woobiquity

How hard can it be?

If you mean getting a reader to move from the title of your piece to the end of the first line or two and onward from there, the answer is ‘very’. (If you’re still reading this, I guess I’m doing alright this time. Whew!)

To quote Billy Collins, with thanks to The Writers Almanac:

"Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong."

And poetry is an aptly extreme example of the challenge, because in so many people’s minds it’s often about as inviting as the idea of driving a car through a soupy fog. Which brings me (can’t see! can’t see!) to the other level of difficulty I’ve been pondering, which is: how hard can a book be to read before it is honest-to-god too hard to read?

Again, a poetry-related quote arrives from Podcastland:

“Poetry is in the nature of a gift, in that it presupposes the dignity of its recipient.”

- Eugenio Montale

I like how this comment flatters both the reader and the writer, while simultaneously presenting both, should they choose to accept it, with a weighty responsibility. It also kindly sets aside the matter of money, and I think money may be what people are mainly referring to when they say, “You can’t make a reader work this hard”. Because no one will buy it.

Now, when the writing is commercial or business-related of course that case is open/shut. For one thing there’s just so much damned competition for the attention. And yes, it’s true that the sheer volume of stuff out there now means anything deeper than sex or flattery or sex could well end up gathering dust.

Which brings us back to the canoe and the little matter of how many things can go wrong on the way to the lake. Who needs another depressing statistic to acknowledge that people are turning away from books faster than you can say “Paris belly-dancing on YouTube!”

Yesterday I caught the final minutes of Breaking the Rules, the British Library exhibition exploring printed work by avant-garde artists in Europe in the first third of the 20th century. Project Runway it wasn’t. This is heavy stuff. And yet, there were so many people crowded in there that I couldn't get close enough to some of the reverently lit cabinets to see their contents properly.

So that was heartening. Of course, if you made it to the show yourself you may be thinking, yes, but, boobies (though somehow a skeleton head on a woman’s naked torso or breasts where a lady’s eyes should be strikes me as neither sexy nor flattering).

And yes, Breaking the Rules was also FREE. That gift thing again. But lots of people seemed to be lining up afterward to buy the book, even if most of them were probably just buying souvenir chocolates.

Patterns and patina

You can call it muddy barriers if you like.

Along Trafalgar Road, SE10, yesterday evening.

What we talk about when we talk about

books. Nora Ephron:

“I had a boyfriend I was crazy about, and it didn’t work out. Twenty-five years later he accused me of not having laughed while reading ‘Candy’ by Terry Southern. This was not the reason it didn’t work out, I promise you.”

As quoted in an interesting if ultimately 'only in New York' essay in today's New York Times, taking an anecdotal look at whether literary compatibility and relationship success have any correlation whatsoever.

A window.

Greenwich, SE10, this evening, as the sun set on the first day of British Summer Time.

The madeleine thing

“When I can’t write, I bake,” Julia Cameron wrote in The Artist’s Way, her classic guide to creativity. (This was long before her signature creativity techniques were repackaged as a weight-loss plan.)

When I can’t write, I listen to food-related podcasts. My favorite of these is Good Food, which has the delightfully cheerful Evan Kleiman broadcasting from the delightfully cheerful climes of Los Angeles.

Listening to people talk about food is so far from the gritty business of putting words on the page and torturously rearranging them until they ‘work’ that it helps to brain take a break from all that. So the brain didn’t know quite what to do this week when the show crossed over into talking about writing.

Evan interviewed an LA woman who runs creative writing sessions involving elaborate, gourmet meals prepared by an executive chef. The idea is that the food helps to stimulate creativity. Masculine foods for a session on writing from the male point of view, etc.

Now, I don’t know about all that. But we all know that taste is the likeliest portal to our inner childhood. In an attempt to force the elusive and unpredictable madeleine moment, I brought back from the States various cheap Easter treats that I hadn’t had in years. Of course, you really can’t force these things. Chocolate covered marshmallow bunnies were not divine, they were schowy, schowy – sorry – chewy, chewy. The radioactively pink sugar on a box of Peeps did not taste bright, it tasted chemically bitter.

And what to do with perfectly good (and already perfectly blue) Cotswold Legbar eggs that in a silly moment you’ve dyed unnatural shades of green, purple and red? Devilled eggs, that’s what. And write about… church socials? Maybe. The circle of creativity goes round and round, round and round. Gulp.

Blue Room / an elegy without caffeine

You pass a Starbucks. At the corner, not 20 paces on, another one. It's not because, you think, the office workers and creative types in Westminster need a Starbucks within spitting distance of their desks. It's a trick. It's predatory. It's a way of squeezing the life out of independents. It's about conformity. And then one day after the plan has worked, bleary-eyed Londoners will have to walk twenty miles for a coffee, stand in blizzard queues that stretch all the way back to the Thames. All for a caffeine fix they won't enjoy because the air conditioning inside is colder than the frost outside and the sped-up Nora Jones CD is on a screeching, scoot-along-now loop.

You run your errand and walk toward Soho, where you plan to kill some time in a coffee shop before an evening meeting. You pass a Starbucks. Perched at a narrow shelf inside the window two trendy-looking people, a guy and a girl, smile at each other, and you wonder why anyone who otherwise looked so ironic-cool and assured would choose to sit in a Starbucks in central London where there are so many great independent places to try.

Tourists, you decide. People who don't know any better. All the more reason to head for something better, to the bohemian-casual Soho cafe that you particularly like, where creative people of all stripes gather without any see-and-be-seen silliness. Where they do such good banana smoothies. Where your name is on the birthday calendar in the loo.

And it's shut. Gone. "That's all folks, thank you, and goodbye."

You pause to absorb the news. You take a photo of your disbelief. You walk onward. You pass a Starbucks.

I went to the Affordable Art Fair

And all I got were these lousy photos. Which I took myself on the long walk back to the Tube.

I call it 'Branch contrast i, ii, and iii'

I wouldn't go hanging them on the living room wall, but then I wouldn't pay £50 to £3,000 for them either.

Should I have been surprised by how much mediocre bourgeois art -- unimaginative landscapes, dull still-lifes -- was on show in those convention-style stalls? Probably not. There's certainly no dirth of mediocre stuff for sale in other artistic mediums, but with most other artistic mediums you pay your £5 or £50 (if it's a really hot ticket or you're in the mood to splurge) and are done with it. If it turns out to be a bad purchase, it doesn't mock you from the hall wall for the next 20 years.

There was some imaginative and provocative stuff there too, of course. But I guess what I'm getting at is that if I ever do decide to buy a piece of high-price original art I'd prefer that the experience was a little less like standing at the mall food court trying to decide between the Sbarro pizza or the dog-like chicken from the China Garden.

The people lining up in Row E to have their purchases bubble-wrapped would no doubt disagree. To which I can only answer: Wanna buy some photos?

Read it and [laugh, think, weep]

The 2008 edition of Goldfish, the Goldsmiths online literary journal, went live this week. All the contributors are on the Creative and Life Writing masters program at the college.

It's a well known fact that writers spend much of their lives in places where either they or someone else is likely to want to say shhhhh, so it was heartening to hear at the launch event last night (in the echoing splendor and dim energy-saving lighting of the Swedenborg Society) just how much noise a bunch of us can make, given enough free wine.

Anyway, here's a taster from my own contribution, a short story called 'Love offering', about a character who is really rather similar to myself, I suppose, apart from being 70-something, female, a widow and a native of southeast London. Not much of a stretch then.

Standing with the lead around her wrist, Maeve hoped the dog would come to its senses, shuffle back and escort her home for a biscuit and a nap before the five o’clock news. If John were here, she thought, he would whistle, two chirps and a kettle going off, and that would be that. Maeve didn’t have the lungs. She had tried; hers was more like someone attempting a tune she hadn’t heard in years.

You can read the full story here. Or for that matter you can print it off and read it anywhere you like.

As close as you can get

Without getting anywhere near it.

You know a phrase has really sunk into the popular consciousness when it begins to be used casually in ways that bear no resemblance to its actual meaning.

“It’s as close to domestic terrorism as you can get.”

That’s Jerry Pistole, a landowner in Cookville, Tennessee, speaking to Robin Young on the public radio program Here and Now.

The thing is, although the crime he’s referring to is bad, it’s about as far from domestic terrorism as you can get, because it happens when nobody is there to see it. That old tree falling in a forest thing again, I hear you say. And, er, yes, how did you know?

Apparently tree thievery is a growing problem in the US, a regular black market racket on the rise. Big, old trees are disappearing from Main Streets, city parks and rural acreage, whether owned by New England aristocrats or the land rich/cash poor of Appalachia.

I don’t know why listening to the discussion made me feel so warm and fuzzy inside. Maybe it was the lull of Mr Pistole’s lovely drawl. Or maybe it was because (despite the implication of the delightful surname) he wasn’t threatening to shoot anybody.

Posters with meaning...

...a bad haiku:

Sometimes the people
who've lived the least know the most.
And... sometimes they don't.

 

Image: a meaningful poster by David Plant, part of a series of advice posters created by graduates of University College Falmouth in Cornwall, England. Best of all: they're for sale.