Clown and Pelican, Entertaining Crowd

A few weeks ago, I experienced my very first St. Giles' Fair. Surely this must be some kind of secret Oxford induction: in the dead-quiet of early September, when the leaves are on the cusp of changing and a hush has come over even the busiest streets, suddenly the flame of festivity erupts on one of the city's most charming tree-and-college-lined roads. In my research, I read that, "since the nineteenth century, St. Giles' Fair has been held on the Monday and Tuesday following the first Sunday after St Giles' Day (1 September)"—a fittingly circuitous formula for a circus-esque display.

Here's what John Betjeman wrote about it in 1937 (in An Oxford University Chest):

"It is about the biggest fair in England. The whole of St Giles' and even Magdalen Street by Elliston and Cavell's right up to and beyond the War Memorial, at the meeting of the Woodstock and Banbury roads, is thick with freak shows, roundabouts, cake-walks, the whip, and the witching waves. Every sort of fairman finds it worth his while to come to St Giles'. Old roundabouts worked by hand that revolve slow enough to suit the very young or the very old, ageing palmists and sinister, alluring houris excite the wonder and the passions of red-faced ploughmen…. Beyond St Giles' the University is silent and dark. Even the lights of the multiple stores in the Cornmarket seem feeble…. And in the alleys between the booths you can hear people talking with an Oxfordshire accent, a change from the Oxford one."

It isn't so very different today, fundamentally: "Beyond St. Giles' the University is silent and dark...".

Historical photos of the fair show ladies under wide parasols, in sweeping black skirts and busty white blouses. The men wear caps at jaunty angles and plus-fours, or suits and bowlers. There are striped tents and little girls with ribbons in their hair. The great stone walls of the University are all but hidden. Elaborate, fairy-tale structures have been erected where once was only an empty avenue.

The caption of one photo, taken in 1895, reads: "A large crowd gathered in St Giles during the annual fair to watch the Fair Days Menagerie. A clown and a pelican are entertaining the crowd waiting to enter."

When I attend the fair, the outfits are t-shirts, scarves, and denim, and nobody carries a parasol, though they wouldn't need to anyway: it's a day as grey as they come. A mist settles on my bicycle as I wheel it through the crowd. There is none of the frivolous accordion music you expect at a fair, only the heavy thump of electronic beats and rock bands (the Man, who works in an office on St. Giles itself, came home that evening looking frazzled and as if he never wanted to go near the place again). The only people on the whirling carousels are white-haired women being photographed by their white-haired husbands, reliving the glory of their childhood one musical spin at a time. Today's young prefer the faster-paced rides: the roller-coaster outside the doors of a college, the things that spin and shake you into a state of blissful oblivion.

I am reviled by the prospect of such things, though a lifelong attraction to bumper cars is rekindled as soon as I see the shiny floor of the Dodgeum ring. Enormous stuffed animals, arcade games, and the universal sweet smell of the fair (cotton candy mixed revoltingly with fried foods) accost the senses at every turn. I have the sense that I have stepped off my cycle and into a Fellini film. I don't know quite where to look: at the Haunted House? The giddy teenagers in their tiny straight-leg jeans and pixie haircuts, cigarettes protruding from underage lips? The enormous pink polar bears on display, the food stalls, the patient tweed-clad fathers trying to keep up with their eager, bounding toddlers? I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest to see a clown and a pelican holding court. Part of me is disgusted, but another part of me can't help cracking an enormous grin.

**

When I get home I check the news, as if there might be something new, but there isn't. There's doom and gloom and the circus of the presidential election--McCain/Palin (a clown and a pelican?) making gaffes wherever they go, Obama making speeches, pundits and political analysts making predictions, everyone else making noise. The whole world appears to have been swallowed by the same Fellini film that took over St. Giles for two days in September.

that good-old-back-to-school-busy-season

I went to buy a new bath mat today, but they didn't have any under £12.99 that weren't all kinds of ugly, and I decided I'd rather not spend that much money on something I'm going to use to dry my feet off with after a lengthy soak. Too lazy to try anywhere else, instead I went down Broad Street and bought myself a few books--which came to a grand total of £13. But in retrospect, I'll take books over bath mats any day.

We have other people's mail coming through our letter box. Some of it I don't know how to send on, so it just piles up on the second desk in the study. We don't own either of the desks, but there they are, lit up by lamps that aren't ours either. I think if you stripped the both of us down to our own true possessions we would have nothing but books and clothes, in that order. I can't decide if that makes us free or just pathetic. But when you have somebody else's furniture crowding up the house you've come to think of as yours, even when it isn't, you start to feel tied down by things.

When I paid the tuition for my MA the other day, I swear my card looked weary when it came out of the machine. It looked up at me balefully as if to say: don't ever make me do this again. I spent a full quarter of an hour marvelling at the fact that I had never ever spent that much money in one easy go before. And I wonder, in a way I've never really wondered before, how all those people with their fancy strings of degree initials actually manage to pay for that much education.

But I'm distracted by the necessity of buying new books, and pens, and stationary. Eighteen years in you would think this might get tiring but there is something eternally satisfying about the back-to-school season, and I don't think that I could ever feel disappointed by the return to education.

It's funny to think of the formative memories I have from my early schooling. Mixing raisins with my apple juice, with disastrous consequences (I was put off raisins for years). Being in the bathroom at preschool and wondering what it would be like to pee standing up, like the boys did. Mouthing the words to a song and having the teacher call me aside after. Her gentle, crushing admonition. Saying my favorite color was white, and not pink, just to be different from all the other little girls. Running across the tarmac at snack-time, falling, scraping my knee, crying, being helped by a boy whose name I have no recollection of. Making stories with felt cutouts. The teacher who limped and carried a cane and frightened me so much that I dreaded the days when my mother would tell me she couldn't pick me up until after storytime. Children calling "na, na, na na na!" at each other on the playground for no good reason. Putting on a play I wrote in the second grade and later in the year coming home to my mother after discovering that King Arthur, our newest focus of study (we'd just finished a lesson on giants), hadn't been a actual king and asking when we were going to learn about real things.

***

It almost almost smells like autumn outside. And it's getting to be chilly. I wore a wool coat to a dinner the other night, and I wasn't sorry. Inside we wrap ourselves in duvets (I'm wrapped in one now). We refuse to put the central heating on until October of course.

Mostly I am in the back-to-school daze, and everything I think to write has left my head by the time I make my busy way back home. The house has become a refuge. Which is funny really. A few weeks ago there was the house down the road which burst into flame; and the fight at the pub at the other end of the street which warrented what seemed to be an entire fleet of police vans. This weekend we were startled into wakefulness by a pair of voices--male, female--arguing in that way that only couples do, and just when we thought maybe they had had their last go we saw the ambulance coming down the road and the man got in with a book tucked under his arm. In the morning we saw the blood pooled outside the house directly next door, where the head wound he had inflicted on himself by hitting the door had spilt onto the concrete. And after all that was over there was an incessent rapping across the street, all morning long, it felt.

Sure, we stick our heads out of the door. We can see other heads poking out, too. But I feel like this is part of living here, and the truth is that I still think we have the most beautiful house in the neighborhood, just like I think I have the handsomest bicycle in Oxford; and we cosy up to the rush of September leaves together: he now only semi-bearded, me wearing thick jumpers. It's winter in California, here: green, rain, cold sunshine, gentle light.

Sunday News Roundup (A Trifle Late)...

Just one on the agenda today, because, let's face it, apart from all the doom-and-gloom predictions about how shit the economy is, and how much shitter it's going to get, there's really been only one constant this week, and her name is Sarah Palin.

I have but three things to say about Ms. Palin (the very sight of whose name makes me feel anxious in a way I haven't since High School, when I was consumed with worry every day).

1. SHE IS A CREATIONIST. Who just recently acquired a passport. No, ladies and gentleman, this is not the latest Miss America, this is the potential President of the United States.
2. When, how, how and HOW did various (fairly respectable) media outlets decide that she not only isn't that bad, she's...er...an invigorating choice for VP? Am I living in an episode of the Twilight Zone?
3. Did I mention she's a CREATIONIST? Who just recently acquired a passport? 'Cos, see, we have this thing called the separation of church and state, and I'd quite like to see that upheld. Moreover, we have this thing called FOREIGN POLICY. Foreign. Policy.

If Ms. Palin is allowed anywhere near the White House—anywhere near—then I shall suggest a mass exodus from the USA.

In other news, the St. Giles fair is on in Oxford. I'm now of the opinion that you can't fully comprehend the word "surreal" until you've seen a roller-coaster shooting by the austere walls of an Oxford college, a Merry-Go-Round beside the Martyr's Memorial.

Crossing

In the old days, people would ask you how your crossing was--was it a rough crossing, or a smooth one? they would want to know. That was when the only way to get to Paris was over the thin, choppy stretch of sea called the English Channel, and it was much more of a production.

Now there is no crossing: only a long, swift, sweeping motion, like a wave of the arm--you fall asleep in Paris and wake in London, and there is just a tunnel, a fast train between two cosmopolitan cities. At the station everything is in French and English and all the announcements are made in both languages. Even at this early hour people are reading newspapers and preparing for their day in suits or swish trousers and high heels. It is impossible to tell why they are making the journey. I myself am making it to get my visa stamped.

"Is this your first presentation?" the man at passport control asks me about the visa, and I nod.

We stayed first in a cheap hotel and then at a friend's crumbling, recently sold apartment. On our last evening there we were having a meal on the mattress--cheese, paté, wine--when a girl came into the apartment to take away all of the furniture. It was embarrassing because our friend had forgotten to tell us she would be coming and had forgotten to tell her that we would be there. We slept without a mattress that night (last night), in the August heat, but it was okay somehow.

We walked around a fair bit, but because he had sprained his ankle the night before we left we had to take it easy. I read The Flaneur by Edmund White; it reminded me that Ernest Hemingway was hungry and poor in Paris, too. There is a passage in A Moveable Feast that I had forgotten until I read The Flaneur; it's long (less a passage and more a chapter) but the start of it goes: "You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food". Then he describes how he used to wind his way around the city avoiding all the places that made him hungry and tempted to spend money. But also he writes: "We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other." So there's that, and it's a far nicer thing than being able to afford a fancy hotel with a mattress or to enter every museum or shop for souvenirs and clothing that will just take up space anyway.

We drank café au lait facing the street so we could watch all the people. Our biggest expense was coffee, not accommodation or food. It was a good thing he had bought me The Flaneur, really; "the flaneur," White writes, "is...in search of a private moment, not a lesson." And, "Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone."

We had a kir each at Sartre's café, Café Flore, across from the Lipp where Hemingway eats in A Moveable Feast. Because the drinks were so expensive we drew them out, sipping slowly and delicately, enjoying being able to rest our feet while other people walked on by. The waiter brought us a plate of green olives and I sucked them from a toothpick and we picked the pits out from our teeth.

There is probably a lot more I could write but I'm tired. We've been on the road for most of August, it seems. We've been to Cambridge, the Cotswolds, Brighton, and Paris. Oxford has emptied completely, taking a tiny breath before she fills with students for the term. Even the Cowley road this morning as we walked back from St. Clements seemed wide and quiet; only a few cars trickling past, hardly any other pedestrians. I'm uploading photos and going to have a nap. It's September, and part of me doesn't know how this came to be, even though I've seen it happen so many times before.

My Age of Anxiety

I was flipping through the Observer magazine yesterday when I came across this article, by Harriet Green, which begins with black, bold lettering: “Welcome to the era of anxiety”. It goes on: “Generalised anxiety disorder is the world’s biggest mental health problem. But do we really have anything to worry about?”

On the facing page, the author holds up a sign that indicates she is worried about the credit crunch, global warming, drinking too much, her sex life, the price of her house, and, of course, being worried.

I waved the magazine excitedly at The Man (who has, if you’ll notice, graduated from being The Boy as his beard has reached an epic stage and he could no more be mistaken for a boy as I could).

“Look!” I cried, pointing. “Who does this remind you of?”

We had a good giggle.

But, as Green points out, “I accept many of my concerns seem unserious. And in public I make light of them, happily casting myself as a kind of female Woody Allen. But when I’m at home those ridiculous concerns can take over.”

Mine took over in spring of 9th grade, when I suddenly and seemingly spontaneously lost the ability to sleep peacefully, something that up until that point I had had no trouble doing at all. My body shook, my head spun, and I lived in a sort of bubble of terror.

To confound matters, I had just acquired my first boyfriend (which is not a term, at the age of 14, that necessarily means the same as it does later, and in this case it meant someone to make out with in the library stacks and hold hands with between classes, more a social rite of passage than a romantic affiliation) and I remember thinking, as I lay awake at night wondering if I was ill or just an insomniac: I have to get to sleep. I can’t be sick. If I don’t get to go to school tomorrow, I don’t get to see him.

To be in darkness was unbearable; I left the light on all night (almost a sin in our solar-powered house) and sometimes, when I thought I could hear the silence crawling into my ears and playing in my head, I put a CD into the boombox and listened to celtic guitar, or medieval chanting, at a volume just quiet enough to not float through the floor and into my parent’s bedroom. I was just old enough to recognize the shame in waking them for such a trivial matter, but just young enough, too, to wish that I could.

This was when I discovered that nights are twice as long as days, and a thousand times as lonely. By dawn I would drift into a state of half-sleep, and the singing of the alarm clock an hour later sounded like relief to my soul.

To comfort me, my father told me that when he was little and trying to get to sleep, he used to get the feeling that the corners of the room where forever receding; but by nighttime I felt alone again. I didn’t try to make a connection with my mother’s famous highway panic-attack, which crippled her driving confidence for years (only recently has she begun making the trek down to Orange County again on her own), or the stresses (mostly social) of my first year in high school.

Instead, I sought rescue in routine, and a host of obsessive-compulsive activities. I started sucking on “Moonlight Mints,” homeopathic, supposedly-sleep-inducing sweets my mother had picked up in an airport at some point, each evening, trying to convince myself that they were in some small way making me weary.

If the sleeplessness passed, the worry certainly never did. Five fretful years later, I found myself in a doctor’s office. I had passed from innocently anxious to severely obsessive-compulsive and back again. On the eve before I started a new job, I awoke with a jolt to all my old symptoms: the walls of my room seemed to be receding before my very eyes, I couldn’t be sure if I was nauseous or not, my heart beat fast. I went upstairs (I was staying the summer in my parents’ house) to the living room and flopped down on the couch. I fell asleep re-reading the same dull passage in Cosmopolitan about how to make your guy lust for you even more, but all summer long I battled with sleeplessness and shakiness, until one panicky evening, my father suggested that I might be suffering from an anxiety disorder.

“What?” I said.
“You know, panic attacks, that sort of thing,” he said. “Look it up.”
I went online. I couldn’t believe this had never occurred to me before. Every single one of my symptoms was named as an indication of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I felt instantly, physically better just knowing this.

I told the doctor that it wasn’t the worry, so much, but the physical symptoms, that I needed help with. I wanted some kind of reassurance that this was normal:

“I’m just amazed at how physical the manifestations are,” I told him. He was a physician’s assistant I had never seen before, our family doctor being on holiday, and he looked at me kindly.
“There’s no need to be embarrassed about it,” he said. “It happens to a lot of people.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to decide if this made me feel better or worse. I wanted to tell him about the way the room spun, the way my stomach churned and my heart raced how I shivered even in the heat of a California summer, but part of me worried (yes, worried) that he would tell me how unnatural this was. It had certainly not occurred to me, however, to be embarrassed about it.
“Sure,” he went on soothingly. “It even happened to me, when I was going through a really stressful time. You are talking about loose stool, aren’t you?”
I wanted to laugh with relief.
“No,” I said.
"Ah," he murmured. And I fancy that, despite his advice to me, he was slightly embarrassed now.

He gave me some pills, which I took home and promptly stashed away. I was genuinely afraid to take them. I read the possible side effects (always a mistake). I flipped through my copy of Overcoming Anxiety for Dummies so often that the pages started to look tired, trying to convince myself that what the doctor had prescribed me would help. Finally, egged on my parents, who I think were growing weary of having a 19-year-old worry-wort wandering the corridors at night, I swallowed the first pill. I awoke in a panic several hours later.

“Um, I think I’m having a bad reaction to the pills,” I told my parents, holding out my hand to show that it was trembling.
“I think,” my father suggested delicately (bless him), “that you might just be worrying about them.”

A few weeks later I wondered why I had made such a big deal of it.

But Harriet Green adds another perspective to her article, which I take to heart because, well, it’s really aimed at people my age: “we are entering a new age of anxiety. As the economic situation worsens, so fretting in the general population rises. In the past year, oil prices have risen by 50%, basic foods such as rice have soared by as much as 70% and house prices are plummeting at a faster rate than we’ve seen in a long time. Those in the know are starting to whisper that we’re heading for the mother of all recessions.” Or, as Merryn Somerset Webb, editor of MoneyWeek, so comfortingly puts it: “People are anxious, and they are right to be…People under 40 are not used to losing jobs or being made redundant.”

In other words: this is a hell of a time to be a newly-indoctrinated adult. Adulthood, I’ve recently learned, is hard enough (who knew that paying your own rent could be so painful?—let alone paying for, say, a second degree from, say, a foreign university?). But being told that in the current climate, we’re right to be anxious adds another layer to it entirely. A new age of anxiety? But I thought I’d already had my age(s) of anxiety.

So I’m starting to think that what remains to be done is follow the advice of Tom Hodgkinson (editor of The Idler, who, if you’ll remember, was partly responsible for the pig-roast in a London traffic island): “Anxiety will drive us back into our comfort blankets of credit-card shopping and bad food—the system deliberately produces anxiety while simultaneously promising to take it away,” Hodgkinson is quoted as saying in Green’s article; he “encourages us to take matters into our own hands and simply shed the burden.”

Yesterday, we went and pulled up all our potatoes and had a gorgeous Sunday roast, complete with chilled rosé and a peach-and-shortbread pudding. Of all the places I’ve lived (and, granted, there haven’t been so very many), England has perfected the art of the Sunday: shops close early still, and the most famous tradition (apart from churchgoing, which frankly I can take or leave) is centered around eating, and, in our young lives, good friends. I know I’ll always have a battle with anxiety—and maybe it’ll be a bigger battle because of the environmental and economic climate, I don’t know. But I do know it’ll be an easier battle with things like long, lazy sunday lunches to look forward to.



"Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy."
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Sunday News Summary Volume I

It occurs to me today that Sunday is, without doubt, one of the best days of the week.  You can, for instance, as we've done today, have tea in the morning, read the Observer Magazine, then head to the pub down the road for a cheap lunch (and a pint) whilst perusing the rest of the paper.  And all this before the frenzy of potato-picking-and-washing (fresh from our garden, some of the tiniest potatoes I've ever seen!), cooking, crossword-doing, chattering: a wine-soaked evening ritual that ends inevitably in a serene sigh, a weary sinking into bed, half a chapter read before eyes droop and drool crawls out the corners of our happy mouths.

In my afternoon's perusal of the Observer today, however, I started doing that thing.  You know the thing I mean, for even if you don't do it yourself, someone you know inevitably does: the half-mumbling, the sighs, the frustrated slap of hand on paper, the shaking of the head.  The Man was watching the football and I was leafing through the news section.  We ate our sandwiches (roast beef and horseradish sauce and bacon and brie, respectively), salads, and chips in contented, domestic happiness, but a cloud started to come over me as I reached the end of the paper.  It's not that I expect--or even want--reporting of nothing-but-the-happy-bits.  No; what I want is to be able to vent at my newspaper.  So with that in mind, a summary of the day's stories, as selected by, well, me:

In this story, we learn that Oxford University has decided to give a better chance of being selected for an interview to applicants who live in low-income areas of the country.  It sounds nice, I suppose--state-school educated youths given a chance to breach the iron gates, handed a golden key to a previously inaccessible city of eternal learning.  But what I suspect this policy will actually do is hurt upper-middle class youngsters, whose families may not have the monetary clout to send their children to posh schools but who otherwise have known no real financial hardship.  Such students might perform just as well as their counterparts on both ends of the financial spectrum, but now they're left out completely, while advantage is given to the very poor and the very rich.  Like affirmative action before it, the policy has admirable roots but suffers from flawed implementation.  (Bear in mind this is all speculation).

This one just makes me angry.  No, no, no, and no again: offshore drilling in the USA is NOT the answer to the energy crisis.  John McCain can champion the cause till the cows come home, but Nancy Pelosi should know better than to hint that "she might allow a vote on the drilling ban if it was part of a wider energy agenda," and Obama too--it could be part of a new energy strategy, in theory--but on its own, "more oil" doesn't sound especially new to me.   And I know the high price of gas has hit people hard; I know it's painful, and I'm thankful that I live in a place where not having a car is a viable--even a preferable option--and yes, I feel for the families and the individuals who have struggled as a result of rocketing prices, but I have also felt that there's one good thing that's come from all of this, and it's that for once, people have started to think about alternative energy, and alternative (read: public) transportation not in the hazy terms of dreamers and environmental radicals, but as real possibilities.  Why squander the opportunity to turn this into strong action?

This is just ludicrous. 

This article makes me wonder where the balance lies between the most basic quality of life (just having a roof over your head) and the slightly less basic, but no less desirable, kind of qualities, like having a garden behind your house.  If we have to destroy people's green spaces in order to give other people a chance to own a home, then the line must be very fine indeed, and as someone with a lovely garden (and an enormous appreciation for the things), I hope there's another solution somewhere.

And in the 7 Days section, we learn the following things: that Sam Cameron, wife of Tory leader David, has "had rave reviews for her newly designed handbag...retailing at a mere £775"; that "the world's most expensive house" has just been purchased by an anonymous Russian for about £400m; that a king penguin (yes, you read that right--I had to scan the paragraph several times to make sure) has been granted regimental knighthood by the Royal Guard in Norway; and that olympic swimmer Michael Phelps adheres to a 12,000 calorie-a-day-diet (again, you read that right).  

This is truly the stuff that the Harper's Index is made of.

Joe Allen at The Cellar/The Community of a Street

So it turns out that the violinist-who-used-to-live-next-door (occasionally we could hear a few notes floating through the walls and into the kitchen) is actually part of this group, who we heard last night at the Cellar.  As per the wonderfully circular world of Oxford, Joe Allen works at the Corner Club, neé QI, which almost everyone we know has connections to.  I like this sort of smallness: not stifling but familiar; large enough still to be surprising, and pleasantly so.

The Cellar would probably more aptly be called the basement.  Cellar implies wood, and warmth, and (quite possibly) wine; but the place reminds me far more strongly of a friend's spacious under-house hideout--a dingy, dark, sticky-floored hollow perfect to listen to music by.  The beer is cheap and the ambiance appealingly sparse; and all confounded by a sense of wonder that you can be here, underneath ancient alleyways, listening to a thoroughly modern selection of youthful, pretty musicians.

Joe Allen, accompanied by Angharad Jenkins on the violin and Chrissie Sheaf on the drums, has a sound that reminds me of Damien Rice, or possibly Stephen Fretwell, with operatic elements (and the shining sounds of an electric violin, which I'm starting to think is something no band should be without...).  The threesome has clearly mastered the art of performance: that is, their music is, in rare fashion, actually enhanced by their physical presence.   At one point I was smiling so widely that a friend looked at me curiously (presumably thinking the £1.50 Foster's had gotten to my head); it was just that good, in a heart-soaring kind of way.

In bed later that night, we were aroused from our half-sleep (books on our chests) by a series of bangs, followed by shouts on the street which sounded distinctly different from the drunken yelps of late-night returners, or the fierce calls of virile men aching for a boozy fight; so we rose on our knees and peeked our heads out of the window.  Down the street, not half a block, we could see an enormous, orange crown of flames pouring out of an alleyway; billows of white smoke came running down towards us and we smelled the acrid flavour of something wrong, something electric.  

Firefighters had arrived on the scene silently, and we watched their figures dart and flit until the smoke had been shrunk and the fire reduced and our necks had begun to ache from craning.  A father and son went out into the street to assess the danger, but otherwise no-one showed any signs of stirring.  We could have gone on sleeping and never even known.  

The whole street seemed precious then, fragile, but ours: the violinist next door, who you know only from the sound of her strings and her Welsh voice, turns out to make you smile harder than you've smiled all day; and firefighters do their job with austerity, guided by the blinking blue lights of their trucks; and we are somehow in the middle of all this.

Surface Truths

When we're kids, we don't have the ability to do all the things we want to, though we have a certain freedom from obligation that makes them tantalizing. And when we're adults, when we finally could, conceivably, do things like travel all over the world, sit on the couch and read a book all day, eat ice cream for dinner--we have too much obligation.

Sometimes, I wonder why it is I know that I could write a novel, or an essay, but not a short story with any depth. When I sit and read other people's short stories, there is an effortlessness that I find unobtainable. For me, everything is either tied to what I know already, or there is not enough room in 10,000 words to create a world, and a people to populate it.

Here is what Jeanette Winterson writes in her introduction to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit--which, if I'm really going to be honest, is probably my favorite part of the book:

"I…couldn’t bring myself to hold down any job that hinted of routine hours.”

There is something unspeakably alarming about routine hours. It is odd for me to feel this way: I like routine. I adhere to one. I can't do anything in the morning without a bite to eat, not even the dishes. I like knowing the general rhythms of a week--Sundays that, aided by wine and a heavy meal, stretch out for ages; Mondays that feel flat in comparison (almost a buffer day: a day made to get back into the swing of things); Thursday nights when he goes to football and I curl up on the couch. But still.

She also writes this: (and I know it's long, but I couldn't weed much of it out without feeling I'd given something up)

“Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was written during the winter of 1983 and the spring of 1984. I was 24. At that time I was sharing two rooms and a hip bath with the actress Vicky Licorish. She had no money, I had no money, we could not afford the luxury of a separate whites wash and so were thankful of the fashion for coloured knickers which allowed those garments most closely associated with our self-esteem, not to be grey. Dinginess is death to a writer...the damp small confines of the mediocre and the gradual corrosion of beauty and light, the compromising and the settling; these things make good work impossible. When Keats was depressed he put on a clean shirt. When Radclyffe Hall was oppressed she ordered new sets of silk underwear from Jermyn Street. Byron, as we all know, allowed only the softest, purest and whitest next to his heroic skin, and I am a great admirer of Byron. So it seemed to me in those days of no money, no job, no prospects and a determined dinginess creeping up from the lower floors of our rooming house, that there had to be a centre, a talisman, a fetish even, that secured order where there seemed to be none; dressing for dinner every night in the jungle, or the men who polished their boots to a hard shine before wading the waters of Gallipoli. To do something large and to do it well demands such observances, personal and peculiar, laughable as they often are, because they stave off that dinginess of soul that says that everything is small and grubby and nothing is really worth the effort.”

After I read this, I thought it is probably why, before I sit down to do a task, particularly to write something, I must always clean up first. I do the dishes, I reorganize the lounge to my liking, I file papers away, I wipe the kitchen counters and hang the laundry out to dry. Because it is summer and our energy bills are low, I sometimes do do a separate white wash. Then I put my focus where it's meant to be; but never before. Despite my Californian propensity towards nudity (bare feet, sandaled feet, short shorts, short skirts, and very little clothing at all when I'm home alone, sometimes, or in the hours just before bed) I loathe to work without proper attire. If I really want to get something done, I get dressed.

"To do something large and to do it well demands such observances..."

Surface truths: I first learned this phrase when I was reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the 12th grade. Surface truths are what keep you afloat, I learned. They are things like polishing your boots before sloping through a muddy, bloody war, or--less dramatically--cleaning your kitchen before sitting down to lose yourself in a mess of words, even though you don't have a handle on anything else, like rent or a proper job. In Conrad, one colonist at a far outposts of the jungle paid such meticulous attention to his own appearance that he looked, despite being away for years, as if he was just freshly arrived from Europe; he did it so as not to go mad, so as not to let the wilderness infringe. Another man read the same book over and over, obsessively, so that he would not forget himself. The further they journeyed down the river by steamboat, the more ludicrous such things seemed; and the more necessary they became.

In Hurst Street, we have finally found a decorator to repaint our house, to replace the mouldy linoleum in the bathroom, to repair the tiny crack in our bedroom wall that has been bothering me of late. We will not (indeed, do not) live in dinginess!

good thing he comes off as gracious and charming...

"Speaking to The Guardian this weekend, Rushdie said: 'I am not trying to prevent him from publishing his stupid book but if they publish it as it is there will be consequences and there will be a libel action.'"

This in response to the publisher's delay of Ron Evans' secret service memoir, which Rushdie "says portrays him as 'mean and arrogant'":

"Apparently these [excerpts] claimed that the security guards protecting Rushdie during the fatwa against him 'got so fed up with his attitude that they locked him in a cupboard under the stairs and all went to the local pub for a pint or two'."

While I certainly hope the last bit isn't true (it's hardly comforting to think of security guards shutting their own wards up in cupboards), there is something to be said for the brilliance of Rushdie responding to allegations of his attitude with the phrase "stupid book."

Valencia Oranges

So I was perusing the books in the downstairs bathroom at the boy’s parent’s house. Every time I’m there I find something I want to read. This time it was Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, and I was very surprised. I never thought I was someone who wanted to read Jeanette Winterson.

I’ve tried, you see.

It goes like this: I first heard of Jeanette Winterson through a girl I spent a month living with, at a summer school for the arts in a hot, horrible inland place. Her name was Caitlin and she looked as if she had never spent more than five minutes in the sun, despite living all her life in sunny Santa Monica. She had thick, dark hair that she straightened every morning, though I could never tell why, as it seemed to fall straight to begin with. She used to spend actual hours in the shared bathroom applying stage makeup, which she’d gotten after a school production, to enhance the pale moon glow of her face.

She woke up at 5 a.m. no matter what, and because she did, I did too, and I would go for slow runs around the campus in half-darkness until I became too tired, and then I would lie back down in bed and go to sleep until the bathroom was free and I could have a shower. Because I was leaving the building so early, I had to lodge a water bottle in the front door so that I wouldn’t be locked out. Once, the door shut anyway, so I had to sneak around to the back of the building and tap helplessly on the glass until my other roommate, who rather pragmatically had not tried to wake up at such an ungodly time, came and rescued me.

Caitlin appealed to me for reasons I could never place. She was mysterious, though whether or not this was an act I never quite discovered. She liked to shut herself away; she had a fickle appetite, and a fragile look about her: on hot walks to the strip mall where we would rent DVDs and buy groceries, she used to breathe heavily, as if her tiny physique was not used to such strenuous activity.

We spent a lot of time in the campus café, where we befriended a pair of 26-year-old music students. One was a composer with shocking blonde hair and a slightly dark edge. The other was cheerier. I was 16, so I had a crush on everyone, but especially these two. I drank more coffee than any 16-year-old should just to be close to them. And to her. My favorite thing was to watch her talking to them about God and philosophy; she stumbling charmingly, them enchanted, me sipping a hot latté, sweating into the cup.

My favorite way to pass an evening was to order Thai food and sit with a cold Thai iced tea while watching episodes of Queer as Folk, much of which I think I enjoyed because of its softer pornographic aspects, with my two roommates. I ate a lot of ice cream, too. I spent a lot of time forgetting that we were meant to be there studying, and suddenly it would be midnight and I would have to write a poem. I was nursing a longstanding crush on a boy back home, so I thought a lot about him, too, and knew I would never have the courage to act on it.

Caitlin was trying to decide if she was gay or not. She never said this outright, but she let it stand between us as a barrier: I’m having an identity crisis, how about you? I had never thought about thinking about being gay or not, but suddenly I wondered if it was the sort of thing that might just appear, out of the ether: borne of a single doubt. One day we were exploring the darkened rooms and theaters of the campus together; we had the sense that we weren’t supposed to, which made it a thrill. We stood backstage, cramped by boxes and curtains. She said, “this would be such a romantic place to make out with somebody.”

I thought of what it would be like to reach across the darkness for her lips, which were, as always, painted redder than their natural shade; and in that moment discovered my own essential straightness: if it had been the boy from back home, or even one of our café men, I might have gotten a thrill of sexual pleasure from the thought, but as it was, all I felt was blank.

I think I wanted to fall in love with her, for poetry’s sake, but I never could, quite.

I was just emerging from the awkward throes of a particularly uncomfortable few teenage years, and vestiges of the clumsiness remained. I wore the same Belle & Sebastian t-shirt every other day, with huge dangly earrings and khaki shorts. I hadn’t yet learned to cut my hair in a flattering way, so it just hung limply on my shoulders, thick and sun-bleached brown. I didn’t really know how to converse with people, so mostly I just admired from afar. The first time I had to read a story out loud to a workshop group, I burst into hideous, childlike tears midway through, and I didn’t even know why.

“Every writer could stand to read a lot more Virginia Woolf,” said Zay Amsbury, the impossibly hip teacher with the black glasses, the shiny bald head, the twenty-something slouch. He wrote a story in lilting singsong rhythm once and read it to us and we all fell helplessly in love with it. “It was a beautiful love affair…” is how it started.

So when I got home, I bought Virginia Woolf, but it would be three years before I would pick it up (and then another three years before I would be able to struggle through the first sentence). And I bought Sexing the Cherry, because Caitlin said that Jeanette Winterson was a genius. I’ve still never read Sexing the Cherry.