Itchy feet

i have them. again. the temptation to take off and head into the unknown. or the semi-known. i guess that's what happens when kids are raised on willie nelson songs, huh?

Back in Business

I'm in love with the original "Fame" movie. I just re-watched the whole thing and am regretting not buying it permanently from Amazon. I will, I think.

When I tell people what a great film Fame is, they usually reply with "But isn't it just another dance movie?" Ach, what fools. They'll at best hum Irene Cara's famous title track, and envision spandex and legwarmers. Either they haven't seen it, or they've forgotten what a fantastic film it is - mainly because it's really not inspirational in a traditional Hollywoody sense. It's not Dirty Dancing - there's no fairy tale ending, where the ugly duckling is turned in to a beautiful, self-assured swan, floating on the arms of the beautiful boy from the wrong side of the tracks.

'Fame', instead, is really troublingly honest. Not necessarily about LaGuardia, the performing arts school where it's set - I've been fascinated by the film, and the TV-series that followed it for long enough to have quizzed every single graduate I've come across what the school was like. (Apparently, there was singing in the corridors. but not as much). It's not even necessarily honest in it's portrayal of different characters; the teachers are all charicatures and even the students portrayed from auditions to the final performance of "I sing the body electric", are barely more than sketches.

Where 'Fame' is really honest, what I guess makes it speak to me so much at the moment, is about theconcerns that go in to living a creative life; just how challenging it is to try to create something, anything, in the midst of regular life. Regardless of what that life may look like. Regardless if you're a cossetted Jewish girl in Brooklyn, an Upper East Side princess, a Puerto Rican boy who's sister is attacked by junkies in the South Bronx or an illiterate African American dance prodigy from the projects, life gets in the way. It's honest about all the temptations and selfishness and mistakes you make along the way - how easy it is to trip up. But it also portrays how the events around you, or even ones you self-destructively or unthinkingly set in motion don't have to be final. Hilary has an abortion and continues dancing on the West Coast, far away from the frosty family she rebelled against. Ralph doesn't quit after his drug use makes him royally screw up a show. Leroy manages to get back into school despite his feud with his English teacher. Coco stays in the business even after her gullibility and a predatory "movie director" have added up to what's suggested is a porn shoot.


And it shows quite how vulnerable you might need to make yourself to be any good. Montgomery opens up about his homosexuality in a move that probably helps him as an actor, but gives him continued problems in his peer group. Doris's search for originality and her own voice put her at odds with her family. In a film done today, I think these choices would be given some sort of censure or pat on the back, but that doesn't happen in "Fame". Montgomery is still lonely; Doris is still very much part of the chorus. They're better, sure, but they're still not Ralph, who may or may not make it anyway - having ridden on talent and chutzpah for the whole movie, his ambition and drug use may get in the way. Or he'll settle to "just" be a comic, an irresponisble goofball, rather than give his work the depth it's clear he has access to.


Perhaps the most poignant relationship, for me, is the one between Bruno and Coco. Bruno, is an Italian-American musical genius, so wrapped up in his own creativity that he can hardly share his music, let alone his emotions, with anyone. Beautiful, talented, determined and commercially minded, Coco becomes the voice of his music - what makes his work accessible and, you feel, the only person he opens up to. Bruno is clearly in love with Coco, who doesn't care for him like that - she's seeing Leroy who she doesn't know has gotten Hilary pregnant. You feel for Bruno, for loving this girl whos mind is set on bigger things and who only sees him as a creative partner and friend, but you don't hate Coco for it. You respect her, for being so wholeheartedly dedicated to what she's building for herself, no matter how childishly she goes about it; she lies to Bruno and his proud-but-exasperated taxidriver father about where she lives, to create an illusion about herself for the one person you feel probably wouldn't care. But there's no judgment passed on her for this - she does what she needs to do, figuring it out as she goes along. Her honesty's in her voice - her rendition of "Out here on my own", which she sings with Bruno listening in and his father nearly crying in the audience. That song, more than anything else, is really the heart of the movie - and it has very much been the soundtrack of my last few months.

That you, even if it's a slightly dented version of you, can come back from problems of yours and others' making, and keep doing what you care about - not because you want to be famous, or even because you're the very best at it, but because it's what you NEED to do - I guess that's why I love "Fame". You can screw up, sell out, doubt yourself and fail - but that doesn't mean it's over. Love it.

A nap better help

Because I'm dying. I joined a writing workshop in order to give myself deadlines, and now, with the self-deadline of Friday looming, I feel as if I have shit for brains, will never write anything ever again, and should probably never even have given up financial journalism or english tutoring. Disaster.

I went for a walk in Prospect Park to think about the story I'm rewriting and get some exercise and fresh air, but instead of becoming relaxed, my thoughts started swirling towards warped, dark sexuality and violence. None of which seem relevant to the story I'm working on. So I tried thinking about other stories where those images might fit. Instead of purging them, it made them darker, harsher, more nightmarish, seeping in to every story I could think of, all razors edges and pain and fear so intense but disconnected from everything around me it neared the hallucinatory.

Reading David Sheff's "Beautiful Boy", about his meth-addict son Nic, and then going online to read Nic's version of the story was clearly not the best way to prepare for a day of writing.

Obama and Healthcare

Just listened to Obama's speech on healthcare. Started feeling the love for him again and then - ZAP! He said that none of the money from the proposed plan would go to fund abortions. Clearly. Deliberately. Just the sort of shameless pandering to the conservatives that I thought he'd avoid. I understand wanting to defuse criticism that might scupper the plan. I understand being pragmatic. (I never act like that myself, but... I can at least intellectually see the value of it).

BUT: if abortions are legal medical procedures, which they still are, why put them in a separate category? If the health plan is supposed to is supposed to protect vulnerable people, well, I have a hard time thinking about a more vulnerable and exposed class of people than women who want to terminate a pregnancy and who lack the funds to do so.

What's not to love?

I've decided that my main character pretends to like be really in to Indie bands, because, well, she's English and sort of pretentious, but actually listens to Cher. On YouTube.

(and yes, this is different to me because I am proud of my love for Her Fabulosity. And I've stopped pretending I find Indie bands anything other than whiny).

Mother Knows Best

My mother, The Great White Chief, is kind of a genius. I called her this morning, feeling a little low about the now-former-boy and the choices I've had to make recently, my writing and my grad school applications, New York and... most things. Her response? A smack-fest about the behaviour of said boy, an exhortation to not care about whether or not I ever write anything again, a "who cares if your grad school application is terrible?", a "you can go wherever you want to if you're sick of New York" and then, the cincher:

"Go do something that's nice for you, that you enjoy, and take this crazy pressure off yourself"

"Ah, well I might go in to the city and go to a museum..."

"Hmmm...", deeply unconvinced

"And," fumbling for acceptable fun things to do, "well, I might join a Yoga studio..."

"Yoga?!?!?!" she replied in horror, "Look at your face in the mirror - you're my child! You're beautiful and you have the figure of a pin-up girl! GO ON A DATE WITH SOME UNCOMPLICATED GUY WHO THINKS YOU'RE HOT - for ten minutes, two hours or three days."


At which point, I had to laugh. "Ok, Chief, I'll go on a date, I'll flirt with boys and let go of this other thing for now and just go back to being me."

"Well, thank God for that. Have to go, darling," (aside): "Irene, turn off the footfixer, I better not be hearing that in background at 8 o'clock!"

"So the Swedish Idol season has started?" I asked.

"YES - 27 episodes. Daily. SO EXCITING! The auditions start today" (under her breath, snickering): "Yoga? What is wrong with with you, you silly girl?"

Contacting Lenses

My contact lenses are driving me crazy. For some reason I can't seem to put them in properly at the moment, so I blink and they move.

Blink, and I'll miss it.

I'm still sort of new to the darn things. I only started wearing them at the really-not-very-tender age of 27. I'd lost my glasses and figured that it was as good a time as any to experiment with lenses. I'd always hated the idea of poking something in my eyeball, and then leaving it there - seems so counter-intuitive. But I'm short sighted, and looks particularly vicious when i squint. And i always forgot to wear my glasses, or avoided it because i thought they looked silly, or they reminded me of the trauma of buying them.

I was broke and half blind and had just broken up with my boyfriend - who had chosen them, because he thought they looked "feminine, but intellectual" - when i bought those glasses. My school paid for them. And they were pretty. Really. Nothing wrong with them. But they felt unlucky. A friend of mine was telling me the other day, as I picked up a penny, that in Zimbabwe nobody picks up money in the streets. Someone may have put a curse on the money, stuck the bad luck in it, ready to be picked up by someone greedy, or thoughtless, or poor. Anyone, as long as it's gone from you. Maybe my glasses were hexed, like Zimbabwean street money...

I mean, they probably weren't. But it just seemed so unnatural a way to see things - through tiny little windows, that fogged and got greasy and that children would grab at when i was a teacher. And i liked the fuzziness of my vision - the prettiness and comfort of not seeing sharp distinctions and lines and features - most of the time. The sharpness of the change between wearing them and not wearing them was too stark and I'd take them on and off too often to ever really get used to them.

So contacts it was, with inevitably ridiculous finger-in-eyeball efforts, SwEnglish cursing and "is it there, or not" moments, which peaked at me having to ask my boss to gaze in to my eye to see if i'd managed to get rid of the whole thing. Charming.

And now, now that I though I had contact lenses down cold, the last stage in my transformation from laden-with-emotional-history trainwreck to someone who is freed from those constarints and phobias, the little bastards seem to be slipping out and disobeying me. I get tired, and they fall out. I cry (I've had a rough week) and they fall out. I try to dispose of them properly and i find them rolled up and dried somewhere two days late, little pieces of incompetence littered around my room.

To top it off, I just received my first ever forwarded email from my college since I left in 2005. It was from the optometrist, calling me for a new eye exam. Nomadic life is ridiculous - of all the letters I may have received at my old address in the past four years, the optometrist makes it through to me.

I'm not getting new glasses - I wear dailies, so even if they're cursed like Zimbabwean pennies, I get rid of them at the end of the day. At least that's something to be said for them.

Least Favourite Word

Only complete wankers use the word "bucolic".


It's such a hideous sounding word. I mean, why on God's green earth would a word that supposedly describes green, calm pastures and other scenes where fluffy sheep prance around, untouched by the naughty bits of Welshmen, sound like an especially bad case of stomach upset??? "I'm sorry, Miss Fitzsimmons, it appears that you have a particularly bad case of bucolic, I don't expect you'll be feeling better until earliest next week."


And it's deliberately obscure, because it seems so disconnected from what it's supposed to describe. Is there such a thing as anti-onomatopoeia? Because "bucolic" qualifies - and "bucolical" is even worse. There can clearly be no aesthetic reasons to use it; there are perfectly satisfying synonyms that are more widely understood. So if you use it, it's only to show off and make other people feel stupid, which stopped being OK when you stopped being a teenager.

Sometimes, it's an Unexpected Cigar

Catching up with a good friend over the phone this morning launched a thought experiment I'm playing with today.

We started talking about life and co-incidences and trying to know what to do, and it could very well have ended in a fiesta of long-distance navel gazing. But it didn't. Because she pointed out that, well, sometimes people get completely lost in trying to find meaning in the things that happen in their lives. And I, with a self-deprecating disclaimer for my love of tacky astrology and fortune telling, agreed with her. Sometimes, as Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar.

So I decided, just for today, to take that thought to the extreme. Not in a Buddhist way - I'm not meditating and I'm not seeking a nothingness in which everything is interconnected. Instead, I was walking around Brooklyn trying to train my brain to see, hear and smell everything as completely random, without relevance, and completely cut off from anything I've known or thought about before - rendering sense impressions as non-sensical as I could.

One of my current "great theories" is that men are often more productive because they think less. Or rather, that I am less productive than most men I know because I get distracted by everything, despite the fact that I actually seem to myself to be working and thinking constantly, even when I'm not "at work". And, well, my internal monologue is never switched off - as evidenced by my "I can't even find it embarassing anymore" habit of talking to myself. In public.

It's surprisingly difficult trying to switch off associations and "meaning" though.

For instance: Two women walking ahead of me, one says to the other "You know, thirty is just another number, like twenty, but you add ten," and my brain starts rushing off finding it funny, a comment on age hysteria and rebranding of ageing-categories ("35 is the new 21"), giggling that someone would actually PRONOUNCE something so banal, wondering if I was an arrogant bitch for laughing at other people's innumeracy while I've carefully groomed my own since high school to avoid having to deal with anything practical and money related outside the sphere of people who know i'm actually really good at maths, and of course what does that say about women in WEstern society? and...
STOP.

Just two women, walking. One says "You know, thirty is just another number, like twenty, but you add ten." I giggle, and think I find it funny because...


STOP

Just two women, walking. One says "You know, thirty is just another number, like twenty, but you add ten." I giggle.


OK good. I can totally do this.

In the store, soy milk costs me almost five dollars. "Really? five dollars? but surely in this day of genetically modified foods all this is a huge mark-up based on the knowledge that the people who buy the product are either rich or hippies or allergic so they are willing to shoulder the cost, and what does it say about my lifestyle choices and would I have become so lactose intolerant if it hadn't been for living in China for so long and remember the last time when you had to run to a bathroom because there's been cream in your food and how embarassing and annoying it was and..."


STOP.

It's soy milk. It costs five dollars. You are carrying enough change. Pay at the till.

Basically, I figure this experiment is exhausting, but a good reminder of how personal perception is - something i struggle with in any creative, non-biographical writing. I'm a terrible, terrible actress because I can't switch my own thought processes and emotional responses off for long enough to don someone else's - and I'm sick of re-reading my character's thoughts and finding that their minds all run away with them in exactly the same ways as mine does. OBVIOUSLY that's why they all sound the same - and i hadn't thought about that until realising that even when I'm not trying to, my brain sees associations and meaning and co-incidences in everything.

Which, in turn, I guess means that my trying to switch off that function of my brain led me to discover something that'd been clouded by "meanings" before - suck on that "cigar".

It Could Happen to You

Wow, i'm sort of in love with this article. And now i actually want to see the film. Does that make me an artsy-but-sensitive dissatisified writer-type who identifies both with being crossed in love but who optimistically feels that there is success and joy on the other side of the rainbow, or simply the stereotypical target audience for indie-rom-coms who fail to uncover advertorials for what they are?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1209556/500-Days-Summer-Revenge-writing-film-girl-dumped-you.htm

'any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental'. But then it adds: 'Especially you, Jenny Beckman. Bitch.'

Antisocial Tendencies

Best idea of the day:

Go grocery shopping.

Wait till you're about to sneeze.

Walk up to randomly selected baby-carriage.

SNEEZE in baby's face.

Wait around to film mother's reaction.


Sometimes, I worry about my antisocial tendencies...

Domestically Conscious

Last day in Sweden before heading back to Brooklyn - wonderful change of pace. Spend a lot of time by myself otherwise, and have now had a month of full-on FitzFamily goodness.

My sister is singing showtunes - currently the ENTIRE Chicago soundtrack - in the next room. Off key. "If you're good to mama, mama's good to you."

Indeed:

As I type, my mother The Great White Chief, is instructing me from across the television set (Holiday Getaway, a show about English people buying second homes in Southern Europe is on, and not to be missed) on how to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome. One of her admirers, from Haifa, sent her a disgusting email about CTS this morning - probably the most positive communication between Sweden and Israel in the last few weeks - and she has now added it to the list of illnesses and disabilities that her children can avoid through proper surveillance and instruction from their wise and wonderful mother.


Re-read a book by a Swedish physicist called Bodil Jonsson about time and what we do with it. One of the things I'd forgotten is that she talks about "warm-up" times necessary for different sorts of tasks, and that you need to accept that different sorts of work will require different warm-up times. I always feel bad about how long it takes me to get writing my own fictiony stuff, compared to the fact that even at my most fiercely exhausted, brainless and hungover states, I've never needed more than ten minutes of coffee, diet Coke and some online facebooking and celebrity gossip to type up a couple of hundred words. But writing something for myself can take me hours of pottering around before i get anything on paper - and unless I'm in good mental shape, I can pretty much forget it. Anyway, one of the things that Jonsson talks about is how warm-up times can be divvied up in to four categories;
easy tasks with short warm ups,
easy tasks with long warm up times,
hard tasks with short warm up times
and hard tasks with long warm up times.

Thinking about it like that might actually help my procrastination-guilt - writing fiction has got to qualify as a hard task with a long wamr up time... At least for me. If not for fricking Trollope the younger, who wrote 2000 words a day, guaranteeing his presence in every SINGLE "how to write fiction" thingy EVER. Wanker. Though I was reminded why I've never read anything by him when i was in a bookstore the other - CRAP they're LONG! And look BORING as ALL COME OUT.

(I might just be resentful that writing fiction was clearly a short-warm-up task for Trollope. But that's OK - I'm not above resenting dead people.)


The other evening we were three women in the kitchen in my mother's flat in Lund, (J, my mom and I) sipping decent wine, flicking through magazines half-heartedly and talking about life and love and all those things as mom was preparing dinner. J had delivered the smack to ber boyfriend about saying really ignorant things, threatening him with the dreaded FINAL breakup, and he'd replied that he didn't really think about stuff. And i piped in, incensed, that "YES, guys seem to NEVER think about stuff until THEY HAVE TO." J and I agreed taht this was stupid and started nodding and getting worked up and talking about how we'd both lost sleep about the worrying thoughtlessness of boys and other people we care about. At which point, my mom looked over at two of her favourite overly intellectual young ladies, and laughed and said "Sweethearts, I know TWO people who lose sleep about why they think and say the things they do - and they're both sitting in this kitchen." This may be a lie. Because i found a thingy from tolstoy saying that he did the same thing:

'I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn't remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember - so that if i had dusted it and forgot - that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they have never been.' Tolstoy, Diary entry 1897


I pointed this out to the mothership, and she maintains that citing a dead Russian aristocrat as a benchmark of sanity and well-adjustedness is contradictory.

Now: CRAYFISH DINNER! SWEEET!

Easily Excited

I have found a new, exciting, wonderful English word:

Arborescent, which means "growing like a tree".


Sadly, I still have a cold.

Answering the Outer Critic

Leaving the snarkily intellectual comfort of the role of critic is frightening as hell. If, like La Fitz herself, you happened to be have been academically gifted in the humanities, the written word combined with art, music or cinema has always been a safe pedestal for you to slither up on. Perhaps not privately - most people who love books, for instance, can tell you of a read that has shaken them - but publicly, your interaction with the humanities have always let you shine. At least that's how it was for me as a wee little Fitz and how it still is as a somewhat bigger Fitz. Get me on a sportsfield and I give malco-ordination a new poster child, try to get me to install something on a computer and new, previously unheard of technical disasters arise. But let me write or talk about books, about philosophy, or some other art form that also happened to be acceptable to The Academy and I recite the Ella-as-Critic ABC- arrogant, bright and controversial - to a reasonably receptive audience.


Going to the other side of the divide between critic and creative is terrifying - not JUST because it means baring a private part of yourself through your work (which in itself is so traumatising that I, who am pretty tough and independent, have had to start this blog as a means of getting up the nerve to show people my creative writing). But also because you're in a shaky role in an arena where you've always been comfortable. And, for anyone who's anything like me, your talents as a critic have been a significant part of building your intellectual self-confidence - if you want to shove in a bit of hyperbole for good measure, your identity.

I'm trying to let myself be on the unsafe side of that divide. And despite support from family and friends, I can't promise that I'll manage to ever produce anything worth reading, anything I'll ever admit to having written 'seriously'.

So I'm really humbled by the people I know who have actually gone out there and put their work on show. And people who know me know that I'm just about the least humble person ever, so that's a big deal. I'm not going to pretend that I'm in any way shape or form a good person, because of course I'm jealous as well - it used to really bubble up inside me. I'd be nastily and toxically thinking "Well, if I had the advantages that those people do, I would write something just as good. Or probably better. Because OBVIOUSLY I'm funnier/brighter/more original / just generally better than those people." But finally having the freedom to read and write what I need, I've found millions of other barriers to actually doing stuff. So for people I like who do well in the arts - power to you.

(If i don't like you, odds are that I've found other parts of your personality on which to pin my dislike - that's an area where i am thoroughly confident of my creativity...)

My friend Sarah is one of those humbling people - and she's generous enough to be really supportive to people like me who are, well, still getting there. A double-bill she wrote just opened in London, performed by young actors. I haven't seen it, so I have no idea of how good it is - but the unimaginative savaging she received by a critic was so lazy, fundamentally unconsidered and stinking of schadenfreude that it reminded me, again, why it's so much scarier to be a creative rather than a critic. And why I think putting your creative work out there is just so much more worthwhile, regardless, I guess, of what field it's in.

I guess there are a lot of ways of answering bullshit like that; reminding yourself about the different roles in the arts, sending a dead fish to the critic, calling down the wrath of God or you Facebook community on the misguided fool, slashing tires, getting riotously drunk, locking yourself in a room and swearing never to read a review again, or some combination of the above. But, even though I'm nowhere near the sort of place in my creative 'career' where I'm having to face outer critics, knowing that they're out there makes me angry -especially because I recognise so much of myself in the way they think and write.

I came across this in a book about Linnaeaus and you've got to respect the guy's classic dismissal of an ignorant critic:


'The dramatic metaphorical form in which Linnaeus published his system based on the 'loves of the plants' was better suited to the manners of the 18th and 19th century, though even in that robust period it did not escape criticism. ... In 1737 the St Petersburg academician Johann G. Siegesbeck attacked it on the basis that 'such loathsome harlotry' (scortationes quasi detestabiles) as several males to one female would never have been permitted in the vegetable kingdom by the Creator and asked how anyone could teach without offence 'so licentious a method' ( methodum talem lasciviam) to studious youth. He is remembered today only through the unpleasant small-flowered weed which Linnaeus named Sigesbeckia.'
(Linnaean Classification by William T. Stern, my bold)


I'm going to suggest to Sarah that she name an insignificant side character who is wrong about everything "Fiona Mountford" - that's what i'd do...

Not my poem

but "mine" at the moment. With a tilt of my virtual hat to La Belle Sylvia, who recently introduced me to the poetry of Mary Oliver:

Dogfish

Mary Oliver

 
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman's boot,
with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know
what a smile means,
don't you?

*

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

*

It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don't know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.

*

Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don't we?

Slowly

*

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

*

You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it's the same old story - - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

*

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

*

And probably,
if they don't waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.


http://plagiarist.com/poetry/3156/

I know it's sad

... I sort of believe in horoscopes. Busted. but just read mine for this week, and well... it seems apropos:
Underdogs are on an upsurge. Topdogs are on a downswing. The rebels have God on their side. The masters merely have money and propaganda. It'll be an excellent week to launch strikes, boycotts, and protests. It'll be prime time to say no to smiling manipulators. The best efforts, whether coming from you or the people you want to be close to, will always have at least a tinge of cheekiness. So now that you've read my spiel, please answer me this: Are you going to sit there passively and grin as some feel-good tyrant tries to break off a chunk of your soul and hurl it into oblivion?


The answer, of course, is NO. In the great words of Leroy, the late, great Gene Anthony Ray from Fame:"Cos I'm gonna be a dancer, a good dancer, you know who says so? ME!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51g-cS7nYUY

Book Struggles

I'm pretty sure I'm killing the husband of one of my characters. I feel bad for him, but he was a pretty shadowy figure anyway, and I only really find him interesting in his wife's interpretation.

Struggling to work out how the two main characters meet. Given that they only exist in my head, it should be easier to make this happen.

Wanting to Smoke

I want to smoke.

No, really. I want to smoke. Light up clumsily (the opposable thumbs gene seems to have skipped me - my comically flat thumbs are useful for thumping tacks into boards. But using a cigarette lighter without looking like a complete muppet? Darwinistic fail). Inhale through my nose (I still can't really inhale properly. Asthma). Flick off ash and stare darkly into the abyss.

OK, so there's no abyss close by. Just empty parking spaces outside the church, showing that the God-fearing folk of small-town Sweden are on holiday, worshipping the sun rather the son of God.

But I've hardly been drinking, I've been doing all sorts of healthy things AND I'm on a boy-detox. I guess they're all subject to revision. When or if my gut feeling changes. But at the moment, I'm flailing around for a vice. And my brain has latched on to smoking.

Books aren't helping. BOTH the books I was reading last night ("Christine Falls" by John Banville writing as Benjamin Black and "The Confession of Max Tivoli" by Andrew Sean Greer) INSIST on using smoking as a device to show young female characters coming in to their own. Potentially disappointed by life. But coming in to their own. And while it SORT OF works, and makes all sorts of Freudian sense (while reminding me of wanting to smoke), it still strikes me as a really superficial way of dealing with female characters. "She's smoking. She's sexually aware, rebellious but wary. Look at her mouth. Ingesting smoke. Like the world. Empty."

But really, all those film noire-y stereotypes of the wounded-but-tough Betty Bacall Dame aren't AT ALL what interests me about women smoking. Women smoking make me think of my mom, who gave up smoking because my father disliked it but still, forty years later, longs for cigarettes and the day when her doctor gives her the go-ahead to chimney it up. I like the "bad mother" jokes surrounding a family friend, who's first photo with her newborn baby, now a balding thirty- something photographer, proudly showed her smoking Marlboro Reds. It reminds me of desperate missions across the Chinese border to Macau, where I'd stand in line for hours at the crossing, only to get hold of the cigarillos I smoked and loved.

Cigarillos. Small, brown and unhealthy. Not entirely unlike me. Sat in my favourite pub, in England, so ridiculously long ago I really shouldn't remember it with clarity. "Fitzsimmons, you love staring at the smoke from those things, don't you?" the then-love-of-my-life asked me.

(He gets me, he really, really gets me, I thought.)

Not even giddy, because that understanding was something I thought I'd somehow deserved, that I'd always have, I grinned. Impishly. Lifted my half-drunk pint of ale. "The Old Speckled Hen". Finest beer in the universe - I'd tested many, never found one quite like it. Left hand holding cigarillo, always-surprisingly-pretty smoke coiling upwards, outwards, elsewards. "Why can't you smoke cigarettes, like other girls? You look like a damn gangster smoking those things." My face must have melted with shock, quickly covered by a smile that fooled neither of us. "Well, I like them," I said. He 'got' me, allright.

I'm sure his new girlfriend doesn't smoke at all. Definitely not cigarillos.

Am not sure that this boy-booze-caffeine detox is making me a more zen and sane person. Just had visions of myself grinding out half-smoked Marlboro Lights on a filthy sidewalk with dirty, un-pedicured feet. Dancing and laughing and doing 'The Twist' to music only i hear. Sticking it to the man, cigarette-style.

Shit like that never makes it in to novels by the stylistically savvy.

Ex-Exile, Expat

Back in Sweden, out of exile. Or so I thought for the first few moments on the train over from Copenhagen. Smiled to myself at the prejudiced ease with which I judged the northern Swedish woman who corrected the local's pronunciation of the place she was asking for directions to, her shriekingly white jeans and blue striped shirt so typical of the upwardly mobile middle class's desire to seem fresh and chic, her chattering little girl identikit cute. Felt relaxed by looking out over the sound, remembering debates about whether the bridge should be built or not, and the horrors of missing the boat on the way to the airport when I was flying off to school. Saw the barns on the Swedish side - an odd feeling to know roughly what they look like inside.

Read C.S Godschalk's Kalimantaan on the plan over - exceptional. Took her ten years to write. So terse but so brimming with life. I understand why she uses her initials - in some ways, it's the least "feminine" book i've read in ages. I can only imagine the horrors of some marketing department trying to flog it as a "love across the boundaries" read set in the tropics... which for some reason i associate with female authors writing about the East (great, I'm prejudiced AND sexist...). Probably the truest description of expat life I've read - how it throws together people that would otherwise have nothing in common, it's cruelty and fleetingness, the impossiblity both of staying and of leaving. The need to have a "home" somewhere else, despite the fact that almost no-one can fully return emotionally - and if they do, they have to exorcise their life "abroad". Living on the cusp of cultures you don't understand, or are constantly trying to understand. And just the occasional smiting insight from Godschalk - that complex personalities struggle in that environment, that your life only seems real in the re-telling to people at home who don't know you anymore because you left them so long ago and have been too busy to keep updated.
In Godschalk's Borneo, it took 5 months for letters to arrive from England - they might as well do today, actually. I'm just about the only writery person i know who doesn't miss letters - i am just as good or bad at writing emails as i was with letters. there are only certain relationships i can maintain in writing - which i guess is odd, because it's where i feel the most like myself. i miss drawing in letters, and i miss the manic letters i used to write to people i was losing, in airports, when i knew i'd never manage to keep up the relationship in the way i wanted to, and somehow, through a quickly scribbled note on the back of tickets and (unused) vomit bags to tell the person that i still loved him or her, in transit. but otherwise i love email. still, the speed of communication does nothing to broach the emotional distance between expats and those 'back home', for me, anyway - it might as well take five months.

So being in Sweden is, as always, strange. Out of exileness, though Sweden has never been permanent for my family, into a false role of returning expat, to a from cultures I've never fully embraced. Both more home and less home than anywhere else. All sounds seems a disruption. Even in towns. Even nature is less intense than in the States, or in Asia - less growth, fewer bugs, not as many animals around. The trees grow further apart - distance measured more in silence than space, somehow. There's a lovely line by Rilke, about learning to love the distance between two people - small wonder he loved it here. Am annoyed I left his letters to Lou Andreas Salome at my flat in Brooklyn - perhaps they would have made sense to me here.

Subway Garlands

A blind woman, white-but-yellowing shoulder length frizzy hair, tapping white cane and glaringly white summer jacket got on the subway last night as I was headed home. She sat down to the right of me. I was leaning on the metal rods that separate the seats from the standing areas. Like a corral. Though without gates. Late at night, the subway always seems to be bumpier, faster, physically less comfortable and safe. I didn't really mind the chill metal digging in to the softish flesh of my upper right arm as I stood, fiddling with my phone, annoyed that I had nothing to read, thinking about the conversation I'd just had with a friend in a humid bar. Knew it would bruise, but didn't care - at least the cold of the metal separating me from the blind woman reminded my skin that it was going home to an air-conditioned, quiet, place.

It took a little while for me to notice what she was doing with her hands. Peripherally, I'd seen her twisting and turning pieces of white paper. Hadn't thought much of it. Thought maybe it was like fiddling with half-dampened tissue paper when you're nervous. Or like peeling the labels off beer bottles, just without fratboyish friends making goofy jokes about sexual frustration. Or like how I, when I find receipts in my bag, fold them into a concertina pattern and slowly rip them into the sort of strips you use for traditional farmers' carpets in Sweden. My mother swears she will never, ever cut strips like that again from any used clothing - she had to help out when she was a child, for the carpets the women in my family would weave to sell in the village. She had a tiny pair of scissors especially for cutting these strips, even though she was too young to really be allowed to handle sharp things. The scissors were shaped like a flying crane, the beak its blades. Really made for cutting fingernails, but fit a little girl's fingers fine. Years and years later, to amuse me, my grandmother taught me how to make carpets and the long strips of cut up material you need for them - a practical anchoring activity for an overly dreamy child. My mother cracked a plan to sell old Swedish carpets to unsuspecting Americans, who think them quaint and rustic. Now her daughter unconsciously, automatically, shreds receipts in the patterns she hates I was ever taught.

But the blind woman next to me didn't seem to be shredding paper unconsciously. Still standing, I tried to look down to see what she was doing. She seemed to sense this; looked up. Her cane, hanging on the bottom of the bars that were still eating in to my right arm, had multi-coloured hairbands around the top. I tried to see if there was a pattern there. To see if i could work out how blind she was - the hairbands were all the same kind, would, I thought, have felt the same, so if there was a pattern based on colour, maybe she wasn't that blind? I couldn't tell if there was a pattern. Despite the fact that what I joke about as MY "blindness" became possible because I could detect patterns in the eye-charts at school, so I was never busted for being shortsighted.

Maybe she really was blind. Somehow she'd sense me looking. Even though I was hardly looking at all - I didn't move. Would just drop the sight from my right eye, these days covered by the contact lenses that repulsed me for years, into her lap. She'd look up. Not at me, directly, but straightening her back, rocking her head back slightly, sensing something not quite right: me, looking at her. I'd look back to my phone, half-heartedly bouncing a virtual ball against equally fake "bricks".

When she'd relax her head, I'd look again.

She'd notice.

I wondered how'd you'd show that interaction on film. If you could capture the two of us interacting with each other through the lens of a third perspective. And how you'd write stage directions for it. "First you look and then she looks and then you look but neither of you really look". Doesn't quite cut it.

But then she took her left hand and fished some more white paper out of her white pocket. (Can she see contrast? If so, my black-and-white face was pretty unsuited for spying on her. I should have called in a darkskinned blonde). She'd unwind what she'd made already, and add the new paper to what looked to be a garland. Then she'd change it - make the baubles larger. Take a piece of paper away. Put it back in her left coat pocket. Her garland looked a bit like hops: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Mz2AU9jVPTr0eoTJ5LUtBvz4guEd-Ii8VAdb5Q8m3MbNOhpuT3j3UJ4ZBLHuywciHtL93K2NP_PvZAEy4qwxk_4UkvTKRuQcwuz78jWkKJrFC9NCYX8UvQZKjrGam3V1tvbZlZsz6jca/s400/humle.jpg


The train rolled in to her station, a few stops before mine. She slipped her made and remade garland into her pocket. Stood up. "Jean?" a large, dreadlocked black man sitting a-ways away asked. "Yes," she replied across the din, the screeching midnight subway brakes, "I thought I heard your voice." And got off.

Personal Mythology Uncovered

I had "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" by Dylan on loop this morning (don't know how to embed yet, but here's a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtkVGClqrT4).

Since the first time I heard it, when I was maybe 17, it has been my private break-up song. My public ones, the ones i play to friends and sing raucously, voice a-scratched from booze and cigarettes, sleep-deprivation and mouth ulcers, are all angry "Fuck you - I never wanted you anyway, and if I did i definitely don't anymore and you are going to be miserable without me"-songs.

"Don't Think Twice" has always been different. It's only for me, often long before the relationship is actually over. It's the song that has always seemed to echo my subconscious, snatches of lyric crystallizing exactly what's wrong. "I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul" - a controlling ex. "Ain't no use in turning on your light babe/ Light I never knowed" - the boy I was in love with in high school who never stopped loving his ex-girlfriend. "I once loved a (wo)man, a child I'm told" - friends telling me how immature some guy is. "You're the reason I'm traveling on" - done that, got the T-shirts and a smattering of Chinese language to show for it. Droves of music writers have discussed and described it with more impressively geeky insights than I could ever muster - it's a great, canonical folk song. Thing is, when I'm not breaking up with someone, it leaves me cold - it's pretty, but it's not ME.

I was really surprised this morning when it spoke to me again. It didn't seem like the right time - I've made a lot of decisions recently, I haven't been hiding from what I don't want to see. I didn't think I needed it. I don't know what's going to happen with the relationship I was recently in, but I'm not sure it's dead. And on the first couple of playings, I cried - because of the song's history for me, where nothing has ever survived the "Don't Think Twice" stage. I enjoy the brassy-blue sound of the picking, and the fact that Dylan bothers to sing almost in tune - but it has always been a death knell, and I hate it for that. In the past, it has inevitably signalled me emotionally checking out; "I'm on the dark side of the road", "So long honey babe, where I'm bound I can't tell". A self-fulfilling emotional prophecy, brought by my subconscious and Bob.

I didn't feel like the prophecy fit. But I couldn't stop listening to it.

I sent the link to my best friend.

Then remembered us singing it in my scabby old car ten years ago.

Felt safer. Decided not to switch to other, less personal songs.

I kept it on loop, stopped crying and started singing along. Then something completely new hit me about the song.
The lyrics may be beautiful.
They may even sound just like the sort of things I say to myself and others when it's over. But they are PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE BULLSHIT!!! How did I not see this before? "Ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe, if you don't know by now"? What the hell is that? Shouldn't he just have told her what was wrong WHEN THEY WERE TOGETHER? And even now when it's over, he's STILL playing that game? (And yes, I realise that i do this. all the time. which is what is terrifying.). And the whole song continues IN THE SAME VEIN. The final verse is the kicker though:

I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I'm bound, I can't tell
But goodbye's too good a word, gal
So I'll just say fare thee well
I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right


YES, YOU ARE saying she treated you "unkind", Bob - you're mad at her for not "turning on her light", for being a child, for not getting you. And then to add "BUT I DON'T MIND"?!?!?!?! Of course you mind. You wouldn't sing about it otherwise. You wouldn't address her. You wouldn't say you "loved" her, carefully parsing the verb to put in safely in the past - and to give you an emotional "get out of jail"-card if she were to say it back to you in the present. The coldness of "You just kind of wasted my precious time" is just horrifically cruel, searing - you don't do that unless you "mind". And the only thing you've let slip earlier is "Still I wish there was somethin' you would do or say/To try and make me change my mind and stay", but you cover your traces with "We never did too much talking anyway", making what you want impossible for the other person to respond to. And then telling her, "But don't think twice, it's alright"? Bob, you are an ass. A passive-aggressive ass.


I just realised how the narration of the song is just so cemotionally conflicted, so addicted to taking the high road, to not having to face rejection, to not having to own up to your own personal weaknesses, celebrating running away because you can't even stand the thought of staying when you've been hurt, and then not even giving the person you were with the "satisfaction" of seeing that he or she mattered...

AND THIS SONG USED TO MAKE ME FEEL BETTER?!?!?!!

I guess it does make sense then, that it spoke to me today - though for different reasons than it used to. I don't want to be someone who feels that the "Don't Think Twice" approach to relationships is OK. That it's fair. That it makes me a "good" person. That it's free, or romantic, or emotionally sustainable.

Here's to hoping that this part of my personal mythology can be re-written, or at least re-interpreted- that "Don't Think Twice" becomes the song that reminds me that, sometimes, it's better to actually ask for things before its too late, instead of a semi-mysterious augury of "The End".


In all its passive-aggressive glory:

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
It don't matter, anyhow
An' it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe
If you don't know by now
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I'll be gone
You're the reason I'm trav'lin' on
Don't think twice, it's all right

It ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An' it ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
I'm on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin' you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin' anyway
So don't think twice, it's all right

It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
Like you never did before
It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
I can't hear you any more
I'm a-thinkin' and a-wond'rin' all the way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I'm told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don't think twice, it's all right

I'm walkin' down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I'm bound, I can't tell
But goodbye's too good a word, gal
So I'll just say fare thee well
I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right

Copyright ©1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

Cleaning Backstories

Words written on novel since last post: 0
Miami Vice episodes watched since last post: 2.5


My roommate's been on a massive summer-cleaning binge. I guess her closets are now clean and tidy - nine years worth of clutter are in big plastic bags in our little hallway. She's smaller than most of the bags, which somehow strikes me as funny. I wonder where she's kept all the stuff - a bit like how you wonder where really thin people put all the food when they binge.

Am terrible at cutting out backstories. Was talking to a friend the other day who asked how a mutual pal was doing. Didn't know what to say without adding probably-not-OK-to-share-with-other-people details of the mutual friend's recent worries and concerns about her relationship, her career, her family, her place in the world, all that stuff. Just said "Yeah, she's doing really well" and edited in commentary about a new job or living situation or something else both superficial and seemingly significant.
Never realised that my belief that people sort of make sense when you know them would be a problem in my fiction writing. I mean, no-one else but me is ever going to care that one of my characters had braces when she was twelve, ones that her parents got her different coloured rubber bands to keep in place and keep cheerful. And that my other character has slightly askew bottom teeth, not terirbly but noticeably tea-stained, and has kept her old amalgam fillings because she hates going to the dentist, and she's worried that the dentist will pull out all her teeth and give her fake teeth that she has to put in a water glass by her bedside when she sleeps.
(What happens to amalgam fillings when you're cremated? Both she and I need to know this.)

My room is a horrific mess - I still haven't cleaned it following two weeks of houseguests. The middle of the room, the bit I love to dance around in and enjoy the feeling of floorboards, is still consumed by a giant inflatable bed. Still made for people that aren't here. It's easy to fix - just deflate, fold and put it in the closet. I've been walking around it for weeks, and until Saturday there was a reason for that. Why I haven't done anything about it since then is anyone's guess.

Firefly psychologist

My open-ended sabbatical is wonderful. But I need to start mimicking the structure of work - the last few years of wage-slavery have taken their toll on my ability to force myself to write without deadlines (actually, I always sort of sucked at that). Thus the "Not Savage Times" blog - until I get a full-time job, I'm forcing myself to post five times a week. And post the number of words I've written on the novel since the last post. Come rain or shine. I should be able to do this.

Just had an evening run in Prospect Park. After I was done, I walked around the park again, to look at fireflies. They really are everything that's right in the world - sort of plain and generically bug-like on the outside, and then light up unexpectedly. Was standing in the dusk watching them through the trees, loving their randomness and hearing in my inner ear J.M. Barrie children in white frilly dresses sing-songing "I believe in fairies" as they clapped their hands and danced about in their newly polished black leather shoes. So it didn't seem odd at all when a small, white-bearded man in a grey top hat walked up to me on the knoll. "They're lovely, aren't they?" I said. "Yes," he said, and asked "Vhat is your profession?" in an Austrian or Yiddish accent. "I'm a writer," I replied, asking him what he did. "I'm a psychologist," he said, which shouldn't surprise me and didn't. "You're a writer... Where? In zee books, or in freelancing?". "I write fiction," I said, "slowly." His top hat was grey and it looked as if he'd duct-taped some new fabric to it -perhaps it's wearing out and he doesn't want to throw it away. A good hat is hard to find. There was a dent on the nub of his nose - as if he'd rub it there when he was thinking. "You are an artistic voman," he said, and I smiled. "God Bless you," he added and I tilted my head, said "You too" and walked home.