Gym/Tate Britain/Timoleon Vieta Book Launch

[We are at war. Two of my friends in Singapore have SARS. A dear friend here has suddenly lost his mother. It would be flippant if not downright disrespectful if I started writing about my week without clarifying that behind the breeziness I am actually trying to take all this in my stride.]

Here’s what went into Thursday:

Continuing gym membership saga

My relationship with my gym membership got even more complicated on Thursday morning. I arrived at the gym too late to go into the Pilates class I’d been aiming for. This was far from devastating, and I was all ready to go cheerily and sweatlessly back to my comfy flat and sprawl on the couch with English Passengers (so good) and tea, but then the girl at reception suggested I use the gym instead. I laughed this off, explaining I’d never used one before. “Oh, but we can book you in for a free induction!” she trilled brightly, and unable to think up another excuse fast enough, I had to reluctantly agree. Friends, I feel myself slowly losing the battle against fitness. What is to be done?

Conversation, culture and closeness

The afternoon was a lesson in how to have a wonderful time in London with very little money. All you need is a beautiful day, a Marks & Spencer’s pasta lunch, a bench outside the Tate Britain, and a best friend you haven’t seen in a long time. At about 3 we decided we should probably fulfil the original purpose of the outing and actually enter the museum, which was a good call given that without some discipline we would have been entirely capable of obliviously talking the afternoon away till the museum closed at 6.

The quantity and range of art you can see for free in London museums never fails to overwhelm me, and this museum is no exception. We’d had a vague plan of seeing some Turner, Days Like These (a triennial exhibition of contemporary British art), and Constable to Delacroix: British Art And The French Romantics, but could only manage the first two in the end. I thoroughly enjoyed Days Like These – I found almost every exhibit visually and conceptually interesting (which doesn’t always happen for me and modern art) and came out with an impressively low number of I-don’t-get-its. The latter comment would perhaps attract sneers from some arty types, but getting it, or at least having some vague sort of clue, is what makes modern art worthwhile for me.

Book launch, dah-ling

It was for a new book by Dan Rhodes, writer of Anthropology (one of my favourite books), and pleasant email surprise every now and then ever since he found this site one day.

Dinner beforehand was the terrible mistake of Ken Hom’s Yellow River Cafe, where I had some of the worst Oriental food I’ve had in this country since I once tried a Budgens chicken in black bean sauce ready meal, but execrable food was soon forgotten when we got to the venue for the book launch and found there was a free bar. I was, however, hoping not to meet Dan in person for the first time by telling him how fanchashtic it wash to vinally meech him, and so I was only delicately sipping at my Smirnoff Ice when Roxette’s Fading Like A Flower filled the room. (At this point I should probably explain that apart from the fact that he wrote a book I like very much, the other connection revealed by our email exchanges was a common love for Roxette and other very uncool pop music.) So I was hopping around telling Alec how much I loved the song, and Alec was trying to look as if he wasn’t with me, and then Dan came over and said hello, he’d seen my face light up at the Roxette, and was I Michelle?

I managed to avoid any embarrassing conversational gaffes, the reading was hilarious and ended with Dan sucking on some helium and leading us all in a rousing nasal sing-a-long to I Want To Know What Love Is, so an evening well spent, I think. Of course, I left with a signed copy of his new book, Timeleon Vieta Come Home, which you must all go and buy too.

Philip Appleman

A few hours before the bombing started, Garrison Keillor read Philip Appleman’s poem Last-Minute Message For A Time Capsule on National Public Radio. I’ve had a number of poems by Philip Appleman on this site for quite a while, and instead of suing me for copyright infringement as he has every right to, he was kind enough to email me this poem himself. His New And Selected Poems is pretty much impossible to find in bookstores here and Amazon UK doesn’t even stock it, but if you like what you’ve read on this site, I highly recommend you try getting your hands on a copy.

Goodbye Barbados

Apologies for recent silence. After lovely weekends away (we went here and you must too!) one tends to come back to earth with a resounding kaboom.

I’m reading Jane Kenyon, and while the Malvern Hills are far from Barbados (literally, ha ha smack), and even though the student life I return to in my Bloomsbury flat in the heart of my beloved London is far from torturous, this stanza still struck a chord:

“Goodbye Barbados – goodbye water, hiss
and thunder; scented winds; clattering palms;
stupefying sun and rum; goodbye turquoise,
pink, copen, lavender, black and red.
Tonight another couple will sleep in our bed.”
– from Leaving Barbados, Jane Kenyon

Poems: Missing God (Dennis O’Driscoll), Sweetbread (Robert Wrigley)

The Saturday poem in the Guardian Review is one of those little weekly happy nuggets in the family-size bucket of happy that is the Saturday papers. I kept the page with Missing God (Dennis O’Driscoll), from December. It did occur to me that it could be found online, but there’s something about the dog-eared, raggedy-edged pages of newsprint that I’ve built up over my few years here that’s more appealing than liquid crystal displays.

Elsewhere in poetry, Sweetbread (Robert Wrigley) is most definitely the loveliest poem about offal I have ever read.

Review: Bel Canto (Ann Patchett)

When I was fourteen or fifteen I read a trashy romance novel called Perfect by Judith McNaught. It was about a Hollywood superstar (male, ruggedly handsome) framed for the murder of his wife, escaping from jail and taking a hostage (female, beautiful, feisty) in his bid for freedom. They drive across the country to his remote log cabin in snowy mountains, bonding along the way despite their implacably opposed positions in the situation. Yet even as she gradually comes to believe he is an innocent man, and he is falling more and more in love with her despite himself, the fact that she is important only as his shield from police gunfire lurks continually in the background. Things come to a head one night in the cabin. His paranoia explodes into fury. Terrified, she tries to escape. In pursuit, he comes to a frozen river and thinks her car has gone through the ice. He plunges in to try and rescue her, risking his own life. She saves him, and from then on they take on the world, prove his innocence and celebrate their new-found love. He takes her to parties in Hollywood and she dances with Patrick Swayze and Kevin Costner. Happy ever after. The end.

Bel Canto (Ann Patchett) is Perfect, minus the great sex. Terrorists storm posh party in poor Latin-American country hoping to take President hostage, but it turns out the President skipped the party in order to watch his favourite soap opera. Yes, really. Terrorists say “Oh, poo” but decide to keep everyone else hostage anyway. Japanese CEO of behemoth electronics corporation and opera singer fall madly in love despite the small glitch of not being able to speak the same language. Everyone else also falls madly in love with opera singer, by the way, because she’s beautiful and her voice is wonderful, wonderful, Maria Callas and Kiri Te Kanawa eat your hearts out; it makes grown men cry and gives young terrorists hard-ons in ways that jungle warfare never did; no one can think of anything more wonderful than sitting and listening to her sing all day, every day, because of course everyone loves opera. CEO’s translator and young girl terrorist called Carmen (aha, allusion!) also fall madly in love, but oh my God, she’s a terrorist and he’s a hostage, how will it all end?

[Spoilers follow]

It ends, my friends, in tragedy. The terrorists have been making ridiculous demands – freeing of prisoners, aid programmes, a Playstation 2 for every member of the organization etc., and the government won’t budge. Special forces decide after a couple of months of sitting around scratching their balls that yeah, they should probably storm the compound. In a cruel twist of fate, Japanese CEO is killed trying to protect Carmen the girl terrorist (I forgot to mention that all the hostages and the terrorists really get along by now. It’s quite a love-in. They play football and all, although I think the Latin-American Terrorists vs Japanese Electronics Corporation People fixture would have been a bit of a foregone conclusion). Translator and opera singer are heartbroken. How will they recover from this loving and losing? They will marry each other, that’s how, even if they displayed not a jot of romantic interest in each other all the time they were imprisoned (well, the translator did proposition the opera singer for sex, but that was on behalf of the CEO). They marry in Puccini’s birthplace, and will live in Italy, where opera singers should live. Happy ever after. The end.

I’m thinking the people who gave this book the Orange Prize and Pen/Faulkner Award must have seen something in it that I’m not seeing. I’m thinking I wasted a few days’ worth of reading time on this. I’m thinking Judith McNaught should be sitting in a room somewhere really pissed off.

I Guess Chuck Palahniuk Thinks I’m A Loser

From Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk):

‘My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it “Entourage.”

This is how bad your life can get.’

I suppose it says something about me that I think the dog’s name is brilliant.

Lessons In Low Self-Esteem

I finally finished Life A User’s Manual (Georges Perec), which has taught me that I am an ignorant, stupid, boring, uncreative person. Now I am reading The Hours (Michael Cunningham), which, 48 pages in, is already teaching me that I really can’t write for shit.

You learn a lot from reading.

The Well-Tempered SF/Fantasy Plot Device

It occurred to me, on reading The Well-Tempered Plot Device, that with SF/Fantasy writing, the simple love-it-or-hate-it divides don’t exist. You either love it, hate it, or if you’re like me, both.

He starts off by promising that “You have to remember that Mr Donaldson’s spent years learning to produce a book so flatulent you have to be careful not to squeeze it in a public place. All I can do in the time available is to offer instruction on the first and most important element of crummy writing, which is (as my title suggests) bad plotting. I can’t promise that by the time you’ve read these pages you’ll have learned to write significantly more stereotyped characters, or that your style will have become significantly more leaden and clichéd. But I do promise that you’ll be fully conversant with the many varieties of plot device, their use and function, and you’ll be able to recognize and admire their handling in the works of the masters: Lionel Fanthorpe, A.E. van Vogt, and the early sword-and-sorcery novels of Michael Moorcock, to name only some of the virtuosi of the plot device I haven’t space to mention in what follows…” and it just gets better and better from there.

He doesn’t really mention the naming conventions (like, why isn’t anyone in fantasy ever called Reg or Cuthbert? Why are they all Gwynion or Tantreth or Xanthia?) or David Edding’s amazing recycling feats which remain unmatched by any Green tree-huggy types in our world, but it’s still going to hit lots of nerves/G-spots if you’ve ever read the genre. Enjoy.

Excerpts + Thoughts: Life A User’s Manual (Georges Perec)

“Cinoc, who was then about fifty, pursued a curious profession. As he said himself, he was a “word-killer”: he worked at keeping Larousse dictionaries up to date. But whilst other compilers sought out new words and meanings, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into disuse.

When he retired in nineteen sixty-five, after fifty-three years of scrupulous service, he had disposed of hundreds and thousands of tools, techniques, customs, beliefs, sayings, dishes, games, nick-names, weights and measures; he had wiped dozens of islands, hundreds of cities and rivers, and thousands of townships off the map; he had returned to taxonomic anonymity hundreds of varieties of cattle, species of birds, insects, and snakes, rather special sorts of fish, kinds of crustaceans, slightly dissimilar plants and particular breeds of vegetables and fruit; and cohorts of geographers, missionaries, entomologists, Church Fathers, men of letters, generals, Gods & Demons had been swept by his hand into eternal obscurity.”

[This seems to be the antithesis of what Perec’s trying to accomplish in this book. He’s trying to document the minutiae, to impress upon the reader that behind everything and everyone in this random Paris apartment block among countless others there is a story to be told and a context to be appreciated, richness beneath apparent mundanities.]

But pretentious literary analysis aside, I was thinking about how much I would hate to be a word-killer. The notion of making a living out of the fall of entities depresses me immensely – to do a proper job you would first have to become familiar with their genesis, their emerging into common parlance, then stagnation, then obsolescence. And after all this your job wouldn’t be to document lives but to cement over them.

Waiting For Vanya

(On Thursday)

The good news is that I finally got to watch Uncle Vanya, the bad news is that I had to spend two and a half hours shivering on the pavement outside the Donmar Warehouse on an exceptionally cold morning for the privilege. It didn’t really help that I’d rushed out of the house and forgotten my tissues, and my nose chose today to make the transition proper from its Suez-Canal-in-the-1950s impression to Ben Johnson in 1988.

I’d brought Life: A User’s Manual with me to read in the queue, hoping that such enforced commitment would help me make significant headway instead of the plodding progress I’ve been making lately. This succeeded to an extent – out of sheer necessity to concentrate on something other than the cold and my nose, I managed another 100 pages and am now almost halfway through its 500 or so. It’s still slow going because of the nature of the book – you’d have to read it to really understand, but basically it’s about a Paris apartment block and its inhabitants, and everything gets described in exhaustive, sometimes almost ridiculous, detail. There isn’t any sort of continuous narrative; we move from apartment to apartment, through entrance halls, up staircases, and every thing and person we encounter has a history. It’s definitely getting better now, and I’ll stick it out till the end, but I still wouldn’t call it absorbing reading, and sneaked a number of envious glances at the Economist in the hands of the friendly man behind me. (Hello, friendly man! You were friendly, unlike snooty man in front of me. I didn’t like snooty man at all.)

So anyway, I was queuing. It was either coincidence or sadism that as I shuffled past the doorstep of the Paul Frank store the music blaring inside it just happened to be the RHCP song with the lyrics Standing in line to see the show tonight. By the time I managed to get a ticket, my toes seemed to have ceased to exist, but the healing powers of eggnog latte (how very bourgeois) eventually nursed them back to health.