Dear Reader,
I started this blog eight years ago, which makes it mature, even ancient, for a blog. I started because I was curious to know, after thirty years of teaching literature, what I had to say about the books I read now, according to whim, week by week, chosen along my own bookshelves, in bookshops, in my own time. What do I have to say, why do I have to say, now there is no one to say it to?
As an adolescent, when my diary was young, I listed all the books I read, with a brief comment, like Good, Very Good, Incomprehensible, or Rubbish. A blog — a resigned, persistent word, like slog, and bog — is a public place with stats and labels and search descriptions, putative readers and pliant, zealous bots from all over, going about their obedient, astral business, day and night. A blog is a format. The diary book, on the other hand, is only what it is, a book, with blank and then written pages. No passwords. No secret language. No algorithm. No one reads it except me. When I was fourteen I wrote with an awareness that someone might read it—my mother, my sister—and created a diligent schoolgirl worried about maths tests. Now I write with only an awareness, if any, of my own re-reading.
I'm aware of who some of my blog readers are, aware of which countries are most active, bots or humans, (USA and Ireland, forays into middle Europe) and that changes things again. Some readers have said that the shifts from one book to another are hard if you don't know the books or the writers. I have a past, I'm liable to change. My bookshelves are many-voiced. I walk up and down waiting for something to strike me. If you had a TV, said a carpenter many years ago, looking at my bookshelves, my records, my esoteric loudspeakers, you wouldn't need any of that.
I am a creature of habit. I have kept a diary since I was fourteen. Once I have started something (making kefir, making bread, growing vegetables, doing yoga, writing a blog), I find it hard to stop. I read what catches my eye on the bookshelves — this week it was Robert Musil stories—what I come upon in Waterstones—They, by Kay Dick, for example, was prominent last time I looked. I met Kay Dick in Brighton once. I was reading William Gerhardie at the time, bad literature I loved to read after the years I spent with Mallarmé. William Gerhardie is a great writer, said Kay Dick, indignant. Bad is good, I said.
A review in the New Yorker of a new biography of Jean Rhys makes me want to read her again. Inn the New York Review of Books I read about Henry James returning to America after many years in England, and the waste and vacuity he found there. A sentence from Henry James puts manners and mystery on you.
There's a swirl of writers in my head at all times, whatever I am doing, going upstairs, picking sugar peas, walking the land, looking out of the window, and that has been the case since my adolescence when I was up to the town library two or three times a week. Reading is like closing your eyes, opening your eyes. You find the book and find your state of mind, a northwest breeze blowing through, whitening the meadow in a dry late summer.
It's hard to pause a blog, to stay a fermentation. A diary pauses when you finish one and start another, this is a moment all its own, a moment with no momentum, a pause between a set of full pages and a set of empty ones. There's a certain discomfiture in putting pen to paper on the first of a set of empty ones. You can't just dash off your day, you need a few easements, a Mozart piano concerto, the same movement over and over. Proust did that with music, paid a string quartet to play over and over the same air, looking for whatever the music held for him.
Hermès, once messenger of the gods, now guarantor of lifestyle, has taken out an arcane ad on the back cover of the New Yorker. A prone woman in a swimsuit, bits of sand clinging to her arm, shades most of her face with a tan leather disc in one hand, the other hand under her hair, her lips and chin in the sun, her face averted towards a wooden bowl. These are the Objects for Interior life— and if you understand that, you may well be suffering brain-melt.
It is late afternoon. The Hermès business plan for Interior life meets up, in Inniscarra, with Objects for Exterior life, for example blackcurrants, caterpillars, beetles and lacewings, tiny white moths rising out of the long grass, with kittens running through, then a heavy shower over the meadow in a dry summer. Phew.
Today, five of us picked and cleaned some twenty pounds of blackcurrants. It was a July day, uncertain and cool. We talked the twenty poundsworth, sorted them into rumtopf best and the rest for jam, wine, blackcurrant cheese or frangipani, observed their quirks and their caterpillars, ate a royal lunch out front, with salad, sushi, beet, the first cucumber, then went for a swim in the reservoir.
I usually write while listening to music. The music picks up the white July meadow, the shower of rain. The shape of a piano concerto or a string quartet.
Reading I do in silence. Up at the pond, on the sofa in the new room, before I go to sleep. If I go to sleep, with all this rattling and stretching in my head.
yrs, etc.
