Biology of the Worst Kind

Life in the Very Slow Lane

Lassitude, indolence, extreme laziness, idleness beyond belief - I don't know how to convey the degree of my incapacity for activity.  People don't believe me.  You don't believe me.  You think I exaggerate.  No, I don't.  You won't believe that either.  You think it an affectation.  So yesterday I went out.  I did a reading with the estimable Francis Spufford at the Small Wonders Festival at Charleston.  There was nothing unpleasant about it (apart from the Bloomsburyness of Charleston.  Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Virginia visiting.  God I hate that drippy painting and twee tastefulness). 

My publisher sent me in a chauffeur driven car from Cambridge to Sussex, causing much hilarity to The Poet who pointed out that I'd have my very own chauffeur on Yom Kippur.  (The academic term might be starting again but even that doesn't stem the flow of punnery from the turmoil, no, maelstrom, in The Poet's mind.)

'Thank God,I'm back,' I wailed as I walked through the door and collapsed into The Poet's arms at eleven o'clock last night.  'I've done it.  It's over now.  I've don't have to go out for the next ten days.'

I'd been out since 2.30 that afternoon.  All I'd done was sit for two and a half hours in the back of a Jaguar ('Would you mind not wearing your cap?' I asked the driver nervously), spent three hours talking and reading to people, signed a few books, and sat for another two and a half hours in the back of the Jag.   If you live what they call A Life, my abjection and exhaustion might strike you as extreme.  What can I say?  I think my blood runs slower than your average three-toed sloth, and that I got born without the gregarious gene that made the human race the monstrous social success it is today.

Actually, I'm about to find out exactly what my problem is, why I'm such a sliver of a soul.  My friend S. send me a card the other day.  We were best mates in the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital in 1968.  Difficult, annoying, angry young women in the bin.  It turns out, astonishingly, that they've still got the medical records from back then, and that the Data Protection Act means I have the right to get copies.  S. got hers.  Every session with the shrinks is noted, all their diagnoses and comments still there.  'Are you sure you're up to it,' S. said.  'What with being madder than I am...'  It's a debate that's been going on between us since 1968.  In fact, she is madder than me, but she just refuses to see it.  So I've filled in the form and I'm awaiting a shoebox full of my deviant past.  Just nobody mention Pandora.  But perhaps it will explain my epic idleness.  Or idyllness, as I prefer to  think of it.

Very excitingly, just by the by, I got paid for doing the reading in scarves.  Instead of real money (hey, writers don't need money, do they, it's not like they need to earn a living?) F. Spufford and I got a voucher each to spend at the Charleston gift shop.  So now I'll be spending the winter with my neck swathed in bloomsbury-hued silk and satin.  I looked on the shelves for elegantly rounded stones to keep in one's pockets in the event of a sudden river in one's vicinity, but they must have run out.  So I shall have to content myself with wearing my Vanessa-and-Virginia scarves sitting in the room of my own in which I plan to stay for as long as I possibly can.

I Am Bad

OK, I've been outed as a noise nut and it's true.  I am crazed by noise.  I have to put my fingers in my ears when I'm on the street and a lorry passes, my whole insides turn liquid when the recycling bin men come by and tip boxes of glass into more glass.  I can't bear it.  I hyperventilate when the dog two doors down barks for twenty minutes.  Noise, like pain, makes me want to leave the planet, but before that to kill someone. 

I spend lunatic hours on Google checking out earplug sites.  None of them (of course) make silence happen.  I organised a visit from a technician to make moulds of my ears for custom ear plugs.  He didn't come.  Hope curled up and sulked.  Earplugs in any case are problematical.  Talking to the daughter who had a temporary problem with roadworks, she said she can't use earplugs because they stop her from thinking.  Which is weirdly right.  I seem (as she does) to need ambient air to think in.  Closing myself off makes my own internal sounds scream, or perhaps it's a kind of claustrophobia.  I've tried white and pink noise cds but they sound like noise to me.  Best thing I've found is Brian Eno's Music for Airports and Neroli.  Which makes the daughter threaten to disown me for naffness.  Anyway, I am a nutcase, I don't have much of a problem owning to that.

But it's actually worse than that.  Much, much worse.  Loud or sudden noise is painful but passes.  What I really hate is the noise of other people.  And that's dissembling, too.  What I really hate is the noise other people make that reminds me that other people exist.  There.  Children screaming and shrieking in the neighbouring gardens (it's hot in my glass study, I have to have the door open) sends me into a spiral of fretting and whimpering.  Do they really need to bellow in order to grow up well-balanced human beings?  Other people's hi fis, their drums, for god's sake.  I know about people's right to have rights, but if my inclination is for silence, it gets trumped by theirs.   I want to  sit in my room and not be reminded ('Do you HAVE to have that conversation in the street under my window?') that I am surrounded by other souls.  Something about the community-minded Sixties just didn't take with me.  I have fantasies about living in the middle of a field (preferably in a house) but the Poet points out that there's nowhere noisier than the countryside.  All those machines, and the birdsong., my dears.  I've spent time on retreat in convents and monasteries of silent orders, and it was wonderful, but there's the god problem (and the food is inedible).  It's like stealing silence.  I want it by right.

All this might sound like typical old lady complaint.  And it is of course.  Christ, the young!  Why don't they grow up...?  But actually apart from my new sense that my time is running out and can I please have things the way I need them while I still can, my vileness and non-fitness for purpose as a human being has always been like this.  I didn't want to hear the sound of the neighbours even when I was a kid.   I am ashamed, and then again, I'm not.   What can I tell you?  I'm bad, through and through.

lazylibrary

Busy, busy...I give you Lazylibrary , for all of you who have better things to do than read just because you want to read.

Ever read a book that was a few hundred pages longer than it needed to be? Yeah, so have we. Fortunately, there are authors out there that would rather have a concise and effective book than a lengthy and diluted tome, and that's where we come in.

Welcome to the lazylibrary, where you can find books on any topic without having to worry about high page counts. If it's over 200 pages, you won't even see it. Read all about anything, in less time, for (usually) less money.

This goes a step beyond cut versions of books.  Use this website and you are promised you won't even be troubled by having to acknowledge the existence of a book longer than 200 pages.

Of course, the assumption is that books have a point, a practical purpose.  Concise and effective is not how you might describe Portrait Of A Lady but then it doesn't have a purpose, it's a novel.  Put Henry James into the search facility and you get The Heiress, the movie script version of Washington Square, Harold Bloom on James's Short Stories (111 pages) and - actual  prose fiction - various James Bond books (Fleming's no fool, 128 pages).

So forget the made-up stuff.  But you don't want to waste time finding out about the topic of your choice, either.  The quick version of everything will do.   Look up 'death' on search and you'll find Dog Heaven (40 pages) and Tear Soup (56 pages) towards the top of the list.  Masterpieces for all I know. 'Love' gets you Individual Power: Reclaiming Your Core, Your Truth, Your Life (a weighty 192 pages) as well as I Love You Stinky Face (a more manageable 30 pages).  No need to linger over anything.  Try 'Quantum Physics' and you won't be troubled with anything over 192 pages. You can bone up on the 'Cold War' in 196 pages, and get Elizabeth Bishop, strangely. It's a biography, however, not her poetry (in fact a search on Elizabeth Bishop only brings up biogs and studies - short ones, of course.  No actual poetry at all). 

I suppose it's perfectly reasonable in a world where fast information is paramount and rough information will do.  Perfectly reasonable if you're in a terrible hurry.  Lifehacker.com who flagged lazylibrary describes it as a way for those who want 'to get back in the habit of reading but need a light point of entry'.  It supposes that 'diehard literati' (that's likely me and you) will yell travesty.  What the hell, they imply, any reading is better than none.  I wonder if that's true?  I really don't know.  It seems a much more moralistic and pointless position than my moaning about cut and short books.  If you don't want to read, then don't.  A little reading is not necessarily better than none.  I'm up for the pleasure of reading, not as little as it's possible to get away with because it's such a dull thing to do. If you don't enjoy it, don't bother, check out Wikipedia. 

Sod it, let's make long, complex, intricate books really hard to find, available only to those who know the secret password, or who can recite Finnegan's Wake backwards.  If you want to read anything longer than 200 pages or more taxing than The Thorn Birds you're going to have to beg.