Things and Thoughts

In Life

• We have been in our new house for four weeks now and I love it. We are nowhere near unpacked because there's nowhere to unpack anything to and I'm haunted by the ever present knowledge that we have to pack up and move out again for two weeks in July (don't ask) but I am hoping we can find some semblance of order and homeliness before then and in the meantime the view from the front doorstep has earned itself its own hashtag. 

• I have ground to a halt with almost all work-related things since we moved. No writing, no working on my etsy shop. Boxes of terribly expensive postcards sit looking at me accusingly and likely will until the easter holidays are finally, finally over.  Then I'm going to take on the world. Probably. Maybe. If this cold ever fucks off. On the upside I have got myself an actual job as a remote PA a couple of mornings a week. Turns out I'm better at answering other people's emails than my own. 

• I am leaving the island in nine days and I am beyond excited. I am excited about four planes, two 7am trains, a multitude of TFL connections at the weekend (LOLZ), relying on the Brighton - London train running on time (double LOLZ) and juggling the baggage allowances of two different airlines on four different journeys, I'm excited about ALL of it. Most of all I'm excited about seeing my friends and photographing two lovely families and seeing how their little have grown and eating foreign food and being responsible for no lives but my own for five whole days. Bliss.

• I am half way through Big Magic, which is pretty good. And Breaking Clean - which is mostly great, and A Clash of Kings - which is unfailingly terrible, but I can't stop. I'm aware that if I don't grow some self-control this is going to be a long term deal, what with there being 74 fucking books. It's far too big for the loaf of bread sized suitcase I have to fit a camera kit and five days worth of clothes into when I go away so maybe I can use all of that travel time to finish some real books. (Further reasons to get a kindle - I can take every GOT book with me everywhere I go. Hmmm...) 

Online

• I loved this piece by Ruth Whippman - she of the quote in my side bar, she of the 'despair and faeces' comment. Stop fetishing parenting, she says, you're sucking all the joy out of it. She writes about the increasing pressure among parents (mothers) to subscribe to a philosophy, to have a mission statement in raising your kids other than 'get everyone to the end of the day in one(ish) piece,' She writes about the extremes of attachment parenting vs routine parenting and sums them up pretty wonderfully;

'The philosophies themselves may be opposing, but what they share is a kind of absolutism, a high stakes alarmist tone, in which the consequences of not sticking to the script can be lifelong and dire.   

In reality, whichever method you choose, your kids are overwhelmingly likely to turn out just fine. There is little evidence to suggest that any one loving parenting style has any particular advantage over any other, but still both of these basic parenting worldviews are firmly rooted in a kind of underlying terror.   

 For the routine-lovers it’s the fear that without a firm hand, a child will become coddled and dependent, lacking in resilience and unable to function in the real world. At the more cuddly end of the spectrum, it’s the heart-chilling anxiety that children are so psychologically fragile that without near constant attention they will suffer long-term emotional damage.' Ruth Whippman, The Guardian. 

I have added her book to my ever growing list. Not because I'm in pursuit of 'happiness' (Oliver Burkeman's incredible book saw to that a few years ago) but because I find Whippman brilliant and wise and hilarious.

• These photos of Paris' Museum of Natural History during the 25 years it lay abandoned and its renovations in the early 90s are fascinating. As are these behind the scene's pictures of the Smithsonian's Natural History collection. I particularly love how straight this army of little dead mice are holding their tails. 

• I've had a hard time following British politics for a while, since about the point where Scotland looked at the open door it was offered and said No, freedom isn't really for us. Ta though.' My denial that this happened is strong. I am loving Sam Gore's facebook page I See You and in particular this post about David Cameron, which should by all rights be the front page of this Sunday's Observer.

''But it's not illegal', they'll cry, as if the boundaries of the law are the issue, rather than the toxic hypocrisy of the idea that we're all in this together. 'Anyone could do it if they wanted', they'll cry, despite the fact it's a logical impossibility for the millions of us on PAYE. 'It's no different to using an ISA', they'll insist, as if putting away the few pence extra you've deigned to bless those on the minimum wage with is in any way comparable to setting up a company in a tax haven in a foreign territory. A few pence for a house they'll never be able to afford in the face of a broken rental market is somehow comparable to squirrelling away the excess millions your terrible friends couldn't spend even if they ate nothing but gold bullion and Fabergé eggs for a year.'

Read the whole thing, it's spectacular. I especially love the description of Cameron as a greased ferret slipping free from the ... well, you read it. I can't type those words where I know my Gran will read them. 

• The wisest words I've ever heard spoken about peanut butter. I still eat it because it's fast and easy protein, but yes, I slather it in jam and no, I don't enjoy it. 

'Look at it. It looks like the contents of a nappy. It looks this repulsive to tell you that it’s bad for you, which it is. It tastes exactly how it looks, too, which is somewhere along the spectrum between awful and so vibrantly foul its flavour makes your entire tract, from top to bottom, twitch like a petrified whippet. Some people try to disguise the odious taste of peanut butter with jam. But these people are Americans. And if a nation that sees spray-on cheese as an acceptable repast thinks peanut butter is only palatable when smeared in jam, it’s time to admit something’s very wrong.'

*photos courtesy of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle via Messy Nessy Chic. 

Things.

Amy Judd

Yes, I'm already bored of and feeling trapped by the doing, reading, listening format - I really don't do well with blog series, as you can tell by the half a dozen that have fizzled out over the years and I can tell by the many many more that have never made it out of my head. 

So, instead, Things.

Things this week;



Life 

- we moved house. Almost a year to the day from leaving France. We now live 200ft down the road from the house my mum built (not by hand, because apparently that needs clarified for some people. My mum is pretty handy but she's not building a house handy) when I was 15. She sold it five or so years later and every time I walk past I'm all 'who the fuck are you and what are you doing in my house? By the way your daffodils look great.' at the people sitting in the kitchen window. Silently and inwardly, because I'm not a total lunatic.

- I'm maybe in the midst of applying to go back to college. Maybe. Shhh, let's say nothing more of it for now.

- I went to work last week, to take photos of a 3D printing workshop. I'm going to write more about it when the photos are done but hell, was it good to spend a day taking pictures again. I miss that.

- I'm considering spending £60 on a hairbrush (BIRTHDAY MONEY, I'm not spunking half of our weekly food budget on fripperies, much as the urge takes me sometimes). I don't know if this is a sign that I'm losing my mind or that I'm creeping ever closer to living my best life.


Writing

- Last week I came extremely close to throwing out everything I've written over the last three months. I haven't been working on it much because of the aforementioned moving and when I came back to it it looked terrible, awful, horrible. But a very wise friend said to me - when I was screaming into my fist and questioning what the point was -

'THE POINT. The point is to practise, The point is to get to a point where your writing aligns with your standards for good writing. The point is to write enough that you can revise it down to something you don't hate. The point is to show up and think the thoughts and do the work. That is the point.  

The point is not to be magically good. The point is to scrub your step until it shines.  

You CAN write. But the point isn't whether you can write. The POINT is to DO IT. You weren't good at marriage at first or pooping in the pot at first or being a grown up at first or drawing at first either, I bet. It took time. It takes time.  

Scrub your step, gal.  

Scrub it good.' 

I love that friend.  And the apps that allow friends who live far apart and in different time zones and in areas without mobile phone reception to exchange words sharp and fast and in real time. And internets that allow them to meet in the first place.

Books 


I bought a whole load of books this week. I don't have any money, but. None of them were the poetry books I mentioned last week which I feel a bit ashamed of. The books in question were;

For me

- Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert. Because I realised that I listened to one of the podcasts and completely loved it and felt invigorated and inspired by it and then forgot to listen to the rest. I'm not saying that I don't do the exact same thing with books but I'm more likely (I think, I hope) to stick with something that I can hold and read and see and feel. Also, the cover is gorgeous.

- Help, Thanks, Wow and Stitches, by Anne Lamott. Because I'm feeling a bit lost, and few books have ever un-lost me like hers.

- Breaking Clean, by Judy Blunt. I can't remember where I read about this but the passage that was quoted in it was desperately beautiful. It's a memoir (so research, innit?) about a woman taking her three children and leaving the homesteading community that her and her husband grew up and were deeply entrenched in. I've only read 20 pages but it's beautiful.

- The Art of Memoir and Lit, by Mary Karr. I found these via Laura's Pinterest page and I had to have them, for the same parenthesised reason mentioned above - research. Not because spending money I don't have comforts me when I'm feeling the aforementioned lost, no sir, not at all.

- A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin. Um, well, yeah. I'm absolutely not going to leave all of those inspiring, life improving books deposited around the house like forgotten rabbit droppings as soon as this next GOT instalment arrives. Not one single bit.


For the Girls -

In My Heart, A Book of Feelings, by Jo Witek. Which isn't to say that the girls struggle with their feelings but SWEET JESUS, do five year olds struggle with their feelings. It's a beautiful book and we've only read it once but it taught us all some stuff about the things our hearts feel.


*Links do not generate me any cash. Not because I'm virtuous or not that into money, I just don't know how to do that 'earning' thing*


Online

- the couples who talk about their poo are the happiest couples of all. It's always nice when a perfectly unqualified stranger on the internet confirms that you and your husband are golden. Although, actually, my husband would like it to be known that I talk, he just listens, a lot. (Emphasis his.)

- period tracking, are you into it? do you do it? would you place a bluetooth enabled device up your fnuh? (the answers in my case are yes, yes, you must be kidding.)

- this article about Brewdog was really interesting to me. The desire to label anyone who comes up with something innovative and is exceptionally good at marketing it a 'pretentious hipster wanker' seems like a particularly British, and a particularly obnoxious British tendency to me. (For what it's worth; I've met the Brewdog guy, I have an extremely low pretension tolerance, I liked him.)

- Connor Stefanison's goat and sheep portraits are everything. This guy knows what I'm all about.

poetry and staying alive

'If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.' Emily Dickinson

Happy World Poetry Day people. 

I love poetry, I have done since I was seventeen and walked into a bookshop, drifted past shelves and over tables and was arrested by a beautiful face staring out at me from the cover of an anthology that promised a lot. Staying Alive – real poems for unreal times quickly became my bible, my gospel, my helpmate. I poured over its pages, reading and re-reading and marking and remembering. I copied poems into my sketchbooks alongside my first moody attempts at black and white photography, I stayed up late into the night reading 'just one more' for hours and hours, I carried it with me in backpacks and suitcases and pinned handwritten copies of my favourites to the wall next to my bed, alongside photos of home and the people I loved.

I cried heavy salty tears into poems that spoke of death and depression and miscarriage and war and I held my breath through dizzying pages dedicated to love and sex and birth and joy. I found reassuring glimpses of feelings I recognised and tasted the smallest but most intense morsels of ones I hadn't even come close to experiencing. I learned that love and death could be the most mundane things and that a bulb pushing through the winter earth or a toad sitting on a river bank could be almost transcendent. I learned about being, and staying, alive. 

Before I bought this book I knew no more about poetry than anyone who had just completed high school English, I was not and still am not knowledgeable about it and find myself embarrassed and mute around friends who know Poetry. I do not know Poetry and I likely never will but I know this book and I know a handful of poems from it and I know that my life is all the richer for it.
When I was eighteen I bought Staying Alive for a friend who was studying English at university. He went on to study poetry and many years later went on again to have his first collection Moontide published by Bloodaxe, that same publisher who brought me my bible. Inside Moontide is a poem dedicated to my girls, to Ella and Ammie, and when I read it I found myself crying tears into a poem for the first time in many many years. I think they call that 'full circle'.
Moontide went on to win a shit tonne of prestigious prizes and you should buy it immediately, because it's excellent. You should also read this interview in Poetry Spotlight where he talks about poetry its relevance and fatherhood  and his new collection which is coming out at the end of the year.
I don't read a lot of poetry any more. In the last few years I've read Niall's book and the Emma PressAnthology of Motherhood, which I recently bought for myself and a friend - partly because poetry and motherhood are dear to my heart, partly because it's a bloody beautiful book - and that's it. It's fairly pitiful. But I'm tired and my kids ate my brain and I don't have a lot of time for reading anything any more. I have deeply loved listening to Dominique Christina's poetry, particularly her Period Poem, which should be required listening for every single person who has ever had a period or been born as the result of someone else's period (everyone, in case you didn't get that.)
I still carry Staying Alive and its sequel Being Alive everywhere with me, they were the first things I carried into our new home and placed onto the mantelpiece and when I'm feeling lost but still capable of reading I delve into them, searching for answers I've already found but forgotten or for ones that have as of yet escaped me - because I still haven't read every poem in those books, am still capable of finding something new. I haven't bought the third book in the Staying Alive trilogy - Being Human - because I know I can not read it, can not do it justice, can not love it the way that I loved that first one. Being Alive has never quite kindled the passion I feel for it's predecessor. Maybe one day I will be ready for it but these words from Niall's interview ring true and comforting to me;

'The dynamic between a reader and a poetry collection is completely different [to that of a novel] – there is much more ‘investment’ by the reader in a poetry collection – there is a reason poetry has never been accused of being escapism! I think that if you have ‘found’ yourself, or a space that might be yours, in a poetry collection then it would be a peculiar madness that would quickly put this aside to begin the search anew.'

 

I will leave you on this World Poetry Day with two of my favourites from Staying Alive and a shopping list of books that I have, that I love, that I want - starting points for current and future lovers of poetry. 

Thoughts After Ruskin by Elma Mitchell and What Every Woman Should Carry, by Maura Dooley are the poems I have copied and carried and reread the most, they lie within two pages of each other in a 500 page book and it is under them that the spine is creased the deepest. 

Thoughts After Ruskin, by Elma Mitchell 

Women reminded him of lilies and roses.

Me they remind rather of blood and soap,

Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,

Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places:

Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,

Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,

Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,

Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverising,

- All the terrible chemistry of their kitchens. 

Their distant husbands lean across mahogany

And delicately manipulate the market,

While safe at home, the tender and gentle

Are killing tiny mice, dead snap by the neck,

Asphyxiating flies, evicting spiders,

Scrubbing, scouring aloud, disturbing cupboards,

Committing things to dustbins, twisting, wringing,

Wrists red and knuckles white and fingers puckered,

Pulpy, tepid. Steering screaming cleaners

Around the snags of furniture, they straighten

And haul out sheets from under the incontinent

And heavy old, stoop to importunate young,

Tugging, folding, tucking, zipping, buttoning,

Spooning in food, encouraging excretion,

Mopping up vomit, stabbing cloth with needles,

Contorting wool around their knitting needles,

Creating snug and comfy on their needles. 

Their huge hands! their everywhere eyes! their voices

Raised to convey across the hullabaloo,

Their massive thighs and breasts dispensing comfort,

Their bloody passages and hairy crannies,

Their wombs that pocket a man upside down! 

And when all's over, off with overalls,

Quickly consulting clocks, they go upstairs,

Sit and sigh a little, brushing hair,

And somehow find, in mirrors, colours, odours,

Their essences of lilies and of roses.

What Every Woman Should Carry, by Maura Dooley

My mother gave me the prayer to Saint Theresa.

I added a used tube ticket, kleenex,

several Polo mints (furry), a tampon, pesetas, 

a florin. Not wishing to be presumptuous, 

not trusting you either, a pack of 3. 

I have a pen. There is space for my guardian

angel, she has to fold her wings. Passport. 

A key. Anguish, at what I said/didn't say

when once you needed/didn't need me. Anadin. 

A credit card. His face the last time, 

my impatience, my useless youth. 

That empty sack, my heart. A box of matches. 

A poetry shopping list, for you, for me, for friends; 

Staying Alive

Being Alive

Being Human, all edited by Neil Astley and published by Bloodaxe

Moontide, by Niall Campbell

Her Birth, Rebecca Goss

The Bones, The Breaking, The Balm; A Coloured Girl's Hymnal

They Are All Me, both by Dominique Christina. 

Sound Barrier

Life Under Water, both by Maura Dooley

The Emma Press Anthology of Motherhood, edited by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright

The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood, edited by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright

Best Friends Forever, Poems On Female Friendship, edited by Amy Key

Further Reading; this buzzfeed list of twelve British poets sharing their favourite poems is wonderful and full of launching pads to the discovery of new poems and poets. 

Happy World Poetry day lovers. I would love to hear about any poetry books you are reading / thinking of reading / once read a long time ago but still remember in the comments and you can find more of my favourite poems that I've blogged here by clicking the poetry tag below. 

Doing, Reading, Listening

Doing; This week has been mostly hanging out with friends who came to visit from Glasgow, I'm loving how Uist is attracting friends, despite the epic ballache that is getting here. We did beaches and exploring and then I got sick and did a lot of sleeping while they walked my dog, cooked me dinner and entertained my children, it was pretty Grade A Friending on their part. Visitors who don't mind when you check out and go to bed and tell them to entertain themselves are the best kind of visitors.

I wrote no words for my big project this week, it's getting embarrassing. I did write this thing about Ammie though which I really love. I haven't written much about my kids or parenting over the last couple of years and it felt a special kind of lovely to celebrate my infuriating, exhausting offspring in words and pictures. 

Instead of writing I have been working on my newest project which is to get my etsy shop off the ground again. It's getting there and I'm really excited about making and selling again.

Reading {paper} I finished Game of Thrones. It was terrible. I can't wait to read the next one.  I started Christopher Brookmyre's One FineDay In The Middle Of The Night a couple of days ago. I love his writing – it's grim, profanity laden, hilarious Scottish crime and he's one of the few writers who can reliably make me laugh out loud. Even his lesser works have lines that make me snorlf;

'St Michael’s RC secondary sat on a promontory overlooking the town of Auchenlea. The choice of site was an indirect consequence of a past mistake in vocational guidance, leading someone who had a pathological hatred of children into town planning, rather than the more traditional field of teaching.' Christopher Brookmyre, 

Reading {internets}This piece in The Pool by Lauren Laverne on finding the meaning in your work even if your work doesn't happen to involve saving lives or creating Great Works Of Art. As someone who has recently realised that perhaps I don't want as noble a career as I once imagined, I found it extremely comforting;

'People started to get in touch. I got to know my regular listeners and I began to understand that, sometimes, a bit of silliness can save your life. Some days, a five-minute distraction is the only thing that gets you through' Lauren Laverne, The Pool

This on the environmental and moral implications of the leather trade convinced me very quickly that I need to think harder and longer about the leather purchases I make. I have always thought of leather as a by-product of the meat industry and I continued to buy and wear it throughout the two decades that I was a militant vegetarian. I haven't bought any leather for 18 months (passively – I've been too broke for shoes and bags) and I think it's going to be a good long time before I do it again.

'Nearly half of the global leather trade is carried out in developing countries – from Ethiopia to Cambodia and Vietnam – where, despite a backdrop of exploitation of animals and humans and the extraordinary level of pollution caused by unregulated tanneries and processors, the pressure is on to produce more.'

And at the other end of the scale entertainment-wise; reddit readers sum up their first sexual encounters with a safe-for-work gif. Their choices are genius.

Listening; the two most recent episodes of Death, Sex and Money – the one with the couple who have been together for 20 years and had three children whilst being raging heroin addicts. That one was gruelling with an ending that had me 'WTF?'-ing out loud, out on the moors (the moors are my go-to podcast walk now, each time I think of that episode of Girls where Hannah lay down in the woods, unable to keep up with her fitter friends, and hugged her This American Life-playing iphone). After that episode I listened to the previous one, an interview with comedian Michael Ian Black, who I had never heard of but really enjoyed. It was wonderful to listen to a middle aged man be deeply neurotic and anxious and hilarious about his weight, a blessed and almost shocking change from the standard 'middle aged (or any aged) woman talks about her body and the neurosis she has about it'

Watching; we are almost finished FridayNight Lights and although I'm sad about reaching the end (again) we are looking forward to to new series of Better Call Saul, which we both preferred to Breaking Bad. As I've been working I've been watching Rupaul's Drag Race which I am loving, LOVING. As a family we've been watching a lot of David Attenborough, which is how my five year old came to ask me 'what is a sperm sack and why is the cuttlefish putting it in the other cuttlefish's mouth?' (cuttlefish are filthy.)  

Doing, Reading, Listening

IT'S GODDAMN MARCH PEOPLE! Thank. The. Sweet. Baby. Jesus. 

I wrote that thing after Christmas about January and how great and restorative and blah blah blah it is and yeah, it was fine, but February, man February was a total downer. That it is the shortest month is literally all it has going for it and knocking back vitamin D tablets like they were tic tacs, counting down the days until friends visited at the end of the month and spending long (really long, interminable) evenings in the bath with the lights turned off was the only way through it.

But it's over! Yay! A weight, a 28 29 day weight has lifted and I am feeling sparklings of what's that? Optimism? Woo! 

Doing: this week in Doing I have been writing but not as rigidly as I was. I have worked on my big thing and I've worked on a few shorter things and for the first time it has been enjoyable. I have also been doing a lot of thinking about my What Next? and if that is getting a job or going back to college or throwing myself into starting a new business. None of those things are imminently achievable but neither are they petrifying, like they were a month ago.

Reading {paper}; still Game of Thrones, the first book. It's terrible, I can't stop. Also The Official DVSA Guide To Driving 2015 (the technique changes annually, who knew?). 

Reading {the internet}; Aside from the dresses I couldn't give two shits about the Oscars but I enjoyed this piece in  The Pool on Disney-esque dressing, whether would be be as interested in watching if the women involved didn't dress like celluloid princesses and if there a princess gene that makes some kids want to dress in mountains of pastel satin while others would rather go naked than wear a princess dress? From my small study group of two, I would say that she might be on to something there. 

Do I think Alicia Vikander and Cate Blanchett wanted to look like Disney characters? Do I think that two highly intelligent and accomplished women woke up and asked their stylists to make them into fairytale princesses for kicks? In terms of a brief, “just do whatever it takes for me to avoid the worst-dressed lists, so that I can block the sexist, racist farrago that is the Oscars out of my mind for another 364 days” is more likely. 

The Disney princess analogy, and our willingness to invoke it, says far more about us than it does about any individual actress. All they’re doing is playing the game. They know that if they dress up nicely, Hollywood will reward them for playing their part in a pageant which, let us not mince words, feels as dated as most things that originated in 1929. Laura Craik, The Pool.

Also on the Oscars and fashion and women and feminism, these pieces in the Guardian and again, The Pool about Jenny Beavan, the genius costume designer behind Mad Max who deigned, deigned to turn up to the Oscars in jeans and a leather jacket, with unbrushed hair and NO MAKE UP (how very dare she) and the frankly horrifying reactions of the fuckwits, I mean men, who she walked past to get to the stage.

Alejandro Iñárritu glowered as if a woman in a leather jacket was somehow more repulsive than DiCaprio chomping down a raw bison liver. One man, bless his heart, all but leapt into the arms of his companion as she sauntered past, in the same manner that a housewife in a 1950s cartoon would if a mouse suddenly crawled out from under the skirting board. Stuart Heritage, The Guardian. 

c. VW Golf advert

Reading {the internets} cont. 

Everything by Emma Lindsay, whose piece about what she learned from dating rape victims went viral last week but who is interesting and articulate and moving on many issues.

There’s another annoying thing that often comes up when I date people who aren’t down with their bodies: I often end up feeling like shit about mine. My ex and I got in this fight once where I said “Do you feel like I accept your body? Because I don’t feel like you accept mine.” She was shocked, and told me she did feel like I accepted her body and was upset that it didn’t feel reciprocated. And I asked her, with all the negative things she said about herself, how could I ever feel safe? She was clearly capable of putting her own body through a fucking ruthless judgement, why would I expect she wasn’t judging mine just as harshly? Emma Linday, Medium. 

This interview with John Irving, who I continue to adore, despite it being years and years since he's written anything I enjoyed reading, because he wrote two of my favourite books ever, a handful more of my almost-favourite books ever and knows how to wrestle a bear.

“The bear is almost blind but one thing he will see is your eyes,” he says, in best shiver-making, frontiersman-mode. “So you must never make direct eye contact. Avert your gaze.” He suddenly transforms into a cringing courtier and adds: “Retreat slowly from the bear and allow him gangway. Above all, don’t run. A bear will outrun a horse over a short distance. They chase and kill deer. Look at the way they’re built, with a powerful upper body, like a sprinter’s.” Somehow you can’t imagine picking up hard-won backwoods tips like these from Julian Barnes. Stephen Smith, The Guardian. 

The Pool (again) is running a series on Motherhood, Sali Hughes on Post Natal Depression (but really on all depression) is wonderful.

'I wasn’t exaggerating. I genuinely felt insane. Since the birth of my much-wanted baby, and the death of my father a few weeks later, my life had felt like an interminable movie I was watching from behind a thick sheet of tracing paper' Sali Hughes, The Pool. 

Listening; I haven't been doing a lot of listening, I've been adoring silence where I can get it, but yesterday Lyra and I walked into the moors and I listened to the latest episode of This American Life, it was heartbreaking, and a stern lesson in believing people when they tell you stuff, even if they are not telling you stuff in the way you think they should tell you stuff. 

There are two songs playing in my head constantly (three if you include that godawful Adele one that won't get off my radio); Hozier's WorkSong which is absurdly beautiful and Lukas Graham's 7 Years, which also won't get off my radio and which I can't decide if I actually like or if it's just catchy like flu.

What doeth, readeth and listeneth you this week?

on writing and the first draft.

but you can edit your first draft.

There is very little flare to my shitty first draft. Aside from those first thousand words that I wrote two years ago and edited until they were gleaming it is just facts on a page, with all of the fluency and grace of a seven year old writing about their school holidays – 'I went swimming then I had a burger then my sister punched me in the leg on the way home so I broke her toy and we both got in trouble and it wasn't fair'. I didn't know that I had it in me to write so badly.

The shitty first draft is an notion that stuck with me after reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird five years ago (and then four years ago and three years ago and one year ago - I love that book). Inspired by Earnest Hemingway's assertion that the first draft of everything is shit, its only purpose to get a writer past the terrifyng hurdle of the blank page to the point where they can revise it and tweak it and turn it into a good second draft and an even better third draft, she wrote a whole chapter extolling the virtues of the Shitty First Draft. It is an explosion of the myth that coherent words just flow from those with a gift for them, that a good writer can just write and that if what comes from your hands the first time around is less than readable then writing is not for you.

She says

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God* likes her or can even stand her.

Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow.

We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time. Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning -- sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.

I find myself thinking of this a lot at the moment, as the words stack up and they are mostly terrible. Lamott also advises vehemently against editing as one goes, she says that you must get to the end and then edit. Doing this pains me. Seeing all of those crappy words sitting there disjointedly and clumsily and adding yet more crappy words to them makes me feel slightly sick, but she knows more than me and is very clever and I need someone to tell me what to do and seeing as she makes me laugh a lot it may as well be her. Not everyone agrees with her, this guy for instance, but I don't know who he is, he has never made me laugh and he doesn't care for the word 'shitty', so I see no reason to listen to him. 

I'm not sure I can do it right until the end. I am working in six sections and I suspect that once I have finished the first one I will go back and edit it, partly to see if I can make it readable before I flog myself over 60,000 more words, and partly because there's only so long I can go on living with this drivel on my hard drive. What if I die before I get a chance to edit it and people think that it was meant to be like this? Sheesh.

* Lamott writes a lot about God and Christianity and has written some beautiful books about faith and how she got there from being a raging alcoholic. I am not religious, not with any regularity or predictability anyway, and I love her writings on God, they are some of the most calming, reasuring, inspiring, hilarious books I have ever read. I have reread Travelling Mercies even more times than I've reread Bird by Bird. 

Doing, Reading, Listening etc

One week's break from doing these DRL posts is enough for me to have completely lost my momentum, which is no surprise. The reason I impose schedules and routines upon myself is because if I don't have them then I don't do stuff and then trying to make myself do stuff is just about as effective as trying to make myself clean that bit of the toilet that you can only reach with rubber gloves and a sponge.

Doing; further schedules that have fallen apart - writing. I can't remember when I last even opened the files I'm working on. I wouldn't be surprised if my word count has started to drop, sentences dying from neglect, paragraphs eating other ones out of hunger and boredom. I can't bear to look. Monday, I'll do it on Monday. 

Instead of writing I've been doing long weekends, visitors, parenting, storm avoidance, mostly rather fun. Simultaneously though I've been banging my head against the walls of housing, schooling, taxes, employment, unemployment... adulthood in other words. Adulthood is a piece of crap. 

Reading {paper} I finished Purple Hibiscus, it was beautiful. Not as beautiful as Half of a Yellow Sun but not as gruelling either. Still gruelling! Just domestic-violence-and-Catholicism gruelling, not rape-genocide-and-civil-war gruelling. 

Immediately upon finishing it I started Isabelle Allende's Portrait in Sepia, read three pages, fell asleep, woke up forgetting that I'd begun it and started reading Game of Thrones (alternatively titled Murder Tits). It's only writing this now, a week later, that Portrait in Sepia came back to me, poking at that part of my brain labelled 'I'm sure I'm supposed to be doing something, what was that? Did I start doing it already? Did I imagine it? Was it all a dream?'.

I read Allende's memoir My Invented Country in the summer, it was a beautiful if irritating study of nostalgia and homesickness, truth and invention, memory and storytelling and writing one's history. It strikes me that I should probably re-read it, now that those things are on my mind more or less all of the time. I photographed the passage at the top of this post (I love photography as a form of note taking, looking back for this picture I was reminded of exactly where and when I was reading this book - by a playpark, under a tree, overlooking a field of donkeys in a camp site in the Cévennes ) because as someone who finds memory, dreams and imagination to be an irredeemably tangled ball of twine it spoke to me deeply and thrillingly. 

Reading {internets} I have read two beautiful and infinitely helpful pieces about doing and making and being in the last couple of weeks. One is this Huffington Post piece To Anyone Who Fears They're Falling Behind In Life which felt like a letter written straight to me, 

'You don't get to control everything. You can wake up at 5 a.m. every day until you're tired and broken, but if the words or the painting or the ideas don't want to come to fruition, they won't. You can show up every day to your best intentions, but if it's not the time, it's just not the fucking time. You need to give yourself permission to be a human being.'

The other piece was Ted Thompson's The Evolution of a First Novel, written two years ago it's the tale of the painful, interminable process of writing a book, of the stops and starts and false turns and the 'I think it's finished! No, wait, I know it's been five years of work but I'm going to throw 95% of this in the bin and start again.' 

'Before I started this, I was always mystified by how books got written. Like how does anyone get from one of those half-formed 2 a.m. ideas to a bound object with a beautiful jacket and 300 deckled pages? Did that take a couple of weekends locked away in a cabin, or was the author struck by creative lightning after work? It seemed impossible or magical. It seemed like something that could only be achieved by very special people—David Foster Wallace in his bandana, looking forlornly away from the camera, or people who lived in other eras and unironically wore hats.' 

Reading both of these pieces released some of the intense pressure I've felt to Just Fucking Write, the feeling that if I apply myself hard enough I will get it done and I will get it done fast, and replaced that with a more healthy sense of doing it in the length of time it actually takes, not the length of time I think it should take. Of course I haven't written a work in ten days, so maybe I need to dial the pressure back up a little. 

Finally, Laura wrote this beautiful piece about being a mother, Sometimes {Moments From Motherhood} that brought tears to my eyes and spoke to me in a way that nothing I've read about motherhood has done for a long time. Laura is one of those parents who inspires me to do a better job, to play more, to listen harder, to let me kids be themselves and she does it without making me want to hold her head underwater and pelt her with wet toast, that's a skill.  I'm not going to post a quote from it because it's something that needs to be read in its entirety.

Doing, reading, listening, etc

Gold Digging, by Euginia Loli

Doing; meh. It's been one of those fortnights where a stomach thing turned into a head thing turned into a glands and shivering thing and people say 'oh! The days are getting longer! Spring is coming! Isn't it wonderful?' but actually I feel shittier than I did all winter and am getting nothing much at all done and I need those people to stop talking.

I'm learning to drive (for the third time) but this time I live on a island where there isn't a driving instructor so I'm learning with Nye. I mostly don't hate this situation. He's a good teacher, takes fairly kindly to me asking him to please shut up, accepts my yelling at him when his instructions ARE NOT CLEAR with good grace and most importantly - I don't have to give him £50 every time I get in the car with him. Handing over money that I could have spent on something that didn't make me stressed, embarrassed and brimming with fury was pretty much what killed learning to drive for me that last time around. Fitting in a few hours of practise was about as productive as my week got.

Oh and I did a blog post with beach photos, taken with a real camera and edited on a computer and everything. I forgot to promote it anywhere so literally no one has seen it. How do you know about new posts now that Reader is dead? Instagram? Twitter? Facebook?  (I know, Reader has been dead for a long time, I'm in denial about blogging being O.V.E.R. Should I just stop this nonsense and write a newsletter? That's what the cool kids are doing.)

Writing; meh. This week I did three mornings instead of the five I swore I would. On those three mornings I did not do the three hours I swore I would. I'm trying this thing where I tell myself I'm easing in gently, I'm going at my own pace, I'm being kind to myself, but actually I'm scared I might just be lazy. My weekly word count is going dowwwwwwwwn, but it's still up on what it has been for the last two years, so yay for that.


Reading {paper}: I gave up on the dragon book, it just wasn't doing anything for me. For years I would not give up on a book once I had started reading it, doing so felt like a huge failure and embarrassment and sign that I was both a quitter and not a Serious Reader. Now that I have established that I actually am a quitter (and met people who are Serious Readers, who are quite clearly a league above me in the book stakes), I'm a lot happier to throw in things that aren't working for me and the number of books I don't finish is probably equal to if not greater than the number of books I reach the end of. I'm okay with this.

I am now reading Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which I'm feeling a lot more optimistic about. My first experience of her writing was Americanah, which is actually possibly one of the first books that I gave up on. It pained me to do it, reading so much as I had about what a great, important novel it is, but I just couldn't get beyond the first couple of chapters. I tried a few times, but no dice and still worried that I was missing something life-changing, gave the door-stop sized book to the charity shop. Then when I was in France I read Half of a Yellow Sun and holy shit, that was a book, one of the best books I have ever read. The story is unavoidably gruelling, set as it is during the Nigerian civil war, but the characters and the story telling and the writing and well, all of those things that make a book, they were beautiful. You should read it. It will probably make you cry but it's worth it. I opened Purple Hibiscus tentatively, wondering if it would grab me like Yellow Sun or if more like Americnah, it would feel like chewing cardboard, I've only read the first five pages but within a paragraph I breathed a huge sigh of relief , it felt like a book I could get lost in.

Reading {the internets}; I have been reading a lot about Beyoncé . I have never really cared about Beyoncé to be honest but her latest video  Formation - sprung on her fans and the internet and America the day before she performed at the SuperBowl (apparently that's something about football, not bowling, who knew?) - is amazing. Visually it is beautiful but as a piece of protest art about race and gender and the Black Lives Matter movement it is deeply moving. This New York Times piece is a good starting point if you want to read more about it but this collection of writing by black women delves much deeper into many issues surrounding the video, from her use of post-Katrina New Orleans as a setting to her baby girl's beautiful afro to her sheer feminist badassery.


Listening: I didn't bother with Serial this week. Are you listening to it? Do you care? Does it just sound like an awful lot of men being dicks to you? I'm just not sure. I love Sarah Koenig and I miss her in this series. My favourite podcast at the moment is Death, Sex, Money with Anna Sale and this week I listened to the last two episodes - LucindaWilliams who is a country singer and Jeb Corliss who is a nutter who jumps off cliffs. I adore Anne Sale, I listen just for when she occasionally laughs, it is the realest most warming laugh on the whole radio and every time it feels like a gift.



Happy weekend. x

Doing, reading, listening etc.

Andy Prokh 

What the hell? It's Friday again? What is this 'time' bullshit that keeps passing? And I'm sure I told myself I'd do this every Friday, this blogging thing? 

But I just blogged yesterday. What's that? Rules are rules? Shut up.

_

I actually haven't been doing a lot of reading and listening this week. Between a storm day that kept the girls home from school on Monday, no electricity for much of Tuesday and a bunch of errands that needed done on Wednesday both my internet time and my writing time has been severely bollocksed this week.

Reading: I've been reading some actual paper books, which has been nice. I'm reading Marie Brennan's A Natural History of Dragons, a Memoir by Lady Trent, which isn't a memoir, obviously but a faux-memoir, about a Victorian-ish era lady dragon enthusiast. It's good, not great. I like the mash up of historical fiction, science fiction and memoir and it's easy bedtime reading but I'm not riveted and I doubt I'll read the rest of the series. 

On the recommendation of a dear friend who shares my prediliction towards Anxiety and Doom I'm also reading Fear, Essential Wisdom For Getting Through the Storm by ThichNhat Hanh. It's less annoying than any other bhuddist books that I've read but it's slow going as it keeps making me cry. Most of what I've read so far are similar techniques, strategies and ideas that I learned about in therapy a few years ago and promptly forgot, all of which do in fact help to dispel my anxiety, once I've stopped blubbing.

Looking at my internet history to see what I've been reading online this week is cringe-worthy, it's almost entirely how to attract the rare cats in Neko Atsume and 3 Messy Signs Your Main Sewer Line is Clogged (I'll spare you the story that led to that one. And the link.)

Reading/Writing: On the recommendation of another friend I did read this BrainPickings piece on the psychology of the daily writing routine, which is something I've been trying to cultivate. Between 9 and 12 is now my Writing Time. Last week went better than this one and between the disruptions of lack of electricity and excess of children at home I managed a paltry 5000 words to last week's 9000, but whatever, I'm still doing it and I'm being kind to myself and I'm letting myself do just one hour when three feels like it might kill me dead. Baby steps.

Watching: Nye and I are watching Friday Night Lights on Netflix at the moment. I've seen it all before but that doesn't seem to be making it any less brilliant/gruelling. People in my real life keep looking at me like I'm deranged when I say that we watch a TV series about American football. These are people who are not doing the internet properly. 

Also watching this vaguely obscene clip of James McAvoy on Cbeebies, over and over again and laughing my arse off.

Listening: Old episodes of This American Life, which are as wonderful as ever. New episodes of Serial, which I find distinctly meh but I can't seem to give up on. And Radio 2, which was back to back Terry Wogan on Monday which made me cry and reminded me that I need to re-watch Stoppit and Tidy Up with my children. Did anyone else watch that as a kid? Nye is literally the only person I've ever mentioned it to who even knows what I'm talking about.

Housekeeping: the food processor is a Kenwood FDP613 (you have to pay more for one with a memorable name). I chose it because it was cheap (for a food processor) and we are broke, also it has pretty good reviews. So far (aside from being mad at it), it does seem good. I don't think it's powerful enough to make smooth nut butter but whatever, Nutella. I never did find the plasters that I KNOW I bought, but a tiny piece of panty liner and a good length of washi tape makes a pretty good alternative, in a pinch. You're welcome.