rationale: to get further with this novel, which completely possesses me still.
2> Write Checkmate
rationale: This has become part of a short story collection, The Labour in Vain, which draws on my experiences from drinking in the same, and also of course lays the foundations for my later examination of the successes and failures of the Blair years. More observational and less analytical, it would ideally by written first.
Learn Russian
Rationale: I will soon have a chance to speak to some Russians, and would like to develop further my as yet inchoate grasp of the slavic languages. I still nurse on occasions the idea of studying the slavic languages at university. Yes, there is no urgency here, but I do enjoy it, and could progress piecemeal.
Read The Optimum Nutrition Bible
Rationale: My research into nutrition has taken me this far, and it could take me further yet if I only put a little more time into it. It could reward me. I raced through the first fifth to a third of the book, as always, but slowed up.
Listen to Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngard
Rationale: I should read more modern novels and analyse them. I saw Shteyngart at the Prague Writer’s Festival when I was first in
Listen to Hard Times
Rationale: Such as this one, which jumps about a little in terms of POV according to E M Forster. It is useful for that. Contains a lot of apparently extraneous material too, which may help me see what should and should not be included in a novel - the serial publication of Dicken’s novels leads to a pretty flabby artefact in my view. Such books do give me a lot to reflect on in terms of structure, something I know too little about still.
Listen to American Prometheus
Rationale: This is the kind of book I genuinely enjoy. I read too few biographies. I Enjoyed Monk’s Wittgenstein, which was similar in many ways. It’s not a book that will encourage me to relax, if relax I should; quite the contrary. But it teaches me a little about science, which I desperately need to know more about. And I enjoy it.
Read Human Nutrition
Rationale: I originally bought this book (at great expense) after my then line manager encouraged me to read more and educate myself in this direction, saying there would be work within the institution for me. Things changed pretty rapidly after that. I really didn’t feel that I was supported.
Write blog about
Rationale: there was a lot that could be written about this: reflections in the car about environmentalism and Marx’s take on progressivism. Horse riding and other brochures. Feeling my age and not doing the things I enjoy. Coming back to
Write blog about the supreme Leader
Possibly two here. I was debating today whether I could still disguise him. This is critically important in terms of the continuation of Yes We Have No Bananas.
Draw cartoon about the supreme leader: shoes, hair, specs?
Make Buckwheat gnocci?
Write “Yorrick Notes to Family Fortunes“
Rationale: This I at one point considered would help me to get a publishing contract. The chutzpah of it. The novelty of it. I bought a few York Notes, and bid on others, trying to get a flavour of this eminently-satirisable genre.
Get fucking internet to work
rationale: No internet, no blog.
Read Ascension du haute mal
Rationale: I have become depressed a couple of times that the things I want to be good at in life, the things I should be good at, I am not.
Practice guitar
Rationale: This I have wanted for years and have found no time for it. I have not now practiced for a couple of weeks at least. Not properly since I had a week off. I spent a lot of time trying to learn French after Uni, and still very little. I should make an effort, even if this includes banning myself from reading English for a month or so to move forward.
Read bible in French
Rationale: As above.
Read My Deti ze stanice Zoo
Rationale: My Czech has not been advancing for months, perhaps for upwards of a year, or as much as two years. This pains me. My pronunciation remains poor, and my fluency very bad. I understand, but it’s not good enough. I should by now be reading genuine literature in
Write about time at Soapy Joe’s
Aspie is… ?
Study Czech grammar
Rationale: My Czech has not been advancing for months, perhaps for upwards of a year, or as much as two years. This pains me. My pronunciation remains poor, and my fluency very bad. I understand, but it’s not good enough. I should by now be reading genuine literature in
Read short stories
Rationale: The basis of my fiction is or should be the short story. Most of my strongest influences are in this medium, though the working of my mind does tend towards the novel. Family Fortunes grew out of an idea for a short story and has become episodic as if it is constructed of shorts. Each chapter will have to be constructed like one.
Read The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Rationale: One strong influence who writes novels. I descided to go back and read it again when I realised that many of the questions I was asking myself about the author’s discussion of characters might be answered in part by reading the book.
Read War and Peace
Rationale: I may have began to read Anna Karenina intending to then read the other works discussed by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of the Novel. I certainly then bought his book from E-Bay, and read Madame Bovary because of this book, which actually discusses not only Tolstoy’s far longer work, but also Richardson’s Clarissa, the longest work in the English language, and one I might never in my life complete.
Shorts such as… getting off the bus at school.
Rationale: I need to start building up a picture of my life, and such memories may be one of the best ways of doing it.
Synopses
Rationale: I constantly write of how many ideas I have and why it is so frustrating to have no time to write - and here of course I am talking about needing to conditions to write longer pieces, which for me differ from the conditions to write short pieces for my blog - and yet I have not demonstrated exactly what ideas have died, and why it grieves me. Also, should any publisher come to read this blog, they would have a better idea of what my work is about if I take this step.
Master Kidderminster introduction
Rationale: I started this all unceremoniously, but I have had myriad ideas how to start it all, from a shard of one of my first ideas for a novel, to the interconnected web of ideas I came up with in Prague back in Christmas left on my own for so many blissful hours filling notebooks. It is too amorphous right now. I need to explain the palimpsestuous reading of Hard Times, and so much else. The Get Involved section in any case has some potential, at least, to stir some shit up should anyone ever start reading this blog.
Think up crossword for access to password-secure entries/articles
Rationale: If I am to be open in my blogs I should consider securing certain entries.
Read The End of Oil
Rationale: partly, I need to keep myself educated about current events. Partly I need to inform myself in a way that will help in the writing of Chris’s character for when he becomes politicised.
Read The Myth of the Goddess by Anne Barings and Jules Cashford
Rationale: This has become a part of the moral backbone of the novel, which is something that seemed wanting after the reading of Anna Karenina with it’s ending. It is one of the drawbacks of such a weighty novel that it seems to demand such a philosophical conclusion, and I am tending towards this again and again.
Read Lysistrata
Rationale: This is not so necessary. The dramatisation of a modernising adaptation of Lysistrata insinuated itself into the novel a couple of times but is likely as not a step too far.
Write Virgin story, with my dad and the phone call, this with Dad on the tape recorder
Redraught and finish Reflections on Igby Goes Down
Look into Educational theorists
Rationale: [censored] If I am to maintain Yeswehavenobananas as a two tier site with a continuation of the original palimpsestuous story, then I must do some research.
Top up Washer bottle with water
Rationale: It’s still full of engine coolant/anti-freeze, which can’t be good.