The world is fucked and books are all we have

The world is fucked and books are all we have. When things are tough, I look for illumination in poetry, nothing has helped, but then a few days ago someone tweeted 'Apes' (1990) by Adam Zagajewski.

 Apes

One day apes made their grab for power.
Gold seal-rings,
starched shirts,
aromatic Havanas,
feet squashed into patent leather.
Deeply involved in our other pursuits,
we didn’t notice: someone read Aristotle,
someone else was wholly in love.
Rulers’ speeches became somewhat more chaotic,
they even gibbered, but still,
when did we ever really listen? Music was better.
Wars: ever more savage; prisons:
stinking worse than before.
Apes, it seems, made their grab for power.

Poem by Adam Zagajewski, from Without End

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On my bedside table just now are these:

Last weekend, I read Claudia Rankine's prose-poem Citizen, which is startling and unsettling (for me, more prose than poem, but well worth reading). I often stop books for no good reason and take weeks/months to go back, it may be a concentration thing. This summer, I stopped The Vegetarian a third of the way through and started a thriller (Apple Tree  Yard by Louise Doughty, which I loved). I will go back to The Vegetarian soon (I also really liked the story behind the translation). The Blue Devils of Nada by Albert Murray is a gorgeous dipping-in book of essays and there are some gems there. I will also, of course, go back to James Baldwin (started and stopped for no good reason). Jackie Kay's Trumpet is a secondhand book passed on to me, which I look forward to.

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The Goldfinch painting by Carel Fabritius has come to Edinburgh (how sad he died aged 32), which prompted me to start my Kindle version of Donna Tartt's Pulitzer-winning novel - I've had it for two years, unread. I'm 100 pages in and love the plot, but the style is too wordy for my liking. The micro-details clutter the prose, which is exhausting to read. I recall mixed reviews at the time. Julie Myerson was not too keen. Not sure I can stay the course. I think it would make a great film though.

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A couple of weeks ago, I watched John Berger and Susan Sontag discussing the process of reading and writing in 'To Tell a Story' on Channel 4 in 1983. The discussion was part of a series called VOICES (I don't remember VOICES, Channel 4 had just started and I was at the beginning of the nightmare of what turned out to be ME). Berger and Sontag are so compelling, you agree with both of them even when they have opposing views. Their earnestness almost seems quaint now, but I was struck by their respectful disagreement with one another. They are mesmerising to watch and listen to.

And I have just discovered Scottish doctor, filmmaker and  poet Margaret Tait (1918-1999), what a remarkable woman. (‘Emily’: ‘Emily Dickinson shut herself in a room / And wrote about her pain. / She wrote too about joy’.) You can hear a recording of Margaret Tait reading 'Emily' and other poems  here on the Scottish Poetry Library website.

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And Leonard Cohen is dead, that is hard to know. Since 1980, I have loved his poetry and his music and his beauty. He was old-ish, I guess, 82, but I have so many folded-up memories that his songs unfold again. 'Suzanne' is mentioned in my novel. ('...and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China' has to be one of the most beautiful lines ever).
 

I cried last Wednesday morning when I learned Trump was elected and I cried again two days later when I learned that Leonard  had died.

The world is fucked and books are all we have.

I don't know what to say about Gaza

I don't know what to say about Gaza, writers should have words, but I have no words. I just want to scream with despair and rage and grief when I watch the news (I watch Channel 4 and Al Jazeera's coverage,  have given up on the BBC). I can't go on marches (though how effective marching is, any more, I don't know, though it demonstrates to Gazans that many in the world are aghast at their suffering). I already boycott Israeli produce in my own tiny way, I never buy fruit or vegetables that,  to my knowledge, are grown there. I have donated to this relief agency,  Medical Aid for Palestinians. And I've signed this open letter to David Cameron. But it all, to be honest, feels pointless, Israel goes on killing with impunity, it seems there is no line it can't cross. I feel powerless to help in any real way. I don't know how anyone in Gaza stays sane. I just don't know. The average age of the 1.8 million population is seventeen, approximately a quarter of a million are children under ten. Last night, one news bulletin showed a hospital ward with horribly injured children, and a forlorn paper lantern hung up for Eid celebrations. Such details of trying to have 'normality' in the face of terror and devastation break your heart.

Jon Snow's short film is well worth watching, his reflections on reporting live from there last week.

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Since I wrote the above, a few days ago, the USA has condemned the IDF's bombing of a UN school, while at the same time handing Israel more arms. 

More than 1400 Palestinians have now been killed, most of them civilians, the suffering of children, hideously visible on our screens.  61 Israeli soldiers have lost their lives, and 3 civilians.

I have to look for meaning in other people's words, as I have lost my own words, I feel more numb and uncomprehending than ever. There is much to read. I recommend the following:

Giles Fraser, a priest in South London London: How can journalists be objective when writing about dead children?

Aaron Bady, a post-doc fellow who teaches African Literature at University of Texas: Texas Stands with Gaza.

Tariq Ali in the London Review of Books: Disgrace.

Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif's recent op-ed in the LA Times: Dead Palestinian Children in Gaza Tell Story of Impunity.

And Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in Haaretz:  It's All Hamas' fault, right, Israel?

The power of narrative (for good and ill)

I am increasingly interested in why we read stories, I think it might make you a better writer if you understand the seduction of narrative (though maybe it is better not to think about these things at all, and just write).  I've been dipping into The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall:  The riddle of fiction comes to this: Evolution is ruthlessly utilitarian. How has the seeming luxury of fiction not been eliminated from human life? My stepdad continues to bemuse us with narratives based on false memories - and what else is narrative if not memory? - he told us at the weekend that he had travelled across India by train in the nineties. He also referred to dinner plates as 'big flats', which is just poetry. I've been horrified at the pre-election violence in Pakistan (my family on my father's side live in Karachi). This clip from a couple of weeks ago is unbearable to watch, capturing a young boy's trauma after a bomb has gone off in Peshawar.  I cannot claim to understand much of the political narrative that is playing out in Pakistan at the moment, but my heart sinks at the seemingly  endless cycle of violence. This is an interesting article  by doctor and writer Qanta Ahmed, who lives in New York. She explores the twisted, nihilistic  narrative that seduces young men like the Boston bombers - there is no motive, just narrative which brings 'meaning' to their senseless and cruel  acts.

Tanks In Our Bedrooms

You feel a helpless fury and incomprehension, you don't even want to see or hear any more news when this is the image you went to sleep with.  It's not rocket science - excuse the terrible pun - to work out that the hugely disproportionate - and brutally predictable - response of Israel is going to lead nowhere except hell. 

I came across this Granta essay from 2009 by Libyan writer Hisham Mater. He has also tweeted that: 'Most US newspaper/magazine articles I've read dwell on Israeli suffering whilst keeping any mention of Gaza brief & incomplete'.

Also read this sobering piece from the Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish who lost three of his daughters in 2009.

And this from Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent on Britain's culpable role in the first place.

When you can't comprehend you turn to the words of others:

Here is Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish via Sarah Irving's interesting blog.

At weekend was dipping into Mourid Barghouti's I was Born There, I was Born Here which I got for Christmas last year. He says:  Many western journalists who mantain a studied and malign blindness to the Occupation have asked me whether the Palestinian people are really ready to coexist with the Jews and I reply that we coexisted with them for hundreds of years in Palestine ...What is asked of us today, however, and has been ever since their military occupation of our land, is to coexist with their tanks in our bedrooms! Show me one person in the world, I say to them, who can live with a tank in his bedroom.'

And my publisher Scott is kindly sending me up his copy of Israeli writer Amos Oz' How to Cure a Fanatic which someone gave him and he has just finished.

* Izzeldin Abuelaish speaks about Gaza 9.30 mins into this Radio 4 programme (19/11/2012). And Mehdi Hasan,  speaks about the importance of context when reporting on Israel/Palestine conflict.

** Journalist Sherine Tadros speaks about difficulty of impartiality in an unbalanced conflict.

Love and war

Born in USA, Janine di Giovanni is a highly respected, award-winning journalist who has covered many zones of  war and hell, so I was keen to read Ghosts By Daylight, her memoir about motherhood and (failed) marriage to French cameraman Bruno, after Jane Shilling described the writing as 'formidable' - I'd very much enjoyed Shilling's own memoir, The Woman in the Mirror. However, I must confess I did not find the writing formidable, I found it repetitive and recursive, the chronology confusing. Unsettling time shifts can work well in fiction - and non-fiction - if well-crafted, but this reads more like a diary and often feels  shapeless and baggy. While her war reportage may well be formidable - I have only read this, a recent article on the elite in Damascus, and I can certainly see her powers as a journalist, I want to read more, I very much respect her experience  -  I wondered if in writing about her own personal life so close up, she lost her way a little. One thing that annoyed me early on is, practically every woman Janine knows is described as 'beautiful', this may indeed be the case, but you need to find another adjective, it feels lazy. And lists, she loves lists! I dread lists in novels/memoirs and this book begins with a long list of their belongings waiting to be unpacked in Paris. It would work well in a film, the camera panning over the exotic details but just too long to read, it stuns you into torpor.

Her life has been fascinating - and romantic -  there is no doubt, and there are moments of brutal poetry, she describes how a friend (a poet) had seen 'a woman's shoe full of blood in the snow' in Sarajevo. I love  her description of finding Bruno's 'enormous silver gun' under the bed with pale green linen sheets in their house in West Africa, she had been hunting for her red sandals. Later, she remarks on Paris tourists in 'their awkard shorts, holding maps', an image that stays with you. I also love the scene where she meets Martha Gellhorn. The first two thirds of the book is most interesting, with  flashbacks to her war reporting, and the dizzying heights of love with Bruno.

She has a difficult pregnancy - after several miscarriages - and you will her and the baby to be okay, she has  a terrible chronic cough for months and months, violent enough to break a rib,  she is tested for everything under the sun and then we never hear about the cough again, as if she has forgotten she has told us.

However, the baby stuff (at one point, two excruciating pages of nanny's notes) and the unravelling of her relationship with Bruno (now alcoholic) is  not so engaging, you just don't care very much. Good writing should force you to care. She describes getting on the motorcycle with Bruno when he is too drunk to drive and I thought how reckless of her when she has her child at home. I had to skip big chunks of the last third of the book, endless details about how she resisted French cooking, then embraced it, a whole two pages on the excitement of a guy at the organic market giving her free chicken, or half a chicken (demi-poulet). This needed one paragraph. Not being able to get pizza in Paris that's not made by Tunisians truly irks her, and I wondered why she cares after everything she has seen. And she yearns for the pink fairycakes in Notting Hill,  in spite of monthly trips back to London (from Paris). Expensive Parisian 'English' tea rooms are just not the same.

The epilogue I enjoyed, after taking a break, the writing is spare - though still rambling in places - and we really learn all we need to know, she revisits Sarajevo where she first met Bruno fifteen years ago. In her  recent Newsweek Damascus report above there is a Daily Beast interview and she says how in all her writing 'she focuses on the microcosm', the individual stories are the most interesting, get the small details and the bigger picture takes shape. I can see how this has worked well for her in journalism, but I think it has not worked so well when she is talking about herself. Still, the book is worth reading if just for the insights into war reporting and glimpses of  life in privileged Paris, but it does seriously slump two-thirds through, and I almost think she knows she is padding, she is far too experienced - and good - a writer not to know.

Authors for Japan Auction

Writer Keris Stainton is arranging an auction to raise funds for the British Red Cross Japan Tsunami Appeal. You can bid for signed copies of many authors' books and services. I've offered a signed copy of The State of Me, (#91). Bidding will start on March 15th at 8am and end on Sunday 20th. Please check out the auction tomorrow, lots of wonderful books on offer! Looking at media reports on the tsunami and earthquake, it is almost impossible to absorb the scale of catastrophe.

A very long post on balance & pain & beauty

People tell me they enjoy this blog because it gets the balance of ME and non-ME right, how do I manage it? I'm not sure I know. My impulse to write - when I am able - is what has saved me from this illness, even just a couple of sentences. My posts are often short. I constantly have words banging together in my head, I would prefer if they were gently colliding. Still, I could never blog about ME all the time, it would bore the arse off me - remember I've had this since 1983 - but of course I must mention what is important, and my rage and disgust at the non-believers never goes away and intensifies periodically.

But neither can I bear undiluted self-absorption - and you do find it on some ME blogs, ironically those who are less ill tend to be the most solipsistic. You will come across this 'monopolisation of suffering' on non-ME blogs too, I guess it's human nature. Of course, there is a therapy to blogging, and we all construct masks when we blog or FB or tweet - unconsciously or not - but when some people - the least isolated, the most supported - seem constantly unable to see beyond themselves, that depresses me a little.

Unfortunately, those with very severe ME are usually too ill to blog much, they are too busy surviving the day, hoping tomorrow might be slightly less awful. Greenwords is a wonderful example of someone severe blogging, her posts are infrequent, but she does it so bloody well. And she is a dabhand on Twitter. Gardening is her passion, she is mostly unable to do it herself, but she is a 'passive gardener' and I learn stuff from her blog/tweets. (I like blogs where I learn something.) Other (ME) blogs I dip into are Digitalesse (photograpy); Ciara writes gorgeous posts on motherhood and Dr Speedy updates us on all the lunacy with just the right amount of scathing.

There was no blogging when I was very severe, I do wonder what I would have expressed of my illness back then if the internet had been around. Intense chronic symptoms distort your view, it can be hard to think of anything else. I remember I used to write my symptoms down to keep track of them and make bargains with God, whom I've never believed in. I'm no saint but I somehow manage(d) to keep hold of the fact that terrible things - and beautiful things - are going on elsewhere, no matter how much this illness has impacted on me. Like Helen Fleet, my character, I have a sense of absurdity, which no doubt helps me cope. But I can't blog solely about my life when children are being bombed in Lebanon/Gaza, flooded in Pakistan . . . take your pick of the horrors.

Still, some days you just want everything to be good for yourself and that is okay. There are still days my heart could shatter at what I have lost. And those with unremitting, severe ME deserve fucking trophies, they really do. I don't tend to put my worst days and hours up here, I think because a lot of that is in my novel, which is my weapon, and I feel I don't have to fight anymore (though I do, really, we all do).

Life can be extraordinarily painful and extraordinarily beautiful, there is luck and there is bad luck. It is how we respond that makes the pain bearable or unbearable. And how we respond depends on who we are at the core, and also on the support we have. Without support, this illness could very easily undo you.

When I see my wee aunt (who is fifty, she has Down's Syndrome and now dementia) I get the extraordinary pain and beauty at the same time. My heart breaks every time I see her, but when she smiles, it unbreaks and the world lights up. I saw her recently and fed her a miniature Milky Way and helped her drink a small carton of Ribena with a straw. It took over an hour. She is strapped into a wheelchair during the day. I hugged her and kissed her and sang a few verses of the Hokey Cokey, once her favourite song/dance. She can no longer walk or speak or read or write or colour in. I was in a state of total exhaustion for the next few weeks from this visit up north, that scary, jetlagged, all muscles compressed into a tin sensation, clumsy and forgetful, but all that mattered was I'd spent precious time with her.

Even taking the wide and bizarre spectrum of ME into account, if you look around the internet and see just how many claim to have (or have had) ME, I still fear that it is being over-diagnosed in some places, some seem to wear it as a badge, inappropriately. This is the fault of GPs and self-diagnosers who are - understandably - stumbling in the dark because of the nonsense peddled for so long by the Wesselyites. (Yeah, we don't actually know what's wrong with you, let's just call it ME. Now, be a good girl/boy, go and do some star jumps and we will train you not to feel pain.)

With any longterm illness comes much pain and chaos - and moments of beauty. We need balance to cope with it all. I don't always get the balance right in real life, but I hope I can do it on this blog.

*I meant to add this blog before but got distracted, have been tweaking this post for a week, it started as a post about my wee aunt and went in another direction. Holey Vision writes with grace (literally, her dog is called Grace) and humour about life with progressive loss of vision. Her spirit and lack of self-pity are quite something.

The opposite of the moon

I'm not the first to have observed that the fascinating and moving rescue of the Chilean miners has been reminiscent of watching a moon landing. A grainy capsule, images being broadcast from an eerie, alien world, except this is down (almost half a mile) instead of up (250 000 miles). I can't help but worry for the last man to be rescued, waiting on his own for Phoenix to come sliding back for him. I've been thinking of Zola's Germinal, which we read in our second year at uni. I recall re-reading it for an exam, my cousin and I had gone to a caravan in the Trossachs for Easter and would go jogging first thing, study all day and get tipsy at night in front of the cosy stove. Those were the days. Good luck, brave miners, I hope by morning you are all 33 safely out, back with your loved ones. It must be sweet agony for those still waiting, 13 I think. I read this piece in Indy with interest. The book deal is already being sewn up. And Oakley - who donated the sunglasses to the emerging miners - are getting major free advertising. I am curious to know how long they have to wear dark glasses for, how long does it take to readjust? And not to dampen the joy of it all, but ... I hope these miners make a fortune from selling their stories to the media. They deserve it.

50 Stories for Pakistan

Very happy my short story 'The Bangle Man' will be among the soon-to-be published 50 Stories for Pakistan, a fundraising anthology for victims of the floods. The collection will be published by Greg McQueen's Big Bad Media and all proceeds will go the Red Cross Pakistan Funds Appeal. Is so long since I've written anything new and this is flash fiction - just 500 words - a perfect length from energy p.o.v but you can still say a lot. I'm delighted to be part of such a great project. I could barely watch the most recent Channel 4 report on this catastrophe. One baby - a wee scrap, almost nothing more than his huge brown eyes - suffering from severe malnutrition and the worst strain of malaria. I had to look away.

Pakistan Floods

It's hard to believe such suffering is going on and the international response has been so sluggish.

Oxfam here.

Other links here.

Luxury items

Coriander and coffee?! These Gazans don't know they're born.

A tale of two cities

IMEU: Palestine in Photos: East Jerusalem residents languish beyond the wall

Why?

I understand that the medical/rescue workers - heroes, all of them - in Haiti are saving lives in horrible circumstances, but why is there not enough morphine by now, why has it not been sent? Why are child amputees screaming? I don't think I can watch or read any more.

Fancy a cruise to Haiti?

Unfucking believable.

Hell

It is impossible not to know what is going on in Haiti just now, and I just read this. All I can do is this (and it's not much but it makes me feel less powerless).

Can't bear it

I have hardly seen the news this last week, but I saw this last night, a report on the last dancing bear in India being released. Fantastic news. Very difficult to watch though.

Donkeys pretending to be zebras

If you are a donkey in Gaza and you are wondering what to do for Hallowe'en, you can always dress up as a zebra. This is so sad to read, but the surrealness prevents you from weeping, and the children seem entertained. The painters have done a great job.

Being drawn in by great writing

I have little appetite for any more 9/11 tales - previously unseen or not - but Colum McCann's piece in yesterday's Guardian really drew me in. Makes me want to read his fiction.

Unimaginable

I've been dipping into Philip Gourevitch's brilliant book about Rwanda for six months now. I can only read a little at a time, not just because the events are so horrific but there are a lot of facts to absorb, my head is not really up to it. Still, having seen the films Shooting Dogs and Hotel Rwanda on television recently, it makes the events more imaginable, if that is the right word - the films are almost like study aids. Last night, I came across a description of a corpse - the man had had his feet and hands chopped off before he died. This apparently was a common torture, the Hutu extremists called it cutting down to size. Crowds would gather to cheer and watch the victims die in agony. I dropped the book on the floor and know it will be a while before I go back. Sure I would have nightmares about machetes I dreamt instead that I'd written a novel about Iran and it was just out in hardback, it had a lovely red and gold cover but I cannot remember its title.

'Music for Gaza'

A six-month-old music school in Gaza was bombed during the siege. Dutch charity Music in Gaza will help rebuild the school when possible. This is a lovely short film of an imaginative concert organised by La Vie Sur Terre last year in Bethlehem. The project was called Carried by the Wind and musicians performed on rooftops on both sides of the Israeli security wall.