Modern Times

'When I Lived in Modern Times' by Linda Grant was the year 2000 winner of the Orange Fiction Prize.

It follows on quite interestingly from 'Voluptuous Delights' that I reviewed a few weeks ago, in that it also deals with a politically and historically significant moment for the country concerned. In this case the country is Israel, or Palestine, depending on your point of view, and the year is 1946. I thought I knew quite a bit about the middle east and it's recent history, but this inside view of the birth of a nation was quite an eye-opener. I kept getting the feeling that the entire book was some kind of allegory; for the character searching for her own identity, for the birth of Israel as a political entity, and for the notion of the Jews and the Diaspora and their search for a homeland and an identity.

The story is told from the perspective of Evelyn, a young British Jewish girl, briefly through her childhood and the (second world) war until she sets off into the unknown world of Palestine. At the time it is a British protectorate struggling with the demands for immigration from holocaust survivors that the government is trying to prevent. Evelyn is a rootless person, with an unknown father and grandparents coming to Britain from eastern Europe, and a mother who provides love and security but no sense of belonging anywhere or to anything. 'Uncle Joe', her mother's boyfriend, supports them and pays for her education, but he has a real wife and children elsewhere and she grows up with a sense of being his "shadow family", a life lacking reality. She picks up some of his zionist politics, and after her mother's death he sends her off to a new world, but she has no real idea of why she is there or why she might belong. Evelyn enters the country pretending to be a christian tourist, then making her way to the Jewish Agency, whence she is placed in a kibbutz, an experience that is short-lived but seems to have quite a lasting impact. She ends up in a little flat, working as a hairdresser and with a boyfriend who turns out to be a terrorist. She adopts a new fake identity and begins to feed information about her affluent and important clients to Johnny (who's real identity is also a mystery). But she is really a very naive girl and when a local policeman becomes suspicious of her everything begins to fall apart, and as the political tension begins to rise she finds herself caught up in something more dangerous than she had imagined.

Really the politics is the main theme of the novel. From the kibbutz dwellers, to her neighbours in the block of flats, to the local Arab population, to her British customers and then the political activists who spirit her away from the authorities, all these people have their own view of what should be happening to Palestine, and all of them are at odds with the others. In fact the only point of view that you don't get is that of the orthodox 'religious' Jews, whom many of the immigrants seem to view as some kind of archaic oddity, not part of a new modern state. The story takes place in Tel Aviv, a place that sees itself as modern, rejecting the past, seeking a new future. It seems at odds with the essential historical nature of Judaism, because it is their past (both recent and more distant) that is driving the creation of Israel. And for the Jews, both religious and not, political and not, it is their historical suffering that is central to their experience and is what they expect the creation of the state of Israel to save them from:

"It was a country of so-what people. So-what you are cold and hungry? You want to know about cold and hunger? Let me tell you where I have been. I know cold and hunger. So-what you miss your mother? My mother was gassed. And my father and my grandparents and my sisters and brothers. So-what you want your boyfriend? My boyfriend was murdered by British soldiers. I was never going to outdo them. They had skins like elephant hides and they brandished their suffering at you like heavy clubs. They'd bash your brains out with those clubs if they could." (p.211)

It is the story that is important. It is Evelyn's story but it is also Israel's story. And when she finally returns, many years later, when an old woman, she reflects on what has changed, and what remains of the Israel she experienced:

"Look at it this way, we are the people of the Book. It is the first thousand years of Jewish history and though we have no second volume for the next two thousand years, each story a Jew tells is part of that book. We have no choice but to listen. Our history was in our story, for the Arabs of Palestine, it was the land. Without a story we're not jews. Without a land they're not just DP's (displaced persons), they're an abstract idea - a cause. That's not a human being. This is the great wrong we did them." (p.239)

I was concentrating so hard on the 'issues' that I paid much less attention to the writing, but it is a very well written book. The atmosphere, cultural, political and geographical, was rich in details and the cast of characters strong and authentic. The history and politics of Israel is a very complex subject and this is a brave attempt to incorporate them into a novel. A very challenging book, but in some ways it left me none the wiser. How do two so different political/religious/cultural groups coexist in such a small space? I guess there are no definitive answers to the many questions that you are left asking.

John Keats

Today is the anniversary of the death of John Keats, I was attracted to the article in The Times when reading something else, and just thought it nice to commemorate having enjoyed the film Bright Star so much last month. This image is a copy of the actual death notice placed in The Times 189 years ago. The phrase "of a decline" was apparently common at the time, and constituted an actual medical diagnosis of his death. If you visit the John Keats website you can see that a great many of his poems were published posthumously, he having died believing himself a failure. I am not very familiar with his work, apart from the "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" well known quotes. Here is one I found on the website, that seems highly appropriate to the occasion. It is entitled "When I have fears that I may cease to be":

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

Picking Wild Strawberries

'The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems' by Billy Collins is not his most recent publication, just the title they had available through the library. I first came across him a few weeks ago and was so taken with the poem I found that I wanted to read some more.

The word that springs to mind to describe him can only be unpretentious. He does not need to use unfathomable vocabulary to get his point across or subtle references to obscure philosophical ideas, in fact in 'The Introduction' he gently mocks the way some poetry does just this. The poem addresses the reader, setting out to explain the references contained within the poem they are about to read, to enable them to appreciate it more fully. He explains that they will need to understand the meaning of 'Imroz', 'Hypsicles' and 'helminthology', that "Wagga Wagga is in New South Wales./ Rhyolite is that soft volcanic rock." but then he politely adds, "The rest of the poem should be clear./ I'll just read it and let it speak for itself./ It's about the time I went picking wild strawberries./ It's called Picking Wild Strawberries." I liked it because while he is making fun he is also making a serious critical point about how poetry can be over analysed, as if there is a correct way to understand a poem, a process that can destroy individual appreciation.

Several of the poems in the collection are what I think of as self-referential, poems that talk about either themselves or the process of being a poet and writing poetry. The first poem 'You, Reader' addresses the reader again, then the second one 'Monday' describes how the poet spends his Monday morning, in contrast with other more normal occupations. I particularly loved this stanza:

"The clerks are at their desks,

the miners are down their mines,

and the poets are looking out of their windows

maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,

and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved."

though he does reflect wryly a few lines later that "because it is their job for which they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon." In 'The Trouble with Poetry', the penultimate poem of the book, he returns to the troubled life of the poet, wondering what they will do "when we have compared everything in the world to everything else in the world" because "mostly poetry fills me with the urge to write poetry". Then he ends with a reference to Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

"whose little amusement park of a book

I carried in a side pocket of my uniform

up and down the treacherous halls of high school."

and I have this lovely image of him as a teenager, already so possessed by poetry that he knows that it will consume his life.

The other repeated theme is death. In 'Reaper' the writer encounters a man with a scythe who becomes, in his imagination, the grim reaper. 'Bereft' was one of my favourites, a woman musing on how easy it must be to be dead, to escape all the mundane things that make up existence, all the things you could do without, exchanging them for simple emptiness. But the writer adds his understated horror at the end:

"a region of silence except for

the occasional beating of wings-

and, I wanted to add

as the sun dazzled your lifted wineglass,

the sound of the newcomers weeping."

And then in 'Breathless' he starts talking about people sleeping, only to digress into the notion of being buried in a comfortable sleeping pose. I really liked this idea, to eschew the "dark suit" and "ridiculous tie" in favour of an "earthy little bedroom":

"curled up in a coffin

in fresh pair of cotton pajamas,

a down pillow under my weighty head."

Some of his poems are slightly disconcerting. They start telling one story, but then the last couple of lines seem to go off at a tangent, almost as if he has forgotten what he was intending to say. But you have to assume it is deliberate, to stop the reader predicting the outcome. I know you do that sometimes, particularly where you have a nice neat rhyme, you think ahead to what other words will fit, and subconsciously try and anticipate where the poem is going. For example, in 'Building with it's face blown off' (and many others are available on Youtube) he describes in detail a bomb blasted building, it's innards exposed to public scrutiny, and then the last couple of stanzas he seems to look off into the distance, and then further away, into another country, where we have a couple on a blanket having a picnic. I was confused. Similarly in 'Class Picture, 1954', Superman makes a surprise appearance at the end of what is a nostalgic tale of a childhood moment.

Others contain beautifully complete stories, capturing a simple idea so succinctly. In 'Eastern Standard Time' he describes the day, from the point of view of people living within his own time zone, that in spite of their different lives, they are bonded together by the common experience of the time of day.

Am going to end with the final poem of the book, entitled 'Silence'. Not typical of Collins, but I think it is hard to pin down what might be a 'typical' poem. Just wonderful images, wonderful use of words, which is what poetry is about.

There is the sudden silence of the crowd

above a motionless player on the field,

and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase

before it strikes the floor,

the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,

the silence of the moon

and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,

the silence of the window above us,

and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning

which I have broken with my pen,

the silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house -

the silence before I wrote a word

and the poorer silence now.

Saturday papers on Sunday

Dunk spotted this interesting piece in The Guardian yesterday, so we popped out late and found a copy, Ten Rules for Writing (which you can read online but I like to have the real thing scattered across the bed myself). Someone I had not heard of has just written a book with this title so the Guardian asked a load of writers what their 'rules' were, and what an interesting selection of ideas resulted.

Some took the project less seriously than others, but I think that it tells you just as much about them, and about the process of writing a book. Roddy Doyle's comments particularly appealed, from the silly, "Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet" to the more helpful, "Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones." The other silly comments included "Don't have children" (Richard Ford), "Prayer might help" (Margaret Atwood) "The first twelve years are the worst" (Anne Enright) and "No going to London" (Colm Toibin). Many things were repeated by several people; the advice to read widely, edit ruthlessly, go for a walk if you get stuck, write what you love, be self-disciplied, avoid cliches and basically just stop dreaming and get on with writing. Oh yes, and avoid having access to an internet connection ... very, very distracting.

Other people took the whole thing much more seriously, and gave some very helpful insights. Michael Morpurgo tells us "Ted Hughes gave me this advice and it works: record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys." Hilary Mantel's thoughts on description; "Description must work for its place. It can't be simply ornamental. It usually works best if it has a human element; it is more effective if it comes from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of the character definition and part of the action." Similarly Sarah Waters suggests "Don't overwrite. Avoid redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs." In fact Elmore Leonard asserts that using adverbs is a "mortal sin", and that exclamation points are to be definitely avoided, also "I have noticed that writers who use 'suddenly' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points." Basically, you can't add atmosphere with punctuation. Joyce Carol Oates continues in this vein, "Unless you are writing something very post-modernist - self-conscious, self-reflexive and 'provocative' - be alert for possibilities of using plain familiar words in place of polysyllabic 'big' words." I really liked Roddy Doyle's other sensible comment, "Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg 'horse', 'ran', 'said'."

Only someone like Andrew Motion is going to say stuff like "Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary" and Philip Pullman dismisses us with "My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work." The other things that made me smile "Learn poems by heart" (Helen Dunmore), "You see more sitting still than chasing after." (Jonathan Franzen) and "Proceed slowly and take care. To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand." (Annie Proulx) I could almost rush out (or is that stay in, I think) and write a book. Or maybe just a blog post.

Tuesday poetry

Linking today to another blog that I follow, Andrew Shields, who's recent post pointed me to this poetry magazine site called SoftBlow (and on to the weirdest site ever, that of Donna Ong, who created this lovely cover image for their front page. I thought at a glance it was butterflies then realised it was tree seeds).

Anyway, I was really struck with this poem, mainly because I used to have really bad train anxiety dreams too.

Stand Clear Of The Closing Doors by Andrew Shields

The train hums in to Mannheim where we change

for Kassel, all our stuff's still strewn about,

Andrea picks up Miles and the backpack,

my arms encircle papers, toys and snacks,

we're on the platform, we just made it out,

I have to go back in for one more thing,

I grab it, but someone's standing in the aisle,

the button's just a second from my finger,

the door is slipping shut, I force it, fly,

and wake to write these lines to keep the dream

from recurring, to close the doors on it.

Chocolate mousse

Yesterday turned out to be one of those "where did the time go?" kind of days, so the chocolate mousse that I promised Dunk never got made. So this morning I started as I mean to go on (in the "not wasting a couple of days holiday just mooching on the computer" way) and got up to make mousse.

It really is idiot proof. I adapted the recipe from several different ideas. I like to include whipped egg white because it makes it a bit lighter, compared to just using cream and chocolate, but totally unsuitable for the pregnant or the elderly because of the presence of raw eggs.

So from the top middle going clockwise (all in separate bowls)

• 1/2 pint of whipped double cream with a bit of sugar
• two teaspoons of gelatine dissolved in hot water (make sure there are no jellyish lumps when you mix it in, that can totally spoil the mousse, if it has started to set rewarm it in the microwave for a few seconds)
• two egg whipped whites (or three if they are a bit small, or you like it fluffy)
• 200g of melted chocolate (I used Galaxy but dark is probably better, or whatever your preference really)
• 2 teaspoons of instant coffee dissolved in a small amount of hot water (then left to cool), because I like it a bit mocha and it takes the edge of the sickliness.
• the two egg yolks mixed with 2oz of castor sugar

Blend the whole lot carefully and thoroughly together with a plastic spatula. (I think I over whipped the cream as it did not blend very smoothly, and sometimes the chocolate sets too quickly and you get little lumps, but it doesn't detract from the general yumminess) Refrigerate for a couple of hours. You end up with a brown sludge that looks totally disgusting, but tastes fabulous, and has practically no calories. Vegetarians can replace the gelatine with some suitable alternative .... vegans can just sit on the sidelines and watch:-) Serves four very generously or six if you are a bit more frugal (but who thinks frugality is a virtue where chocolate mousse is concerned). Enjoy.

Un-valentine day slippers

The girls, in a spirit of un-romantic solidarity, decided to celebrate un-valentine's day, with terrible macho films and a lack of make-up and general appearance neglect. I am not sure I will be joining them for Mortal Kombat or Starship Troopers, but South Park The Movie is always good fun.

Instead I have gone for another slipper experiment ... and it was much more successful than last time. I scaled the pattern down by about half, and I used merino this time, which in general I much prefer anyway.

• I laid out layers of undyed roving for the sole and the inside then added some colours that will go up the sides and around onto the top. This was all wetted down and then turned over.

• I put the plastic pattern pieces in the centre of the roving and wrapped it around.

• Then I added a bit more decoration.

• Then this is all rolled around the rolling pin for about half an hour or so, unwrapping and changing the direction every now and then. Then I made a small incision with a craft knife and removed the pattern.

• Then you just rub the slippers by hand with lots of soap for another half an hour or so, maybe it was longer I lost track of time. The shrinkage will cause the hole to get bigger so don't make it too large to start with, though I did even mine up a bit when one hole looked much bigger than the other (in fact one slipper is a bit bigger than the other too, but we'll try and ignore that)

• When you are satisfied that it is all well felted you rinse them *thoroughly* with hot and then cold water. I did try them on at this stage to see how they fitted.

• and on the whole they fit pretty well. I left the edges kind of rough, I am worried that if I attempt to trim them neatly it will just spoil the whole thing.