Archive for August 25th, 2007
I’d love to say that I’ve done lots of writing this summer, after all my ‘I must write’ blog posts, but I have made a little start.
I now have a notebook for writing. Some of it is just funny things that I see or come across, in the hope that they may form the basis for writing. I’m finding myself thinking a lot about the mechanics of writing, what beginnings look like, what endings look like, and examples of what seems to work, from film and TV as well as fiction, to work out how good stories are put together.
I’m also working out what I enjoy reading/viewing, in terms of stories, and hopefully that may give me an idea of what I want to write about.
I should probably take my notebook on the bus, as my best option for observing people, one-off stories in newspapers, signs misread that suggest a different meaning, that kind of thing. While my journeys to and from work have usually been about pacing myself into, and out of, work, perhaps now I can use that ‘not required to do anything’ time to take my imagination for a walk.
I also find I’m reading the literary sections of newspapers more, seeing what critics think of books, though not so that I can only write in a way that ’sells’. There are times when critics express that happy amazement you get with books that do take you somewhere new, or when they write about what and why they write.
Jeanette Winterston has some amazing pieces fortnightly in the Times Book Review where you can feel yes, I really am doing society a favour if I write. All of this is good for enthusiasm that books and writing are about pleasure as well as about ideas, both of which I want to hang on to in the process of trying out some writing.
Just after coming back from holiday, Dan and I met with a Polish couple living in England but visiting Edinburgh for the festival. The lady was a former pupil of mine when I last taught in Poland, and has gone from strength to strength, say I with pride though not much responsibility. The man is a lecturer in marketing, but went on to tell us the kind of societal trends behind products that he actually researches.
Probably no big surprise that it’s more and more about story telling in marketing, so that a product is based in the context of a story that you can be in too. I’d read a few months back about society shifting away from acquiring things to acquiring experiences, and he agreed that the story telling comes into this too.
In some ways that’s good. It doesn’t take much looking around to see that with the web, everyone has the chance to tell their stories more. In other ways, it can be a pressure - there are yet more stories out there, what space is there for mine? But I have to remind myself that my criteria for writing when starting in this direction were not of marketability, but of doing something that I love, for my own ends rather than anyone else’s.
It’s tricky to keep this focus as I start out, not to interrogate what I do too much. Thinking about writing while on holiday, I distinguished between writing as art and writing as craft. Sometimes with crafts, the fun is more in the process than in the end product. I’d like a nice end product too, some day, but for now, there’s no substitute for hard craft.
August 25th, 2007
I feel a little retro in a much earlier sense. I’m finally reading some Sherlock Holmes stories, and yes, they are cracking!
No, you can’t guess really what is happening, because Holmes does get to comment on things that you only hear about in the next paragraph, rather than Conan Doyle giving people more clues as Agatha Christie does.
I should admit at this point that I am not a huge reader of crime fiction, so I’m not very well placed to work out what happens next. But there again, I read a bit of newspaper on the bus yesterday where Ian Rankin had been commenting on JK Rowling being a classic crime writer in the way she sets up her stories. We did guess a bit of what was coming in Harry Potter (though not ‘the big revelation’ in book 7) so maybe my powers of observation are just not elementary enough for Holmes.
The books are fascinating - so much of it is familiar, but some of it clearly lost as far as our society is concerned. At one point, Holmes and Watson proceed to a scene where there is a scissors grinder, plying his trade on the street. I’m sure some people would like there to be scissor grinders still, but it’s not something that makes it into G2 as a complaint against the Government, for example.
We also saw a great couple of interviews last week, one about Stephen Fry, one with him. Reading Holmes, I feel that Stephen might approve…It’s not his ‘holy canon’ of Woodehouse, Waugh and Wilde, but it is of a society where indiscretion could ruin a reputation in a much more serious way than the supposed shock headlines re celebrities.
A society of bonnets, and smoking jackets; of people having probably more regularised habits than today, so that Holmes can tell how they type, where their bootscraper is placed in relation to their front door…I did wonder slightly whether our fragmentation might allow him to draw as good a set of conclusions
as in his books. Or perhaps Holmes would have a good career ahead of him as a social anthropologist, a reader of people’s food habits, a pundit of what their clutter really says about them. No doubt the joke ‘alimentary, my dear Watson’ has already been made, so I’ll stop right there…
August 25th, 2007
Thought I’d published this one quite a while back, but doesn’t seem like I hit the right button.
Better late than never…
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Have been following some of the BBC series on rock music, running on Saturday nights. Conveniently, there is time to watch Dr Who, have something to eat, and then settle down for a history of rock.
I started off wanting to watch the one on Jimi Hendrix, and ended up seeing a few more. Tonight’s one was mostly on REM and Nirvana, and others in the alt rock scene.
It’s partly intriguing, seeing how one band influenced another’s sound; how some key tracks were almost abandoned as seeming like a rip-off of another band, but in the end came to be associated more with those following on behind.
What also comes through is the way that the rush for stardom, or sometimes the way stardom overcomes those who crest the wave at a particular time, has such an incredibly damaging effect. We applaud the sentiments in the songs, grateful for someone else who feels our pain, or evokes our aspirations. We just don’t want to be the people whose talent burns them out in their 20s.
Musing afterwards as to whether suffering has to be linked to genius in some way. Dan could think of examples that weren’t. We’re aware of people who have been hailed as geniuses in other fields (like Einstein) but who were seen as very ordinary at earlier points in their lives. Music in particular does seem to be full of people whose lives became much more unsteady as a result.
For the alt rock guys, making a place for themselves outside the establishment, there seems like less chasing after fame than there is currently, and more sense of wanting to ‘keep it real’ by playing music on lesser known circuits.
There is probably madness, or confusion, hiding under lots of different types of creativity, but it does make cake baking seem a safer outlet for expression, at least for the time being.
August 25th, 2007
No, we haven’t abandoned the blogosphere…seems to have been a long time since we wrote anything.
This weekend is meant to be one of the last nice ones before autumn sets in (though you could feel the temperature falling at the start of the week anyway), so probably I should be out there, soaking it all up, instead of typing. But then, the timing of my writing is also related to the availability of Dan’s laptop, so now is actually a good time for a post.
This is meant to be a catch up post, so we can excuse why we haven’t been writing, and then do some more individual posts on different things we’ve been up to.
July: Glasgow course for me, arrival of the final Harry Potter, minor op for me and recuperation time, and then:
August: Ten days of holiday in Poland, and now just over two weeks back at work, being pretty busy.
July and August have also seen the departures of two of our cell group, a Finnish lady and a Brazilian lady, and the arrival of several new babies, the most recent being Amy Louise Gibbons, the latest addition to Rachel and David and family, based near Milan.
Dare we say it, our most exciting arrival has been our new bathroom, which our friend Olly and his plumber mate Artur worked on while we were in Poland. An example of EU mobility that while the Brits went to Poland, the Pole was at our place working on our tiling… The bathroom is very small, but having very soothing pale green tiles and a new loo and basin, and some lights on dimmers, makes us feel very swish.
Dan has had his designer leave the company, and is now wading through CVs, waiting to see who will stand out as the next choice, or whether to go with a range of freelance designers as an alternative. I get to see a fair number of websites, between my work and viewing Dan’s work, but it was interesting to see who I thought might work - and how quickly each of us came to our conclusions of which ones didn’t…
The departures continue at my work - one last Thursday, two on Tuesday, and probably more to come. Managers have come to the end of a heroic month of interviewing to fill all our vacancies, but some current colleagues have got promotions, and there’s at last a bit more hope that things will finally settle.
And now, the weather…variable, but always the chance of some sun, whether in our lives or someone close to us.
August 25th, 2007