much’ gave me a chance to test my understanding of this particular area of the past and what I found (which is, of course, random, a limited sample, and possibly not representative of contemporary literature as a whole) rather depressed me.

Here’s the thing. I was born in the sixties – too late to be a flower child, but young enough to be infected with many of the hippy generation’s beliefs. I grew up with the developments of that era: the contraceptive pill, equal rights for women, rampant consumerism to name but three that emerged through my teenage years and twenties. And like many of my contemporaries, both male and female, I was sexually hedonistic, amoral and what would now be called promiscuous. Back then we called it having a good time. And we did.

The thing about sexual hedonism is that, by and large, it takes more than one person to experience it. And, like all those university students who sat in pot-smoke filled rooms, listening to folk music, in the generation above mine, I could name names. If I was there, so were you, and you and you …

So why aren’t you writing about it? Current morality requires safer sex, that’s sure, and those of us who didn’t end up with an STD or HIV (and, surprisingly, most of my generation were lucky enough to get away with it) may now regret what we did for other reasons, but that doesn’t wipe it off our histories. Like the US Senators who deny smoking pot (or snorting/ingesting/injecting worse things) our denial deprives our children of the chance to learn from us. It gives them no resource to call on. It leaves them believing that they must make discoveries for themselves because we never went there, or did that, or felt bad (or good) about it.

To be blunt, I’ve never regretted a moment of my past. Sexual hedonism, in a guilt-free atmosphere, when you are both desiring and desired, is one of the most powerful periods of life you can experience, because it is an integrated experience involving body, mind and emotions and provides, if you’re lucky, absolute gratification in pretty short order. Even when I can’t remember the names of the people I had sex with, I remember the actual sex with great fondness. I know that this is not true for everybody, and from time to time I find myself listening to a litany of woes from somebody (usually male) who regrets his Lothario past and wishes he’d learnt to be a considerate man rather than a profligate lover. Sometimes it’s the other side of the equation entirely – those people who didn’t, or couldn’t or weren’t welcome to join in, who tell me how their young selves were scarred by rejection or denial or outright prejudice. While I can’t enter into either experience, I can at least empathise with the different facets of what it meant to be one of that generation and to have a different path through our sexual jungle.

But what I can’t forgive is the way that this period seems to be wiped from our literature. Perhaps I’m just not reading the right books, so if there’s literature out there that admits that young people in the sixties and seventies were at it like rabbits, regardless of their later regrets, please tell me. Because I’ve been looking for it, and I can’t find it, and that makes me sad. And I’m wondering – if I’m right about its literary absence - if we don’t write it, or publishers don’t publish it, or readers don’t want to read it? And I really can’t believe it’s the latter.

Aaargh! Library fail

From the Brighton and Hove Library website:

Reservation charges from June 1, 2009 - From June 15 2009 there will be a reservation charge of 50p (concessionary rate 25p) for items in stock in Brighton & Hove Libraries. This will apply to people aged 16 and over. Reservations for people aged 15 and under will remain free. The charge will go towards the administrative cost of reserving items and will help us to deliver a better reservation service. This administrative charge will be put on your account, to be paid when you collect the reserved item.

Well buggeration! I love my libraries, from the big and sleek Jubilee to my lovely little local Hangleton, but this is a kick in the groin and no mistake. I usually reserve between four and sixteen books a month (and I read them too, I’m a librovore) and a charge like this is going to cold turkey my library reservation habit as of right now! Instead of reserving I shall just browse the catalogue and go and collect the books from the relevant library myself, on the basis that a £3.60 bus fare would take me into town for coffee, meeting a friend, and collecting half a dozen books in comfort and pleasure, rather than giving 50p per book to the library service to do it for me. I know I should support the system but honestly – I spend a good part of most of my workshop time exhorting people to use their libraries as a magnificent and free resource, and then they do this!

Drat.