2012 /13

Monday 25th February 2013


By doing this I am exposing just how I am NOT progressing. The whole world can see it. There was a lot of activity in 2011 when I began to keep a visible account. I felt obliged to keep going on pain of invalidating myself. Then last year the truth did out. What I said I did was what I did. And now it is 2013.

Annie, the cat - she is ineffably old... 18? 19?
Used to live in Manchester, now lives in London
Writing:1.
While cat sitting last week I managed to open a file containing a version of my book The Glassblower's Daughter, which I am supposed to be editing. I can do it - I have had (regrettably) the pre-requisite 2 year break from even looking at it.  And I did edit about four pages of it. I enjoyed it. I got stuck in. And then it was bedtime. And that was it. I was somehow too busy to go back to it. I had envisaged this week on my own in a flat with just a cat for company as the perfect opportunity to disengage from the hectic stuff I do normally and get back into  book writing mode. I can now tell you that it would need a lot longer. A week serves to prepare you for arriving in that state. It is maybe the airlock before the de-contamination chamber. I would have to be retired from my job now, to get back to it. I've just got too embedded in my job at the uni. That and the classical guitar promoting.

2.
I did jot down some observations in my bag book. A few lines. About hair.

3.
I wrote a great many digital media posts (Twitter/Facebook) for the job as publicity manager for Bobbie Neate.

Reading
Reading was more successful. I read Will Self''s Umbrella. I enjoyed it. I was reminded very strongly of London Orbital which was a pleasant experience. Near the end I felt as if the two books were overlapping, as if Zack Busner as his old self in Umbrella, turns into Iain Sinclair, upon entering the asylum that has been turned into luxury apartments with health spa. So maybe it is homage to Sinclair.






Friday June 22nd 2012

Writing:
1. New book - I haven't touched those notebooks - that piece of DIFFICULT work - since May; 4th, that day I last reported on.
2. The editing job on May These Curses Flee was awarded to me and is going well. I am about three quarters through it now. It is all about the curses and incantations written on bowls that archaeologists have  found buried in the ground in various middle Eastern locations. They are breathtakingly ancient and fragile artefacts. Some have images as well as words inscribed on them. The bowls or the incantations on them, are mostly apotropaic, that is, they have the power of averting evil influence or bad luck. Some very few of them are more aggressive. It gives you an insight into the  beliefs and fears of people from so far back it is almost too much to imagine (5th - 7th century CE). It is like squinting through a very small chink at them - a chink that is constantly being obscured so you never get a clear look for any length of time.


Reading:
I. I just finished The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright. I am in two minds about the book. Much as I love her work - she is one of my favourite writers - I don't like it. Is it that I don't like the main character? I don't. She is too problematic. She must have been born in about 1978 going on information we are given ('...I was 34 years old...') and yet the section/chapter titles are all pop songs from a much earlier era than the one you would expect her to have been familiar with as she was growing up - 10cc's The Things We Do for Love (1977), Bob Dylan's Knocking on Heaven's Door (1973), more of this later - I am very interested in it but I am off to play tennis...


Friday May 4th
Writing:
1. I got out the notebooks with my new book which I haven't touched since last August and I actually did some more work on it. I've edited some of the sections. Oh what a mess it is. When you begin writing a journal you are constantly catching up with yourself. You never just sit down at exactly the came time each day and write a chronological account. Well I don't. I ramble on and then there will be a gap followed by the word 'later...' and then off I go again. And some of what is described in that section will have happened earlier than what was said in the first section because the first section was describing a dream or a feeling rather than the things that were happening. So the book is a mess and might not ever be turnable into a readable work of ... um, well I could say art or fiction but I hesitate. I'll just leave it at 'work'.

2. I've said I'll edit a book for Dan. Its title is May These Curses Flee. He might decide to let another editor do it but he might choose me. He asked me to put in a tender for the job anyway, so I did.



Friday March 9th
Writing:
1. I went to a meeting of the Merchant Navy Association at the Seamen's Mission yesterday evening. The group of sailors were all getting on a bit and were sadly few in the spacious surroundings of their impressive building but they made me warmly welcome and I was greatly entertained by their robustness and humour. I explained to them ('... our speaker hasn't turned up so you can have the floor!') that I would be obliged to anyone there who wouldn't mind me picking their brains for the research for part of the book I am trying to write. I now have eight contacts and must arrange to see them and hear their stories. I don't think there are any left now who would have worked in tankers or cargo ships in 1939 though. They were all merchantmen in the fifties which means they would have been on cruise liners from what they were saying. There were very few cargo boats using white crews by then, they told me.

Reading:
1. I finished Polyn (the first volume; translated from Yiddish) by Yeshua Trunk. Fantastically evocative filmic description. An invaluable work because it transcribes something which even as he wrote it, existed only in his memory and the memories of others his age or older - most of whom were dead or about to be dead. Emergency art  - art as survival; art that is like running for your life. Not your life depends on it, but somehow life depends on it. preservation of life depends on it. It is a blueprint capture. It is a DNA print rendered desperately into the only algorithm available.