Capital Capitals

Am hanging in here. Capital letters at last returned to me thanks to at least a couple of the pinkies on my right hand feeling a little more up to keyboard bashing.

The doctor looked at my second x-ray yesterday and said that I was healing well and would only need to wear the cast for another ten days or so. Glad about that. I itch underneath it and can't scratch. Temperature has apparently been as high at 38C so constantly sweating under there. Now have a bottle of alchohol to tip down into the cast to give some relief. Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

Really can't so much at the moment. Good time to put my feet up and read. Slicing a swathe through the works of Toby Litt - ignorance rapidly being banished you'll be pleased to learn. Also spent time getting bits of me renovated at beauty salon and hairdressers.

Had some (mostly writing) friends around to dinner last night. Had planned to cook something nice but it was mostly bought back food and simple things I could put together with one hand (plus teeth to tear open packets). Some good conversation on the verandah - which is really what life is about. More more please.

A Set Of Russian Dolls

Just finished Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, the novel tipped to win the last Booker prize, although it was pipped to the post by Alan Hollingsworth's In The Line of Beauty.

Quite an amazing read - very daring! It's like a set of Russian dolls with one story nestling inside another story nestling inside ... . In all there are six novellas of equal length - covering a whole range of genres and text types - history, comedy, thriller and science-fiction ... journal, letters, memoir, best-seller, musical composition, interview and oral history. In a playful twist the protagonist of each story becomes the consumer of the story that has gone before. Our need for stories is part of our humanity, he seems to say - and always will be. Less savoury aspects of our humanity are explored through the stories - greed and consumerism, prejudice, exploitation and enslavement.

I must confess to having enjoyed The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish most. I don't often laugh out loud when I read, but this was deliciously, wickedly funny. Loved it where a disgruntled author encounters a critic who has written a particularly negative review, pitches him over the balcony. (Makes you wonder if there is an element of wishful thinking on Mitchell's part here!)

But ultimately It's Mitchell's skill with language that excites most - how does the guy manage to juggle so many styles, so many distinctive voices? In the final story Shoosha's Crossing and Everything After he creates a completely new post-apocolyptic dialect of English which is both plausible and poetic. In Half Lives - The First Luisa Rey Mystery he manages to write a thriller which conforms to all the characteristics of the genre (one which I generally hate)- but which is actually a great deal better written than many of the thrillers that make the best-seller list. He makes it look so effortless too. And I found myself underlining some of Timothy Cavendish's hilarious pronouncements because they delighted me so much. Can't resist slipping in a couple of my favourite lines here:

A trio of teenettes, dressed like Prostitute Barbie, approached, driftnetting the width of the pavement.

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

The only moan that I have about the book is that the Sceptre paperback version had print so small that it had me reaching for my reading glasses, and one of the least inspiring cover designs I've seen on a paperback in yonks.

Trick Lit

We've had chick lit. Now, according to Australia's The Age the latest phonomena in the publishing world appears to be what they call Trick Lit, in other words bonk-and-tell tales told by sex workers.

Should curiosity(at least!) be stirred ... you can read the original Belle de Jour here.

Distribution

Went to the second of MPH's Writer's Circle meetings - this time on book distribution. Ong from MPH distributors and a guy called Vincent (can't decipher my terrible left-handed scrawl here to be able to tell you which company he represents!)gave some fascinating insights into how the business works in Malaysia. Both very gung-ho about dealing with self-published writers, which is encouraging as for most Malaysian writers, this is their way ahead. They both talked about how essential it is for writers to actually get out and promote their books if they want sales. Writing the book and producing it is the easy part - marketing yourself is every bit as important. But health and wealth titles though are the books that sell ... no real local market for fiction.

Local writer Azizi Ali, a highly engaging speaker, is a self-published success story.



He currently has six titles on money management out and last year made RM700,000 from his publications. He has several more titles in preparation, is eyeing the international market. He also intends to publish other local writers. Who says local writers can't make good?

Super Booker Shortlist

The shortlist's out for the new international Man Booker Prize. Eighten heavyweights from 13 counties. 5 of the nobel laureates, two of the Booker winners. Most of 'em I've read at least something by, four I've never heard of (my vast ignorance again, as no doubt Susan will be on hand to remind me!) - but I guess the great value of a prize like this is that it sets you on the trail of new and exciting reading.(Find it most odd, incidentally, that Rushdie is not on this list when Midnight's Children has been voted the Booker of Bookers.)

I would love to see the annual Man Booker prize become an international competition. Would love to see American writers compete on an even playing field and on an ongoing basis with British and Commonwealth writers and works in translation.

So who do you think will win in this competition? I hope it's Doris Lessing, who has written three of my all time favorite books The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist and The Golden Notebook. Margaret Atwood would be my second choice.

wrist

you'll have to excuse the terrible typing
the lack of uppercase
this morning broke my right wrist
slid on the wet carporch as i was on my way to collect the newspaper from the gate
put out my hand to save myself
crack!
took a taxi to damansara specialist centre where i got x-rayed
a break right across and the alignment of the bones out
the most painful injection i've ever endured was a local anaesthetic into the bone
then the whole thing plastered up
would have liked a rainbow coloured cast
at least the doctor set my hand at the right angle for typing when it's healed a bit
just about the worst thing that could happen when i have so much to do

Litt-erature!

Just heard today - I will be chairing a video conference session with British thriller writer Toby Litt as part of the British Councils' Meet The Author' Series. (I've already chaired discussions with David Lodge and Beryl Bainbridge, and introduced Paul Bailey at the KL Litfest as part of this series.) The session is open to the public, free of charge (and there are even refreshments!) but spaces are limited.

Date: 9 March

Time: 18.30-19.30 (ish)

Venue: BC Video-conference suite (as usual)

If you would like to go let me know and I will forward your names.

I'd love to say that I could tell you all about this writer ... but have huge gaps in my knowledge of contemporary British writers, I'm ashamed to say. One reason is that when I first moved overseas in the 1980's (to Nigeria first and then Malaysia), I felt that I was much too insular, too "Britocentric", so tended to avoid novels from my own part of the world, reading writers from just about anywhere but ...

I know, I know ...!

And this past year has really brought it home to me just how much I've missed! It's been a voyage of discovery, intensive readings of writers I've grown to have the greatest of respect for.

Now I've got how many days till ... okay, first I have to do a city-wide bookshop to track down copies of his books (apparently there's a couple of titles in Times in KLCC), and there are copies of other titles in British Council library. Then there's intensive reading ... this part I love most, sitting for hours in my favourite chair or over a "flat white" outside the cafe I frequent almost everyday ... with the best bookworm excuse in the whole world: "I'm not taking it easy - I'm working, I really am." Then I'll get together with my journalist friend who is interviewing him first, to bat around ideas of interesting questions to ask, issues to raise. (Booktalk gets the heart a-pumping and don't I just love that.)

So ... all you fellow bookaholics, come along on the day.

But more importantly, if you write fiction yourself, turn up and grill this guy about the issues in writing you care most about. Successful writers have so much to share with you about the craft!

What Booklovers Look Like

Muntaj sent me some photos from our book club's Christmas party way back in December(as these things tend to be!):

You can see my poxy Christmas tree - a sad remnant of its former self - topiaried into lollipop roundness by my husband. And I'm the loony standing directly behind it.

This is what mad keen booklovers look like. Scary isn't it?

Incidentally, a very nice article from the Guardian about book clubs.

She Didn't Quite Get It

My mum passed away five years ago. Here are some of the things she said which made me laugh out loud.

__________________________________________________________

“Oooh … so your boyfriend’s a Moslem? ..."

(When she first learned I was going out with Abu)

" ... Does he pray to the Buddha every day?”

___________________________________________________________

“May Allah forgive me.”

(As she served up a pork chop, the first time I brought him home for dinner. He was caught between two terrible and opposing fears - that of offending God, and that of offending mother-in-law.)
___________________________________________________________

“I love Malaysian food ..."

(When she came to visit me in Malaysia, we made sure that we only took her to places where she’d cope with the food - so all the spicy stuff was out - and which were clean. We ended up eating nearly all the time in coffeee shops in the bigger hotels.)

" ... especially the lamb chops.”

___________________________________________________________

“Look, look over here. You’ve got to come over here and see this.”

(At Greenwich Maritime Museum in a room containing the earliest chronometers. We race over to look at what amazing antique scientific instrument has caught her eye ... and find her pointing at a radiator.)

“It’s just like the one I’ve got at home.”

___________________________________________________________

“I’ll have you know my mother was the head cook for the Duchess of Grafton.”

(The month before she died of cancer, when we suggested that she take 'Meals on Wheels': a service for the sick and elderly, with lunches delivered to the door.)

Surprises

And something else I love about living here. The way that plants appear suddenly in places where you don't expect them.

Large white mushrooms sprang up on the lawn overnight. The gardener took them (and lived to tell the tale - more fool us who were too slow!)

Today I see my African tulip tree (already a riot of raucous reds) is sporting two orchids, leaves like green tongues, though not flowering yet.

The monstera against the verandah pillar (variagated leaves as large as serving platters) grew there apparently from a seed dropped by birds (oh so conveniently, in exactly the right spot.)

My birds nest fern appeared in a pot where something else was growing, as if by magic.

And no crumbling shophouse is so poor, it seems, that it does not have a glossy ficus benjamina sprouting from its roof.

Attack of the Mutant Amoeba

He's finally done it. Started a blog.

I told him too after finding his writings in my e-mail each morning - little musings on life, beautifully observed and written.

Shan't give away his identity for the moment. Let him continue to hide behind his Taliban headscarf and dark glasses.

But here's a clue - he is one half of the team who put the pair of corpse feet on the collection of short stories I edited for Silverfish.

The Right to Write

Just finished Julia Cameron's Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life. It's one of those wonderfully affirming and inspiring books (much like Nathalie Goldberg's) to dip into and read as a meditation on writing.



Cameron's The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity worked very well for me and lead to real changes in my life and instances of uncanny synchronicity. I still go back to reread chapters from time to time to keep myself on the right track, and plan to run a creativity programme based around it.

Cameron in Right to Write and Goldberg in books like Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind focus primarily on the practice of writing as everyday spiritual practice (a kind of 'zazen', to borrow the term from Buddhism) and a tool for personal growth. Writing does not have to be about writing for publication, they say, the process is every bit as valid as the product.

Cameron talks about "connecting with the powers of the universe" when we write. And yes, there was a time when my more than cynical self would have laughed at such an idea. But truly that's what it feels like when writing goes well, when we lose self-consciousness and the ideas just ... flow.

Writing is about getting something down, not about thinking something up, she says. Creativity is a lamp, not a candle. Something wants to write through us as badly as we want to write.

This strikes me as very true. Time after time I see my writing friends come up with perfectly formed, heart-breakingly true pieces, after just a few minutes of frantically-paced "free-writing".

And I loved the chapter about taking your writing outside into your everyday world ... not making it too precious and serious and daunting:

Writing is about making brain children. When it comes to conception, it can but doesn't need to be in the missionary position. ... Don't make it so fancy. Do it on the kitchen table. Let your prose flash like Jessica Lange's white panties in the Postman always rings twice. Do it in the back pew at church. Do it outside next to the lilac bush. Do it in a cafe. On an airplane. Do it, do it, do it.

I'm not a flasher, but always have notebooks with me (different sized notebooks for different sized handbags) and often feel the urge to scribble things down. Cafes are great writing places and I love to people watch and play the sneaky spy. I've also written in long bank queues, at the check-out in Jaya Jusco, while waiting for friends to arrive at the airport, and once in the toilet during a formal function because the conversation on my table just had to be got down to paper as soon as possible!

I like to write on trains where there is a sort of enforced intimacy with strangers, and it's fun to try to get them down to the page without them suspecting what you're doing! Got the tables turned on me once though ... on a train from Plymouth to London, a young man, a student I thought, settled into the seat opposite. I was just wondering whether to take out my notebook and write a quick sketch of him, when he opened his bag, took out a notebook and proceeded to scribble something down in it, glancing sneakily at me from time to time though I pretended not to notice. I like to think that he was writing about me! A kind of writerly synchronicity.

Bookguilt

How nice! Found a letter from MPH in my letterbox today telling me that I could collect RM33 of book vouchers - my rebate on the more than RM600 I've spent in the store in the last few months. RM600 out of the housekeeping money. (Shhhh ... don't tell my husband.) Bookguilt overwhelms me.

It's simply dreadful to have a decent bookshop this close to my house. To find my feet taking me there every time I'm bored, on the slightest pretext. ("I'm just going to 1 Utama to recycle my bottles.")

Bookgreed is my downfall. Cannot walk into a bookshop without coming out with a bagfull of books. Kinokuniya, Times, Popular, Silverfish (where Raman knows my weak spots) ... I'm a totally promiscuous bookbuyer and have all the members cards to prove it. KL's book emporiums are soon to include a franchise of Border's. (Raman informs me that book retail space in KL has grown from 20,000 square foot of retail space to 250,000 in the last five years ... are there enough readers to sustain this growth?) I haven't even mentioned Payless Books because I don't dare set foot inside the shop ... I know my weakness all too well. (I bought a dozen or so hardbacks donated by Payless to the Austrian/Swiss/German charity fair before Christmas anyway.)

And now sitting at the computer has become doubly dangerous because Amazon now has "one-click" ordering and any book you fancy is on it's way to you before you've even realised what your itchy-twitchy mouse-finger has done. (I hide the Amazon boxes in my car as a binging alchoholic hides the bottles.)

That RM600 spent at MPH is the thin end of the wedge, I'm telling you.

Then Abebooks is amazing. It's a database of second-hand bookshops around the globe. I used their services when I was trying to track down books by some of the authors coming to the Litfest last year. I got a brand-new hardback copy Ken Wiwa's In The Shadow of A Saint for just $12 Canadian from a university bookshop in British Columbia, and I managed to track down several of Paul Bailey's earlier novels (why on earth are they out of print? - another rant waiting to happen here!) for less than one pound sterling - interestingly enough, most of them seem to have been lifted at some point from libraries around Britain.

The next confession is a little more painful. I am not so much an avid reader as a squirreling bookhorder.

Might as well buy the book now while I see it, I think, because titles seems to just disappear from the shelves here when they are no longer flavour of the month. (Sadly I haven't quite developed the knack of finding my way to warehouse sales ...)

I accumulate books on my "To Be Read Shelf", where the titles are stacked two deep, with others wedged in on top of them. I tell myself I won't add to the stash until I've read at least some of them. And if I don't read them, I hope for some kind of osmosis to take place where book-knowledge transfers itself into my waiting brain while I am asleep. If only.

I shouldn't buy more books. My conscious mind can handle this fact. But then my resolve weakens when I get within sniffing distance of a bookshop and I have to have my fix.

(Jit Murad once compared reading to snuggling under his mother's armpit because both give the same sense of comfort and acceptance. Maybe this is the root cause of my bookaholism - a lack of maternal love ...)

Incidentally, the RM33 voucher goes towards the volume of Neruda's poems I actually managed to restrain myself (really!) from buying the other day.

The Sea

My review of John Banville's The Sea from today's Star :

“The past beats inside me like a second heart,” writes Max Morden, the elderly narrator of John Banville’s Booker Prize shortlisted The Sea. Max takes up lodging in a boarding house, The Cedars, in the small Irish seaside town where he once spent childhood holidays. Ostensibly there to finish writing a book of art criticism, he makes instead a journey into the past, writing a memoir to make sense of his personal history. A tragedy is foreshadowed from the very first page of the novel.

The Sea is about memory and how we reconstruct the past for ourselves. We embroider and edit, recall insignificant details with perfect clarity and yet forget things that are important to us. In Max’s narrative one memory conjures another as he moves between different layers of the past. Much of the story is told in a series of vignettes: time is frozen so that Max can step inside the frame, and examine each detail for fresh significance.

Recently widowed, Max wanders back through “the chamber of horrors” in his head and revisits his wife Anna’s terminal illness, from prognosis to death. “She is lodged in me like a knife” he laments, yet already the memory of her is fading. Memories are as “real” as anything in the physical world, he decides: “Which is more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her?”

Max’s relationship with the Graces is also re-examined. The events of the “the day of the strange tide” continue to haunt him and he hopes that by returning to the Cedars which the family made their holiday home, he can make sense of what happened.

In flashbacks we watch as ten year old Max encounters the family on the beach and falls into the easy acquaintance with the strange twins, Myles and Chloe. Max, already aware of social distinctions, adopts the family hoping that something of their “godlike” stature will rub off on him.

Despite definite echoes of L.P. Hartley’s classic novel The Go-between, this is not a tale of childhood innocence lost. The children taunt the child-minder, Rose cruelly when they think they have discovered the object of her secret infatuation. (The truth revealed much later.) Max harbours violent feelings for the strange web-footed mute, Myles, and feels for Mrs. Grace with an emotional intensity which has him weeping for her in “rapturously lovestruck grief”, until he transfers his affections to the capricious and sexually precocious Chloe.

The twins though, remain distant and inscrutable: the mysterious psychic bond between them so strong that as Chloe tells Max, it’s as if they were a couple of convicts on the run, shackled together.

The Sea is an achingly melancholy and beautifully written novel. It is impossible to read it without feeling grief for our own small lives measured against the immensity of time and the uncaring physical universe. Consequently, we do not feel a particular horror at the long anticipated tragedy played out at the end of the book. It is Max realises “just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference” and there is a strange justice in the novel’s climax.

Stop Press - Lost City Found and Jim Carrey Has A Period!

From today's Star, a story to intrigue. The remains of the lost city of Kota Gelanggi have been discovered in the rainforests of Johor. A trading post, a centre of learning which predates the founding of Malacca sultanate.

According to another article in the paper, it was an old Malay manuscript once owned by Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, in a London library that led an independent researcher Raimy Che-Ross to the existence of the lost city in Johor.

Doesn't it thrill to know that such discoveries are still there waiting to be made? That history books may yet get rewritten? And isn't it perhaps true that there is a desire to be a treasure-hunter in all of us ...



(Aerial view of showing what is possibly the base of a temple complex or stupa, at the possible site of the lost city of Kota Gelanggi.)


And a story on the Mind Our English page that made me laugh out loud. A reader wrote in to complain about a mistranslation on ASTRO. She was watching Oprah Winfrey Prime Time featuring Jim Carrey as one of Oprah’s guests:

Jim Carrey rattled on about his latest movie and at one point, to punctuate his sentences, he used the word “period” to mean full stop.

Guess what Malay word our wise guy/gal used to translate that word?

“MENSTRUASI”!

Jim Carrey used the word “period” twice and twice the translated word “menstruasi” was flashed on the screen.

Mind you, I remember being perfectly mystified the first time I heard an American friend using the word "period" in this way, wondering why she had to inform the world so publicly and frequently about her time of month!

The Etiquette of Blogging

Went surfing around to find it if anyone had written an article about the etiquette of blogging, it being after all a fairly recent means of human interaction. I liked this one best:


Learning The Lessons of Nixon

This seems fair enough, doesn't it? I thought this bit particularly relevant:

Comments and the “Living Room Doctrine.” I consider my blog to be a virtual extension of my living space. As such, any comments that I would find threatening or offensive if said to me in person in my living room will be deleted. It’s fine to disagree with me (I allow that in my living room). Not fine is unbridled hostility, name calling, etc., either towards me or towards other commenters.

Can we live with this, friends?