I got depressed at around three o’clock today when M____ went to work because I hadn’t done anything this morning or afternoon and didn’t know what I could get down to, and indeed I didn’t get down to very much at all. I read a little of Exit into History by Eva Hoffman, one of the many books on Eastern Europe that I had bought over a year ago for research into Darina’s part in the novel, something which had been born back then as a novel in and of itself sometime around new year 2005 from M_____’s experiences as an au pair and which I had vacilated over but couldn’t get shot of. After that I cooked a pasta sauce listening to Robert Openheimer, American Prometheus, the audiobook I have managed to stick out the longest. Read the rest of this entry »
Today was a bad day. Read the rest of this entry »
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
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
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
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.
A few months back when I was getting into planning Family Fortunes perhaps before it became really unwieldy, I had a dilemma over Chris and his fate. This dilemma was shaped in no small part by B_____ and his luck with women. Chris, you see, is a fantastic guy. He becomes the real hero of the piece, though it was not initially conceived in that way, I think. He has no luck with women, however. Part of this is the way he dresses, in oversized geeky t-shirts and naff boots (the right-hand sketch above is mid-way through his transformation in the novel) but also because he is a geek. Part of the problem, though, is with women, who can’t see through this, because many women in Britain claim to want one thing in men but actually go for something else entirely and decent men like Chris often get overlooked.
The novel is in part about the relationships between men and women in England, and how this is curretly dysfunctional. I had a dilemma with Chris because I think a man like him could continue to get overlooked, and women would continue to reject him. I wanted, however, to offset the depressive nature of the novel and its focus on one of the few communal rituals we still have in Britain, the stag night, and the fact that it is so dysfunctional, and the rape. I did not want to make the novel too moralistic and schematic, with good characters getting their reward and bad characters their comeuppance (as time went on there were more and more instances of exactly this, however, with the rapist being threatened in a restaurant, and a burglar being both stabed and electrocuted in the testicles with the broken bulb of a desk light; it seems I came to enjoy these more Dickensian elements) but Chris seemed to deserve something, and his being coupled off and changing and growing with time seemed to free me to diverge from this karmic trend elsewhere, to show for example that fate is less kind to those who are already underprivileged, like Gemma, the rape victim who winds up doing worse than a Dickensian villain.
B______ has been overlooked by women. He doesn’t jump through all the hoops of what a man should be according to women, and the quorums of friends who get together to discuss men and relationships. We saw him a month or so back at a nice little pub over in Clent where some old folks had got together to play jazz with a french horn, a clarinet and sax, a little drum kit and an old singer - reminiscent, I thought at the time, of Belleville Rendezvous. He had brought his girlfriend. He was off the anti-depressants he had been on and was doing ok. Only now I saw him last week and he hadn’t seen her for a couple of weeks, and the whole cycle was coming round again - he tends to last with one girl for a month or so and then lose contact without any real reason given. He gets clingly, that’s for sure, and can be uncommunicative and intense at times, and that doesn’t help, but M_____ can’t believe the luck he has. Assholes tend to get the girls.
And what really brought back the dilemma I had over Chris was that it was the lads who had fucked it up for him, just as Ben and his lot almost fuck it up for Eddie and Danielle in FF. D_____ was back from Sandhurst with his girlfriend, and they went on a double date. He regaled B____’s girlfriend, who we had taken to be older and wiser, and less likely to fuck him around, with stories of B____’s past with women. It seems she wasn’t impressed, and she has barely spoken to him since.
It’s too late for me to change anything with Chris. Everything is locked together now, and Chris’s relationship with Rock Chick [the one character whose name I haven’t yet decided on] is now crucial, but B____’s fate, and the anger it spurred in me really brought it back, and perhaps made me feel that in one way, the novel is a little untrue to life. I say perhaps because it’s been a week now since I mulled all this over, and I have been away since then in Shell Island with work, and a lot happens in a week. Emotionally I am once again removed from the dilemma, but one way I reassured myself was that, actually, geeks like Chris do very well when they are monied, as he is, and with prospects, that Rock Chick has been burned by the kind of men women tend to go for, and that he does change, becoming more socially clued in (though she still has to see his occasional lapses as endearing) and interesting. And of course, he is a hero, and fucked over one of her exes. All in all, it is not so unbalanced, but it just shows one of the ways that life influences art.
Friday, I finished a course in Studio 3 today early, then went to town where I bought a book on blues guitar and a few picks and then met Misa. Before this I had gone into town with James, and seen a poster for Bank Account Plus which featured a Matryoshka, a Russian Doll. I laughed about this because at one point in the training on Monday moning or afternoon, the guy asked us what triggers us to be angry. I said a couple of things, and then pointed to the corner of the room – it was the Eurythmy room – at a Russian doll. I hate those things, I said, prompting laughter, most people of course thinking this strange.