The Guardian’s Saturday Review was once one of the highlights of my week. The only reason it isn’t now is because of my desperate attempts to cut out all the distractions in my life. Desperate attempts, of course, which haven’t remotely worked and which are no doubt destined to continue for some time. Favourites are Doonesbury, which is occasionally perplexing (I once looked up a site to get the measure of the cast of characters, but didn’t succeed in learning very much) but unfailingly entertaining, the political cartoon, and a column called Writer’s Rooms in which a photograph is accompanied by a short description of a writer’s relationship with their room and the various items in it.Inevitably this has led to countless reveries of me describing my own room, and this has come about again today for various reasons. It started off with buying the Guardian all this week. I haven’t been buying it often at all for a long time now. Again, trying to minimise my distractions. I’m getting pretty out of shape with my knowledge of current affairs, something I used to be pretty clued up on. I started by chance buying it perhaps on Monday (yes, it must have been, because I took the day off, stressed, on Tuesday) when I was sent up the road to look for a stray student and couldn’t help buying myself some snacks for the pre-lunch lull. It just so happened that from the next day there were to be booklets of poetry, Eliot, Auden, Plath, Hughs, Larkin. On Saturday there was a CD with readings I hope to upload to my Ipod as soon as I’ve fitted the hard drive I had to order today (with the extra ram this old G4 has needed forever) to sort out the chock full boot drive - all 15 gig of her.
And so I read the Writer’s rooms, and enjoyed one of those petty moments of pleasure I so seldom experience when I realised it was a writer’s room and not an artist’s - for so long it seemed that it was never that, and then I felt so cheated when the format seemed to have changed on me. It was Charlotte Mendelson whose Love in Idleness I had struggled through late last year.
Another reason was the fact that I had been desperate today to sort myself out. This last week, as I have related in a post on MK’s sister site I have been incapable of doing anything much at all, and so I took to trying to brainstorm and desultorily set down ideas for systems for myself to organise my writing and my cooking, which is critically important to my wellbeing, at least for the moment.
It started out, I think, yesterday, after a morning and afternoon wasted with much vexation. I took a pen, the pen I had been wielding unsuccessfully trying to draw sketches for Pumpkin Positive in an attempt to arrive at a stripped down style I could consistently turn out, and started brainstorming on several sheets of paper at once. One related to cooking and had those tasks I could do in five and ten and fifteen minute slots of restless energy: peeling ginger, making onion purees, chopping onions and garlic, ginger and the like for curries the next day, making herb butters and even herby ice cubes. There would be a block of wood with a spike through it for receipts - one in the kitchen for food receipts, and one in my study for the miscellaneous crap I spend on to get into the financial situation I am in. There would be a row of bulldog clips screwed into the wall into which I would put shopping lists which would already be written out for certain recipes, those five and ten and fifteen minutes jobs that would need doing etc etc. These could be written up on cards which could be held in one of those boards like the ones they use in factories to hold the clocking in card.* I could make one of these from wood. Or metal. (You can see how this brainstorming process suits my mind, and how indeed the notebooks I have recently blogged about are also perfect for me, in the sense that I can sit down and thought can follow thought and I can try and follow them, writing and drawing as fast as I can.) Another paper consisted of two things. One was ideas for a flow chart which was to help me match my mood to the most suitable activity, so that, for example, I could go over old songs on the guitar when I was tired, exercise when angry, read (or write) in Czech when my limited reserves of concentration could be harnessed by my obsessive streak, and similarly, perhaps, with poetry. This, I had thought to be a more sustainable organisational system than a timetable. The second element to this paper ere Maxims, rules by which I was to live such as that I was to take Omega III fatty acids and only try to do two things with the day (cooking and my five and ten minute activities being of course excluded from the count).
I came away from this at one point today to find the ADD-Friendly Ways to Organise Your Life book that I bought two years ago only to read a fifth and then move on, for it eventually to be lost underneath a stack of books and eventually be tidied away. It has come out a couple of times since to be subjected to the same fate. I was fixing to do something. At one point I read about a “Launching Pad” (is that what they called it?), a place which is intended to remind us sufferers what we need for the day. It should be near the door and packed with visial clues and items to be remembered. I realised there was such a space beside the front door and directly in front of the descent from the stairs before you turn back to the right for the last few steps to get down the the door. I cleared that, or rather, chucked everything off it onto the floor in arbitrary piles. From that I moved upstairs, flushing outhe two drawers that were still full of clutter. (Drawers we learn in this book, are the enemy of the ADDer.) This to fill them up with the piles of czech magazines I haven’t picked up once to read, though I would certainly have enjoyed it if I had, and then all those books that I could read from time to time, such as the Historical Atlas of the Celtic World that I bought and started to read while waiting for my boss and our student to finish off in the muzeum in Bath, the large and expensive textbook Human Nutrition by Catherine Geissler and Hilary Powers I bought after having been encouraged to look further into nutrition by my then outgoing line manager, Line by Line, a book on How to Edit Your Own Wrtiting which I bought probably a year ago, and the New Gaia Atlas of Planet Management. All of which I now suspect will get shut away and forgotten about as much as the poetry books in the top drawer (also intended for the same purpose of being amenable to small much-needed breaks from writing), the one czech magazine that was already in that second drawer, and indeed the Faber Book of Reportage, the Economist forecast for 2007 (or whatever it is) and the politics textbooks left over from my degree that I was hoping to delve into once in a while when I shut them in the one accessible drawer in my divan bed in the room at my parents’ house I haven’t slept in for over two years, since M came over and started first staying at my folk’s in the sofa bed in the spare room at weekends, the room I took to staying in even through the week when she stayed still as an au pair at her family in Birmingham because of the mess that had spread across the bed and the 6 square metres of space on the floor in what would become my study.
Such efforts are always quixotic. And yet perhaps they move me on by tiny steps each time.
My short story collections have moved from one of the shelves against the wall to the window ledge directly in front of my desk. This, I hope, may actually do more to encourage my reading than any other clever structures. Quite simply, they are visible, and should not, I hope, get crowded out.
So far little else has changed. I have put a few diaries, Kafka’s, Isherwood’s, Kingsley Amis’ and Benn’s underneath the drawers, and a few magazines in the basket underneath my weights bench which was to be my projects bin (the idea being that there was limited space in the basket. I never used it). The weights bench itself, which in my Writer’s rooms reveries I have always defended as one of the things which gets me back on task, along with my guitars, I have only today discovered as being exceptionally comfortable as a reading recliner chair. I sat back on it today and rested my legs over the curls support cushion, which I swivelled round 180 degrees, resting my feet then on the foam pad of the leg curl bar. Very comfortable but for the fact that you can’t rest your head back because the back rest doesn’t extend far enough. Still, I fond I could clutch the book with one hand, and support my head with the other, which was comfortable enough, especially when I switched periodically to sit in the other position, leaning forward with my feet on the lower foam pad of the leg curl bar, and leaning against the backward forcep curl bar with my forearms. But then I had a brainwave. I could stretch some material from the back rest around the metal bar of the weights sat in the bench press position and, so long as I had my body weight on it with my back I could rest my head on that. And so it transpired. I used the (faux?) leather soft case of my bass guitar (which, hanging on the wall opposite my two desks, would not be in the picture).
I moved my amp to the top of my mini filing cabinet, and the metronome my brother bought me ast Christmas in front of that. The two lamps still in the middle of my two desks, the sunlight box still in the corner to keep my energy levels up at times. And that new addition, the twin candle beside my new supersize me monitor (which I love, even if I thought I was ordering a different model with memory card readers and all sorts). The candle is also intended to organise me. It’s from an idea I had looking at candles maybe two years back at the German market in Birmingham around Christmas time with big candles which advertised an eighty hour burn time I thought I could use for specific projects so that I could never fool myself how much work I was doing, how much time I was putting into it - so long as I was strict with myself, blowing out the candle when I got distracted etc. The obsession renewed this year when we visited the market again to see the same stall and I bought these diddy scentless candles from E-bay. They make a pretty spill of wax on the desk. Currently they are measuring my efforts at any kind of writing (and I mean writing as opposed to planning) and playing guitar (I really fretted about assigning this one, but didn’t really hold out and just started burning it for guitar, probably because I hadn’t been able to play for a long time and so pushed it up the priorities list a little higher than it was intended to go).
I could go on. The cartoon I bought M for Christmas last year which currently sits on the floor but will probably go up one day, the weighted gloves I use (very occasionally) for shadow boxing, the camera hanging on the wall I keep intending to take out to photograph the Black Country. But it’s late, I’m getting up early to drop M off to work, and to post that shit to Germany!
ps. I have since photographed the room, and plan to add it to this post (the fact that I don’t have a card reader on my monitor makes that whole process so much the harder). The photo includes my screensaver (the screensaver which often comes on when I’m addressing my place of work with a powerpoint presentation as the new owner, coming back as a famous author having been sacked some time before). This was not intentional, and it came on at about my fifth shot a fraction of a second before I took the picture. It would have been contrived to put the screensaver on to take the picture, but after it had come on, I felt it would almost be contrived to do other than use this picture (that and the photo in the corner was obscured by the compression ring of the barbell, something that featured in my decision, though I don’t plan to upload it at a resolution that this would make any difference). The screensaver has prompted some of the arguments we used to have and has since been discovered too on my Ipod.
*For a very long time I had an obsession about these cards, and these machines. I wanted one I could clock in and out of my various projects… I say that as if I am distancing myself from it. I would still love to have one of these machines. The obsession, however has faded. Perhaps by the time I get to be in the Guardian’s Writer’s Rooms I will have one, and proudly show it off.