Thursday, 29 September 2016
Ringworld - Larry Niven, Iain.M.Banks, Culture Novels
Ever gawped in wonder at Iain M Banks Culture series, and thought yes this is the only imagined "utopia" that I would like to live in, and certainly one that I would love to have thought up and written about. Then I started reading Ringworld and I realised that this is where Iain M Banks got his ideas from - which is not in any way to diminish the achievement of the Culture novels, it's just to find out that everyone builds on someone else's imagination. The main male character, Louis Wu is very similar to some of Banks's heros - been everywhere, done everything, and the main female character Teela Brown, has lots of similarities with Banks's too - beautiful, rich, privileged but with hidden depths. There's even an equivalent of the Affronters in the fierce cat like species the kzin, and there's some great humour too. I like the Ringworld a lot, as well as Iain M Banks Culture novels - I can see where Banks has taken themes and ideas and developed them rather than copied them, with wit and verve.
Tuesday, 27 September 2016
The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Rachel Cusk - A Life's Work
Sylvia Plath writes about not being able to encompass it all, not being able to read all the books, about being in a state of privilege but still being unhappy, at eighteen years old and it all feels fresh, insightful and real especially overshadowed as it is by her later suicide, a young single mother with two small children in a cold bleak London in the deep freeze of the 1963 winter who put her head in a gas oven. Rachel Cusk writes about the miasma of pregnancy then the terminal tiredness of having a baby that wakes all through the night, about the loss of self that this involves. Cusk has emerged from this intact, I suspect that this is one of the things that Plath did not emerge intact from. It is certainly such a strong theme in her early journals, the knowledge that childbearing and marriage were going to be a stifling, imprisoning trap. Although she realises that she does seek a mate, that she does not want to live her life without the intensity of a proper relationship, she also sees the dangers that this has for a woman in the 1950s oh so clearly.
Cusk's book was lauded as honest and for not shrinking from the negative aspects of being the mother of a small baby - negative aspects being a very dry and neutral way of referring to the absolute haze of emotion and loss of identity that she describes so well. Every prospective mother ( and father)should read it, those who are already parents will surely recognise some of their darkest moments written here. I'd read somewhere that Cusk had provoked furious reactions for portraying such a dark picture of motherhood and pregnancy and birth and I wondered who these people were. The Daily Mail, I guessed, so I did a search for "Daily Mail Rachel Cusk a life's work", and sure enough, first link I hit has this quotable little piece of garbage:
Ahh the injustice of the world - Amazon you promise so much!
She has written twenty-one Amazon reviews, of which there are six five star reviews, while the rest are one or two star reviews. The preoccupation with size continues - "I expected it to be larger and sturdier."; "Much smaller and flimsier than the tin I'd seen";"Note that they are very small indeed.".
Mainly though she goes for short pithy review titles such as Terrible product., or Atrocious. or Rubbish. or Not as shown! albeit she explains and justifies her position in short reviews afterwards.
This one is a personal favourite of mine:
Cusk's book was lauded as honest and for not shrinking from the negative aspects of being the mother of a small baby - negative aspects being a very dry and neutral way of referring to the absolute haze of emotion and loss of identity that she describes so well. Every prospective mother ( and father)should read it, those who are already parents will surely recognise some of their darkest moments written here. I'd read somewhere that Cusk had provoked furious reactions for portraying such a dark picture of motherhood and pregnancy and birth and I wondered who these people were. The Daily Mail, I guessed, so I did a search for "Daily Mail Rachel Cusk a life's work", and sure enough, first link I hit has this quotable little piece of garbage:
"In 2001 Rachel wrote a coruscating attack on motherhood, called A Life's Work.Her picture of maternity wasn't warts and all, it was just warts."
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-367512/Saving-Rachel-Cusk.html#ixzz4LRtzPRoc Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
It's in inaccurate and lazy reading of A Life's Work, which certainly does dwell on the "warts" ( a typical grubby, disease like choice of words for the Daily Mail), but it certainly isn't "just warts" - there are lots of little quotes about the joys of this period as well - it's just that this is attempting to make heard and visible these unspoken trials. It's not "a coruscating attack on motherhood", it's a description of what it's like, with the darker parts emphasized. But the Daily Mail is so easy to criticise precisely because it is so lazy and loathable. I thought I'd have a look at some of the Amazon reviews. Now, nineteen of the twenty-one Amazon reviewers gave it 4 or 5 stars and lots of praise. Two reviewers didn't. One of those, her Dad(!), bought it for her and she found it so far from her own experience (lucky her I can't help thinking, or maybe she is just mentally glossing over the interminable lack of sleep of baby carers or maybe her baby just slept - who knows, stranger things have been known) that she could only give it two stars. The other one, the one star reviewer is more interesting. Here's her review in its entirety:
Absolutely appalling, insane rants on motherhood,28 July 2011 "I started the book yesterday and today I have decided to light our BBQ with it. It is not worth the paper it's printed on. I am shocked at people's glowing reviews, especially those that seem to find humor in the author's depressing navel-gazing style. This has absolutely nothing to do with whether she loves her children or not. I don't think someone that self-absorbed can love anything or anyone at all. It's obvious that she thinks of herself as the intellectual, independent woman suddenly imprisoned by motherhood, but she comes across as depressed and ranting character from Sex and the City.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R188NQ8P9E3QA/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0571238491
Aside from not having much idea how to light BBQs, she's obviously horrified that anyone could feel such things about motherhood, so of course the book:
" is not worth the paper it's printed on"
It's a very strong reaction which seems to be saying "how dare someone have such a view of motherhood, and even if she does, how dare she express it " This seems to me to be a very limited world view. Maybe she's in denial of her own experience? - she must be a mother because she has written lots of other reviews mainly about toys and gadgets for small children ( and one nursing bra). When you read these reviews you realise however that she is someone with a small amount of time on her hands, a fairly deep well of anger to draw on, and a mission to alert the world to the injustice of badly designed goods that are not maybe as they are advertised. For example of the Stretchy Dinosaurs for Children to Play with Perfect Party Bag Filler Small Gift Idea for Kids (Pack of 12) she points out, not unreasonably I suppose, not only are they very small, but
"of all the types shown we only received 3 types and 11 in total, not 12 as promised"
Ahh the injustice of the world - Amazon you promise so much!
She has written twenty-one Amazon reviews, of which there are six five star reviews, while the rest are one or two star reviews. The preoccupation with size continues - "I expected it to be larger and sturdier."; "Much smaller and flimsier than the tin I'd seen";"Note that they are very small indeed.".
Mainly though she goes for short pithy review titles such as Terrible product., or Atrocious. or Rubbish. or Not as shown! albeit she explains and justifies her position in short reviews afterwards.
This one is a personal favourite of mine:
4 of 5 people found this review helpful
2012-07-02
But I don't want to end this blog post on a negative note. Rejoice in the following review
Thursday, 11 August 2016
Virginia Woolf - Selected Diaries, Sylvia Plath - Journals 1950-1963, Tolstoy Letters Vol I and Vol II, James Joyce - Ulysses, In Our Time (podcast), Tom Drury - Hunts In Dreams
There's a kind of Brownian motion to life that randomly buffets you in myriad small and large ways, directing you down this path, down that. On my own for two weeks I get up between 6.45 and 7.15 am then walk into town for coffee, listening to New Yorker short stories or In Our Time podcasts, or just walking for the familiar sights and smells and for the sense of power that I get from my legs (really!), propelling me along. Today I listened to In Our Time on James Joyce's Ulysses and so I've picked up my re-reading of it again - there's something so luscious and so peaceful and so energetic all at the same time about Joyce's prose.
You can't say the same about Sylvia Plath's Journals, least not about any of the entries for 1950 that I have been reading - well there is lusciousness, there is energy, but there is no peace. It is the fiercely intelligent journal of an adolescent girl / woman who is aware of her powers, her desires, the social and cultural straps with which she is bound, and she is bursting to get out of them, but she knows she can't, she knows/thinks/ rationalizes that she must wait. Wait for what? Well that's the dilemma of adolescence and early adulthood but made so poignant in the light of her eventual suicide as an adult just thirteen years later.
The Tolstoy letters and the Woolf diaries I have just bought and I'm just reading odd snippets. I've bought the last volume of the collected Virginia Woolf diaries as well as the selected diaries which is a bit of overkill. But then buying Sylvia Plath's Journals and Tolstoy's collected letters ( 2 volumes) on consecutive days is a bit of overkill as well. There's a little bit of time left to read Hunts in Dreams, but only a little, so I have to keep backtracking to remember what happened and who is who - lucky it's a real book and not an ebook.
You can't say the same about Sylvia Plath's Journals, least not about any of the entries for 1950 that I have been reading - well there is lusciousness, there is energy, but there is no peace. It is the fiercely intelligent journal of an adolescent girl / woman who is aware of her powers, her desires, the social and cultural straps with which she is bound, and she is bursting to get out of them, but she knows she can't, she knows/thinks/ rationalizes that she must wait. Wait for what? Well that's the dilemma of adolescence and early adulthood but made so poignant in the light of her eventual suicide as an adult just thirteen years later.
The Tolstoy letters and the Woolf diaries I have just bought and I'm just reading odd snippets. I've bought the last volume of the collected Virginia Woolf diaries as well as the selected diaries which is a bit of overkill. But then buying Sylvia Plath's Journals and Tolstoy's collected letters ( 2 volumes) on consecutive days is a bit of overkill as well. There's a little bit of time left to read Hunts in Dreams, but only a little, so I have to keep backtracking to remember what happened and who is who - lucky it's a real book and not an ebook.
Monday, 8 August 2016
and - Linda Grace Hoyer - The New Yorker Magazine
And who is Linda Grace Hoyer? - why John Updike's mother. I've just printed out three of her stories from the New Yorker magazine, published in 1966, 1969 and 1983, so within the working writing life of John Updike. They stand up well though. What's strange is how they describe the same farm / small holding that John Updike describes in The Centaur, the atmosphere is so much the same - in a good way, not in a copying sort of way. The stories are all based on a woman Belle's childhood and then her relationship with her husband, George and they are beautifully paced with dialogue and image.
The Magician's Guild - Trudi Canavan, Letters of Virginia Woolf (vol 6)
Every so often I want something escapist and easy to read, often in the Sci Fi fantasy line, so I picked up The Magician's Guild in the second hand bookshop at Fiveways, still one of the best 2nd bookshops there is. It's readable and I feel a bit miserly and in saying that it's well enough written as it's got a good flowing style and nothing that makes yo think "ew" don't write that. There is some problem with scale which always happens with these kind of novels - the protagonist is often young and poor, in a an authoritarian country, with minor tyrants in the domestic setting and bigger tyrants ruling above. Often this is dealt with by making the hero work in the kitchens of a huge ruling castle. Canavan adopts the ruling city approach, and actually makes the "tyrants" - the Magicians - a mixture of hateful and sympathetic characters which is interesting, but the problem of scale does arise - just how powerful are the wizards ( and the king they rule for), and where are the larger scale politics? That said I'm enjoying it, it's a Lord of the Rings level read, intelligent enough without being stretching. It feels like I'm damning it with faint praise, but that isn't my intent.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf (vol 6) I picked up in the Open Market bookshop - more geared to first editions and the literary pile, and it's fascinating, and makes me think how much we've lost by having phones and email and Skype instead of letters.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf (vol 6) I picked up in the Open Market bookshop - more geared to first editions and the literary pile, and it's fascinating, and makes me think how much we've lost by having phones and email and Skype instead of letters.
Wednesday, 3 August 2016
The Book of Strange New Things - Michael Faber - a time to read and a time to..., Bridge of Spies
I finished reading The Book of Strange New Things this morning, sitting in bed for an hour and a half because I didn't need to get up, and it is one of those books that draws you in deeper and tighter as you read - in some respects. One of the other of those respects is the letters that the protagonist, Peter - a missionary on a far off planet- and his wife, Beatrice, left back on a social disintegrating earth of buffeted by the effects of global warming, exchange are written as those characters may have written - so there's no literary beauty, there are even typos, and they are the inadequate scribblings of two people trying to communicate across a vast distance. It makes them something that I read quickly, speed read, skim, like you do an article that doesn't interest you much, but you do need to get the gist of the story, you do need to take it all in. It's curiously unsatisfying, but necessary for the book as a who;e - the rest of the writing is clear and satisfying by contrast, striking in its building up of the incidental and the important, compelling in both description and narrative. It has no answers though. I thought that it might have, that it might produce some new and illuminating perspective from which I could learn new and strange things.
It's been a day like that. Now I'm watching Bridge of Spies, and taking breaks from it to have snacks, with writing this, even play games of Hearthstone, in the way that you can't if you are watching with somebody else. Bridge of Spies is satisfying, it's moral dilemmas are clear and distinct, and the lawyer defending the Russian spy is straight up and honorable, unwilling to break his client confidentiality to satisfy the CIA, he is decided that if he is to represent this client, he will not compromise the values, rules and the Constitution. It's well photographed, the steely blues and rain of the spy movie, the warm ochres of home scenes sit well on the eye.
It's been a day like that. Now I'm watching Bridge of Spies, and taking breaks from it to have snacks, with writing this, even play games of Hearthstone, in the way that you can't if you are watching with somebody else. Bridge of Spies is satisfying, it's moral dilemmas are clear and distinct, and the lawyer defending the Russian spy is straight up and honorable, unwilling to break his client confidentiality to satisfy the CIA, he is decided that if he is to represent this client, he will not compromise the values, rules and the Constitution. It's well photographed, the steely blues and rain of the spy movie, the warm ochres of home scenes sit well on the eye.
Wednesday, 27 July 2016
More reading obviously: the never-ending list. In Gratitude - Jenny Diski, The Book of Strange New Things - Michael Faber
The list is never-ending - I've given up writing down titles from the New Yorker and the Guardian book reviews, but there are books that leap out at me and I think, yes I must read this. In Gratitude is what manged the leap from review to reading, for a number of reasons. I like Jenny Diski's writing, particularly her autobiographical stuff. It's an inelegant word, "stuff", but I use it intentionally, because there is another more prurient, more "stuff" centered reason for reading In Gratitude - it's because she finally writes about her relationship with Doris Lessing, one of my most revered writers, both for her novels and writing and for her approach to politics and Sufism - it's because of Doris Lessing that I started reading Idris Shah and that gave me a way of thinking that, I think, has made me so much more critical of any ideologies or received ideas, and maybe, just maybe, has made me a more useful person that I might have been without exposure to Sufi ideas. Let's straight away dispose of any notion that I got any secret spiritual or any other enlightenment - I didn't. What I have understood from Idris Shah and Doris Lessing's writings on Sufism is that service, just plain ordinary service is what counts - forget enlightenment, forget spiritual insight - until you are of practical ordinary use in the world there is no possibility of gaining that - and in addition, even if you are of service, do practical good, there are no guarantees, no promises - you might be in the wrong car, the wrong place, at the wrong time and nothing is going to come of it. I've always felt that this has been a useful way to look at the world if only to prevent yourself being swept up in cults, ideologies, political and campaigning groups, ways of thinking that are more about group bindings and emotional satisfaction than anything else. Other than that, on balance, I think it's caused me more pain and upset than if I had gone down these other routes in that I don't think I have been able to apply the lessons therein and I don't think I have been able to be of service except in very small limited ways - which is not self-beration, it's just a simple statement of fact, and it does not detract from the very small services that I have performed at various times.
What I read in In Gratitude about Doris Lessing was disturbing, upsetting and unsettling. You can read much of it here. The background was that Doris Lessing took Jenny Diski in as a very disturbed 15yr old girl, and allowed her to live in her house for four years, and even after that gave her an allowance to live on. That it was a continuing act of unimaginable generosity is never in doubt, that Doris Lessing did not understand in any way how to look after a damaged 15yr old girl is, certainly from reading Jenny Diski's account, never in doubt either.
The Book of Strange New Things needs a quick mention, - by the author of the rather disturbing Under the Skin (do I make a point of reading disturbing books all the time I wonder - is that why I have so many nightmares?) . It too is disturbing, but in a more friendly, good way - perhaps gently provoking is a better description - but I'm only a quarter of the way through, and I have no idea at all where it is headed, although it reads well and coherently so far - which is an exciting thing in a book. Maybe I'll buy his new book now. Sigh.
Post script re In Gratitude
Of course one of the most disturbing (I know I'm using the word disturbing too much in this entry, but it seems stupid to look up synonyms just for the sake of it) things about In Gratitude was its rather dismissive take on Idris Shah and the Sufis. That's been bothering me - but I found this letter from Seán Gallagher in the LRB that explains it . "Shah didn’t work with other Sufis at Langton Green, his home in Kent. It would have been pointless. " he says - Shah gathered people around him to help in his endeavors, but they were not Sufis - nor did Doris Lessing claim to be a Sufi. What Shah did was gather people around him :
This makes sense to me - particularly since I've met a few of the people who did indeed meet with Shah, and that to me did not seem "Sufis", but certainly very able in their fields, sometimes a little strange - but then who am I to judge?
What I read in In Gratitude about Doris Lessing was disturbing, upsetting and unsettling. You can read much of it here. The background was that Doris Lessing took Jenny Diski in as a very disturbed 15yr old girl, and allowed her to live in her house for four years, and even after that gave her an allowance to live on. That it was a continuing act of unimaginable generosity is never in doubt, that Doris Lessing did not understand in any way how to look after a damaged 15yr old girl is, certainly from reading Jenny Diski's account, never in doubt either.
The Book of Strange New Things needs a quick mention, - by the author of the rather disturbing Under the Skin (do I make a point of reading disturbing books all the time I wonder - is that why I have so many nightmares?) . It too is disturbing, but in a more friendly, good way - perhaps gently provoking is a better description - but I'm only a quarter of the way through, and I have no idea at all where it is headed, although it reads well and coherently so far - which is an exciting thing in a book. Maybe I'll buy his new book now. Sigh.
Post script re In Gratitude
Of course one of the most disturbing (I know I'm using the word disturbing too much in this entry, but it seems stupid to look up synonyms just for the sake of it) things about In Gratitude was its rather dismissive take on Idris Shah and the Sufis. That's been bothering me - but I found this letter from Seán Gallagher in the LRB that explains it . "Shah didn’t work with other Sufis at Langton Green, his home in Kent. It would have been pointless. " he says - Shah gathered people around him to help in his endeavors, but they were not Sufis - nor did Doris Lessing claim to be a Sufi. What Shah did was gather people around him :
"What he sought was potential. Given his task of spreading Sufism at all reachable levels of society, he did indeed draw about him groups of men and women of social influence, not all of them as students, to help advance his ‘brief’. That this worked is clear from the international spread of his university lectureships and in the reach of his more than thirty published works, sold in a dozen translations and in their millions."Letter to the London Review of Books, 7 January 2016.
This makes sense to me - particularly since I've met a few of the people who did indeed meet with Shah, and that to me did not seem "Sufis", but certainly very able in their fields, sometimes a little strange - but then who am I to judge?
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