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.

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.

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:

The Why

I woke up this morning and thought, I'd really like to go for a run today, only it was pissing with rain, the streets slick and the eaves dripping. So I hunkered down in the study with several cups of lapsang souchong tea (there's nothing like drinking tea that smells of woodfire smoke in winter to make you feel the season in your bones) and got to work. Several hours later I was so absorbed in my work I was surprised to notice that the day has cleared entirely, the sky blue through the empty branches of the plum tree outside my window. No, I still haven't gone for my run.

I'm doing research, and in order to continue this post I'm going to have to admit once and for all something that I have a hard time saying aloud. Every time the words escape my lips I give a little schoolgirl giggle, blush furiously, and backtrack out of embarrasment. But, I'm writing a book (yes, a book, b-o-o-k and no, you do not need to tell me how unlikely literary success is in this age), and today I've been searching for information on the best way to pitch said book to literary agents.

The problem, of course, is that said book belongs to a genre that is nebulous at best. It's certainly not fiction, but it's also not a biography, an analysis of current events, a how-to book. Okay, so it must be something else? How about memoir, or narrative nonfiction. According to one site memoir is "the only nonfiction subject that must be treated as fiction," while "narrative nonfiction...is still nonfiction and you would submit a proposal." Which is fine, except that my book is not memoir, strictly speaking, and neither is it narrative nonfiction, strictly speaking, if I'm to believe what I read (narrative nonfiction: The Perfect Storm, Seabiscuit, et cetera). The only way I've ever been able to pinpoint what I'm writing is by comparing it to other things, kind of like a movie pitch. It's The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton meets Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer meets The Flaneur by Edmund White meets All Souls by Javiar Marias (which is a novel, confusingly) meets Isolarian by James Atlee--you get the point. And obviously, the more I think about it, the deeper I fall into the abyss of finding the genre.

So I'm stepping away from that for awhile. Something I read this morning advised the author to "look at the value your book offers to the reader," and that's something I can do much more easily. It makes me think of Roger Mudd asking Ted Kennedy in 1979: "Why do you want to be president?" and Ted Kennedy botching the answer, not knowing, not being able to compensate for never having thought about a question that sounds too basic to be problematic. It was one of the greatest lessons of my undergraduate degree: if you're going to run for president (or write a book, for that matter), you should sure as hell be able to answer the question "why."

Why? Because I'm too young to write a book; because there's no reason I can think of for someone to remain silent because of age or experience. Because while we may be entering an era of austerity, the election of Barack Obama indicates that we're finally, eight years late, exiting an era of intellectual shrinkage. We're becoming curious again*, and suddenly, the way in which we view the world--as individuals, as a generation, as the human race--is becomming important. Because sometimes a city is not just a dot on the map but a state of mind, and this affects us, whether we think about it or not. Because the art of experiencing place is a universal art; there is a backdrop to everything. Because the more we think about where we are--physically, geographically, generationally, emotionally, intellectually--the better we're able to understand where we're going. And because there's always something to be said for a few pretty words on a page. It's finer entertainment than anything else I can think of.



*Obama: "But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old."

The Tyranny of Winter

I have another cold; it's bleak midwinter outside, all grey and frost and bare, spindly-limbed trees. It's Christmas, almost, but it doesn't feel it: I have the sense of running at full speed towards something that I can't see, that's just, perhaps, over-that-hill-there. We were meant to babysit tonight but because I'm feeling so rotten I'm staying home to soak in the bath and drink cup after cup of tea; somehow the prospect of spending the evening without The Man seems dark to me, even though I know I have a lot of work I need to get down to doing, anyway; even though I'm not great company at the moment anyway. I think this is what they call man-flu, maybe--but I'm not officially admitting to it, just throwing it out into the ether as a suggestion.

But in my avoidance of work, which today so far has taken the form of perusing The Guardian's Books section (a far more highbrow form of avoidance than usual, to be honest), I came across this, which amuses me to consider. But my problem is not so much all the books I've bought but refuse, for some reason or other, to read, but all the books I've bought and would really really like to read but haven't yet because other books keep getting in the way.

Take George Steiner's My Unwritten Books: I've been on page three for nearly six months now, because I keep reading other things. Or Oil! by Upton Sinclair, Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, The File on H by Ismail Kadare, all of which are lingering near my pile of "books I'm currently reading," as if they, too, want to be included; all of which I've dipped tentatively into at some point and then withdrawn so that, in their stead, I've finished Orlando, The Night Climbers, various novels by Colin Dexter, and an über-academic text on Walter Benjamin's writings on The City (as a literary idea, so therefore, in my mind, it deserves unecessary capitals).

Then again, maybe I'm just in denial. Maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me that actually, I don't really want to read these books, in spite of the fact that I think I do. Or maybe I should just buckle down, concentrate on one thing for longer than fifteen minutes without finding something else more interesting, and actually read them.

But somehow, I think none of this is going to stop me from buying oodles of books this holiday season.

Demand Nothing but the Best

I found this article, (it's a bit of an oldie) on Sadie Jones, author of the bestseller The Outcast, rather interesting:

"She is every publisher's dream – good-looking, husky-toned and, what's more, she can actually write. Her debut bridges the tricky gap between literary and commercial writing: shortlisted for the Orange Prize, picked as a Richard & Judy Summer Read (which sent it to number one in the book charts), and there was even talk - which eventually came to nothing - of a Booker Prize longlisting. "The Richard & Judy/Booker Venn diagram crossover – no, I don't think they've ever done that," she says wryly today."

As you may have guessed, I'm not an enormous fan of the divide (no, make that abyss) between what's perceived to be "academic" type literature (i.e. cryptic at best) and what's perceived to be "trash" (i.e. anything found on your way out of Tesco). So I like that Ms. Jones, as a successful writer, is willing to make a wry comment or two about the perceived disparity between Booker-worthy literature and Richard & Judy-selected books.

What worries me, though, is The Outcast itself, which I read some months ago (one of the perks of being attached to someone in the book industry is the acquisition of proofs) without judgment. I knew nothing about Jones, and I knew nothing about how the public would react to her book. All I knew was that I read the book fast, and obsessively, and that I didn't like the writing very much, but I thought she could tell a damn compelling story. It's not that the writing was poor; it was perfectly adequete, even lovely at times. But it lacked the sparkle of well-used language, and I fret that, though we're making steps towards the "The Richard & Judy/Booker Venn diagram crossover" what's got lost in the meantime is appreciation of craft, and that what we forget to value is an exceptional ability with words, because, unlike an exceptional ability with characters, such an ability cannot stand alone.

***

On a more political note, we can hardly find this surprising, though it's refreshing to see it in print:

"In 17 countries, the most common view was that US relations with the rest of the world would improve under Mr Obama."

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.

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.

Revisiting Brideshead (For the Millionth Time): Part I

I can't tell you why Evelyn Waugh's 1945 classic novel--and the subject of a recent spate of articles in entertainment magazines--is such a favorite of mine (perhaps it is even the favorite). I first read Brideshead Revisited as a high school student looking for a different state of mind: I was tired of Orwellian politics, Salinger-esque angst, Shakespearean epics. I was even tired of the dreamy, druggy worlds conjured up by obscure beat poet and, no doubt, regular acid-dropper Richard Brautigan (which was certainly different, though not much else can be said in its favor), and the heavy, racy words of Rushdie, who I did not quite understand (I still may not quite understand).

So I picked up Waugh, who was like nothing I had ever read before. At the time, I thought he must have been writing just for me: the gentle, lolling tone, the exaggerated tenderness, the polite reproaches (narrator Charles Ryder gets a "grand remonstrance" from his cousin Jasper, but it is neither hot nor heavy, just a careful, English avoiding of the subject at hand), all bound together by a profound and often undeserved nostalgia. It was quintessentially English; the words were beautiful (I once read that Waugh had later disparaged the novel for being too sappy, too verbose, and was saddened to know it), the characters drawn, in their flapper dresses, their fedoras and flannel suits, to an ideal I knew and loved above all other literary things.

So at first, I don't think my adoration of the novel--an unusual choice anyhow for a 15-year-old American girl--had anything to do with its specific themes or nuances. It was an escape; and though the characters be tortured, I found it a respite from other things. It was easy on the mind, so to speak. You know from the beginning that Charles Ryder is a tragic character, and you can see from the start that his embroilment in the Marchmain family's sordid affairs will be his ultimate undoing, but because this is all set out for you, you also know that you can then enjoy the lavish surroundings without disappointment or surprise.

I've since re-read the novel enough times to be able to quote it, often at alarming length. I find myself sometimes saying slightly odious things to people: "Oh! It's like when Julia Flyte tells Charles Ryder that she can't marry him because it would be like 'setting up a rival good to God'!" and then when they nod blithely, probably frightened by my sudden intensity, I realize I'm being unnecessarily pretentious without even meaning to.

But the words have seeped in, by now. When I first came to Oxford--which was something I'd dreamed, in one form or another, of doing for years--they (some production company or Hollywood crew) happened to be filming a feature-length version of the story, which I found slightly sacrilegious ("how can they fit all of that into two hours?" I cried desperately to my poor boy, with the tone of someone who doesn't believe in editing) but also deeply appropriate. My first summer in England--in Oxford, no less, the sight of so much of Ryder's sweet remembrance, and of course the novel was being adapted to film. Some of our friends got jobs as extras and wore jaunty boaters and elegant suits. The city itself didn't need much alteration for us to believe that it was the 1920s again.

After one particularly boozy evening at the Turf Tavern, we staggered out onto New College Lane and whirled around under the Bridge of Sighs with a friend of ours, a student at Hertford College (where Waugh attended) working towards a doctorate in archeology. I suppose, in my cider-soaked friendliness, I had let slip some wisp of admiration for Waugh, because our friend suddenly offered to take us into the college, to see the "Waugh Room".

"The what?" we said, as we came into the main Hertford quad. We followed our friend into a room with lots of books on low bookshelves: the room where Waugh had apparently spent a lot of time as a student, now nicknamed after him. I tried to take a picture of us in the room but missed; now the memory is only marked by a photograph of a poster on the wall, featuring the black-and-white face of a 1920s era girl with a smashing hat.

So today, in California, I sit down to read a back issue of Vanity Fair (I say "read", but what I mean is gape at the photographs of half-naked celebrities), and what do I find but a feature on the new Brideshead Revisited, replete with photographs of the actors lounging around, in costume, at Magdalen College (which I pass by every day on my way from our Cowley road house to town). "The new production of Brideshead Revisited," writes James Wolcott, "will strike some as a sacrilege to the memory of the TV landmark [uh, what about the novel??], but it too has a dream cast and luxury settings--why spurn another opportunity for lavishment?"

And I find, in fact, that I agree with the magazine, in principle.

An Amusing Game

Can you guess where this quote comes from?

"Ye gods and little fishes...can it be? George, it's my own particular, one-and-only, four-starred pussy. The super pussy of all pussies."

a. A Porn Star
b. Ian Fleming
c. Agatha Christie

Amazing, the things I read as a kid and didn't bat an eyelash at...

Bookish Part II

Because they had enjoyed Wales so well the first time they'd come to the UK, my parents took me there the first time I came to the UK. We spent a few days in relative wilderness, stumbling along Offa's Dyke and being windswept at the top of rolling green hills, but then came one day to rest in Hay-on-Wye, a town my parents had specially selected for me, their strange 13-year-old daughter, because it is known as "the town of books". In a matter of hours, I saw more independent bookshops than I had seen in my entire young life. They let me loose and I swept up every strange title I could. It was bliss.

The Hay Literary Festival is something else, though. We drove up with some friends, chewing cold pizza in the car and trying to discern whether the weather would hold. A few spits of rain hit our windshield; then suddenly the trees would open up to reveal a sparkle of pure sunshine. We arrived at our friends' rented cottage just as it was turning dark; the garden in which we would be camping overlooked the Wye valley and the town shimmered purple, then indigo, with the sunset. To the right we could see a settlement of great white tents and a few flashing lights. We had enormous chunks of steak with wine and salad and fell asleep and then woke to a day that held promise: warm out of the wind, clear blue sky, and the possibility of books.

But the festival is--well, weird. We got there and were overwhelmed almost immediately. We stood in long queues to buy tickets to events that we weren't even entirely sure we wanted to see (the Salman Rushdie talk we ended up at, for instance, was incomprehensible at best--why is this man showing us these pictures? I kept asking myself. What on earth is he trying to say to us? How can one of the greatest writers of contemporary literature produce something so utterly dry?--to keep alert, I tried taking notes, but all I ended up with were a slew of poetic half-phrases which, taken out of context, were only pretty, and empty). We walked under the shade of a dozen white tents and sipped lattés outside by a puddle of water, wiping fevered brows. We fought our way to the festival bookshop and then elbowed our way close enough to the shelves (a feat, I'll tell you) to be able to read the spines of the books, and even bought a few but mostly, I suspect, so that we felt purposeful; but eventually we could take it no longer and went in search of lunch.

We walked back toward the town and alighted upon, quite by accident, a food festival; so we wandered close to the enticing stalls, which advertised venison burgers, a local cider bar, creamy ice cream, pastries, meat pies, nuts and berries of all ilks, wines and liqueurs. We settled for venison burgers and cider and sat on a grassy knoll in the sun, overlooking the shabby but appealing festival, and talked, what else, of books. We were with an author friend of ours who was in the process of revising her novel for publication in the US; call me shallow, but it had never really occurred to me that you would need to physically change the structure of your book to suit the states. Have we really become so disparate that there need be translators from one English speaking country to another?

She told me some of the things they had wanted her to do to make it more viable; I was fascinated. I mean, yes, I knew of course about the not-so-subtle changes publishers had made--the infamous Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone debacle, for instance; the title of the book, as I understand it, being changed because publishers didn't think stateside readers would understand the allusion to the philosopher's stone. I suppose they figured if they threw some alliteration in there, the books would sell more readily--but I think we are equally capable of buying whether we understand an allusion or not; and surely it's unfair to keep a nation in the dark about basic cultural literacy simply out of an urge to make profit.

In the end I wasn't sure I understood entirely why they wanted her to change things--the structure of things, even, structure being something, in my opinion, that impacts enormously the way you read something. If it really is all for profit, that's one thing; but it being the literary world, you begin to suspect that also, perhaps, they--whoever "they" really are--genuinely believe that there needs to be some sort of translation or, if not translation, then perhaps transposition, between English books and American books. I'm inclined to say hell, let people figure things out for themselves; but I daresay the people whose jobs depend upon advising novelists how best to sell their work across the pond would disagree.

After venison and cider (strong stuff that made my head spin after only a pint), I lapped up some ice cream and we wandered into the heart of the town to peruse the bookshops. It was a blissful afternoon indeed, but the bliss had nothing to do, really, with the festival itself, and everything to do with circumstance, and company, and the myriad of enticing shops. We were three people who should probably not be let loose for any extended period of time in such a place; but were relatively safe within the confines of a weekend.

The next day it--it what? I would say "rained", except that rained seems misleading. It implies something ordinary, everyday, a bit of British regularity. It implies a simple wetness, not a profound one like what we experienced. Wet to the bone, I think. We awoke in our tent utterly dry and by the time we had sprinted across the grass to the cottage my hair was dripping and my feet felt as if they had been soaked in a bath for hours. At the festival, the pathways under the white tents had begun literally to foam, and the squeak of wellies created an actual din. In a tent the size of the White House we listened to Salman Rushdie, watching not his tiny figure on the stage but a video projection of his head and torso on an enormous screen, and I shivered deeply, and couldn't wait for tea, and warmth, and to be somewhere else.

Back in Oxford, we unloaded our bags and discovered that we had bought so many new books that we didn't know quite what to do with them; so we left them temporarily on the trunks in the lounge to impress--or rather stun--our visitors, and felt oddly fulfilled, somehow.

Bookish Part I

"Ah, I've missed you," I say to the books downstairs in my parents' house. They are what remains; they are the chronicle of a childhood, an addiction, a love, a growing-up, a whatever-else-you-can-call-it.
Beside me, he says:
"I know what you mean."

I look at them and silently pick out the ones I want to take back with me; hell, I want them all. I wonder how much it would cost to ship the whole bookshelf back to Oxford; how much more, in fact, than the $800 I've already invested. I wonder why we're like this. I don't care. I feel immeasurably happy that we both understand.

Another Stupidly Long List of Books I’m Currently Reading (Plus Some Social Commentary!)

In no particular order, as there appears to be no particular order about my reading habits, to be frank:

Mind the Gap by Ferdinand Mount
The English by Jeremy Paxman
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton
The Grass Dancer by Susan Power
Jill by Phillip Larkin
Oxford by Jan Morris

And I’m enjoying them all—even the Harry Potter, which I’m re-reading as a sort of “lull myselfto sleep” book (though I couldn’t have picked a worse book, physically speaking—it’s so huge that it slumps from side to side and makes it close to impossible to read comfortably in bed). The last two are for research purposes, technically; but then again, I suppose there’s a way in which everything I read is for research purposes.

The Mount has managed to elicit the strongest emotional response from me, because I'm reading it with a mixture of incredulity ("They let him say this? They think it's good? But it's just absolute shit!") and awe ("Oh, he's really on to something here"etc.) He's often very apt: "Mobility is the essence of being modern," he writes, and I couldn't agree more; or this one: "There is something peculiar about the British attidue to class, some contradiction or unease. On the one hand, we say that class is a thing of the past or rapidly becoming so...On the other hand, we continue to 'mind the gap'. The subject has not lost its power to provoke and wound and illuminate. We still talk quite a bit about it in various ways: journalistic-facetious, or pretend-anthropological, or even old-fashioned snobbish."

But then he comes up with gem like this, next to which I tend to scribble things like "bollocks" in the margins: "Social difference in the old-fashioned sense is no longer a legitimate topic for discussion. This is an admirable change. It removes a set of stultifying constraints...Looking back, we may find it odd that the class code should have lasted so long after the material power of the aristocracy had unmistakably cracked."

See, the thing is, not talking about class division has changed its face, without question--but I don't see how this is necessarily an "admirable change". As far as I can tell, all it's done is pushed class issues under the table; it makes understanding the whole thing, as an outsider, nigh on impossible (even my love, who is elegantly verboise, often finds it frankly too hard to try to explain certain subtle customs or cultural understandings to me, playing the classic "I can't explain...it's just something you have to know" card, and referring me to a book, which more often than not is just as coy as he is on the subject)--it wrenches those of us who weren't born with this apparently inherent British knowledge from the core of perception and sets us precariously on the edge of acceptance, where we teeter delicately, often able to play our gaffes as charming local-isms but sometimes just plain out of touch.

It's hard, sometimes, to live here, when you don't know all the things you think you should. Because it's never talked about, because it's changed shape so drastically over the years, a morphic monster that hides in hearts and minds, social transgression is both easier and more punishable. We're terrible snobs everywhere, really, us humans--and no less so in the states. I'm a terrible snob about a lot of things on a personal level--if I wanted to be honest with you, I'd say that I look down, at least a little, on people who don't read obsessively, for instance. But it isn't snobbishness, per se, that plauges the British, any more than it plaugues anyone else. It's adherence to a secret code, I think: an understanding of what is and isn't truly naff, for example, that has nothing to do with the word's actual definition and everything to do with a grasp gained by years and years of repeated example and association. It's not that there's more class consciousness here; it's only that it's a far more elusive and enigmatic thing.

I'm waiting to see if Mount can tell me why.

Tout Doucement

Minus the foot-long stapler that belongs to George-the-poet-who-lived-here-in-the-fall, the things in our lounge are pretty good representations of us: the still shot from a Fellini film, Marcello Mastroianni and Fellini himself holding up an umbrella that threatens to but doesn't quite blow away; Tim Curry, from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, comfortable--no, downright charged with sex--in drag, painted lips plumped round a cigarette; and Samuel Beckett looking faded and chiseled, eyeing the camera sideways, sultry.  All in black and white.

Oh.  And lots of books.  I mean lots of books and they aren't even all the ones we own.  Mine are the ones that have followed me from California to Boston to here.  I spent over $800 sending them here and it never occurred to me that this was a luxury expense.  It was money I had to pay, because, well--where would I be if I didn't have weird histories of the British colonization of Kenya and the Almanac of American Politics to flip through late at night someday when the urge (which has yet to strike) finally comes?  Old favourites, too.  You never know what book you will need and when.  I have many more in California and I tell you, I miss them.  He has books too.  Lots and lots and lots (he did used to be a bookseller but mostly I think it is like me: a security blanket for the nerdy adult).  

Our books don't all fit on the shelves, so they are also in the kitchen, the guest room, our bedroom, and the bathroom.  They are on shelves and in piles; perched on mantles, tables, the trunks that serve as coffee tables in the lunge, the wooden board that serves as a spicerack in the kitchen.  

We're a little baffled by George's stapler, not because we don't see the point of having such a thing but because of its size: absurd.  A Dada-ist office appliance.  But maybe I think it's because we can't lose something that big, not even in a house so full of words you have to swim through them just to get to bed, just to hang the laundry up.  Not like other things we've lost here.  A brown dress, once.  Then a ring, which I thought was

 important but wasn't in the end, from the island John Fowles based his Phraxos on.  I thought it meant a lot to me but I was surprised to find that a day after losing it, I no longer minded.  What turned out to be more important was being somewhere so happy that losing a thing, whose value had been attributed only arbitrarily by me anyway, didn't seem very important.  That's what was important.

Other things in our lounge are more obvious, like the suede and sheepskin blanket that keeps us warm during naps, and the pokers and the steel bucket beside the fireplace, and the firewood.  It is winter, after all.  And one evening, we are sitting on the couch, sharing some champagne that George-the-Poet kindly left for us when he moved out, eating pizza and watching Sideways, when Xander suddenly pauses the film and sits up straight and said "shhhh."  S0 we listen, and a woman's lusty voice is coursing down the street, French and brazen.

"It's George," Xander whispers.  "It has to be, no one else would be playing Edith Piaf that loudly," because a few days before we had driven through town out to the Rose and Crown with George and the whole way he had played her, and the sheer volume of those magnificent vocals filled the car and made it--not crowded, exactly (though it's a very small car)--cozy.  And sure enough, he is suddenly on our doorstep, just saying hello, he has a quick question, he was passing by--something, but I'm only half-listening because I can't even get up to greet him because underneath the blanket I have shed my jeans (I'm about to eat half of a very large pizza, remember).  So I wait until they go back outside and I find my jeans and pop out to join them.