Predictions of man pushing a bicycle
Trundling up the hill with a couple of loaves at the ready last week, as I was conveniently mustering up curmugeonly thoughts about the nuisance of Christmas, I caught sight of a man I didn’t use to live far from and he greets me with a hearty Merry Christmas. I fall into step with him and his bicycle, which he’s pushing with some gusto. I ask after damage to the trees near him following the recent storm and following a detailed report on the tumble of several large branches he swiftly deviates into mumblings along the lines of man being a whirlwind and being headed for calamity. I offer a few global warming hints, but he’s not talking about global warming he’s on some other plain. “Some people,” he says, ” have had certain experiences and these experiences have prevented them from doing things.” He’s getting pretty cryptic at this point, and much as I am tempted to inquire after the variety of these experiences (would it be borstal or moving statues or messages from the beyond, or eating toast?). Mostly I want to inquire to see if perhaps I might have had one, but I resist because if I stop him in his flow we might get into some moral disagreement and then he won’t answer what I really want to know. So on he continues and it’s riveting, but just as the conspiracy of world tumult is getting going he keeps interrupting it to tell me he believes in reincarnation. Again tempted as I am to refer him to neuro Henry and the surgeons view we will not be returning as frogs I keep my replies limited to appropriate “rights, and is that right, yes indeed.”
He’s very keen to express that even though he knows it’s all coming to a head and the world’s essentially on a collision course to an abrupt end that he’s relaxed about it because he’s known about it for a while and besides he believes in reincarnation and so this is what has to happen.
Finally I can no longer contain myself so I ask quietly: would you have clue about a date when you think this might all be due to happen?
And very clearly and confidently he answers “yes around 2012.” I must say that I admire a conspiracy theory where the practical things like dates and times have been nailed.
It’s time to turn left because he’s back to the cryptic crossword talk again. We bid our goodbyes and as he loops into the traffic he raises his arm in the air and encourages me repeatedly to have “fortitude.”
It rather made my day to know there are folks milling around who pay so much attention to detail. There was something almost architectural about the precision and exactness with which he envisaged the future. Obviously he was a little more woolly on the past.
Fortitude indeed.
Where is the Iraqi War Literature?
Damascus, Asharq Al Awsat – With a few exceptions of Iraqi writers and artists, the continuous bloodshed in Iraq has failed to elicit any poetry or prose from the Arab men of letters. While political writers expounded and analyzed, the literary writers and artists did not channel this harrowing Arab tragedy into creativity, and neither did they attempt to engage with it.
http://aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=3&id=7322
(interesting article worth reading.)
I’ve been wondering about this for a long while, from a slightly different perspective, why are there so few fiction writers translated into English? The foremost Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh has one of her seven novels available in English according to Words Without Borders. Surely publishers have a significant role to play in it.
Last year I tried to write a piece about Iraqi writers still living in Iraq, it was difficult to get any newspaper to bite on it and even harder to find writers because of communication problems. (ie. no electricity etc) and because I am a complete neophyte on the topic. Then I intended to turn it into a radio essay, but John McGahern died and his passing bumped the beleagured Iraqi writer and the essay turned to him.
I did talk to a number of exiled writers and academics who all had various takes on it, including in one opinion that there was an avoidance of Arabic literature by publishers (Western). I should dig out what I gathered and upload it to a page. At the time I felt rather out of my depth and couldn’t understand why the New York Times had not commissioned some arts journalist to go on the trail of the Iraqi writer. I remember being convinced that if everyone who marched in a protest actually went out and purchased a translated, small press, novel, as a political gesture, it could kick start some kind of financial injection into Iraqi lit or just translated literature generally that would result in more writers having opportunities to publish. But it would have to be novels that people bought, not tomes with angry titles.
One press who had published a significant novel reviewed favourably in the NY Times admitted they had yet to raise the cash to even pay the translation bill and could barely afford to send out review copies. I realized at that point the scale of what they were up against.
Here’s a link to the Baghdad supplement that Al-Ahram did back in 2003.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/634/bo1.htm
The list of blue titles on the right hand side link to different essays and pieces.
Mr Pamuk’s take on his dad’s suitcase — audio
Here’s a radio link to an English translation of Orhan Pamuk’s Turkish essay/speech given in response to his recent Nobel Prize cheque.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/pip/56ujd/?focuswin
Is it my imagination or are there a remarkable number of unpublished dads behind published male writers? I’ve never noticed this trend with women. Or mothers handing over their notebooks. Of course, it could be that dads forget to mention their literary ambitions to their daughters. It’s also highly likely that having a writer for a parent would sincerely put you off ever lifting your pen. It’s not exactly like having a footballer or snooker player for a parent, where you can go a few rounds out by the front hedge or bond over the green felt.
Flaubert’s take
“However much you fatten human cattle, giving them straw as high as their bellies, and even gilding their stable, they will remain brutes, no matter what one says. All the advance that one can hope for, is to make the brute a little less wicked. But as for elevating the ideas of the mass, giving it a larger and therefore a less human conception of God, I have my doubts”
There now something to brighten up your Sunday morning. Some of Flaubert’s and George Sand’s correspondence can be found ici:
Randomness
A random remark and conversation about a dog (given I’m not generally a fan of dogs, it really was random) a few days ago led a young woman to describe to me how earlier in the week she had been “jumped” by three guys in a residential street. They pushed her to the ground and repeatedly kicked her in the ribs, when she refused to go with them to the bank machine. Remarkably, the woman, who I’d observed previously to be a patient, gentle individual, now with several broken ribs, had only one big question in relation to it: What was going through their minds while they did it?
Today when listening to that brain programme I thought of that incident again. Those six legs that chose to kick her operated from three different brains. And since they repeatedly kicked her, were those also single individual brains making the choice to do that each time or at that point had they somehow melded into one?
She was able to somehow see a bigger tapestry. Surprisingly she did not express bitterness toward the area where it happened. She was grateful to still have her teeth. It was the question of their minds that had remained with her, even overriding the residual pain of their boots which must have persisted with every inhale of the conversation. I should say that there was nothing religious about this woman, she was not in some kind of forgiveness mode: she genuinely sought an answer to that question.
We know so little about the brain.
Neuro Henry on brain, science and medicine.
Here’s the listen again link to the Free thinking program with Henry Marsh — neurosurgeon.
He puts the cap on notion of the soul and afterlife, so basically you can relax on that front. By the sounds of it unlikely we’ll be returning as frogs or anything wiggly. He also somewhat dismisses the implied significance of left/right brain divisions, saying it’s not as absolute as previously purported by some factions. There’s a whole wadge of other stuff, but due to poor memory I cannot recall. It’s probably the most engaging thing I have heard on this yellow brick road of lunching with logic. Maybe because it’s audio. Maybe because he’s a bit of a skeptic, which appeals to my first language: pessimism.
Meteorological matters
We had the arses well and truly blown off ourselves last night in these parts. I have spent enough of my time on Sealink ferries and in the West of Ireland — where the wind appears to reserve its most committed effort at bluster — this new variety is astonishing. Especially in a place usually habituee to a mild climate.
It’s somewhat difficult to cull an interest in the weather, when it’s whipping the arse of you. I became fixated on the weather as a security guard, even though I was only outside patrolling car parks, and spent much of my time inside, getting cosy with the 12 mini security screens, rereading Coetzee novels, in a jacket 19 times too big for me, obsessively texting the weather forecast.
Once in a Cagney and Lacey moment and to make it seem like I was a useful entity I wrote a report (we had to keep hourly reports on what was happening, there was largely nothing happening, hence the need for the odd fictional slant on nothingness) of noticing two people out the back digging a hole and burying something. I realised afterwards, that the area I had described was in fact a vast expanse of concrete and a man or woman would have needed pneumatic arms to dig anything out there. I think the person may have been tying a shoelace. Poor quality cameras can rapidly up the drama factor of almost any movement. An ambling dog blurred can look like a bison. Even someone pausing to light a ciggarette can begin to look as if they are conspiring to knock down a building.
A real highlight of that job was when someone politely asked me if I collected bottles, offering a bagful of empties. Another time someone gave me a plastic bag full of small shampoo bottles and soap, but nothing topped the harrassed hockey fan who appeared in front of me one night wondering if I could fix his toilet which had inconveniently gone on the blink in the middle of a match. I suppose by logical deduction that made me a well-dressed binner, who needed to pay more attention to washing, but had the makings of a great plumber.
Curiously rarely did anyone ask about the books I was reading.
It was an interesting vista watching people entering and exiting their lives, because the time waiting for the elevator was like a pause in the grand scale of what they were doing and always they remarked on the weather, so perhaps that’s where the responsibility to be up to date and add to the weather discussion lay. Otherwise where could the 17 second conversation go?
Brains and surrendering on attention
So at the symphony on Friday — with the small Puffin making his debut in the back row, supported by a stack of bubble gum, cough sweets, and finally chewy mints — the teenage virtuoso (Ryu Goto) is interviewed before he takes to the stage. 18 yrs old, he casually describes how he’s studying physics and maths at Harvard. Ah, ha. I take his neurological measure from seat 148. Section 14. Music, maths, and physics yahoy. All nestling in the same neurological sun lounger. Je comprends.
Later I read that when musicians are playing they actually have brain activity in the language centre of their brains. I feel immediately cheated. So Mr Virtuoso has been bestowed the sun lounger in one lobe and gets to pole vault into the other lobe, as soon as he starts bowing. And while he’s bowing does he also have the instant ability to speak fluent Arabic or Amharic simultaneously? Not fair. Neurology = very unfair business.
I have observed there is a mini publishing industry dedicated to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It now occurs to me that it indicates we are actually not cut out for paying attention. Or perhaps we are creatures of selective attention paying and should release ourselves from this blessed hell of paying attention to so many multiple things and everyone just chose one or two each, with room for a bit of doubling up here and there. If it was evenly distributed it would work out very fairly. I feel confident that I could commit to pay attention to the act of hoovering and folding clothes after they are dry in the domestic realm, but nothing else. Never is one made more aware of this when one is parent to a small Puffin. The world decrees the Puffin must just learn how to do x, x and x. X usually involves dreary task like sitting on uncomfortable carpet, while taller person describes sides of a triangle. Under my system small Puffins would state two things they are willing to pay attention to and we’d just not worry too much about the rest. I cannot find much support for this thinking on an average Monday in rainy playground.
Finally, I have discovered two camps of brain books. The first are people who know the technicals on the brain, but if they veer into the direction of a simile force instant closing of reader’s eyes or closure of book to prevent dizzy spell. Then there are the poetic types, whose similes do not jar the thorax quite so violently, but so dense is the waxing poetics, it’s really hard to find the lobe or cortex or neuron information through these mosquito nets of vervy description. Neither camp is exactly satisfying.
I did gather from one that anxiety and motivation may reside in the same part of the brain I cannot remember the name of and could face a bit of inter neuron argy bargy because anxiety could cancel your motivation. I wondered about athletes, if say you were anxious about next Saturday’s race would that then cancel your urge to get up this morning and run like a rabbit to prepare for it. Or does the general abundance of endorphins take care of it?
My next reading on the brain has the word endorphins in capitals in the title. I also realise my earlier assertion of the brain as heavy as a frozen chicken would cause plenty neck problems. Should be a frozen chicken in a state of thaw. A very petite poulet.
If you want a happy brain moment there are some excellent docs on youtube about Jacqueline du Pre. One is a collaboration on the Trout quintet. The other is a film from the 1960’s about her relationship with the Elgar concerto. London looks precisely like the picture on the front of JM Coetzee’s book Youth or rather London looks precisely as it did look to those trotting about in the Sixties. Like East Berlin or Czech looked in 1988 to those of us who weren’t.
du Pre and Elgar
http://youtube.com/watch?v=PToFY-Upaw0 (there are 8 parts to this documentary they should pop up by the side of the first one once you watch it)
Trout Quintet.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=sKbK5inlHlU&mode=related&search= (There are at least 4-5 parts to this)
Up the pole with Dickens
This is one you’ll enjoy. Simon Gray describes his dementing Tango dance trying to write a play, then film, the radio play, then play about the life of Dickens:
Bernard Shaw said that writing a play was either easy or impossible. My play wasn’t impossible: I’d been at it too long and spent too much of my best blood on it to allow it to be impossible. I reverted to the old tactic of stealing up on it when it wasn’t looking, and then batter, batter, batter: “Come out you bastard, and fight!” etc. But of course I was nearly 40 years older than the last time I’d attempted it, overweight and short of breath, so I gave that up and tried cheating – by putting what I thought to be my best draft on the computer. From it I extracted drafts galore, draft on draft on draft, sometimes attaching the top half of one to the bottom half of another. This is the great thing about the computer, at least for someone of my generation, with my sort of temperament: it gives you the illusion of work. You go to bed at five in the morning with squinty eyes, a befuddled head and an unnatural but satisfied sense of having cut, copied and pasted yourself to well-earned oblivion.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1969190,00.html
I have to confess I loved the batter, batter, batter idea. It’s the closest description I’ve read to the level of loathing one can muster for one’s pet project that continues to evade as the Christmas’s tick by.
I foolishly keep telling myself that there’s method in the madness of continuing to fight for evasive characters in an evasive novel. Then I read a random novel, that in my humble opinion, might have benefitted from another year or two of ruminating and recommit myself to the task. Batter, batter, batter.
This is especially pertinent for my generation, some of whom appear more concerned about producing a stack of books, than actually taking the time to cultivate something deserving of the readers time and attention. This desperate notion of career instead of work is redolent of these by-pass roads. As my mother always says off them “we go onto it from a boreen and we come off the other end into a boreen”. I sometimes think of the novel (from the pov of the writer trying to write one, not as the reader of one) as a pugnacious, drunken git, who for some perplexing reason no matter how poorly he sings, you cannot give up on him/it.
You can hear the results of Gray’s batter, batter, batter on Radio 4 (www.bbc.co.uk/radio4) on Saturday. I think Little Nell might be the title.
Neuro-flop
This brain business is very exhausting. So far all I have ascertained is human brain weighs the same as an average frozen chicken (3 pounds). In the bookshop had an unfortunate time trying to negotiate the neurology titles, which for some peculiar neurologically challenged decision were filed beside books with blasterish titles in orange capitals like: The verbally abusive man — will he ever change? And lilac, pale green books, that have taken over as gifts, where previously the recipient would be given a box of talcum powder and a puff.
I’m deeply suspicious of books that stick Mozart in the title. Mozart has a monopoly on having a brain it seems.
Salvation may however be on its way however as Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3 and the Free Thinking Festival have the following scheduled for Dec 13th, 2006.
Free Thinking Festival
Wednesday 13 December 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
More highlights from the Free Thinking Festival of Ideas recorded in Liverpool in November.
Henry Marsh, one of Britain’s leading neurosurgeons, delivers a lecture on the brain and the memory.