This Blog Has Moved (AGAIN!)

Find me here from now on. That's www.aliteralgirl.com. I've got my own domain name and everything! Cool, huh?

THIS BLOG HAS OFFICIALLY MOVED...

It's a little scary for me to say this (I feel as if I'm literally uprooting myself), but this blog, the one you're reading now, has officially MOVED to aliteralgirl.wordpress.com. It now lives here, and nothing but the web address (and, ok, the design) has changed, so please please visit me here from now on. Update your bookmarks, your newsfeeds, your brains. I'll even remind you again of the NEW ADDRESS! It's: aliteralgirl.wordpress.com.

Thanks for bearing with me, and for reading my blog; from now on, I'll see you here...

Photosynthesis

The city this morning was heartbreakingly beautiful. Puffy clouds and air so fresh you could drink it (I seem to have a thing about this). I detoured, went gliding down Broad Street and curled up St. Giles so that I could buy a sandwich and a pastry from a cheerful woman. Traffic, thick traffic, all the way towards town, but the roads away from town were clear and the city in spite of the traffic still had that air of Easter emptiness. I saw a girl in a striped shirt-dress and boots pedalling towards the Bodleian, her basket laden with bags and books, and thought how lovely it would be to have woken up early just to work in a library, to come out into the sun at intervals like a young stalk needing to photosynthesize, to maybe have tea later at the Vaults & Gardens cafe, outside in the graveyard where the chairs overlook tombs and flowers and the yellow-bodied dome of the Radcliffe Camera.

Hurst Street, Springtime, 6 am

I wake at the unfamiliar hour to animal sounds. Noises like foxes fighting; exotic screeches carried down the street by wind or proximity. You are asleep until I stick my head out of the window, peering left and right past the dawn-bathed terraced houses.
"That sound," I say.
"Cats?" you say. Fall asleep again. I go into the bathroom, where the window overlooks a single street lamp. As I am watching it, through the blinds, observing the sallow glow against the almost-bright morning sky, it goes out. Apart from the emptiness it might be mid-morning.

Back in bed, the fox-sounds have stopped. Now it's only birds. Doves? In that way that early-morning birds have of making repetitive songs with their hoots and growls, they are like the worst pop song on the radio. Over and over again in my head (I'll forget the tune by afternoon). You are still asleep, and I ponder getting up, going outside, to see the street before anyone else sees it. Sunday mornings are best for this; no early commuters whistling past on bicycles, smugly more productive. All the drunks have gone to bed. For the first time in a long time I perceive how ugly all the cars are, lined up nose-to-tail, cows going to slaughter, in various shades of modern, various kinds of disrepair. There was one last year with a smashed-in window, that sat on the corner of Leopold Street and Hurst, and for months if you wanted to walk past it you had to pick your way through broken green glass. The houses still look bare--even the ones with gardens out front are still suffering the effects of winter gloom.

The thing about this street is, it wears its shabbiness well. Last night as we rounded the corner I said to you how I fond I was of the place where our street meets Magdalen road--of the pub with her bicycle rack, her evening-yellow windows, the red-and-green facades of the bookshop and the café, the weary half-rendered lettering of Silvesters ("E TERS STORES"), with its pots, its herbs, its kitchenware.

Not a soul about this morning, and as I try to fall asleep my mind is suddenly full of a Boston autumn, the crispness of the Charles River and the smell of rich people's houses in the Back Bay. Couldn't be further from where we are now. I close my eyes to picture the promenade in October better, the strange dome of the half-shell in afternoon light, the runners, the girls in skirts and light coats, stretching the days of sensible dressing out as long as possible. I think for certain I won't fall asleep but I do, with you and the pop-songs of the morning birds and the empty river of street that runs between James and Magdalen.

Cowley Road, 4:30 pm

Sometimes Simon & Garfunkel is the only suitable soundtrack. Even when the sky isn't cloudy. Today it's a wide sheet of azure that the Mediterranean would be jealous of. I like the way the building across the street, made of blackened red brick, slants, moves away from the Cowley Road at a precise angle. The graffiti scrawled in white, below the beetroot window frames: Total Texaco Fuel Oppression in Burma. A poetic structure, as I sit here listening to the hum of ice-cream eaters, smelling burnt toast. Watching balding man in an army-green coat, brown leather brogues, smoking. Joined now by a woman with black hair and black boots. She's taller than him, but they're both made in miniature, fragile, transient beside the brick. Three girls, one in pink, one in blue, one in green, passing by. The delivery bicycle with its vast basket, shiny silver bell (I'm reflected in the domed steel). The shadow of this building is slinking up the side of the one across the road. Stealthy springtime: before you know it the sky will darken and the evening will dawn, the drunks will come out to play, the chill will slide back into the air and the dark hairs of you thin arms will stand on end, soldiers at attention, reminding you of a photograph taken at that September party, when you wore the jacket of his uniform over your sleeveless dress and leaned against somebody's garden wall.

And We Don't Even Own This House

On days like these, I'm reminded of the ranch. We have a dead something festering in the walls or under the floorboards somewhere; all we know is that the smell is strongest at the spot just before you enter the kitchen. The Man comes home from football wanting to take a shower; but a pipe has burst, or broken, or done whatever it is pipes do, so that the kitchen is flooded with a sudden stream of water before we turn the main off. By sticking our heads in the cupboard under the sink (him in football kit, me in an oversized and ripped man's shirt and a pair of silk pajama shorts because I thought, silly me, I might have an early night) we ascertain which particular bit of pipe is the problem ("You see the silvery one?" he says. "No, not that silvery one, that silvery one."). But what good is knowing this? I have the imprint of a wet review section of the Guardian from six months ago on my feet and the Man can feel some "fraying," but neither of us is taking a bath tonight, I can guarantee that. As we carpet the kitchen in newspaper we talk about the smell, which the Man is convinced is like galvanized rubber. "It's dead rodent," I assure him. "I got very used to that smell in my childhood." Which makes my childhood sound horrific; it wasn't, quite the opposite, just infused, every so often, with eau de decomposing rat. Or eau de galvanized rubber, if you prefer.

A Country Evening

Just as we finish scrambling along the wet shores of a makeshift lake, my phone rings. We're behind a perfectly English stone wall, sheltered from the muddy road running away from the village. Just a 9-year-old boy and myself. We've been exploring the outskirts of the village, the secret swampy places between water and meadow, for nearly an hour. At one point, after I sink in the mud, I tell my companion about the time my Dad and I donned wellies and walked the length of our local creek, following it until it met the sea. Now he's calling me, my Dad. From Buellton, the truck-stop town of grocery stores and auto-repair shops. I can't see civilization from here (maybe the gleam of a thatched roof beyond the wall) but I can talk to California. I'm watching the 9-year-old leaping over a stream in the same way I used to do while I waited for my Dad to finish his work in the garage. I'm speaking to that same Dad while I watch the 9-year-old. There's something strangely circular about this, and something dizzyingly meta. And, more simply, something rather delightful.

(Also, re: the last post, this, from Alain de Botton: "Journeys are the midwives of thought.")

Thought in Motion

I'm starting to think that I'm like one of those kinetic powered watches. Fueled by movement. When I was very small, my favorite thing to do at home was to think. For many people, thinking may be an active process only in the mind, but for me, it was (and, I'm increasingly aware, still is) a physically active process as well. At eight I traced a path around a pile of rocks outside my Grandparents' house. It was a small circuit and it might have made anyone dizzy, but maybe that was the point: in my dizziness I created stories for hours. Sometimes I bounced a ball against the side of the house--one of those red rubber balls, the ones we played four-square with in the playground at school. I was a good four-square player and bouncing the ball against the wall gave me practice as well as time to crawl inside my own self. I climbed the rocks behind the house, too. Some people might have said I was a little feral, even. I sniffed my books and sometimes, when I was out walking in circles around the pile of rocks, I took a bookmark with me to simulate the feel of words, which were so tied already to the act of reading.

Later I took longer walks in the hills. Being stationary made my mind cave in, my thoughts turn idle, as if my brain was made of syrup. I made stories up in my head and if I was feeling particularly excited about one I had to go out, I couldn't sit still, not even in a rainstorm. If I sat still the thoughts festered, but if I walked, they came easy and in great numbers. I think my breath was tied to my ideas somehow.

It became less literal over the years, as, it seems, many things do. When we're children, things manifest in concrete ways, but by the time we've reached adulthood we've found ways to complicate even something as simple as the process of thought, so that metaphor is all we have left to describe ourselves. Now what happens is that journey--going somewhere, travel--stimulates thought. Not even necessarily about the place itself, but, as with the watch, the movement of self sets something else in motion.

I'm a travel writer, in the way that travel can be taken to mean the trip from one end of the garden path to the other.

Like Being a Kid Again

We made a few sausages today. We're making more tomorrow. All I'll say for now is, PIG INTESTINES FEEL SO WEIRD. I stood there unraveling them (they're puzzles), rinsing their insides with water so that we could fill them with minced pork, and all I could think was, this is way, way better than play-dough.

Fés, Summer, 2007 (A Poem in Prose)

Fés, Summer, 2007

From the bruised-sky countenance of an English summer (three hot days and a thunderstorm) we fly south; we are young.

At Bab Boujaloud, the blue-green gate, we look up, eyes hot, sweating diamonds onto a street paved with dust. Hey, Bob Dylan! Ali Baba! Nice girl! (I like being your nice girl, while you, today, are all shaggy brown hair, beard, sunglasses).

I like it when you speak French, when you say shokran, when you sit for hours, beneath a lamp, sketching its lace form, each precise indent, measuring with your eyes. You are intimate with it; I want to ask how these things are done, but the silence is all that keeps us cool.

Kif? We watch the owner of the café, carefully rolling, with stained and heavy hands, a joint. Kif? He says. Then I lose track; we swim home through Fauvist paint (even you look made of blue and green now). We follow sex with a nap, wake with eyes ringed red to dancing music. Listen to that, you say. (Perfect bliss).

In sudden palaces, children play, women scrub the smell of decay, the rot of orange blossoms from the floor. The tiles arranged with surgical symmetry (mathematics by color). We spend our days walking imperfect circles around the riads, the minarets, the medersas. We spend our nights too hot to touch.

Mornings made of honey and a single cube of sugar dissolved in the ocean of your coffee. I prefer mint, hot, sweet, so you teach me to tie a paper napkin round the glass because it was something you learned, once. I read the guidebook to you: It seems to exist suspended in time.

Even the shadows are still.

The Circus at Night

Through an open window I can see that the circus has come to town, planted itself on the top of a grassy knoll, where I stood a week ago in awe of the city spires, drenched in dusk-light. Walking past it now, in the chill of early spring, I don't see the city spires, but hear the music. Whimsical; accordions and whistles. The big-domed tents and the splashes of red-and-yellow and the grass, eerily bright at this time of night. The twinkle of lights. I can't see any people; are they inside the tents? Are they ghosts? How has this series of structures, this thing which is to me more an idea than a reality, come to be so suddenly on this grassy knoll? I hear the familiar squeak of my bicycle wheels; I fail to understand the apparition.

And what, anyway, do I actually know about circuses? Nothing really. Once I read a book in which a girl and her brother, wounded in combat, limping, dour, soured by years in the trenches, visit the circus. Once I knew a girl who objected to circuses because of the animals. She didn't say why and I didn't ask. Once my parents went to see the Circ du Soleil, the circus in the sun, the circus made of human bodies, with some friends. They're things I know only from the outside, circuses.

Coming down the hill that I cycled up hours earlier, my fingers turn to ten fat icicles, it feels. I no longer know when I'm squeezing my brakes. I arrive home and it hurts just to turn the lock in the door. The city is indecisive; is she playful, or cold and somber? Is she warm or is she still rapt in the throes of winter? Does she--and do we, by extension--miss her students, in this time of their absence, or is she reveling without them, a feather set free upon an April wind?

Impossible to tell, tonight.

Bruises and Bills and Boot-Heels, Oh My

This week has probably not been one of the finest of my entire existence. I promise this won't be one of those whiny "everything's gone to shit" posts, but I fell down the stairs at work yesterday. FELL DOWN THE STAIRS. Just saying.

I was reading the paper. I should have known not to do this, as once, when I was about six, I was reading a book whilst walking down the street with my Dad, when all the sudden a parking meter sprung from the earth and hit me in the face and I fell down, but it's not an excuse anyway. I tripped over my own feet with about three stairs to go, and stopped my fall by hitting my head on the wall in front of me. I was so surprised by this that I couldn't decide if I should cry or laugh or what, so I just gathered myself up and pressed a palm to the painful part of my head. After a little while it occurred to me that I was just standing on the landing with one hand clapped to my head, looking loony, and that maybe I should move, so I took my hand away from the bump and saw blood. Well, head wounds do that, I thought calmly, and I went upstairs to the staff toilet and splashed water on my face.

All well and good, but by the time I had got back down to the office again, it was bleeding again. I should mention that it wasn't bleeding profusely, not by any means. More just...seeping. So when a co-worker asked idly if I'd hit my head, I said, yeah, I fell down the stairs, and giggled, and she said Oh my gosh, you mean right now? Because your head is bleeding.

Well, that was it. I could no longer pretend that my clumsiness was casual. Instead, I had to go across the road and get ice from the kitchen. Only they had no ice, so the chef brought me a plastic bag full of frozen corn. My boss wanted to bandage it to my head so that my arm wouldn't get sore holding it there, but I drew the line at being an English patient lookalike. After a half hour of idleness I put a plaster over the cut and threw myself (metaphorically, not literally) back at my work.

I felt fine, and I wasn't prepared to linger for long on the incident, especially not as it highlighted an example of stupendous ineptitude. But after ten thousand questions, expressions of sympathy, Natasha Richardson comparisons, and suggestions that I drink a little less at work (I don't drink at all at work, in case you're tempted to take that literally), I began to fret. It doesn't take much to make me fret (I suffer, after all, from varying degrees of generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and hypochondria, which is a common but very unfortunate combination of ailments), and the internet, let me tell you, is the jackpot of fret-fuel.

So if you ever wanted to know what could possibly happen to you if you hit your head, causing your brain to strike your skull and begin bleeding, look it up online and then PANIC. By the time I got home to the Man, I was a proper wreck. "I don't want to die because I fell down the stairs," I sobbed at him, in his arms. He (and everyone else) had already asked me if I felt dizzy, nauseous, if I'd blacked out, if I had any symptoms whatsoever of a series injury, and the answer was no, I don't think so, but the problem was of course that by that time I'd worked myself up so much that I did feel a bit dizzy just from the worry.

"Don't worry," he said to me, after I'd convinced him to help me look up head injuries online, after we'd ruled out together the possibility of concussion, "You're going to be fine." I decided to start blaming everyone else for my panic. "I wasn't worried until everyone else started saying things," I said, which was true, to an extent.

Having dramatized the event as much as possible, I decided it was finally time to settle down, take some Paracetemol, have some dinner, relax, and practice how I was going to tell this story to people in the days to come. I decided to acknowledge the fact that actually, I hadn't hit my head that hard; that by now, the only sore part of me (besides my ego) was the bit of broken skin at my temple. I decided all this was easier, in fact, than working myself up into an epic panic.

My relaxation was aided by a solid hour spent reading passages from Enid Blyton's Famous Five books, which sounds dull until you realize that they're riddled with gems like this one: "'That queer-looking man seems to like Dick,' said Anne."

***

And then I awoke the next day and in spite of a distinct tenderness near the wound, felt good, until my spirits were dampened by the din of the bills in the study, clamoring to be paid. I would pay you, I told them sternly as I tried to find an unoccupied slice of desk on which to put my tea and branflakes, if I could pay you, but you insist on being so large as to be unmanageable. In response, they just moaned some more, and huffed, and one or two even did a little angry jig atop my computer.

To ease my guilt and shut them up, I paid my half of the rent and my portion of the gas bill, which made me feel momentarily better, until I realized that I'm just about at the end of my coping-tether. The catalyst for this realization was the knowledge that I'd been wrongly charged £20 by a broken cashpoint in Fulham. For an instant I blamed Fulham (maybe the big smoke, knowing I've rejected it as a place to live, is somehow out to get me), but I couldn't hide for long from the fact that I'm a postgraduate student living in a graduate's world. I'm ignoring the credit crunch, the recession, the big scary black monster in the corner, whatever you want to call it, because my problems are deeper than that.

Here's how it is: I reached a point today where I no longer understood how I could go on like this. It baffled me, this realization. I actually sat down on the couch and pondered it. Because I've never been happier, emotionally, fundamentally. I have someone to love, and who loves me, and we live in a beautiful city and do beautiful (if not very lucrative) things, and our life is both exciting to me and soothing, gentle. But here I was on a glorious March morning wondering how we were going to pay those loud bills in the study after all, how, indeed, I was going to pay for groceries and to have the heel stuck back onto my boot and to get my coat, now impossibly soiled, dry-cleaned, how I was going to buy laundry detergent, do all of the little things that require money.

It's not that I don't work, it's that I don't work enough--but I can't work more, without sacrificing my masters degree (and, also, the legality of my visa--not to mention my sanity). In that bleak moment I couldn't stop myself from wondering if my fall down the stairs was not symbolic in some way, if perhaps I am not only falling but also hitting a wall in my work, my career (my career? What career?), my financial well-being.

But then, this evening at university, a successful and well-respected novelist began his chat with us by recounting how just yesterday, he'd been walking down his street, head turned, distracted by the for-sale signs on a pair of houses, when suddenly he smacked into the side of a metal pole, and look at the mark on the side of my head, he said.

So real writers have those moments too. And anyway, the really annoying thing about not having any money isn't not being able to pay the bills; it's not being able to buy the Man a really super birthday present.

Our First Mature Trip To London?

Didn't start very encouragingly. Boxed red wine in the station ("it's like being with a rugby team," the Man kept saying). An impromptu train switch at Reading. The night already folding in on us. I'd been at work, then caught in a downpour, then at home, then late, then not late (a kindly friend had lied about the train time so I wouldn't miss it). It was suddenly cold again; what happened to the almost-summer of last week? Another world. I needed gloves. And maybe socks. On the tube a toddler bounced between his mother and his father, every shift on the tracks a new hazard. Many stops later (or maybe not so many; I forgot to keep track), a part of London unidentifiable to me. We walked against the wind. Fulham. You hear so much about Fulham, but until last night it was just another London name.

Past a nursing home. Everything looked suburban. Not expensive but empty, tired, devoid of spirit. Around a corner, a sudden pub. We ate round a long table. Potted shrimp, scotch eggs, salmon, terrine, soft bread. Mashed potatoes, curly kale, slabs of bleeding beef. The Man looked especially happy. "Are you happy?" I said, looking over the top of my red wine glass. "Meat," he grinned, reminding me of my dad's 50th birthday (picture: a barbecue pit by the beach, some friends, and nothing to eat but pounds and pounds of tri-tip, which my mother had bought thinking it was the manly food to get). I even got past my fear of meat that hasn't been cooked so well it looks black and enjoyed the tenderness (a little).

We sat on couches after. Shared an espresso, the Man and I, with a sugar cube. Back on the tube. We all shared no-hot-food-on-the-bus-back-to-Oxford horror stories (there are many). We were on the bus back before midnight. All so civilized. At St. Clements we alighted. As always I felt cold. I had to pee. I'd fallen asleep on the coach and my neck felt bent the wrong way. At home, relief, the sighs after a long night, but also a bewildered and delighted sense that neither of us had once considered screaming in frustration, this time.

Cheesy But So What

I'm taking this as a good sign: after I had a minor meltdown in All Bar One this evening I came home to sulk in bed and read my news feeds, and what should I see but this little piece of advice:

"Do you have a dream? Do you really want to get published? Then quit with the excuses, get off your butt, and make the dream happen."

Inelegantly phrased, perhaps, and a little on the wrong side of cheesy, but like I said: so what. We all need a little of that every once in awhile, especially after recovering from some semi-public tear-shedding (is that embarrassment I sense?).

Sunday I'm in Love

We sit in Christ Church meadows by the daffodils, watching a stream of toddlers drawn as if by magnetism to the mound of dirt beside the pathway. One rolls repeatedly down the mound until his father tells him they're moving on.
"I don't want to go," says the boy.
"Well, we're going, anyhow," says the father, and scoops up his other son, dissapears behind some trees. Dirtboy takes one last lackluster plunge through the mess, then sprints after his family.

After sandwiches which are too big for our mouths, we share a banana. I practise pouting my lips, the Facebook face, the look that other girls take on when posing for profile photos. I can't plump them up enough without looking demented, descending into giggles. I give up and we watch more children, attracted by the mound of dirt. We watch the toddlers who have just learnt to walk careening down the path, thrilled by their own movements, unsteady but unwavering in gusto and intent. The Man says maybe I'm a little like that, too.
"I get the impression," he says, "that at the age of about four, you decided you'd mastered all the basics, and from then on out you were just going to read."

It's more or less true, I say back. (Later, walking down the flat surface of the High street, I trip spontaneously. More true than less true, I think).

At the kissing gate by Merton college he traps me, kisses me sweetly.
"Is that because no one can see us?" I say.
"It's because it's a kissing gate, you moron," he says. Kisses me again.

After we circle the city with our footsteps we come to settle at a bar on the High street where we sit close to the window, watching pink blossoms shuddering in wind. He reads the paper while I attack Essays in Love. There's the strange sadness of a Sunday as the afternoon wilts into evening, as we move away from weekend papers, ipmromptu picnics in the garden, towards alarm clocks, early morning stresses, hours spent at work.

I look up every so often to make a different point about de Botton's book. At the reference to Aristophanes, I balk.
"I find the idea that we're all looking for someone who was once a part of ourselves really lonely," I say. "Like, I want the person I love to be different. I want company."
"I'm not sure that's what that means," he says. Whether he's right or not I don't know, but it highlights how differently we can read things. "It's just about completion."

A huge clock hangs from the cieling of the bar. It makes me feel both unwelcome and excessively desirous of staying all at the same time. The same way that being in a train station makes me feel. I know I'm in transition, but I could stay for hours, I think, watching everyone else, going somewhere else. Rhythms marked by a minute hand (is it coincidence, then, that the Man tells me this bar used to be a music store?).

Later, I finish Essays in Love in bed. I have read the entire book in a day and feel heavy with de Botton's relationship woes. Sleep comes easy, and when it comes, it is quiet.

Pages Devoid of Guilt

The other day, Thursday, my day off, the sweetest thing possible in the middle of the week, I got a solid few hours' (writing) work done in town and decided to reward myself with the one thing I don't need more of: books. So here's how I spent the birthday Blackwell's gift certificate, at long last:

The Other by Ryszard Kapuscinski
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth
The Return of the Solider by Rebecca West
Essays in Love by Alain de Botton

The weight of them in my bicycle basket on the way home afforded me great happiness indeed. I've spent some time feeling them, smelling them, turning pages, reading paragraphs at random. This ritual of acquisition seems not ugly, as perhaps it should do in dire times (surely he who has a spare £20 to spend on books shouldn't do so with quite so much unrestrained glee), but kind, rewarding. I've found the one place that my overdeveloped sense of guilt doesn't stretch to, and it's nice to spend a few moments every so often here, smelling the books.

Drinking the City

Except for the part where I sank ankle-deep in a hidden bog on the southern edge of South Parks, my run this evening was unbelievably beautiful. The sky , and pink blossoms everywhere, and a rain of fragrant white petals, and a red sun over the spires, which, in the thick dusky light, looked made of silver and dreams, hardly real, maybe not real at all. All the big trees lining the park were still bare and through black boughs a wind came wafting.

I know it sounds strange to say (and not a little unhealthy), but sometimes I like going for a run when I'm already a little thirsty. That way the cool air feels like something to drink. I am drinking the city, I like to think. (Then I self-consciously remember that line from Belle and Sebastian's "Stars of Track and Field": "You only did it so that you could wear your terry underwear and feel the city air run past your body.")

After I got a stitch in my side running down Divinity Road I walked for a bit. It occurred to me that I need more walks in my life. (They wash the mind, clarify the thoughts, allow fully formed sentences to appear like ghosts in my head.)

Home again, I took the laundry down from the line outside. Earlier we ate bacon sandwiches in the garden. I don't know if the Man did it just to humour me or not, but we sipped pineapple juice, and he read me an op-ed piece on Obama while I read him Tim Dowling at the supermarket checkout. At one point I laughed so hard I worried the bite I'd just taken would drop right out of my mouth. Now the dark has sagged over East Oxford. The kitchen is glowing yellow (the yellow walls make that happen, I think). My very muddy shoes are in the middle of the hallway, and my left leg is spotted with dirt. I think I'll have a bath.

The Anxiety of Age

I hear this in my head. I hear, I'm too young. I want to say, how can you be too young, but I don't say anything at all in response. I think, well, maybe I am. I look for evidence of it. Who got published at 22? Who had a relationship at 22 that lasted past 23? Who had a relationship at 22 that lasted past 23 that was healthy and beautiful and went on and on and on? Who did anything meaningful at all at 22, except die, maybe. There were a lot of 22-year-olds, a lot of 20-year-olds even, who died in wars.

We live in such a perverse world. I mean this in the most literal sense possible. Opposition, contradiction. We value youth, we say. We want our Hollywood stars fresh-faced, wrinkle-free. But real youth--the youth measured not by lines on a forehead but by years, by how much we've done, by how much we haven't done--we disregard. We call it cute, we call it charming. We want our fashion models that way because we don't want our fashion models to be anything we respect. Then we draw a line.

All we've done is extend adolescence. When I was a teenager I used to think that the ideal age to be was somewhere in one's 20s. I used to think that that's what everyone craved. Teenagers wanted to be older, everyone else wanted to be younger. And now I find I've reached what I thought was the golden era, the time-of-all-times, only to learn that I'm still in the teenage-hood of society. Nobody thinks a 20-something can do anything worthwhile, because we're, as they say, still learning.

This has turned into more of a diatribe than I meant it to be. All I meant it to be was a thought: that here I am, paying my own rent, expected to make a fool of myself. I know what I write now will, in ten year's time, be irrelevant; I know my tone will change, my voice, my point of view. But still, I'd like to think that if I'm old enough to support myself, I'm old enough to be trusted with my own heart, my own soul.

Living in a Yurt in Kathmandu? I Saw the Status Update.

Has Facebook made the high school reunion redundant?

Yes, I realize I'm delving into the trite and the technical, but a few months ago I received an invite to my high school reunion and, to steal a phrase from Carrie Bradshaw (not something I ever saw myself doing, ever), I couldn't help but wonder: in an era where every breath we take is published and publicized, what's the point?

I saw myself standing with my colleagues on the campus where we spent our awkward years, nodding my head. "Oh, so you're working in finance? Yeah, I thought I saw that on Facebook. Married? I noticed your relationship status had changed. Babies? Your album was cute. Grad school? Running your own business? Running seven marathons a year? Converting to Mormanism? Living in a yurt in Kathmandu? I saw the status update."

In the heady days before Facebook, when it was possible for someone you'd spent four intensely uncomfortable years with to slip completely off your radar in a day, I envisaged the high school reunion with some satisfaction. My social discomfort at the time, my shy, blushing-at-everything countenance, made me the perfect candidate for a major five-years-later comeback. I would breeze into the room looking gorgeous and tanned (why do we think that tanned is somehow an indicator of good physical and emotional health?), my hair styled precisely to the trends of the moment, my clothes impressive in their well-tailored flattery and their obvious expense. I would have someone at my arm from well outside the sphere of the Santa Ynez Valley--an Englishman, preferably, who I'd met in New York City, where I'd settled after college to finish my novel (the one with the big advance) and write an enormously popular column. I would be a little tired--just got back from a trip to South Africa, research for my next book, you know--but the transformation from angst-ridden outcast to real-world success would be stunning.

But here's the truth of it: we can't shock each other anymore. Everyone I'm friends with on Facebook is already going to know what I look like these days, that I'm living abroad, that I'm getting another degree. If they read this blog they'll even know that I'm poorer than dirt and have no wildly popular column to boast about. We grew up with each other, my classmates and I, but then (and we were really the first generation to do this) we continued growing up with each other, remotely. We saw all the college relationships, distilled to a single line ("in a relationship with...", "it's complicated with.."), all the parties, distilled to a wittily-named online album. We saw the shifts in geography, the aquisition of degrees (or not), the weddings, the children, the message that so-and-so wrote to so-and-so. What's left to tell?

I ask myself, too: am I bitter because I'm not going? In that sophomore-year vision of an eight-year-older me, I never once considered skipping the event. But here I am, and the pressures of adulthood dictate that I stay put at the end of April, remain in Oxford, with (go figure) my Englishman, working on (go figure again) my book, living my already very public life. (But frankly, the way the weather is looking today, you couldn't pay me to miss Oxford in full springtime bloom.)

A very close friend of mine wrote me a letter recently. "To be perfectly honest," she wrote, "I think without you there I would be reverted back to the shy/awkward/semingly semi-retarded person I was at Dunn," and the awful truth is, so would I. I can picture the scene much more clearly on this side of graduation. I would stand there, with my loyal Englishman at my arm, looking nice, dressed well, holding in my head the knowledge of my in-process book, my Oxford life, the places I've been, the places I'll go, and I would become as dumb and uncomfortable as I was at 15.

Maybe I ought to be happy that Facebook has made it possible for me to feel smug without ever having to set foot on the campus of my alma mater. Maybe it's not that Facebook has made the high school reunion redundant, exactly; it's that it's made it redundant for people who only ever considered going for the shallow aim of proving a point (i.e., you were wrong about me; in fact, I was wrong about myself). Maybe it's that it will make the event less about showing off and more about socializing in a genuine way.

I'll never know--but, because I can, because this is the world we're living in and this is who I am in it now, I'll blog about it anyway.

The Breathing Space Between Hilary and Trinity

My mood at the moment: lustful. I lust for longer days, warmer evenings, summer dresses. I lust for new clothes (I spend hours at the computer, clicking photographs of things I can't afford). I lust for the glow of inspiration to sparkle into a frenzy of of productivity. And by wanting this so much, I stay stuck (it's the trickery of Spring).

The city has emptied herself again, tipped the students out, and we see who is left. "The arselickers who stayed," Philip Larkin called them (called us). But all I can think is that now that they are gone I will go to the Bodleian and get lost amongst the books.

Suddenly Monday nights are blank in a good way, they are quiet again, and as I glide wraithlike down the High street under eleven o'clock darkness there might be no one but me in all the city, no one but me and the lonely kebab vendor, in his cloud of grease and chip smells, no one but me and the lonely kebab vendor and the ghosts crawling over the college walls, frolicking in the gardens while they can.

(The Man gets home late, I hear him undressing and the birds starting to wake simultaneously; he slips into bed beside me while the night is melting into morning, and our window is wide open).

I forget how still Jericho is. On Plantation Road I lean against the curb with my bicycle, so warm I've shed even my cardigan, and wait for a few minutes just to feel the sun and the stillness. Later a friend and I sit in the garden with a bottle of strong beer between us, chasing a pool of sunshine to the edge of the grass. It's like a wilderness this far away from the house, hugging the brambles coming over the fence.

We talk of Africa. I haven't been to Africa, I almost say, but the truth is that I have. I forget that I have; the Africa I've been to is smoky, spicy, sultry in the way I imagine the Middle East to be (but how would I know?). Not the Africa I used to dream about. But then, we all have different Africas, maybe; and I think about how complicated our relationship with place is, anyway, how much love and experience it takes to get to the root of it.

Later I meet the Man for a drink; we should go back to Fés soon, he says, apropos of nothing, nothing but the strange exhilaration which has overtaken everyone now that the weather is turning warm again. Is it really only the warmth, the clarity of light, that makes us believe in the glory of the future, the adventure of a summer, again?

Funny, I think.

Reading...*

I'm doing a reasonable amount of reading at the moment. Revisiting Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy (secretly thinking, ok, if she can win a Booker, why can't I?), alongside heavy perusal of a book called Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War by Peter Leese. This may or may not be research for something; it remains to be seen (or admitted).

Also finishing Beloved. My opinion of it this time around is cloudy at best. It's a shame, because my hatred for it was so pure for so many years. Overwritten, overwrought, over-hyped. Simple. Now I think, there may be no joy in reading it, but maybe I was a little hard on Toni Morrison, because sometimes there's something just this side of beautiful about the whole thing. Maturity breeds indecision, it would seem.

Also on my mind: Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk, which I'm strolling through for structural and narrative inspiration (this may or may not be the reason for my recent obsession with seasons).

*The title of this post refers not to "Reading" the place but in fact the act of "reading" a book, to clarify any possible confusion...

Midmarch

On the way to work, sudden blossoms. They came overnight. First the delicate yellow flowers outside our front door, now, on the trees, a bloom of white. It's warm enough to cycle in ballet flats, no socks--that's a good warm, it's all I'd ask of March. Yesterday, we ate lunch outside, in the garden.

With these sudden blossoms comes, too, a sudden remembrance of my love for the city. I hope this infusion of affection seeps into the work I'm doing on the book. The freeze of winter has made me cold about the project, not lacking in theoretical enthusiasm but lacking in the ability to translate thought into word. I've been drawn into myself like a creature curled in its own shell. I wouldn't want to make this malady specific, wouldn't want it to lose its poetry by pinpointing it preciesely, giving it a name, say, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Then again, perhaps it's like the aquisition of a degree: Miranda Ward, GAD, SAD. (Or, indeed, like a Dr. Seuss rhyme).

But I don't think it's like this. I think what I feel in winter is a choice. I like to wrap myself in the cocoon of my own worries, like to hibernate in my study, fretting, picking at my own fingers, sighing, watching the naked trees, thinking that my projects are languishing, my ability shrinking. It makes the transition to Spring sweeter, makes me feel like, as soon as the blossoms come, I can shed my ugly countenance, wear something nicer for the Summer.

I wasn't always like this. I'm a California girl, you see; not obsessed with seasons, not even aware of them except for the changes in light and the subtle shift of colour. I write this often, so it must be important to me. I write, often, too, of how my time in Boston made me aware of something I'd never known before, about my own reaction to the malleability of days, my own obsession with the weather. (The Man says that when I enthuse about temperature or sun or rain in the way that I can, sometimes, I become in that moment almost perfectly British.)

But still, here we are, at the edge. I'm hoping that the expanding sunlight makes the work, too, expand, so that it fills the days like blossoms and warmth. Punting weather, garden weather.

In Between the Crack of the Bed and the Wall

My knees are stiff from being bent in the same position for hours. My papers are spread across the couch like a dropped deck of cards. As part of my research, I started putting post-its on a map of Oxford earlier but they've all come off (the map to limp, the post-its too acquiescent) and now at my feet is a puddle of pink strips. I've been picking continuously at my right pinky all day. Earlier, I had a glorious run in the almost-sunshine, wearing shorts, which I haven't done in so long, followed by an hour-long bath, in which I listened to classic.fm and read Pat Barker's Regeneration, so my head is full of choral music and shell-shocked dreams. Every time I think about what I'm working on I feel a tiny jolt of panic.

"Don't let your silly dreams fall in between the crack of the bed and the wall," I hear, and I think, I'm trying not to, really.

In short, I need to get out of the house.

Here in the House which was the Site of Our Budding Love

1.

I suddenly feel weary with the anticipation of a Saturday. Here I am at my desk, which is not a proper desk but a slab of coarse wood, which used to be the kitchen table, staring out at the garden behind the house thinking thoughts of Springtime, Springtime which is still just beyond our reach. There are yellow flowers and a few misty buds, but the trees are still blank, the grass still pale, the dead leaves of last year still plastered to the frosty pathway.

We're in the time-between-seasons; you wake up one morning and here it is, Spring, and you put on a light coat, you dispense of your winter boots, but by mid-afternoon it's Winter again and shivering you cycle home against a fierce wind that belongs to January, not March.

2.

I need a chair big enough to swallow me. I don't want to sit at my desk with my legs crossed neatly, dangling toward the ground, I want to fold them beneath myself, I want them to have freedom and space. The thing is of course that none of this furniture is ours, but now that we've lived here--how long? nearly two years?--it fits us. It owns us if we don't own it.

I think about this sometimes (I've probably written about it before, too). What anchors us to this house is not possession. All that we own, between us, is a bed. You could say that's too symbolic to be true, but it is true, and the only reason we even own the bed is because some friends were getting rid of it and thought that maybe we would want to graduate from a folding futon to a proper mattress-and-headboard bed.

So we have a bed and our books. We sound portable. But I don't think we are as portable as all that. Here is the site of our budding love. How do you take that with you when you go?--say, the memory of sitting on the kitchen floor, midnight, two weeks in, picking apart a chicken carcass from the fridge, sipping a gin and tonic; the memory of the first walk to the bus stop, the smell of early summertime and the sunlight and the way he puts his sunglasses over your eyes because it's early and you need a shield, and a piece of insurance, something to tie you together.

Because the thing is that while we're here, they aren't just memories; I can actually see a two-years-younger version of ourselves sitting in the garden watching the nine o'clock sunlight fade behind the East Oxford terraced houses. I haven't actually converted these things into memory yet. I know I need to start doing it, like a computer caches old emails (if that's what they do), or my mind will start to feel cloudy and crowded, but. But.

3.

(A little truth about myself: sometimes I mix up Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth. And Henry David Thoreau, because of Walden Pond. All those Ws. Even though I've been to Walden Pond. One sticky Boston summer. I ate potato chips on the way there, bikini beneath black dress, and it was clear as anything but when we drove up to the pond the world suddenly clouded over and a few drops of rain hit our heads and then a crack of thunder, a fissure of lightening across the sky. So we didn't swim in Walden Pond after all.)

4.

I'd like to wear a summer dress, today; or a pair of cutoff denim shorts, like I am seven again, and a fluttery blouse that lifts in the gentle wind. I'd like to see all of our clothes--his shirts, my knickers--our sheets--hanging on the line in the garden. That's the nicest thing, here, in summer. Looking over the fences and seeing that everybody on the street has hung their washing outside.

And the days of the barbecues. Walk outside in the early Sunday afternoon, smell the char and the smoke from next door, or from your own garden. One day we spend hours outside, into the night, lying on a blanket. The boys burn old pieces of wood in the barbecue just for fun. We leave all the plates and bowls outside until the next morning.

5.

So it's funny to think that for all that, it isn't ours (ownership being a thing about money, not memory). Still, here we are on a Saturday, doing our laundry, our dishes, he bringing me tea while I work, Billie Holiday drowned out by the sound of the washing machine shuddering its way through another load, passing through this in-between season and into another.

The Friday Dump

My brain, today, has decided to be very basic. I mean that I don't feel capable of complicated thought or action. And I don't know for sure what the inside of my head looks like (thankfully), but I'm imagining it full of words. Today those words are as follows:

eat
sleep
eat more
sleep more
run?
write
hate work
meh

Fridays are the worst. Every Thursday evening, after hours of class, after reading, after pondering the next stage of my book (which I am, by the way, totally overthinking now), I feel both intellectually stimulated and emotionally/physically exhausted. More than that, I feel the overwhelming urge NOT TO GO TO WORK ON FRIDAY, because I know that what I'd rather do is sleep in and then spend the day eating at my desk and writing. But because we have to pay this thing called rent (and indeed our bills, which always come floating through the letterbox at the worst possible times), what I do instead is wake up, stagger round the house eating cereal and trying to remember how to dress myself, leave the house, cycle halfway down Hurst Street, realize by seeing my own reflection in a car window that I've completely forgotten my helmet, cycle back home, retrieve the helmet, head to work.

It's an impossible situation, really. As soon as I get to work I remember that as far as jobs go, mine isn't half bad, and I like the people that I work with, I like that it's a school, I like, moreover, that they pay me regularly. And I know that to a certain extent it's good to have one foot on the ground, so to speak; last summer when I wasn't working I was so fretful about money, and about how I was spending my time, that I forgot what the real world is like, and neglected to write as much as I could (and should) have. But I know this is not what I want to be doing, this photocopying, filing, organizing job, and I know that come September, when I have another degree and (hopefully) a manuscript, I'll need to make some decisions. Days like this make me think the decisions will be easy; but the truth is they won't.

Funnily Enough, Stephen King, There ARE Exceptions

So I got up "early" this morning (read: not five minutes before I have to leave for work) so that I could write something, but now I'm going to scrap that something in favor of something else. See, I opened up Firefox this morning and saw my Google quote of the day (yeeeeah....I'm a certifiable nerd), courtesy of Stephen King:

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."

At first I thought, okay, fair enough. I see what he's saying. If you have to search for something it's probably not going to be the most natural word in the sentence, it might obscure the meaning, it isn't necessary, blah blah blah.

But then I thought, hang on. Stephen's success is undeniable, but it's not for his, er, literary prowess that he's famous so much as for his accessibility. Am I wrong? Am I missing something brilliant about the way he crafts phrases? Because last time I checked, I wouldn't actually want to write like Stephen, no matter how much I'd love to reach his level of (monetary) achievement.

(And do you know what? I just used an online thesaurus to find an alternative to the word "success" ("achievement") because, frankly, it's earlier than I'm usually up and my brain isn't working properly and SUE ME, STEPHEN.)

My writing process has changed over the years, though not drastically, but I'll tell you one way in which it has: I'm a more careful writer today. Part of what I do when I write something which isn't rushed and ranty (i.e. this) is spend a lot of time considering individual words. I will actually stop halfway through a sentence and reconsider one word because the rhythm is off, say. And in instances like that I find searching for synonyms is not so much like searching for answers as for inspiration.

So in short, I beg to differ, Stephen.

Recently

I have a new song obsession. These things come over me suddenly, and when they do, I pity anyone who has to share a house with me (in this case, the Man). Hearing the same rhythms over-and-over-again-for-hours-upon-hours. But it makes me more productive. Or maybe it's that I obsess when I'm already feeling productive. I don't know which and, frankly, the whole thing is weird enough that I don't really know if I want to delve any deeper.

(Because you asked, here's my current favorite. Click on "Golly Sandra" to hear what my house sounds like at the moment.)

A lot of people recently have said to me, "I don't know where the autumn went, how is it already a new year, how is it already mid-March?" and I've been saying back, "I don't know, but I feel the same way." As humans, we're incapable of processing time in the way we think we're supposed to. But then I looked at my calendar and I realized that I probably feel this way because I had something happening EVERY FREAKING DAY IN NOVEMBER. Sometimes poetry doesn't explain things as well as I like to think.

Lately, I've been on a constant sock-and-stocking hunt. I've actually altered outfits because I can't find the right garments for my feet. I don't know where they go, exactly, but I do think I know what they're telling me: it's about time for Spring. Bare legs, bare feet.

Speaking of which--I've been seeing blossoms. Not fully-fledged, springtime-is-here blossoms, but the sweetest little buds. There are some by our front door. It's nice.

In the Stone Circle, the Unpronouncable Village, the Widest High Street in Britain, the Place Where the Thames Starts

After we arrive in Bedwyn, I tell the Man that my right boot is still making funny sounds.
"Funny sounds?" he says.
"Yeah. Like a horse clopping down the road."
I shake my right foot. I can feel something jiggling. I've had this feeling off-and-on since we came back from New York. He follows the movement of my leg.
"It's because your HEEL IS ABOUT TO FALL OFF," he tells me.
I look down. The heel of my boot is dangling from several rusty nails. Several questions pop into my head all at once. How have I not noticed this before? Why did I somehow think that the jiggling was coming from the toe of my boot? And, more pressing still: how am I going to cope with a broken boot in a village so small that the first cab driver we call says, "oh no, sorry, I'm just having myself a cup of tea, I can't pick you up"?

In Avebury, where we end up after a pint and a perusal of the Guardian whilst waiting for the third cab driver we call to arrive, we meet up with friends and I am able to borrow the wellies of an 11-year-old boy whose feet are definitely at least a size bigger than mine. The Man gestures wildly as we stand on a windy ridge overlooking a circle of giant stones (only in England); he punches a hole in his Barbour.
"We're a mess," I say. I like our mess, but still.

It's overcast and the children want to climb the stones, roll down the hills. A humourless pair of English hippies in moon-patterned trousers and tie-dye jumpers tries to stop them: in future re-tellings of this story (and there will be many), they say, Don't climb the rocks. This is our temple; this is our Church. But in all truth they do not say this, just look disapprovingly, just bark . They remind me of the puckered old woman in the Great Tew church telling us: What do they think this is, a nursery? In my day children would never be allowed to play in a place like this. The hippies with their sour countenance, their wild hair and ugly demeanor, move on. Ned the puppy pulls me along the side of a hill. We have no time for hippy temples, for rules or regulations. Only time to stand windblown on a ridge, to watch children rolling so fast and so far it makes us fret (but briefly).

In Mildenhall which is pronounced Minal we sleep above the pub. There is no store in the village and no school; the people are rooted to the place only through a town hall and an eating-and-drinking establishment. We mention we might want a taxi to the train station after dinner.
"A taxi?" says the woman.
"Oooh I dunno about that," says the man. We feel like the city-slickers, even in our torn Barbours, our too-big wellies.

So we stay; in a room which is the essence of the English bed-and-breakfast. Shabby floral curtains, pulled back to reveal the pub sign, the cobbled pavement, the thatched cottages across the narrow street. Upholstered chairs, worn and soft. An ugly purple duvet, a flowery third pillow.

"Why are there three pillows?" I want to know. The Man holds up the third pillow.
"Just look at it," he says. Then he hits his head on the mantelpiece-above-the-bed.
"Why is there a mantelpiece above the bed?" I also want to know, but the simple answer is that there is no why; the why is in its existing at all. And in the morning, we have a greasy and delicious full English breakfast while the owners' three black poodles wander around the front room like a trio of furry balloon animals.

Passing through Marlborough; the widest High Street in Britain, though you wouldn't think it now. Just a parking lot now--a thick row of vehicles clogging up the centre. But look at a picture of it a hundred years ago and it is impressive. Like a sea between the two sides of the road.

Now past the place where the Thames starts.
"Look, you know the Thames, the Thames in London, this is where it begins," says the boys' mother, one hand on the wheel, pointing over the bridge.
"We know the Thames is in London," says one of the boys, pouting, pressing his face against the side of the car. "You don't have to keep saying, 'the Thames in London.'"
"But look," we say, "this is where it starts, isn't that incredible?" And then the Man adds, "and it goes through Oxford, too. It splits into two, but it's still the Thames."

(And then we can't remember, for a bit, which is the Isis and which is the Cherwell.)

Burford suddenly feels like home, because it's the Cotswolds--Cotswold stone, Cotswold colour. I am lost in the map of England, it's swallowed me completely, and every foray from the city where we live feels like magic and mystery (and so does every re-entry).

Oxford, Late Winter, Evening

I like to watch the steeples puncturing the sunset as I cycle home, showering the city with blood-orange colours, setting the tops of buildings alight. Such precise buildings: the filigree, the sculpted domes, the golden windows. The roads seem wider at this hour, and unpaved. I go towards home, towards the pub with the rusty bicycle outside, towards the café where magic (they say) happens. Towards the bare-wood-planked edifice of our love.

Earlier I ran mundane errands. I bought ugly things, useful things. I hate to spend my money on ugly, useful things. Razors, shampoo, tampons, condoms. I went to the self-checkout because I did not want to be seen. Please let them not think that this is what I do, what I do, in my red pencil skirt, my leather heeled brogues, my rust-coloured coat, after work, on a Friday evening. Let them not think that this city and this life has become so prosaic for me, because that would be an unfair representation, and even if I buy razors and tampons on a Friday evening while the air and the light is shimmering all around us, I also...

...have this thought: cycling to work, early morning. The sun coming down the wide, empty (unpaved) High. I had forgotten how much I love to see the city in this light. The closed, sour winter-me, so suddenly self-obsessed, so willing to be saddened or hardened, moved by the temperature, the darkened days, had forgotten this very simple thing; but all it took was a touch of light upon my skin to remember it.

(Still, strolling down Turl Street, I see a stationer is closing its doors for good, and in the Covered Market, past the fresh meat and leather and hot cookies, several shops wear signs: Sale. Last few days. Everything must go. I have thought for so long that the economy does not touch me, because I am poor anyway, I am in the throes of youth, but maybe, I think, I will miss the stationer, where I once bought a set of notecards, and the shop in the covered market where I once bought a blue satin clutch to go with my dress for a friend's wedding.)

Wednesday Morning in the Countryside

This morning, after we awoke to the sounds of an electric guitar and feeling of two terriers bouncing on our bed, after we packed the kids off to school (no, not our kids and no, not our terriers), after we cleaned up the puppy poo from the floor and loaded the dishwasher (alas, also not our dishwasher--a dishwasher being in my mind the height of domestic luxury) and bought cinammon rolls from the shop next door, we indulged, whilst waiting for a taxi to take us back to our real life in Oxford, in some television.

Some people, channeling fond memories of childhood, might opt for cartoons or sitcoms, but as the Man and I were not television children, and neither are we in the least bit ordinary, our greatest TV pleasure is anything that has to do with houses. Programs about selling houses, buying them, rennovating them, decorating them, living in them: it doesn't matter. We both seem to have this sickening need to scoff at how badly other people have designed their bathrooms, and/or drool over their opportunities for buying (and therefore fixing up) property.

This morning it was a program called "Wanted Down Under". A family was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to stay in Britain or make the move to Australia, and we followed them on a house-hunting expedition, slightly sullen teenage son in tow. Then it was "Axe the Agent", which, sadly, we only got middway through before our cab arrived. The family with the seven-bedroom house had just finished cleaning it up, but I still wouldn't buy it (too reminiscant of the sprawling ultra-new California mansions I loathed as a youth).

I don't know quite what it says about us that the sort of television we most enjoy watching is on at 10 am on a weekday morning.

Keeping Calm in the Year of the Plants

I need to start making some big decisions about the, er, book. It's reaching a point where I can no longer afford not to know, for instance, how it ends, or how it's structured. The problem, of course, is that in over-thinking these things, I've forced myself into a dark, dark corner. In this corner, nothing makes the least bit of sense, and things I thought I knew about the book (that it's written in first person, for instance) are shadowed with extreme doubt. Basically, this means that, at a moment when writing this book has never been so important, I can't actually write it. It may sound painfully inadequate, but...whoops.

Amidst a week of running into a brick wall, falling over, climbing up again, running back into the wall (who was it who said that stupidity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?), I also had a birthday, which has turned out to be the birthday of the plants. Three separate friends, completely independently, entrusted a living thing to me in honour of my advancing age. Apart from the fact that I quite like plants, I'm also trying to see this as a good omen, a metaphor for the creative process that I'm finding so difficult at the moment. It just needs nurturing (and, occasionally, a walk through the sunny garden, as my miniature yew tree apparently requires on a semi-regular basis).

Should, Want

Things I Should Do Today:

• go for a run
• make soup
• do the laundry
• write at least something related to the book

Things I Want To Do Today:

• sit on the couch bathed in sunlight
• have a nap
  

Notes on New York City V

In the museum, people move with false reverence. What we're affected by is not so much the painting, the sculpture, the historical or the avant-garde--it's the way we're all here together, but all separated by experience.

In front of my favourite Monet (and why should this be my favourite, this image of a cathedral I have never seen, cast in a light I have never experienced?), two women with their studying faces on. One (short dark hair, glasses, very still), hands crossed at chest; the other (longer dark hair, full of nervous energy), hands placed at the small of her back, bag worn across her chest and in front, as if she's afraid of something, wants to hold her possesions close. They seem to be looking for something in the painting, something, perhaps, in the cathedral itself. Sharing (or trying to recall) a memory that neither of them actually owns. I want to sit in front of the painting, as I do every time I am here (there is a bench placed before it as if just for me) but they distort my view, they may as well have stepped into the image itself, and I'm too fascinated by watching them watch it to pay any real attention to Rouen Cathedral.

Walker Evans' collection of postcards. Americana distilled. The streets were wider then; no, that's not right, they were only emptier. People against a patchwork backdrop: LA, Nashville, church spires, telephone wires. Shiny black automobiles, from the days when they could still be called "automobiles," still had some dignity.

Gauguin's Tahiti is enough to make anyone crave a warmer place. I photograph it in black and white to see what, when the image is bled of colour, is left. Still something, I'll tell you that much.

Irrisistible for the artist to make a sketch. One girl, on the floor, cross-legged, pony-tailed, makes a sketch of a lumpy, pasty female nude. Her breasts uneven (the nude, not the girl). A man, in flat cap and scarf, has brought his own folding chair, sits before a scultpure, balances his pad on his knees. People peer over his shoulder; the rendition is good, exact.

Back on the street, the Upper East Side, the sunlight is almost too much after the shadowed light, the light made for looking at things. We squint our way down Park Avenue. There's nothing to eat in the Upper East. What, I say, do rich people not need to eat? Do they, I ask, as we pass Gucci, Prada, Christian Dior, get their sustenence from expensive shoes and ugly handbags? Do they get off on knowing that we will find their wide-avenued world unpenetrable?

Probably, the Man says, to shut me up. I'm hungry, therefore irrational.

Notes on New York City IV

Nothing here is as it seems. The museum in black and white; it's not the paintings we care about, really, it's the people looking at them, isn't it? Karl Rove in Federal Hall, touring the Lincoln exhibit. (He has a crushing laugh, loud and ugly). The shop that proclaims to be "your 24 hour pot dealer" is really only an emporium for vases decorated with nipples. A barbershop proudly displays posters of boys wearing perfect bowl-cuts, men in mullets. Another features images of men in tight boxer shorts, dancing with their hair straighteners. Am I in a Dr. Seuss book? (Oh, the places--) Unnecessary quotation marks everywhere. How about this one: "free soup" with any sandwich! A plaque tells of a place called The Highway Leading to the Fortification Called Oyster Pasty. A friend takes us up the steps of a church; look closer, he says, so we lean towards the cathedral pillars and see a baby's head emerging from a vaginal cornstalk.

All the absurdities. A sign that tells us both to cross the street and not to cross the street at the same time; even the signals have become confused, here. The windows of Bergdorf Goodman's look as rich as any painting in the Met. I find a place outside Trinity Church where the Queen stood in the 1970s; Prince Philip, reads the inscription in the tile, stood nearby. Oh, no photographs, not here, says the woman selling posters at the flea market, and I retreat from her snarls and stumble into a rack of fur coats, brown and white, urban bears. On Madison Avenue, our first night in the city, cold and hungry, we look across the broad street (broad as an ocean) and see the Oxford Café. Seen from a certain angle, the statue of first world war soldiers on the eastern edge of Central Park becomes real; shadowy men pierce a wintry tree with freshly sharpened bayonets (do bayonets need to be sharpened?).

And I have a photograph to prove every single one of these things; but as one placard in the museum points out: "a photograph of an angel is either a miracle or a hoax." (Even the photograph in this post is merely a reflection).

Notes on New York City III

On the subway, rumbling under the map of Manhattan, somewhere or other beneath the dots, the lines and grids, the green space of parks, the skyscraper dreamscape, I read this:

"Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people."

It is Don Delilo, White Noise. Five years ago or so, I tried to read White Noise. It was an assignment and I rallied against it with all my will; I threw my late-teenage energy, such as it was, into hating the novel, into finding it blasé, so over, so dated, so not something I could relate to. Now I read it in between subway stops. 81st street and 42nd street are the bookends for one chapter; 14th and 72nd frame another. I find myself transfixed. Why is this, my dad wants to know, why the change of heart? I say maybe it's because I failed to see the humour in it the first time around. I say maybe it's because I was too afraid to recognize certain anxieties as being mine, too; that maybe it's because, now that I openly own these anxieties, I can allow myself to enjoy the language.

Here's a situation. Bryant Park. It's fashion week but the only people outside the white tents are the nobodies, the people who work for the people who work for the people who do something related to fashion, and they're badly dressed, they look cold, so we skirt the park. On the library side we try to identify the buildings around us. Lit up; dizzying. A man in a baseball cap comes close, asking for spare change. My reaction is always to turn the other way. I become absorbed in a bench. Is it some sort of denial, or is it just smart? I can hear him talking to the Man, and the Man's two brothers, twins, nine years his junior.

"You take care of your sons," the beggar tells the Man. I don't know where this places me. And the funniest thing of all of course is that he does take care of them, as if they were his sons; and when he drops them off at the airport, leaves them there, he frets for their safety, their peace of mind.

***

"It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city," Delilo writes. "All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography."

I always liked the subway. I like it more now, and I have Delilo's staccato words in my head whenever I mount the steps. I have no way of knowing whether the sentences that start to form when the cold sunlight hits my face are mine or his; but they end up being mine, twisted into something that only I could say. That's all ownership is--and anyway, nobody owns anything here.

Notes on New York City II

The thing about jet lag is this: it doesn't just mess with your sense of time, it messes with your sense of place. This is a far more serious offense. Time is nebulous enough on its own that when, for a few days, we've totally lost track of it, when we're hours ahead of or behind ourselves, we feel that maybe it is, this secret force we live by, just asserting itself for awhile.

Place is different. There's nothing so off-putting as falling asleep in the late afternoon, knowing you're in Oxford, and waking up convinced you're in New York, and being therefore in a New York state of mind, and realizing only by the voices outside, crawling their way home after an evening at the pub, only by the smell of your house (a nice smell, a specific smell), that your body is still where you left it hours earlier to sleep.

I don't know how to count the hours, speaking of them. And I never know how to describe the time before a transatlantic flight: is it yesterday that we left, really, truly? I can hardly convince myself that this can be so--that yesterday, whatever that means, we woke up late, we had lattes and bagels, we took the subway to midtown, and then again back uptown, we ate a Korean lunch across the street from Columbia. And I ask this, not to be pedantic or navel-gazing, particularly, but because I genuinely do not know how to answer it: was it yesterday or today or some time in-between that we sat eating croissants at an altitude so high it is usually reserved for our hopes and dreams alone, that I wondered, because my mind had gone numb in the hours of no movement while we sped over an ocean, if the correct way to spell student was s-t-u-d-e-n-t or s-t-u-d-a-n-t? My copy of White Noise now bears proof of this struggle, but I don't know exactly when the struggle occured. Student. Studant. Student. If I spell it wrong, will they let me back into the country? (In the end, I spelled it right).

***

Photography is banned at the Institute of Contemporary Photography. Never mind irony, or paradox, or, indeed, copyright: there was a large part of me that wanted to turn round upon seeing this sign, back into the night wind, that wanted to say, even though admission was free, this isn't worth it. Because I've started to become convinced that the value of a gallery or a museum or an exhibition space has almost nothing to do with the art being viewed. It's about the art being created, the human traffic, the art that could potentially be created as a result. If I keep following this train of thought I realize of course that this is impossible, that only in a futile world could things be so: surely a passive audience is necessary, if for nothing but to stroke an artist's fragile ego, reassure him that his work has some value, at least in terms of time.

But time. One time, we took the metro, from the village to the upper west side. As we were underground, staring at our own feet, moving fast through a rare darkness, things happened outside. Rain fell. Night fell. Things we couldn't know until we re-emerged. Before we alighted at our station I looked at the bookmark in my novel, a thank-you note from a friend. Our Oxford address on it. I liked the way the address looked, the way the country (England) was not specified, the way our last names (Ward, Cansell, things that identify us in ways we can not change) were not specified. It seemed friendly, familiar, small in a city where nothing and everything is small.

Notes on New York City I

The last time I was here: two years ago, almost to the day.  A good friend and I meet for a drink this time, late in the evening, at the bar of the same hotel we stayed in then.  I am, as always, delighted by the circular.  Still there seems suddenly to be a strange disconnect between my life in Oxford and my being here.  I feel in-between.  This is not a place I've ever called home (Boston or California, say), but not a place completely new to me, either.  I am in my own country, but things that used to seem prosaic now delight me (lemon flavored iced tea, Smartfood, Banana Republic).  

We go to Times Square to feel small, at the mercy of flashing lights and a crowd with no beginning and no end, no direction, no understanding of time or place.  The wide boulevards of the Upper West Side seem like temporary home.  We all go to the Met, we all enter the same museum, but when we leave it's like we went to six different places and talk past each other.  My Met was in black and white, all modern, all about the people, not the art.  The Man's, I think, was Renaissance and photography.  Maybe this is a metaphor for the city, but I don't know yet.

In the hotel room which is hot and small and comfortable I am typing on a computer that is not mine thinking that sleep is what I crave, because by the rhythms of my body clock it is darkest morning.  I sleep well here, and heavy.  My dreams are infused by the sense of this city and the memory of other places.  Sometimes I think that my dreams, and not my thoughts, are the perfect manifestation of a home-like feeling, but when I wake up I can never recapture it in any terms but the most abstract.  

How to Pack for a Midwinter Vacation

1. Make sure ahead of time that your day is as full as possible (I'm talking 7 hours of class full)
2. Sleep in
3. Skip lunch; do a load of laundry instead so that all your clothes will still be wet by evening
4. Leave the house
5. 8 hours later, have two pints of Addlestone's on a semi-empty stomach
6. Head home and toss some stuff in a bag

Oddly enough, this may have turned out to be one of the smoothest packing jobs in my personal history. No wardrobe crises, no major omissions (like, oh shit, I forgot SHOES), no sitting on the suitcase to make it shut. Go us.

In other, more exciting news, the Man and I are headed to New York City for the week. If you live there, have lived there, are visiting, have visited--let me know. I want suggestions for groovy off-the-beaten-path things to do. We have wifi at our hotel so I'll blog as often as possible...

House of Words

I'm on a bit of a design kick these days. Last week the Man and I went for a lovely dinner with some friends, and then spent the entire ten minute walk home discussing how we would re-do their kitchen if it was ours. We didn't even get to the rest of the house.

I have also developed a--let's call it a "healthy interest"--in bookshelves. Anyone who's been to our house knows that the Man and I don't seem to believe in any form of decorating except to pile the books a little higher. But if we were a little wealthier, we could have some seriously cool bookshelves, as the following photos illustrate. Who needs art when you have these?

Having said that, the Man and I are cultivating a fondness for big, bold prints like these ones, discovered courtesy of this blog:
The more I think about it, we seem to be literally building a house of words (here I am, a writer, and here he is, a researcher). I think the visual manifestation of this started with this print, which the Man picked up from work (on the other side, it's actually a promo poster for Penguin):Our most recent acquisition is a fabulous little print from the lovely Badaude, who offered a wonderful books-for-artwork exchange last month. Since we are already the proud owners of the print she was offering, and since we are neighbors, we popped over one chilly evening for a glass of wine and a perusal through some really rather stunning stuff. I'm such a fan of this sort of old-fashioned bartering system, and, as the Man pointed out, there's something weighty about owning a piece of art that you have a personal tie to. (When he said this I suddenly remembered going to Santa Barbara with my parents as a child, to this artist's studio, and how my favorite paintings growing up were always the two we'd chosen on that day.)

It was a tough choice, but here's what we've ended up with from Badaude (the photo doesn't do the incredible green real justice). It's called "wake-up call" and the man in the middle is, the artist told us, actually Edgar Allen Poe, though she hadn't realized it at first. How apropriate: