10 things they have in the UK we don’t have in Ireland or maybe I should get out more often

1. Hand dryers that dry your hands
2. Free newspapers in airports
3. Houses with exposed stone that don’t look naff
4. good quality soap in bathrooms
5. Take-away sushi
6. Paddington Bear shops
7. Flea markets
8. Timetables at bus stops
9. Broadleaf forests
10. Public parks

Homework: Forbidden places

Firstly, visualise your forbidden place. It’s somewhere you shouldn’t be. It might be a room in your house; a rough part of town; the house of a friend your parents disapprove of. In the present tense, describe the place, using all your senses: the sounds, the smells, the way it looks. Write continuously for 5 minutes…

Yes I have a forbidden place. I have exactly what the creative writing teacher wants: a broken down cottage, the smell of wet soot, the faraway sounds of cars on the main road and my ear straining to make out the wheezing engine of a particular van. But I can’t write about this. Because even I was ever ready to approach this in writing, it would be more an exercise in psychoanalysis than in creative writing. So my mind strains, unable to find another angle, drawn back again to that forbidden place that I am forbidden to talk about…

What to do? Funny thing, I’m facing the exact opposite problem in my yoga class.

The sun shining through the bay window, warming my body after the class, a winter morning, incense burning. The soothing voice of the yoga teacher. Now find a place where you feel safe. Use all your senses, the sounds, the smells, the way it looks... I drift blissfully to my bed. The house is empty. I am under the quilt, looking out of the velux window at the clouds passing by in accelerated motion.

The yoga teacher jolts me out of my reverie. It can be any place, a beach, a field in the country. Anywhere, as long as it’s not your bed...

My meditation is unsettled instantly. I struggle. In a panic, I scan other possible places, and abandon them again. Not my bed? My only safe place is forbidden and I can’t settle to another safe place. I am agitated. I am the opposite of relaxed. The yoga class is over.

Photo by Nora

Ecrire, dit-elle - Marguerite Duras on writing

L’amant est le premier a entendre et a croire que la petite veut devenir ecrivain. La mere, elle, n’a jamais voulu y croire.

“Je suis tres seule. Je suis seule comme apres qu’on a fini d’ecrire et qu’on se sent l’envie de le dire et que tout dort.” (MD)

De la meme maniere qu’avec les restes de la veille, elle confectionne d’excellents ragouts, elle conserve ces pages dispersees qu’elle recycle plus tard.

Une mere peut-elle comprendre l’ecriture de son enfant?

“On a une vie tres pauvre, les ecrivains, je parle des gens qui ecrivent vraiment… Je ne connais personne qui ait moins de vie personnelle que moi.” (MD)

“Je dis du bien de moi. Il faut bien que quelqu’un en dise. C’etait extraordinaire, on ne me croyait pas. Je faisais quand meme la cuisine, les courses. Il y avait beaucoup de monde qui passait. Je faisais tout ce qu’il fallait pour qu’il y ait a boire et a manger. De temps en temps, je disais: je suis bien contente, j’ai bien travaille. Je me souviens qu’on me disait: tu fais trop de cas de ce que tu fais, trop de cas du fait d’ecrire. Regarde, nous on ne dit rien.” (MD)

“Faire quelque chose ensemble est un bonheur si violent que la creation solitaire parait une mauvaise habitude.” (MD)

“Les gens qui disent ne pas aimer leurs propres livres s’il y en a c’est qu’ils n’ont pas surmonte l’attrait de l’humilation.”(MD)

“Des fois on a peur de mourir avant que la page soit pleine.”(MD)

Le vrai probleme etant encore une fois celui des femmes, la recherche du sens par les femmes de la vie qu’elles menent et qu’elles n’ont pas desiree.”

All quotes from Laure Adler's biography, "Marguerite Duras".

Celebrate Earth Day!

My article about Gaia on Elsevier's blog
http://libraryconnect.blogspot.com
and Twitter
http://bit.ly/aOXM0d

Photo by Nora

Homework: emotions #3

Fear

She always hoped that he wouldn’t come back. That he had an accident. That he was dead or, at least, maimed. When the time came, she would start tuning in to the sound of traffic. She wouldn’t begin any new chore around the house, anything that would need her full attention. Anything that he would interrupt, or question. Soon, his wheezing van emerged from the background noise, more and more defined as he turned the corner into their estate, more insistent. For a few moments she still hoped that it was another car, that it was just using the cul-de-sac to turn around, that it would be on its way. When the sound stopped outside there was no doubt. Still, every time, without fail, her heart jumped. The sound of the key in the door.

Guilt

Everyone who has lost a parent knows the guilt. That thing you had promised to do. That word you never said. How many weeks you hadn’t visited. For me, guilt is an unfinished game of chess. I was a teenager, torn between the pressure of my boyfriend wanting to go out - to which unimportant event I can not remember - and the unconscious knowledge that the game would remain unfinished for ever. My grandfather waved me on. It wasn’t important, he said, we’d continue the game later. He didn’t die until years after this, but I was right. We didn’t finish that game of chess.

Photo by Carmel

Earth Week

As I write, three of my unfortunate colleagues are slowly making their way back from Amsterdam to Shannon by land and sea. I don’t envy them. I did my share of 2-day-journeys from the east of France to the west of Ireland, back in the days before cheap air travel. What doesn’t one do for love, when one is young?

Looking at the (much) bigger picture, Gaia, our planet Earth, which in Greek mythology and in the hypothesis of James Lovelock can be seen as a living organism, must be breathing a sigh of relief. Studies using the post-9/11 flight ban as an incidental large-scale experiment in end-of-civilisation-climate have shown that commercial flights have a marked influence on the atmosphere.

In a 2002 Nature article , David Travis and colleagues wrote: “The potential of condensation trails (contrails) from jet aircraft to affect regional-scale surface temperatures has been debated for years, but was difficult to verify until an opportunity arose as a result of the three-day grounding of all commercial aircraft in the United States in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001." I’m sure my colleagues are marvelling at the clear skies over the Autoroutes de France…

The flight disruptions caused by the ash cloud from the volcanic eruption in Iceland last Friday are compared to the scale of the post-9/11 flight ban. While the 2001 results have been disputed – after all, it is difficult to draw statistically significant conclusions from a single event – this year’s renewed experiment in a flight-free western world are bound to generate further studies, which should help to validate or invalidate the previous conclusions.

Happy Earth Week!

Photo by Lonan

Eco-friendly sex-toys

LOL! Eco-friendly sex-toys , what can I say, I just had to have a look! The reason I'm blogging about it is that by doing so I am hereby entering a draw to win one of the said toys. I realise that the last statement could be construed as just base greed, or alternatively as cowardice, and I shall cultivate the ambiguity.

So. Eco-friendly sex-toys? There is the wooden yoke, and gorgeously veined wood it looks too, although it's nothing that one couldn't carve oneself with the appropriate raw material and a pen knife. But silicon? eco-friendly? Not in my books. And solar-powered gadgets? Maybe in sunny California, but I can't see myself taking my pleasure in my chilly backyard too often, not too mention the family-friendly neighbourhood.

Ah well. I'll find a use for the thing if I win it. Recycling it as a kitchen implement might be in fact philosophically most appropriate to its nature...

The draw is organised by the Feminist Review at the occasion of Earth Day 2010 on April 22nd.

Photo by Fabrice

The great American misogynists

Reading Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, it occurs to me that I haven’t read the great American misogynists. So far. An omission I shall endeavour to remedy.

Yes, I’m leaning towards feminist ideals, but these were different times. These were times when American male intellectuals were misogynists, tinted with homophobia if needs be. For Mailer as for even my literary hero Jack Kerouac, a following of interchangeable groupies was indissociable from the status of hero of the mind, along with copious amounts of liquor and whatever drugs one could get one’s hands on. Men did the thinking and the hard playing, and complacent flower girls did the pleasuring. This was, after all, free love.

Does the passing of time excuse everything? Or course not. What excuses (nearly) everything is genius. If you’re going to be outrageous, then for God’s sake do it with confidence, humour, and above all, style. And Norman Mailer had plenty of it all. Humour to make me laugh out loud in bed on my own. Style to make me earmark my poor battered second-hand paperback copy of The Armies of the Night beyond recognition.

I have thought about points of view in the novel, and experimented with them. As far as I could see there were two main ones, each with their pros and cons. The 3rd person ominiscient was for phallocentric Victorian novels, and the 1st person internal monologue was for post-Joycean feminine writing. Fine. But what was The Armies of the Night? During the first few pages, uncomprehending, I had to keep switching over and back to the front cover, to make sure that it was the same Norman Mailer, the writer of the book, who had written an autobiographical account of an anecdote in the life of Norman Mailer. The dichotomy first/third person has never stopped people from writing thinly veiled auto-fiction, but that style necessitates at the very least a change of name. But no, there it was. Norman Mailer inside. Normal Mailer outside.

The device is simple and brilliant, but I had never encountered it before. The book's subtitle: "History as a Novel. The Novel as History" illustrates its Janus-like form. It allows one to be truthful, more truthful than with autobiography, because one can be both self-deprecating and self-agrandising at the same time without sounding pompous [See Doris Lessing quote]. And Mailer is totally and utterly truthful, every scratch, itch, cowardice, hesitation, compromise, alcohol-fuelled antics, subsequent embarrassment and pounding headache, is explored and laid out in delightfully obscene exhibitionist detail. And what gorgeous detail! If God is in the details, it certainly feels like some higher power was propelling Mailer on this Ulyssean feat of hilarious minute-by-minute recording of the events of these few days of anti-Vietnam war protest. It’s true, and it’s so human. We have all groped in the dark, drunk, for a light switch and ended up pissing outside the toilet bowl. Have you not? Ok so, it’s just me and Normal Mailer.

So what happens in The Armies of the Night? The book opens with a Mailer-bashing newspaper article from the Time, and proceeds to trace back the action as experienced from the eyes of our anti-hero Norman Mailer. It starts with an early morning phone call. “It was taken for granted that nothing respectable would come out of the day if the morning began on the phone, and indeed for periods when he was writing he looked on transactions via telephone as Arabs look upon pigs.”

The action proceeds, broken up by incongruous newspaper-type headings delimiting arbitrary sections, akin to Ulysses’s parody of journalism in the Aeolus chapter set in a newspaper office. The story can be summarised by borrowing again a random quote from this eminently quotable book: “The March on the Pentagon was an ambiguous event whose essential value of absurdity may not be established for ten or twenty years, or indeed ever.”

I won’t go on about what exactly happens in the book, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s great writing and a great story and you should get your hands on it. If I may borrow again a quote on writing to conclude: “Just as professional football players love sex because it is so close to football, so he was fond of speaking in public because it was thus near to writing.”

Photo by Lonan

Shallow Grave

Oh what a treat! An evening dedicated to Danny Boyle as part of the “15 British Films” cycle on Film 4! Yes, last night I added two others notches on my bedpost, with “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Shallow Grave”. I shall concentrate on the latter here.

Shallow Grave is a crime thriller inscribed in Boyle’s proud lineage of goofy-crime-thrillers-gone-wrong-with-Ewan-McGregor. In this series I obviously place A Life Less Ordinary (see earlier review), but also Trainspotting for its final psychological battle around the archetypal suitcase full of cash. In fact the three movies can almost form a trilogy, directed as they were in succession during the 1990s.

As usual for Boyle, the characters in Shallow Grave are awesome. What else is there to say about Ewan McGregor? But the main female character is again a stroke of genius. Kerry Fox’s charms can not be hidden for long beneath her desperate Lady-di haircut, impossible collection of patterned cardigans, and totally un-hollywoodian curviness. Like Cameron Diaz in the later A Life Less Ordinary, Fox oozes magnetic sensuality and perversity, her expressive mouth as if made for loving, and yes fellas, we do get a gratuitous shot of her plump breasts – but I digress…

To have a story, you need to make the characters interact. Throwing them together as housemates is one such devices, that can feel totally artificial in lesser chick-flicks like Catch and Release (why on earth would a newly widowed posh girl move in with her late fiance’s batchelor flatmates?). In Shallow Grave, the characters’ incidental relationships and their environment are exploited to their full potential, from the first lengthy exposition of the “interview” of new prospective tenants, to intimist, nearly theatre-like psychological developments, to horror at the mercy of the shy accountant turned voyeurist stalker entrenched in the loft.

The exposition part of the movie, the interview, is not only perfect to establish the characters, but also gorgeous, placing a cast of misfits auditioning for the coveted housematedom on an absurdly grand couch in the shabby chic apartment. Does it matter what colours the doors are painted or what cardigans Fox wears? Yes, because Boyle is a total filmmaker, a master of his art, in all its visual, musical, cinematic, photographic aspects. Everything matters, every scene, every chiselled diamond-like shot, every great song of his soundtracks which are classics in their own right.

Shallow Grave has been compared to Hitchcock’s films noirs. I see in it more the ultraviolence of Stanley Kubrick in a Clockwork Orange, down to the name of the main character, Alex. Do I dare saying that I prefer Danny Boyle to Kubrick? Well, every scene of Boyle’s films fills me with awe and glee, and I just want to watch them again. Not next year, or next month, but tomorrow.

Yin, yang and architecture

I shouldn’t complain about the barren cultural landscape of Ennis Co. Clare. I work best with limited choice and under constraint.

The yearly sale of books withdrawn from stock at the local library is a rare opportunity to stock up on culture, at 1 euro each for adult books or 2 kids’ books for 1 euro. There I buy books by the kilo. Some of these for genuine interest in the subject matter, others because they are simply too good a bargain to leave behind. “The Architecture of I.M. Pei” was one of them. A couple of kilos heavy, gorgeous photography, and a sticker at the back indicating an original sale price of £44.40.

I.M. Pei was not a totally foreign name. Although the first time I ever heard it, I was, like my French contemporaries, stunned. Why was this unknown Chinese man picked by Francois Mitterrand to build a glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvres? At the time, I didn’t know that he wasn’t a newcomer in the architectural world, nor did I question why the right-wing media were planting nationalist seeds in the public mind.

In the last month, I went through my loot of 1 euro ex-library stock books. If I left “The Architecture of I.M. Pei” last, it was because he’s a man, and I figured his subject matter rather sterile. I was wrong.

I fell in love at first sight. Not with the modernist blocks of concrete - I grew up in one - they seemed like a good idea at one time. I fell in love with his I.M. Pei's brain. The fact that I.M. Pei is eastern is probably why I discovered such a connection with his way of thinking and operating. Although he is a master, and a man with a vision, he has done his best work under huge constraints and controversy. Of course architecture is one of those areas where you don’t create in a vacuum. You have to consider not only your patrons, but building regulations, budgets, angry citizens and so on, not to mention the eternal tensions between the aesthetic and the practical.

Instead of bulling his way head-on, Pei has had to make an endless number of alterations, and about-faces, in some cases stretching projects to decades and moving them from site to site. To design a symphony center, he was paired with an “accoustician”. “… Johnson objected that the columns would interfere with the sound. The columns went in. Pei wanted carpet on the orchestra floor. Johnson objected, saying it would absorb too much sound. The carpet was abandoned. etc”

Pei was hugely skilled at people relationships, in the art of convincing and negociating, and was blessed with Zen-like patience and restraint. The most interesting insight in the workings of his mind however is how his creativity expressed itself under the multiplicity of constraints. The solution, the perfect solution, the one that not only solved the technical problem at hand but was also supremely elegant, would suddenly impose itself to him. But it was no compromise. It was in fact a better solution than the original one.

An example from his mid-career was the East building he designed for the National Gallery in Washington. His blank canvas was an awkward triangular site. His solution was to use triangles, and more triangles, and more triangles. And because you can’t hang paintings face-to-face in the sharp corners of a triangle, he simply walled these corners off and used them to put elevators, air conditioning conduits and other services.

Like women, Pei being a foreigner, of relatively humble origins and a not-too-forceful person by nature, has had to deal with and bow to an unending string of sometimes not-so-enlightened persons. The boundaries would close around him, he would concede, appease, and then find a way that would leave his opponents speechless, because it took into account their concerns, their rules, and turn them on their head. The ultimate way of thinking outside the box.

Photo by Nora

yes I said yes I will Yes

I admit, it wasn’t my idea.

But it’s sooo cool!

The other day, I came across the most elegant mix of science and art. In his preface, the editor of a collection of scientific presentations summarized the contents with one single image: a word cloud of the most frequent words that appeared in all the articles.

Beautiful, and clever.

Because it’s never easy, at least to over-analytical people like me, to describe the contents of a piece of writing. When people ask me what my book is about, my heart sinks. I did write a 300-word synopsis and duly sent it to a literary agent. How bad must it have been for even the literary agent (notice I didn’t say publisher) to not grace my efforts with a polite “thanks but no thanks”?

I know now what I’m going to do. I’m going to generate a word cloud. And send it to those rude agents out there. When I’m asked what my book is about, instead of humming and hawing, I’ll be able to say: well, it’s about X, and Y, and Z. In 300 words.

But I’m a bit nervous. What if all these bad words that I used come out in screaming bold letter? What if no words come out apart from the boring little filler words? Word clouds don’t lie.

So I’m going to start with Joyce’s Ulysses.

I used http://www.wordle.net, like that inventive scientific editor I mentioned. And here are the results: Chap. 18 (Molly Bloom's soliloquy) , the one that ends with "yes I said yes I will Yes", and Chap. 4 (Leopold Bloom’s first appearance), the one that starts with "Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." I selected the same font and colour scheme for both word clouds, only changing “rounder edges” for Molly to “straighter edges” for Leopold.

Fascinating no?

Molly’s big huge like, dwarfing all other words. And the famous yes that closes the book is there too, in what looks like second place. Men apparently are less single-minded - who would have known? More anchored in time too, with their thoughts consumed with day, morning, now, back, old and time. Although the pleasures of the flesh are not too far away, with tea, and kidney…

So now dear readers, stay tuned for the word cloud of my novel!

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?