learning to read

I don't remember learning how to read. I just did. I remember reading Spot books to myself before I went to school and I remember coming home from school with my first reading book ("The big red lorry went up the hill..."). I've always been a book worm, always the one tucked away in a corner, lost in a book. I read voraciously, anything and everything, had the usual phase of finding a book I loved and then seeking out everything by the same author. I think when I went to secondary school, my first method of assessing the school library was to find out how many P G Wodehouse books they had that I hadn't already read.

I carried on reading. I didn't plan to take English Literature A-Level, but when I picked it up a month into sixth form, I discovered I'd read more over the summer than people who had planned to take it, which made me wonder why I hadn't thought of it in the first place. I loved English and the lessons kept me sane through my A-levels. They were discursive and thought-provoking in a way that Maths, Physics and Chemistry just weren't.

I read less during my Physics degree. There just wasn't time in term, but I did still read lots in the holidays. I wrote some poems then too, even got elected JCR Poet Laureate for a year.

Jump forward a few years, and I started studying with the Open University while working. At first, just for fun, but as I started to find my feet and get into the course, studying literature become something I loved doing and was good at, something I wanted to pursue more seriously.

But something changed as I studied. By my third year of OU, a sort of panic was beginning to set in whenever I had to read for study, especially text books. I'd look at a page and find myself speeding up, getting faster and faster and more panicky, wondering how much I much I was taking in. I rarely read anything that wasn't for my course, and when I did, I felt guilty about it. I dismissed the panic as pressure of time. After all, I was also working full time and studying had to get squeezed in between working and the rest of life. I'd work in short bursts, often relying on the pressure of an approaching deadline to get myself motivated to write.

When I left work to start my MA, I initially enjoyed the freedom to read. My course texts were varied and interesting, especially the 20th century ones. I tried reading Ulysses in one day (didn't make it, but got quite a good way through), read in the library, at home, in bed, at work while waiting for videos to process. It was fun. But the panic was still there, especially when I sat down to write an essay. I sailed closer and closer to the wind with my deadlines, producing things at the very last minute, and always conscious that they weren't as good as I wanted them to be.

By the time I got really ill, books just weren't working anymore. Although I did read (and love) Bleak House during a week in bed, that was probably the last time I managed to read something complex. A few weeks after that, I couldn't read, couldn't think coherently, couldn't do anything much. Somehow, over the summer, I managed to read and write enough to produce an essay on The Water Babies, a review and a dissertation proposal. I'm not entirely sure how. As my ability to concentrate came back, I read a bit - mostly detective stories, old favourites, the odd bit of fantasy fiction and not too taxing comic fiction. I'm not sure how I'd define it. Not quite chick lit. The sort of novels with tragi-comic families and adolescent heroines. Lots of Kate Atkinson. I didn't feel up to tackling anything big, say, Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which I've wanted to complete reading since I studied The Ghost Road in my OU course, or Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, which has been sat on my to-read pile since I found it second-hand, or Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell which I've been halfway through for over a year. There are lots of books I've started and failed to finish - Nights at the Circus, Lud-in-the-Mist, A Confederacy of Dunces, all of which sat by my bed for months, waiting for me to feel up to reading them again.

I still don't. There are signs of hope. I read Coraline in one go on a train journey at the beginning of January. I'm slowly working my way through Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, when I'm not feeling too sad to read it. But I haven't yet approached anything relevant to my MA, or even re-read my dissertation proposal, or properly read the marker's comments. I'm scared. Scared that I'll never re-capture my love of reading. Scared that some part of my identity is gone forever. Scared of pushing myself too hard and becoming ill again. I know I need to retrain my brain to concentrate and that I can't go straight back to tackling big serious books again, but I don't quite know where to start. I'm also not very motivated to get back to my dissertation. The topic is too close to my heart. There are too many aspects of it that are important to me, that I want to get right and say something worth saying and thought-provoking about, and yet I'm also sick of it because I've been living with those same issues for the past three years and I'd really rather do something else, that mattered less. I don't know whether to give it up; pick another dissertation topic (if I can) or just plough on through the difficulties. I feel like I could do with a reading coach. My supervisor, I suppose, might fulfill that role, but I'm scared of her. And I'm not good at asking for help.

I don't really know what to do. Pray, and live and try to do what I can. And ask God to help me conquer my fears.

splinter birds

There's a tree in the next road over that's often full of magpies and sometimes jays. I like jays. They remind me of the Splinter Birds in Rebecca's World by Terry Nation. The splinter birds are extinct at the beginning; they're an almost mythical species of birds with long beaks who can be called upon to remove splinters from fingers. It's been a while since I read Rebecca's World (Memo to home: Can someone bring it when you next see me? It better not have gone in the great book clear out.) but I remember bits of it very clearly, especially the illustrations; Rebecca with her long curly hair and long ruffled dress with pockets, the shiny Mr Glister. At a time when I was far too scared to watch Dr Who, I think I read a Dr Who novel I found in the school library because it was also written by Terry Nation. (I wonder what it was?)

I still love fantasy stories. Not everything, but well crafted novels which draw you into a parallel or surreal world. Gormenghast, The Never-Ending Story, The Box of Delights, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (though probably the former more than the latter), Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams. (I think a taste for HHGG probably helped me survive years of male-dominated physics lectures and practicals. If you share geeky humour, you can fit in by being an honorary bloke.) I briefly considered doing an MA dissertation on Neil Gaiman and Hope Mirlees' Lud-in-the-Mist but decided I didn't really know enough about either.

I'm fond (possibly too fond) of escaping into books. I didn't like 'teenage fiction' when I was younger because it was to much like real life. I wanted my books to be unreal worlds, to take me away from the life I knew. In the last few months, I've gone back to that feeling. I've been avoiding serious hard work books (i.e. anything that might be relevant to my MA) and instead reading silly ones, detective stories, fantasy, children's books. Anything to escape. I don't know if that's a good thing or not.

Footnote: While googling to find some explanatory links, I found this page which suggests Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris as a similar book. Er, how, exactly?

ooh look, a book

Anna Broadway's blog Sexless in the City makes me laugh and scratch my head and laugh a bit more, being about the trials and tribulations of love and dating as a Christian girl. (The head-scratching is caused by my lack of knowledge of American dating culture, mostly). She hasn't blogged much for ages, but we'll forgive her because she's been writing a book (which you can pre-order here from Amazon.com. Not available on Amazon.co.uk currently. Dunno if it's going to be published over here, but maybe if enough people look interested...)

(And she's running a draw for a free copy if you mention her book in a blog post.)

And there's a book soundtrack on iTunes too. (Again, iTunes.com not iTunes.co.uk). Which intrigues me. It's rather UltraWordesque.

so tired

Tiredness seems to be the story of my life at the moment. I was sleepy at the beginning of the week, by Tuesday, sleepy had become ill. I spent Wednesday and Thursday mostly curled up inside reading Bleak House (which I can thoroughly recommend, ill or not). Today I'm a bit better, back in work, but rapidly running out of energy. I think I may be back on the settee with Esther Summerson this afternoon. So much for all the essay writing I was planning on doing. Maybe next week?

the trouble with Austen

I do love a good costume drama romance. The current BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility being a case in point. I wonder though, whether they're quite good for one. However tangled and supense-filled the romantic upsets and twists and turns, there's always a happy ending, the heroine always finds her man, although she usually learns some important lessons on the way. Do they paint a picture that's too neat, too hopeful, too much certainty of finding love and marriage? Perhaps. But the process of learning is important too. Jane Austen's heroines don't get their husbands on a plate, they must learn and change first, whether that means leaving behind sily notions of gothic romance or wrong first impressions. It's the humanity of the process that makes the novels more than silly romances and that makes them last, as well as Austen's wit and narrative voice. Perhaps they're not a bad impression of finding love after all. I think it's just the apparent inevitabilty of the process that worries me. Hmm.

locked in the library

Not literally, but I've been here all day, working on the essay that's due in on Monday. I've made pretty good progress today. Nearly at 4000 words, another push tomorrow and it should be done, with a day in hand to tidy it up. At least that's the plan.

I now know more about Bartholomew Fair, William Poel and the Elizabethan stage company and Renaissance lath and plaster than I did this morning. And I have a slightly sore feeling throat which I hope is just the result of too much dry air conditioned air and not the start of something nasty.

My brain is quite tired. Home soon to wind down with knitting or a (non-work) book or just sleep.

wow!

I was trying to think of an apposite quotation, but my brain's too fuzzy. I've just got back from the English department trip to Stratford-upon-Avon after a fantastic couple of days watching plays and talking about them and it was such fun! I feel like I've been living in plays for the last couple of days and it's a real wrench to have to leave the world of kings and civil war and struggle and come home to real life.

We saw part of the cycle of history plays the RSC are doing at the moment: Richard II on Wednesday, and the two parts of Henry IV yesterday. It was amazing, seeing them in order, within a few hours of each other and seeing the big story and the smaller stories unfold in front of our eyes. I'd have loved to do as some others are doing and stay tonight for Henry V. Having seen the same actor (Geoffrey Streatfeild, brilliant) playing Hal and developing across yesterday's plays, it would be amazing to then see him play Henry today. We had a Q&A session with him this morning, really interesting to get an inside perspective on the role of Hal/Henry. But I had to come back and I'm probably a little too tired to appreciate another play tonight. A bunch of us are plotting to go and see it when the Histories come to London next year.

I'll try a more considered post when I'm more awake, but right now I'm just in awe of the plays and the performances and the feeling of being caught up in the sweep of history.

friday once again

Comes round every week, apparently.

Term ends today, well sort of. I had my last seminar of this calendar year yesterday, the next one's not until almost the end of January. Before then, quite a long while before then, I need to have written and handed in two 5000 word essays. It's been a while since I've written anything that long. Essay one might be fun, essay two I'm less sure about. Neither has been started yet, both will involve a lot more reading and thinking and note-making before the writing can begin. I forsee some last minute late night writing in early January. I'll try to minimise it, but there's only so much writing you can do over Christmas whilst visting family and friends.

Today I made some chocolate and ginger truffles (for Sunday morning's Christmas service. I allowed myself to eat one, but no more), bought things to wear for singing in the choir for Sunday evening's carol service, did some paid work, cooked and ate sort-of-Thai curry, finished the book I was reading and finished the cardigan I've been knitting for yonks.

Time for bed, I think.

I do love Nightwaves

Ooh, hooray for Anne Atkins. She's talking sense about the Bible in a discussion on Nightwaves with a man who's written a book about reclaiming the Bible from the political right for the left. And not in a good way since he wants to pick and chose the bits he likes (which he quite rightly points out is exactly what those on the right do) and identify with the rebels rather than the 'establishment' figures he who sees as having written it. And Anne is pointing out that you just can't do that, the Bible is a whole and to make sense of it, you have to submit to its authority.

Go and listen on the Nightwaves page, it'll be there for the next week. The bit about the Bible is about 30 minutes in, after the bit about the film abut Mark Chapman.

head in the cluds, nose in a book

Both are true, for once. I'm reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. And I'm loving it. I've got to finish it in time to prepare a presentation for Monday evening, but I don't think that'll be a problem. The finishing it bit, at least.

It's an intriguing book, made up of 6 nested narratives. I'm only 3 in, and beginning to see connections, but I'm sure there's more to come.

I was amused by a reference to someone "breastfeeding a hangover". Now I'm fairly sure that's some lazy editor deciding to do and find and replace with a US English to British English lexicon (i.e. nursing = breastfeeding). But there's an important plot point in the same section that turns on the boot of a VW Beetle not locking properly (mine never did) and it's definitely referred to as "the hood" or "the trunk". Hmm. It's the sort of tricksy novel in which you're never quite sure whether mistakes are deliberate or not. Or perhaps I'm too suspicious minded?

stars of page and screen

Last week I read and adored Stardust by Neil Gaiman. Yesterday I watched and liked, but didn't love, the film of Stardust. It's easy to moan about how films never get books right and how they left all your favourite bits out and he just doesn't look like that. Films and books are different animals and there's no point expecting what you see on screen to be like the pictures in your head. Rather, I want to muse on the differences between the two Stardusts and the reasons for them.

Inevitably there are compressions of time. The book Tristran takes a year to wander Faerie and get back for the fair, where the film's Tristan has a week in which to bring back Victoria's birthday present. Characters and events are lost and the story becomes simplified to its essential details. We'll leave aside the silly camp pirates and the unnecessary Ricky Gervais cameo (the pirates were OK. There's a wonderful sword fight set to Offenbach's Can Can which is deliciously silly. Ricky Gervais I just don't like.)

One thing I did find interesting was that the film managed to be both less menacing and less innocent than the book. In Gaiman's Faerie, no-one is safe. People die, sometimes bloodily and it's a shock when they do. This creates a real tension and fear for the central characters. The usual fairytale guarantees that the good will end happily and the bad unhappily seem to be in doubt all the way through. The film puts back those conventions and there's no shock or real fear that the wrong person might die. Yet, there's a sort of innocence about the central pair of characters in the book that gets completely lost in the film. From the off, they're confidently exchanging insults and arguing and there's none of Tristran's tender standoffishness that I liked in the book. Inevitably, when they realise their love for one another, they fall into bed in a way which just wouldn't occur to their page-bound counterparts. Not that Gaiman's book is coy about sex, quite the opposite, but most of the earthier bits get cut out completely, which means in one case the death of one of the would-be Lords of Stormhold happens via a sub-Princess Bride scene of poisoned and switched goblets, rather than to the accompaniment of a barmaid's willing seduction.

The film's denouement is of course dramatic and full of explosions and swords and broken glass. The book's clever, but less dramatic end just wouldn't work for Hollywood, which is fair enough. And the good end happily and the bad, unhappily and all is well forever after, as you would expect. Still, on the whole, I think I prefer books to films of books, however good the latter are. There's always the shadow of 'The Book' hanging over a film of a book, which just isn't there with an original film. Unless the book is dreadful, in which case the film can only improve on it. Can you think of any examples where that is the case?

Nothing but curious pleasures

A certain BFC (aka big fat/fine cat aka my uncle Jon) asked about how I found Pericles etc, so here's the promised post.

I did finish reading Pericles. It's a bit like The Winter's Tale with added shipwrecks and no bears. I think I read it a little too fast to appreciate it properly. I'd like to see it performed. The structure's interesting - narration from Gower and dumbshows to show us what's going on. Most of the really dramatic action seems to take place in the dumbshows, except for the storm at sea in which Marina is born.

The main point of looking at Pericles for the seminar was the choices made in editing and we had a go at editing a bit of the beginning of 2.1, which was trickier than I thought, if you're going to worry about the placement of every jot and tittle as well as try to guess whether the apparent mistakes are due to misreadings, mishearings, uncertain spelling, archaic words or something else. I think my attitude would probably be to change as little as possible and work out the details in performance, repunctuating or substituting words as necessary to make sense of it. The way different editors differ over the placement of commas or the interpretation of ellisions sometimes seems a little far away from the text's first incarnation as a performance. But then, punctuation can make a huge difference to meaning, so it's not unimportant.

Yes, I did read all of Titus Andronicus, not just the fly-killing scene. It's a pretty gory piece of work. Again, I feel I need to see a production or two to appreciate it properly. I can't help wondering how things like "Enter the Empress' sons with LAVINIA, her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and ravished" would be staged. The fly-killing scene (3.2) is a later addition to the play. I saw it as a private family scene, in contrast to the more public scenes that surround it. For some reason it my head it's like a scene from a film, very claustrophic and dark, with the Andronici gathered together, eating, because they need sustenance, comforting each other and gathering strength for their revenge. The camera plans along the table and flicks from face to face as they react to Titus's pouring out of his heart and attempted comfortings of Lavinia. The killing of the fly is like a summary of the entire play - "How if that fly had a father and a mother?" - that's the problem with killing people: their families generally want revenge and in this play that pits a father, Titus, and a mother, Tamora, against one another for revenge for their respective offspring. But of course "it was a black ill-favoured fly/ Like to the empress's Moor" so it had to die. There's the personal element of revenge and the tricky character of Aaron the Moor (also a father, in his own violent way). It's all wrapped up in those few lines. Hmm, perhaps I have more to say about Titus Andronicus than I thought?

And Cymbeline. I love Cymbeline! I really must read it. (And Jon, you MUST let me read your thesis). Yes, there were some bits that cut in the last production we saw that were included this time, notably the doctor with his suddenly remembered details, the comic jailers, Posthumous' family and Jupiter appearing from the heavens (actually appearing swathed in a giant silk parachute, rising out of the box which was the main consituent of the set. People found their costumes in it, props were taken out of and put into it, Iachimo hid in it, obviously. Actually I think it disappeared for a bit in Wales, which missed a few tricks, it could have been the cave, or the grave, or a boat, or cover for the battling armies.) Some other bits got missed out. Imogen's speech to the headless body of her (supposed) husband was even more truncated. It was a fun production, played for (even more) laughs than the Barbican production, with a wonderfully devious and scheming Queen. Although she did seem to go off her head rather too rapidly. Cloten began almost every one of his scenes by hurling his doublet to the ground and lived up to his name (definitely Clot-en).

On to this week. I'm currently supposed to be reading Dr Faustus, Mankind, extracts from Mediaeval morality plays and some scenes from Henry VI 3, King John and Macbeth. And it's pouring with rain and nothing could be nicer than curling up with some books and Radio 3.

ETA: I think part of the problem with the film of As You Like It were all the bits that got cut in the final scene, particularly Hymen (fair enough, no-one knows who Hymen is today anyway and what would she be doing in 19th Centuary Japan?), with some lines reassigned to Rosalind. Unfortunately they cut most of the 'If I were...would you then.." lines that explain how each character then reacts to the revelation of Ganymede's identity as Rosaline, so to have everyone suddenly understanding when she appeared dressed as herself again made very little sense. I don't think As You Like It makes that much sense to start with, but it's a comedy and believing in the character's rather unlikely deceptions is part of the fun.

shakespeare week

That's what it feels like right now. Yesterday I saw As You Like it* tonight I'm going to see Cymbeline. I'm halfway through reading Romeo and Juliet, I've got to finish that and Pericles by Thuirsday evening and have something coherent to say about the fly-killing scene in Titus Andronicus. And I've been reading Making Shakespeare by Tiffany Stern.

I am happy! :-)

* It was OK, the lead actors are good, particularly Bryce Dallas Howard as Rosalind, but somehow it doesn't sparkle as it should and it doesn't quite make sense to me, at a psychological level, particularly at the end when all the couples are matched up. I'm not sure whether that's the play's fault or the way the film chops it around. I'll have to read it again.

today I am mostly...

...reading Ulysses. Trying to see how much of it I can get read in one day.

So far today, I've also broken a glass and sent shards of glass all over the kitchen, re-wired the vacuum cleaner plug so that I could clean it up, washed everything on the kitchen worktop that got covered in little bits of glass, checked my emails, sent party invites on Facebook, registered for a conference and written a blog post to tell the whole world what I've done.

So not a lot of reading then.

science in art

I'm just finished reading The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas. It's a fun read, concerning the investigations of PhD student Ariel into a mysterious novel, reputed to be cursed, also called The End of Mr. Y by an odd Victorian scientist called Thomas Lumas. The first few chapters felt like Thomas had stolen my ideas of what I wanted to do with my life and given them to her character. Ariel goes to a lecture by Prof. Burlem on Lumas, and after it, he offers her a PhD project based in a Literature department looking at the history of thought experiments. (If only...) As the novel begins, Burlem has disappeared, a building at the university has collapsed (apparently to no-one's great suprise) and on her way home, Ariel finds a copy of Lumas' cursed novel in a box of books in a second hand shop, which she quickly buys, before the shop assistant can realise its value. Chapters from Lumas' novel alternate with Ariel's first person narrative of her, rather dark and gloomy, life. (I was amused to notice that Ariel, like the heroine of Thomas' previous novel PopCo and Thomas herself, eats a vegan diet. This is mostly irrelevent to the plot apart from the fact that as an impoverished PhD student, Ariel can afford to buy very little food, although I'm sure a dietician would have something to say about the perils of surviving on potatoes, dark chocolate, black coffee and slivovitz.)

The collapsed building is a means for introducing to Ariel's department office a evolutionary biologist and a theologian. Here things start to clunk a little. An impromptu dinner party is the scene for a discussion of origins and truth. The themes are relevant, but I don't think they're handled very well. If you want to write a novel which explores theoretical physics, philosophy and multiple dimensions, then you're going to need to explain them somehow, but how exactly is tricky. Giving differing philosophical positions to different characters is usually how it works (David Lodge does it rather well) but somehow it didn't quite work for me. The theologian character, Adam, becomes more important by the end of the novel, but the biologist seems to be there only to be to impart some information about science and then fades into the background.

It's a highly fantastical novel and by the end we've left reality far behind. I did like the unravelling of Ariel as a character. At the beginning, I wasn't sure I liked her. By the end, she had become rounded out and understandable, as facts and snippets of her past life were revealed. It's an odd mixture of quantum theory, Baudrillard, time travel, Heidegger and a whole string of literary theorists and philosophers, predictable in some aspects (start with quantum indeterminacy and a world constructed from langauge and see where you end up) but ends up in some unexpected places. The effect is a little confused, as if too many ideas got thrown into the the mix. It reminded me of PopCo by the same author and of Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

I'm vaguely thinking about dissertation ideas at the moment and thinking about doing something about how scientific ideas get used in literature. I'm not sure if this novel is typical of the sort of thing I want to investigate. More data needed, I think.