Saturday morning, 3:52. Been up an hour or two. Reading “The Return” by Hisham Matar which I haven’t quite got into. It’s about a Libyan writer and his return to the country after many years of exile. I’m such a curmudgeon. I’ve always slightly resented biographical books in the first person about how successful the author and their family have been, how erudite their reading, how prolific their writing. Maybe its just envy. Well done, good on you! It’s something to do with separating the work from the person, which is not very fashionable today. Everyone wants to know everything about the writer, the film director, the artist. I don’t. I like reading introductions and reviews that discuss the book, not the author. I suppose in autobiographical books it can’t be separated. Maybe it’s the success aspect that I’m envy of.
I mull things over. We do live in a very immediate world. Text SMS, WhatsApp, Twitter – short quick reactions defining the events of our lives. But there is something about this blog which has more the quality of writing letters. My mother found a collection of letters that her parents had exchanged whilst courting. Yorkshire, early 1910s. Not much happened but it was the tone of the writing, and the incidental trivia, that captured the moment. I can imagine them sitting down at a desk and composing their letters. In slow time. It’s a pace that I try to emulate.
I got WhatsApp from C at 0100. Of course they’re five hours earlier so it was just evening there. It’s a good time to exchange thoughts, in the middle of the night, whilst the rest of the world is sleeping. C and I have a sort of back-channel correspondence, quite separate from the social communications. It’s special for us both. I feel close to her even though in her late teens and early twenties she was very hurt when I suddenly got married again, even though that didn’t last long. In her early teens she and I used to go on long weekends and backpacking holidays. Anyway I was telling her that I’ve started writing this blog which is mainly ideas but with some carefully edited diary and bio pieces.
The NYT leading article yesterday was titled Paris Burning. “… the French favour change in the abstract but abhor it in practice”. Riots and the “casseurs” and “deepening malaise”, but also “Macron… failed to see the anger rising”. Anger. I was looking at a WhatsApp I sent to S in Amsterdam a few weeks ago – “I’ve given up handling the ambivalence, and I’m done with passive aggressive. Now I’m just aggressive. Everyone is angry and so am I …” I must have been in the context of letting the flat although I do seem to be getting more passionate about things generally. I worry about what it happening to civility.
P has a whole collection of mandolins in his green room. He lives in Glastonbury in a terrace house deep in the alternative world of planets and crystals. He bought the house some years ago and is gradually doing it up, but when you walk into the green room it is so magical, fully of music and instruments and books. Maybe it’s his metaphorical shed. It’s where he retreats for days and weeks at a time. He’s certainly had a rough time with some crazy relationships, and needs some space, both geographically and emotionally.
I love Country music – Johnny Cash, Willy Nelson, Lucina Williams, Nora Jones… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psJpZzQ_FKs Most of it was on CDs (which are now down in my container) but maybe I can find some old vinyls.
I was going to write about Transference but it’s almost dawn now. Time to go.