Books I have taken upstairs that I have smuggled downstairs to the lounge over the last three months of living in this house in a parallel of what happened at the old house living with Mum and Dad of having such an absolute mess in my own room that I found I couldn’t work there. I am trying to make an effort at the moment to clear out my tip of a room so I can use it to work, and so I can have some kind of maintained space that will then help me keep the clutter in my brain to a minimum. I have always thought that the clutter in my brain inevitably caused clutter in my surroundings, but my parents would try to tell me that the opposite can also be the case, and it may indeed be true that if I enforced order in my room and had a basket of all the things that I am working on at any one time, I might be able to stick to that.
In any case, here is the list, as an example of some of the clutter that does pervade my life:
(in no particular order)
John O’Hara’s Ourselves to Know, a novel I read less than a page of before taking it back from a holiday I have just been on with a student and another member of staff.
John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meanie, yet another novel I began in order to get some ideas about Point of View and narration styles. Stalled at p. 140
Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, I have no reason why I brought this downstairs.
Paul Roger’s The End of Oil, broadly I was reading this to get a handle of the politics of the novel with regard to Chris’s later take on things. Stalled at p, 186
Jeanne Gregory and Sue Lees, Policing Sexual Assault, a library book I have just renewed at great expense (it seems they have either just introduced costs for renewals without any forewarning or that I have incurred it for the length of time I have had this book). This is one of the books I took out a year or so ago at around the same time I bought the book in which I recently found the bookmark with the priorities list. I renewed it and the others many many times last time and have done so again this time but have progressed no further. One of my more idiosyncratic bookmarks, the cover of a metal nail file which I used to maladroitly file down my quixotic fingerpicking plucking hand nails for the couple of months in which I inconsistently prioritised guitar playing, is between pages twenty five and twenty six, “Police Culture and its Contradictions.”
A BBC Book, Great Journeys, another borrowed book, this time from a colleague. I borrowed this many months ago when I was pencilled in for going to Russia. One chapter is a ‘potted history’ of Russia by Norman Stone. The chapter is barely twenty five pages long. I did not manage to read all of it, nor to return the book, despite the fact I found it very interesting. I remember that I was bringing a rediculous number of books to work at the time.
Roger Graff, Talking Blues, one of the many books I took out from the library both a year ago and now. In fact the first stamp on the current ticket goes back to 01. JUL 00 so my stamp in this book actually must be… No, this is one I looked at last year but didn’t take out. It was when I was trying to crowbar in the police in the already crammed story. In any case, page 69.
James Norton’s Bent Coppers, however, was stamped for me last year on the same date as Policing Sexual Assault, 26 SEP 2006, the last stamp for both of them. On neither occasions did I open the book. Looking at it with a cup-half-full POV, on neither occasion did the book stall.
Ray Mears, The Real Heroes of Telemark. Another book I have borrowed from a friend at work, so long ago that I feel bad about giving it back. I mentioned to him that I had read it, but on audiobook so that I did not see the pictures, and so he offered to lend me the book. I have not yet found time to open it, nor been able to rationalise to myself why I should prioritise the book that would not be advancing either my understanding of the crafting of fiction nor the necessary research for my novel. The audiobook was one of the ones I read in Prague when my brother sent a lot of audiobooks over one Christmas and I had more or less finished them when the day came.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House. One of the sadder of the inclusions in this collection, it has stalled this time at p. 208, chapter 17. I first started reading it to try and keep up with the BBC serialisation that started soon after I came back from Prague. I thought it would be good for me to read for a number of reasons. For the sake of narrative styles, because it is a book that E M Forster uses to illustrate his view that consistency of narrative style is not necessary so long as the reader is carried along, and also because of the themes I was developing with my novel at the time I began to read it, perhaps for the second time. I get bogged down with the sentimentality of the book, and with what I see as the rather frivolous unrealistic characterisation. This time I tried to skip from the paperback edition to an audiobook, but this has stalled all the same with the difficulty of keeping up with uploads to my MP3 player what with the necessity of doing so at my parents house because my MP3 player is not Mac compatible.
Charlotte joko Beck, Everyday Zen. This was a book given to me one time by Pak Choi and which I picked up when I was feeling depressed at how little time I had when I took off a week a couple of months back. Stalled, probably at around page thirty it depressed me a little more. I find the idea of relaxing into the present moment insidious. I am resisitent to it, and cannot force myself to become attuned to any spiritual take on things.
Anthony Storr, Solitude. I think I wrote a piece about this a while ago. I tried to read a little of it while I took that week off. Stalled very early.
Aristophanes, translated by Douglass Parker, Lysistrata. Crazy! This is the first time I have opened this book, inscribed with the lonely but helpful single word marginalia SEX on page 17. This book illustrates the tangential triangulation that comes to make up one of my novels. Tangential triangulation is the name I have just made up to describe the way in which my novels develop in my brain. Just as reveries form from tangents of my life, donnees, story ideas, form from the same, but since my brain works in this way, they do not sit still, and tangents continue to form from tangents even while the idea for the novel gestates in my mind – in that long gestation period which is the other other inevitable consequence of my attentional problems, since I cannot sit down and simply write the novel. This one, fortunately, developed in such a way that it is discrete, and can be excised. Others form in such a way, triangulated into other ideas and flashes of inspiration, that excising them would involve a complex operation not dissimilar to those performed to separate conjoined twins, an operation which, due to the necessary level of prolonged intellectual intensity, no more gets down than the writing itself. Lysistrata was to be the basis of a play within the novel written and performed to satarise the Americans in Iraq and the neocons and Republicans who pushed Iraq up the policy agenda. This was at once both a donnee and a reverie, since I was to write the play into the novel and at once write to Tony Harrison asking him if I could name drop and write in the novel that he translated the play (I once began to read a play translated by Tony Harrison in Prague Central Library). Of course, in many reveries, Tony was later to write the play based on my ideas. Tony has featured in my reveries for many years, and most centrally since I realised that he had once lived in the Czech Republic and once translated a libretta by, I think, Janacek. The most regular was sitting at a table at one of the awards ceremonies that I get so regularly invited to in my mind and switching to speaking in Czech after the ever invidious Alain De Botton insisted on speaking down to my girlfriend. There were various takes on what happens in ‘his’ translation and I would have to make a real effort to find the original notes (which could, as ever be in any number of places, hidden away on this computer or a number of others, on any number of notebooks, or dictated files which might or might not be descriptively titled), but I think that essentially the sex strike of the wives of leading Republicans leads to them finding their atavistic Puritan selves and finding at once the smiting Old Testament God, therefore only increasing their zeal in waging war. Power hungry women whose relationship with the sisterhood is as supportive as Anne Coulter’s also play their role, acting as willing self-styled ‘labour scabs’ (‘If sex is labour then I’m a labour scab’ reads one banner which wilfully misrepresents the arguments expressed by the striking workers in a protest against the sex strike led by scantily clad women who believe they should be supporting their men [I’m now making it up as I go along as this last motif was not a part of the original]). Another way of looking at the way I create is not triangulation (I have just scribbled a tongue-in-cheek representation of this) but by using the metaphor of fractals, which are created with the same algorithm aplied over and over so that patterns repeat however detailed a picture becomes, and to any level of magnification. This is what this particular idea feels like. Ie. I could zoom into the schema of my novel in my head and see this play branching out. In any case, it is insane, and the very fact that the idea does not attach itself at any point, but that I was thinking that different characters could be involved in some way with the play (though I was overwhelmingly tending towards Nat, perhaps with Chris) demonstrates that however much this play is an expression of my world, it is excrescence in terms of the novel itself. Tony Harrison can rest easy.
There are many other novels and books scattered around me but I will have to continue the list another day. I have done nothing that I would have hoped to do today and have to earn some brownie points by cleaning the kitchen. Besides, I have had an alternative idea for something I must do for my doctor’s appointment coming up, rather, that is, than writing him a letter. Confronting this clutter, and at a time when I am not so able to concentrate having drank some coffee today, and when drawing is pushing itself up again in order to document my day at the woods succumbing to the culture for coffee there, is inevitably making me think of how I can try to move forward and do something about this problem.