From Banal Fiction To Movie Masterpiece

A few weeks ago, I was dragging my heels in the local library. I stumbled upon the French books and decided to pick something new, or at least new to me. Pity that the selection was so tiny and so obvious (Le Rouge et Le Noir for God's sake, who has studied French literature and hasn't read that one?!) that I had to resort to Le Journal de Bridget Jones or Bridget Jones's Diary. I know, you'll wonder where I have been for the past, oh I don't know, twelve, maybe thirteen years? I know that Fielding's novel is the original chick lit but I cannot say that even its standing as supreme crap-a-rola for girls ever enticed me past the back cover.



In French though, it seemed different. Indeed it seemed almost impossible that a male-obsessed, occasionally silly little fatty could even exist by virtue of tongue-relations in the land of the stick-thin and of le petit macaron. Of course France isn't all super-stylish and skinny my friends, I've lived there, but the myth persists, undeterred by statistics that trumpet les français too are getting fatter by the minute. Yes, but... you know statistics... two people, four slices of cake, one person eats three slices, one person eats one, statistics tell us that they both had two each. Moral of the story: proceed with caution when in France, chances are everyone you meet will still be thinner than you and everyone you know from home, minus twenty pounds.

But I digress because Le Journal de Bridget Jones may be in French but the story is still très anglaise. In truth though, I have nothing piercing to say about Bridget Jones, in this or in any other language. Of course the effervescent musicality of French means that banal pieces of information très obvious to any Briton sound like philosophical musings delivered by a witty, upper-class professor, see this bit right here:

Bref, tout le monde célèbre cet été exquis alors que je me morfonds. C'est peat-être la faute de notre tradition climatique. Nous n'avons pas la mentalité qu'il faut pour jouir du soleir and du ciel sans nuages qui sont pour nous des accidents rarissimes. Devant ce phénomène traumatique, nous paniquons: un instinct puissant nous dicte de fuir le bureau en courant, de nous déshabiller le plus possible and de nous coucher, a bout be souffle, dans l'escalier de secour.

The rest is a mix of slight vulgarity and same old same chick idiocy. Upon completion I was afflicted by a strong urge to watch the movie (and its sequel too, in one sitting). I realised then that, for all of the flack Hugh Grant (l'idiot anglais) and Colin Firth (he who only ever plays Colin Firth) normally get, the film-makers have taken a banal, average novel and have transformed it into a comical masterpiece I could never tire of watching. And I know that in the early days Bridget aficionados reeled at the casting of a then insignificant blondie as their fiesty (and brunette) heroine but the truth is, Renée Zellweger gives us a Bridget that is at once vulnerable, tender, intelligent, eventually self-assured, very funny and not at all vapid nor banal. In its very charming denouement Bridget Jones's Diary isn't chick lit par excellence any longer; it's a Hollywood miracle.

All Systems Go

It has been one of those weeks. You start on Monday morning and five minutes later it is 8 pm on Friday evening. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, especially after such a draught in more ways than one, but I don't like it when time flies by so quickly that I don't know what day it is. I don't like it because this week I didn't manage to track anything at all of what I was thinking or doing not just on here but on the red Moleskine that only a handful of weeks back was teasing me, full of promises, opportunities, dreams and as-yet-un-thought ideas.

I flicked through it early and its latest pages are immaculate and very nearly still stuck together, as if I hadn't lived the days at all, but still functioned in expectation. I may have to up the ante next week and write deep into the night if need be, because I do not like this gap, not one bit. Meanwhile, work at the poet's has been steaming ahead. I returned home with an armful (make that two, actually) of poems to transcribe, a file to finish and a database to create. I am not quite done yet and there is the distinct possibility that part of Saturday will be dedicated to this, even though good, cold weather beckons from the Met office's page and a steaming hot Starbee with Rich, which I rarely have the opportunity to share, seems like an attractive enough proposition.

It's always a time of assessment and looking back January, isn't it, but the tax return has nothing to do with it (well, not in my case. I suppose that a payroll/accounting husband does come in handy once a year). It is a time of assessment because the exhilaration of a new year (and new diary) has long worn off and because life isn't half as dull and boring once we are comfortable into our everyday again. I always return to the mundane in January with a sense of sinking dread; two weeks into it and I think that, all in all, life ain't that bad; four weeks into it and I've forgotten to think about it.

This week I've been promoted to the role of co-editor of the selection of poems I've been working on. I was flabbergasted when my guy told me; in fact, I agonised over having given him the completely wrong impression for quite some time. I should have leapt out of my chair, hugged and kissed him, while I just stayed there and nodded in silence, looking less than impressed, I am sure. I rectified it all via email today, when I wrote that 'I shall be delighted to co-edit this book with you and thank you for this exciting opportunity'. It read a bit like a press release, not my style at all, but sometimes, when so many things whirr away in your head and you are working on ten different projects, including cutting out your own inner critic, only a press release will do.

Good Luck To You

I am installed at the poet's and burrowing away at the archive. I've got my own, warm quarters, the gallery overlooks an exceedingly charming garden decorated with antlers, I heard foxes and owls at night, and the gentle fog raising from Sherwood Forest is the stuff of winter dreams. I must confess secretly to expect Robin Hood to burst into the study, handing me a wad of cash for my literary troubles and wishing me well with the rest of my life.

As I was leafing through mags, journals, collections, anthologies and cuttings, I came across Bogg, a poetry magazine apparently still in existence, at least according to a certain poetry website. I have been skim-reading an awful lot of info over the past two days, but one line in particular has stuck to memory, this one:

As always, editing is a subjective affair, and we print what takes our fancy.

Think I made that pearl of wisdom up? I've got photographic evidence, look closely:



I re-read it a few times, of course, just to make sure it really had been printed. The initial surprise at such degree of honesty was soon replaced with gratitude. Ah, you see? Someone who has the guts to tell writers that they operate within a subjective business and that tough shit if they don't like it! If only all editors were like this, if only they did not come up with a rack of statistical data and a far-fetched report on how your writing could be improved but in fact just said, I don't like it and that's why I won't publish it! The sooner you realise this is the way it works, the better it is dear writer. And, as ever, good luck to you, for you are going to need it.

Confessions Of A Semi-Successful Author

I, like Foucault, have always thought knowledge to be power therefore I don't want to hear whinings about this one. Take a look at what this semi-successful author has to say about publishing and keep on writing nonetheless. We, like The Watchmen, do it because we are compelled. There is just no other rational explanation out there. There cannot be.

The Starbucks Guy

I do not recall when I first noticed him, except I do remember why. He was sitting opposite me, hunched on a book and a notepad, drinking an espresso and toying with a tall latte to-go. What struck me, of course, was neither the espresso, nor the latte, but the intent look with which he was reading and taking notes. In fact, was he taking notes? I couldn’t tell. Perhaps he was getting inspiration from that book or perhaps he was doing what I do, writing quotations so that he could get back to them later. Maybe he was reading the book but writing about something else entirely. Perhaps it was just a to-do list or, worse, a supermarket one and I am just romanticising it all.



But then I resolved it couldn’t be just a list because this guy is coming to Starbee almost daily to write lists while reading a different book each time. I know it’s none of my business but you must understand that when I see someone who gives me an inkling that he could be even vaguely just like me, my antennas start twitching. Who is he? What does he do? What does he like to read? What has he got to write all the time? I am interested. No, I am not interested, I am dying to know.

Notably, I caught his eye too. It could be all down to my staring, of course. As surreptitious as I may think my gaze to be, in truth it poses itself on him and tends to stay there and then moves from book to notepad to espresso to him back to book back to him and so on and so forth. It is thus that our eyes have met on more than a couple of occasions. There I am, thinking that he may be a stifled creative and there he is, probably wondering why the fuck is that woman staring and why is she in here every day, hasn’t she got a job?

Last week I resolved to talk to him. In fact, I even asked for advice from Rick who, as any other straight male out there, just isn’t very good at advice. ‘Talk to him’ was the suggestion, as he obviously doesn’t understand the ins-and-outs of male/female dynamics. I have often stricken passing conversations with women at Starbucks.

Only last week I gushed over somebody’s ‘fab teal coat’ which I squealed in her direction and sure enough I was informed that it was a great buy, and three years old to boot and a pure cashmere one at that and doesn’t it still look great? Doesn’t it just, it was lovely. But now imagine that there is this man sitting next to me, someone I see often for he comes to Starbee for his lunch, often accompanied by an older colleague. Yes, imagine this guy sitting next to me, reading the news on his phone like he was doing today and me edging over to quip: ‘I love your pinstriped suit’. Pwhoooar. Are you smiling at this point? Maybe even laughing? Well, MY POINT EXACTLY. You just don’t strike a convo with members of the opposite sex if you’re a woman. Period.

What am I supposed to do with my guy? Sidle over and whisper: ‘I was just wondering what you’ve been writing for the past four months?’. Now that’s a possibility, even though I concede that I may scare him off and he may never return to Starbee at lunchtime which would then suit everyone involved. But I just don’t think this would be the case because something of note happened last week, when I left Starbee and him in it, went to Waterstone’s for a mindless browse and crossed paths with him as I was leaving. At that point he smiled at me, in that I-am-not-sure-whether-you-noticed-but-I-also-always-see-you-in-Starbucks-and-I-am-not-sure-whether-I-should-have-smiled-at-all-because-I-don’t-really-know-you way.

I left Waterstone’s grinning to myself. This guy also wants to talk to me. So it was that on Monday I plonked myself there early in the morning to work. By the time he arrived, some bastards were sat in the table next to mine and he couldn’t sit anywhere. Waving at him with a grin and pointing at the free chair at my table seemed a little forward considering that we don’t even know each other’s names. Heck, I’ve never even heard his voice. So he left with his to-go and that was that. Yesterday I skipped and today he skipped. And that’s that about The Starbucks Guy for now.

I am still kicking myself over that one occasion weeks ago when we were sitting next to each other and he was reading and writing... but I was so immersed in the crap I was editing that by the time I realised it was him, he was packing his stuff and going. Well, whatever it takes, I am gonna have to do as Rick says and just talk to him. Watch this space.

1348

You know how numerology associates subliminal meanings to numbers? The number 3, 7 and 23 spring to my mind, but I am sure that those experts can come up with earth-shattering revelations about every single number out there. As far as I am concerned, my magic number is 1348. It all started months back, when I was trying to build a PhD-writing routine. How do I snort even now! To think that, not so very long ago, I still thought that PhD and routine could seamlessly come together beggars the proverbial belief.

This is the work of hindsight though; then, I really did think it was possible and so it happened that for a week or so, I ended up sorting out my life in the mornings in order to sit down at the desk, free as a bird, in the afternoon. The time was always 13:48 according to the Mac. Even today, which I have spent holed up with a dog and a brush, then with a mop and a bucket, then with an iron and a board, and then with a cheese toastie and a cup of tea, I sat down at 13:48 exactly, fingers poised on the keyboard as my eyes darted to the top right corner where they were met by the magic number.

I must have developed a biological writing clock that goes off at 13:48 every day, as I can quite safely report that writing rarely crosses my mind in the mornings. I am one of those people who hankers after an early spell at the keyboard and a daily finish at midday sharp while, in reality, I am saddled with an ability to come up with something coherent only between 2 pm and 5 pm. This span is always interspersed with the need for a coffee, a tea, a biscuit, a cheese-and-Marmite toastie, an online browse, a pat to a dog, a phone call, a row of knitting, a trip to the toilet, an urge to do some yoga, one to re-arrange the kitchen cupboards, one to clean the bathroom, one to arrange my knickers by type, and another one to sort all the VOGUEs in month-year order every single time. In fact, it’s a bit of a miracle that I get any writing done at all.

But then I have found that the magic number gets me into gear, if only for a minute spell, and we all know that some writing is better than no writing at all. Late yesterday afternoon the urge to make some chocolate rice crispies descended upon me like a pack of ravenous wolves and I had to give in. As I always do. I am very, very well-practised to giving in.


200g dark chocolate
50g rice crispies
50g butter
2 tsps Golden Syrup

Melt the butter, the chocolate and the Golden Syrup together in a double-boiler if, like me, you’ve yet to enter modern times and still haven’t got a microwave.

Remove from heat and fold in the rice crispies. Drop a tablespoon of this mix in paper cups and place in the fridge to chill.

The upshot of these is that they are terribly, terribly tasty and can be whipped up in fifteen minutes flat. In fact, I made mine right in the middle of writing. Works every time.

How To Make A Journal Of Your Life

At some point last year I came across Danny Gregory, the author of one of my favourite books, The Creative License. Via Danny, I then found another great guy, Dan Price, author of the modern classic, How To Make A Journal of Your Life, a little book first published in 1999 and still riding high among stifled creative types.


Go to Amazon and click to look inside.

Here Dan talks of walking the path, finding the way, wondering about things and finding one's bliss. I cannot quite tell you what it is that makes me feel so strongly about this book in the way I can with Danny Gregory's. The Creative License is all about allowing yourself to be creative. How To Make A Journal is a bit about that, but is also very much about how to proceed and how to have fun, if indeed you have forgotten what fun is. And, let me tell you, if you are reading this book or even considering buying it, it is because, deep down, you know that you've lost your way.

The back cover reads:

Has your intuition been telling you to get an empty journal and begin filling it with all those interesting events in your life? Well time is racing by. All those neat things that happened just last week have quickly become the past...

I read these few lines the other day, as I was rummaging through my bag (also known as the Bottomless Pit) and the scattered pages of the book came out in pieces, as they often do when I am searching for something else entirely. They rang true to me then as I had been thinking about updating my diary for some time (this diary, this one you're reading, yes, this is my diary). I was working flat-out on the editing of a book, the formatting of some plays and then some and no matter the good intentions, I always ended up shattered and brain-fried at night, unable to sit down for an extra ten minutes just to record: 'And today I did this'.

And do you know why I am telling you about this now? Because Dan is right as right can be: time is racing by, all those nice things that happened to me since last Saturday have already become the past. And I have forgotten about them already. What did I do on Monday? Yes, sure, I worked on the plays but... did I work at home or at Starbee? What was the weather like? What did I eat? Well, exactly, I don't remember and the older I get, the more urgent the need to record everything I do makes itself felt. You may think that only interesting people keep journals (define 'interesting person' please) and that you are not an interesting person (to you maybe, not to me) and that you haven't got the time (oh you so bloody have) and that what is the point anyway (why are you reading then?). Just try removing the set of blinkers from your eyes and try and see the world again as you used to when you were little. Everyone could use and enjoy pencils and crayons and stickers then. You still can.

I shall leave you with a little extract from Dan's book and Dan, if you are reading this from Hawaii... thank you. To the rest of you: time is racing by... go start a journal!

You see, your mind will be saying obnoxious things like this:

1- What makes you think you have anything worthwhile to say?
2- There's nothing special about your old humdrum life that warrants documentation.
3- Who said you were a writer anyway? Don't embarrass yourself.

Well, well, that's all really interesting, Mr Brain. Fortunately we have decided to send you off on sabbatical for a while and will instead be using our hearts to fill these pages. Heh. Heh.

In hearing this news your heart may begin to beat wildly. It will greatly appreciate you considering it worthy. Goose bumps may appear up and down your spine. And given this new task, the heart says things like this:

1- My thoughts, deeds, and doings are who I am trying to be, and each one is a gift that does warrant recording.
2- If I grow tired of self-examination, all I need do is lift my eyes and behold the beauty of our glorious world.
3- Writing down my thoughts will be the easiest thing in the world to do because I'll be expressing my own innermost feelings, and only I know what those are.

So go ahead and scribble. At first you may dislike your seemingly pretentious babbling. But, hey, great novels were not written overnight. Try to do some writing and remember to listen only to your hear, not your head. Then have a cookie.

Ignoring Everybody

Today I found another piece of inspirational writing, although this one is hilarious too. I am reading Hugh MacLeod's very excellent Ignore Everybody, a little book about the creative process. Part of it is on Hugh's own website, and I urge you to go and take a gander, but I would like to reproduce a snippet right here, so that you don't have to scroll all the way when you're there. This is one of the truest oblique descriptions of corporate life I've ever had the pleasure to come across. Thank you Hugh; you're, once again, spot-on.

Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with com­panies that champion creativity. Nor can you bully a subordinate into becoming a genius.

Since the modern, scientifically-conceived corporation was invented in the early half of the Twentieth Century, creativity has been sacrificed in favor of forwarding the interests of the “Team Player”.

Fair enough. There was more money in doing it that way; that’s why they did it.

There’s only one problem. Team Players are not very good at creating value on their own. They are not autonomous; they need a team in order to exist.

So now corporations are awash with non-autonomous thinkers.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

And so on.

Creating an economically viable entity where lack of original thought is handsomely rewar­ded creates a rich, fertile environment for parasites to breed. And that’s exactly what’s been happening. So now we have millions upon millions of human tapeworms thriving in the Western World, making love to their Powerpoint presentations, feasting on the creati­vity of others.

What happens to an ecology, when the parasite level reaches critical mass?

The ecology dies.

If you’re creative, if you can think independently, if you can articulate passion, if you can override the fear of being wrong, then your company needs you now more than it ever did. And now your company can no longer afford to pretend that isn’t the case.

So dust off your horn and start tooting it. Exactly.

However if you’re not paricularly creative, then you’re in real trouble. And there’s no buzz word or “new paradigm” that can help you. They may not have mentioned this in business school, but… people like watching dinosaurs die.

The Pursuit Of Being Well-Rounded

I don't often use my diary as a publicity vehicle for others' writings. Yet, when I do, I know it is because these writings are going straight into my scrapbook under the Things Worth Re-Reading heading. I have done it in the past with Twyla Tharp, Danny Gregory and others and today I am doing it with Danielle LaPorte, whom I have been following since her Style Statement days and whom I think is one of the most inspirational female entrepreneurs around. So go and read Danielle's excellent piece on being well-rounded. I nodded in appreciation and chuckled in recognition. I mean... who wouldn't?

Pondering

Today has been One Of Those Days. You start off all vibrant and on top of things, ticking items off the list, humming to yourself that the best way is the focused way and then... And then something as insignificant as £ 1.64 places itself between you and your feeling, if not happy, at least serene and everything changes. £ 1.64 is the amount of money in my bank account today. It wouldn’t be too bad if I knew that a nice, fat salary (or even an ugly, thin one) would materialise itself on Friday but you know what my situation is like, I now get paid by project, and not that much at that, and so I live on the proverbial shoestring. Why am I telling you this? Am I fishing for empathy? No. Actually, this is a post about editing, not about the state of my bank account.



Like so: the first book I proof-read was dire. And I mean FUCKING DIRE. In fact, I did not proof-read it, I edited it. No problem with that, right? Absolutely no problem, as I know what I am doing. However, a few days after I sent it forth to prosper, I started thinking about the general editor of this book, someone I do not know personally but whom I know is a full-time academic and who, crucially my friends, had already edited the book. Did he really? Why could I possibly have found stuff such as I might have caught the figure of a clown when I jerked off my mental recapitulations in it then?

Surely, an editor would have at least flagged that abomination as a bit of an odd sentence, right? I am asking you now: what do you think it means? Let me say that again: I might have caught the figure of a clown when I jerked off my mental recapitulations. Because I don’t know what it means. I couldn’t even figure it out by the convoluted context either (and I spare you the context, for the rest of the page is itself stomach-churning). It makes no sense. Yet the general editor of that stuff thought it was ok. I’ll tell you more, he also thinks that regrettable and regretful are interchangeable. He doesn’t know the difference between incidence and incident. He scatters commas over the page as pigeons shit over everything that moves and doesn’t move. But he is a lecturer in English, let’s be clear on this one, and a general editor of the stuff I had to edit with a pick and an axe.

While I was chipping away at these 214 pages, I did not think much of it. Sure, I was shaking my head in disbelief as I had never known a ‘writer’ capable to use four different tenses within a two-and-a-half line sentence, but even less likely did I think an editor capable to read that sentence, nod in approval and move on. It’s shocking and even more shocking (and pernicious, as an erudite friend of mine says) is knowing that this person is a lecturer in English. Oh my God, Jesus, Mary and all the saints.

I told you already that I know of lecturers that consistently (and that’s key my friends, consistently, for it indicates ingrained belief) mix up palette with palate with pallet. I think that only an idiot could do so but I also wouldn’t be likely to rant about it if that person were a plumber or a builder or a footballer. When it’s a senior lecturer in English that makes the mistake over and over and over and over and over... well, I lose the will to live. The same senior lecturer also uses it’s and its interchangeably. Others I’ve had the misfortune to come across do not know the difference between a semi-colon and a colon or between use and usage or license and licence.

Some say that native speakers are usually sloppy, but this is an excuse that holds about as much water as 'Hitler hated the Jews because they killed Jesus'. If native speakers were always sloppy, then a native speaker that knows grammar and uses it well would be a freak occurrance. Luckily, this isn't the case, as there are as many competent native speakers as there are incompetent ones.

I, in any case, and allow me to blow my own trumpet for a second here, can recognise conceits, hyperbatons, hyperboles, paratactic vs. hypotactic constructions; fables, fabliaux, fabula, fabulation, fancy and fantasy (and there I’ve just given you some alliterative examples too). But all of this is normal in my book. I’ve got a PhD for God's sake, I would expect no less. Yet, here I am correcting a lecturer in English and general editor that doesn’t know the difference between commas and full-stops, irrelevance and irreverent, kinesis and kinectic, nose and ass. Shite like this by the fucking truckload my friends. And here I am, with £ 1.64 in the bank. There you go.

New Ventures

All of this time spent in semi-isolation, dedicating myself to the activities that I love, has yielded a lot of reflective thinking. And, boy, did that hurt. I've come to a number of conclusions, mainly that I need to re-focus on different creative endeavours so to start autumn with a few strings to my bow. And so I've got a number of (very small) new ventures in mind and I spent the morning plotting them out. I like the two little words, new ventures. I also like them because I recently signed the contract for my book, which will be distributed by New Ventures. So it really is going to happen, how utterly swell!

Anger

I am re-reading Julia Cameron’s seminal book about the creative process, not something that I do often as I prefer to read books I haven’t read yet, and there are so many of those... But this book is such a classic for lost, and not-so-lost, artists that it makes good reading even when one feels above the instruction. Something that struck me this time was her piece on anger. When I read it the first time, I didn’t think much of it, but now I can see how anger is the artist’s friend.

Anger is fuel. We feel it and we want to do something. Hit someone, break something, throw a fit, smash a fist into the wall, tell those bastards. But we are nice people, and what we do with our anger is stuff it, deny it, bury it, block it, hide it, lie about it, medicate it, muffle it, ignore it. We do everything but listen to it.

Anger is meant to be listened to. Anger is a voice, a shout, a plea, a demand. Anger is meant to be respected. Why? Because anger is amap. Anger shows us what our boundaries are. Anger shows us where we want to go. It lets us see where we’ve been and lets us know when we haven’t liked it. Anger points the way, not just the finger. In the recovery of a blocked artist, anger is a sign of health.

Anger is meant to be acted upon. It is not meant to be acted out. Anger points the direction. We are meant to use anger as fuel to take the actions we need to move where our anger points us. With a little thought, we can usually translate the message that our anger is sending us.

[...]

Anger is the firestorm that signals the death of our old life. Anger is the fuel that propels us into our new one. Anger is a tool, not a master. Anger is meant to be tapped into and drawn upon. Used properly, anger is use-full.

Sloth, apathy, and despair are the enemy. Anger is not. Anger is our friend. Not a gentle friend. But a very, very loyal friend. It will always tell us when we have been betrayed. It will always tell us when we have betrayed ourselves. It will always tell us that it is time to act in our own best interests.

Anger is not the action itself. It is the action’s invitation.

When The Rich Play Frugal

It was sometimes last autumn, as I was dragging my heels in my local Waterstones, newly job-less and rejoicing the advantages of being free, mid-morning and mid-week, that I saw India Knight’s The Thrift Book for the first time. As my eyes darted from cover to author’s name to title and then back again in multiple loops, I felt my lips parting and my brow corrugating itself with the familiar stab of subtle misapprehension. It could not possibly be the India Knight, who pretty much made her name by writing a book (The Shops, n.d.r.) that celebrates the psychologically nourishing effects of blowing your monthly salary on a Chloe bag during your lunch hour, now suggesting that we’d better be thrifty and careful with money, could it?

Yes, that hideous term when connected to money, 'careful', as if money were a two-faced friend praising you one day while out on the coffee run and slagging you off with colleagues the next. As I began to flick, my eyes scuttling across pages filled with romanticised common sense in book form, I became aware of a supernatural presence bursting out of the depths of memory. It was Immanuel Kant, the paradigmatic philosopher of the Enlightenment, rising from the dead, placing a hand on my shoulder and admitting that, really, he was wrong the first time round, we cannot live up to knowledge and action without outside assistance, we need support, we need divine intervention, our reason alone just isn’t enough.

Is this what India Knight was doing, scrapping her entire philosophy of life, and one that sounded as enticing as a siren’s call to young women like me, in favour of thrift, make do and mend, saving and being ‘careful with money’? If so, why? Stuff such as 'save bucks by making your own sarnie and take to work' is as old a pearl of wisdom as sarnies themselves, and sits so much at odds when pitted against Knight’s previous book, a 224-page transliteration of the ubiquitous ‘you’re worth it’ mantra, as to turn The Thrift Book into the stuff of lifestyle nightmares. Even with the author’s earnest confession in opening, a financially reckless life lead on the high wings of overdrafts and loans, all I could muster was an inner quiver and the suppressed urge to reach for my violin and play a suitably tear-jerking melody in the middle of the bookshop.

Snapped back to reality though, I realised that her book was not the freakish outbreak of a public mid-life crisis, but one of many similar offerings, as this trash was already multiplying itself exponentially. There was Delia's Frugal Food, Frugal Living For Dummies, Frugal Living, The Frugal Cook, The Frugal Duchess, Chick Living: Frugal and Fabulous, Frugal Cooking, Frugality, The Frugal Life, The Frugal Gardener, The Thrifty Gardener, Charity Shopping and The Thrifty Lifestyle, The Thrifty Girl’s Guide To Glamour, Thrifty Ways For Modern Days, Thrifty Chic, The Spend Less Handbook and even the phantastically conceived How I Lived A Year On Just One Pound A Day, which should not be shelved within lifestyle or finance but within science-fiction. Blow me right out of the water, the need to be frugal as financial necessity commands had been turned into fashion.

For some time afterwards I became weary of shops in general; what if I came across a beaming cardboard Jamie Oliver next to the battery eggs at the supermarket or Nigella’s latest effort How To Be A Fat-Free Goddess at the bookshop? I knew I would not be able to stand for very long on the precipice of travesty without eventually releasing all of their books to the wilderness in disgust. This has not yet happened, even though a more subtle variation of frugalism has added itself to the equation in the shape of books that shy away from even the mere mention of thrift or frugal while operating a new, underground strategy: convincing the reader that cutting back is better than spending money, no matter your financial situation.



Enters Elspeth Thompson and her deliciously conceited The Wonderful Weekend Book: Reclaiming Life’s Simple Pleasures which laments the demise of the Great British Weekend now usurped by the shopping habit that never ends. No, the author tells us, slow down, festoon the house, wear cashmere, take up photography, rent a cottage. Life’s simple pleasures are the only real pleasures and, guess what, they won't make you skint either! Now that depends on the camera you’re buying and on the cashmere you’re wearing and on where that cottage you’re renting is, but I digress.

I still skipped home glowing and smug, in that spectacularly peculiar and fuzzy way that only a book that tells me things I already know backwards can instill in me. Except as I began reading, I felt something was entirely off. This is because being able to buy a Chanel bag (my own example) is quite a different thing from taking a walk in the park. Even more jarring is the contrast between knitting a Chanel-like bag instead of buying the real thing because I cannot afford to do so. The pleasure derived from making an object, or trying one’s hand at a new craft, is not on a par with the pleasure derived from buying an object because we can afford to do so, no more than can and must can be thought of as operating on the same level. They speak to our subconscious in entirely different ways because they are different entities.

I investigated a little and realised that Elspeth Thompson is an ex World of Interiors editor and successful writer with one house in London and one project house by the sea, a set of Victorian railway carriages she is turning into an eco-home. Let me explain this in context: she used to be an editor of a magazine that celebrates the merits of hand-painted wallpaper at
£ 7,500 a roll and now figuratively tells us that we needn't worry because that wallpaper isn't going to make us happy anyway, a walk in the park will. I took it from there and started looking for other similarly enlightened individuals doing the Frugal and Happy Hippie lark and soon realised that I had been living in my own blinkered version of The Truman Show, as signs of this twisted game were, and are, everywhere.

The free Waitrose brochures stacked at the tills are now wildly more concerned with the 'cost per portion' of the recipes they write about and not so much with the calories/ saturated fat in them, while millionaire model and lingerie pseudo-guru Elle Mcpherson acknowledges from the pages of Tatler that she too is feeling the pinch while wearing a lycra mini-dress that would buy regular people a small car. But then maybe she was referring to tight lycra as it is known to pinch on occasion. And what to make of Liz Hurley who, also from the pages of Tatler, waxes lyrical about the advantages of upping sticks to the country for that gentler pace of life of yesteryear, while wearing £ 10,000 worth of couture?

It all brings me back to that seminal moment in Ab Fab when Edi, her mother and Pats are accidentally locked in the drawing room and the old woman relishes the moment, because ‘it’s a bit like the war’. Except, Edi spits: ‘Without the war!’. A gentler pace of life is a fabricated fallacy that did not exist in the shape and form suggested by today’s authors and pseudo-celebrities. Acting oblivious to the class-rooted differences between those who could play cards all day and those who took four hours on foot to get to the houses they were contracted to clean, they persist in broadcasting a fictitious Pleasantville-like hyper reality of well-fed, well-behaved children who excel at school while their mothers take great joy in scrubbing floors on all fours and setting the dinner on the table with military precision every day at six o’clock for the rest of their lives. Even with my average middle-class background I can assure you that, were my grandma alive today, there is no chance in heaven or hell that she would refer to her weekly donkey-like walk down to the river while carrying two stones worth of laundry and a bucket of ashes for bleach as anything other than a royal pain in the ass.

It does not stop at celebrities or reasonably high-profile authors that churn out fluff though: playing frugal is so much fun that absolutely everyone wants to have a go. Vogue recently published a list of forty tips for fabulous frugality: they included a stay-at-home supper topped with taleggio and truffles and skipping lunch at Cipriani in order to adopt a glamourous cause instead ‘or better still, adopt a cause then talk about it over lunch at Cipriani’. Blog-land is bursting with diarists who write about their pressing need to be thrifty, objectivised by the picture of their receipts spiked on a metal stick next to their computers, and then yap on about their new £ 20,000 car ‘which is so much better for an expanding family like ours’. A friend of mine has been out of work since last year and while lamenting the lack of income, lack of intellectual engagement and lack of someplace to go on Monday morning, he just had a £ 12,000 side conservatory installed. The game is spiralling out of control. It seems so irresistible even I want to try it out, except the pre-requisite is to be reasonably financially secure, and I’m afraid by the time that happens to me, we may well have moved onto another state of play altogether.

Why should I care? Because the proliferation of thrifty titles bestowed upon the little people by those who need not count their pennies is symptomatic of a borderline farcical trend the new incarnation of which has already started to surface on the horizon in the shape of Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights. A model publishing a book about cooking is quite possibly the Ultimate Oxymoron, if we discount that Tony-Blair-As-Ambassador-Of-Peace stunt. What next? A shell-suited chav on benefits writing a style guide? Now that would be rich indeed.

Not Forgotten

Somebody wrote to me the other day, wondering whether 'nothing is happening'. I don't know whether this is the case, but what I do know is that a public diary makes one ponder the daily mundane. Who can be interested about reading my thoughts on the progress of my tomato plant, on yet another edit I am doing, on more non-progress on the job front?

In truth, I have been busy over the past two weeks, so much so as to think about writing all of the time. And let me tell you something: if you are doing a PhD, this is the state you want to be in always. Absorbed by your writing, thinking about your research all of the time, editing, adjusting, making it better. That's why I think that a PhD only really takes ten months. If only we could be In The Zone all the time, we would be done before one calendar year is out.

But I needn't worry any longer as mine is done, a few more red tick marks on the margins of a 250-sheet stack currently plonked on my bed, my thoughts reeling with pictures to include, paper weight, font size. And can you believe it? I will miss the PhD.

Lying Very Low

I feel like nothing has happened in my life over the past week. In fact, I feel like nothing has happened since I sealed the writing-up of the PhD, and so that would make it over two weeks. I have tended to really pressing tasks such as re-arranging my Chanel nail polishes, the library books, my books, old VOGUEs and unfinished knitting projects. I have also managed to miss some movies I wanted to watch (Night At The Museum 2, Terminator Salvation, Wolverine, Let The Right One In), to read a truly awful book (Let The Right One In) and a dire manga comic (Vampire Knight) and to rent some spectacularly leaded film (Twilight). But I needed the last three, as I have figured out that a PhD which is predominantly centred on Gothic literature cannot ignore them, even though typing ‘Twilight’ and ‘literature’ in the same line makes me barf.

The nights are shorter and shorter and lighter and lighter. I sleep very badly and long for the depths of winter, when night is night and day is day. I swear I have seasonal affected disorder, except it hits me right now, and not in January. Last night I was still tossing and turning at midnight (not at all like me) and so had a flick through two of my favourite books, The Creative Habit and The Creative License. I love these books. They feel familiar, they smell familiar and I have come to the conclusion that it is because of them that my PhD quickly surged towards completion. This weekend I drafted a couple of courses I am going to teach when I am a lecturer and I have also written a string of essay titles I want my students to tackle.

You're the editor of a new anthology of Romantic poetry and need to write a 3,000-word introductory piece that justifies your choices.

You're the editor that first published Biographia Literaria and have just read Hazlitt's thrashing review of it. Respond with a 3,000-word article.

The Twilight Saga, trash or literature?

Mary Shelley, the Other or her own person? 

I also continued to peruse the shredded pages of Biographia Literaria, promising myself, and the family, that they will go in the bin eventually. What a gripping life I do lead.

Finishing - Stage One

I’ve nailed it right down, I am on schedule, I’ve sent my last piece, I’m off the hook. I have ticked box a, also known as Finishing - Stage One. Most PhDs go through a few degrees of ‘finishing’, whereby you first finish the argument, then the editing, than the conclusion and finally the re-editing. At that point, you will waltz (although I will tango) into a binding office with a wad of paper and waltz out (or tango out) with one little book (and me with a crimson rose to stick among the pages, obviously).

For me though, the highest hurdle had always been represented by the finished argument. I think that most people can cope really well with editing and re-doing more of the same, with adjustments and cross-references, but starting from zilch is a very different matter. It’s all at full speed from now on, the difficult bit is over, hurrah! And from Monday I will have some time to myself without having to think the same stuff over and over. Blimey that feels incredible already.

Counting Down

Ages ago I heard that you know when you are finishing your PhD because instead of just thinking about it, you're actually writing it. Seems obvious, doesn't it? It isn't though, not until the thinking process has ended. In a way, it never ends. Whether your gathering of data stage takes place in a lab or in the library, and whether your companions are molecules or poems, you can never quite disconnect from the creation of the argument which, really, continues right until the very end.

It is true though that something really special is happening to you when you're just doing your research to the exclusion of everything else. And everything else is not just something you like to do, such as knitting, cooking or riding, but something that you'd rather do in lieu of writing, such as dusting, re-arranging books or sharpening pencils. These are procrastination activities which every researcher is well acquainted with, as Procrastination is to a PhD what Life-in-Death is to Death; an inseparable companion that wakes up and goes to sleep with you, always present, always there, always ready to pounce and shrill: 'Hey! Wouldn't it be really fun to clean the kitchen shelves? Hey, wouldn't it be really fun to scrub right behind the toilet? Hey, wouldn't it be really fun to iron those six stones of ironing you've left for weeks?'

You'd be surprised what Procrastination likes to tell people. No matters what it says, it always manages to go long ways, much longer ways than even an eight-hour writing stretch could ever take you. Procrastination wins when all good intentions are reduced to a speck of dust on a far-away shelf that needs to be dusted right now, right this second.

But then something changes when you know that you are suddenly counting down to your words, no longer adding numbers to make up the first, second, third chapter, but taking them off a tally that is getting smaller and smaller by the day. Mine currently stands at a miserable minus 4,500 which is really small when pitted against 80,000 to 100,000, which is the accepted length of a PhD, at least here in the UK.

All I've done for the past week has been my research, if we discount two extraordinarily exotic trips to get some food and put a cheque in the bank. At this stage I am perhaps expected to whine that it hasn't been easy but in reality, it has. If you really knew how quiet and sheltered my life is at present, you too would agree that summoning up concentration and The Muse isn't hard at all. I don't even receive post anymore. My dogs do, but I don't.

Dear William, we are very sorry to hear that you have not been well recently, please find enclosed yet another settlement cheque, which brings your lifetime expenditure to £ 11,234.72. We thought your owner would like to know so to appreciate how good we have been to you both although she may want to consider getting a goldfish next time around. We insure them too. Happy 10th forthcoming birthday!

Dear Victoria, it is hard to believe but it has already been a year since your last vaccinations. Please show this letter to Steph in order to remind her that she should book you in for your routine check and don't forget that by introducing your doggie friends to our practice, you will get a 5% discount on your booster.

And more yada, yada, yada. Nothing for me, for weeks, which is just as well because I usually get nothing other than bills I've already paid (just) by direct debit. Meanwhile, the writing continues, even though I must confess to be running ever so slightly behind schedule. I should be at minus 2,000 while it looks like I may have to string in a little bit of work this weekend in order to have everything I wanted on paper before the end of May. But you know what, that will be the last of the weekend work as I am about to crash through the ceiling of Finishing - Stage One, and that is a fabulous feeling no matter what.

Just To Clarify

A palate is in the mouth.

A pallette is a selection of colours.

A pallet is something that is used to transport items.

Doesn't everyone know that? Why do I keep receiving emails from illiterate morons who mix these three things all the time? And most importantly, why do I get so many emails containing one of these words? Is somebody trying to wind me up?

Thrashing

I don’t think there is a writer out there capable to ignore reviews. Not long ago I was talking to a guy who has written a highly engaging and effervescent work of non fiction and do you know how he met my praise? With this: ‘Oh thanks Steph, that’s good to hear, especially after those awful reviews on Amazon’. I hadn’t seen these reviews, so I had a gander after he referred to them.

He only has ten, six of which are written by seemingly illiterate people. I told him that he should know better than agonise over a moron who spells plagiarism as pleggiarism and yet I understand his deflation, because putting your work out there for the thrashing makes one feel figuratively naked and completely vulnerable. And how do you respond to criticism without sounding like an embittered lunatic that just cannot let it rest? You don't, that's how, which means that you seethe over it instead.

But if my friend was worrying about a couple of misplaced comments left online by someone who is, and will remain, a nobody, in the grand scheme of his life, he will probably feel better once he stumbles on this entry. Today I was writing about one of the most scathing pieces of criticism ever to make it into print and one that can sink AA Gill’s remarks without even trying. It makes my own criticisms, literary or otherwise, sound like the strangled cry of a three year-old that pricked her finger on a hairslide.

I am referring to Hazlitt’s review of Coleridge’s BioLit, as quoted by Richard Holmes in the second volume of Coleridge’s biography, Darker Reflections. Think your life as a misunderstood writer is so hard? You’ll feel better after reading this one.

The reviews of Coleridge’s new books began to appear in the autumn of 1817. They were as bad as he feared, or rather worse. Hazlitt immediately set about the Biographia in an enormous 10,000-word assault in the August issue of the Edinburgh Review, calling it a “garrulous” production from “the maggots of his brain”. Hazlitt concentrated his fire on what he regarded as Coleridge’s well-established weaknesses: obscurity of style, shifts of political opinion, “maudlin egotism”, “garrulous” reminiscences, and above all the passion for metaphysics which “have been a dead weight on the wings of his imagination”. Hazlitt simply did not engage with the great strengths of the Biographia. The story of the philosophical pilgrimage was a “long-winding metaphysical march”. The emerging theory of the Imagination was “unintelligible”. The superb critical dialogue with Wordsworth was “not very remarkable either for clearness or candour”. The memorable psychological accounts of how a poet’s mind works, and how poetry is actually composed (with all its arresting imagery) were “mawkish spleen in fulsome eulogies of his own virtue”. It was the most unrelenting of Hazlitt’s attacks, giving no quarter, and returning again and again to the charge of intellectual charlatanism and political apostasy. His old mentor was now “a disappointed demagogue” who kept up, in vain, “that pleasurable poetic fervour which has been the cordial and bane of his existence”. “Till he can do something better, we would rather hear no more of him”.

Spanners

I think I may be the only person in the world to have captured an idiom on camera. This is what it looks like:



Once upon a time, that mass of shredded paper was known by the name of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Although an old edition, this one held more sentimental than actual value for me, as I bought it on 18th Feb 2003 (I know because I still have the receipt), in a little second-hand bookshop in Lower Manhattan, on my way back from Strand and Books of Wonder, in the middle of a blizzard that pretty much stopped the city in its tracks. But believe you me, if there’s a will to shop, there’s way to get to the shops. BioLit is one of my favourite books because it applies philosophy to literature and because I love the way in which Coleridge refers to his good friend and colleague as ‘Mr Wordsworth’ throughout.

Above and beyond all this, BioLit has featured prominently in my writings as of late and this is precisely the reason why it laid bookmarked on the rattan trunk at the bottom of my bed this morning, when I left the house and forgot William’s door open. It wasn’t William that entertained himself with it because William does not do these things. It was the seemingly innocuous Victoria that did it, sinking my heart and potentially jeopardising the end of my piece in one swoop. I returned to a floor covered in torn pages, the book itself only recognisable to the trained (and affectionate) eye and to the nose that many times enjoyed a whiff of its 1906 ink. There may be a bit of an adjustment to be made to next week’s schedule but at least now I’ve got a picture of a spanner in the works.