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.

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 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.

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 :

"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?

What to read, what to read

The mountain of books I want to read gets bigger, the time, inevitably gets shorter. There is no possibility of reading them all - I am going to have to get super selective, so much better at forecasting whether this is the one to read , not that one. Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is one that I saw reviewed in the New Yorker Magazine and thought I have to read this book, and my instinct was right. It's a - well I was going to use the word coruscating, because I like the sound of it, and it has, in my mind a connection with pouring hydrochloric acid into a filthy toilet bowl and cleaning it out, taking away the dark faecal stains and limescale - which is a horrible image and, in fact, has little connection to the real meaning of the  word, which is "flashing, sparkling, glittering, twinkling [twinkling!!] brilliant, dazzling, scintillating, exhilarating, stimulating, invigorating"  Serendipitously this all describes my reaction to the book and the book itself, because the book does glitter with thinking and feeling along with this undercurrent of cleansing and eating away at the pain with acid. It's a complex thing, it's a complex book.

But there are still more books I want to read. Here's the list as it stands at this actual moment, just after reading and skipping through the Guardian review pages where I awlays find books I want to read, mentally note them, and often forget until I see them again. 

1. Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot, Mark Vanhoenacker -= the review soeaks of the books beauty in terms that make me see this as a must read - but when? how.  Because there is also:
2. Criminal: The Truth about Why Bad People Do Bad Things, Tom Gash - "disproving the 11 most commonly believed myths about crime", from left and right wing points of view - it's not just about morality, it's not just about poverty. I've got form here - I used to work in juvenile justice, and we always used to say about our alternative to custody program that we had kids (16-18 year olds) who did bad things, not bad kids per se. So this is a "must read" - I am going to have to put "must read" in inverted commas now, because it's just a euphemism for "want", and the fact that wanting to read something is almost as beautiful as actually reading it sometimes better when the rad doesn't live up to expectations. (More about wanting and reading later). 

3. Then there's China Mieville - I don't really like his books, have tried to read Perdido Station twice and put it down, - even thrown away the copy that had its cover ripped off in some bookish accident, but every time I see someone praising his writing I think I must go back and try again, read another of his densely plotted and written novels of future dystopias because otherwise I will miss out on a brilliant writer. (More about wanting and reading, and missing out later). So I want read The City and the City - or do I?

4. Kazuo Ishiguro - there';s an article on him reading Proust while ill and imagining the novel that became The Artist of the Floating World, and I think I only have that book in an electronic copy and I would like to read most of  Kazuo Ishiguro's novels again.

And I haven't finished reading the Guardian review this week. More to come.

Is there anyone? Incompleteness - Rebecca Goldstein 2, Gödel, Einstein

So is there anyone out there (preferably in Brighton, but hey we've got the internet)  who deeply understands Gödel's Incompleteness theorems, and Einstein's special and general theories of relativity enough to explain them to me in depth (I have a superficial understanding only) AND then to collaborate on a play or short story something like Michael Frayn's Copenhagen that imagines the conversations between Godel and Einstein as they walk between buildings at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in New Jersey in the early 1940s and on to Einstein's death in 1955. The play will concentrate on the platonic versus the logical positivist philosophical approaches, with references, of course, to the Bohr/ Heisenberg's rejection of physics being descriptive of actual reality( as explored in Copenhagen). Provisionally titled "No Dice". Any takers?

Of course the play will also be about friendship and insanity and their limits.