Where you start/end a story can change everything. I got very interested in narrative and story structure when I was looking at psycho-analytic theory, and later when I was a documentary student at the NFTS. It’s as if there is always (in history and in fiction) a chronology of events which has no beginning or end, and that story somehow segments this into meaningful chunks which start somewhere and end somewhere else.
I love Raymond Carver, What we talk about.. and particularly Elephant. And David Lodge’s Art of Fiction in which each chapter starts with the opening line of a book. I have mini background project to chart out a chronology of my life, a card index of times with the events and people, almost as a pointer to recalling or reconstructing a story of what happened. Kundera also wrote about writing. I never really liked him, he seemed arrogant and sexist. But I loved the Incredible Lightness of Being, or at least the idea of the heaviness of repeating the same safe action, and Being being so light it cannot be held. Ha! If only… I read a review in the New Yorker today about a poet called Max Ritvo who was dead by the age of 25.
Very unlike me, I took a last minute short break holiday to the Red Sea last week to try out scuba diving. Every day we went off on a “dive boat” to some reef or bay. I didn’t always dive and enjoyed just hanging about the boat, gazing at the sea and the sense of awe that is life. At midday, I noticed some of the Egyptian crew wander off to the front of the boat to say their prayers. They wrapped a sort of clothe around their legs and quietly spent some minutes together. I envied them. They were also lovely people (unlike many of the diving fraternity with whom I shared the week). I’ve developed such a disdain for religion which seems so easily to become a dangerous delusion. But I miss it. I miss the ritual, the silence, the honesty, the sharing.
I had a long and (looking back) not very successful career as a psychiatrist. In fact I’m not sure medicine really was the right choice for me. I never really found any affinity with other psychiatrists or doctors. But all that is over now. The job I really loved was as a senior lecturer at UCL in the 1980s/90s when I got involved in AI and neuroscience, and teaching. I loved teaching. Bit of a clinical burn-out in the late 90s left me rather misanthropic but I’ve bounced back from that.
I love music, particularly live music. I drift from one type to another (and back again) entirely on mood. Sometimes I just listen to classical music, via a subscription to the Berlin Philharmonic digital concert hall. I’ve watched them so much I feel I know the individual members of the orchestra. I bought tickets to a concert in Berlin, but didn’t go. Then I love Latin jazz and salsa and syncopated Afro-Cuban music, and dance. It’s got so much energy, and youth.
For me, live music has really been festivals, from Hendrix at the Isle of Wight 1970, to Leonard Cohen at the Big Chill in 2008, to the Port Eliot music/literary festival which I’ve gone to each year for a while. And of course YouTube which has so much live music from the 1970s and 80s.
Opera too (Opera101 byFred Protkin). Not surprisingly I like Wagner, particularly Tristan, but I’ve never been to an opera. I get slightly socially anxious in bid auditoriums, and am tired of fighting my demons, so find a way round. The concert I was going to in Berlin was an open air one at the Waldbühne. Magical