Recently in Other People's Writing Category
Now it's all or nothing. - Simple Minds, Alive and Kicking
I've been reading a lot. It's a 'Yes!' to A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Words and how they express how you feel and how you never have enough, regardless of the language you try to express yourself in. Words and what they mean, how to interpret them, how they feel when you say them, how they make other people feel when you say them.
Regardless. The other book I've been reading is Zoe Heller's Everything You Know. Meh. Not so much. This one is hard work - I can't identify with the main character, whereas it was simple to identify with Z in the other book. I find the protagonist annoying and his manner irritating. Unlike Jack Nicholson, who I just watched in the Bucket List, Heller's lead character has no charisma to carry him through.
One concept from the book sticks though and that's at the end when he's contemplating life and how it plays out and he considers how people precis their lives, how they assign crib notes to sections of life and then use those crib notes until they believe what they've written about themselves.
I got to thinking, as you do, about life and what my crib notes have been. The things I say to people when I meet them and they want a recap of my life, or like recently at work, when I needed a magazine introduction - how I condense myself into one short paragraph. It was a really interesting exercise. The one for work came up with something like :
'Ashleigh has worked in the educational and governmental sectors in Southern Africa and Europe and brings a wide background of experience to her position as xx at xxx'
Obviously nothing like the truth which is:
'Random jobs until bored speechless at university position after which she had an 8 year break before getting really lucky and re-entering corporate life.'
Which one is the real version? When I'm 60 am I going to believe the magazine version? Hope so.
And the rest of it? This is how I could condense my life so far:
0 - 10 : Grew up in a warzone in a sanctioned country.
10 - 20 : Boarding school. Teen pregnancy. Failed marriage.
20 - 25 : New marriage. New baby. New country. New house.
25 - 30 : Another new country. Another new baby. Another new house.
30 - 35 : Kids go to school. Lose lots of weight. Find out what I want is not what I wanted before.
So where are the details? Filtered into static.
What are your crib notes?
'Poetry is no place for a heart that's a whore
And I'm young & I'm strong
But I feel old & tired
Overfired'
- Martha Wainwright, BMFA
Forgive me, there are things that need saying, but I'm not saying them. Not today, anyway. Maybe later.
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I've been running but I have shin splints, so I'm back in the horrible bloody mother fucking support socks 24/7 'til Friday and I can't run 'til at least Saturday and I need it, I need it, I need it soooo bad.
The DTs are setting in, I'm starting to shake and are those spiders I see coming out of the walls?
I won't get on the bike because I've been there done that and it just isn't the same. I need to feel my knees jar to get the endorphins rushing.
So the mother of gloom is standing over my bed with her hands in my head (listen to the song above). Playing with my hair, whispering in my ear, softly at first, then shrieking. I want to calm the roar but my antidepressants are not available. I'm all alone with this one, 'til Saturday. Unless I find some other way to work it out, work it out, work out, work out. (even my writing takes on a subliminal mind of its own)
Work through it dammit.
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Completely unrelated, well maybe not. My youngest son was back at swimming lessons today after a 4 month break. He forget which door to go through to get back to me after his lesson and when I found him he was chlorine soaked, red-eyed and inconsolable.
Anyone remember that feeling when you've lost your mom and you have no idea where she is? My mom was late a few times to fetch me from school when I was in kindergarten and I can remember sitting in a dejected heap on my brown school suitcase, under the big jacaranda tree at the entrance to the school. And feeling absolutely abandoned.
Today with my son, while I towelled him off, gave him kisses and hugs and patted his head until he finally stopped crying, I thought about how much nicer it would have been if I could have delayed this moment for him.
The moment being that big moment.
The one where you realise that you are completely alone in the world, and that sometimes there is no-one on the other side of the door, and sometimes you have no idea where the freaking door even is.
Couldn't he have been a little older? Couldn't I have been a little older?
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Finished the book. Read the last bit in the swimming pool cafe. Laughed hysterically and out loud at the bits about how one's clitoris apparently disappears once you enter your sixties? How disappointing! Some of us are less emancipated than others and may have only just discovered ours, and then to get told it disappears as you get older? Dire. Absolutely dire.
26 years left ...
My next book is Over by Margaret Forster. No laughing here I'm afraid, no disappearing clitorises either. In fact, let me rethink that and choose another book for the next couple of days. I've been reading this one for a while and I keep putting it down because even though her writing is beautifully spare, the subject matter, a death in the family and the subsequent dissolution of the family, cuts a bit too keenly to be read with comfort.
Maybe I'll be spending some time with Charlaine Harris instead. Screw modern literature this week, give me vampire chick lit romance and loooooove (with fangs).
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And that, she said, was that.
'the answer better be, it pleases me.' - Nina Simone, Do I Move YouYes yes, I know there are other, more important, life changing, breaking-news things to write about and here I am with books and fashion.
Books, books, books.
Today's book, 'No I don't want to join a Bookclub' by Virginia Ironside is hysterically funny.
It's so humorously engaging that lying in the quiet room at the sauna and reading it was not really an option for me. Not really an option due to the eruption of giggles and hysterical snorting and general inability to keep my good humour to myself.
Nothing like lying naked in a quiet room with a whole lot of other people and shaking with laughter to make the other people look at you funny. Never mind the jiggling when you try and keep the giggles in when giggles really will out, at all costs.
What I like about this book is that there are these moments of acute hilarity, interspersed with really astute views on how life is. It's written from the point of view of a 60 year old woman who starts a diary. Fascinating.
A funny excerpt (familiar with this feeling, anyone?):
'Woke feeling absolutely terrible, all the 1,001 muscles in my face still trapped in a rictus of insincerity. Knew, even worse, that I would have to suffer this cramped feeling till the following morning when the ghastly evening had finally drained from my body.
To make matters worse, I looked terrible. Last night before I went to the party I saw in the mirror a raging beauty, with incredible olive skin, high cheekbones, a sensitive mouth, utterly ravishing. But when I glanced in the mirror this morning, I couldn't believe what started back at me - I looked grotesque; Charles Laughton in a dressing gown. My face was like an uncooked doughnut. Piggy eyes, small, pursed, pale-lipped mouth, deep frown-marks, all puff. Revolting. What is it that happens in the night? Clearly Something - God knows what - Collects. Or perhaps it was the Rioja. Or perhaps, more likely, the therapist, quite understandably, had put a curse on me.'
And this is one of the astute ones:
'I remember only recently realising that you could hold two feelings in yourself at the same time, that you could both like someone and dislike them in one go, that you could both want a cigarette and want to give up smoking.
As one who sees life rather in black and white - strong hates and loves - I have always tried to compromise by seeing everything in a kind of grey. The trick is not to do that at all, but to manage to hold the contrasts in oneself at exactly the same time. That results in a much more lively and invigorating approach. Very late in the day to discover that thought, but it has made relationships with people far, far easier. And oddly, kinder.'
Haven't got even to the middle of the book yet but absolutely loving it.
I hope I'm just like this heroine at 60: eccentric, bloody-minded and outspoken.
In fact, I'll just start now, shall I?
'I loved them 'til they loved me.' - Carla Bruni, after Dorothy Parker, Ballade at Thirty FiveSerendipitous, again.
On Wednesday I heard Carla Bruni for the first time, singing in French, her first album. Not in person, obviously.
I was captivated by her voice. Not a clue what she was singing, no French spoken here, but it sounded beautiful.
I bought No Promises when I got home. Love love love it. Poems read in that breathy voice to music. Dorothy Parker's Ballade at 35. Ok, I'm 34, but give me a year.
Today, relaxing, I opened my Esta and there, in the back was an article written tongue in cheek about how if your man walked past Carla Bruni, sat with a coffee at a cafe, poetry book in hand, he'd be quoting Auden and thinking 'Carla Carla Carla' for the rest of his life. The shorts and the sneakers, and the hair and the poems, oh the poems.
Auden's The Secret is Out. Christina Rosetti's Promises Like Pie Crust:
The Observer and Cool Hunting had something to say about this album too, and it's all good.Promise me no promises,
So will I not promise you:
Keep we both our liberties,
Never false and never true:
Let us hold the die uncast,
Free to come as free to go:
For I cannot know your past,
And of mine what can you know?
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Glad or sad. Emotion analysis of photos as part of a University of Amsterdam study. I submitted a photo, please go vote on mine so I can get the analysis. I want to see if I'm really happy! Just in case I need reminding in the future.
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New shoes really make you go faster. 5 km in 35 minutes today. This was serendipitous too. Last week three different people told me my shoes needed replacing. Then Wednesday I ran with them and hurt my shins. Yesterday I bought some new shoes, and these are them. And only 49 euros.
Last week I was running 4 km in 31 minutes. It's all the shoes, I tell you.
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Son #1 told me today 'Mama, you put on weight.'
Hah. How to tell the boy that mama has pre-menstrual bloat and combined with PMS saying things like that might not be the best way to win favours?
Then he compounded the pain by saying 'Ja echt, mama, you look fatter around the middle'. Careful boy!
He turns 8 soon. We're going disco bowling, yeah babay! Mama gets to bowl too. For Amstelveen.
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Job interview on Monday. 2 days a week in Schiphol-Rijk. I could do that, right? 2 days a week and not go crazy?
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If you don't read Neil Gaiman's blog, you should. But, if you don't, you wouldn't know that there is a free download of Harlequin Valentine on Last.fm.
So now you do.
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Books bought yesterday:
India Knight's The Dirty Bits for Girls. I hesitate (and blush) to share that I read most of the books that have excerpts in this book. Notable though, in the Dirty Bits reading was Lace, which my mom caught me reading lying down by the side of her bed. Ooh la la. I was 11 and already naughty.
The New Granta Book of the American Short Story. I have a weakness for short stories. They're so cut and dried. A beginning, a middle and an end. Swift and succinct, short as a love affair, there is no time for disillusionment. My shelves are full of them.
Books I want:
Four Letter Word, New Love Letters and Francine Oomen's Gek van Liefde. Ben je gek van de liefde? Or is it all a matter of choice? Crazy not crazy crazy not crazy... Love is a conscious choice. Chemistry, ah, that's different.
A bit like this:
Book club I joined:sitting across from him in the cafe
I thought for a minute that I could see
that brief moment of truth
of how it could be
the ins and outs, the shine
then just as quickly it went again.
One in Amsterdam, on Wednesday nights. Book being read right now, Andrea Levy's Small Island.
Book club I started, linked with the Dutch Word of the Day:
First book. Boudewijn Buch's de kleine, blonde dood. Grab a copy and come join us on facebook. We start in March.
Go read the Dutch Word of the Day too. Those guys do a fantastic job of making Dutch accessible.
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I just realised I could have spun this blog post out into a whole week, but today I have so much to say. Funny how that happens sometimes.
'Oh my god, oh you think I'm in control' - Ida Maria, Oh My God
Love love loving your six words.
In fact, so impressive, am speechless.
Would love you to write more.
Keep surprising me, I like surprises.
'And on the jukebox is your, is your only song & I, I have never remembered the words.' - Martha Wainwright, When the Day is Short
I have been reading Anais Nin's Henry and June. My initial impression was undecided, I suppose. I had to remind myself that these extracts were written in diary format, that these are her thoughts, that self-absorption is the basis of a diary, not written or intended for anyone else except the diarist.
Now that I'm finished the book I have more of a sense of who she was and what she was searching for. The search for self, for actualisation, for meaning. The desire to feel and feel anything. In the last entry that was included in this book she writes:
'Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become a woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. ... I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.'I can't pretend to be able to take apart the book and analyse it for its literary impact, but I can see the advantage that Nin had of being first, being the first one to write about these things, being the first one with an openly bohemian lifestyle. Now, in 2008, if the same work were published it would be old, no longer fresh, boring.
Which brings me to my own diary. This diary. I thought it might metamorphose into something else but no, it's a record of my thoughts and actions from day to day. So it's a diary. There are some stories, some recipes, some other stuff, but it's a collection, a collecting place for everything I don't know where to put, including my thoughts.
I am almost tempted to make it private, but something stops me, I can't say what. The thrill of writing a diary lies perhaps in the surreptitious reader, the opening of the window into another life, the questions that each answered question raises in reply.
Anonymity is such a double edged sword. You think it protects you, but it's nebulous really.
Yesterday I went to read the scent of water and found a year of ordinary.
Beautiful writing about life, less ordinary.
'I''ve been looking so long at these pictures of you that i almost believe that they're real' - The Cure, Pictures of You
How adolescent of me. Don't laugh.
So, it's Saturday. Way-hey.
This week has been kind of crappy, despite the horoscope predictions of a fabulous week. Monday was good.
I spent some time working out on Monday evening and the company was fab. That just happens sometimes, you know?
Thursday was good too, it was Ms Blonde But Bright's birthday drinks. I drove with Citizen Stu to Leiden and we had a little mini-blogger meet in amongst all the real people. Thanks J!
I got lost on the A2 driving Stu back home because I was talking too much, but it was fun. Stu, let's get lost again together sometime.
In retrospect it hasn't been crappy at all. The only aspect that's been crappy is money.
The loss of it, the not having it.
Oh well.
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Saturday seems to be the day when I collect all my uncollected thoughts and put them in one place. Here's one - how odd it is that I can read enough German and French to order from various online shops? Linguistic shopping abilities - chalk up 110% for Ash. Real life German and French skills? Uh.
Here's another: Tamara-the-uber-trainer told me today that people find it difficult to step over the threshold and get themselves into a gym because once inside you are confronted with yourself.
Not only the physical shortcomings, but the mental ones too, determination and drive, fear of failure. I never thought of it that way but it's true. Every time you walk in you make a choice. I guess I'm not so bad at making choices after all.
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The online shopping I did was at amazon.de. I bought a whole heap of books. Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture, The New Rules of Lifting for Women, Tim Winton's Cloudstreet and Henry & June, Anais Nin.
Don't try and find any connection between any of the books on the list. Unless I'm bodybuilding to find rapture on Cloudstreet using Anais Nin as my guidebook?
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I trained so hard today that I thought my nose might bleed. Unrelated to that: coconut really is the best flavour of protein powder.
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The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl came! (Addressing Shauna directly) Woweeeeee babe! You are so hot! I had never gone through your whole blog before because I only started reading about a year ago but so much of what you say in the book is my story too. I could tell you all the similarities but that would be boring. Instead I'm just going to say thank you so much for sharing what you have to say! Big hugs!
(Addressing the rest of you lot again) Go and buy Shauna's book. Even if you're not trying to lose weight, not struggling with an eating disorder, even if you're a man and you think it's a girly book. She's side-splittingly funny, she has a perspective on life that is guaranteed to be different from your own, she comes from a time and place very much like mine. Oh, and I'm telling you to. So shoo! Go!
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Last Sunday evening I went with my girlfriend T to the possibly-ultra-hip&happening Panama. I say 'possibly' because these places are not usually hip once someone tells someone else that they're hip. Know what I mean?
We went to watch Xandra van Rossem, a friend of T's who I had met once before at a different concert, sing at Jazz it Up.
I was completely speechless. She is breathtaking. I can't remember what she sang now, but the atmosphere was amazing and her voice is piercingly clear, yet surprisingly warm.
The club felt so 1930s. The piano and a barstool for the singer in the centre of the room, beanbags and low stools arranged all around, tables and chairs at the outside. The fake fog swirled, the conversation flowed, the jazz types were there in their hats and suits. Couples kissing on the beanbags while Xandra sang.
It felt glamorous and grownup. I could see myself in a cocktail dress, stocking-clad legs crossed demurely at the ankle, lipsticked mouth neatly sipping from my glass while I sat across the table from my partner in crime who carefully leaned forward to light my cigarette.
To listen to Xandra you need to click this link, then choose Nederlands (the English version isn't done yet), choose music, scroll down and listen to my favourite, Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Ah.
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A photo of mine was used for Schmap! Cool beans, huh? It looks like a cute application. In the summer I plan to photograph more. You can trawl through Amsterdam's Schmap yourself to find the photo.
Other great photography that I came across this week is from Xelia. Go see. Take heed, flickr will ask you if you want to go back to the kittens. 'Tis all I'm saying. Beautiful photography. I love it.
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I rejoined the Daring Bakers. I will be daringly baking tomorrow. Anyone want some? Come over around 4. Phone first please, let me know you're coming. I wouldn't want to be surprised.
And that ends Saturday's long, languid post. Long and languid is the best kind, right?
'When we dance, angels will run and hide their wings' - Sting, When we Dance
When I was a girl I happened across Contemporary British & North American Verse, an anthology edited by Martin Booth, nestling amongst the crime and romances on my aunt's bookshelf.
In the wilds of Africa poetry isn't exactly encouraged as an outlet for expressing oneself, so I'm not sure where it came from, but there it was. Pristine and on the shelf. Left behind by someone's lover, maybe? Someone with a wider life?
Sure, we did poetry in school. Lots of Shakespeare, some Christina Rossetti, classics. Nothing contemporary. I think there was too much sex in contemporary verse for it to be allowed...
When I found this book I was surprised at the intensity of the language. I was astonished that contemporary song lyrics could be considered poetry.
I still have the book, which travelled with me through two marriages and four countries. I re-read it occasionally. I like poetry. I like it more when it's obscure. I like discovering things I think nobody knows about until I find that everyone does and I'm just late to the party.
Old favourites jump out at me.
Richard Brautigan's On the Elevator Going Down and Douglas Dunn's Young Women in Rollers. Ted Hughes' Bedtime Story and The Tractor. Brian Patten's A Blade of Grass. A Blade of Grass was the first real love poem I ever read that made sense, and it's still the poem I think of when I think of romantic love.
Of course, Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning is in there, and some Sylvia Plath, which I hurriedly skip over. There should be no Bee Boxes in my life.
Peter Redgrove's A Storm alarms me now, just as it did then.
He says:
I find some pressed rose petals in my book from my very first love affair. They've faded to a deep brown, like a blood stain, and the colour has dissipated murkily into the surrounding pages. I can't remember who gave me this rose, but I must have loved him. For I kept its petals after it died.Somebody is throttling that tree
Green hair tumbled and cracking throat,
By the way it's threshing about;
I'm glad it's no one I know, or me,
The head thrust back at the throat,His thumbs drive into her windpipe,
She cannot cry out,
Only swishing and groaning: death swells ripe.
The light is dimming but the fight goes on.
Chips strike my window. In the morning, there
Stands the tree, still, bushy and calm,
Not as I saw it, twisted heel to ear.
But fluffed up, boughs chafing slightly.
What's become of her attacker?
I'm glad he's not mine or known to me,
Flipped to the ground, heel over ear:
She preens herself, with a soft bough-purr
Was he swallowed up, lip over ear?
He's gone anyway. The path is thick in her fur.
Am I a friend, may I walk near?
Jeanette Winterson has a column on poetry critique on her website. She has reproduced some of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry. I've just added Rapture to my reading list.
Surely the rest of the collection can't be as good as this:
Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head.
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell.
--- You, Carol Ann Duffy
'Gonna use my my my imagination.' - The Pretenders, Brass in Pocket
I read too little last year. I don't really know why but nothing held my attention for very long and whatever did had to be very good to make it through the crap filters.
In fact, only a few books made it through judging by the quantities of books with bookmarks stuck in them, floating around the house.
Some of the one's that didn't make it the first time:
The Ringmaster's Daughter, Jostein Gaarder. I love the idea of this book and I want to read it so badly but. Eh.
Lolita, Nabokov. Possibly too erudite for me. Another one that I really want to read, I want to feel all that simmering passion, but no. Nabokov is not delivering the goods for me.
Mothers & Sons by Colm Toibin. I can't even tell you why I stopped because the bookmark is only three pages in.
Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert. I wanted to like this so much. Everyone had such good things to say. Meh.
The two that kicked ass?
Miranda July's, No One Belongs Here More Than You. I loved this so much. I think my favourite story in the book was 'Mon Plaisir'. My favourite bit:
'When my husband saw the new short hair, he gave me the look we give each other when one of us forgets who we are. We are not people who buy instant cocoa powder, we do not make small talk, we do not buy Hallmark cards or believe in Hallmark rituals such as Valentine's Day or weddings. In general we try to stay away from things that are MEANINGLESS, and we favour things that are MEANINGFUL. Our top three meaningful things are: Buddhism, eating right, and the internal landscape. Haircuts are in the same category as trimming the finger- and toenails, which is in the same category as mowing the lawn. We don't really believe in mowing the lawn; we do it only to avoid unnecessary engagement with the neighbours.'The other one was Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal. Look at this:
Sheba says I couldn't possibly understand what it feels like after twenty years of faithful marriage, to be kissed by someone other then your husband; to feel the pressure of a stranger's mouth on yours. "Things call asleep in a marriage," she told me once. "They have to. You have to lose that mad sexual alertness you had when you were out in the world on your own. All these years with Richard, I don't think I've ever consciously suppressed anything. I've always been so grateful to be married - so relieved that I would never have to be naked in front of a stranger again. But I'd forgotten how exhilarating it is to expose yourself ... to be a little scared. As soon as Steven kissed me, it all came back in an instant. The, you know, high of it. I was amazed at how I could have lived without that all those years."
Then there was Anna Quindlen's Rise and Shine. And Ray Kluun's Love Life, Joanna Trollope's Second Honeymoon and Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.
These were the ones that stuck with me. I guess that's not bad.
Six really good and really compelling books in one year?
What were your favourites?
'I draw a jackal-headed woman in the sand, sing of a lover's fate sealed by jealous hate' - 10,000 Maniacs, Verdi Cries
Sex Without LoveHow do they do it, the ones who make love
- Sharon Olds
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
This poem has some incredibly interesting interpretations on the internet. Do a search on it and you'll find a million right-wing born-again Christians claiming that Sharon Olds wrote this in favour of their pro-life, anti-abortion, no-sex-before-marriage, oh-my-god-how-sinful-you-are beliefs.
There is the odd voice of dissent which urges the majority to re-read and consider that perhaps Olds envied those who can have sex without love. But those voices are very few and far between.
To me she seems to be mourning for a self that won't confuse the lover with the pleasure, a self that doesn't exist.
I love the analogy to running. The solitude, even when you run with others.
When I run on the treadmill I don't see or hear anyone else. I just hear my music, the sound of my feet hitting the band and I hear my breath in my throat. Pure focus on my goal. No distraction. Perhaps she envies the 'sex without love' lovers for their lack of distraction?
The last line, 'just factors, like the partner in the bed, and not the truth, which is the single body alone in the universe against its own best time.' is very real for me, and not about sex. About life.
In the end we're all just running and trying to better our own best times.
