New Links

Also used the sleepless time to take a blue pen (or pair of scissors? which simile?) to the Blog Roll and Book Shelf lists. Some of the blogs I haven't looked at for a bit; several have disappeared (!?);some new ones on writing, particularly Stella Duffy, might be interesting. I lurve Lucy Mangan's stuff! An eclectic/eccentric collection, i agree. Don't make too many assumptions about me from these lists (like, I'm not gay, or blonde, or have small children, or am a member of a Catholic religious order or anything). And I enjoy reading them; I don't necessarily agree with them; they make me think. Try one and see what you can find.

More of that ...

Been revisiting my journal of 1998 again, in the course of preparing a couple of presentations on journal writing, and, if I may say so, am still pleased with it as a piece of work. I collected a lot of pieces, snippets, quotations, in the course of compiling it. Here are two more which I think still work today. First a Jewish academic on the tragedy of relations between the Children of Abraham/Ibrahim, the so-called People of the Book:

“The image I have is of three traumatized individuals walking through darkness and holding flickering candles to illumine their way; candles lit by their forebears to get them through the dark nights of the soul … three wandering pilgrims yearning to get back home, afraid that out of the darkness some old or new enemy will attack them, afraid of perpetual victimization, afraid to trust each other, afraid to trust others who might help them overcome their fear and dread. And then, suddenly, the three of them converge, and their candles illumine each others faces, and each experiences the shock of mutual recognition; in the human faces is the reflection of something mysteriously Divine, so that all three can echo the exclamation of the wounded Jacob, renamed Israel: “I see the face of God in your face”.
(Yehetzkel Landau)

And this:

“Late, and it’s starting to rain. It’s time to go home.
We’ve wandered long enough in empty buildings.
I know it’s tempting to stay and meet these new people.
I know it’s even more\sensible
To spend the night here with them,
But I want to go home.

We’ve seen enough beautiful places with signs on them
Saying “This is God’s House”.
That’ seeing grain like ants do,
Without the work of harvesting.
Let’s leave the grazing to the cows, and go
Where we will know what everyone really intends,
Where we can walk around with no clothes on.”
(Jal aladin Rumi, 1207-1273)

A Place between the Somewheres

During a month’s stay in Israel and Palestine ten years ago I kept a journal. In it I recorded this story by Daniel Rossing, who had worked in the Israeli government Department of Religious Affairs:

“A Romanian Orthodox church in Mea Shearim was being restored. A wealthy couple gave money for two crosses to be replaced, one on the dome and one on the tower. The Orthodox Jewish institution across the street was outraged, and demanded their removal, as they looked down on them in direct line of sight towards Temple Mount. I told them repeatedly that the Romanians refused to take down the crosses. Still they kept up their demands, until I offered them a compromise solution – that the crosses be rotated through ninety degrees. The Jews agreed to this and the dispute was settled. The Romanians have their crosses, but to the Jews they appear as flag poles.

Everywhere consists of a number of somewheres. Perhaps the Middle East needs more betweens and less somewheres, more compromises and less positions, more traveling and less arriving, more attempts to live with the differences and less attempts to remove those differences.”
I believe that’s increasingly true for all of us.

Why I don't read much theology

“'Let's at least agree on one thing, God is a hypothesis.' That's what one of my professors used to say. 'Your hypothesis may be different from mine, but if you insist it is superior because you have a better line to God than me, it leads to nothing but bitterness, rancour and even war. The best course is mutual toleration - live and let live.' But then, Jonathan is an Anglican.”
(Will Hutton: The Observer 6 July 2008)

I’ve just read two books that would appear on the face of it to be coming from opposite directions, but actually have far more in common than either author would wish to have pointed out. Stephen Cottrell is the Anglican Bishop of Reading, one of the new breed of “Call me Steve” types, I guess (why are they always called Steve?). His book is “Do nothing to Change your Life”. The cover, the marketing, and the chapter headings seek to catch the zeitgeist of the slow movement, and books that I have mentioned on the blog before, such as Carl Honore and Tom Hodgkinson. “A joyous affirmation of life for anyone feeling exhausted” it says in the blurb on the front, and “Discovering what happens when you stop”. It opens with some unlikely premises that you are supposed to swallow, like a bishop who can decide to lay in bed until eleven in the morning, and perhaps encourage his clergy to do the same occasionally. “We need to stop imagining everything is so urgent. We need to nurture our inner slob”, it says in the blurb on the back. Do you believe that? I thought not.

“The Form of Things”, by AC Grayling, promises “Essays on Life Ideas and Liberty in the 21st century”. Indeed the first, third and fourth sections are exactly that; witty and perceptive, thought-provoking, gentle, generous. He writes on fashion, beauty, colour, dance. Towards the end he writes well on civil liberties, terrorism and human rights. So far, so good. But in the middle section called “Polemics”, rather sadly, we get a gloves-off attack on religion, in the manner of Dawkins and his disciples. Why? Why could Grayling not be generous here too, and at least accept that here we have two hypotheses on which we are not going to agree, alongside a great deal about which humanists, atheists, scientists and believers will want to agree wholeheartedly?

And it is here that we find the common ground between the two books, for Cottrell’s work is in fact, at heart, an evangelical tract, dressed up in modern clothes, just as Grayling is, at least in part, writing an atheist tract. The core of the book, in chapter five, is “the strange story of Jesus of Nazareth, and the incredible claims Christians make about him”. This is what Cottrell set out to deliver, and the rest of the book, before and after this story, is gift wrapping to help to get it off the shelves.

What a pity. Both books could have been so much better. I found neither book honest about its intentions, and therefore both books, while containing many good things, ultimately disappointing.

Why I still read the papers

I get fed up with reading newspapers and wonder why I still bother. Then an issue comes along that knocks my socks off, with so much stuff that I might as well have personally ordered to be written, so relevant and interesting is it. The Guardian Review last Saturday was one such issue. A real page-turner.

The main article was on “The Art of Texting” by David Crystal, with Will Self and Lynn Truss. Really good stuff about this research that shows that texting has not led to the decline of the language, the end of spelling, or anything like that. In fact, text language is just a process that’s been going on since the first use of “IOU” in 1618.

Over the page, and Martin Amis and the trouble with God; a review of the Sixties Unplugged by Gerard DeGroot (Wilson was a great PM; yes!). It gets better; Anne Enright on writing on page 15, plus ten of the best Last Sentences, including Laurence Sterne’s “A Sentimental Journey”; Lives and Letters on page 21 has Geoffrey Moorhouse’s account of a visit from Janet Frame, and John Crace’s Digested Classic is Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. How good is all that? Well I enjoyed it, anyway. Worth the £1.50 just for the Review, I reckon.

Here are the gumboots you ordered, Madam

Further mature reflection revealed that not only is a trip to Whitstable out of the question as part of a weekend in East Anglia (there are insurmountable obstacles, such as the Thames estuary), but staging a performance art event of my own following a Church of England ordination would not be practical either. Having abandoned that idea the Dude and I did the next best thing and watched the whole of Reggie Perrin Series One on video. Nobbs writing is sublime. It appeared surreal and overstated at the time, but now many of the scenes he suggested (the ridiculous excuses for rail delays, 24 hour helplines that have no-one available, the management speak) and the speech mannerisms given to the characters (unlikely tabloid headlines; “cock up on the catering front”; or “I’m a fish person” – it’s not just me, is it?) are part of everyday life. The series ends with Reggie at his own memorial service, and, after Alan Bennett in “Beyond the Fringe”, one of the best comic sermons ever , delivered by one of the best TV vicars ever, Gerald Sim. And so to bed. Great! Super!

Finding your Voice

And to a meeting of a group of women who, by the group name and their general demeanour, clearly wish to be considered Thoughtful and Up With Things, and not like those other ladies groups that do flower arranging and try out Wartime Recipes. They were too. Thoughful, I mean. Nice people. I did a taster session for the life story course and told them a bit about my writing. The opening is a bit like going to AA (I’m told). “Hello, this is my name, and I’m a writer”.

I told them about journaling, and the local magazine column I do, and then mentioned blogging. Blank looks. I explained about the internet and Facebook and Blogger, and incomprehension was replaced by horror on some faces. Surely, very dangerous, one said. I tried to explain that it didn’t need to be, and how I write anonymously, because I feel free to express myself. Everyone now looked very suspicious.

Why do I find this complicated and hard to explain? Here I’m racingdemon, but that’s not really me, or entirely me, and there’s another me, or even several me’s (now I sound mentally ill); all this is based in reality, but a slightly adapted form of reality, and it may not have happened in this order, and I probably didn’t think of the various examples of rapier wit and dazzling humour until I got home and started to write. I don’t write posts directly on line, but on the word processor, and work on them and edit them, so it might be a few days before something appears on the blog. “So you lie, and make things up then!” said one of them. “If it’s true, and not scurrilous, why do you hide your identity?” said another. Oh dear, I’m not doing very well at this. Anyone out there got any better explanation?

Read Lucy Mangan in the Guardian, and there are some good examples. This week she writes about starting a vegetable patch, and her boyfriend and parent’s reactions. Do I believe that everything was said verbatim? No. Was the gist of it true? I expect so. Did it make for an entertaining column? Certainly.

Is what we bloggers write fiction, or fact, or faction? Sometimes all three. Anyone remember David Lodge writing his series of articles in the Independent on Sunday, around 1991, “The Art of Fiction”. I have the Penguin paperback with the collected articles. He says that writing is “essentially a rhetorical art …” where the writer “persuades us to share a certain view of the world for the duration of the reading experience, effecting when successful, that rapt immersion in an imagined reality, that Van Gogh captured so well in his painting “The Novel Reader””. Wow, yes.

I’ve just finished Ian Banks “Raw Spirit”. Banks is a novelist, but this is part travelogue, part memoir, part biography, as he tours Scotland in various cars, visiting distilleries, sampling whisky and writing down his thoughts, reactions, reminiscences, and stories. I haven’t read any of Banks novels (sorry Ian); I don’t drink much whisky; I’m not a great fan of Scotland (only been three times; too many midges; Banks writes about them at one point); I’m not that interested in cars, and Banks on driving. So why have I read it? What makes the book good, indeed hard to put down, is that in the process of writing, and throughout the whole book, Banks Finds His Own Voice. One of the best examples I have of this illusive gift. When I write, I am constantly trying to find out how to do this, and how to sustain it. Sometimes I think I manage it for a paragraph or two, often I don’t.

John Fairfax and John Moat, founders of the Arvon Foundation, wrote on writing some years ago: “It is by working, by writing, by practicing the art long and regularly that the writer develops his ear, ie that sense which eventually enables the writer to hear where the power of the word lies, and ultimately, his own voice.”

Epictetus wrote, “If you wish to be a good writer, then write.”

Surely that is what the great democratic exercise of the blog is all about, giving all the chance to practice and practice at all times of the day and night, anywhere in the world, and to give us the chance to read and comment on one another’s efforts.

With this group, it was in the free writing exercises and the opportunity to just let the pen run across the page, to let the ideas come, almost bypassing the conscious mind, to find their own voice, as if they were in relaxed conversation with one trusted friend, that the group enjoyed themselves most and, I think, saw the point. So it was worth going. And a good supper too.