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Excerpts: Writing Home (Alan Bennett)

Writing Home is one of John's favourite books, and I'm glad he made me read it despite my complete unfamiliarity with Alan Bennett's work. In some ways it's an experience akin to reading the very best (I use that word loosely, and won't bother to clarify it) blog/online diary combinations, except that you can curl up in bed with this, and it is consistently charming. Thought I'd put a few favourite entries up here before I return the book to John (with many thanks!):

1982
5 April, Yorkshire. I walk round the village at half past ten, the shadows from the barns sharp and clear under Larkin's "strong, unhindered moon". "This must wait", is my foolish thought, "until I have written something that permits me to enjoy it."

1983
20 December, New York. I am reading a book on Kafka. It is a library book, and someone has marked a passage in the margin with a long, wavering line. I pay the passage special attention without finding it particularly rewarding. As I turn the page the line moves. It is a long, dark hair.

1984
25 September. Gore Vidal is being interviewed on Start the Week along with Richard (Watership Down) Adams. Adams is asked what he thought of Vidal's new novel about Lincoln. "I thought it was meretricious." "Really?" says Gore. "Well, meretricious and a happy new year." That's the way to do it.

7 December. To a party at the Department of the History of Medicine at Univeristy College. I talk to Alan Tyson, who's like a figure out of the eighteenth century: a genial, snuff-taking, snuff-coloured, easy-going aristocrat - Fox, perhaps, or one of the Bourbons. He is a fellow of All Souls, and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including some of the economist G.D.H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, "And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G.D.H. Dole." Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, "Cole, not Dole." In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve.

1986
4 March. Read Winnie the Pooh to an audience of children at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn. Many have never been in a theatre before. I battle against the crying of babies and the shouts of toddlers and end up screaming and shouting myself hoarse. It is Winnie the Pooh as read by Dr Goebbels.

David Grubbs (The Spitz, London)

Music Industry Trends Not Yet Overexposed (A McSweeney's list). I swear some of these already exist on the AMG.

Elsewhere in music, we went to see David Grubbs at the Spitz on Tuesday. I'd never heard any of his solo stuff before - what drew me to the gig was more the six degrees process of connection i.e. David Grubbs was in Gastr Del Sol with Jim O'Rourke who now works with Sonic Youth, who is Michelle's favourite band. So I already knew it wasn't going to be one of those gigs where I could stick my head up my arse for a bit and, based on my own personal knowledge of the artist, revel smugly in the indieness coursing through my veins. This is probably why I spent a large part of the "song" where sounds of a baby crying/cat wailing (not sure which it was), opera, orchestra and random blips were repeatedly and what felt like randomly pastiched together inwardly giggling at my cliched wondering of whether he was just getting his sound samples ready for the song, or whether the song had already started, or whether everything had gone horribly wrong technically and he was desperately trying to regain control. (Aside: Man, that was a convoluted sentence.)

I enjoyed the gig, though. He looked and acted like his name, which is not to say he was engorged and slimy and writhed around on the floor under a big log, but rather that he seemed overwhelmingly ordinary when he wasn't being a brilliant guitarist, the sort of person who'd mooch unassumingly into a gig and sit stolidly two thirds of the distance away from the stage with his Bud, watch quietly and leave.

We sat at a bad angle from the stage, and I think poor Alec spent most of the gig watching a pillar playing the guitar. Every now and then the tea light at our table would wink out from a draft and we'd have to relight it. I didn't actually observe everyone else around us that much, except for a guy with some serious beard action and an aging hipster whose reactions to the music tended to be obvious but didn't seem put-on. For some reason, even though I was perfectly happy being in a room with lots of other people, none of whom were irritating me (this can be rare), even though I was definitely absorbed in what was a fairly remarkable performance, there was a corner of my mind where the edges of the room seemed to blur where Alec ended, where the hand that wasn't touching him didn't register as a part of me and the hand that did, did.

Attack Of The Clones

Attack Of The Clones on Sunday was everything you expect from a Star Wars movie - cool effects, terrible dialogue, corny jokes, shameless use of devices (retain Jar Jar so he can (a) be given away with Happy Meals and (b) propose emergency powers for the Chancellor in the absence of Queen Amidala; get Amidala's back slashed by animal in gladiatoral arena so that later her top may magically but legitimately become ripped and midriff-baring).

Low points:

• Hayden Christenson AKA Darth Sipid.
• The sound of the devil laughing gleefully over Natalie Portman's soul.

• Yoda, who was my imaginary friend for most of my childhood. I somehow formed an attachment to him in Return Of The Jedi (the second film I ever saw in a cinema. I think the first was ET.) and probably embarrassed my family by crying my eyes out when he died. He'd already been swordfighting his way through most of my imaginary worlds for years before Attack Of The Clones, but it was still nice to see it happen on the screen, even if I do think my imagination was better at realistic computer animation than Industrial Light And Magic seem to have been with him in this movie.
• C3PO: I'm programmed for etiquette, not destruction!

Bart Davenport/Homescience/Amazing Pilots/Ladybug Transistor (The Arts Cafe, London)

On Saturday people on the boating lake in Regent's Park may have been pleasantly reminded of the age of imperialism by the sight of a small yellow girl rowing a tall poncily reclining white guy round the lake, although Alec had admittedly rowed me round the lake for the previous 45 minutes, and the Irish arguably have as much cause for resentment about imperialism as us yellow people do.

At night I'd decided to indulge my delusions of indieness by going to a gig at the Arts Cafe. We had a good time, but I ended up enjoying the performance of Bart Davenport (who wasn't even advertised) most, and Ladybug Transistor (the only band I'd actually heard of) least. In between those two were Homescience (not the most cohesive or animated performers around, but their songs were mildly Pavementy so I liked them well enough) and The Amazing Pilots (who were, in contrast, incredibly cohesive, really got into their performance, and had much better rapport with the crowd, but whose songs were for the most part less interesting except for one called I Thought About It And I've Still Not Changed My Mind, which lived up to its rather great title).

Alec bought Bart Davenport's CD on the strength of what he managed with just the quality of his voice, his songs, his guitar and the occasional kazoo, but it turned out to be disappointingly glossier - a bit too sunkissed and xylophoney - than what we'd been expecting from the performance. Still pleasant enough though, and well worth looking up if you like Summer Hymns or Yuji Oniki, who produced some of the CD.

There was nothing I specifically disliked about Ladybug Transistor, but there seemed to be a sameness to all aspects of their performance and their songs that didn't capture me at all. In response to the last sentence of this review at Pitchfork, I guess I do just prefer the less sophisticated and trippier ways of channelling 60s sound that the Elephant 6 bands come up with (which reminds me, must go listen to my Olivia Tremor Control CDs for maximum summerness).

Spread Eagle Surprise

Friday was meant to be practical day. It was meant to involve writing heartfelt treatises about why a Masters in Law, and particularly subjects like International And Comparative Commercial Arbitration, would give me mojo. Instead I found myself staring up at the Cutty Sark and chasing an elusive meridian line across Greenwich Park with Luke. As you do.

Later, with a dead phone battery, I was in Shoreditch trying to find a public phone to call Russ about meeting up in Herbal. Walking down the street, a pub door opened and a man came out. Right, I thought, pubs are good for public phones, and so I strode in. In hindsight the fact that all the windows were frosted should perhaps have warned me that The Spread Eagle was a pub where the line between public and private was somewhat blurred. Specifically, the line between women's privates and the male public. Hindsight is always 20/20, so they say, and here I did indeed sight several 'hinds' with disturbing and unlooked-for clarity before beating a hasty retreat to a pub where everyone was fully clothed.

Herbal was enjoyable enough, except that the diversity of the music in the Ninja Tune room meant that we didn't always feel like dancing to what was being played. Also, getting a split lip from an accidental hit on the dancefloor (miscellaneous wanker dancing way too vigorously for reggae) wasn't too much fun. While spitting a lot of blood into the sink, I remembered primary school health education tests where you had to memorize the functions of the different teeth. Mrs Ang was right about incisors, although at the time I think the point she was trying to make was that it was naughty to bite people.

Goddess Of Small Things

The details of my life seem that much more shallow sometimes when I try to write them down here, but for me buying a lot of CDs, endorphin-level-wise, is right up there with beautiful sunsets, belly laughs, MSG, and a warm man. Well, maybe not quite as good as a warm man, but anyway, it feels damn good.

So on Thursday I bought:

• Since I Left You (Avalanches, £8.99, Virgin)
• Spoonface (Ben Christophers, £8.99, Virgin)
• Good Morning Spider (Sparklehorse, £8.99, Reckless)
• Fog (Fog, £6.99, Reckless)
• Black Whole Styles (Big Dada compilation, £7.99, Reckless)
• cLOUDDEAD (cLOUDDEAD, £5.99, Selectadisc)

Dinner with Alec and his dad was inevitably stressful and toothachesome from holding back my usual stream of inappropriate comments and smiling a lot, but it was well worth it for the valuable ammunition of embarrassing Alec stories gained.

Back in my room, I snuggled up in bed with cherry juice and Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (Meera Syal), which I found very much more tragic than 'omedy, as opposed to the You'll laugh! You'll cry! type review excerpts it had on the back cover and elsewhere on the Web. When I closed the book the light outside was long beyond Prussian blue and well on its way to eggshell.

Happy Ending

I've only just come to the stage of post-examness where writing for the blog begins to feel like a growing necessity rather than the enforced sidetrack from Getting A Life that it would have been in the past few days.

There is nothing wild or bacchanalian to report. Company Law went much better than I'd expected, and I left quickly after exchanging a few perfunctory words with the few people I actually talk to in the course, nothing of substance; there was no feeling of Here Ends Undergraduateness (assuming I pass), no lump in the throat.

It's an illustration of my general lack of connection with the social aspects of the law faculty, I guess, even if I will miss the lady in the cafe who worried aloud that the owner of the purply coat left behind (mine) would be cold and since then always reminds me to take it with me when I leave, the lovely Irish security guard who always tried to calm me down every time I was desperately apologizing that my debating tournaments were keeping him there overtime (we always got him some whisky to make up for it), and strangely, the roadworker on a long-term job on the road to the faculty, who chats me up every time I walk past and tells me I'm pretty even when I look bloody awful.

I grabbed a Time Out, a Marks & Spencers lunch, and made a long list of things to do, both practical and frivolous. I went shopping - the makeshift stall on Goodge Street again proved itself an unlikely treasure trove when I found Adventures In Foam (Cujo, 2 CDs, £10), reeled back in disbelief, and snapped it up hungrily. Oxford Street yielded two skirts and a garish top.

Last year the night the exams ended was celebrated in typical style - dinner, pub, club till dawn. This year I had dinner with just Russ (in Carluccio's, which I loved. Can't wait to try the one in St Christopher's Place). It felt right, celebrating the end of my undergraduate life at UCL with a friendship which I count among my most important achievements at university. I didn't feel the need for anything more glamorous.

Insensitive

The exam venue was a large room which is usually a stomping ground for rampaging medical students (in their UCL Union building on Huntley Street. Thursday nights here are epitomized by mass karaoke and wild table dancing.) I think it was a bit insensitive to leave the Time Crisis machine in there when converting the room to an exam hall.

Hall Chronicles: Theology Students

Being around theology students makes life that little bit more surreal. Two conversational snippets with my hallmate Stefan:

Me: You look troubled.
Stefan: Yes, I am trying to write an essay. The Trinity, it is annoying me.

*

Me: So how's the studying for ancient Greek going?
Stefan: Oh, I decided to focus on human salvation instead today. I thought it was more important.

Star Wars Cockney Rhyming Slang

On Wednesday morning Xfm was giving out Attack Of The Clones tickets (still can't say that without making it into ATTACK!!!! of the clones) for the best Star Wars Cockney rhyming-slang listeners could come up with. One guy's contribution was "Imperial Fleet", to be used in the context of "let's go into the bedroom and I'll show you my Imperial Fleet". Another guy called up later, suggesting "Trade Federation", which is "something you can do with your Imperial Fleet".

New Adventures Of Bobbin #2

Okay, at number 94. I'm going soon, I really am...

New Adventures Of Bobbin #1

I really, really, really should be studying anti-suit injunctions, but I'm too busy embarrassing myself by laughing out loud in the computer cluster room at The New Adventures Of Bobbin (found at Jolene's), which you will absolutely love if you are a sarky Singaporean ex-convent girl like yours truly (okay, they're technically not convent girls in the comic, but they've got the uniform, the humour and, er, sense of morality), and even if you're not, go read it anyway for proof that Singaporeans do have a sense of humour.

Oh, and can someone competent in Mandarin please explain this one to me?

Meanwhile, I'm at strip number 74. Only 37 more to go before The New Adventures Of Anti-Suit Injunctions...

They Should Have Achtunged, Baby

Other notable snippets from the weekend include overhearing the Columbian priest staying in my hall discussing terrorism in his country - "Oh, the FARC, it is terrible..." - sorry, childish, I know, and Mark's (see entry for Monday, 13 May) references to my metaphysical chastity belt when discussing the Channel 4 documentary on Nazi homophobia.

The boy continues to misunderstand. My point, flippantly made, was that surely shagging while you are an NS soldier in Nazi Germany meant to be on duty patrolling the forest, is a dereliction of duty whoever or whatever you're shagging, especially if you are supposed to be devoting your entire being to serving the Fuhrer rather than servicing Lieutenant Bigschtaff. But enough said on the topic. Mark's just a slag. :P

Now I Know He Really Loves Me

Alec has earned a significant amount of boyfriend credit (spendable on forgotten anniversaries/birthdays, or uncalled-for "you look fat in that" remarks) by volunteering to buy us Sonic Youth tickets for their gig here in June (can't wait, can't wait), and actually following through on that promise the very next day. This from a man who forgot his own 21st birthday and enjoys traditional Irish music rather than my somewhat more abrasive tastes.

[Admittedly this compartmentalizes him too much. He was, after all, walking down the street with me just on Sunday holding a laminated bra in one hand and a lager-soaked jumper in the other. But that's a long story.]

Halfway Through, Need More Bullshit

It's half over. There was an annoying little man in my dreams last night; he had black spectacles and a reedy voice and followed me around rasping "interpretation, interpretation" when he wasn't engaged in unintelligible mumbling. Without needing to don my armchair dream interpreter hat, I think I can safely say that he was very much inspired by this man, whose existence I was hoping to completely ignore in today's jurisprudence exam due to my hatred of his Law's Empire. I unfortunately failed in this noble endeavour, but am comforted by the fact that I only invoked his evil name in criticizing Fuller's The Morality of Law, which richly deserved the criticism anyway.

So much for the fun exams. Today's went fairly well compared to public international law last Thursday, where I found myself answering an essay entirely from hazy memories of the Human Rights Act, which I studied in 1999. I daresay much more has happened since then than Naomi Campbell's grudge match with the tabloids, and I'm sure actually studying the topic would have allowed me to write an essay more than one page long, but such is life.

And now to Conflict of Laws next Monday (which I haven't started studying for) and Company Law the day after. I think the bullshitting possibilities of these exams ran out today. Ulp.

Boguslawski!

Must really stop giggling every time I think of the Boguslawski case, but this is difficult given that my mental connection of the facts of the case with its name involves imagining a bunch of Polish people in an English courtroom shouting "LAWSKI!" and "No, BOGUSLAWSKI!" at each other.

(Sorry, I know that'll be lost on anyone who doesn't know public international law. I'll stop talking about it soon enough, I promise. Monday is jurisprudence.)

I Heart Have I Got News For You

This might be one of those things where you just had to be there, but during the captions segment of Have I Got News For You last week, one of the pictures was a close-up of several medal-festooned Chinese military officials standing amidst others in a choir-like formation, eyebrows resolute and aggressive, mouths formed into perfect O's fervently singing what must have been a political anthem.

Someone's caption was "That man on the right is thinking: For God's sake will somebody say 'klahoma!"

Brilliant.

On Deciding Not To Engage Zadie Smith In Conversation

I can't guarantee it really was Zadie Smith I saw coming out of Bookhouse (lovely discount bookstore off Tottenham Court Road) on Saturday, but it certainly looked a lot like her. Thoughts of saying hello skittered briefly across my mind, but disappeared almost immediately. I figured even literary celebrities might get tired of being recognised, and what with loaded Tesco's bags in my hands and a bad hair day, I didn't really feel I was in optimum mode for meeting anyone anyway.

What would I have said, anyway? Do you come here often? Lovely bookshop, isn't it? Hey, liked your book. You really do like Salman Rushdie a lot, don't you? Not that I'm saying your book's derivative. He should be flattered, really. And so should you, because his writing style's so tough to copy, I mean, emulate, no, I mean...er...lovely day, isn't it?

I was probably right to keep all that for the inner monologue. But I really do like White Teeth, even if a large part of that liking is derived from loving Rushdie.

[Indulge me on a tangential analogy here: I like And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead largely because they manage to incorporate a ridiculous amount of all that is good about Sonic Youth in their work, and avoid the bad (Kim Gordon vocals, for example). Perhaps it's completely arbitrary of me to say Trail Of Dead's Madonna and Zadie Smith's White Teeth are influenced but not derivative, but somehow that's how I intuitively feel about them. The realm of artistry is theoretically open to both the Velvet Undergrounds and the Velvet Underground-influenced, although in practice we may justifiably bicker about the door policy. (There is no guest list.)]

[Footnote to above tangent: I probably diss Kim more than necessary. She takes a lot of getting used to, but it wouldn't be the same without her. Love Kim, really.]

Bloody Typical

I write the Great American Novel, save it to disk, and come in here to find that my disk can't be read.

Okay, it wasn't the Great American Novel. It was company law notes on agency and shareholder litigation, plus two blog entries, and I'm not American. But regardless of all this I claim the right to be annoyed.

Public International Law on Thursday. If Re Pinochet (No.3) and humanitarian intervention don't feature strongly in the paper, heads will roll, namely mine.

Anticipating Endless Nights

From Neil Gaiman's journal:

"I finished Miguelanxo Prado's story for Endless Nights yesterday -- a very strange story, in which we get to see one of Dream's first relationships, and learn weird things about the DC universe at the dawn of time (so there will be some people who will find it really cool that Killalla of the Glow is from Oa, and some people will simply go "What a short name for a world"). The strangest thing was writing a two page scene for Delight - who is, obviously, in a hundred million years or so, going to be Delirium, but isn't her yet."

The information above will mean nothing to you if you've never read Sandman, but if you have, please join with me now in responding: I WANT.

Michelle Vs Photocopier...FIGHT!

Me: "COPY"
Photocopier: ADD TONER. DO YOU NEED HELP IN ADDING TONER?
Me: "YES"
Photocopier: PRESS "INFO" FOR HELP IN ADDING TONER
Me: "INFO"
Photocopier: [extremely complex instructions beginning with OPEN FRONT COVER and moving on to tasks such as configuration of nuclear reactor, retrieval of lost space probe, removal of own appendix with dessert spoon...]
Me: "CANCEL"
Photocopier: [extremely complex instructions beginning with OPEN FRONT COVER and moving on to tasks such as configuration of nuclear reactor, retrieval of lost space probe, removal of own appendix with dessert spoon...]
Me, exasperated: "NO"
Photocopier: ADD TONER.
Me, giving up but wilful: "NO" (!)
Photocopier: ADD TONER. (!)
Me, starting to find this funny: "NO" (!!!)
Photocopier: ADD TONER. (!!!)
Me, in fits of laughter: Interactive technology my arse!

(Other people present make timid expressions of concern before running away from strange girl.)

Juxtapositions

I decide my cheek and the library table are getting on a little too well for their own good, so I stagger to my room and put on some Sonic Youth at their most dissonant and abrasive - crashing guitars, wailing feedback, screamed vocals, the lot. I jump around a lot.

Feeling better, I go downstairs for dinner and find a string quartet playing in the dining room. How nice. A former hallmate's brought his quartet here for some small-scale performance experience. I sit down and spend most of the performance trying to physically restrain my cringes at off-pitch notes and jittery timing, both of which literally give me goose-bumps in their imprecision.

Sometimes life's little juxtapositions amuse me.

Preferences

I have nothing to say right now that isn't about jurisprudence (quick summary: love Socrates, hate Dworkin, think Fuller lacks precision, originality and intellect), and outside all is malaise and greyness.

And it occurs to me that I would still rather live here with every day like this than be back in Singapore with no worries and blue skies every day.

I have neither the time nor energy to wade through angst towards clarity, so for now I'm not bothering with either concept. I just want to stay.