12 May 2010: When out walking on May Day, I came across a pagan rite which prompted this blog. I was striding past this circle of celebrants, fascinated by the surreal sequinned mermaid, when I was stopped in my tracks. A member of the group said, loud enough for the nearby crows and dogs to hear, “This is the day of the vulva.” You don’t hear that very often on Hampstead Heath. The General Election got in the way of publishing this blog last week, so here it is. The political and secular interrupting and mixing with the spiritual and personal. That is the story of May Day itself.
In pre-Christian Britain, May Day divided the year into half and was called Beltane. People lit bonfires which were danced around and cattle and young couples passed through the flames to be purified. These rituals were meant to give strength to the spring sun beginning to warm the earth for next year’s crops. In early May, the Romans had a five-day celebration of spring, known as the Floralia, to worship the goddess of flowers. Today, many customs associated with May Day are a combination of Beltane and Floralia: the Maypole (a fertility symbol) and the crowning of a May Queen (the goddess Flora).
In the eighteenth century in France, the May Tree became the “Tree of Liberty” and the symbol of their revolution. May Day went international and took on a secular form. It was the struggle to win the fight for an 8-hour day that resulted in the first May Day parade in Chicago in 1886. Three years later, French socialists declared 1 May “Labour Day”.
There are at least two short stories with this day at their heart: F Scott Fitzgerald’s “May Day” which uses the May Day riots of 1919 to intertwine the lives of drunken socialites and brawling soldiers. In “May Day Eve”, the writer Nick Joaquin shows the oppression of Filipino women who were forced to marry men against their will. The day of the vulva indeed. Stay tuned . . .
Anne Aylor
5 May 2010: There are plenty of contemporary novels with elections at their heart, Jonathan Coe’s What A Carve Up, Justin Cartwright’s Half in Love and Robert Harris’s The Ghost which has recently been made into a film of the same name with Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor. But I want to take you back to the nineteenth century when elections were a persistent theme in novels.
In Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers he described the parliamentary system as "eatandswill". In Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, Augustus Melmotte is a "great financier" (read my lips . . . crook) whobribes and lies his way into Parliament. In The Prime Minister, another Trollope book, Tory MP Gerald Fedden is elected, despite being engulfed in sexual and financial scandal.
Disraeli was a novelist as well as Prime Minister. In Coningsby he has two spin doctors, Tadpole and Taper, who devise a catchy election theme, “Ancient institutions and Modern improvements”. Nothing changes.
Napoleon started out as an idealist and became an emperor. When he was still a man of the people he said, "A throne is just a bench with velvet on it." The electorate to most politicians is a steamed pudding to be carved up and eaten. The American writer and essayist, Gore Vidal said, “Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.” Personally, I'm for the planet. Stay tuned . . .
28 April 2010: It was with sadness that I learned of the death of Corin Redgrave who I had the privilege of working with in what was to be the last year of his life. He took part in two readings of The Trainer, acting alongside Tim Pigott-Smith, Janie Dee, Paul Herzberg and Jana Zeineddine in a play co-written by David Wilson and me. The Trainer is a play about a love affair between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian law student and includes a court case about an opera. it was staged to raise money for the rebuilding of the Gaza Music School. (For a slideshow of more of Guy Smallman’s photos, click here). Despite being unwell, Corin played his role of Oliver Higdon-Brown to perfection, giving a fabulous performance as a pompous High Court judge.
The readings took place in 2009 at Oxford House and the Hackney Empire. It was not easy for him to get from South London to Bethnal Green and Hackney, but with support from his wife, the actress Kika Markham, Corin was determined to help the cause. Because of his huge reputation, I was nervous about working with him, but I needn’t have been. The man who had played major roles at the RSC and National and starred in movies and TV gave attention and care to his performance in The Trainer. He was a consummate professional: courteous and enthusiastic and put everyone involved with the benefit at their ease.
For many years, his acting took second place to his deeply-held political beliefs. As a Shakespearean actor, I’ll bet he loved these lines from Richard III:
And thus I clothe my naked villany
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
In exposing the villainy of those devils in power, he disappeared from the stage for many years. In 2005 he suffered a heart attack while campaigning for Roma rights. After a period of recuperation, he returned to the theatre as Oscar Wilde in De Profundis. He had been weakened, but he never gave up. I last saw him at the Jermyn Street Theatre performing letters of the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo. The show opened on the night news broke of his niece Natasha Richardson’s tragic death.
He was a sweet bear of a man, a humanitarian who loved the world. He will be sorely missed by his public, as well as by his family and friends. The words on the oldest known pyramid are these: ‘The doors of the sky are thrown open for you.’ Corin, travel well.
21 April 2010: Our planet is volcanic. All life emerged from volcanoes and their ash and yet they have the power to induce fear in all of us. In Virgil’s Aeneid, the entrance to the underworld was on Mt Vesuvius. Over a thousand years later, Dante Alighieri’s nine levels of Hell was inspired by volcanoes. As man’s understanding of the natural world advanced, volcanoes continued to inspire awe, but became a backdrop to works of fiction and science fiction. In Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Professor Lidenbrock and his friends descend into Iceland’s Snæfellsjökull volcano, have many adventures and then are spat out of another volcano on the Italian island of Stromboli. In The Crater James Fenimore Cooper, the author of The Last of the Mohicans, wrote of shipwrecked sailors who set up a utopia on a volcanic island.
How many people know that the Tambora volcano in Indonesia was the genesis for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? In 1816 Mary, her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron were confined to a cottage in the Swiss Alps because of bad weather brought about by Tambora’s eruption the year before. Byron suggested a ghost story competition and this resulted in Mary conceiving her monster.
In our own era, volcanoes continue to erupt in fiction. One of the great works of twentieth-century literature, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, tells the story of an alcoholic British consul in the Mexican town of Quauhnahuac on the Day of the Dead. In Susan Sontag’s The Volcano, Sir William Hamilton’s wife, Emma, becomes the lover of Horatio Nelson under a steaming Vesuvius. Isabel Allende’s memoir, My Invented Country, refers to her native Chile “shaken by the sighs of hundreds of volcanoes”. Her fellow countryman, the poet Pablo Neruda, wrote, "Give me silence, water, hope. Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes". Volcanoes have given the earth life. They have also given us a few stories.
14 April 2010: New York City is a place of dreams, a city where you can feel the electricity in the air. It is also the setting for fiction as diverse as F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and the poignant stories of John Cheevor. When I lived there, I was drawn to Greenwich Village because this was where the cool cats went: an area of coffee houses, small theatres, bookstores and art house movies. It was also where some of my cultural heroes had lived: Isadora Duncan, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill.
I spent my first months in New York in a women’s residence on the northern border of the Village with grim-faced nuns. As soon as I could afford to, I moved to a garret on Christopher Street where the previous tenant had been evicted and the paint-drizzled floor looked more like a canvas than something to walk on. The flat was bohemian: unfurnished with one consumptive, gasping radiator I nicknamed “Camille”.
In the 50s and 60s Greenwich Village was hopping with jazz and folk music. Now Tin Palace in the Bowery and Bell’s of Hell on West 13th Street are gone. The building I lived in houses a Petite Puppy parlour which sells small breeds to residents who are now more likely to be drinking fine wines than going to smoky dives for a set.
You would need to take the L train to Williamsburg in Brooklyn to find a place which carries on some of the Village traditions. The coffee houses and bars are now off Hope Street. Across the East River is Madison Avenue, the setting for the brilliant TV drama Mad Men set in 60s New York. For their 2009 Christmas party the series that is Cheever on celluloid asked the Brooklyn-based group, Eclectic Method, to provide the entertainment. EM are also madly creative men whose innovative audio-visual remixing of film and music is a leap into the future. Check it out here. Stay tuned . . .
7 April 2010: At 7PM on 14 April at Waterstones in Hampstead there will be a book launch I’d strongly encourage you to attend. One of my students, Robin Bayley, will be talking about, and reading from, his new book, The Mango Orchard.
As a child, Robin had been bewitched by his grandmother's stories of her father's Mexican adventures: of jungles and banditos, of hidden silver and a narrow escape at the time of the Mexican Revolution.
Almost a hundred years later, Robin retraced his ancestor's steps via New York and Columbia. His book is as much about this journey as it is about Arthur's odyssey. It is a story that travels through time and place, culminating in the discovery that Arturo had left behind him, not just a country, but a Mexicana who had given birth to his child. The story ends with an extraordinary coming together of Arturo’s two families who had not known of each other’s existence until Robin’s arrival.
Trevor Dolby said of Robin’s book, “This is an extraordinary travel book from an extraordinary new talent. The Mango Orchard ranks up there with Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo, and even the books of the great Bruce Chatwin himself.” Click here to check out Robin’s website. There is also a video clip of the the launch party and my interview with Robin here. Stay tuned . . .
31 March 2010: English is an incredibly rich language, a bazaar of many tongues. We are lucky to have a huge vocabulary to draw upon, but as writers we don’t want to obfuscate language. Did I just have you reaching for your dictionary? When students begin to write, one of the things they tend to do is use “suspect verbs”, a phrase I invented. Whenever it occurs, I underline the offending verb and write SV above it. A couple of examples are “She wended her way to school” and “He masticated his meat.” A more natural way would be to say, “She walked to school” and “He chewed his meat.”
Subconsciously, I think people use suspect verbs to be considered clever, but its effect is to alienate the reader. As Jonathan Franzen said, “Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting." It doesn’t mean you can’t use language in a rich way, but it must honour your style, your story and your voice. Adverbs, adjectives and, less commonly, nouns can also be “suspect” as you’ll see in this passage:
He beseeched his spouse to accompany him to the garden to see how those beloved, pungent foxes
of hers had wreaked havoc in the crepuscular hours. “Perfidious vulpine creatures!” he exclaimed
vociferously. “They have purloined my philtrons!”
As a little exercise, have a go at rewriting this without any suspect verbs, adverbs, adjectives or nouns. Stay tuned . . .
24 March 2010: As writers, the way we order each word is important. This thought came to mind on Tuesday after the screening of this week’s Channel 4 Dispatches. My husband’s friend, Robin Beste, pointed out that the name chosen by the filmmakers who approached the “cash-for-influence MPs” with their bogus lobbying company was called “Anderson Perry”. Geoff Hoon, Patricia Hewitt, Stephen Byers and others were being given a clue that this was a stitch-up. Perry Anderson was, for many years, the editor of the New Left Review and remains a prominent philosopher and polemicist on the British Left. He probably finds it amusing that his fore- and surnames had been transposed for this sting.
Consider The Brothers Karamazov which has a very different connotation to The Karamazov Brothers. The former title carries gravitas, makes the reader think this is a classic Russian novel. Had it been given the same title with the two main words reversed, it could have been a circus act or the HBO sequel to The Sopranos. So the placing of each word is important. The poet Andrew Motion said, "Every time I peer into [the Oxford English Dictionary] . . . I think: All the words I'll ever need are here; the only thing I have to do is get them in the right order."
While we’re talking about word order, I thought you might like to know that there is a book with a picture of Winnie the Pooh on the cover that teaches children how to bake. It’s unfortunate, but hilarious, that its title is Cooking with Pooh and offers the promise of “Yummy Tummy Cookie Cutter Treats”. The recipes in this cookbook would only be “yummy” if it had a different title. The ex-Cabinet Ministers who were so willing to offer their services “for hire” were either so beef-witted or greedy that they couldn’t foresee the poo they would be in. Stay tuned . . .
17 March 2010: The past few weeks I have been reading Julie Kavanagh's biography, Rudolf Nureyev. Today is an apt day for posting this blog as it would have been Rudi's 72nd birthday.
When I was a teenager, everyone else I knew had posters of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones on their walls. I had a dozen different posters of Rudik. He was a huge and charismatic presence and, even 17 years after his death, he still seems to be here among the living, one of those rare people you can't quite believe still does not walk (dance) this earth.
Born in 1938 on the Trans-Siberian Railway, he was constantly performing, choreographing, teaching. He had a huge intelligence, educating himself about everything from Byron's poetry to how to spot the best kilims. He worked endlessly, pushing his body to extend his repertoire and technique. From 1973 until his death in 1993, Kavanagh writes "Rudolf had been dancing with a permanent tear in his leg muscle; he had destroyed his Achilles tendon by years of landing badly; he had heel spurs; his bones were chipped so that even basic walking gave him pain." None of this stopped him from his passion of performing. One of the many ballets he left his stamp on was Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. If you want to see the final heartrending scene with Margot Fonteyn, watch this YouTube clip and weep. Stay tuned . . .
10 March 2010: Translations have always fascinated me and even more so when I read this quote by Miguel de Cervantes: “Translations are the other side of a tapestry.” That set me thinking. You have the original writer writing in their own language. Then you have the translator writing in theirs and, in some cases, you have translations from translations, not to mention literal translations. Most early English translations of Turgenev were not from Russian, but from French!
One of the great Chekhov translators was Constance Garnett (1862 – 1946) who translated seventeen Chekhov works, seventeen volumes of Turgenev, thirteen volumes of Dostoevsky, six of Gogol and four of Tolstoy. She worked so quickly that when she came across an awkward passage, she would leave it out. D H Lawrence remembered her 'turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. The pile would be . . . almost up to her knees, and all magical.'
In 1994 Donald Rayfield compared Garnett's translations with the most recent scholarly versions of Chekhov’s stories: 'While she makes elementary blunders, her care in unravelling difficult syntactical knots and her research on the right terms for Chekhov's many plants, birds and fish are impressive . . . Her English is not only nearly contemporaneous to Chekhov's, it is often comparable.' In the 1998 anthology, The Essential Tales of Chekhov, the Constance Garnett translations were used by its editor, Richard Ford.
In the spirit of exploration I thought it might be interesting to look at the first sentences, translators and titles of one of Chekhov’s most famous stories. Here goes:
1) ‘People were saying that someone new had appeared on the seafront: a lady with a little dog.’
Rosamund Bartlett, “The Lady with the Little Dog”
2) ‘It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog.’ Constance
Garnett, “The Lady with the Dog”
3) 'People said that there was a new arrival on the Promenade: a lady with a little dog.' Ronald Wilks,
“The Lady with the Little Dog”
4) 'There was said to be a new arrival on the Esplanade: a lady with a dog.' Ronald Hingley, "A Lady
with a Dog"
5) 'The appearance on the front of a new arrival - a lady with a lapdog - became the topic of general
conversation.' David Magarshack, “The Lady with the Lapdog"
On the basis of the story title and the opening sentence alone, which 'other side of a tapestry' would you choose as the most authentic 'voice' of Chekhov? Which has the most nuance and style? Having read all the various versions of this story, I know who my money would be on. Stay tuned . . .
3 March 2010: Books are so important that some regimes have burned them. There have certainly been books which have marked me as permanently as a branding iron. The first I can remember was a biography of Anna Pavlova which made me want to become a dancer.
The next was one I had to read in school when I was thirteen, A Tale of Two Cities. It was with a chill I realised that the broken cask outside the Defarge’s wine shop was Dickens’ foreshadowing the blood that would flow during the French Revolution: “The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes.”
Another book which changed my life was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast which, with 20/20 hindsight, encouraged me to think of writing as something I might do. It also made me determined to come to Europe as I wanted to see the Paris he had written about so poignantly. On my arrival in Europe I spent a month there, surviving on $5 a day. Four weeks in a bug-infested hotel on the Quai de la Tournelle whose only advantage was that I could see Notre Dame from my window. Walking from one end of Paris to the other, I could hardly believe that I was in the city of two of my literary heroes. Standing in the Place de la Concorde where the statue of Louis XV
had been replaced by the Obelisk of Luxor, I saw not only the stone needle pointing to the sky, but something that had never physically existed: the knitting needles of pitiless Madame Defarge secretly stitching the names of victims who would one day lose their heads. Stay tuned . . .
24 February 2010: One of the exercises I give my students is to ask them to list what they would take if they were suddenly forced into exile. This always results in profound and moving writing. Objects chosen range from a pinch of garden soil to a map of the London Underground.
An Iraqi exile is the poet, painter, novelist and Guardian columnist, Haifa Zangana. Her book, Dreaming of Baghdad, has just been published by the Feminist Press, New York City. One of the strongest parts for me is the chapter about Haifa’s mother attempting to visit her in Abu Ghraib in the 1970s where she was held as a political prisoner. “That little woman with big black eyes, full lips, and a round face, that woman who hated walking the streets alone, hated shopping alone, hated sleeping in the dark, went to the Ministry of Defense alone for weeks on end.” Haifa’s moving account of her mother trying to bring her food and clothing, not knowing whether she was alive or dead, reminds me of Anna Akhmatova’s searing poem, “Requiem”, some of which is about a prison vigil when Akhmatova was trying to visit her son during the Stalinist Terror. In a video interview I recently did with Haifa, she reads an excerpt from the chapter, “Heart, What Have You Seen”. To view it, click here. Stay tuned . . .
17 February 2010: My father-in-law was editor of The Lancet. Though long retired, he is still a stickler for meaning what you say and saying what you mean. He remembers the Daily Express headline at the time of El Alamein which lacked an all-important comma: “8th Army Push Bottles Up Germans”. Another headline during World War II that made him laugh was “Monty Flies Back to Front”.
Here are some interesting facts about punctuation. In Roman times, writers did not punctuate. “The marking of pauses in a copy of a text was normally left to the initiative of the individual reader who would insert them, or not, according to the degree of difficulty presented by the text, or the extent of his comprehension.” (M B Parkes,1992). Until approximately the eighth century, writers did not use spaces between words. Until the middle of the nineteenth, punctuation in books was usually determined by the printer rather than by the author.
I have my own favourite sentences with missing commas (or hyphens) like this one at a safari park: “Elephants Please Stay in Your Car” or “Sheep rustling in the hills”. Apostrophes are also something that need to be used correctly. A vegetarian café advertised goat cheese salad on its menu. Its ingredients included “tomatoes, onions, goats, cheese.” Spot the missing apostrophe and superfluous comma! Edgar Allan Poe was right: “The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood . . . For the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.”
Then there are those wonderful mistranslations such as this one seen in a Moscow hotel: “You are welcome to visit the cemetery where famous Russian and Soviet composers, artists and writers are buried daily except Thursday.” Or this one at a tailor shop in Rhodes: “Order your summer suit. Because is big rush we will execute customers in strict rotation”. Or this photograph of a Korean sign with its hilariously accurate, but unintended, English translation: “For Restrooms, Go back toward your behind.” Tautology or what? Stay
tuned . . .
10 February 2010: I've just booked a ticket to New York City where I used to live. After so many years away, it will be interesting to visit my old haunts, one of which is said to be haunted. The New Amsterdam on West 42nd Street is the oldest surviving theater on Broadway and, according to Wikipedia, “the first concrete example of art nouveau in NYC”. The New Amsterdam was, for many years, the home of the Ziegfeld Follies. During the Depression it became a movie house, but by the late 70s it was derelict. It was only returned to its former glory in the 1990s when the Disney corporation spent a rumoured $34 million to restore it. It reopened in 1993 with The Lion King and is currently the Broadway home of Mary Poppins.
I went to the New Amsterdam’s old rooftop theater in the 80s to see a showcase evening of what was eventually to become the movie, Popeye, starring Robin Williams. On the way up to the miniature theatre where the naughtier version of the Ziegfeld Girls used to perform, the elevator operator told me an intriguing story. The place was haunted by a ghost called "Olive" who had been a famous Ziegfeld star. He said she had killed herself by overdosing on her two-timing husband’s pills.
During research for this blog, I read a Playbill article by Robert Viagas that said that not long after she committed suicide, stagehands at the Rooftop Theater started seeing Olive wearing her green beaded Follies’ dress, her beaded headpiece and sash. She was carrying a big blue bottle which had held the mercury bichloride pills her husband had used to treat his syphilis. During the Disney restoration, a security guard was patrolling the building and saw someone on stage in a Twenties’ dress. He yelled at her and was terrified to see Olive’s ghost vanish through a stage wall on the 41st Street side.
I didn't see Olive when I visited "the Roof", but the dilapidated theatre with its dusty seats and flaking gilt felt distinctly ghostly. The place was so atmospheric I decided to write a story with its setting there, something unusual for me, because I usually start with character. I don’t know where the narrator, Ruby McGuire, came from, but maybe Olive wanted someone’s story to be told, if not hers. “Roman Candles” which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 was the result. Click here if you’d like to hear it and go the bottom of the page. Stay tuned . . .
3 February 2010: My writing career began many years ago with the purchase of an Adler typewriter. I hated writing by hand, hated the look of my own kindergartenish writing, and so it was not until I purchased my new machine from the Regent Street Typewriter Company for the then huge sum of £50 that I started in earnest. It was on this machine I wrote, and re-wrote, many short stories and clacked out my first novel, No Angel Hotel. When home computers came onto the market in the 80s, I resisted moving to one for a few years, knowing I would miss the athletic fingerwork and the percussive noise of my reliable German machine.
Now I work on a sleek, silent, state-of-the-art Apple, but I also make good use of my Ryman's lined notebook which I use when I travel or when I set exercises in class. I still hate my handwriting, but I like the look of my neat printing so I do that instead. While the students write, I write too, plugging into the creative energy that comes when a group of people are drawn together to bring something into existence that has never existed before.
The idea for this week's blog came about when I saw this picture of what I first thought were sculptures, only to find out that they are graphite pens. I was tempted to order a set of them for their beauty alone: acorn and twig, curled leaf, spindle shell. Then I thought about it. If I did, these beautiful objects would disappear. If I used them to leave words on a page, they would vanish. Then I wondered which writers in the past might have wanted these on their desks. My research showed that Ernest Hemingway frequently wrote in pencil, beginning his writing day with the ritual sharpening of dozens of them. John Steinbeck used pencils too. When he complained that hexagonal pencils cut into his fingers after a long day's work, his editor supplied him with round ones.These gloriously anarchic pencils wouldn't have worked for him!
Thomas Wolfe wrote with pencil stubs he kept in a coffee can. Truman Capote’s favourite writing tool was the Blackwing No 602, an intensely black lead pencil made by Faber Castell. Stephen King and Elmore Leonard are among those who write in longhand, though I'm not sure whether they are pen or pencil pushers. Ernest Hemingway said, “You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true.” Stay tuned . . .
27 January 2010: Margaret Atwood’s blog has ten tips for writer’s block. Number 1 is to go for a walk. Others include “Write in some other form - even a letter or a journal entry. Or a grocery list. Keep those words flowing through your fingers.” (No 3) and “Eat chocolate, not too much, must be dark, shade-grown, organic.” (No 6)
Whether I am struggling with my current manuscript or not, I walk on Hampstead Heath. Where I turn back to go home, there is a bench with this verse in place of the usual dedication to a deceased loved one:
I was born tomorrow
Today I live
Yesterday killed me
Perhaps I should use these words by the Iranian writer, Parviz Oswis, in an exercise and ask my students what Parviz meant. Each time I look at them, I come up with a new meaning.
This being Hampstead, there is quirky poetry too (Leslie Noaks1914 - 2000):
“Seagull, seagull, how do you float?
Upon the water without a boat?”
He thought to himself and then he frowned
Turned on his side and slowly drowned
There is one near the ponds on the Parliament Hill side of the Heath which was meant to be funny, but has undergone a change since its original inscription: "Now in years bestride my eighties, this Elysian seat I have vacated, but gentle neighbour sigh not yet, I’ve only moved to Somerset." It has an addendum: “Died 1999”
These benches are wooden memorials, as well as places of rest and refuge. Those marking a life are poignant reminders of how precious, and short, life is. One of my students, Pat Conway, came to a workshop last year and sent me the following: "Write Now! in New Mexico” was the best writing workshop I've ever been to. Every aspect was helpful: the exercises, the feedback, the sharing. It made me realize that WRITING is the point, not writing a book or even getting published. Those can all come or not; writing is the goal. Your teaching helped me remember that I don't want to die with my song unsung." So go for that walk, look at the sky, the kites, the grass. Then come home and write. Stay tuned . . .
20 January 2010: I was walking in a small park near my home when I saw a woman with binoculars, intently staring at a tree. For a long time she stood in the middle of the path. Intrigued, I asked her what she was looking at. She pointed at hundreds of small birds perched on several tall trees which I’d not noticed. She said they were redwings, a type of thrush who spends the winter months in England. In cities, she said, they gather in parks and small woods. ‘You’ll never find them in gardens. They like to stick together.’ She said they come from Scandinavia and Russia, arriving in November and returning north in March.
After being alerted, I could hear their excited chirping. The writer Maya Angelou said, "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song." That’s true, but I think there is more to it when it comes to the redwing. Surely it sings to keep in touch with the flock when in flight over great distances, hence its scorn for small gardens where there isn’t enough room for them to roost together. To hear redwings, click here.
One of the exercises I set is to write about birds because we need to protect them, as well as watch them. Join the RSPB, leave food out in your gardens. Look out for the birds. Stay tuned . . .
13 January 2010: This week I went to see Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, the biopic about the rocker, Ian Dury. It's not a movie I would have chosen to see but, because of the snow, I couldn't be bothered to travel into town in the ice and cold for Jane Campion's Bright Dreams or Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story. I was pleasantly surprised.
Dury is brilliantly played by Andy Serkis who spent three years getting into character. Ian Dury suffered from polio which caused his lameness. To capture his ungainly walk, Serkis injured himself while wearing a leg brace to prepare himself physically, and
psychologically, for the part. Directed by Mat Whitecross, the film is a fantastical take on standard biopic film-making. In an act of alchemy, Serkis literally becomes Dury. Today, the actor now sings with Ian’s band, The Blockheads, the result of his commitment to the part.
Those three years of Stanislavskian preparation is the filmic equivalent of a writer truly getting under the skin of a character. Annie Proulx spends years researching her next project, even going so far as to draw most of the plants in the landscape where her books are set.
This kind of thoroughness has lessons for us all, whether we’re actors or writers. Go see this movie and check out Dury's songs for yourself. Stay tuned . . .
6 January 2010: Over the holiday period I went to see Lee Hall's Pitmen Painters at the National Theatre. It is the extraordinary story of a group of Ashington miners in Northumberland who, in 1934, hired an artist to teach them art appreciation. Bored with lectures on the intricacies of Rembrandt's use of shadows and Modigliani's lines, they rapidly abandoned theory in favour of practice.
In their evening classes the pitmen began to paint . . . and to paint well. Within a few years, avant-garde artists became their friends and their work was acquired by prestigious collecters, but every day they continued to work as miners.
Pitmen Painters is a humorous, yet serious look at art, class and politics. As a creative writing teacher, I know that the world is full of “pitmen painters”. Many who enrol on my courses are initially worried whether they will be competent enough to write. I never hesitate when I answer: “Yes, you are good enough.” And then I quote Henry Van Dyke: "Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best." Stay tuned . . .
30 December 2009: This marks the first instalment of my weekly blogs so here goes . . .
Last night I went with my administrator and playwriting tutor, David Wilson, and spent an evening with Michael Walling and his actress wife, Nisha.
Mike is Artistic Director of Border Crossings, a maverick theatre production company. In 2009 he was responsible for staging Origins: Festival of First Nations, with actors and directors from Cherokee playwrights to Australian Aboriginee actors. As someone who is part Cherokee, I love what he's doing. The First Nations have much to teach us if this planet is to survive. To read more about Border Crossings, click here.
Mike directed David's first play, Simple Writings, which is based on Grimmelshausen's novel, Simplicissimus. Last night's discussion crossed many borders, inspiring new ideas: always useful for a writer. Talk ranged from Chaucer's subversive use of the English language to why Genghis Khan was buried beside a baby camel. More about this in a later blog. Stay tuned . . .
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