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.

Literature, outsiders and welcoming them in

Thanks to the excellent Baroque in Hackney my stuporous misery has been punctured by the reminder that it is Refugee Week. Hurrah! Following the Griffin pelting, which still makes me smile despite my long-standing conviction that even symbolic violence is wrong, I am motivated to do something. On the Refugee Week website there are 20 simple acts that any of us can undertake to show that we welcome people of any and all culture, religion or ethnic group to our society.

Many of our greatest writers are exiles from their homes, whether voluntary or involuntary. Literary history recognises the value of the outsider, and the outside view, the shift of context that comes from observation of cultural difference and the strength of common bonds: family, love, loyalty, loss. In other words, refugees have been both a resource and a depository of literary culture. One of my greatest loves is that amorphous body of writing called ‘diaspora literature’ and refugees and the refugee experience are the bedrock of that particularly bittersweet genre.

My current condition precludes playing football with a refugee, or with anybody for that matter, and while I’d love to take tea with a refugee (or with anybody, for that matter) there don’t seem to be any Brighton based tea-related events. So I’m taking the tribe (ha, we’re a tribette if we’re anything, too small to even be nuclear!) to the Pav Theatre to see a refugee-led performance of dance, drama and discussion (and it says food too, my cup runneth over and hopefully my plate as well) on 14 June. What will you do to show the BNP and their unlovely ilk that they are just plain wrong?

And if you think it’s none of your business, remember that a bit more egg-pelting and a bit less recession thinking might have stopped Hitler before he was able to begin implementing the Final Solution. If Vidal Sassoon could put down his scissors in the late 1940s to fight fascism on the streets of London, we can all find a couple of hours to do the same, and we don’t even have to fight, we can enjoy ourselves in the process.

Refugee tot in Afghanistan courtesy of tracyhunter at Flickr

“The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated”

But not utterly exaggerated …

Yes I have been absent on more dramatic terms this time. Two hospital interludes: the second one planned, the first an impromptu response to something (virus? bacterium? body attacking itself out of sheer boredom?) that left me so weak I was almost unable to walk.

What fun. Not.

Convalescence is not much fun either. I wish I was the lounging around in elegant pyjamas and looking interestingly languid type, but I’m the grumpy, creased, intolerant and shuffling type instead. And I currently have the attention span of an ill-tempered gnat.

That means that my book pile has been whatever it is when you reject nine out of ten—not decimated which means rejecting (or actually, killing) one out of ten and it drives me mad when people use it to mean more than that—in three days. I’ve just chucked out any novel that didn’t grip me halfway through the first chapter and most didn’t. It would be invidious to name them, I’m sure you all have your own list of ‘writers who have disappointed’. What has made it through the winnowing so far: The Corrections and The Girl Who Played With Fire – nice substantial books with nice substantial themes too. My review pile is looking denuded too: I had to email one publisher and say that, kind as it was of them to send me a novel to review, I wasn’t going to be able to recommend it to my readers. No reply. Still on the pile are two books that interest me but that I haven’t got around to reading yet: The Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger and Hashish, Wine, Opium by Baudelaire and Gautier.

The latter is attractive to me for an odd reason. When I first moved to France, as a non-French speaker, I found exactly two books on the shelves of the place we were staying: Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger in French translation and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. I tried both, French dictionary in hand, and found the Baudelaire more palatable than the Fleming … so my first foray into French literature in its native tongue was hand in hand with one of France’s more disreputable sons. Thus are associations formed and it is a fact that I have never been able to finish a James Bond novel in either language …

Hospital bed courtesy of A. www.viajar24h.com at Flickr under a creative commons licence