woobiquity

'The most admirable kind of worldly haven'

Well. I received an award last night for the writing I did for my MA portfolio at Goldsmiths. The award was presented by the Soho-based literary and talent agency United Agents, as a new annual tribute to Pat Kavanagh, the legendary literary agent who died last year.

My project is far from finished, so the proof will be in the pudding, as far as that goes. Which, by all accounts, is exactly what Pat Kavanagh might have said. It's humbling to think about myself in contrast with someone who lived as full and influential and elegant a life as she did. I never met her, of course, but if this passage from Hermione Lee's exquisite obituary is anything to go by, I sure wish I had:

Pat and Julian [...] created an exemplary household of two, open to people they liked, full of excellent objects, the most admirable kind of worldly haven. They divided some areas of interest. In her remarkable garden, Pat did the flowers and shrubs, Julian did the vegetables. At supper-time, Pat (as good a chef as Julian, "the pedant in the kitchen", in fact), usually did the salad, which she would devour faster than any guest could keep up with. She liked to dance, he does not. She listened avidly to The Archers, he groaned and left the room. She went bird-watching in India, shopped excellently for clothes with women friends, took Italian lessons and piano lessons, made quilts, collected pictures of women reading. But mostly they worked as a complete team: walking together in Italy and France (their last long walk was in Sicily), going to art shows and the theatre and many concerts (where Pat would sit ramrod still from first to last note), visiting friends in Scotland and Yorkshire and Oxford, Normandy, New England and California, making long adventurous journeys to Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and all around America.

Now I just have to figure out what to spend the prize money on that could possibly live up to the admirable and worldly mantle of this extraordinary person. I'm sure I'll think of something...

(UPDATE. Nervous cheesy grin photos from the event, here.)

Calm daily creativity

(View, with coffee and mosquitoes, this morning, the first of a 10-day research trip to New Orleans)

Which made me think of this quote that I jotted down in my notebook at the excellent little Ingmar Bergman exhibition that the Barbican had on recently, called The Man Who Asked Hard Questions:

If I can just live unchallenged and quietly in calm daily creativity in which I can survey my reality and in which I am allowed to be kind and don’t have to demand all sorts of things and keep all sorts of appointments, that’s when I work best. 

The freedom of the first draft

Here's something for the writers among us. Novelist and story writer Patrick Ness is the first writer in residence at Booktrust. As such he's writing the Writer in Residence blog, and it's briliant. Lots of practical insights into the writing process, including this, which I thought was especially useful to know:

...no one, and I mean NO ONE, ever reads my first drafts aside from me. And knowing that going in, I have a LOT more freedom to try things out, to overwrite where I'm struggling, to fall on my face and fix it without anyone ever knowing it happened.

Woobiquitisn't?

"Anyone who thinks there are two Starbucks on every block in Manhattan," I huffed, "is severely deluded!" This after half an hour of weaving through streets near the hideously crowded Fifth Avenue last Saturday in dire need of reputable caffeine. And a muffin.

I have to say I wasn't exactly fumbling around at the time for a word to describe this thing that generally seems ubiquitous until you actually need it. (Whatever words I needed for it at the time came all too easily to mind.) But now that The Atlantic mentions it, I do think maybe there ought to be such a word. I'm just not sure any of these is it:

Neverywhere was probably the most popular suggestion. Runners-up include unbiquitous, ubiquitless, and fewbiquitous. Helen Reich, of West Melbourne, Australia, suggested ubi-quit-on-ous; and Sheila Tombe, of Lady’s Island, S.C., ubiquitisn’t. Brett Price, of Austin, Texas, proposed omnipresen’t; Patricia Peters, of East Norriton, Pa., omniabsent; and Glen Henderson, of Toronto, omnevanescent.

Clever though.

The first rejection hurts the most?

I don't know. I'll let you know when the 20th one arrives. That should be a statistically significant sample. Or 40. Forty should be enough to judge.

Thanks very much for sending us your work. We have now had a chance to read it, and feel that it is not right for (IMPORTANT AMERICAN LITERARY JOURNAL, TITLE TYPED IN ALL CAPS). But we appreciate your thinking of us. -The Editors

Actually... I'm over it already. But thanks for listening.

And is that comma after 'read it' only there for dramatic effect or what? Oh well, there could be no better time than now, to link to this.

'The ever elusive muse (that bitch)'

Litro has a new blog. And a tongue-in-cheek fundraising plea.

...George Bernard Shaw’s typewriter is up for sale. Do you see where we’re going with this? George Bernard Shaw’s typewriter. Think of the superstitious possibilities. For a mere $8,417.44 (about £4500), this Remington Noiseless Portable Typewriter, on which the author of Pygmalion is likely to have prepared many a manuscript for publication, can be yours. Or ours.

Poetry post-Katrina

A week or so ago in New Orleans I ventured on foot into Bywater, a riverside community with a high density of both artists and dilapidated homes, to catch a reading of the excellent post-Katrina poem Green Zone New Orleans, read by the poet and a merry band of other voices. You can read about the experience here if you're interested. Or, here's the digested version:

In performance, the poem spoke loudest, literally, at the surprise climax, when all nine readers re-read their sections in unison. The whirlwind of noise they created was not unlike a hurricane or a heave beyond grief or a city of stunned citizens finding their voices all at once.

Hearing poetry performed almost always gets my meager poetic impulses buzzing. Add to that the sense of living dangerously (however internally contrived it may have been) that came with walking an unfamiliar street into and back out of the infamous Ninth Ward (however tangentially) and they were off the charts.

So I stopped at a coffeehouse and took some notes that became, or are becoming, this:

Two By Two By Burgundy Street

Two white ladies, one cupping a hand
To her lips to wonder, Is this a long poem?

Two black women fanning themselves
On a concrete stoop, their conversation

A poetry as natural as breathing: Girl,
Shut the fuck up. I know you ain’t lying.

Two frying pans face down in grass,
One rust-brown, one blacker than ever.

Two bicycle handlebars spread like
Featherless wings atop a chain-link fence.

Two dogs. A tidy Chihuahua on a leash and
An unruly woof loose behind locks and bars.

Two, four families peering out from within
Barbed wire and glowing, guilty and bemused.

Two sets of tracks in the asphalt, ghost
Rails connecting platforms of bristly grass.

Two of you: yourself and the man
In the red helmet, with eyes as wide

As the spaces between the spaces between
The skinny overlapping beams in a structure

Deconstructed, less a house than the sketch
Of a house, an old roof asleep on spidery legs,

A new door in the attic opening onto a drop
Almost as deep as the longing in the retinas,

That screen within a screen within a screen.
Was there a long history  — walking on,

You wish you’d cupped your hand and
Asked this — here?  And so you turn to see

Two denim legs turned toward you, under
A body of fluted blossoms heavy with rain.

Thus spake the orchestra

Hear here!

As in, Hear Here!, the Royal Philharmonic Society and Classic FM project exploring what it means to really listen to classical music. Along with three of my fellow Goldsmithians I've contributed a short piece inspired by a recent Sunday afternoon Philharmonia Orchestra performance.

The concept was 'notes into letters' and the brief: 'an imaginative piece of writing in response to what you've heard'. This was my first afternoon concert at the Royal Festival Hall, and I immediately saw that seeing is listening on these occasions. I am referring to the impressive hairdos (such sturdy, streamlined constructions as even the grand dames of Manhattan's Upper East Side could only dream about).

When the orchestra started Thus Spake Zarathustra, the Richard Strauss tone poem popularly known as the fanfare from 2001: A Space Odyssey, I rolled my eyes, only to see how much the venue resembles a Stanley Kubrick movie set. Of course, the fanfare itself is the big bang that gives way to a much more cathartic piece of 19th-century music.

"Closing your eyes to listen properly you soon forget the time and place. Melodies overlap in layers so palpable and full that you could climb up them into the expanse of the room. And you do, metaphorically, propping your head up with your elbows and watching the busy musicians below."

It kind of takes off from there.

One way of looking at the dead

At a poetry reading at the Wellcome Collection last week, the poet and novelist Tobias Hill read his five-part poem, Five Ways of Looking at My Grandfather. Afterward he said that he had never considered writing about his grandfather while he was alive, and that he thinks of the person who took shape on the page not so much as his actual grandfather as a kind of character.

Blake Morrison said something similar when the movie version of ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’ came out last year. He said (possibly with a wink) that after watching the film take shape and seeing it on the big screen, the man he saw when he closed his eyes to picture his father was Jim Broadbent, the actor who played his father in the movie. And Broadbent was already only playing the character version of Arthur Morrison who Blake Morrison had constructed in his book.

So to keep alive the memory of a loved one by writing about them, the writer changes them. Or changes the memory anyway. Sharpens it, dulls it, whatever.

This can apply equally to the writing of strangers. After my great-grandmother died in February I found out she’d been featured in a book about women who ran boarding houses. Her chapter begins with a dramatic opener, in which we meet her creeping up the boarding house stairs in the middle of the night.

Night enveloped her, but the steel revolver she clutched gave her comfort. Rowdy talk came from the bedroom. She opened the door and leveled the gun at two people sitting on the bed.

“Get out of my house now,” she demanded.

“Don’t shoot,” yelled one as he scrambled over empty liquor bottles and dove under the bed.

“Steel Revolver!,” my mom exclaimed when I read the passage out over the phone. “Don’t shoot!” I wanted to reply. Though I’ll admit I’m territorial. And that there’s no denying that reading someone else’s construction of this woman whose stories I heard over and over again firsthand, changed her (and the stories -- is there a difference now?) a degree or two in my memory. I guess that’s what words can do.

Another cat poem

Another poem BY a cat, that is. I got back to my desk to find this one waiting like a turd in the middle of a sentence I'd been honing.

o p00000000000000000000000

Very funny, Guru.