mardi 9 décembre 2003

'Who'd you say you write for again?' Next on my read and probably review list will be 'In the Skin of a Lion' by Michael Ondaatje (1987), which is in memory of four people and written "for Linda" and for two others... ...or 'Revelation Space' by Alastair Reynolds (2000), which has no published dedication. And these days I'm going to bed with my favourite story-teller, Ursula K. Le Guin, now that 'The Telling' (2001; at her place), a "novel of the Hainish", has come my way in paperback. Ursula is exceptional because ever since I was a young lad I've always thought each of her books was specially written for nobody but me. They've been like almost lifelong intimate conversations with a close friend who sometimes speaks on several levels at once, a feeling I don't doubt I share with hundreds of thousands of Le Guin's other readers worldwide, now including the Kid. In the Factory, I've frequently urged less experienced writers never to forget the Kansas City Milkman. This can lead to intrigued questions when I direct the remark to, say, a Nigerian in Abuja. But it's a useful way of reminding people that somebody somewhere may always be finding their story the first he's ever read on events he knew absolutely nothing about in a place he's never heard of before. And that he's not going to get past the first paragraph unless you've captured his interest and it's news. While by the third, she wants all the essential background that needs to be known. Last week, veteran journalist Barry James, who's long known how to grab attention with the very first line (IHT/BJ, some '97 examples), told me it had been a long time since he'd heard talk of the Kansas City Milkman. Better yet, Barry said that once he'd even met the fabled milkman, indeed a whole posse of them on an excursion. Just why people write is one complicated thing, but who we do it for is quite another. Nowadays when people tell me they simply write for themselves, I find it hard to believe them. At work, I can't write a story without an composite imaginary reader in mind; this journal, meanwhile, is increasingly written for she whom I can only adore (though I don't believe she reads it much) and a few other real people I often think about, with all their highly varied interests, humours and tastes. And I think I know who the Wildcat writes for most when she's writing her "personal stuff", which is becoming ever better and richer, the work of a remarkably visual imagination -- it's not for me, by the way, but that's beside the point. So I was struck during a recent visit to the blogosphere by 'The Writer Who Began With a Hyphen,' a Washington Post portrait by Teresa Wiltz of Pulitzer prize-winning "Deshi" author Jhumpa Lahiri, who says she's "never written for anyone but myself". "'I don't think it's wise for a writer to question why a book is praised or dismissed. It's just my job to write the books.' "So don't ask her if she considers herself a good writer, because she doesn't know how to answer that," Wiltz says. "It's not like she reads her work for pleasure, you know? She'd prefer to not read it at all, frankly. That's not what matters. Rather, writing is a puzzle, something to ponder and figure out, a way to toy with ideas and experiences. It's something that is never, ever easy, is always, always difficult, but she does it because that is what she most loves to do. Once it's out of her hands, though, her relationship to it is done. That's it. None of her business if her work is loved or loathed." Via, with thanks, 'Integrate: Chaos and Convergence' by Pavi Thomas in an intriguing -- and non-doctrinaire -- shared place (that Excelsis site might convince even a jaded and "scientifically atheist" Baudier that Christianity and intelligent life are not contradictions in terms). "So why do people write poetry? The reasons are as numerous as the poems themselves. Some people want to Make nice with the gods, as in the Psalms or the Bhagavad Gita. Tell the stories of their communities, as Homer did in The Odyssey. Record history, as Anna Akhmatova did in 'Requiem, 1935–1940'. Commemorate a moment of personal history, as Ben Jonson did in 'On My First Son'. Take an achingly clear snapshot of experience, as H.D. did in 'Heat'. Embody their feelings, as Theodore Roethke did in 'I Knew a Woman'. Create a state of feeling, as Stéphane Mallarmé did in 'Afternoon of a Faun'. Explore language, as John Ashbery did in 'Corky's Car Keys'." For a list like that, you have to admit to being a dummy, because the "online resource for the rest of us" doesn't settle for tackling poetry on its language and arts pages, but even offers 'The Origins of Tolkien's Middle-earth for Dummies'... At Abeleto in Edinburgh, some onetime "usability consultants" ask "what do you want" as a (web) writer. "Some write as a hobby, for a living, out of vanity, or for ten other valid reasons; but nearly all will write with a readership in mind. Writing involves creating an effect with the reader, wanted or unwanted. In order to amuse, entertain, shock or provoke people effectively, your writing style is just as important as the content of your message. Be aware that your ideas, i.e. the meaningful content of your text, will suffer if your style is inappropriate. If you are not sure of your own intentions, you do not manage to get through to your reader." All hefty emphasis is their own in a 'tutorial'. Sorry, Jhumpa Lahiri, looks like you're out on a lonely limb, prize or no prize. "So why would someone want to post their private thoughts on the Internet?" Linda Roeder asks at About.com. "Let me just give you some thoughts from what I have read on this subject so far. Sometimes a journal is kept to communicate with far away friends and family as a way of letting them know what is going on in your life. Some people feel that this is an art of expression. Some are just self-centered and think everyone wants to know all about them (although I believe this to be a small group). Some are looking for pity because their lives are not what they want them to be. Some have a real life scenario that they want to share to help others such as those with cancer or AIDS. Then there are the young people wanting to share their 'new' experiences that are not new to a lot of us but new to them all the same." But in the end, I suspect Lahiri might have the winning hand after all. When I started writing "creatively", the only reader I had in mind was me. That's precisely what the Kid and her friend Sév insist they're doing at 'The Retour .... les gens nous aimaient .... avant qu'on revienne' (Fr., "people loved us .... before we came back"). So who reads it all? Especially on the world wide web: all those billions of Google-busting pages? The answer is hinted it by one of the most self-satisfied Net-gurus of them all, Jakob Nielsen at the admirable 'useit.com.' "How Users Read on the Web They don't." So if you're still here, you deserve either a trip to 'The Attic' ("WARNING: Imagination in Use™") ... or there's always the cellar, with a real question: How do you score in the 'Dante's Inferno Hell Test'? 10:36:48 PM  link   your views? [] Of lessons in fortitude & surprises I'm assailed by advice, most well-meaning but occasionally less so, from sometimes unexpected quarters. Going down for three days with a high fever and migraine assault didn't help things, but I'm emerging again. I managed a fight neither of us wanted with the Wildcat. Her 'phone keeps cutting us off in mid-flow, making our conversations fragmented and disjointed. Given my own problem finding any cheap way of communicating with her, not for lack of trying, the bills have begun to alarm me. I don't want to find that all the savings supposedly being set aside to go somewhere hot and relaxed with her -- a dream of say, Italy, next year -- have been chewed up in communications technology. Love may well not count the cost, but when it eats into the resources for anything really desired, that's annoying. Especially when you get cut off in mid-fight. Anyway... Sunday's entry on the downside of working in today's media, the pitfalls and declining standards, has now brought half a dozen replies apart from what the ever responsive Natalie said in her comments. Most moving was a letter from a writer for a "highbrow" London daily, which triggered an exchange of e-mails. This bright and philosophical man, R. -- who prefers I don't identify him since it could go down badly with others he helps now in volunteer programmes -- sent me a long account of his nervous breakdown in the first half of the '90s, when he was working in television news, with its own considerable stresses. R's tale is one of increasing disillusionment with that broadcasting job, mounting family tensions to a point of marital friction almost beyond repair, dependence on alcohol, rows with his boss ("an awful ego, far less enlightened than your own immediate superiors seem to be"), and the view that what he was expected to tell trainee journalists in a class he gave was a "pack of lies". This culminated in almost 10 months in hospital and then a long, courageous convalescence. Last night, I suppose I was so grimly over-involved in my own summary of R.'s story that the Wildcat had me pack it in, even trashing it in a fit of pique. But still it's worth recounting. R. writes that he plans to tell the story himself: he's now embarked on a book, "with the precious support of my wife, who stuck by me even in the very worst of it". Via some -- be warned -- gruesome 'Unseen Gulf War' pictures by Peter Turnley, he introduces me and thus you to quite a discovery of an "online magazine for visual journalism": 'The Digital Journalist'. One curt e-mail writer takes the trouble to slag me off for "besmirching the profession of journalists with your silly diatribe". Had she read what I said -- admittedly it was verbose -- she'd have seen that it's a whole system I take strong issue with and those who pull tight on the purse-strings, but not most of the professionals engaged in it. My hearthief, for her part, wanted me to brighten my dark thoughts with more poetry, music, literature and "other things you enjoy", instead of "destroying yourself". The Wildcat also feels that journalism was no worse and no less open to dishonesty and impoverishment of content 40 years ago. And maybe that I'm simply stating the obvious. I admire R.'s outlook and his courageous tale of "a slow and painful 'recovery'" (his own inverted commas) and reconciliation with a media environment where he's now one of the most gifted and least arrogant of star writers. He first discovered this "open diary of yours" months ago, he says, during a web search on that very outspoken AFP journalist turned writer (in French) on 'Journalism and Misinformation', my late and admirable friend Andreas Freund (a May 23 entry on 'High time to talk of my "teachers".') Yup. That same Andreas who told me back in the mid-80s: "AFP? "Nick, you'll survive just three years in that place at most, but it's an education you need before you move on." Hmm. What would Monsieur Freund make of me now? Yesterday's latest rendez-vous with "psychosomatic shrink" Dr G. was ... surprising. The Loyal 5 ¾ know that I made it clear to her that I didn't want to be further "shrunk at length", but sought practical help beyond a set state of mind and its impact on the Condition. A holistic approach. I like Dr G. very much. Unlike other psychotherapists I've had dealings with, once past the stock interrogation she has a pragmatic outlook and a fine sense both of humour and of irony. She looks like almost anybody's favourite auntie, getting on just a little in years, with grey curly hair, dressing to combine stylishness with a casual and pleasing sloppiness round the edges. Dr G agreed to my request to work with her on an "intensive basis" (at least twice a week), but not before early in January. So she suggested that instead of pressing the career change decisions I've had in mind, I see bloghero Yang and another doctor about the necessary "palliatives" to tide me over the so-called festive season. This I'm doing, then it's back to the Factory once more on Thursday, without agonised and premature admissions of defeat after the horrors of last week. Our discussion of specific things I'd found the most distressing before my bowels fell apart again last week has no place here, but I much appreciated her original and unexpected thought as to what I might do about them till we next meet. "Etes-vous capable d'être un vrai teigne?" she inquired. ("Are you up to being a real bastard?") I was so taken aback that I asked if I'd misheard her, but her gaze was sharp, slightly amused, direct. "I'm not sure I've ever really tried," I said, "though I've often succeeded by accident." "Well, I strongly recommend you give it a go," said she. "Consider it an experiment. Like that online journal of yours." As to the Wildcat's flower, its message is one we could easily share (though not what she described as "our secret" in one of her many surprising moments). The notion that the camomile has a nigh on amphibious variant pleases me at a time when some might ask merely walking on water to figure among our lesser talents. The ©redit for this one goes to Youri and Olga (Galanter), who spotted it in Brooklyn's Botanical Garden. 5:33:04 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.