A Hooker Unmasks, A Diva Retires, and A Poet Appropriates

Really, my apologies for not being a very good blogger over the last week or two. I'm not sure what's happened to me, but I seem to be more easily distractible than usual. (I just spent 20 minutes getting distracted by this nice blog while looking to see if I had spelt the word right!). This being the case, I offer you some quick links to stories that have caught my eye over the last week or two and hope you enjoy them : Margaret Atwood turned 70 and on The Guardian books blog Daragh McManus celebrates the work of a writer whose versatility astounds. (I am currently reading and relishing After the Flood and reckon it needs to be the second book of a trilogy.) Zadie Smith suffers from what she calls 'novel nausea' and turns to the essay in a piece that is both erudite and refreshing. Oprah Winfrey announces that her talk show is coming to an end and Bookninja gets very emotional. Call-girl blogger Belle De Jour (one of the earliest to be successfully "blooked") reveals her real identity after years of speculation in the press - she's Bristol-based researcher named Dr. Brooke Magnanti and she turned to prostitution to finance her education. (As Rowan Pelling at The Telegraph says, the revelation is shocking because it turns on its head what we think we know about the world's oldest trade.)

I stand behind every word with pride ...

unearthed her secret way back but - bless him - gave away nothing about:

... the greatest story in the history of blogging, and probably the biggest literary puzzle in the UK this century.

British poet laureate Andrew Motion is accused of "shameless burglary” by a military historian for "extracting sexy soundbites" from his work on military psychiatry. The creation of collages of words - often called found poetry - is though a time-homoured technique. Motion's resulting poem for Armistice Day, An Equal Voice, is far better than the usually trite stuff offered up by laureates on official occasions. But still, the argument raises interesting questions about what plagiarism is and what poets can get away with. (Ellen Whyte tagged me with a link to this article on Facebook, feeling properly angry I think.) Apologies to those who have asked me to blog this and that. I am slowly sorting myself out and plan to put up some local book news very soon.

The Curse of Writer's Block

... when creative blockage sets in, the blank page before you grows to the size of a tablecloth. The grey laptop screen seems to hum with malignity. You feel you have nothing of interest or amusement to impart to the world. Words refuse to shift – as they always have done hitherto – from the vast lexicon in your memory to the sentences half-forming in your brain. You can't for the life of you remember why your character X has fetched up in a Wyoming mining town when, according to the plot, she should be falling in love with her tutor in Cambridge. You have not the faintest clue how to begin the next chapter.

John Walsh explores the phenomena known as "writer's block" in the Independent today, following British poet laureate Andrew Motion's admission yesterday that his own words dried up.

Along the way he finds that :

Some of the history's most famous, and prodigiously fluent, authors suffered temporary cessations of text: Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Katherine Mansfield.

Perhaps Joseph Roth's story is the most remarkable :

(His) Depression-era novel, Call It Sleep, was written in 1934. Roth tried a second novel without success, and gave up writing to work as a firefighter,
teacher and labourer. After his book was rediscovered by readers in the 1960s,
he resumed writing and, at 73, began a series of novels called Mercy Of A Rude
Stream. The first, A Star Shines Over Morris Park, came out in 1994, an amazing 60 years after its predecessor.

There are of course those authors who deny that there is such a thing, and I must say I like Will Self's attitude :

I have never experienced writer's block. Writing is a muscular action and, like any other, all you need to do is exercise the muscles. I don't even think of it as writing – it's typing.

Exploring Childhood - A British Genre?

This post guest-blogged by Preeta Samarasan, whose first novel Evening is the Whole Day is published by Houghton Mifflin (in the US) and Harper Collins (in the UK) in May.

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Reviewing UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion’s memoir, In The Blood (what a great title for a visceral meditation on family, no?), Richard Eder begins thus:

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."The British novelist L .P. Hartley was referring to childhood or, more exactly, to the memory of childhood. It’s the foundation of any explored adult consciousness, of course, and particularly that of the poet and often the novelist. It is most particularly true of British writers, who have made a virtual genre of traveling back to that foreign country and treating it as Arcadia.

(Read the whole review from the New York Times here.)

The quote is the famous opening of Hartley’s masterpiece, The Go Between. I’ve always been partial to novels that revolve around children’s mistakes, so Eder’s observation got me thinking: is it true that British writers tend to explore childhood more than, say, American writers? And the more interesting question is: if so, why? (I’m talking about writing that is for adults but about childhood, of course, not writing for children, which is a different subject entirely and obviously as popular in the US as it is in the UK.)

I’d always assumed that few of my examples in this “genre” were American because I’m less familiar with American literature, but I think of contemporary American novels and few are about children or from a child’s point of view. I even skimmed the lists of Pulitzer winners and National Book Award finalists. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; possibly The History of Love; can anyone think of others?

On the other side of the Atlantic -- for the purposes of this post I’m going to include Irish writers as well, though I know they’re not British -- childhood continues to be a popular subject not just among serious novelists (McEwan, Frayn, Roddy Doyle, Jeannette Winterson, Trezza Azzopardi, M.J. Hyland, and this is just off the top of my head -- I’m sure you can come up with lots more!) but among poets we well, as Eder says. One of my favourite Seamus Heaney (yes, Irish, I know) poems is Mid-Term Break, with its chilling closing rhyme.

What is that drives some writers, but not others, back to childhood for inspiration and insight? In Heaney’s case -- and Motion’s, too, as you’ll see if you read the whole review -- it’s a traumatic event that seems to need “processing,” to use the psychological term. But this isn’t always the case, and certainly not for writers of fiction. Is it cultural? Linked in some way to geography or history? I really shouldn’t attempt to draw grand conclusions when I have only two American examples, but I’m going to throw this final question out there anyway: is it possible to make any distinctions between American and British styles of writing about children? (I think it is, but I’m not going to say anything more because I’m curious to see what other people think!)