Laurie Graham's Blog, page 18

Feeling Tense

So there I was, at the advanced age of sixty eight, published author an’ all, on the receiving end of the most withering of looks from my Russian teacher. ‘Where is your predicate, Laurie?’ she said, and I was darned if I had an answer for her.

My knowledge of grammar is threadbare. I must have been away the day they did transitive and intransitive verbs. If you put me on the spot I still hesitate between ‘who’ and ‘whom’. And I start sentences with conjunctions. But not always. How very odd then that I became a writer and that the one place in the world where I feel I know what I’m doing is on the written page. I guess it’s like some people take naturally to platform diving without knowing the theory. If I should get too cocky and attempt three and a half literary somersaults in the tuck position there’ll always be an editor to clean up the mess when I go splat.

I also have trouble with the word ‘wierd‘. Which is weird because I was spelling bee champion 1956-7, East Midlands Under Elevens, beating Brenda ‘The Swot’ Bracegirdle to the punch with ‘superfluous.’

I made that last bit up. Well hell, I am a novelist, hanging prepositions be damned.

 

 

 

Unaccountable Freaks

I spent a good deal of yesterday gazing more in resignation than in hope at an airport departure board and so missed posting on the anniversary of Mark Twain’s death.  He is a perennially uncontested entry in my list of favourite authors. The day I grow tired of reading him I will truly be tired of life.

MT accurately predicted his own death on the basis that he had been born in a year when Halley’s Comet approached Earth (1835) and would surely leave this life on the comet’s next return in 1910. And so he did. He imagined God saying to Himself, ‘Now here are a pair of unaccountable freaks. They came in together and must go out together.’

 

A week away from the desk is beneficial in many ways   –  a rest for the eyes from the computer screen for one thing. The pleasure or not with which one returns to work is a good test of how things are going and particularly of whether certain characters are turning out to be satisfactory creations. Absence makes the ear grow sharper. Is someone too predictable, too monochrome, too improbable? Monday morning I may well have to call a couple of characters into my office for a final warning. I have the power of life and death, but fortunately only on the page.

Old White Guys

I’ve had a bit of an Old White Guy week with two joy-delivering discoveries. First, Richard Ford.

‘Earth to Laurie. Where have you been all these years?’

Richard Ford (I now know) is the deservedly successful creator of Frank Bascombe with whom I am currently sleeping or at least sharing, before I nod off, the sardonic observations of a man who will never again see 50 nor enjoy good prostate health. If you too have just emerged from the Siberian taiga or landed from Mars and haven’t yet read Richard Ford  –  get to it.

Then there is Ted Kooser who lives in Nebraska and deserves an Olympic Gold for self-deprecation. He says, and I quote, ‘I considered myself a relatively unknown poet. 2004 I got a call to say I’d been chosen to be Poet Laureate. I was so staggered I could barely respond. Next morning I backed the car out of the garage and tore the mirror clean off the driver’s side.’

You can sample his poetry here

Don’t you just love it when you stumble on a writer or a composer or an artist who really speaks to you, better late than never.  But then I start worrying who else I’m missing. Perhaps those will  be my dying words.

‘I never got to read…. so much….

Danger: Writer at Work

 

So let’s talk about cultural appropriation. J K Rowling got a tongue-lashing this week from an American academic with a big Cherokee Nation axe to grind. JK has apparently dared to venture onto the hallowed ground of Native American beliefs and written, on her website, about skin-walking.  Miss Rowling doesn’t need me to defend her but I do think I should say a word or two on behalf of writers in general.

If academics (and you will notice it is almost always university teachers or students) are going to dictate what fiction writers can and can’t do we might as well screw the tops back on our pens and go home. If writers only wrote about their own little corner of the universe we’d be the very much poorer for it. No wrong has been done the Cherokee Nation by what J K Rowling wrote. Indeed some people may have had their interest piqued and gone on to learn more. I think what we’re seeing here is not a successful writer trampling over a people’s culture but a serious ‘sense of proportion failure’ in Dr Adrienne Keene.

Writers, in the West at any rate, are free to write whatever they please. If people don’t like what they read they’ll stop buying a writer’s books. Like J K Rowling should lose any sleep over that!

Success in the Theatre 101

Anal rape.                                                              [image error]

Do I now have your attention?

My loyal reader may remember the discouraging advice I received from my agent a few months back, regarding play scripts: no money to be made, and the only plays  people are interested in are those that address difficult contemporary themes. Reading reviews of the National Theatre’s current production of Cleansed I now absolutely see her point. Totes.

Cleansed was written and first produced in the Eighties so it has a long history of audiences walking out or, if their legs won’t carry them to the bar, fainting in their seats. Now, long after its author Sarah Kane committed suicide, it has been resuscitated by the National. The production has been praised as ‘unflinching’. Also as ‘remarkable’  –  one of those words like ‘interesting’ which one can safely use when one might otherwise be dumbstruck by the sheer awfulness of someone’s artistic creation. One critic (I think for Time Out) described it as ‘savagely beautiful’.  So you probably wouldn’t want a blind date with him.

There is a valuable lesson for me here.  My play omitted even a hint of genital mutilation. No-one got electrocuted or raped, anally or elsewhere. My very few wardrobe notes didn’t call for balaklavas, nor did my general remarks advise having St John’s Ambulance cadets on standby to deal with shocked and nauseated punters. In brief, I was still living in a daydream world where people go to the theatre for a good chuckle or a weep. What a fule!

By now I must surely have whetted your appetite to go see Cleansed.  Well hurry, hurry, hurry, because it’s already sold out for March. A good stalls seat will cost you 40 quid but you might have just as much fun for less outlay sitting in the Understudy Bar waiting for the casualties to crawl in. I can just hear it now.

I’ll have a double brandy. And the next time I say I fancy seeing Guys and Dolls, we’ll go and see Guys and Dolls.

Just Words

There are novelists who are enviably skilled at plot construction, there are columnists who always manage to hit my funny bone, and there are sleb authors who send me into a red mist of fury that they ever got published. But it’s a rare thing for me to be moved to tears by a poet, as happened yesterday. 

Being a Dead White Male, Henry Longfellow is out of fashion these days but The Cross of Snow, written in memory of his beloved wife who was fatally burned when her gown caught fire, is simply beautiful. I thought I’d pass it along to you. Well there’s nothing going on in my life worthy of report.

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,

A gentle face—the face of one long dead—

Looks at me from the wall, where round its head

The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.

Here in this room she died; and soul more white

    Never through martyrdom of fire was led

    To its repose; nor can in books be read

    The legend of a life more benedight.

There is a mountain in the distant West

    That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines

    Displays a cross of snow upon its side.

Such is the cross I wear upon my breast

    These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes

    And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

A new word in there for you as well.  It means blessed, it rhymes with white and I think we should consider reviving its usage.

 

 

The Face is Familiar But…

Writing a sequel is proving to be an interesting project.  The principal characters, their voices and in some cases even their hair colour, have come back to me easily. It’s the vast Greek chorus of walk-ons that’s the problem. Who the heck was Dorothy Kurlich? Who was Norton Beebe? And why? When you write a novel you’re not really thinking about a possible sequel, though if you’re smart you should be (n.b. rookie novelists).

Much of my writing day is now taken up leafing through The Future Homemakers of America trying to place people and regretting that I populated the book with so many superfluous characters. But I guess real life is like that too. I recently had to go back through my daybooks for the early 2000s to identify the date of a particular event and I was horrified by the number of guests we entertained in those days,  to drinks or dinner or even overnight stays, whose names now mean nothing to me. I’ve forgotten them and they have very likely forgotten me. I dunno. What’s it all about, Alfie?

Still Standing

  Well, dear readers, I truly thought I’d die of stress and exhaustion, but here I am, to tell the tale. We have a pulse.  House moves are bad, we all know that. House moves with a dementia sufferer are bad with extra chopped nuts. It’s more than a month since I did a lick of work and my panic level is rising. So today, by way of a little limbering up, I thought I should at least blow the dust off my blog.

I have a designated study in our cosy new apartment and yesterday I actually stowed away a load of stuff and succeeded in uncovering its floor. The trouble is, now I’ve set it up I’m not sure I want to work in there. I find myself gravitating to the kitchen table, which is all very well  –  it’s where I started my writing career, after all   –  but it has two big disadvantages. For one thing, in the kitchen I’m visible and accessible to my husband. When my children were small they were easily trained not to interrupt my work but people with Alzheimer’s are untrainable. Every moment for them is a clean slate. So there’s that, and then there’s the sea view that keeps drawing my eye away from the page. I hoped it would be both entertaining and soothing for my husband. It turns out I’m the one it entertains. I’m tempted to buy myself a decent pair of binoculars and become an unapologetic bird-watcher but if I do I fear this novel will take five years to write. And that, says the bank manager, will never do.

The other thing about the study-designate is the inherited curtains. They’re kind of pumice pink. Maybe I should change them. Maybe I should just stop being a diva and write the damned novel.

A Writer & Her Screwdriver

Not a lot of writing going on at present. Actually, not any writing, except things like FRAGILE and THIS WAY UP on packing cases. I’ve spent three weeks sifting, sorting, tsk tsk-ing and hurling things into a skip. If they ever make skip-hurling an Olympic sport, I’m your woman.

One considerable achievement has been the dismantling of several miles of home made bookshelves. My husband used to do all that manly stuff while I hovered in the kitchen with flour on the end of my nose. No more. He is a frail and sick man and I must take over. But I’ve discovered how deeply satisfying it can be to figure out how a shelf was made and so unmake it. I’ve fallen into bed at night aching from unaccustomed weight lifting. I’ve dreamed of Phillips head screws. Hundreds of them. I can’t say I’ve lost any weight   –  rewarding myself with Bailey’s Irish Cream each evening has put the kibosh on that desirable possibility  –  but I certainly feel fitter, I have a great sense of achievement, and I’m raring to get back to the day job.

A writer and her screwdriver. Whoever would have thought it. Moving Day is December 29th. Spare a thought for me, dear reader.

A Bit of a Do

I’m conscious that I’ve spent much of this year bemoaning the insecure lot of freelance writers so I’m rather pleased to have found something positive to say about it at long last. I spent this past weekend at a hotel in the south of England and it provided me with a front stalls view of a circle of hell unknown to Dante and to freelancers: the office Christmas party.

The first I witnessed was a typical social mismatch of people who have little enough to say to one another 9 till 5 Monday to Friday without having to pull any crackers or wear reindeer antlers. The girls, I observed, were dolled up in sequins. The guys…. weren’t.

Then on Saturday night I happened upon the pre-dinner drinks reception for a very large outfit. Black tie, wives invited. I’d guess they were a big accountancy or law firm. There they all were, sweating in their dinner jackets, cursing their Spanx and yelling over the roar of Chardonnay-fuelled gaiety. I saw a woman standing alone in corner, clutching a glass and trying to look like she didn’t mind. What kind of party people allow that to happen? Was no-one keeping an eye open for loners? I should have advised her to slip away, go home, have an early night with a boxed set. After all, what would she have missed? A catered turkey blow-out. Speeches. Excruciating in-jokes. The sight of the head of HR in a paper crown. A droit de seigneur snog with her boss?

I went up to my room and gave thanks that whatever the vagaries of my working life at least I’ll never have to endure The Works’ Christmas Do.