The Woman who went to Bed for a Year by Sue Townsend

I wonder why the reviewers say this book is "hilarious"? Perhaps they didn't read it? It's about a woman having a breakdown because she has been weak for too long, and she wants to change. Of course, it's quite farcical, in that this situation (woman afraid to get out of bed) would not be tolerated by a real life family. I don't think so. I think Sue Townsend must have started it to see where it would go, and used her intuition to decide how it would develop. I think that's why it feels truthful. I found that the Guardian reviewer felt, like me, that it was not so much hilarious as "dark".

The thing is, that going to bed and doing nothing is not a good treatment for a life crisis.  I was thinking about the film "Wild" in which the female protagonist goes for a long walk. Travel is generally healing, but stasis is stasis and this is one of the truths of the narrative.

Eva, the woman of the title, decides to get rid of all her possessions, including Billy the bookcase and all her books, which she is attached to, but she tells her new friend, the decorator, that she has always used books as an anaesthetic. Ha!! Yes!! She wants to be rid of them to see what life is like with no rushing about, no work, no books, just thoughts. I am rather in favour of this. Sometimes I am terribly tired and I find myself doing, and thinking, nothing, but this is not the same as just looking inward to find out if there is anything in there. In here. Either way. Or letting one's thoughts go for a walk.

Townsend's fiction has often hinted at a darkness beneath the humour, but this novel gives it freer rein than previously. Eva begins her retreat as a fairly typical fed-up housewife, sick of being over-used and under-appreciated, at once liberated and made redundant by the departure of her children, keen to revivify the brain that seems to her like a "poor thing ... huddled in a corner, waiting to be fed". She ends it as a far more radical figure – not quite the messiah that the distressed and needy masses who begin to gather beneath her bedroom window hope for, but a character compelled to dispense with all forms of consolation and comfort while she examines the basis of her life. It is, consequently, an occasionally ragged book, its comic touches dissipated by lingering moments of bleakness. It doesn't seem out of place when Ruby tells her daughter that she occasionally looks forward to death: "I'm tired of living down here since everything went complicated."

Two books hardly make a literary trend, but it's interesting that Ali Smith's most recent novel, There But For The, also featured a protagonist who refused to come out of a bedroom. What unites these vastly different books is how cleverly they both explore the immense power someone who decides to halt their story suddenly acquires, and the unexpected shapes that people make around these human-shaped absences. In Eva Beaver's case, once she's opted for a life lying down, what surprises both us and her is not that she's there, but that we haven't, as it were, all joined her.

My ridiculous New Year Resolutions

Recently I made some of the above. Well, it was New Year. I had forgotten my previous coming-to-terms-with-resolutions wisdom and I made the WRONG kind of resolution.

I decided that I must concentrate more on my work and less on the things that I love. The result would be that I would not feel anxious about being behind with my work, which is how I feel pretty much all the time. When I had got into a position of being ahead with my work I could do other things like: read books and newspapers. One of my resolutions was not to get into reading any kind of narrative, because that sort of thing takes over one's tiny mind. OK, my tiny mind. Everyone else's mind holds more equipment and can do many more things. So I thought I would read art books instead e.g. The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman by Grayson Perry, and The History of the German People by Mr MacGregor of the British Museum. I could pick them up, muse awhile, and put them down, muse finished.

Mobile Shrine to Alan Measles

The significance of this image is explained here: review of Unknown Craftsman

And I decided I would stop "buying" the Guardian when I popped into Waitrose just because it is free if you spend £5 and I always spend £5 because things in Waitrose are somehow slightly nicer than the average foodstuffs and more expensive (what a strange coincidence) without being ridiculously gussied up for the wannabees as they are in Marks. Because I get into the Guardian and find its columnists worth reading as long as you take a bit of time over them. Therefore, the Guardian is wasting my time and my brain when I should be working. (To start with, I found the Guardian impenetrable.  But you get used to it, and the effort it takes to read. You get to like it. Just like the crossword, which is REALLY hard.)

Anyway, I have failed to stick to these resolutions (apart from reading narratives, I have not read a novel or story since the Christmas hols) and I am rather glad, because life shouldn't be all horrid. There should be some changes and developments, and although my idea of narrowing was only temporary (the next 6 months), I can't bear it because my work is OK but not my passion.

My original resolution was: eat mainly soup. This is not a bad idea either because I am very overweight and I never have been overweight before. I have lost the knack of losing weight. Also, I really like soup, so it's do -able. The trouble is, I also have a husband and son for whom I cater and they are not satisfied with soup.

So far this year I have cooked dishes I haven't cooked before (duck with cherry sauce, last night, and something with meatballs (very good idea, meatballs, quick and tasty)) and that's a much better  resolution: cook some new dishes!

And although I really wanted to get involved with the Green Party this turns out to be not do-able either, as my local branch meets on Wednesday evenings, when I teach until 9 pm. I could do without teaching until 9 p.m. Basically, I want to do something worth doing with other people whom I might like, but this longing is being stymied at every turn.

Sad: I never saw the Germany exhibition at the BM (all over now) and I never saw the Rembrandts. Just never took the time out of my busy but meaningless schedule of working and hoovering, etc.

The Sun - and petitions

One of the petitions I have signed is about taking the bare boobs out of The Sun newspaper. I think it is sad to encourage young girls to think their tits give them more value than any other thing about them. There is more than enough encouragement for young girls to think that way and it would be great to prune it back a little. Sadly, girls judge themselves by what boys/men think and eventually they fall under the spell of judging themselves by what one boy/man thinks. (Until they are older and wiser - but sometimes there's no chance of becoming wise.) However, when it came to explaining why I signed up to take the boobs out of The Sun I just couldn't do it - it seemed so self-righteous. So I never tried to spread that particular petition. I have also signed one against FGM. It is illegal in this country so the Muslim communities who want it done (African) take their girls back to Africa for them to be mutilated in this way. So the petition is to spread the word that this is happening and by teaching about it in schools, make it socially unacceptable.

A lot of the petitions do have a good effect! For example, the petition to keep searching for the crew of Cheeky Rafiki, that was lost in the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, had an immediate effect.

I signed a petition to stop Michael Gove making the English Lit curriculum so "Little England" - everything on the GCSE syllabus has to be English, ridiculous. No more "Of Mice and Men", or "To Kill a Mocking Bird" - these are stories with a bit of real meat to them which show young people how powerful a story in a book can be. Who cares that they're American?? It doesn't matter. Young people have to do Shakespeare and a 19th cent novel - this is hard enough for them: let them have at least one book they can just enjoy.

Another petition I tried to spread is the Stop the Funding Cuts to Kew Gardens one. it's still short of signatories. But the organisers have taken it to Downing Street by way of getting it in the news. Needs 1200 more to cause a question to be asked in parliament I believe. It's so close.

the Sun newspaper came through my door (a free marketing strategy) and it has a lovely montage on the front of 117 English people we are proud of. The Queen is there in front of the mob and there are many, many popular entertainers, Prof Brian Cox is near the front with David Attenborough to represent science. Stephen Hawking is squeezed in at the back. But we seem to be mainly a nation of pop singers, actors and footballers. They even have a pixellated image of someone you have to guess is Banksy.   It's not racist as there's a smattering of black musicians and footballers and Mo Farrer - suddenly he's English. But inside we have a poem by Katie Hopkins, an erstwhile contestant on The Apprentice who looked as though she would give the patronising Alan Sugar something to think about and then became a journalist.

I'm not naturally distrustful

I just like my own

Proper English lads - strong and brave

Perfectly home grown

Whatever happens at the World Cup

I know this to be true

If you cut me to my core

My blood's red, white and blue.

Racism is never far from patriotism and I haven't seen anything like this for ages. But then, I get the Guardian free from Waitrose, don't I?  (This means, a liberal paper from an upmarket supermarket.) I have no idea what most of the country thinks, because I live in a prosperous part of the country. Some of my family is pretty right-wing and probably reads this sort of thing every day quite happily.

Maus, a survivor's tale by Art Spiegelman

I re-read this work which I first read I think in 1989. It's brilliant. It tells one Jew's story of being deprived of his comfortable life in Poland, fighting the Germans, being rounded up into a ghetto, people being taken away batch by batch, hiding away from the Nazis in desperately cramped conditions and finally being betrayed and taken to Auschwitz. It tells a terrible tale of loss.It also tells the tale of a son who finds his old father very irritating and irrational, especially in his fixation with money, but from the story of the father's traumatic experiences we find out how much, in the end, money does really matter. It bought them time.

All the Jews are drawn as mice, and yet... we understand their emotions from their body language. We also understand from the drawings who are the virile young mice and who are the elderly.

"a remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution ... at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant." 

Jules Feiffer 

 From the Guardian: 11th June 2009

Art Spiegelman has found it difficult to produce another long-length work since Maus.

Spiegelman, 61, looks just as he draws himself - a waistcoat, a constant cigarette; he is self-mockingly neurotic but infinitely wise, still carrying the heavy burden of guilt that plagues survivors' children. His vast career has ranged from the grotesque Garbage Pail Kids, to In the Shadow of No Towers, his comic-strip journal about September 11, and last year's reissue of Breakdowns, a graphic memoir described as "the Citizen Kane of modern comics".

Despite the awful details of his life, Spiegelman's confessional style makes his works almost impossible to put down. His parents were forced into the Polish ghettos in 1941, reluctantly handing their eldest son - Spiegelman's brother - over to relatives to hide him. The little boy was poisoned to death by his aunt during a Nazi raid; she thought it better than letting him go to the camps, and killed herself, too. His grief-stricken parents ended up in Auschwitz, which they survived. Spiegelman was born after the war and raised in New York, an only child with a "ghost brother". His father was brutalised and damaged; his mother took her own life when Spiegelman was 20 and didn't leave a note. All this is laid bare in his work. To him, Maus, published in 1986 and 1992, was, "as a blues musician would say, my crossover hit"; but he sees all his work on a continuum, "made from the same fractured psyche".

..What he calls his "efficiently casual" drawings in Maus took 20 to 30 drafts. He is so paralysed by the pressure of creating the perfect sketchbook that he prefers to draw while on the phone, on Post-It notes or envelopes, which he usually throws away. If he is drawing on a newspaper scrap, it is easier to shut down the left side of the brain, so the right side is free to move around; he won't know what the drawing is until it is finished.

Spiegelman tells me this in a stream of rapid-fire, Woody Allen-style self-deprecation as we walk down a Paris street. "I have too much respect for books, so to make a mark in a blank one seems like a violation," he says. "Then the neurosis compounds itself, because if you make a good drawing, you don't want to screw the book up by making a bad drawing after. So I have a lot of sketchbooks that have one drawing in them - a whole shelf full. And then if you make a bad drawing, you never want to look at the book again. So I have a lot of sketchbooks that have one page torn out that I never went back to. It's very rare that I can just get myself engaged and overcome all these strange inhibitions I've set up for myself." Still, he loves these drawings for their quality as "electrocardiograms, recording thought very directly". Publishing the sketchbooks has been liberating, he says. "When you've been revealed in all your pathetic nakedness, there's nothing else to lose. So yes, finally therapy that worked!"

... This was an experiment in forcing himself to sit down every day and draw in a sketchbook in 2007. The self-analytical sketches include bloodstained "finished" drawings on a battlefield. "It was a kind of, 'What's your problem, Jack?'" he says. "And what the problem has tended to be over many years now is that ever since Maus resulted in this bright Klieg light always aimed in my direction, which has its benefits, it has also created this discomforting sense of always being observed, as if I had little eyeballs sitting on my shoulder with arms and legs, and all the eyeballs are saying, 'Oh look, look, he made a line!' That's not the best way to make lines." Will he ever escape the shadow of Maus? "It's even worse than that," he says, lighting a cigarette. "Most other cartoonists are afraid of the same thing." He means that every graphic novel is compared to Maus. "As a result, it's sort of a curse on me and all other cartoonists I know."
...
Spiegelman worries that this makes him sound like one of his drawings ("megalomaniac with an inferiority complex"), but he hates critics using Maus as a measuring stick for new work. "The thing is, Maus was not made to teach anybody except me anything. I knew I had a story worth telling. But it wasn't like, 'I know, I'll take the heaviest subject I know and turn it into a comic - that'll show the bastards.'" His aim was to "build the damn thing to last", by making a well-structured comic. Now, he feels, structure has been eclipsed by subject matter. "On the other," he says, "I realise I'm very fortunate. Maus has given me a licence to kill. I can even publish my sketchbooks."

Spiegelman, who prefers the spelling "comix" (a nod to the underground comics movement he emerged from), remains the champion defender of the form. His third sketchbook in this collection, Nose, was made when he and his wife, the French art editor Françoise Mouly, ran the 1980s comix magazine Raw, when comics were at their nadir of respectability. The underground comics explosion of the 1960s and 70s had come to an end, and even mainstream comic books were dying off. Spiegelman argued that when a mass medium, such as the comic, stops being so, "it either has to become art or die". He is currently compiling a vast anthology of American children's comic book literature from 1938 and 1961; this has meant unearthing the comics put on bonfires in the 1950s "when comics were the Grand Theft Auto of their moment", seen as causing delinquency.

With Maus, Spiegelman says he wanted to make "a long comic book that needed a bookmark and would have the density I associate with novels"; but he never used the term graphic novel. "I kind of like the unsavoury roots of the form," he says. "It's not like I want it all dressed up in a tuxedo so it can be in public. Comics are the hunch-backed dwarves of the arts and they should be proud of the fact." Recently, he was reading Posy Simmonds on a plane and a man said, "Oh I've heard of that graphic novel, is it good?" Spiegelman grins. "Ten years earlier, people would have given me a wide berth: that guy's a moron, he's reading comic books and he's a grown up. So I realise things have changed and as long as you call them graphic novels, it's OK to read them. If that's the case, so be it."

He has just had three sketchbooks published, exquisitely tied up with an elasticated leg band (at least, it was too small for my head). I've never met anybody as painstaking as Spiegelman, nor anyone who has come close to producing a sustained masterpiece like Maus. These sketchbooks may explain why it is so good: he took infinite pains to get it right. It also explains why he has done nothing like it since: he just takes so long to do anything.

...
Drawing comics (as Spiegelman puts it, "make boxes - fill them - cartoonists and undertakers - same business") is one of the most constraining art forms. "By pencilling and inking my comics," writes Spiegelman, "I cover my traces, dressing up my demons before they reach the public. The rehearsed snap of a 'professional' line replaces raw and intimate seismographs of thought." I couldn't have put it better myself. Drawing has to question, to record, to speculate - but above all, it has to breathe, free from the pressure to perform. Whether it's bound in books or not, that's what happens in sketches.

More strange facts about octopuses

From the Guardian 16th May: by Ian Sample, edited by me:

Octopuses can regrow limbs lopped off by predators and mean scientists.

"~But for all their impressive feats, the octopus's walnut-sized brain cannot keep track of what its eight arms are doing. The problem is too hard. Since each arm is studded with suckers that act on contact, the mystery is this: how do octopuses not get tangled up in knots?

Researchers in Israel set out to answer that questions in a series of experiments that grew steadily more gruesome..

The limbs are intriguing for roboticists, because they are autonomous: none knows what the others are doing, and they make many of their own decisions. Of the octopus's 500 million nerve cells, more than half are in their arms.

...The arms can survive for around an hour after being amputated. Lone limbs have been seen to grab food and even pass morsels to where the arm thinks its owner's mouth must be.

It was a student of Hochner's who first noticed octopus suckers attached everything but octopus skin. ... On more that 30 occasions, Hochner noticed that amputated arms never latched on to themselves. ... The only time one amputated arm grabbed old of another was when the latter was peeled. [Urggghh]

Presented with dismembered arms, some octopuses grabbed them as if they were lumps of food , and brought them to their mouths. They were less likely to do so if the amputated arm was one of their own.

The scientists now want to learn which chemical is responsible for blocking the suckers, and how the animals can tell their own flesh from that of others.

Cocaine, its effects in the City and elsewhere

Geraint Anderson wrote in the Guardian, 16/4/13, Was cocaine to blame for the credit crunch?

"Wall Street got drunk" was George W Bush's verdict on the emerging financial crisis in July 2008. Two years later the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, explained in his Mansion House speech that "the role of a central bank in monetary policy is to take the punch bowl away just as the party gets going" (something that he had admitted had not occurred). But  perhaps the wrong intoxicant was being blamed. The controversial former drug tsar David Nutt told the Sunday Times this weekend that cocaine-using bankers with their "culture of excitement and drive and more and more and more ... got us into this terrible mess".

I'm inclined to agree. Cocaine is ... a drug that results in intense bouts of over-exuberance as well as a tendency to talk convincingly about stuff you know nothing about. ...Furthermore, surely only cocaine-ravaged buffoons would actually buy billions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities when they were so clearly doomed to explode.

.... Dr Chris Luke, an A&E specialist based at Cork University Hospital, who has studied the effects of cocaine on bankers, has stated that "prominent figures in financial and political circles made irrational decisions as a result of megalomania brought on by cocaine usage".

Greed, selfishness, ignorance and ruthlessness played their part of course, but I think it would be foolish not to see the role the drug played in creating the bubble. Herd mentality, which thrives in times of uncertainty, is certainly much more explicable when you factor in the trembling insecurity and depleted discernment that go hand in hand with a coke habit. 

 In my experience of knowing someone whose personality changed when he took cocaine, I can say that under its influence, empathy took a nose dive and he became someone whose selfish nature held sway over him. Morally, he was a nonentity.

It is also important to note that cocaine is illegal. Those who take it tend to think that the law does not apply to them, but only to the uninitiated, the little people. Therefore they do not regard the law or any other code of ethics. You never know what they might do. How city bankers could be allowed to take cocaine when we so needed them to be sober with our money is the hugest scandal. But everyone knew it was going on. Q. Why weren't the drug squad called in? A. Because they were all implicated. Pity the police didn't take the initiative. After all, the water in the drains was tested to find areas of cocaine use, and the City scored high!

I once read that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was written by Stevenson when he was in bed ill, and taking cocaine as medication. In its first draft, the story was about a doctor who took some chemicals that freed him from moral obligations. Ugly little Mr Hyde was the result. On reading the draft, his wife recommended that Stevenson make it less factual and more like an allegory of good and evil, which he did. Even disguised, some of the cocaine story is still there - for example, Jekyll is full of remorse after his moral transgressions, and what he likes about Hyde is that he feels no remorse. Hyde is stronger than Jekyll because of this omission, and the more Jekyll takes the potion, the stronger Hyde grows, and Jekyll's hold on his own personality becomes correspondingly weaker. Growing drug dependence is the story. Well, I think so! The truth will never be known.