Life Less Literary

Bizarre… I have this kind of weird back-brain obsession with Berwick upon Tweed - ever since seeing it nestled there when I was on the train to Edinburgh, then subsequently having a weird dream about a freaky 70s weekend break. But I digress. I just got an email, I presume it was spam although I don’t know why anyone would spam me with this… anyway, I don’t think I know a Rachael and Alex. But this is the email: http://www.pleasantland.org/postcard3/

The stuff I just missed in Antwerp :’-(

PS Antwerp blog/photos… yes, very long time coming. One day (maybe the same day I finish off my Wedding page)

Went to London last week - on the train back, I was tempted to blog. But I was too engrossed in my book, and now I haven’t the time and inclination to write much, except that I met up with Jan and his friend Katarina, who was going to test a friend’s theory that nerd sex is the best sex there is - she approached some non-descript middle age grey man at a bus stop with the sole intention of seducing him to see what the sex was like. Weird, a little scary but at the same time kinda exciting. Anyway, together we went to see Standing in the Shadows of Motown, which was a great feel-good documentary about the unsung heroes of Motown, the musicans. Then I met up with Zaid for some interesting conversation and brain stimulating stuff.

On the train back, I was feeling kinda emotional and intellectual and slightly melancholy and all those things, and was getting inspired by the scenery. Note to self: when getting the 20.25 train from St Pancras at this time of year, take a look West as the train approaches Bedford - incredible sunset, a dark indigo sky with a thumb-smudge patch of deep magenta-red just over one small hillock, and peering through the middle of it the top millimetre or two of a vast seething sun the like of which I’d seen before in India and Egypt but rarely in this country.

But, like I said, what kept me from blogging was my book, Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami. A very easy read, but beautiful, deep and… different, in a way that perhaps only a book translated from Japanese to English can be (I often wonder about the effect of language upon translation - all of the German books I’ve read are interminably hard to plough through - The Tin Drum was worthwhile, but I’ve rarely got beyond page two of any other Gunther Grass I’ve tried. Hesse is great, but best when, as in Siddartha, brief. Swiss and Austrian books don’t seem much better. But Czech books somehow manage to be equally deep but much lighter fare. Hmmm. I digress).

The book revolves around three characters: our narrator, K, is a twenty-something schoolteacher, who in typical narratorly fashion doesn’t give away much about himself (and indeed professes to be unable to write about himself objectively). The hero (I guess) is Sumire, a deeply impractical woman who was at college with with K, who shares his obsession for literature and is determined to be a writer. Miu is another woman in her late thirties, who runs a wine import company, seems incredibly sophisticated, but has hidden and obviously sad mysteries to her life. K loves Sumire, mentally and physically. Sumire loves Miu, mentally and physically. Miu is unable to have physical relations, but has a lot of affection for Sumire. Sumire and Miu meet at a wedding, and when their talk turns to literature, Sumire’s talks of her current obsession with the work of Jack Kerouac and Miu says “wasn’t he one of those Sputniks?” - hence the book’s title. She later discovers that Sputnik is Russian for Travelling Companion, after adopting Sumire as her travelling companion through Europe, the spark behind this beautiful paragraph on page 129 of this 229-page book:

“And it came to me then. That we were wonderful travelling companions, but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal on their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happen to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.”

And then, on page 149, something else which I instantly associated with my vague desires to be a writer and with this blog:

Which explains my stance as a writer. I think - in a very ordinary way - and reach a point where, in a realm I cannot even give a name to, I conceive a dream, a sightless foetus called understanding, floating in the universal, overwhelming amniotic fluid of incomprehension. Which must be why my novels are absurdly long and, up till now, at least, never reach a proper conclusion. The technical, and moral, skills needed to maintain a supply line on that scale are beyond me.

and then…

What I’ve written here is a message to myself. I toss it into the air like a boomerang. It slices through the dark, lays the little soul of some kangaroo out cold, and finally comes back to me.

But the boomerang that returns is not the same one that I threw.

Boomerang, boomerang.

Hmmm… I often mean to horde quotes from novels, I admire the way that Niina seems to have a quote for just about every book she’s read (hey, she even has some, lots, for Sputnik Sweetheart!), but somehow when I’m reading that’s not really what’s on my mind. Well, this time the quotes (combined, obviously, with my mental state at the time) were so compelling I couldn’t ignore them.

I’ve been subscribed to Merriam Webster’s word-of-the-day email for a while now, usually it’s words I already know, though kinda interesting to read of their origins and stuff. Recently though, there’s been a run of fairly interesting and novel ones. I especially liked this word, from Saturday:

The Word of the Day for Jul 26 is:
usufruct \YOO-zuh-frukt\ noun *1 : the legal right of using and enjoying the fruits or profits of something belonging to another 2 : the right to use or enjoy something
Example sentence: When they sold the land, the Arnolds retained the usufruct to pick the apples in the orchards they had planted.
Did you know? Thomas Jefferson said that “The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.” He apparently understood that when you hold something in usufruct, you gain something of significant value, but only temporarily. The gains granted by “usufruct” can be clearly seen in the Latin phrase from which the word developed, “usus et fructus,” which means “use and enjoyment.” Latin speakers condensed that phrase to “ususfructus,” the term English speakers used as the model for our modern word. “Usufruct” has been used as a noun for rights that seem the legal equivalent of having your cake and eating it too since at least the 1630s. Any right granted by usufruct ends at a specific point, usually the death of the individual who holds it. *Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.
Subscribe to Word of the Day via the Web: click here © 2003 by Merriam-Webster, Incorporated

Just gone through another of those cycles… been getting increasingly down, finding it hard (impossible) to get started on any work, sleep patterns all weird. So today I broke it with the traditional day’s sleep, and now I’m still in bed 24 hours later and buzzing with ideas and excitement, but wary that none of them ever get anywhere. I was supposed to be in London today, feel like going there now, but am not sure what I’d do once I got there - I want to do new things, meet new people, hang out and just discover excitement lurking around every corner. But I know that if I did go, I’d just find somewhere to kip and follow the old routines, so I’m staying in Sheffield for the night. Beyond that, I’m really keen to travel alone, expose myself to danger and find new experiences that way. I was thinking how great it would be to visit Southern Iraq to visit the Marsh Arabs and see how the marshes are gradually returning, but I think I should leave that a couple of years yet. In the meantime, I’m really tempted by the whole arab world - was thinking it would be nice to go back to Egypt, but that seems a bit touristy for the kind of trip I’d like to take. Beirut is somewhere I’ve heard amazing things about. Hmmm. Tempting, yes. And closer to home, I feel like taking up some new hobbies, doing some acting again, following a new career (I’ve been quite tempted to study law recently, I’ve a strange feeling I’d be rather good at court-room conflicts, but of course I’ll never really bother to do all that study and working my way up, so scrap that idea), just going out into the wildest weirdest wonderful places and meeting lots and lots and lots of new people and doing crazy things.

But I know, of course, that I won’t.

I think that part of this has to do with working from home and rarely ever going out to meet people except for my trips to London every 2 or 3 weeks. I’m socially isolated. And I kind of like it that way, at least it makes for an easy life day to day, but I think that I don’t need an easy life.

So… challenge to my readers… please help me to find some motivation and inspiration somewhere, give me your suggestions and encouragements for new things I could be doing.