In my time writing this blog, that is, trying to, trying not to, writing those desultory pieces in the useless downtime I could not set to any other useful purpose, I have scratched the surface of what it is all about so little that as often before, I tend to feel it is better not to have opened my mouth, put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard at all, than to settle for something so inchoate, that will inevitably allow people to know me less rather than more. One of the things I have barely mentioned is my notebooks. Strange, given that, I suppose, looking back, these notebooks, full of thoughts badly expressed, drawings, poems, names of novels and stories, song lyrics, inventions, angry jottings, ideas for anything from monetary systems to bicycle, camera and guitar designs, stories, of course, are a more consistent part of my behaviour since childhood than anything else. Also, they are the place I sketched out (literally), my ideas for this site which has, of course, come to be nothing remotely like the eccentric but coherent and characterful website I first planned out.
I can’t draw. But then again I can make a resemblance to things, something pointed out to me when I was teaching English abroad. There, other teachers would joke about my sketches. I remembered just today in fact, when depressively reminding myself of my own incompetence at teaching, the day I tried to teach a complicated roleplay about Karen Silkwood. It was a complicated role play involving role cards with prompts for such people as plant manager, New York Times journalist and Silkwood’s family. It was the time I was perhaps at my most angry and radical following the September 11th attacks and subsequent invasion of Iraq and I had previously tried to teach a lesson, to the same class I think, in which I described how deploying tanks was no deterrent against the surface-to-air missiles that were said to have been the subject of specific intelligence warnings (I felt at the time and still do that the tanks were more for the purpose of promoting the very fear and panic terrorists are keen to be the cause of, armed patrols being rather too common a sight in many airports around the world to do this sufficiently), I was reading the Ecologist in the library and following the news with the excellent BBC World Service. The role play, like the annotated version of Tony Harrison’s V I tried to teach the same class, was way beyond their level, and so forgetting once again the basic teaching practise of trying to elicit new words, that is, asking the class if they knew them from a description, I set out again to write up lists onto the board, and sketch a few drawings besides. The one that really tickled the tutor I shared the class with was ‘wake,’ as in the wake from a boat or ship, and not even that, but its use in the phrase ‘in the wake of’. This for a class none of whom had yet grasped the present perfect! I drew it out and they later guessed the meaning of a word in Jana’s class (a quite stunningly attractive tall slender teacher with a perfect complexion and sexy bob haircut just over her ear I might once have had something with if I had only picked up the hints and had a little more bottle), offering the puzzling suggestion that it might be the disruption of water after a boat, and then the explanation from the students that they had derived this guess from one of the little pictures I draw on the board all the while. I remember how I got a quite aspergic handle on that particular conversation, thinking she was serious when she said ‘I must be a bad teacher because I don’t draw pictures all the time on the board.’ (She had a nice voice, too, thinking about it.
Anyway, the point being that I can’t draw, but then again I can’t sing and sing in the car, and would sing in the shower if only I could remember more than the chorus of any given song. I can’t sing and I can’t draw, but I would love to be able to do either, still more both. I can’t draw but used to do it all the time, even as far as wanting to be a cartoonist when I grew up. I always had a book full of drawings and panelled-off cartoon stories, and then even when my stories started getting more wordy, I would still annotate for many years.
I wrote notes about the Silkwood class, incidentally, and the surface-to-air missile digression, if digression it was. It gives a good enough example of when these notes come about, and by extension, the drawing. Sat in the Cafe Imperial on Na Prikope (literally on the ditch) in Prague 1, the marble tiled cafe down the road from where I used to teach, I wrote what I can only imagine was a characteristically incoherent piece entitled, I think, No Can Do. This piece, the title of which was taken from the phrase “those who can, do, those who can’t, teach,” was nothing but fragmentary notes, a medium I have made my own over the years. It took in, I think, my inability to teach, overthinking things to an embarassing degree, my sometime anti-Americanism (I think the title may also have referred to the American “Can Do” spirit), and I don’t know what else. This is how it goes: these notes take in a curious aray of thoughts. They can be a snapshot of a state of mind. They are, consequently, quite uncommonly cathartic.
More recently drawing has been reserved for insomniac spells, like the above, a rendering of my work down the woods I set to whilst watching Ewan McGregor’s The Long Way Down; for staving off boredom in social situations (principally at home at my parents’ whilst I was still living here, as, temporarily, I am again); and at one and the same time brainstorming a character or two, like the picture below.
I got serious about it for a while, just like I got serious about trying to learn to sing while playing guitar. There was shading, exercises, self portrait.
But then what haven’t I got serious about? These obsessions cycle around and around, and its a matter of entropy in my life that every interest I have ever had, however vague it may be doesn’t ever lie low or take a back seat for long.
It was with this great upheaval over Christmas, an upheaval that like all the others, happens so quickly that I haven’t managed to write about it at all, that drawing returned to haunt me. How?
I needed to simplify my life. But more than that, I had determined upon a New Year’s resolution, to live with my temperament, not struggle against it. Reading all of the books Percy Lubbock analyses in his The Craft of Fiction did not seem to cut it on this score, not when War and Peace is one such and when I hadn’t even managed to ascertain which Tolstoy book it was before ploughing on with Anna Karenina, and not when Richardson’s Clarissa, the longest work in English literature, is one of the others, a book I imagine to be so monumentally dull that I would struggle with a single page. Nor for that matter did reading Milan Kundera’s essays on the novel, and all the of the novels he analyses. Yet these were my plans, intended to put me on the path to writing my own novels, which I would after such an education, be able to structure much more satisfactorily. And then there was the novels. I had built myself up to some obsession about book clubs, an obsession born of the loneliness that later saw my life come crumbling down around me and then had tried to roadtest this latest obsession (built up at one point to an idea for naming it the Lunar Club after a club Erasmus Darwin and friends had established in Birmingham) by trying to read the Guardian Book Club’s choice for the month, Lanark by Alasdair Gray. I couldn’t get through it at all. It begins with the exact kind of fantastical nonsense I cannot stand. (I am afraid I find it hard to agree with Kundera’s assessment of Kafka, that he is one of last century’s greats, his worldscapes add up to no atmosphere at all for me since they are not rooted in this flawed world we know.) I could see then how few novels I actually get through, and how slowly. I could no way stick with a book club nor stick most of the characters in it. Like most of my plans, this bubble burst and burst good. I started asking for poetry books for Christmas to try and pare it all down. I could scarcely write a novel if I can barely read one! It was time to stop struggling against myself to do all these things I have to force myself to do. Writing novels was one of them - Family Fortunes had died a death around this time, something that may have been more traumatic than I even knew. Living this settled life in a long-term relationship and in a semi-detached house was the same.
The poetry came and went. It will inevitably come back again. It came and went essentially with this upheaval I have intimated. And then there were the drawing implements I had asked for for Christmas. My brother’s girlfriend had given me some pencils and a couple of sketchbooks. For a long time after Christmas these had seemed like just another iron in the fire, like the woodworking book I had impulsively asked for from M. It seemed too much. I was trying to write and it was going so slowly, and I was trying to find a routine for it again, and then there was this extra thing. But at some point, the belief developed - and I will comment not at all on its logic and veracity - that drawing graphic novels and comics, or at least drawing and writing for others to do so, annotating my work, would be easier for me, more in tune with my personality, than writing novels or even short stories.
This has been a long time in coming. I have been toying in my mind for a long time with illustration for Family Fortunes. I had Chris Riddell down as providing the illustrations, and have met him in numerous reveries, just in the same way as I have had Tony Harrison writing the free adaptation ofLysistrata for Family Fortunes. At times, when I have despaired ofthe complexity of the novel, I have welcomed this whimsical embrace of this medium. At other times I have seriously considered it as a legitimate method of pacing - for the Stag Weekend sections, for example. Always it was other people’s drawing.
But I have started keeping a notebook again recently and have, for this period at least, been drawing. I have been trying to keep that Christmas notebook for drawing on the right-hand page, and experiments in verse on the left.
Most recently, I have been drawing ideas for a strip/graphic novel entitled Pumpkin Positive. The title is taken from an example of medical abbreviation.
The start of the notebook, the two pages pictured above, refers to an appointment with my psychiatrist, and this strip has an obvious connection to my condition and search for appropriate treatment. I was looking up medical abbreviations on the net following a session looking into my medical records at the doctor’s, a day I had off from work ostensibly with a bad cold, but actually, perhaps, with die-off symptoms of Candida, a condition the doctor eventually started that day to take seriously. No insulting abbreviations and acronyms that I could find. Only DNA, over and over, something I discovered means nothing more than ‘did not attend.’
I have thought a lot about this now and still don’t know how I feel about it all, aside from knowing it has not remotely reduced the hill I would have to climb, though it may do something for my motivation. I know too that I am in the middle of an obsession right now, and the bubble will burst, as it always does. I have thought about how to track down an illustrator. There must be plenty out there who can’t write. When I took a trip down London at the weekend, I tried to find a magazine with some classified, but had no success. I have thought over so much. From putting up some of the ’stories for illustration’ I have written notes for in the past and asking for submissions on the net, to paring down my drawing style to such an extent that I could manage myself. (It is a classic beginner’s error, of course, whether it be with music, art or writing, to see something done simply, and well, and think ‘I could do that!’ but I did think of Jeffrey Brown and his ingenuous Clumsy and Unlikely, which I had enjoyed immensely in the reading binges I never get with novels a few months before.)
I’ll be writing another What a To Do in a few months time and drawing won’t feature at all and I’ll be amazed at myself I could ever have kidded myself at all, but right now I’m as happy as ever to be intoxicated by hope, dreams, the promise of future success.