Hi, my name is Anne and I’m a…

No. I couldn’t possibly be a blogaholic. I’ve only been blogging for a couple of weeks. I only have two work blogs and one in the outside world. You can’t develop an addiction that quickly, can you?

Yet the familiar signs are here. Not the amount of time or words that I commit to this new medium, but the fact that I seriously considered, yet again, spending a night away from my kids. In the end I probably won’t, my mother instinct will kick in at the last minute.

You see, the annual Irish blog awards are coming to a town near me on Saturday night. Galway is only an hour away. It would be awfully convenient. Except that I only see my kids at the week-end, so it’s basically a choice between a night with a bunch of nerds, pet lovers and mommy bloggers, and an evening on the couch head-to-toe with my daughter watching the newly released 2012. No contest.

I recognised that feeling of internal struggle though. Not so long ago, there was the first time in history when the Ultimate Fighting Championship came to Ireland. In the end I invited myself at my ex-mother-in-laws to watch it on satellite. Don’t try this at home. The embarrassment it not worth it. Curiously, around the same time I also considered flying away to a much more ladylike patchwork exhibition in France. There's patchwork, and then there's ultimate patchwork...

And so I know that my serially addictive personality hasn’t entered the fourth and final stage yet, the stage of full dependency, the one where the family breaks down…

Check out the Irish blog awards winners . The good thing is, you don't have to leave your seat.

Photo by Verena

Homework: emotions #2

It was about 20 years ago, how time flies… I was getting settled in, a new adult, living in our first rented house in Co. Galway. I was very proud of the pizza I made from scratch. It took hours for the yeast dough to rise, in the cold, damp cottage. Then the tomato sauce, and the thinly sliced vegetables for the topping: peppers, mushrooms, onions… Real mozzarella too.

He was watching television with a friend. It was a program about the holocaust if I remember well. I didn’t mind them being in the sitting room watching television and me being in the kitchen, I was happy to think that I would soon be feeding them homemade pizza, contributing to the social atmosphere, playing housewife.

The pizza was cooked. He wasn’t hungry, he said. Accusingly, too: how can one be hungry when they watch the holocaust on television? I was hurt. I hadn’t watched the program. I was hungry. Besides, the holocaust happened 50 years ago. It happened, it was an awful, awful time in history. But the fact that it was on television that particular day, that particular time, was a totally random fact. It wasn’t happening right now, in our sitting room. If the neighbours had been watching the program and not us, should we still refrain from eating pizza? He’d be hungry later on, when the program was over and they had joked about other subjects. The holocaust would still have happened 50 years ago. You can’t stop eating pizza for the rest of your life just because the holocaust happened 50 years ago.

I should have thrown the pizza in the bin. I don’t remember what I did, but I’m pretty sure I ate it on my own in the kitchen, choking on tears, rage and anchovies. That would be me. I haven’t changed in 20 years.

A Life Less Ordinary

I knew Danny Boyle was a genius before knowing who Danny Boyle was. I saw Trainspotting when it came out, and it blew my mind – but that’s a different movie review. The important thing to remember about Trainspotting is not to drag along your mother and her bridge partner to see it. I’ll know in a next life.

Recently, I saw by pure chance “A Life Less Ordinary” on TV. I still didn’t know who Danny Boyle was. The movie was again mind-blowing in its unambitious way. The proof of its unambitiousness is that I subsequently found it in a 3-for-the-price-of-one DVD set alongside two other irrelevant chick-flicks, which will enhance their usefulness as bird scarers in my allotment.

In this goofy kidnapping story, total loser Robert (Ewan McGregor) loses his job as a janitor – what else – to a robot, and ends up more or less accidentally kidnapping the boss’s daughter (Cameron Diaz). Not only do they fall in love, but their love transcends all things including death in the form of a bullet that pierces Robert’s heart but only manages to let the sun shine through his body. Goofy, what?

The characters are perfect. Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz are impossibly good-looking, Ewan in the cartoon character shirt that he wears throughout, while Cameron being the girl would of course change outfits regularly, even though she is held captive in a remote cabin. This is Hollywood after all. Then there is the parallel story of the two bounty hunters who are in fact angels (don’t ask), similarly superb characters.

And then there is The Scene. There would have to be a Joycean scene in a movie I like. The lady bounty hunter is lying in bed reading a trashy romantic novel and carrying on a conversation with her associate at the same time. The way Danny Boyle executes this scene is by alternating the internal reading (her voice reading excerpts of the novel) and the external dialogue, seamlessly. She is obviously more concentrated on the steamy action in the book than on what her interlocutor is saying and by this simple, incidental scene, the Director has established what kind of a person she is. It’s surreal, it’s true, and it’s a flash of genius.

The Scene being sadly not on Youtube, you might watch the ransom scene as a taster.

The Golden Notebook

I finished reading Doris Lessing’s "The Golden Notebook". Reading through it was alternatively a chore and morbidly compelling. I didn’t have problems with the themes or the ideas, being sympathetic to both feminism and communism. Even though at the time the particular brand of communism was Stalinism, there are interesting and truthful insights on the internal and external dilemmas faced by the card-carrying members and the fellow-travellers of the Party. Universal themes of toeing the official line in face of compromises with the Truth, purity and hierarchy, which can be easily translated to contemporary experiences in the corporate world.

As for feminism, well, its themes are just as universal. The novel was vilified in its time for being castrating, and in truth the women attack the poor central character of Richard for his faults – a married man and compulsive womanizer, and a ruthless captain of industry. Maybe it’s caricatural that all the “free women” in the book have a string of dehumanizing affairs with universally married men. Still, my short experience on internet dating sites has taught me that this is not so far-off from the situation out there. There are some insights along the book that I strongly identified with, the neediness of women, the pangs of jealousy, the compulsion to bolster up the virility of the most selfish men.

So this is a Novel of Ideas. A genre well-known for going hand-in-hand with didactism and poorly drawn characters. I hadn’t experienced it for myself until then. Yes, I could believe in the ideas in the book, as expressed by interchangeable characters in interchangeable situations, in an innovative form that I quite enjoyed: interweaving a novel and 4 notebooks compartimentalising the narrator’s thoughts into the political, sentimental and so on. What I couldn’t for one minute believe in was the characters.

This started early on in the book, in the first part of the embedded novel “Free Women”. Richard, the unfaithful tycoon, spends what seems like hours arguing in the apartment of emancipated Anna and Molly, defending himself and his values against the flurry of verbal attacks. Why? Why would someone like him do that? The answer is: he wouldn’t. That was my problem early on, and it didn’t get any better as the book went on. Not for one minute in the nearly 600 pages of the Harper edition did my disbelief suspend itself. And yet, I wanted to know more, more about the ideas of Doris Lessing, those ideas of mine that she was able to recognise, extract from her psyche and self-abused body, and put on a page.

And finally a little note. I wonder did Doris Lessing realise how much she used the adjective “dry”? It is a leitmotiv, expressing all sorts of things, emotional states, dialogues, always in a negative way. I don’t think it was conscious, it’s such a little word as to be inconspicuous. I wondered whether it was the experience of her childhood in Africa, where “dry” was dangerous, something to combat at all times. Then I wondered whether “dry” was rather an unconscious fear or the future, expressing literally the physiological end of her womanhood…

(Photo by Nora)

100 things about me

1) My name is Anne Ruimy
2) I was born in Strasbourg
3) It’s in France, not in Germany
4) I was born on 8 March, International Women’s day
5) the celebration of which predates my birth by about 60 years
6) I wanted to be a writer
7) In primary school my French teacher gave me a gift of Anne Frank’s diary. I was extremely proud of this
8) A not so proud memory was a PE teacher who wrote in my report book that I “lack motor coordination”
9) As a teenager I wore the same braces as Willy Wonka in “Charlie and the Chocolate factory”
10) Glasses too
11) I was not a very attractive teenager
12) I got married in Reno, Nevada, for 75 US$
13) I wish I could say it saved me money in the long term
14) Went on honeymoon in the desert and saw the Hale Bopp comet like no one else did
15) I saw the Northern lights in Saskatchewan and even in west Clare one year
16) I have a PhD in global ecology
17) I did a post-doc at Stanford
18) I lived in Palo Alto in a house with swimming pool and hot tub
19) Why did I leave again?
20) I tried to play the harmonica, guitar and accordion.
21) See #8
22) As a post-doc I was given a VIP tour of Biosphere 2 in Arizona
23) I wrote a novel last winter. It’s about… well, it’s complicated…
24) I find it extremely difficult to make up my mind
25) My father was a Jewish psychiatrist
26) I grew up on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital (for women)
27) I was in the Christmas 1999 hurricane in France, trying to catch a train or something silly like that
28) I was once in an ambulance hearing myself described by paramedics as a “36 year old female with no pulse”
29) The seriousness of the situation didn’t quite register
30) I didn’t see a tunnel with a bright light at the end
31) Nor saw my life flash in front of my eyes
32) My right leg is longer than my left. In fact I recently discovered that the whole right side of my body is longer than the left
33) It’s freaky
34) I guess it must say something about my masculine versus my feminine side
35) My son’s name means “cloud” in Zuni
36) I study Ninjutsu
37) Before that I trained in Mixed Martial Arts (aka Ultimate Fighting) for 4 years
38) I painted Jimy Hendrix in oil
39) One of my favourite animals is the buffalo
40) I went through my entire schooling without learning the multiplication tables
41) I cut my hair in a Mohawk and died it pink for 80s day at work
42) I don’t drink or smoke
43) I gave birth to my daughter in the back of a Nissan micra. She was breech.
44) I think I’ll stop this list at #50…
45) I am allergic to cats, dust and pollen
46) I gave up eating gluten and dairy
47) I’m addicted to dates and nuts
48) (the edible variety)
49) I have a buddy in Beijing (Hi Jie!)
50) I remember the first fleece jacket, internet, word processor….
51) I love sushi, seaweed and all things Japanese
52) I have to read in bed
53) I grew bonsai when I was young
54) Does everybody spend as much time as me analysing things?
55) Some days I have a clear and profound understanding of quantum physics
56) Obstetricians would classify me as Para 2020
57) I think Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman and Danny Boyle are geniuses
58) Same for James Joyce and Jack Kerouac
59) I once was able to meditate
60) I love garlic
61) I don’t have many friends
62) I hated my name as a kid. I wanted to be called Marina
63) Life begins at 40
64) I identified with Anne Frank
65) I like watching hip hop dancing
66) Every free sky channel I’ve ever loved has been taken away from me: the Fight Network, World Movies
67) I don’t own a credit card
68) I never bought anything on the internet
69) I listen to loud music in my car
70) I rarely listen to music at home
71) I rarely watch TV
72) I rarely read the papers
73) I have a very bad memory
74) Wow I’m already at #74
75) I can write things that I’d never say to anyone
76) I’m very bad at small talk
77) I just finished reading the Golden Notebook
78) I wish it wasn’t so badly written
79) I buy most of my clothes in second hand shops
80) Or else they’re given to me free
81) Books too, and furniture
82) I have an allotment
83) No-dig gardening doesn’t really work
84) I fall in love about once a month
85) I don’t wear make-up
86) I’m at grave danger of becoming a loner
87) I don’t like playing card games, board games, computer games, any games
88) I think they’re a waste of time
89) I waste a lot of time on the internet
90) Holidays make me anxious these days
91) There is a big list of things I need to do and am not doing
92) I hate when people are late
93) I’m grateful to be working for Elsevier. Seriously
94) The first book I ever read was Noddy. I stayed up all night
95) My breakfast consists of rice cakes with crunchy salted peanut butter and banana slices
96) Watered down with chicory and rice milk
97) I hate being late
98) I wish I lived in a farm
99) I live in a semi-detached house in a housing estate
100) Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?

Homework: emotions #1

The little blue car entered the housing estate slowly, turned right, and right again. Slower, it pulled into the driveway and docked to the semi-detached red-brick house, as the receiving aircraft mates with the nozzle of the big tanker in the sky. No. As a piglet latches on to its mother.

It was only 4 pm. Soon all the cars would be back to their station, muzzle first, like a row of little piglets suckling a great big brown sow. Across the road, a similar brown sow rested on its side, weary, nursing her piglets for the night. All around the estate, great big sows, lying on their flanks.

Her piglets could come and go during the day, in relative freedom, to the jobs, the pubs, or their weekly sporting activities. The great big sow however was confined behind steel bars, unable to move, her only purpose in life to produce and feed piglets.

The great big sow felt lonely sometimes. She could see, but not connect to the other sow across the road. The battery of other breeder sows in the rest of the estate were even more inaccessible. Sometimes she felt sad too, an unbearable sadness, that her piglets were taken away from her so soon, to be sacrificed. But mostly, she felt an absence of feeling…

Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director: a victory for feminism? I disagree.

Before I go on, I have to disclose that I haven’t seen any of her movies. No, this isn’t laziness: this is Ireland. Only the blockbusters in the Hollywood blockbuster list make it to the big screen or the bins of Xtra vision. I will not comment on her style, but only on the genre of movies she has chosen to direct. And if her directing is truly ground-breaking within the chosen genres, I apologise.

Fighting movies, biker movies, detective movies, and finally war movies, culminating with her award-winning The Hurt Locker. Apparently, there was only a bum note in her action-movie career, her 2000 film The Weight of Water, a portrait of two women trapped in suffocating relationships.

So Kathryn Bigelow can do men flicks, as well or better than men. So film has moved to the stage where women don’t have to take “George Elliot” as their nom de plume to write Victorian novels – sorry, Hollywood blockbusters. It’s good. It’s great, it’s certainly an advance. There are some who might ask “did Katherine Bigelow win the Oscar for Best Director because she was the best, or because she was a woman?” but as I said, having not seen her movies, I am not in a position to comment.

This shows however that film, unlike literature, has not moved beyond the phallocentric Victorian novel. Or at least that mainstream recognition has not yet been given to “feminine writing” in film. By this I don’t mean chick flicks. I mean revolutionising the form of film, like James Joyce revolutionised the novel with "stream-of-consciousness" narrative. As Bigelow said in 2009: “I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about what my aptitude is, and I really think it's to explore and push the medium. It's not about breaking gender roles or genre traditions. ”

International Women’s Day

Eighth of March nineteen sixty seven
From the father to the husband
From the fire to the frying pan
The glass ceiling is in my head
The glass ceiling
Is in my head

(Photo by Nora)

Atomised

Driving back from training the other night, I turned on the radio, which is something I almost never do. I don’t listen to the radio, read the papers or watch TV. Rather irresponsible behaviour for a writer, but. I figure that the truly momentous events, the wars, tsunami, gangland murders in Limerick and sex scandals of the rich and famous, will somehow filter through me by word of mouth. It’s a pretty good system.

A novel. It was recognisably a novel. Was it fiction? I caught it in the middle. I was hypnotised. Waiting outside the house for the reading to finish, in the cold car. 11:30 pm on a weekday. What if they were reading the whole book, what if it lasted all night? Yet I couldn’t leave. Who was this man, this writer? French words thrown in. But not in the awkward, fake way than an English writer would. Yet not a translation. Too good to be a translation. A man talking about his life, his innermost, womanmost thoughts. Analysing. Talking to his brother, this was the narrative device. Not a very effective device, but the language, the voice, was amazing. How can one write so much, and so well, about nothing. I fell in love. Then found out it was Michel Houellebecq(yes, French. And yes, a translation). The book: Les Particules Elementaires (Atomised). Wow. What do I do now? Do I throw everyting away? Do I start again? Is there any point? Can I write after this? Why did I have to listen to it?

Truth & fiction

"I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record. Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I don't begin to understand."

-- Doris Lessing

e-lit

Funny thing about e-books. I mean there is huge potential there, for a writer that is. But reading an e-book? Not me. I don’t want to read books on a screen. God, this is the last thing I don’t have to read on a screen. I’m in front of a screen all day. I don’t want to bring a screen to bed with me. Reading an e-book? No way. But writing one? Tempting.

E-novels? One struggles to see the point of it. People don’t want video links to tell them how the characters look like, sound like. They want to use their imagination – so they say. Still, they sense that once the technology, the ecological niche, the humus is there, things will grow out of it. From the bottom-up. Vaguely, people understand that it’s not about adapting existing literature. A new literature will emerge.

I know what kind of e-novels will be written. It will be these “experimental” books that writers have struggled, lost their sanity or their lives to bring out. It will be B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo. Loose chapters unbound in a box, to be read randomly. A publisher’s, a librarian’s nightmare. But imagine the ease of it in e-book format? Hit the scramble button again: read another book on your return plane journey. Imagine even, further, personalised, unique versions of Albert Angelo. Hit the scramble button once, and not only will chapters arrange themselves in a given order, but all alternative versions will be lost for you, reader lambda. Or, further. A book that will evolve differently, depending on choices you make, or random dice-throwing, at given crisis points.

A bit like life really. The choices you make, for whatever reasons. Good reasons, bad reasons. Because you were angry. Because you were hungry. Or even the minor choices you make, the non-choices, the randomness of life. Getting up five minutes later and meeting your future life mate, or being hit by that bus. And your life is changed forever, alternative versions inaccessible, like parallel universes.

Life: thoughts and action. Film is a better medium than literature for certain things. What’s the point in doing action-lit? So many words to describe what one image can do in a fraction of a second. On the other hand, internal monologue isn’t great on film. It can be transcribed with subtitles, voice-overs, but it doesn’t “sound” natural. Mixing film and book? Film for the action sequences, book for the introspection.

And further again. Writing like one thinks: James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness. Not only do people think in words or in pictures or with all their senses, but thoughts don’t follow a storyline. It is not that thoughts are multidimensional, or web-like: they are still linear, because time is linear. But consciousness jumps from idea to idea, snippets of conversation to impressions, randomly, a bit like following the clicks of an internet surfer. Thoughts might take any route depending on the inclination, what catches one’s fancy or what one sees at any given moment. Imagine Molly Bloom’s soliloquy written in hyperlink blue, the whole 40 pages and eight gargantuan sentences of it, and follow your thoughts.

(Photo by Lonan)

Logorrhee

-- God, he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.
-- Ulysses Chap. 1

Merde, dit-il.
Regarde, Dedale!
Regarde la mer
Notre douce et grise mere
La mer vert-de-gris
Gris cadavre
La mere douce-amere.

Thalassa! Thalassa!
Lis dans le texte, Dedale!
Lie-de-vin
Ligne de vie
Lit de mort

Bois la tasse
A ta sante!
A la vie a la mort
Mort en mer
Mise en biere
Vert morve
Mer morte

Homework: metaphors

I hate metaphors. Metaphors are like, like, I don’t know, like graffiti on a wall. No that’s wrong. Graffiti on a wall can be beautiful, on urban decaying walls, on freshly poured suburban concrete, those eyesores erected to separate: the good citizens from the bad: the cars from terrorist pedestrians: graffiti as resistance, graffiti culture pop culture pop art NY subway Berlin wall. Il est interdit d’interdire. No, not like graffiti.

Metaphors are more like, like, paint on a woman’s face. Foundation clogging the pores of delicate woman’s skin, pollution clogging stomates of a young birch leaf. White lead on geisha’s skin, death. A poisoned apple for Snowwhite, skin white as snow lips red as blood. I do like black eyes though, kohl, oh but black lead too. Still, smokey eyes sixties Twiggy Marilyn who was that girl Velvet Underground Andy Warhol’s muse she never took it off just put on a fresh layer of mascara in the morning Edie Sedgwick? Suicide? Or runny black eyeliner Courtney Love or even even on men feminine men Kurt Cobain. No, not like paint on a woman’s face.

Ugly like, like a metaphor in a haiku. And yet how so tempting. The impression on that day, that moment, the very first thing that goes through your head: it’s an image, a metaphor isn’t it? But writing it down like you saw it, show don’t tell, the metaphor the image will form in the readers head. In such a short space in so few words. Oh how difficult! So many haikus thrown in the bin -- metaphorically of course! Basho’s old pond: no sign of a metaphor yet the entire haiku is a metaphor, a metaphor for the lived experience for the image the feeling the sensation that the poet wants to elicit/summon/unearth/share… After rooting them out ruthlessly I should now put them back in? Are all haikus metaphors anyway? Is the whole of literature?

Oh I better write something. A paragraph, a thing, anything. Anything as long as it has a metaphor in it. Any car colour as long as it’s black. Shouldn’t be too hard.

She applied paint on her face like graffiti on a wall. Partly to hide that face that she had to watch in the mirror every morning. No.

She applied paint on her face. Instead of looking in the mirror she looked out to that stained concrete wall with leaky protruding pipes opposite her bathroom window, at the graffiti of topless busty women two storeys down.

She applied paint on her face like a metaphor on the thick poreclogging foundation holding up the decaying urban wall

What?

She applied. Pain. On her. Face.

Pain! That’s pretty good. Leave it at that.

Great graffiti blog post: Garage doors of Dublin lanes