Biology of the Worst Kind

Confessions of a Spiderphobe

This is a Diary piece in the latest LRB, the rest of it is at www.lrb.co.uk:

Autumn looms darkly and terrible in my life. From midsummer I start to worry, and by late August I am filled with dread. My arachnophobia has ensured that the autumnal mating urge which causes spiders to wander into our houses – confused by some sudden indefinable but compelling ache in the forefront of their small minds – in search of a nice warm dark corner to nest (don’t think about it), ushers in my personal annual festival of anxiety and horror. Not that I felt secure during the other ten months of the year. My ex, having been my ex for some years and grown tired of being called out in the middle of the night to deal with a spider, gave me a blowtorch, which I used with desperate abandon. It’s a professional version of the hairspray and lighter technique, more or less likely to have resulted in my charred remains (oh God, and the daughter, the cats, the occasional lover . . .) being found in the smoking ruins. But death was never a worse alternative to being in the same room as a spider....

Apology for Histrionics

It's really only a sore ankle and a bit of excitement, the fall downstairs.  Kind folk have read the last post (how appropriate) and emailed me.  I am ashamed of myself.  There's writers for you: self-dramatists and attention seekers.  And leading such boring lives that a tumble downstairs rates as something happening.   Consider me sad rather than bad.

A Nice Cup of Tea in Bed and a Good Book

I fell downstairs on Monday.  Foolishly rather than dramatically.  Nothing broke, so the anti-osteoporosis pills are working.  Just a swollen ankle and a bruise or two. I saw a large silver moon with eyes open and shut for ten minutes.  Some people see stars, I see the moon.  My intention had been to make a cup of tea in bed for The Poet, but as it turned out, or as my sorry psyche made it turn out, he had to put me back in bed and make me a cup of tea.  Which is what he usually does (make me a cup of tea, not put me back in bed).  I got the fuss of being a fallen woman and the tea, plus credit for the virtuous intention that set it all in motion.  The  Poet is endlessly patient.  A friend explained to me once that the only reason for getting married was to get a cup of tea in bed in the morning.  I hadn't the heart to point out that only 50% of couples get tea, the other 50% have to make it.

Then on Tuesday morning there was a piece about the new Pynchon novel on the Today programme.  It's an event, a new Pynchon, so the morning news magazine couldn't ignore it, but let's not get serious about books.  They had Louise Doughty tell Ian Rankin and anyone else who might have been thinking of buying the book that Pynchon's works 'aren't good reads'.  No, and they're rubbish for washing your hair, The Poet muttered.  The requirement for a good, or even an interesting book is not that it should be a good read. 

A couple of weeks ago Louise Doughty wrote a blog about my anti creative-writing course blog (see How to Get Rich and Famous Without Writing A Bestseller below).  She defended writing courses by saying 'not everyone can be James Joyce'.  Evidently, being James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon and asking readers to make an effort is to be frowned on. Somehow it's more democratic to be a mediocre writer.  We should actually train people to produce a good read.  A good read is a sorry phrase which means unambitious, and not requiring any mental effort.  The opposite isn't a bad read, but a demanding read.  Why aren't we celebrating difficulty and complexity, instead of having books dismissed on those grounds and potential readers warned against them?  Have we lost the notion of writers as anything more than producers of page turners to pass the time?  It's pathetic.  It's deadly, actually, like that phrase people use to put down bright children: you're too clever by half.  We dislike being made to think or play along with a playful or intriguing writer.  It's not that writers like Pynchon are beyond criticism - some of them are terrible, pretentious, ridiculous - but mostly they are trying to do something not just churning out what the market wants.  I dare say many people enjoy reading good reads and writing them,too, but to dismiss serious writing as not being a good read won't bloody do.

Jungle Clearings

If the world was a less  excruciating, less incorrigibly awful place for most people to be, there might be a case to be made for taking it seriously.  Just a glimmer of the possibility of doing something about any of it, would justify making that the centre of your life.  As it is, sincerity seems at best naive, more likely self-righteously and pointlessly pious.  (Just reinvented the wheel there: the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.) So I think now, after so many years of watching very little improve, unless you count the freedom to fuck on TV a great humane breakthrough.  It's not cynical to be cynical, it's perverse not to be.

Still, I remember marching from Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square at sixteen, half of me thinking that so many people must have some effect, and the other half knowing absolutely that at best I was just making myself feel good.  Exactly divided.  I confess I still am astonished (while 50% of me knows better) that the voiced dissent against the invasion of Iraq could be entirely ignored, that the scandal of lies, evasions, claims to having god's ear and the corruption of those who both bombed and made money out of rebuilding, all just went on and on, transparent enough for an infant to see through.  How can that happen?  How, in full daylight, with intelligent objections, can essential individual human rights in the UK and US be whittled away in the name of guarding against an incredibly handy global something which, for entirely understandable reasons, doesn't like us?  I don't like us either. 

This morning, the radio news announced that some international negotiator had stood in 'a jungle clearing' and tried to persuade the leader of God's Revolutionary Army in Uganda that the best way to get the international community to respect him more would be to release his child soldiers.  I hope the negotiator moves on to jungle clearings in Washington and somewhere near Downing Street. 

Ostrich Thoughts

It goes without saying, I suppose, that it ought to be of central importance to a writer how well they write, but should it matter to them how well they are read?  Perhaps any failure to understand on the part of the reader is by definition a failure of the writer to write well enough.  At any rate, it's a good rule to go by, to assume that your reader is at least as smart, knowledgeable, aware as you.  Writing for an imagined reader who doesn't know as much as you do about the world is not just patronising, it is the death of the writing project.  In other words, you don't write for the reader, you write for you and hope that if anyone reads it, they'll get it.  Always assuming you've done the writing well. 

The writing project is a reaching for the edges of your ability to think and to make that thinking coherent to others.  It's not a matter of others agreeing with you, or liking what you do.  That's their business, not the business of the writer.   Writing isn't standing for election, it isn't even wanting to be nominated.  And reading isn't about having an easy ride with someone who is just like you and doesn't make things awkward.

What about entertainment?  Giving the reader a good time?  There are people who do that, and they are generally well rewarded for doing it well, but it doesn't mean it has to be what a writer must do. 

On the other hand, what you mustn't do if you're not in the entertainment business is find out what your readers think they have read, or the manner in which they have read you.  Here a bit of realism creeps into my thoughts on the subject.  Some people it turns out read better than others - that is, they pay attention and assume they should pay attention.  However, you do discover, via letters and other responses, that there are people who read less attentively and come up with a view of what you said that bears little relation to what you were trying to do.  It's not that they have a different opinion, they just don't get what it was you were saying or the tone in which you were saying it, or they seem to have read what they were thinking not what you were writing.  As a writer who respects readers, I expect readers to work as hard at reading as I do at writing.  Best not to discover that some don't.

Turn the postman away, don't check what people say in reviews or online about what you wrote   It's too discouraging when it seems they have read something  quite different from what you have written. And even those occasions when people see exactly what you are trying to say, though wonderful, are probably not good for a writer's view of their own ability.  If we think we're very good at what we do, we are in grave danger of thinking we are good enough.  Between discouragement and complacency lies the way of the ostrich.  Stick your head in the sand.  Stay home and just get on.

Nothing's Changed. Again.

So after a parliamentary vote there will be no public inquiry into the invasion of Iraq while Tony Blair is Prime Minister.  It's more or less definitive that he has got away with it.  I wonder why the getting away with it is what angers me so much, when I should rather be focusing on what is happening in Iraq?  Getting away with something is what upsets children.  Not the fact of  wrongdoing but the lack of consequence upsets them because it suggests that there might be no natural justice.  An elementary part of growing up is acknowledging that and a few other things.  No natural justice.  No purpose.  Contingency is the nature of the world.  We die.

It doesn't seem like much to have got into my head after all these years, and you won't find me denying any of them, but I still can't confront any of those facts with equanimity.  I can tell you the only way of being human is somehow to manage in that reality .  It can be done with good manners and respect for everyone else in the same boat.  It can be done by being quietly useful.  I can say that, believe it, too, but it does nothing to lessen my fury with the way of the world.  I thought there was something terribly wrong with it (socially, politically, intellectually) when I was young and had some notion then (as many of us did, hormones, probably) that it was possible to change it; that things could be made different.  This entailed marching, demonstrating, arguing, raging, running alternative schools, teaching in regular schools, paying attention to writing, painting, music and drama, taking drugs and even being mad in response to the way things and people were, how it all worked.  I'm wasn't sure that those things would have much effect in the world we didn't like, but  if nothing else we were passing time and giving warning while we waited until 'we' were running things and things were therefore improved. 

Well, I'm quite moved by such ideas and sorry there aren't more young people now believing that of themselves.  But nothing in the way of who controls the world and their motives has altered, nothing has changed and here we all are, just as they ever were.  It turned out that for our lot, wanting, taking and keeping power went on being the way to be in the world and superceded anything I thought of to pass the time less harmfully.  And even those who understood about the overwhelming attraction of power didn't have the means of subverting it.  Political activity might make you feel better but it appears to change none of the structures that keep greed and ambition keep on keeping on.  It seems the best manner to be in the world is provide it with palliative care as NGOs attempt to do.

So I am furious that Blair, Bush and the network of self-interested parties who have caused such havoc in Iraq that no one seems to have a solution for it, are going to get away with it.  Again and again and again.   I am also furious with myself for not having grown up enough to understand that they will always get away with it and for finding no better response than to be furious.  It's the anger of the impotent, but impotence is no excuse.