But before I go.. Barbara

A few days off

I’ll be leaving the insufferable heat of central Italy tomorrow for a week in the more temperate climes of the English Midlands. I can’t wait. The blissful vacancy of travel. M&S duck à l’orange and Jeremy Kyle (my guilty secret, alas no longer), Thornton’s chocolate gingers, traditional pork pie from Kirk’s, my mother’s (and her mother’s) favourite butcher’s, the Guardian and the Independent actually printed on paper, my favourite Chinese all-you-can-eat-for-£4.99 buffet on School Street. Yes. Yes.

And you know what? I’m worth it.

RIP Simon Gray

I was sad to see that Simon Gray had died. I started reading him when an extract from the first of his diaries to be published – The Smoking Diaries – appeared in Granta some years ago, and I’ve been buying each new instalment as it came out, in hardback, unusually for me, because I couldn’t wait. I remember reading the first volume at more or less the same time as an edition of the journals Christopher Isherwood kept when he was living in Los Angeles in the late 50s-early 60s and coming to the conclusion, with a heavy heart, that I preferred the stubborn, tetchy, doubt-ridden, heterosexual, pet-loving, regretful, easily irritated playwright to the vacuous bed-hopping star-fucking campy pseudo-Quaker that Isherwood had become. Both men wrote their journals to be read, Isherwood presumably – and wisely – after his death, Gray as soon as possible, and there’s a wonderful feeling in the latter’s diaries of a very public confession going on, of an opening out. I’m not a theatre-goer, and I’ve never seen any of his plays, I’m not even sure that I want to, but his diaries were a source of great and constant pleasure to me. He wrote about animals as well as he did about himself and other people; at one point he wonderfully describes the ‘dainty waddle’ of a cat. There is, apparently, a final volume waiting to be published, and that’s it.

Little Monsters review

Scott Pack has written an excellent review of Little Monsters. I’m particularly fond of this bit (you can probably guess why):

The way Lambert handles relationships, and how small betrayals and minor secrets can divert their course, reminded me of Milan Kundera…

You can find the rest of it here.

A-Z

Once again, you have Maud Newton to thank for pointing me to this.

High

Following the recent mountaineering deaths on K2 I’ve been thinking about the way we react, or we’re supposed to react, to this kind of disaster. A bunch of people push their bodies to the limit to achieve a sort of temporary exaltation, of no real value other than as an entirely personal experience, of no earthly use to anyone else. They spend substantial amounts of money, their own or that of others (sponsors), ignoring any claims their families and loved ones may have on them in pursuit of this elusive satisfaction. When anything goes wrong, as it often does, dozens of other people are obliged to risk their lives to rescue them. Yet everyone seems to agree that the death of a mountaineer is a tragedy, on a par with that of a fire-fighter, soldier, etc. Pages of newspapers, hours of television are devoted to glorifying the noble aspects of their lives and deaths. They’re seen as heroes dying heroes’ deaths.

Well, I don’t get it. I don’t say people shouldn’t climb mountains, any more than that they shouldn’t dive from high places or wrestle big cats in Las Vegas. I’m sure these are all pretty exciting ways to pass the time. But I don’t see the intrinsic difference between using a lump of snow-covered rock to get high and using a rock of crack or a line of snow to achieve the same effect. Let’s face it. They’re dragging their expensively kitted bodies up the side of Everest, or wherever, for the kick. They’re not doing it for anyone else’s good. In human terms, Reinhold Messner and Amy Winehouse are each worth as much as the other, except that Amy Winehouse is also a genius, and Messner just climbs things.

It’s as though physical exercise were, in itself, ennobling. It’s rather like the shocked reaction to these new drugs that may induce fitness in – horror of horrors- people who don’t deserve it. Why not? Because they just sit around thinking, or reading, or watching TV, instead of running in endless circles or lifting weights. Well, good for them. Pass me the pills while I read Omega Minor.

Interestingly, the only time I remember seeing a climber criticised for failing to consider the social fallout their addictive and selfish activities might have on someone else was when the climber in question was – wait for it – a mother. A woman’s place is clearly not up the Eiger. Leave that to the (sponsored) boys.

Head and neck should be opened

This image comes from a site called Face Analyst: A New Approach to the Old Puzzle. It’s written in what reads like an unholy marriage between machine translation and psychobabble. The text beside it goes like this:

The classical type of the “castrating woman” leaving man with an inferiority complex, represents a combination of high parameters of authoritativeness, rivalries and criticalities of thinking.

If you’d like to know more, or think you recognise this woman (try imagining hair) and are feeling low-level anxiety, go straight to the site in question, where you will find this kind of crystalline explanation:

The principle of reverse afferentation (the mechanism of reverse connection) gives an opportunity to influence on the specified basic psychological feature by conscious activation (or relaxation) of correlating mimic elements. Training techniques created on the basis of Autogenic Training by J.Shultz and regulating mental processes, connected with emotional conditions, by a muscular relaxation, optimize the general emotional state of the person. The proposed technique (STEMA) allows selectively influence on concrete psychological features directly in a phase of the daily activity of the person, depending on requirements of an environment, or the certain professional specificity.

Should you feel the need for a bit of extra STEMA, you can ask the site directly for counselling. All you have to do is send a photograph. Here are the instructions:

The person on video / photo image should behave naturally (not to sit with the frozen face, as on documents), head and neck should be opened.

Bare naked homophobia

Jesus’ General is one of my favourite blogs pretty much all the time, but his latest post is particularly wonderful. Read it here. The illustration comes from it.

I love you I hate you

I was talking to a friend last night about what it might mean to have an inferiority complex. In one sense the term’s an oxymoron. The moment you understand your inferiority is a complex rather than a simple fact about you, you’re no longer inferior. You’re actually sharper than those glittering automata who think they’re so special, and aren’t, and don’t even know it. Damn them.

Given this irony – which is reassuring but, well, insufficient – we started to wonder about whether the mixture of envy and admiration that accounts for a good part of one’s feeling inferior is a quality that might be useful, even indispensable, in a writer. Feeling inferior sharpens the eye wonderfully. You watch the others, the superior ones, with the attention of a fearing and doting child, but also with that of a servant, whose service is bought at the cost of his contempt; and finally with that of a dog, alert to whatever might fall from the table. Aren’t these Proustian characteristics? Isn’t this what Thackeray did? And Waugh? And Genet? How often the narrator’s eye seems both pitiless and enamoured.

And then there are the others. Dickens, Penelope Fitzgerald, Rohinton Mistry…

"a sense today"

An illuminating post from Lally’s Alley, with extracts from work by Nathan Kernan and Bill Corbett that do exactly what extracts should do: make you want to read the rest. The title to this post comes from one of them.