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.