Series of films on photos and fiction

Fascinating series of short films via the Irish Times which explore the cross-disciplinary blending of image and fiction.

More to come on this, just popping the link here. I particularly appreciated the first one Bruges La Morte

Marine cloud cover baby!

We have had two solid days of solid sunshine! It’s like a collective menopause. This is unusually warm for September. It’s very strange with the nights drawing in much earlier — darkness — and to concurrently have this heat.

Today I was alerted by a friend to “fog” to the West, which turned out, on inquiry, to be Marine Cloud Cover caused by fog and stratus that travelled up from California. (Thanks Johanna Wagstaffe CBC weather genius for educating me on this).

Pretty soon I am off on the road again to a few festivals, where the climate is bound to be much colder. I am curious to see whether this warm spell endures. Will we as usual need to turn the heat on in October?

What is happening with your weather? Are you also having a warm patch ? Report in the comments.

I’m off to find a humidifier.

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I was reading A Far Cry From Kensington in my Sparkist revisit. Muriel Spark reminds me of Beryl Bainbridge in her depiction of post-war Britain. I have to say I have cried off A Far Cry … because I didn’t understand why she took the narrative into publishing, publishing people, instead of staying with Wanda, the Polish seamstress. (*I did find her who gets a job part salient) However I find much to contemplate in her early depiction of Wanda and Millie. There’s something timeless about it. The struggle, landing up in a country, trying to find work, struggling, inventing and settling on work that may be far from what you did back home, but a survival nonetheless. This applies less to Wanda and more to some of the people I met on my recent trip to England and knew during my many years living there. Wanda has endured because Spark imbued her with anxiety and humility rather than just being a talking head to serve a plot line or a larger theme. My next stop on the Spark shelf will be The Comforters.

On the other line: I am reading Chris Kraus Summer of Hate. There’s an excellent paragraph where she sums up who reads her books (and perhaps acknowledges the dilutionists she has also spawned). I am glad to have read the book for that paragraph, however I may also be churning to a stop with it. I can’t get beyond the fact that Michele Bernstein was doing something similar 50 years ago and she was doing it in a more engaging literary manner. The prose in Summer of Hate is a tad leaden and plunky. Even though her meta-real estate dabbling is intriguing. Kraus is funny in a clipped way which I appreciate. For now we go on, mostly for the sake of thinking about the leaden line both on the page and the continuum of the line she’s treading. I want to consider how or whether any solid aesthetic has emerged since Bernstein with this work. (Bernstein’s second novel has only just been translated to English) I waver on whether it’s a “can’t be arsed” school of transcription we’ve come to now or has some anchor that I am swimming blindly past in my reading.

What matters is the thinking, more so than the conclusion, since conclusions can change and evolve.

Subsequent storm: The 1100

Last week we had a 6.2 earthquake off the coast of Bella Bella I believe it was. Several aftershocks. I was having my rib put back in because it had popped out again, hence I was getting relocated and did not have my usual earthquake nostrils available. They were facedown on the table.

The weather event known henceforth as The 1100.

On Thursday (was it?) there were 1100 lightning strikes in Vancouver. 5700 people lost power. That number may have been much higher. I boiled the kettle at 5700 and then drank tea frantically. It was splendid. Except we had to go to the dentist in the early part of it as my boy had to have two teeth pulled.

The two teeth had been growing in a direct East and a direct West out of the side of his gums. He had the mouth of Equine confusion. I’m v surprised he never complained since biting the inside of one’s mouth is common enough without having directly piercing the sides.

I think there was about 72 lightning strikes before the teeth left the gums. We witnessed the 1028 others either driving or inside the apt windows. I will say that the tea frantically drunk was that cup of tea, you know the one I’ve mentioned. That cup of tea with the particular taste that an unimpeded tongue chases.

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In honour of their being no limits or qualifications required, I am going to read Padgett Powell’s novel written in nothing but questions as soon as I can lay my pinks upon it.

I continue to find Thalia Field’s Bird Lovers, Backyard remarkable and have decided to write on it in some way, shape or space whether it be here or there. I await Point and Line.

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Today on the radio the word unedifying was used 4 times by the same woman. Or I heard the same soundbite 4 times? Either way a barometer of the current state of things?

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Warm review for Malarky in The Guardian

Thanks to The Guardian for reviewing Malarky. Given how tight space is for reviews these days I am very grateful. Thank you v much to

Marina Lewycka who “greatly enjoyed this novel, and I admire Schofield’s ability to pull off something so difficult with charm and brio.”

Mrs Dalloway insulates

For anyone who failed to note it, there is a hot water bottle mentioned in Mrs Dalloway.

Gracias Aira

Gracias Cesar Aira for a solid few hours lepping along through The Miracle Cures of Dr Aira (New Directions) last night. Aira is the ultimate racehorse of a writer, nose forward, except he refuses to capitulate to the fences and ploughs into the watery troughs in enlightening ways. Were he an actual racehorse he’d be standing on said nose, wagon wheeling his legs and doing these kinds of equine circus tricks in a mash up of show jumping and racing on a dirt track road in front of a dentist’s office.

The Miracle Cures of Dr Aira seemed in its subtext to be a clinical depiction of the struggle to create narrative but told obviously through the fictional struggle to fix medical maladies.

On the last page, Aira (scribbler not fictional Dr) caved in and took the dia-morphine (sp?). This was a pity. He merely put the cap on the bottle, when all the way along it was a bottle of a book that called for no cap. And he was so intent on the unexpected. But perhaps that choice speaks to bailing out on miracles. Perhaps it is legitimate to bail out on miracles? More advisable to bail in on narrative in my opinion. I’ll be bailing in with Cesar Aira and will next read his Portrait of a Landscape Painter when I can get my fingertips on it.

Also, I have not encountered a miracle healer since Brian Friel’s play The Faith Healer which I saw at the Royal Court in London one rainy night so many, many years ago. It was the theatre that often staged Carol Churchill’s (why do I think I’ve spelt her first name wrong it needs a y in it I think?) and the remarkable one woman show by Emily Woof (What happened to Emily ?) who first introduced me to cross genre-blending with music, trapeze, literature and theatre. Back to The Faith Healer … Grace was played by Sinead Cusack  who bailed so far into that role, I can still see her face in it. 

Sunday Business Post review of Malarky & A Girl is a Half Formed Thing

What a thrill to see Malarky reviewed alongside Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing in the most recent Sunday Business Post newspaper. If you click the jpeg you should be able to eventually read the review once it enlarges)  Our novels are certainly in conversation with each other and I look forward to digging in with Eimear’s.

I love that Joanne Hayden so intelligently discerned the overturning of stereotypes in Malarky and that she picked up on Bina in the book who I’m partial to. Thanks to Joanne for such an intelligent and considerate reckoning on both novels and her final note and nod to the Independent publishers who take risks on work like Eimear’s and mine and without whom we’d have both been scuppered.

Voltage of the language: On storm and Seamus

Late last evening we had the wildest series of thunder, lightning, wind and monsoon rain storm. I turned all the lights off and the apartment lit up intermittently like a muted Jean Michel Jarre concert where he was searching for the notes but the lights were doing their own thing.

At 5am I woke to the news that Seamus had died. Famous Seamus. May he rest in peace.

Saddened immensely though we all are, I am glad he made his exit with this particular weather event at his back. (Even if it were in another timezone). For a man who spent much of his formative years outdoors, based on his father being a cattle dealer and the reoccurrence of bog and turf and digging in his pomes — he might have appreciated a symphony of a weather moment and “the voltage of the language” that comes to the page and eyes from weather.

RTE  are screening a documentary tonight on him at 2235 (Irish time). Tune in if you’re near a telly. Or pick up a book if you’re near your bookshelf.

I think of his family. He may have been a poet — the poet — to the world but for them he was a dad, brother, husband, a man who turned on the tap, boiled the potatoes or carrots dry and probably left a large quantity of newspapers or slender tomes in translation lying about the place that were trod upon by the dog or cat. How to find some privacy for the person when they’re a public figure? How to find the necessary quietness when the world mourns with you? It’s something of headache to navigate at a time of already overwhelming shock and deep sadness.

The hat landscape

Finally in this rapid slew of posts covering all manner of mutterings … I was rereading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie this week and in relation to my earlier post on landscape and the dispensing with it in the novel, I noticed that Muriel Spark introduces us to the landscape of the novel or that the landscape in the novel opens and declares itself in people’s hats. Each character is initially defined or described by the manner in which they wear or carry their hat.

It’s perfectly apt that she does not open the novel with descriptions of buildings or what have you, instead she situates us where we’ll explore from the head down. It was great to be reminded of how funny the novel is. I’m going to seek her very first novel The Comforters.

Our Woman gets fresh with Mr Penumbra

A reader sent me this happy snap of Our Woman canoodling or getting fresh beside Mr Penumbra there in the New Books section of Waterstones Bookshop in the UK. Have you spotted Our Woman snuggling up in any bookshops?