I don’t plan to write anything about the situation in Ukraine because there is nothing I can usefully say. So here are some inconsequentialities.
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The postman finally delivered 5 complete shows from the 2021 Phish tour on CD today (I ordered them in December as a Christmas treat for myself.) Sadly for them, they arrived on the same day as the new Half Man Half Biscuit CD, The Voltarol Years. Sorry Phish, but one has priorities.
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One of our neighbours has suffered a triple misfortune:
she has injured herself
she is stuck in Sheffield
she can’t use her ticket for Scotland-France at Murrayfield tomorrow.
On a similar principle to that espoused by Half Man Half Biscuit on their timeless classic Dead Men Don’t Need Season Tickets, the ticket for the match is now mine. This will be a decent way to occupy my time before heading into town to see Van Der Graaf Generator on what may well be their final tour.
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A dark day in the life of your blogger, who has opened a new Facebook account. My views on Facebook have been well aired here, they have not changed in the least, and I’m not going to rehearse them again. All I will say is that I have been persuaded that a Facebook presence is a ‘nice to have’ ahead of publishing a novel later this year. It is about marketing – or tawdry self-promotion if you prefer. If you’re interested you’ll find me here: IanBurdonWriter.
A page linking to various places that you’ll find me is now on Linktree.
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Only two years after others tried it during lockdown, I have been trying to make sourdough bread. Results so far:
Batch 1: 100% spelt flour. ‘Good taste but texturally challenged,’ per daughter.
Batch 2: 100% spelt flour. Similar to batch 1, but this time I used a baking tin and not so moist a dough so it rose more.
Batch 3: spelt starter, stoneground wholemeal wheat flour. Would be great had it not stuck firmly to the non-stick baking tin.
Strange days. As a long-term blogger I feel that I ought to have something smart and apposite to say about events in the Ukraine, but instead I feel like I’m taking the evening air on Horsell Common. Since Putin doesn’t strike me as the sort who’d trigger something of this magnitude without some sort of plan, the worry is, of course, what comes next.
That worry is not lessened by the shower of corrupt incompetents that currently comprise the UK Government – for the avoidance of doubt I detest every last one of them. The one tool that we have at our disposal – hitting the Russian money-laundering via the City of London – is the one thing that our present regime will not do because of their own complicity in the whole sordid business. The useless Liz Truss squirming on the TV this morning when quizzed about Russian donations to the Tories is a signifier of that. I’m old enough to remember when the Kremlin contented itself with bunging cash to trade unions and protest movements: I wonder what bright spark in the Kremlin figured out that funding the brain-dead automata of the Right would be more fruitful.
Anyway, there’s nowt I can do about it but watch everyone go about their daily business as though nothing was happening and Mars wasn’t looking a bit funny, and thereby gain a greater appreciation of those novels written prior to 1914 and 1939 that show no awareness of what was to befall Europe.
On the other hand, all current indications are that the world is tracking the worst-case predictions for climate change, so maybe it doesn’t matter much in the long run.
I watched the most recent Ghostbusters film – Ghostbusters: Afterlife. I’d seen some duff reviews of it, but I really enjoyed it. It made no demands on the intellect, it was just good fun. And the young actors were terrific. Recommended if you get the chance.
TV watching has been erratic to nonexistent. I had a recommendation for the Amazon series Reacher and enjoyed the first episode. I’ll be back for more. I almost had second thoughts when I found out that liking meant I came close to agreeing with a Lucy Mangan review in The Guardian – I go by the rule of thumb that I will probably think the opposite of her. My blushes were saved because I didn’t entirely agree with her. A Discovery of Witches season three hasn’t finished yet, so no spoilers, but I did have abstract thoughts arising from it and other TV adaptations of books I’ve enjoyed.
The fashion these days is to condense adapted books into almost pure narrative. But a lot of the reason I enjoy a lot of books – such as the trilogy on which A Discovery of Witches is based – is not only the narrative but also the tone of the book and the authorial voice and all the other things that give richness to the story. By omitting these and going straight for narrative, adaptations will generally cut out the bits that make a book worthwhile for me, or at least the bits that make a book more than plot and story.
La Mangan opined that what book fans, such as Reacher fans, want is the straight story as in the books. And that’s where I disagree with her.
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I wrote a short story on Saturday: I sat down at my 1970s Adler Gabriel 25 typewriter and let the words come. What emerged, though, was pretty much the narrative only, a treatment of what the story will eventually be, more or less as I thought it up when out for a walk. What’s missing is the voice of the narrator and the things that combine to make the bare bones of the story into a piece of writing with, hopefully, some depth and richness.
The key to how I plan to rewrite it came when I listened to an audiobook of an abridged version of Joyce’s Ulysses and got more meaning from hearing it than I ever have from trying to read it. When I do the first rewrite – which I’m having to think about quite carefully, the influence of Joyce (and Virginia Woolf) is likely to be seen. I have the narrative, the plot, but I don’t have a piece of writing of any merit. Were, hypothetically, the story ever to be filmed, I would be disappointed were the work I’m about to put into it to be discarded, just to squeeze the bones of the story into a running time.
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1941 Hermes Baby
The typewriter in the picture is a Hermes Baby, built in Switzerland in 1941. It came cheap from eBay, and buying typewriters on eBay is a chancy business because you can’t try them and, invariably, they aren’t packed properly. This one, however, arrived in near-perfect condition for an 81-year-old machine – all it needed was some routine cleaning. However, when I was using it, every so often some of the letters in a word would squeeze up together (‘piling’) with no obvious rhyme or reason.
There can be a lot of causes of this, so I took the metal casing off and gave its mechanism a deep clean, and applied a tiny touch of sewing machine oil to a couple of strategic spots. The result is a really enjoyable and snappy machine to use. But the letter piling issue hasn’t gone away, or not completely at any rate.
Late this afternoon, I realised that the underlying problem was nothing to do with the typewriter but everything to do with me. I’ve been using computers for 40 years – since I started to use the computer lab at the Law Faculty at Edinburgh University. That was pre-Windows. Prior to that was the occasional game on an Acorn and a Sinclair (I think) that used a cassette recorder as memory. One of the features of computer keyboards is that they are extremely tolerant of poor typing technique: you can be pretty sure that if you touch a key on the keyboard with a minimum of force, it will register the letter. What I eventually worked out is that the Hermes is extremely intolerant of poor typing technique. Once I focused on what I was doing and typed evenly, the problem more or less disappeared – and only reappeared when I rushed certain standard letter combinations – like ‘th’. My plan is to standardise on this machine for a week or two as a means of forcing myself to improve my typing technique.
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Anyway, my pal Steve has been doing much more interesting things. I invite you to sit down with a cuppa and spend fifteen minutes in his company in the video below.
In the early 1970s, when I was 13 or so, I discovered Xaviera Hollander’s ‘Happy Hooker’. It taught me more than school ever did, including the importance of female agency. Mum borrowed it from me and didn’t ever say it was ‘age inappropriate’ – taught me a lot about parenting.
I’ve been thinking about it on and off since that reply, particularly three things that rankled when I read them in the original thread. The first was the notion of kids being allowed to read certain things, or not; the second was the suggestion that ‘no one was paying any attention to kids from 81-93; and the third was the notion of age inappropriate books. This all ties up with some of my thoughts on ‘YA’ books and writing and also with my own memories of what I was reading in the early 1970s and what my daughters read as they grew up.
Cards on the table, I am deeply suspicious of, and uncomfortable with, where the idea of YA books is going: it seems to me that what was once a marketing category has, somewhere along the line, morphed into a genre, or pseudo-genre, imbued with all sorts of unstated assumptions and presumptions. For the most part, I find these to be of a kind with the assumptions/presumptions that promote saccharine-coated Disney versions of Grimms’s Fairy Tales over the originals. There is a very American, middle-class notion of childhood deeply embedded in there. There is a similar, though not identical, dynamic in the UK. I think I’ve noted before somewhere that I’m suspicious of decisions on what constitutes ‘good’ children’s books being taken by adults (including writers, agents, publishers and critics) on the basis of what adults think kids should be reading rather than what kids actually read. I know I’m exaggerating here, somewhat, to land the point.
Broadly speaking, I don’t like the idea of age inappropriate books, except in the obvious senses of language and concepts beyond the experience and critical capacity of the child on an individual basis. Dostoevsky is age-inappropriate because the writing is too complex for children (although the core of his stories often isn’t). My experience is that children and teens will read what interests them: if they don’t understand it or if it doesn’t engage them, they’ll ignore it, or skip the bits they don’t understand. Far from ‘allowing’ things to be read, there is, in practice, no way to stop books and stories being read if the reader’s imagination or intellect (or both) is captured. If they are not read in the home, they will be read somewhere else.
My assumption as a parent was that, just as I found that Xaviera Hollander book (at a church jumble-sale), my kids, too, would encounter material irrespective of any attempt by me to ‘allow’ it – which, in this context, really means prohibit it – or to act as a gatekeeper.
Far from not paying attention to what my kids read, I paid a lot of attention to it, and made sure I was on hand to talk about any themes in the books if needed. What I wanted was for the girls to grow to be able to read and evaluate things for themselves. And they did, and do. Having said that, when reading out loud at bedtime, I concede that I did abridge the text sometimes. The two I remember are (i) reading the whole of The Lord of the Rings but skipping all the elven songs and poems; and (ii) editing Norman Hunter’s The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm, first published in 1933 and later published by Puffin as a children’s book, for sexism and misogyny.
In my own case, I remember reading a lot of Agatha Christie for a while, and Ian Fleming, discovering Dad’s collection of Dennis Wheatley novels, then reading Asimov and the wider science fiction collection at our local library. I also read a lot of Greek mythology in my early years at high school, thanks to the town’s main library. With regard to the Wheatley, btw, I recently revisited a couple and had no problem with the narratives as such, but did have a problem with misogyny, racism, snobbery and ‘robust’ attitudes to workers’ rights and labour issues. I remember Papillon and Alastair Maclean, and Eerie comics as well as Airfix magazine. To the best of my recollection. Mum and Dad were happy simply to let me read – widely and voraciously. I also remember Saturday-morning matinées at East Kilbride Cinema, where we all, I think without exception, preferred Tom and Jerry and the anarchic brutality of Warner Brothers’ cartoons to the mimsy morality tales that came out of Disney.
Finally, just before Christmas, I read a profile of Giovanni Rose in the Guardian (you can find it here.) I don’t want to put words into his mouth when he clearly can articulate his thoughts for himself, but it does seem to me that the writing/literature that would engage a young teen in his circumstances is very different from the dreams of the White middle-class literati. That writing must begin with acknowledging lived experience.
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On which subject, I’ve sent the manuscripts of my two novels, The Raven and the Hart and The Magpie Rhyme for a sensitivity read with a focus on one of the lead characters in both books, who is Black. Why? you might ask. Is this evidence of excessive ‘wokeness’?
No.
Were I to write a police procedural or a hospital drama, I’d take care to ensure that my police procedure and descriptions of ‘canteen culture’ were accurate (like Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London sequence) and that my doctors knew the difference between a femur and a fibula. My character Constance is a 19-year-old Black girl from Swindon; I am a 62-year-old White man in Scotland. I need to bridge that gap and a sensitivity read lets me know what’s right, what’s wrong, and what else I might consider as I approach a completed draft of the novels. Giovanni Rose’s poem, and David Harewood’s Maybe I Don’t Belong Here are recent reminders of the gap to be bridged.
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