Pictorial: Polyomniyummyvore (Academia Creates Dependency Upon Titles With Colons)

Sri Lanka by mari-gold

29th November by mari-gold

NaNooo! WriMo?: The Conclusion

November has come and gone. In some ways, it has slipped through our fingers as quickly as every month does, in the end. In other ways, it has seemed to drag on interminably. On 31st October I was quietly optimistic about my NaNoWriMo plans: in all honesty, I didn't think I would complete the 50,000 words, but I knew it was possible to get a good part of the way there.

The first week was difficult. Getting started has always been difficult. I didn't much like my protagonist, but loved his story, and pushed on with it. Eventually I got the boat out into the current and whipped along, building a good steady speed. I came to realise that I disliked the protagonist simply because he wasn't a very nice person. Writing straight into the laptop was an adjustment, but I forgot the keys under my fingertips and imagined I was moulding the semi-fictional London landscape in my hands.

Alas, by the third week, things ground to a juddering stop. After the first burst, the rate of writing slowed down. I fretted and fought with myself over getting more done, and the result was that less got done. The pressure of time stunted the normal rhythm of how I write. In the end, I went nearly a week without writing a word, and at the end of that week, I decided to call it a day.

The thing was, it wasn't an unusual turn of events in my writing life anyway. Often often, if not most of the time, the first love-fuelled drive is what gets the skeleton down on paper/screen, and then things slacken off a little as the story blossoms in my head. I have always, apart from the first drive, written slowly.

Did I throw in the towel prematurely? Maybe. But it was my first experience of National Novel Writing Month. The first time I have ever written under that particular kind of time-frame. I was balancing it with a full-time life (and I must impress upon you that the other side of the not-writing-a-word week was an onslaught of schoolwork which took unfortunate priority). Happily, I entered into it knowing what my writing quirks are, and so I've avoided beating myself up over it. I wrote 7001 words in three weeks, which is very good going. And actually, dire though some passages are, I'm pretty happy with what I've got.

[Indebted to Dominic for the excellent title.]

The Problem With Blogging From New Places; or, Who Do You Blog For?

It's been a funny week. Dancing, dancing. Then it comes crashing down. Crying on the phone to Lioba on Saturday night, crying on the phone to Father Alexander on Tuesday night; perfectly happy in between.  Experiencing a new kind of tiredness, a kind that knocks me out in the middle of the afternoon. There is a lot of work to get done in these last two weeks: hard, but also fun. And I have £2.80 in all the world, which is a reason to work, if nothing else.

Writing about new things with new people can be difficult, because it requires a whole lot of background information and context in order to make sense to people other than me. I've been adamant that this blog is first and foremost a personal record of my life, not promising to be complete or explanatory; some things are deliberately neither of those. And I don't know when I started thinking about whether the blog made sense to anyone other than me. In her diary, Anne Frank introduces all the people in her life, schoolfriends, family, etc. as though someone other than her would actually be reading it (little did she know). I catch myself thinking like that, and I wonder who I do write this blog for these days.

My reluctance to give all this context - which is not for any untoward reason; only, how to put three months into short words? - but also, newly, reluctance to go ahead and write without giving context, it feels restricting. It affects what, how often, and why I blog. It seems like to overcome it, I need to choose one of the options. I know which would be easier: write as I did before, without context, without the expectation that anyone will read it. However, once you know people will read what you write (which I genuinely didn't for a long time), it is extraordinarily difficult to write as though you're not aware of what they might think of what you write.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel

You were famous, your heart was a legend

You told me again you preferred handsome men

But for me you would make an exception

And clenching your fists for the ones like us

Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty

You fixed yourself and said, 'Well, never mind

We are ugly, but we have the music.'

Poetry Wednesday Vol. II: Victoria Market

I said to my companion, this is walking

I said to my companion, how my heart goes
out to all lovers

The darkness was still warm
but the fields were freshening beautifully
in the winter rain;
the market was full of little lights
and I remarked the ear of a sack
sleeping on top of a tyre like a cat
on the kerbstone


I said to my friend stop falling on your knees
I have to keep pulling you on to your feet again -
then the dawn came down silently between
the rows of vegetables
and we passed out into the white star
rejoicing companionless in our love

As I crossed the square on my way home
the highest spires were ablaze with the movement of feet.

- by Francis Brabazon. See Enanoslivo for Poetry Wednesdays.

Against This Fantasia Is This Place And My Time

From Second Terrace, via Ochlophobist, comes a superb post on locality. I wasn't familiar with this blogger's blogging until now, but first impressions are good. In my own self-centred way, what I of course mean by 'good' is 'I identify with it'. And it's well-written, which is a nice change. You wouldn't believe the syntacto-grammatical wrangling in academia!

Here's an especially 'good' snippet. Change Pittsburgh for London (or Norwich, hmmmaybe) and it's something I could have written.

"I fear not a Mayan 2012, a Palin/Beck ticket or Obama's embrace of a muezzin. I fear no socialist or fascist or even a wahhabist/salafist putsch. These are all stupid fantasies – science-fiction nostalgias if you will. What I fear is the coming of an anti-Jerusalem, a dis-mental no-place where memory is vanquished and the Word – the principle of all thought – is expunged.

What I have, against this fantasia, is this Place and my Time, and my memory of all the places and times before and a history that strings them together. What I have is a real embrace, a vision of certain smiles, and a field of stars projected from a little yard. What I have is an amateur garden and a church where iron sharpens iron with full communion. What I have is a glimpse of the One Place, the New Jerusalem, which glimmers through this Pittsburgh in which I live."

Poetry Wednesday Vol. I: Fulbright Scholars

Where was it, in the Strand? A display
Of news items, in photographs.
For some reason I noticed it.
A picture of that year's intake
Of Fulbright Scholars. Just arriving -
Or arrived. Or some of them.
Were you among them? I studied it,
Not too minutely, wondering
Which of them I might meet.
I remember that thought. Not
Your face. No doubt I scanned particularly
The girls. Maybe I noticed you.
Maybe I weighed you up, feeling unlikely.
Noted your long hair, loose waves -
Your Veronica Lake bang. Not what it hid.
It would appear blond. And your grin.
Your exaggerated American
Grin for the cameras, the judges, the strangers, the frighteners.
Then I forgot. Yet I remember
The picture: the Fulbright Scholars.
With their luggage? It seems unlikely..
Could they have come as a team? I was walking
Sore-footed, under hot son, hot pavements.
Was it then I bought a peach? That's as I remember.
From a stall near Charing Cross Station.
It was the first fresh peach I had ever tasted.
I could hardly believe how delicious.
At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh
By my ignorance of the simplest things.

- by Ted Hughes. See Enanoslivo for Poetry Wednesdays.

Memory Eternal Father Pavle!

Via Father Stephen, I learned today that Patriarch Pavle of Serbia has died. It so often seems that we - or maybe just I - only learn about these saintly people when they die. Memory eternal!