Aug 29
Aug 29
It’s late Wednesday and my head is absoloutely exploding. I feel so trapped with the house, and with living with M_____ now. I can’t deal with it. I’m getting nothing from this and I am so restless to get out and do anything else. I need to travel and write, and the impulse is so strong and yet I was at home just now for a few minutes having ridden home to pick up my car from its MOT which my Dad sorted out and go and pick up M_____ from round the corner of my parents’ house and Dad shushed us in the few words we had spoken because the property news had come on and in the West Midlands in particular house prices are down. Slowed growth is the overall trend but in this area it doesn’t look good.
Aug 28
Today was a bad day. Read the rest of this entry »
Aug 26
Everything’s moving so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. I’m not coping would be the best way of looking at this past week or so. Still most bills aren’t paid, and I’m down to zero in my account. I haven’t heard word on my rise yet, and I have had several reveries of walking out due to not getting one at all. My radishes have been eaten and I looked into encouraging hedgehogs but that the garden is too hemmed in and fenced off for them to make it in. (Plenty of reveries and story ideas from this one.)
Aug 22
The last couple of days I have really forced myself to sit down and write. I’m writing a chapter introducing Nat, her boyfriend Ade and his doper crowd and yesterday, for the first time in my life I bought a Writer’s Magazine - as pointless as I had always assumed they would be - and read a couple of articles and interviews while sitting outside in the sun with M____ before she went to work, and then a little more after she had gone. It was pointless as it happens, and I had talked myself into getting the thing because I remembered having some kind of a row with my brother in his car a couple of years back when he was telling me I don’t accept advice from anybody (an O’Gara trait, or so my mum would have it) and telling me what his then flatmate, an aspirant writer, did for her writing, reading magazines and talking about writing groups and the like. I was telling him that I didn’t believe in any of that. That writer’s groups would waste the time I could be spending at the keyboard, the typewriter, the notebook. Anyway, I came upon the phrase Bum Glue. This, according to one writer, is what separates the published from the unpublished writer. And that really set me to my chair. This is familiar, it seems to me. I have heard other writers talking about reading such material and finding that the only sensible, useful things they said were to write every day, and stay at it. Obvious enough. But obvious enough, of course, to bear repetition: I have always know it, always kept it in mind, but of course, when that bum glue becomes that little bit less adhesive, it is high time for a kick up the arse. Read the rest of this entry »
Aug 17
A day in the life - Mr Luddite makes a return? *
Posted by: cupid in The Unforgiving Minutes No Comments »A typical day in many ways, and an exceptionally frustrating one too in many ways having got nothing done in terms of writing.
I got up late having set my works mobile later than my personal one which I set my first day at work for 7:15, a one-off. I didn’t realise for a while, and so, having settled down in front of the TV with a good shake of Spirulina powder shook up in a 5l bottle of mineral water, and getting myself ready to mute the telly and do some reading, I had to rush to cook some rice and get showered and ready.
I turned in a little late and had forgotten the last photocopied sheet of the food diary page my dietician had given me - I had wanted to photocopy a few more sheets to keep it going as I start my new exclusion diet.
There had been no morning meeting, though, and we weren’t to be given too many jobs, just a little tidying up of the office I was building up flat pack furniture for and moving things around: boxes of files to be taken upstairs and a desk to be swapped around with a little shelf unit which, since it tended to fall apart, had to be strengthened in some way before being moved next door. All pretty good work among people who were genial, gregarious and grateful, and certainly not in any way bossy.
It didn’t take up a morning, and after a little while getting under [Darren]’s feet while he was tidying the office, I went to the computer room to get on the internet and sort out a broadband connection for the new house here. I signed up for that and then I took him down to his gym. I had happened to mention that I had been meaning to buy proper running shoes for a long while since I was trying to get back into running. He said we could go up - there was a decent running shop at his gym, a fantastic, expensive development in Brierly Hill.
And so, I ran about for a while in the shop with the young sales assistent watching me. She told me I have good arches but that I over pronate on one foot but not the other. She got out a few shoes with a little support and had me run about in them to see how I feel. We were there at least half an hour, and I paid a little more than I had anticipated at £70 but I did go for a run afterwards and though I’m sure I ran faster than normal and stopped to walk for shorter distances, and though I feel the benefits too, I don’t feel any discomfort in my legs.
After the shop [Daz] showed me around the gym for a while. It is astounding, and I was imagining myself writing there. Walking around seeing people just sitting down within the complex, presumeably after a workout, I was having reveries of explaining to journalists my routine, which included a work-out to get the brain working at full power. These were extensions to past reveries which of doing the my workspace-type columns such as I have seen in the Guardian: I have had some of these due to my guitars and weights bench in my writing room, and the fact I was considering buying Daz’s boxing dummy; they have been triggered by as little as squeezing the forearm building rubber ring M____ gave me our first christmas together to remind me of the tines we had driven to her cottage with her father passing me one of the things to do some exercise on the way, and putting it away for later use squeezed into the gap between drawers on my desk for easy reach.
I drove back, forgetting where I was going on route - I wanted to go to town to pick up the bean/seed growing kit that I had ordered through E-bay the other day. It had been sent to the Delivery office because I was out when they came to deliver it. the hardware store’s car park was full so I drove round to a supermarket where I would have 45 minutes to park free - provided, of course, that I was going to shop there. I bought a few things, leaks (in part to replace the onions I would not be able to eat on the exclusion diet, though in writing this I have just looked and leek are also not allowed(!), broccoli, passata (not allowed!), and some herbs and spices) and then went for the parcel. On the way I met a couple of people I used to know from the hardware store I used to work at and congratulated myself on having almost a minute of non-dysfunctional conversation with them.
So, back home. Home to an absolute mess. A week and a bit of M____ being away and the fruits of my psychic anarchy are everywhere.
Starving, and I warm up a curry. I had left the tuppaware box out and so worried about that for a while with it being reasonably warm in the room, but had nothing else aside from the fish I’d be needing for dinner.
It was still good on the third, fourth day.
Here in the lounge are numerous books I have been reading and using, as well as those I have hoped to find time for, over the week or so:
The Cook’s Book, Editor-in-chief Jill Norman [read up on Indian cooking]
El coyote y el tlacuache/Kojot a Oposum (a Czech/Spanish paralel text) [read one story aloud in Czech and Spanish]
Les Contes francais/Francouske pohadky (a Czech/French parallel text) [quixotically brought downstairs]
Reunions de Famille/Rodinny sjezd (ditto) [ditto]
My Deti ze Stanice Zoo, Christiane F [read a fair bit, mostly aloud - an excellent, disturbing book about heroin addiction in Berlin, if it is not translated into English, it should be]
Collected Stories, Elizabeth Bowen [quixotically carted around with me]
Bleak House, Charles Dickens [a few chapters here and there, now somewhat stalled, albeit for understandable reasons]
The End of Oil, Paul Roberts [a chapter]
New Optimum Nutritional Bible, Patrick Holford [the first 137 pages (of almost 500) in the last few weeks, as always, principally in the first few days]
Indian Meals in Minutes, Thomas Neil [a look over some key recipes, getting some good ideas, especially when set against Atul Kochhar’s chapter in The Cook’s Book]
Easy Spanish Reader, William R. Tardy [a chapter or two]
Cesko-spanelsky slovnik [a Czech Spanish dictionary, occasional reference]
Spanelstina pro samouky [a Czech language Spanish textbook, quixotically taken down]
The Barrytown Trilogy, Roddy Doyle [the second, excellent, very funny, novel, The Snapper; it comes highly recommended]
The Captive State, George Monbiot [The first chapter]
Velky Cesko-anglicky slovnik [a czech dictionary]
Cuentos en Espagnol/short stories in Spanish (Parallel Text) [Brief flick before giving up for Easy Spanish Reader]
Solitude, Anthony Storr [A look over the introduction and first chapter following a recollections I wrote about a few days ago]
Confessions of a lapsed standard bearer, Andrei Makine [finished the novel in one sitting, which, though it is a short book, is testament to the positive effects of my diet at the moment]
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapiova [sic] [read aloud a few times and finished: excellent]
The collected stories, Vladimir Nabokov [three stories]
Policing Sexual Assault, Jeanne Gregory and Sue Leeds [a very dry account, I read a little for research purposes, and reserved Carnal Knowledge, Rape on Trial today]
Bob Dylan Anthology, Guitar Tablature Edition [a bit of singing and a bit of strumming, now used as a base for my laptop to prevent overheating on my lap]
I find it impossible to read one book at a time, or even just a handful. These are far from being the only ones I dipped into over the week, and then there’s the Pimsleur Russian I listened to a few times on my MP3 player.
I don’t deal well with being between things. M____ is back tomorrow and I’ve got some cleaning to do. These things mean no writing is going to get done.
So I settled down to Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, something I started yesterday to try and get a handle on the structure and tone of it (it’s in my bag now with the fifth, or perhaps sixth book of David B’s L’Ascension du Haute Mal and a French dictionary and so not on my list). That didn’t last long. Tiredness came over me and I could do nothing.
And so, I read my Spanish for a while.
Dad rang. They are going on holiday tomorrow and so they were offering to take a key over to me so I could get in the front door without setting the alarm off. I said I wasn’t going over for dinner.
Mum rang. She confirmed I wasn’t coming over for dinner and said she had some courgettes for me (she didn’t call them aubergines for once), even though I had picked up a couple yesterday. I figured she must want me to come over to save Dad dropping off the keys so I offered to pop round.
I did a little more but it wasn’t long before I had to lie down. I watched Ready Steady Cook for a while and then tried to sleep.
No dice. But I couldn’t do much else. The tiredness that comes after just one night of being spiked is awful, and can lay me out for a week. Luckily, I wasn’t drawn to drinking coffee as I used to be - in fact it may have been the coffee yesterday that made me so tired this second day.
I dressed to go out and try my running shoes, vacilating for a while dreading the fact I might be walking more than running, and seen to be doing so on my new road.
But my piss was pretty orange from the Vitamin tablets I had taken when I had got back and so I drank a little more water - I find if it’s too concentrated it can lead to discomfort - and did a little washing up in the kitchen for it to go down.
18:15, though and I was ready to go. I had changed already from my shorts to my Ron Hills and got out. I could feel an improvement, and managed to go a little further than I usually would. Not all that much longer, but I did feel that it would be now more a question of psychology, of keeping goig on that second wind. Running was comfortable. I stopped for a short walk and then going again. I was soon back, and not as tired as I usually would be.
I don’t remember if I sat down, but I was soon cooking, sweating the leaks and throwing in some finely chopped celery before poaching the fish in rice milk with a couple of bay leaves and a little curry powder. Mum had given me some rice, beans and broccoli yesterday for me to warm up today - she has been inviting me round the last few nights to heolp me out with my diet so I would have more time for writing, though this has essentially just broken up my routine that is so essential for me, distracting me to tasks that could easily have been put off. I put these on a plate and in the oven, not wanting to overuse the microwave in case it is true that it destroys vitamins in food (I want to read some more about this).
I enjoyed the fish - one good result of the exclusion diet if I played my cards right could be a better familiarity with fish, since this is something I am allowed, and which I enjoy.
I read my Indian Meals in minutes book, and this resolved a question which has been on my mind recently, whether it is possible to not fry off the onions at the start of a curry, but cook them in the sauce with everything else (it is, this is exactly what an Indian family near the author did, and what he recommends). This would be the healthier option, of course, as Patrick Holford repeatedly observes. I then read a few recipes in Atul Kochhar’s chapter of The Cook’s Book.
Soon after this I took off down to Mum and Dad’s taking (quixotically) my notebooks with me.
I soon got stuck in to the computer.
I renewed my library books and reserved Carnal Knowledge, which I had once had out for a run of months, getting little of it read, unable to prioritise it consistently.
And of course I found a thousand other things to do.
There was my ISA, which I paid some money into. My credit card, which I didn’t succeed logging into for a while - I have numerous passwords which I use, but cannot stand restrictions such as the need to have a password of 6-8 characters with numbers and letters; this only forces me to try every possible iteration without really getting anywhere. Having finally got in, breaking one of my passwords in another place, my current account debit card was declined in trying to pay off some of the credit card. In looking at the statement and discovering I had spent more on the card than I realised, I found too that the card was pretty high interest. My dad had recommended the card thinking it was something it was not, and so my attempt to get the best cards a year or so again was buggered up, especially since I had forgotten the PIN numbers of some other of my cards.
And so I called up www.moneysavingexpert.com and looked through how I could resolve this. A year ago I had grudgingly told myself I would try to stop haemoraging money and would make an effort to do these kinds of things, and, to be fair, having gone for a run and eaten well, I was far more able to do it then back then. I must have been reading that for a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes or so when I clicked through to apply for a Halifax card which would take up the debt for 0% for a year.
And so, finally, on to Audible, the biggest irritation of the last few weeks, and something which could seriously turn me back into a Luddite (I once had a number of Hotmail accounts, all from ADD moments at uni; one of them was mr_luddite).
Getting the MP3 player not long after coming back from Prague was to be a breakthrough. If I ever come to sort out my first attempts at Unforgiving Minutes it will show how obsessed I had become with the idea of a digital dictaphone back then in Prague. An MP3 player was to be one of these as well as a source of audio books, which I would listen to all over the place, and which I would concentrate on better than I did books, and which freed me up to cooking and exercise and anything else at the same time.
Of course, the first one I ordered didn’t function as a digital recorder at all. I made a recording of a kind of diary, and the file was corrupt. I had a bit of a run around with customer support at Sandisk (who are exceptionally good at making Memory, it must be said), downloaded some firmware, and fucked around on some forums wasting time, and then had to send the thing back.
I have listened to a few books on the thing, though not as much as I thought I would. I have got a good lot of use out of it. But now I have been having the same problem with Audible.com as I have been having with Audioville.co.uk, that is, that I cannot successfully sync with the device apparently because of the security keys and the like used with the files.
And so I have a couple of books, Bleak House, which I figured would be more manageable and interesting if I could read a few chapters, and then listen to a few, and so on as convenient, and American Prometheus, a book on whatsisname, who helped to design the nuclear Bomb, and no way of listening to them on the MP3 player, though the files are sitting there in its memory. And this when eight or nine pounds is coming out of my account every month for the privilege and when I am trying to budget!
And so I today downloaded loads of firmware for the thing, spending a great deal of time, reformatted it, wiping all data on it, and tried to upload the files again. Still no joy.
Audible say they are going to have to ring me. Well, right now it seems a lot more hassle than it’s worth, and so difficult to get decent audiobooks - even on Audible’s site there seem to be very few unabridged titles.
So, once again no dice. So, back home to try and get some value out of the day by writing this while watching Shaun Meadow’s 24/7. I’ll be tired for that tomorrow.
Oh yes, and I put some seeds on to sprout, and probably did plenty more besides that has slipped my mind.
Aug 14
News Flash: M____ wants a Dog!
After months if not years of ribbing her about wanting a dog, of borrowing kittens and talking incessantly about dogs - sometimes I have seriously thought it may be my only subject of conversation - M____ has relented: she wants a dog!
And I’m not sure if I want one. Not sure because it would mean extra work, and I am overburdened as it is. Not sure because I will have so little time for work and perhaps it could only lead to becoming more domesticated (me that is, not the dog) which could only itself lead to the need sooner or later, and I imagine sooner, to break free, to leave the country again or do something else drastic.
I have had a week of almost reclusive bliss, staying in my house and doing a little of everything, and a decent amount of writing, and it is what I seriously need for at least six months of my life very very soon - and this six months in order to secure sixty years of it, by writing something that will get me writing professionally. And it is going to be so hard to go back to work after that, not to mention settling down again to do all the cooking and everything else that monogamous life in a house demands.
I love dogs, and smile like an eejit simple boy on Xmas day practically every time I see one, but I don’t now know if I am ready to have one. I have so little time as it is, and I am very worried about that.
Aug 14
The last couple of days have been a little frustrating. I have broken my routine a little, my routine, that is, of staying at home and writing for much if not most of my time, of close reads of short stories and novels, cooking and planning FF. Today I went over to Mum and Dad’s. I did so after having spent the morning reading a few stories, starting straight away on getting up with an O’Henry and a Chekhov on my MP3 player, and then writing an introduction of Darren, the underclass anti-hero of the novel, first on paper, and then finishing on dictaphone to try and get all the ideas out before I forgot them. I should have got right on back to it, since notes rarely translate into the kind of prose I was getting on with this morning, but that had taken me up to a quarter past one, and I had to cook, had to indeed Ready Steady Cook something out of a few pieces of veg that had gone past their best, and that after cleaning up the fetid mess of a kitchen left after several days of being on my own - the sink left half full in an aborted attempt at soaking the gram flour pancakes adhered to the stainless steel tray I had grabbed for a baking sheet cum frying pan, a new wooden chopping board now warped, food processor blades and the rest. No problem, I put on my Pimsleur Russian and quite enjoyed it, revising and talking out loud to myself Eesveneetya, vyee paneemayeetya paangleecky? Ja Nimnoga paneemayoo pa rrusky. until I burnt myself out and had to turn to beacon, the local station which was playing surprisingly tolerable songs. After dinner, a curry that had become a little watered down and insipid after I decided to fast-track it in the preasure cooker, I felt tired and could do little but practice pentatonic scales in front of Ready Steady Cook (actually, I do think a reclusive life of writing in the mornings and evenings, and having a kind of siesta in front of Ainsley and the boys could really suit me down to the ground: if there’s any budding benefactors reading, please take note). Read the rest of this entry »
Aug 14
[picture of Darren]
The last couple of days have been a little frustrating. I have broken my routine a little, my routine, that is, of staying at home and writing for much if not most of my time, of close reads of short stories and novels, cooking and planning FF. Today I went over to Mum and Dad’s. I did so after having spent the morning reading a few stories, starting straight away on getting up with an O’Henry and a Chekhov on my MP3 player, and then writing an introduction of Darren, the underclass anti-hero of the novel, first on paper, and then finishing on dictaphone to try and get all the ideas out before I forgot them. I should have got right on back to it, since notes rarely translate into the kind of prose I was getting on with this morning, but that had taken me up to a quarter past one, and I had to cook, had to indeed Ready Steady Cook something out of a few pieces of veg that had gone past their best, and that after cleaning up the fetid mess of a kitchen left after several days of being on my own - the sink left half full in an aborted attempt at soaking the gram flour pancakes adhered to the stainless steel tray I had grabbed for a baking sheet cum frying pan, a new wooden chopping board now warped, food processor blades and the rest. No problem, I put on my Pimsleur Russian and quite enjoyed it, revising and talking out loud to myself Eesveneetya, vyee paneemayeetya paangleecky? Ja Nimnoga paneemayoo pa rrusky. until I burnt myself out and had to turn to beacon, the local station which was playing surprisingly tolerable songs. After dinner, a curry that had become a little watered down and insipid after I decided to fast-track it in the preasure cooker, I felt tired and could do little but practice pentatonic scales in front of Ready Steady Cook (actually, I do think a reclusive life of writing in the mornings and evenings, and having a kind of siesta in front of Ainsley and the boys could really suit me down to the ground: if there’s any budding benefactors reading, please take note).
Aug 11
On Thursday I dropped M_____ off at the airport to go home with her mother who had been over for a few days. Her mother’s visit was not entirely successful. On her first full day here we held a barbecue and though M____ had invited her Czech friends a month in advance for her mother to have someone to talk to, they let her down. I had had little time to myself and was finding it difficult to be around people - I find that I am much more gregarious in Prague than on home turf - and on a trip to London I was positively reticent, broody and irritable, in part from the food I had eaten, two packs of sandwiches there and oats in the morning, in part from being among people all day, and in part from the crowds and the rush of it all. Besides, after a few weeks of practically not drinking at all, and months of drinking very little, I got wasted on vodka and that set me back for a few days of her short visit!
Since Thursday evening, then, I have been writing, reading, doing some exercise, cooking, and doing everything I would rather spend all my time doing. No doubt people will expect that after these few days, I will be satisfied for a while, but it’s making me think seriously about my life and whether it is natural for me at all to be in such a relationship with M____ as I purport to be. It is so natural for me to be on my own, and so unnatural to be with people.
Since living on our own I have been forced to cook more often and have been able to experiment and try a few more things out. Before, even when I tried to buy things for certain recipes, I would go on a big shop, get more or less everything I need (there are always one or two things that are not stocked) and then Mum would offer to cook and I would accept in order to have more time for writing and the like. Then I would make one big meal from one of the recipes and make enoughy for several days, and so then I would not attempt a further recipe and most often everything would go off, riling my parents.
It was going fairly well, though I had one or two slips which I documented because I finally saw a dietician on the 6th. Finally getting used to the diet I was on, I will be on an exclusion diet with no onions, no potatoes, no corn, and so on and so forth. Still, I hope that being monitored will help me to be more consistent in following my diet, even though I am less and less inclined to believe that diet alone will be a solution to my problems. Even now, with so much time to myself, and time to get a diet more or less right, I find I am losing a great deal of time to faltering concentration, reveries, restlessness.
A couple of days back I was trying again to keep a note of my reveries, thinking again of something like The Unforgiving Minutes, that is, a project I started in Prague to try and document my life and everything that gets in the way of writing, everything that frustrates me so much and which would document to the minutes of my reveries, that is, notes of the conversations I have in my mind and the situations and scenarios that arise again and again and form so great a part of my consciousness. I found once again that it is impossible.
Nonetheless I had one such this morning, the kind of reverie, or rather, what I have lately come to tag a palimpsest, that …
[I’m not concentrating now this morning. I’ve slipped into tangents several times already now, but one I have just intercepted began as thinking about how to solve my dilemma of needing to be on my own. It moved to thinking over seeing my doctor, to making demands of my incompetent shrink, to being placed on stimulant medication and addressing the morning meeting at work explaining that the reason I seem different is because I have finally been diagnosed and medicated, and that if people want to use it against me they can, and similarly, if they want to see me as somebody who has to a degree conquered his difficulties they also can.]
…the kind of reverie that forms itself into a donnee, a story idea, a conception, an artistic zygote.
I made a concerted effort last night to read some stories. I started with Chekhov on MP3. I hadn’t listened for a while, despite having had them for months and months. I used to have a habit of walking late at night with a bag on my back full of books listening to these stories, and to language instruction, sometimes while smoking cigars. And then I fell out of the habit. But I listened, my thinking being that I had been unable to concentrate, and so I might be able to listen better than read, since listening, the pace is set by the recording and not by eyes which may tend to wander. I listened and I drew, sketching in pencil some of the naked models and semi-clothed girls I had compiled into a folder on my G4 Mac and set up as a screensaver which for the first few days here I was watching as I sat at my desk writing Checkmate on a ringbound notebook. The first, of a pretty girl with dark hair turned sandy blonde by the sun tied up yet hanging loose, her face in profile, her shoulders bare and her full breasts distinct beneath a white silk nightdress, wasn’t too bad, I thought, despite some difficult shading.
Chekhov, understandably, was intimidating. I was doing everything wrong. I would have to practice, practice, practice, setting myself tasks and exercises to complete and being patient enough to do them in what little time I had! The stories I listened to were pitch perfect, of course, constructed of bravura performances of conversation which set a mood and provided the kind of rare first impressions of a character which could be relied upon to give a precise handle on a life: a louche jewess who was the acme of allure and chutzpah, a dyspepsic husband and father, a medical student. Descriptions were rare and sparse. My stories in comparison were loose, lazy, far too inclusive and meandering. I then turned to The Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. His being well travelled and his familiarity with so many evocative settings made me feel again the parochialism of my life, especially back here in the black country. It is something I have been feeling again recently. I want to move on. I am feeling claustrophobic in my relationship, in my life here, restricted in my job, earning so little money with so little time to travel. I have such a need to move on.
His stories were taut, as deceptively leisurely as Chekhov’s but, certainly these early ones are far more confected, not nearly so natural. The first one I read runs like this:
A man who waits on the dining carriage of a train and who long passed has lost his wife having had to flee Russia plans to kill himself. That very night his wife is on the train speaking about him with a stranger. As she moves to the dining carriage an uncouth stranger accosts her and, unnerved, she repairs to her compartment having lost her appetite. Later, she realises she has lost her wedding ring: she must have left it in the dining carriage. She returns but the carriage has been decoupled. The waiter, who has a cokaine habit, has glimpsed her, but cannot place where he knows her from. His colleague spies a ring andm, checking nobody can see him, picks it up and secretes it into a pocket. The lost emigre walks out of the carriage, crunching into the cinder of the neighbouring railway track as a train comes through.
No doubt the story says more about fate than I was at first prepared to grant it - I dislike confection in literature and was looking for something, anything with which to find fault in these great authors, or something that could make it all seem achievable to me sat at my writing desk distracted by old books about zen I was given as presents which it would be a disservice to a loyal and generous and understanding friend to leave further to gather dust, tempted by books about solitude, by French Spanish and Russian, by exercise and food. Probably it says more about an age in which these geographical dislocations were tragically common and in which divine providence and fate were experienced as ineffable forces than a more naturalistic work could possibly do. Certainly, in the cold light of day it is as intimidating as the Chekhov and it might pay for me to read some of those ‘finger exercises’ authors like to pass off as short stories once in a while - Joseph Heller was right when he commented that many prospective authors read only classics, and they think the only kind of books that exist are classics. Still, if our grasp does not exceed our grasp, then what is heaven for?
This morning I woke again unable to concentrate. I’ve just come back from an hour’s exertion riding my bike round the canal. I perhaps hadn’t slept well. Perhaps due to ginseng tea which I had yesterday and the day before. In any case I don‘t usually remember my dreams and over the last couple of days recalled at least something. First several robin red breasts flying onto a window above my bed, and then flying into the room. And second being in a group of people, possibly from work though I don’t recall trying to catch a bird, I think, a pigeon. Finally, after several attempts with it flying right by me, I succeeded.
I took to reading another story. Another Russian abroad, in France, in a hotel, I think (I am not sure, and this is why I term these reveries palimpsests), and then in a Russian restaurant. My mind drifted, and I thought of how I could set a story in a louche hotel or bed and breakfast. Soon enough I had thought up a man who had gone into hiding having convinced himself he had been the perpetrator of a prominant murder, and I began to think how this would sit with my other fiction such as Collateral Damage, a story about a student going out to paint grafiti on an abandoned building beside a railway line where she falls through the roof and breaks her leg and pelvis stuck then when a paranoid schizophrenic returns sure that she is plotting against him, and Lithium Elysium about another student, an artist who has been put on Lithium Carbonate following a number of manic episodes involving hypersexuality, who rings around former amours trying to find somebody who understands who it feels to suddenly be numb to everything.
There was something about the idea I didn’t like. I moved on. Developed it. Fused it with an old idea I had over a decade ago now about gangs carrying out shootings of rich individuals with cryonics bangles designed to inform medical personnel to preserve the bodies in a particular way at the point of death before their collection for cryonic preservation. It became an idea for a science fiction novel. A dystopian future. Alongside those signed up for cryonic freezing there were a number of children born to genetic selection who were raised in a kind of kibbutzim and taught from infancy to play and perform, to speak numerous languages (each was assigned to a living area in which three languages were spoken), to argue and think logically, and so on and so forth. They were, of course, intended to be an elite. Only, once these children grew and some were taught about method acting, some, who had come to resent their upbringing (there was one in particular who was charismatic, and, from reading J S Mill and his autobiography saw faults in the argument regarding Socrates and a pig satisfied - Witgenstein was satisfied, but Mill was not, he had not experienced the animal pleasures, that much was clear, and so had no ground to dismiss them as their carers did in agonised paranoia that they might become dissolute and careless, like fin de siecle aristocrats; he rejected Mill’s hothousing and so, his own), thought of a way to exact their revenge. Once they had left the bounds of their education and kibbutzim, they went out to act. Some become drug addicts. Some acted out mental illness - one such going out and going on the run having convinced herself she had committed a horrific murder Others humiliated themselves in like manner. Some took overdoses and died. At first, they got together and acted as themselves. Later, they were sure they were being bugged and followed everwhere and could no longer do so. Some committed suicide.
Later, once it was discovered, there was a whole damage limitation exercise. They were hailed posthumously as genii who were prepared, many of them, to die for their art. Their ‘work’ was interpreted by highly-regarded academics.
The novel would be set in Prague in a future where the Czech Republic either remains as a lesser-valued member of the EU with less stringent regulations on genetic selection and the like, or has left the union.
This led to further reveries about how the novel could be written in Czech, my bad czech being corrected by M_____ and finally sent off to R, Mrs Pigeon’s husband, the writer and PR exec, to submit it somewhere or other so that we could begin our life together in the city - these, reveries borrowed from my Christmas reveries on To Je Bomba, a Czech-language farce I thought up while I was over there drinking with M____ and her brother, unable to concentrate with the lager and the fact that he speaks so quickly.