the ninth : work stuff

 

Couple of items at work yesterday amused me. Firstly the fact that that snails really aren't fussy and don't only wreck your spinach seedlings ... they crawl inside post boxes and quite enjoy munching on envelopes too. There was a postbox in Chastleton that was always full of snails as it was in a stone wall and was old and damp under the trees. 

The other letter, from the King, I wondered if it was a sign of the times. I delivered one only last week, presumably a 100th birthday card to a lady on Brunswick road; these letters had always previously been Special Delivery, but they seem to be economising and only sending them recorded delivery now:

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

Day Eight : Garden Stuff

Had crappy day at work, and it's a bit wet and windy but I stepped outside to say hello to the babies.

The honeysuckle is just coming into flower and is going to be lush again this year.

The purple stuff on the walls that comes back reliably every year is lush too, and the bees love it.

The sweet william survived the winter and is enjoying the damp weather:

The valerian is everywhere, but again the bees like it and it's a gorgeous colour.

I realised I don't have a name for my gnome?

He was 'rescued' (a couple of years ago now) from the garden of a deceased customer, because I knew that the council would sweep in and put everything in a skip, which they duly did the following week. He was very worn and faded and I finally got around to repainting him.

(Do not google 'good name for a gnome', that is one weird rabbit hole.)

I've decided on Benedict.

Stay safe. Be kind. Adopt a gnome.

seventh (7th): Three Days

Anne Tyler is my comfort read. I have read at least half a dozen of her twenty something novels, and they are always warm and human. They are about people and their small incidental lives, which is what most of us live, which is what makes them relatable I think. I was thinking this about 'To The Dogs', how the events it contains do not happen to most people. The storyline is escapist because it offers something more 'exciting' than most people's lives. It's not that I only like to read about lives like my own, far from it, I relish vicarious experience of other people's lives, but events do need to be part of real life. In the crime fiction it felt like so much was 'happening' that I wasn't connecting to what the characters were thinking and feeling about their experience. In fact the point of the story is for 'things' to 'happen', the people they are happening to are secondary. Having said that sometimes writers like Anne Tyler blur ... their books do not leave a strong impression, no strong emotional response, only a vague something...

On the other hand Anne Tyler often has huge things happen to her characters, things that totally disrupt their lives, but it is all about how they deal with it. Here Gail's daughter is about to get married, something she feels a little on the periphery of, the grooms parents having taken over the organisation of the event. When her ex-husband arrives on her doorstep with a rescue cat needing a place to stay (away from the allergic groom), they find themselves settling back into their former comfortable routines. They kind of potter about through three days while the momentous thing happens to their daughter. That's all really. I really related to how much she found other people stressful and annoying. 

" 'You're talking as if it would be a beach house,' I said, 'but the cost of living at the beach is astronomical.'

'No, I'm talking about my neck of the woods,' he said, 'Cornboro. They could stay with you in Cornboro and then drive to the nearest beach every day in not much more than an hour.'

'Oh, you're right,' I said. 'And the drive would be so undemanding that Kenny Junior can take the wheel as soon as he gets his learner's permit.'

Max looked confused, but only for a second. 'True enough,' he agreed.

'Max,' I said. 'I appreciate the thought. But the fact is that I believe I have only one span of life allotted to me. I don't feel I have the option of just ... trying out various random ideas and giving up if they don't work out.'

'Yes, well,' Max said with a sigh.

He himself, apparently, assumed he had an infinite number of lives.

Someday I'd like to be given credit for all the times I have not said something that I could have." (p.151)

Stay safe. Be kind. Maybe move to the beach. See you tomorrow.

Sixth day: Completely, unjustly, darkly alone

I bought 'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey and sent it to Monkey, fully intending to pinch it back when I visited. Interestingly mum did not enjoy it at all, but Monkey and I both loved it. I love a book where nothing much happens. And floating around in space nothing much happens. Is it like being dead I wonder. I mean they are almost like Schrodinger's astronauts, there is a nasty crack in the space station so potentially they are kind of alive and dead at the same time, since nobody could save them if there is a breach.

This was quite a scientific book. Much research must have gone in to understanding the flight path and also the experience of the astronauts/cosmonauts. Six people are sealed in a tiny container rushing at thousands of miles an hour around the planet. And they just wake up and get on with their routine day. The book hops from one to another of the people, telling you what they are doing, what they are thinking, what they are eating, what they are talking about. I expected it to feel claustrophobic but they spend so much time looking out that it doesn't feel confined; it's almost as if they live in the whole of space. And I loved the fact that they never seemed to lose their sense of awe at what they are getting to experience. 

Queue the quotes, so much good writing in this book:

"At first on their missions they each miss their families, sometimes so much that it seems to scrape out their insides; now, out of necessity, they've come to see that their family is this one here, these others who know the things they know and see the things they see, with whom they need no word of explanation. When they get back how will they even begin to say what happened to them, who and what they were? They want no view except this view from the window of the solar arrays as they taper into emptiness. No rivets in the entirety of the world will do except these rivets around the window frames. They want padded gangways for the rest of their lives. This continuous hum." (p.12-13)

I love her long convoluted sentences. She has so much to say each time she starts one that she just keeps going:

"This planet that's been relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines - the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its knobble of moon. This thing that harbours we humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it's a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind's ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through." (p.28)

Here Nell is on a spacewalk:

"She was outside for hours - almost seven, so she was told. You have no idea at all of the passing of time. You install or repair whatever you are tasked to install or repair; you photograph some of the hatches, the external tools, you do a litter pick of debris, plucking from space a few of those tens of thousands of remnants of jettisoned or exploded satellites and launch-vehicle stages and craft; wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it, perhaps the nature of all life, to do this. Dusk steals upon you and the earth is a bruising of azure and purple and green, and you remove your sun visor and turn on your light and darkness brings out the stars and Asia passes by bejewelled and you work in your light-pool until the sun comes up once more behind you and burnishes an ocean you can't identify. Daylight spills blue on a snowy landmass moving into view and, against the black, the rim of the earth is a light bright mauve that brings a pain of elation to the gut. What might be the Gobi Desert rolls out beneath you while ground crews give soothing instructions and your partner leafs through the manual attached to the arm of his spacesuit and you can just about see his face through the sun visor, a tranquil oval of human face in the enormous anonymity of our landscape, and meanwhile the solar arrays drink the sun until dusk comes back and your partner is blackened by the sunset behind him and night creeps from the underside of the earth and engulfs it." (p.69-70)

Here Shaun and Pietro discuss a postcard. It is of a painting that, earlier in the book, we had learned was discussed in a class where Shaun and his wife first encountered each other. I liked this conversation because I like art, and I like how sometimes you have to really look. And so much of the book is just about looking. So much of science is just about looking. You have to look to understand, in both art and science. 

"Did someone send you a postcard? Pietro jokes, coming to the doorway of Shaun's quarters and nodding at the Las Meninas that's in free drift.

My wife, fifteen years ago, he says.

Pietro nods, and Shaun nips the postcard from its drift and hands it to him.

Read the back, Shaun says.

I wouldn't - 

No, go ahead.

What is the subject of the painting? his wife has written on the postcard's reverse. Who is looking at whom? the painter at the king and queen; the king and queen at themselves in a mirror; the viewer at the king and queen in the mirror; the viewer at the painter; the painter at the viewer, the viewer at the princes, the viewer at the ladies-in-waiting? Welcome to the labyrinth of mirror that is human life.

Is your wife always so obsessed with petty small-talk? Pietro asks.

And Shaun replies: I'm telling you, it's relentless.

Pietro stares for a while at the painting, and a while longer, then says, It's the dog.

Pardon?

To answer your wife's question, the subject of the painting is the dog.

He looks then - when Pietyro hands back the postcard, reaches across to squeeze the bony dome of Shaun's shoulder before diving away - at the dog in the foreground. He's never given it a second glance, but now he can't look at anything else. It has its eyes closed. In a painting that's all about looking and seeing, it's the only living thing in the scene that isn't looking anywhere, at anyone or anything. He sees now how large and handsome it is, and how prominent - and though it's dozing there's nothing slumped or dumb in that doze. Its paws are outstretched, its head erected and proud.

This can't be coincidental, he thinks, in so orchestrated and symbolic a scene, and it suddenly seems that Pietro is right, that he's understood the painting, or that his comment has made Shaun see a different painting altogether to the one he'd seen before. Now he doesn't see a painter or princess or dwarf or monarch, he sees a portrait of a dog. An animal surrounded by the strangeness of humans, all their odd cuffs and ruffles and silks and posturing, the mirrors and angles and viewpoints; all the ways they've tried not to be animals and how comical this is, when he looks at it now. And how the dog is the only thing in the painting that isn't slightly laughable or trapped within a matrix of vanities. The only thing in the painting that could be called vaguely free." (p104-105)

Las Meninas by Velazques

You could read this book in one sitting it is so short, in fact I might recommend it, for total absorption into their experience. And finally:

"Pietro doesn't dream. He has a rare night of deep and solid unthinking sleep. His breaths and heartbeats are smooth and few, his face resolves of its crease, his body a well of atom-self, an unworried sum of parts, as if he knows that outside the earth falls away in perpetual invention and leaves nothing more for him to do. Our lives here are inexpressible trivial and momentous at once, it seems he's about to wake up and say. Both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything. Some metal separates us from the void; death is so close. Life is everywhere, everywhere." (p.121)

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

5: Enter Ghost

I picked 'Enter Ghost' by Isabella Hammad from the Women's Fiction Prize shortlist from last year, and it sat waiting for quite a long time. It follows Sonia as she returns to her homeland of Palestine after a long time living in London, reconnecting with her sister and her country. It is set in 2017 and so very much predates the current violence but as I read you feel aware all the time of the tension between the residents of the West Bank and the occupying Israeli forces. Sonia is an actor and, lacking anything particular to spend her time on, she ends up joining a theatre group staging Hamlet in Arabic. Much of the story is taken up with the relationships within the group of actors and watching them rehearse. It was a serious read, lots of literary references, that would no doubt mean more to someone familiar with the play, I often felt I was missing something more subtle. It's very much a book about identity and sense of belonging. And yet also there is also an atmosphere of weary resignation amongst the Palestinians, of acceptance of the restrictions imposed on their lives and the pointlessness of resisting them.

Couple of long quotes, the first really struck me, an incident where they pull up at a checkpoint that bought home the tension of the whole situation:

"One foreign national with an Arab name, two Palestinian citizens of Israel and one West Bank resident with a temporary permit sit in a car with yellow Israeli plates approaching a checkpoint. The line is sluggish: the soldiers are investigating every vehicle, regardless of the number-plate colour. Near the windowless tower, a shabby Israeli flag roils on the wind, looking not at all like those forlorn fraying Palestinian flags that, once illegal but now par for the course, adorn electricity pylons across Ramallah, but rather somehow eternal and careless, a mark of the ragged outposts of empire. Part of the checkpoint itself is surrounded by scaffolding, and the red plastic webbing around the base has broken down, the stick supports in the corners pointing at odd angles. A tap on the driver's window: a slender soldier bends over wearing a very large green helmet like an upside-down basket. He has blond eyelashes. A typical rigmarole of identification cards and passports ensues, conducted in Hebrew with the driver. Then the soldier points at the youngest of the men, the West Bank resident, sitting in the back. Hebrew switches to Arabic. The soldier tells him to get out of the car.

'I have a permit,' says the young man.

'He has a permit,' repeats the woman driving.

Another soldier appears on the other side of the car. He opens the rear door and orders the young man out; the threat has materialised so quickly, unspoken, that if he does not comply they will force him out. Wael gets out. The soldiers escort him into the building at the checkpoint.

As they are passing through the doorway, the blond soldier taps him on the back of the head, and Wael's shoulders flinch into an automatic hunch. It is as though the scene is being played out on a roll of film, from which this frame onward has been bleached.

I was hardly aware of my body as I thrust my door open. I only knew my vision filled with white. And now I was outside, and the morning air was cool on my face and hands. Propelled by an alien force I marched over the uneven, untended terrain that preceded the checkpoint, the rubble and trash and random horizontal blocks of concrete, towards another soldier now standing to attention with his gun ready. Dimly conscious that Mariam and Ibrahim were shouting at me from the car windows, Come back, Sonia, come back, the crucial thought swooped through my mind that the soldier might suspect I had a knife, a suspicion I knew was grounds for shoot to kill, and although my ability to pass as a foreigner might offer me some protection I nevertheless dropped my pace and lifted my arms to make clear that my hands were empty. Rage was making me vibrate. Strangely, as I neared him, the soldier turned to one side, as if to ignore me, except that his hands were on his weapon and he looked ready to use it. He was young, probably eighteen or nineteen. Perhaps he didn't know how to respond to this situation, the approach of a possibly raving woman in white linen trousers and Converse sneakers. He spoke rapidly into his walkie-talkie. Oh god, what am I doing? I thought, and then said loudly in English: 'Where have you taken my son?' The voice came from somewhere other than my mouth, somewhere further away." (p. 153-154)

It is another feature of the book that she frequently finds herself observing, as if she is not part of the scene. And lots of theatre-y language and references, and some of the 'scenes' between the characters are written in the form of a play. It is designed to make you aware of the very fine dividing line between reality and performance; how much of the time we are all playing parts. Here they are seeing the outdoor set that has been constructed for the performance for the first time, having just heard the news that a cast member has received an interrogation order. Where earlier Sonia had been outraged and forthright, here she seems to have accepted that control over her actions is limited:

"Jenan and Wael returned to their positions to complete the dialogue. Both looked rattles, particularly Jenan, which was understandable: she'd just joined us, she was feeling out our dynamic, and now not only was a new dynamic hatching but a threat had materialised of interrogation, of danger. Of dissolution, even. As far as I was concerned, if the Israelis really made an effort to stop us it would not be worth the fight. We were mere human beings, there was only so much we could do. The only person who didn't look unnerved was Mariam, who stared at her actors as though with the force of her gaze she could make them more sturdy. I had a feeling I sometimes get when I drink too much coffee, which was that while standing still, watching Jenan and Wael, another more agitated Sonia was wriggling inside my skin, trying to get out. I was thirsty as well and I needed the loo, and in this state of physical discomfort something strange happened. My viewpoint switched, and as though I were in a dream and my perspective had been breached I moved like a surveillance drone and saw our project from above, situation fragilely in time and place, this summer, this side of the wall. Accompanying this vision was a fear, almost a premonition, that it was all foretold anyway, everything had been decided in advance, we were only acting parts that had been given to us, and now some inexorable machinery was being set in motion that would sooner or later throw our efforts out into the audience, dismantle our illusions, and leave us cowering before the faceless gods of Fate and State." (p.223-224)

Seriously thinking about making some fatet betenjan.

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

Fourth day: Bee Movie

 Some of my favourites, the furrow bees, they are not cute and fluffy, in fact they look like tiny black flies, but they are busy doing the same job as all the others.

I watered the garden ... so of course it finally rained.

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.

Day 3 and a half : Book Club Books

'The Gentleman from Peru' by André Aciman was our book club book in April. I am pissed that I spent my hard earned money on it. The premise must have seemed interesting since we must have voted for it at an earlier meeting but it only took a couple of pages for me to know it was going to annoy me. A group of affluent young Americans are stranded at a hotel on the Amalfi coast by a boat breakdown and they meet a fellow resident, the gentleman from Peru. The minute he rests a hand on one of the young men's shoulders and appears to cure a nagging injury I admit I developed a bad attitude to it. I hate this kind of tosh. The use of a description for the character rather than his name to create some kind of fake 'mystery' was annoying too. His magical abilities seemed many and various and were never questioned, but mostly he had contrived their presence in order to befriend one of the women, and proceeds to tell her she is the reincarnation of his lost love. He wines and dines her and takes her to places he used to go with his former love, until she begins to remember her past life. But he is old and dying and tells her that their lives are out of synch and it will be three hundred and something years before the two of them will be reincarnated and young at the same time. Bleurgh ... I notice now, looking at the book, "Readers adore the Gentleman from Peru" it claims but that nobody has put their actual names to the 'recommendations' on the cover. We did have quite an interesting discussion about the book, the young woman leading the group had plenty of questions to keep the chat going, and I love the fact that people are there for the books and have opinions they are happy to share.

Then this month's book was 'To The Dogs' by Louise Welsh, that I fortunately ordered from the library and read in pretty much one sitting. It was a crime thriller set in Glasgow about a university professor who hasn't quite managed to escape the criminal roots of his family, as he discovers when his son is arrested for drug dealing. It was fast paced and well plotted but I hate it when characters make stupid choices and behave in irrational ways. So while I'm going to go to the meeting next week I am disappointed that this was the second book in a row that I found weak and uninteresting. I am sticking it out thanks to Irena Rey, because I do love having people who want to talk about books, and hoping that there will be other good reads in the months ahead.

Stay safe. Be kind. See you tomorrow.