Edith's Diary, My Diary

It's a while since I read a page-turner where things were going to get worse; you know from the dull start in New Jersey/Pennsylvania in the 1960s, Edith's Diary will be a lie. Edith's life continues to split off from Edith's diary. Her 100% dreadful son, in her diary is an engineering hero with a lovely wife and child near Princeton, New Jersey. Her husband leaves her for a younger woman, whom he eventually marries, and has a daughter with. Meanwhile Edith, as her diary sharpens into fresh fantasies, sculpts the head of her son in plasticine and joins him, little by little, in delinquency.

This is Patricia Highsmith. It will get worse.  

Greetings from the Countryside (Strong Emotions)

An exchange between Judy Kravis and Laura Fitzgerald 

Hi Laura,

I've been reading your Greetings from the Countryside (Strong Emotions).

Good to see it on the page, with time to mull over your version of land etc.

You are so much of the place, by birth and more, whereas we have come in and made a place our own.

Strong emotions in either case. You by birthright and we by no right, as some would say.

Our immediate neighbours, and we only have one lot, have told us that everyone around here hates us.

Which isn't true, but they'd just like company for their own hatred.

I asked another neighbour a mile or two away, from a small farm in west cork herself, why they hate us.

She said it's because we're english by birth and they think we're better than them.

Becoming irish is no answer. You have to have a couple of people in the ground to be irish, someone told us.

And if you do, it's just another set of problems isn't it ....

Hope the exhibition went well. Do come visit if you're coming this way,

all the best,

Judy xx

Hello Judy,

I think the above email is very much a thing in itself, a container story. It's complex isn't it ... we all do and don't belong. Sure I think I'm probably Norman given the Fitzgerald, who knows who plundered what if you go back far enough ...

Thanks so much for buying a copy of the publication. I'm very glad I was able to make the printed version, the gallery were very good to me.

I hope we can manage to meet up over the summer, yourself and Peter are very welcome to call to us in Inch also. I'm sure Dad would enjoy showing you around.

Thanks for the great email/short story!

Best wishes,

Laura

INCURABLE

This afternoon I listened to Daniel Michael Kaiser's translation of incurable into music, a music of disappearing, almost a non-music, DK says. All rhythms were suddenly strange, every pause uncertain. The singing voice dancing over what I wrote and how I have read it out loud, to say nothing of how it took form in the first place. A manifestation of how DK made his way through it, what resonances he found and how the singer sings them.

The best part of listening is I have no words for it. I barely have words for what I write. I listened with bated breath on a broad plain. A thin fabric, translucent, seemingly improvised (although it is not). I wanted to focus on the resonance, he says. The reverb was recorded in an abandoned sugar factory tower.

Hard to listen on the computer, such thin sound. Brings you up short. I wanted to hear this sung version in all its literal resonance, this light incantation, translucent, yes. And all the time I was pulling on what I wrote seven years ago. incurable 'A tense and gnomic journey into the past as it resonates during a difficult long moment in the present, with personal photographs and influential images from the dangerous years of growing up', I said.

Counting Backwards from 100, Judy Kravis

In many insomniac nights I have started counting backwards from one hundred, looking for associations, counting my way through my life. Addresses, bus numbers, years, dates, Now that I have written down a version, I don't do it at night any more. I don't count backwards.  I sleep better. There's more room for dreams.

Here's the current end of Counting Backwards from 100

There are no number thirteen buses, I imagine

Twelve years a slave. Twelve years free 

Eleven pipers piping. If you like piping

Ten. One Oh. Forget it 

Dorothy L. Sayers' Nine Tailors were bells

Eight and a half. Fellini. Mastroianni over Roma 

Seven Years in Tibet

Now we are six 

Five Go Mad in Dorset

Four-minute warning before the world ends 

Three is not a crowd

Two of a kind is kindness itself 

One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so

Clarice Lispector, The Chandelier

Clarice Lispector's The Chandelier, written when she was 23, calls up my diary's desert years, in my early twenties, which you can't so much read as taste and then pause. No crevice left unexplored, unsaid. Clarice had a firmer grasp on the stuff of her life than I did. She pulls back from the brink of what can't be said, and then says it.

That's when things became real. Who'd forced her to speak, who: she could cry scared and tired in that instant because if there were a strange phrase to say it would be: please pass me the olives.

She is persistent; you can choose any sentence in The Chandelier and there it is.

He laughed, all his teeth appeared in silence.

She has the muscularity of what she looks at. She is resolute. She uses many verbs. I avoided verbs, unless in the subjunctive mood. I liked (abstract) nouns. I was deflected, diluted and hung out to dry in the groves of academe. I was reading Mallarmé and trying to comprehend my solitude and its diary.

and to tell me not to speak
would be to tell me that
all I ever said was but
a crevice long in the wood
in the frame of a picture
I thought was not mine alone.

With Clarice there's a push to make clear the connect/disconnect of the outer to the inner world. Here is every last thought and observation, every conjecture.

Reality was laughing at all of them. She was arranging the flowers with all her fingers. Her barely-present lips were hiding in shadows born from the position of her head.. Her breasts were growing congested squeezed by her clothes, her hips were widening with fatigue, without beauty.

Tuesday 9th June 1970, JK's diary takes a rueful look at itself.

It will perhaps be the one triumph of this diary to have written itself both in and out of existence. 

On the 17th of July 1970 I recorded the bus conductor's conversation with one of his passengers. How he was going to Jersey this year with the wife, £42, cottage of course, including the fare, and that's £18, so it's not bad. Other people's reality butted in verbatim with a certitude I could only keep in reserve. Other people's lives. Clear as fiction.

Clarice, bless her, is always in existence, batting about among her certitudes, wrangling her definitions.

Stubborn, she was staring at her face trying to define its fleeting magic, the softness of the movement of breathing that was lighting it and slowly putting it out. The corruption was bathing her in a sweet light. So there she was. So there she was. There was no one who could save or lose her. And that's how the moments were unfurling and dying while her quiet and mute face was floating in expectation. So there she was. Even yesterday the pleasure of laughing had made her laugh. And ahead of her stretched the entire future. 

You can pick any few pages, any few lines, and there she is, seeking herself out, losing and then seeking, saying it all: the truth was so fast you had to squint to see it. In the diary of JK age 23, the truth was so submerged you had to drown to find it.

And the more dire the dead end, the long sheet of failure, gales that are perplexity incarnate.

The Chandelier and JK's diary are alike intense, best tasted in essence, like lavender, then left to rest. These two young women are scrupulous and relentless, JK all metaphor and remove, Clarice all tongue and fire, both strung out on the effort, torture, pleasure, of trying to clarify.

Orlando, Virginia Woolf, on foot the velvet odyssey, Judy Kravis

Orlando led me, by who knows what mycelium, to the first novel I wrote, circa 1978: on foot the velvet odyssey. The only copy I could find was a carbon copy sent to a friend who politely returned it. The blurred print is appropriate to the remoteness of the writer—me—a few years out of England with an English topography and an English idiom, her hesitations and her festivities, a lively step, several removes and a lot of inward turns. This is a distinct reading experience, a novel suspension of disbelief: is/was this one of my beings, aka me, who willed her words thus? If not, who?

I'm a reader amazed. This was how I ran on then. Oh, and I ran. Lush but obscure. Mouvementé. Accidenté. Apologetic. Too many adverbs. A genuine questing and wresting. Volume on the slow increase. Using all my language.  All my characters. Une doctrine en même temps qu'une contrée. A kinetic experience, like driving in a desert.

A carbon copy on thin bank paper, so, in order to read it, you have to detach a page into free air so that the next doesn't show through. Some letters didn't print, not enough pressure on the keys; and you have to travel the xxxx where you changed your mind.

How would this read if it were in focus?

The narrative is already soft: drift and perversity in England in the mid-20th century. A lot of sensing and longing for sleep and the sea, for a spectacle in which you were, briefly, a performer.

A carbon copy on bank paper could be the ideal state.