Manhole Covers

All those years ago I tried to tell you that manhole covers were interesting. I was Japanese at heart it seems.See?

Entirely to do with the Writing Process - a tale of writing this shit in 10 curses.

1. As a writer, it is so important to use the right tools. I  first used Microsoft Word® and chose the  Nimbus Roman font, mainly because it had the ® mark in the Special Characters, I then switched to LibreOffice® because Microsoft are part of an #EvilEmpire, and I am not paying a monthly fee Oh No, and my document is saved in the .ODT format which is better than .docx, just because. 

2. I bought a Moleskine® notebook and a top class r0tring® mechanical pencil. I carry these everywhere because Joanne Harris told me in her book that the First Rule of Writing was to carry a notebook. The best tools would make the job better. I still haven't written much of course, but it will come. 

3. I bought a Scrivener® licence! If you are going to be a proper writer, and lots of Proper Writers that I have never heard of but that's because I don't Read Around enough, swear by it. Scrivener® is really good and has a useful Chalkboard Feature. I have never yet used the Chalkboard Feature, but I am glad it is there: it could really Come In Useful one day. It is annoying that I have to change the spell-checking to English(UK), but I won't uninstall it, because it costs £40. 

4. Oh Happy Day! I have become a LaTex® user! It is Free and OpenSource and promises that What You See Is What You Want , which is what I want. It is apparently very efficient for mathematical notation, which of course I won't use, but that's great; there is a Steep Learning Curve, which I am up for. 

5. I will choose  Export to Epub  rather than dull old PDF! I haven't written very much yet but I just want to use a comfortable tool. 

6. There are some really good writing aids out there tp look after your typos and tell you if you are using the Passive Voice too much. 

7. One of these Writing Aids has Auto-Renewed: I must have given it my card details in a  fit of Too Much Primitivo, and I now have access to a 

myriad of Pro Features. Mainly though I need to navigate to the small grey semi-transparent link to ensure I don't Auto-Renew again in November, now that the Primitivo has worn off . 

8. I wrote a Limerick in my lovely Moleskine® notebook. I am proud of it, except that the last line doesn't scan properly. 

9. I have forgotten whether my top-of-the-range r0tring® mechanical pencil takes 0.5 or 0.7mm refills. These are among the curses of being a Writer. 

10. When I am a professional writer with an agent and a 5 book deal I will be able to claim these things against tax and live in Key West like my hero. 

2

Reflections

Part 1: Climate Change, Southern Water and The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley.

It is August. Grass everywhere is the colour of sand.

Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby sits disconsolately in just-waist-deep water, in a nearly empty river bed. She looks, to quote Pepys at an execution, “as cheerful as any (wo)man could do in that condition.”

Unable to even look at her reflection in the pond, or the dried cracked depression which once was a pond, Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid reflects, but only internally, on the year, with its drought, its deaths, its usual invasion of her habitat by sewage and litter. The Human Race had never cared, but now it was doing its not-caring on a scale they had never seen.

The Water Babies depicts a fantasy water-land of clean, though savage, innocence, teeming with creatures and life. Already under threat from industry when published in 1863 with the great waterways full of pollution already, we now see rivers and streams culverted as if an inconvenience, drying out or full of algal invasion, mismanaged by the people and companies who are paid large amounts to do the opposite.

The water-fairies pondered what revenge was to be taken on those who caused the ejection of foulness into the waters as soon as they thought nobody was looking, but found they were only moralistic Victorian personifications after all.

Part 2: Truss & Floods & Writing

It is October. It rains and rains and rains. Liz Truss has come and gone.

“I write with acid – there mustn’t be one single word out of place or one word that could be taken out.” (Katherine Mansfield) : - A writing ambition for 2023 which will behave like a drunken man wandering into the Ladies, but must come under control.

Pop You Round Pebsham

A piece I wrote for a Writers' Group Competition. It didn't get placed, and you'll probably see why. I enjoyed the way the process pushed me from a rather kitchen-sink thing to Greek Goddesses. It turned out far from seamless though.

Preamble “And now Hephaestus, yours is the charge to observe the mandates laid upon you by the father-- to clamp this miscreant upon the high craggy rocks in shackles of binding adamant that cannot be broken…. Hurry then to cast the fetters about him.” Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound.

 The legend of the Titan, Prometheus, is one of the best-known of all the Greek myths. For the crime of giving fire to the mortals, he is punished by Zeus. He is fettered to a rock, and every day an eagle appears and consumes his vitals, which every day regenerate for a repeat the next day. Who among the gods and goddesses had the strength to bind him? And what has this to do with the harmless and charmless little town of Pebsham?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pebsham 

A bus appears. It is first not there, then is. It is the way of buses. It resolves itself along the spray-damped seafront road. The driver: “I’ll just pop you round Pebsham, then we’ll go straight to Bexhill.” I have never before been to Pebsham. I am content. The driver has a centuries old, blasted look, the look of a man who has taken a million or a billion fares. The serpent tattoo on his forearm is faded almost to a smudge. I pay with, not an obolus or other ancient coin, but Google Wallet. I am nobody, a mere resider in the world. I am travelling to meet somebody from the beginning of history, history long merged into myth.

A word about Pebsham. It is a housing estate, adjacent to Bexhill, and near Hastings, deep in the south of England. It is near the sea, yet no tourists go there. Nobody goes there to shop: there is one shop. Nobody drinks there: there is no pub. Pebsham sprawls, spreading its bungular cul-de-sac tentacles into the fields and Sussex countryside, unnoticed and unregarded. Any secrets it holds are surely the earthbound secrets of every town. Our double-decker bus hauls itself around a roundabout, deviating from my usual trip home. Upstairs are a few solitary characters, besides myself. Opposite, a bald man, the top of whose head almost comes to a point, looks unwonderingly out of the window. Intermittently his bottom set of false teeth shoots out alarmingly beyond his half-closed mouth: he pushes it back with a satisfying – to him – “glock” sound. I cannot decipher the name of the band depicted on his T-shirt but the iconography suggests catastrophic sound, distortion, chaos. A flicker of light, like a minor aurora, momentarily shows itself over the marsh and field. In the front seat sits another man. I can only see the back of him, but his voice loudly pierces the dead echo of the interior: he expresses alarm at something only he can see or feel. Pebsham: we are in you.

 

 

 

 

 

Bia 

I ring the bell; I get off. I had only asked to go further in a faint attempt to confuse any pursuers. After a brief entanglement, with the three elderly women trying to get on, during which no eye contact is made but a “tut” is audible, I find myself on a grass verge. In front of me is The Co-op. A tall, powerful-looking woman dressed in all black sits at a wallpaper pasting table on the open space next to the shop. She is lightly drenched in voter apathy while seemingly attempting to be elected to the Town Council. I move towards her, curious. She smiles, lifts a stone paperweight from the table. Five or six leaflets are blown into the road. The seventh she gives to me, speaking: “Were you seen?” “I think not, though for a moment I thought the driver knew me.” “Let me show you Pebsham.” I ask: “Why, how, in all of the world, does a Goddess, the daughter of a Titan, companion of Zeus himself, find herself in this Pebsham of all the places? A storyteller and known liar I have heard of tells me that Prometheus once found himself in Swindon, but at least that has a civic centre and shops: but this…” “…is handy for the seaside. That’s something.” “To be the personification of POWER is something. To have been the only god or goddess with the strength to bind a Titan to a rock is something.” Again I say: “this…” Her form shifts. The seeming black cloak is revealed as… wings; wings which spread outward, above her head and mine, raven-black feathers rustling in the thin, newly-chilling breeze. She now towers above me, her blazing green eyes fixed to the middle-distance above me. An elderly woman leaves the Co-op pulling a wheeled trolley. Of course, she doesn’t see me or the ten foot tall winged goddess beside me. Why should she? It is none of her business. “Let me show you Pebsham”, Bia repeats.

 

 

 

 

Explore 

Along Pebsham Lane is an unkempt bungalow with an encrusted orange cement mixer anchored immovably to the front garden, like a parody of a Greek statue. His neighbours loved Gordon because he did up their soffits at cost for cash, but now they avoid him because bereavement is so embarrassing. He supports Chelsea, but hasn’t been since Bonetti was in goal. That old wallpaper mocks him: if Sheila had still been here they’d have chosen new by now. He is old now; tired, old and lonely. The cement mixer would need a drill to get it off its accidental plinth. Maybe next week. “Neither Force nor Power have a rôle here. That would need an altogether more empathetic goddess. Good.” A faint smell of semen joins the atmosphere around a town-house in Amanda Close. We do not linger. A house in Top Cross Road is on fire. Nobody has yet spotted this, not even Janet who lives there. She is trying to write a book combining Magic Realism with Regency England, which she is starting to suspect will never be published. Her suspicion is well-founded. The ghost of Eleanor Rigby smiles amiably upon Janet; the fire brigade less so after the fire has spread next door, and next-door-but-one. Her doomed manuscript survives to continue unread for another day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What On Earth

“This is all very whimsical,” I venture, “but I still don’t understand why an ancient Goddess with the power to bind Titans is here. To call this Pebsham ‘unremarkable’ is to garland it. You could have put out that fire with a breath, but we just moved on to look at that house that sells houseplants and has a view of the sea. Of all the places in the world, the sky-bothering mountains, the mighty deserts, the whirlpools that swallow huge ships, mighty cities, giant rivers, huge forests. You could do some GOOD in the world, this world its tenants are bent on destroying, in a way that the ancient gods would have been amazed at.” "I'm a personification of Force and Power. How have Force and Power served the world these thousands of years? I feel the crushing weight of history upon me. It's as heavy as the rock and the fetters Hephaestus and I clamped onto Prometheus. History– so old they call it prehistory, or they call it myth. There's no history here in Pebsham. 10 minutes ago it seems, there was only a farmhouse. Empty, no history. That was like air to me. I wanted that. I don't like reminding myself that nobody even knows where Scythia was, even if they’ve heard of it at all.. I don't want to stand next to a pile of worn-out old carved stones and call it home. Memory is my curse. Have you met my sister?”

Canvassing 

  In Kniver Lane stands an extraordinarily ordinary end-terrace house. A paved drive and rhododendron ‘Nova Zembla’ flourishing redly in the gap between it and next- door. Though the window is netted, a light seems to oscillate behind the net curtain, and draws my eyes towards the interior. Instead of the expected sofa, TV, occasional table and souvenir of Malaga I instead wonder at a distant vista, a mountain, no, a mountain range. I am standing in a darkened, desolate landscape of rock, of the toughest shrubs, of stunted hardy trees. The sky is first red, then green then glows gold as the wind swirls, and the cloud is lit from below by a fountain of sparks from the mountainside. Lightning suddenly fills the window and the shock of it almost literally knocks me backwards. Suddenly back on the paviours outside the house, I look around for help but Bia has vanished. “Can I help you”? A cardiganned man stands indignant on the far side of the gaudy rhododendron, holding in his right hand that direful weapon of householders everywhere, a soft broom with a red handle. “I’m sorry, I…” I look back towards the window. The net curtain and window are blank, colourless, suburban once more. “What are you doing here? You’ve no business peeping through people’s windows. Perhaps I should call the police.” “It’s all right, he’s with me.” A woman in black, sans wings, no longer 10 feet tall, reassures him. "Can I give you one of my election leaflets? ”

Winged Victory

“What did you see?” I tell her. “Mighty Mount Olympus, we used to call it. I think it’s a National Park these days. Haven’t been there since the World was young.” “What was that blinding light I saw?” “You know I asked if you’d met my sister Nike? I think you just have. The question is, was it just a vision or an actual manifestation? All golden sandals and big wings and perpetual victory. Cow. The last time I saw her she was taking legal advice about a shoe company using her name. She was told that as an unembodied being and moreover a mere aspect or attribute of another goddess she literally didn’t have a leg to stand on. I don’t normally do jokes by the way, but she just makes me cross.”

Milligans

Discontented but with no further reason to linger, I take my leave of the reluctant but retired goddess and make my way to the bus stop, looking around me at the houses all around and try with a shiver to block out any more thoughts of lives behind curtains. After ten minutes which seem like thirty the bus approaches, arrives, and I climb the stairs. To my astonishment the pointed-headed man from before is there, and his eyes flicker towards me before returning to the window. I hear a “glock” and a sharp intake of saliva. A shout of panicked alarm from the front seat completes the phantasm. It seems a natural response in me after experiencing so much, to go for a drink or two to help me process all I had seen. I settle down in the bar of a pub named after a famous comedian: he too saw things that changed his life. A pint of Doom Bar in front of me, I begin to regain my equilibrium. The barmaid comes to collect glasses, wipe tables. She is known to her customers as Alice. She looks towards me with the unseeing yet all-seeing eyes of one who is everyone’s yet no-one’s friend. Her eyes shine gold: she is Victory. She is Nike, She works in a pub. She raises a finger to her lips and wordlessly begs my silence.

`Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.' Hesiod, The Theogony

Twilight. No, not Twilight

 

A little piece I did for a competition set by Hastings Young Writers for the adults of Hastings Writers Group. It came 3rd.

The scene is an old-fashioned classroom: at the front is a teacher, behind her is a chalkboard on which she has written some long and difficult-looking words. In front of her sit the schoolchildren. At the very back of the classroom, at a desk far too small for him, sits a man never seen before, his face hidden: perhaps he is an OFSTED inspector.

Referring to one of the words on the board, one of the class asks; “What does ‘crepuscular’ mean, miss?”

The teacher thinks briefly about rolling her eyes and/or sighing, but does not. “Don’t wait for me to tell you. You can look it up. J.K. Rowling said that children are not afraid of difficult words. So see if you can find out what ‘crepuscular’ means on your own.”

There is a moment's silence.

“Who's J.K. Rowling, miss?”

“Surely you must know. Harry Potter?”

Another moment passes.

“That nasty old boomer.”

The OFSTED inspector disentangles himself from the too-small desk and stands up, revealing himself to be an indignant elderly man of about 35. He removes a thin but gnarled stick from his rucksack, shakes his slightly-greying long red hair and, waving the stick more or less vigorously, feebly cries out "crepusculo", and, as he falls over backwards exhausted, all the lights go out.

Erik Satie- an “obituary”.

 

A piece submitted for a Hastings Writers Group competition, with a few changes to things that didn’t work at all.

 

Erik Satie, musician, composer and writer died on 1st July 1925.

Eric Alfred Leslie Satie, born 17 May 1866 in Honfleur, Normandy, was the son of a French father and a British mother. Jane Satie was an English Protestant of Scottish descent. His father, Alfred Satie was a Roman Catholic – and an anglophobe.

He had three siblings, Conrad, Olga and Diane.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Satie is today known chiefly for just one of his many pieces for solo piano, Gymnopédie No.1.

 (A gymnopédie is defined in one source, - Dominique Mondo's Dictionnaire de Musique - as a "nude dance, accompanied by song, which youthful Spartan maidens danced on specific occasions"). It has been described as the “most relaxing piece of music ever written”. If it were just that it would languish in the “forgotten” pile, with a million pieces of ambient music, but decidedly does not. It is not now, nor was it ever, commonly accompanied by nude dancing.

He was described by his music teachers at the Paris Conservatoire as "... worthless. Three months just to learn the piece. Cannot sight-read properly", and as “the laziest student in the Conservatoire”. In turn, Satie hated the Conservatoire, calling it “a sort of district prison with no beauty on the inside – nor on the outside, for that matter”.

Unsurprisingly, he left the Conservatoire but foolishly instead volunteered for military service. He was invalided out after deliberately contracting acute bronchitis by standing outside, shirtless, on a winter’s night.

<< Before I compose a piece, I walk round it several times, accompanied by myself. >>

Satie signed himself “Erik” rather than “Eric” after the publication of his first piano work in 1884.

He wrote literally hundreds of pieces of music, and at the peak of his fame worked with Claude Debussy, Sergei Diaghilev, Pablo Picasso and many others in the course of his work.

All his life, the visual arts were important to Satie,. As well as Picasso, he spent time with Braque, Derain, and others. Man Ray called Satie the only musician to "have eyes”. Satie’s only love affair, as far as anyone knows, was with a painter, Suzanne Valadon, with whom he was obsessed, but the attraction seems to have been almost one-sided, and was certainly short-lived, for she left him after six months, leaving him “devastated”. He composed his “Dances Gothiques” during their relationship.

Afterwards, he said that he was left with "nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness".

He purchased seven identical, grey velvet corduroy suits which he proceeded to wear, with no variation, for 10 years.

<< I am by far your superior, but my notorious modesty prevents me from saying so. >>

He gave some of his later works absurd titles, such as Veritables Prèludes flasques (pour un chien) ("True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)", 1912), Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois ("Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man", 1913) and Sonatine bureaucràtique ("Bureaucratic Sonata", 1917).

Satie was sued for libel in 1917 over insulting and, some would say, obscene postcards (Link, but BE WARNED!) that he had sent to the composer and critic Jean Marie Octave Géraud Poueigh, who had said of Satie that he lacked “wit, skill and inventiveness” shortly after the premiere of Jean Cocteau’s ballet "Parade", for which Satie had written the music; the resulting prison sentence and large fine were overcome by that patron of the French avant-garde Winnaretta Singer, the sewing machine heiress and Princess by marriage.

Satie’s longest piece of music was also one of his shortest: “Vexations” played once usually comes in at about 3 minutes 40 seconds, but Satie declared that for the full effect it was to be played 840 times, making the full piece well over 9 hours long. It is available in full on YouTube in a concert performance by Nicolas Horvath, complete with external sounds of rustlings and scrapings, and, quite early on, a police siren. Your obituarist held out for nearly 30 minutes. Horvath explains himself here

Satie was a heavy drinker throughout his life.

<< I eat only white foods: eggs, sugar, grated bones, the fat of dead animals; veal, salt, coconut, chicken cooked in white water; fruit mould, rice, turnips; camphorated sausage, dough, cheese (white), cotton salad, and certain fish (skinless). >>

 

 

Satie was also an author. His writings were collected in one volume many years after his death under the title “A Mammal’s Notebook” (ISBN-13: 978-1-900565-66-0). Like some of his music these are fragments, indeed they were often woven into the music, leading to his instruction that, although these written pieces were integral parts of the music, they were not to be performed. They are written in idiomatic, almost untranslatable French, yet translated into English anyway by one Anthony Melville via Satie’s posthumous editor Ornella Volta. “To whom it may concern, I forbid reading the text aloud in the course of musical performance, Any failure to observe this requirement will incur my righteous indignation against the presuming party. No special cases will be allowed”

‘The sea is wide madame.

In any case it is pretty deep.

Do not sit on the bottom. It is very damp.

Here come some nice old  

waves.

They are full of water.

You are completely soaked!

“Yes I am. Sir.”’

There is a good deal more of this in A Mammal’s Notebook. We cannot recommend it highly enough:- we can hardly recommend it at all. 

 

<< My dream is to be played everywhere, not only at the Opera.>>

Satie never married, as we have seen, and his home for most of his adult life was a single small room, first in Montmartre and, from 1898 to his death, in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris and historically, intermittently, from Roman times until the 18th Century, a place of aqueducts.

<< I took to my room and let small things evolve slowly. >>

  

Present-day reluctant adopters of technology will sympathise with Satie, a man who would never listen to recorded music, and made only one telephone call in his life.

He adopted various what we would call now “images” or “personae” over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly dress, the period of the velvet suits, and is well-known for his last persona, in neat bourgeois costume, with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella. He died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59, and is buried in Arcueil. Despite his dapper public appearance, when friends entered his Arcueil apartment after his death they found “indescribable squalor”.

Satie is remembered today for his pieces for solo piano, the “Gymnopédies” series mentioned above, the “Gnossiennes”, and numbers of others in a similar vein. He was firmly of the avant-garde and is seen as a precursor to composers such as John Cage and Phillip Glass.

<<I came into the world very young, in an age that was very old >>

His childhood home in Honfleur is now a museum.  A recent TripAdvisor review of the Satie House Museum records:

“This museum is very strange, which suits the man it's an homage to! Before you go you should read a bit about Eric Satie and his time. Besides, you might profit from a couple of audio excerpts of his works. Don't go in without an audio guide or you'll be lost in space. There are a couple of exhibits which you can touch and work, such as a merry-go-round that you can mount and which you have to power yourself like a bicycle. If you do that you'll see Satie's unplayable instruments such as the dictionary accordion. Take enough time to imbibe the atmosphere”.

<< “I liked the bit about quarter to eleven”: no-context Satie.>>

“ What I would like to see, is all Frenchmen, actually born on French soil, of parents that are French, or at least look it, have a right to a job as a postman in the Paris post-office”.

“The more musicians we have, the more madmen we have”

“ Drinking absinthe means killing yourself sip by sip ”.

“The more I know about men, the more I admire dogs”. . Finally, It is surely scarcely debatable that Satie would have chosen the original German language version of Nena’s 99 Red Balloons over the relatively insipid English version.

 

Further Links:

Life & Works https://www.famouscomposers.net/erik-satie

Quotes by Satie https://www.azquotes.com/author/19078-Erik_Satie

An Erik Satie Primer https://ftp.wfmu.org/LCD/21/satie.html

Nena 99 Red Ballons https://genius.com/Nena-99-red-balloons-lyrics

Hit The North

 

Just what is The North? Writing from here, in Orkney, I have a valid claim to be In The North. Awaiting next week though is Shetland. Seems North to me. Orkney? Southern softies.

We passed through Yorkshire a few days ago on the way up. Yorkshire people think they’re in The North, but when we came through York we weren’t even halfway. So Rugby League Country is barely even The Midlands.

We passed through Robertsbridge and Etchingham in East Sussex on the way up, 20 minutes from my house. They are not Northern. Roger Daltrey, who sang that he hoped he’d die before he got old and didn’t, lives here. Rudyard Kipling, who hoped his son would live to get old, lived here too. This is a marshy yet hilly land, firmly of the south, where the wind doth blow but it’s usually a warm South-Westerly: people take photos of the rare snow.

This is more like it: this is the North-East coast, past the nearly-north of Newcastle, coasting towards Berwick:

Wetherspoons

There's always a vague feeling of unease within. There's often a sort of anti-you activity among the bickering bar staff who find their bickering more interesting than the would-be customer.  They are not Johnny Cash but they wear all black, apart from the manager who wears a white shirt and the demeanour of a disappointed non-commisioned officer in a disappointing batallion. He would like to shout at the stupid elderly half-pissed customers but knows he won't and can't. Behind a partition in the back bar a man groans continuously - imagine "The Scream" repainted as "The Lonely Groan". (This would be a good name for a Wetherspoons). A fat ugly couple dandle their baby. A baby that will come to know Wetherspoons, and groan in his turn.