Ever heard of “Blue Monday”? Weirdly, I hadn’t until this week when Deutschlandfunk introduced me to the phenomenon round five on Monday morning, and I thought: THAT is me, today! There was no special indication of its being the “worst day of the year” – as I wasn’t particularly low in money nor spirits – though depressingly high in weight – had had a nice Sunday out seeing a very special film (“The Banshees of Inisherin”) and – most importantly – had even acted upon an unusually clear perception about what was to be the most important thing to be done in the new year … Nonetheless I found myself on this pinpoint of depression where the world just looks EXACTLY as it is. About half an hour later, though, apparently acting on inverse motivation, I discovered that THIS was going to be a splendid day. Walking to work, I pointedly noticed the change in the weather. (No longer torrential, but finally colder.) And I noticed and enjoyed my determination to take things head on even before I had started to do so. When I did act on it, though, I got instant gratification out of the most inconsequential success – like being able to buy adhesive foil to mend my well-worn Cornwell paperbacks in an ACTUAL shop, just a stone’s throw away from where I work, instead of having to order it on Amazon …
This is going nowhere, but I had to get into twenty-three mode before being able to write anything. And the only thing I already know about twenty-three is that it will be full of surprises. (Which is basically good.) Meanwhile I know I am not back from my excursion into the real world. And I won’t be anytime soon. Another thing I expect for twenty-three is that it will be first and foremost about the real world. (Which is a pity.)
But I must admit that the world of fiction had dried up a while ago, and I had ended up watching TV series just for the sake of watching. A month or so ago, I made a list in my head of fictional things I wanted to explore and write about, but nothing came of it. The weekend before this I had a psychological boot-camp, meeting my four siblings for the express purpose of catching-up. Apart from a great Indian restaurant and too much alcohol, it turned out quite tough. Luckily, it doesn’t get tough in our family because of inherent conflicts or people being judgemental – heaven forbid, we are all too nice for this world! - but just having a GLIMPSE of what everybody had gone through in the last years, or well back, because we never did this before but once, was … there is not quite a word for it. Being home again, I decided that this would have to be enough of the “real world” for some time …
Things in the fictional world have improved slightly since. For one thing, I have been to the cinema quite often round the end of the year, and enjoyed it, though more for the sake of the outing and the atmosphere. In fact, I really remember very few of the films I saw, except for “Bros” – which, despite the bad press, is an extraordinarily beautiful film. (Wonderful acting!) “She Said” was good too, but I had forgotten all about it almost as soon as I had seen it except for being appalled one more time about what had to happen BEFORE anything about what happened got out. It must have been the real world “taking over”? (But now I am remembering, and I have to mention a fabulous female cast. Samantha Morton almost made me cry just because of the matter of fact way she presented her character’s vulnerability.)
My first film in 2023, “The Banshees of Inisherin”, deserves every bit of the good press and the Golden Globe it got and increases my expectations for a good cinema year 2023. (All the potentially award-winning films the rest of the world has already seen will be in cinemas here in the next two months!đ) It is definitely not a comedy, though, but had to be something, I suppose, to be eligible to win. “Comedy” probably because, apart from a very sweet donkey and a weird lad, nobody DIES !? It is beautiful, and serious, as in: “to be taken seriously” and actually being about some deep issues about life and relationships we cannot escape, even if we DON’T live on an Island where the faces are always the same and every day is exactly as the day before. Partially funny, true, but ultimately very sad, in a “good”, realistic way. And, last but not least, quite political – in a good way too - and probably more so for the Irish than the rest of the world. But, even though I have given up on Ireland before ever getting into it, I seem to have picked up the essentials … In short, one of these silent, monumental films where every sentence and every emotion rings a hundred percent true. And – what I even liked best! – one has to wait for the very last sentence of the film to get its full impact.
The best thing about 2023 so far is, though, that I seem finally to be reading again. I mean BOOKS. The realization surprised me because I am used to thinking that I am always reading something. Well, of course I am, and very seldom non-fictional, like my actual favourite by Vivian Dittmar about feelings. One of the important things she writes is that we are usually doing all kinds of things with feelings apart from FEELING them. And this, I noticed, describes my relationship with books quite accurately – at least for some time now. I am never without a book, they are absolutely a part of my daily routine, I am always thinking about them, talking about them, mending them with adhesive foil, downloading them on Audible and transforming them into a format I can listen to offline. Some I actually listen to in the end, and mostly ENJOY having them read to me, usually without really picking up a thing! I am in a constant relationship with some books that I REMEMBER having read, or am planning and looking forward to reading or ordering on Amazon or downloading, or which I have a weird bad conscience about because I have never read them … Actually READING them is something that rarely occurs. (As I just proved once again, it occurs more often with films!) To enjoy having them read to me, trying to follow the plot, or appreciating the writing MIGHT count as reading and might up the count a bit. But it is not really what I mean. Way back, almost every book used to be this beautiful world of its own …
Again, with the beginning of 2023, I noticed a SLIGHT change. Compared to the monumental things I tackled in 2022, my blog in 2023 will probably be about the small things …
And as, in truth, I have very few ideas about how and why I am getting in bed with books and – equally interesting in certain cases – why I don’t, I’ll approach the subject tentatively, writing about two recent experiences. One thing I discovered I knew only recently, in conversation with my friend, even though it is about writing, not reading, may cover some of this ground. We had seen the film “Emily” and unanimously disliked it – though I’ll always remember that evening because auf the best Indian meal I ever had. When I got home, I remembered that I had seen another recent film about the BrontĂ«s on DVD which I knew I hadn’t really understood at the time. I watched it again, and now I understood it because it was exactly the opposite of everything I had disliked about “Emily”. It doesn’t really matter except for the fact that “To walk invisible” really is about WRITING and dealing with text, like actually publishing something, and what a life-changing experience this might entail, not about the FICTIONAL story of a writer that became “Wuthering Heights”. I would never deny that there are probably lots of personal things that got into this novel – usually where we would least suspect it! – but it is DEFINITELY not a novel about Emily BrontĂ«’s LIFE. I’d say: quite the contrary. The important thing was that, for the first time, I could SAY why I am so almost universally annoyed by films about writers. It is because “they” always get it wrong, and most of the time ON PURPOSE! As a dilettante writer I know at least this:
GOOD WRITING doesn’t come out of life, at least not directly. It COMES OUT OF READING. A successful writer endeavours and achieves to RECREATE THE GREAT EXPERIENCES THEY HAD READING.
Okay, this was my first fictional breakthrough in 2023. Writing follows reading, and there has to be some reading-experience it relates to which might well be to just enjoy text or the way it is written. But this alone, even though entertainment and readability are the parents of countless bestselling novels, is not all. What I am really looking for – and, mostly because of my own inability to “engage”, am not able to get - is this singular and personal experience, the way this book exclusively “messes” with ME.
I’ll start with the case where it DIDN’T happen. More precisely: where it didn’t happen even though I expected it to happen. Most of the time, I don’t expect to really read what I am reading, and this is okay. But sometimes I definitely do, especially when somebody I am taking seriously as a reader recommended it to me. And then I want to know why nothing happened. This applied to “The Reading List” (by Sara Nisha Adams). There isn’t much to tell because nothing happened, but, even though I didn’t really find it interesting, I might have enjoyed the book the way I totally enjoyed “The Jane Austen Society”, which is a stupid book about inauthentic people with uninteresting predicaments but with a rather original, clever plot. In this respect, “The Reading List” is rather alike, at least in my estimation, but I didn’t enjoy the book, it totally PUT ME OFF. Maybe it is just a nicer experience to have this kind of book expertly read to me than reading it myself? But this is not all. I totally loved “The Jane Austen Society” and listened to it three or four times because it made me feel good, and was totally annoyed with “The Reading List” without knowing why. Maybe because the latter is “pretentious” – actually pretending to be about something, to be “deep” – whereas “The Jane Austen Society” doesn’t pretend to be anything else but entertainment? – Be this as it may, for some reason it ANTAGONIZED me. I didn’t like the characters, or couldn’t “get them out of the pages”, for no sufficient reason …
No answers here. If I really read something I like, though, I usually know why. My first relevant fictional experience of 2023 – uncharacteristically - was about a book. And I don’t remember something that intense since Sally Rooney – which might have been in 2022, but I am afraid it was more like 21. This recent one was about Stephen Fry’s first novel “The Hippopotamus”. It was a random find, not something I ever intended to read, but, on one of my recent trips to the “Museum” cinema, I stumbled on a very small bookshop with a substantial choice of English books, and I spontaneously picked Stephen Fry’s “Mythos”. I read the first few pages and liked it, and as my sister had seen me reading it, she got me “The Hippopotamus” as a Christmas present. I decided to leave “Mythos” and read this first, but couldn’t get into it. As I always do, especially if something was given or recommended to me, I read it through, but I never stopped thinking: Why am I wasting my time, following the ramblings of this old-fashioned, grumpy fart of a narrator and a plot that doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere? Other people might find this entertaining, but I HATE books that are about somebody proving how bad, clever, world-weary and erudite they are, and who think that every burp their brain produces is worth hearing …
The interesting and singular quality of this reading experience was the sudden and complete reversal of EVERYTHING I had read towards the end of the book, which had never before occurred in this way. I had picked up that it was some kind of unbloody “mystery” but presumed that this was just a pretext for limitless incontinent rambling about what the world has come to. Pretty close to the end, though, it becomes suddenly apparent that “we” have been fooled about EVERYTHING, and the success of this book WITH ME actually depended on MY OWN capacity for being fooled in this way, of having taken up EVERY prejudice about people the author evoked, every false lead, having followed him into every dead alley … Surprisingly, this didn’t put me off. On the contrary: I was thrilled and totally loved the book and Stephen Fry for showing me in such a singularly clever way how stupid I had been. Now I am reading it again – aloud! – to fully appreciate the brilliant writing which I couldn’t enjoy the least bit, being constantly annoyed. The writing’s dead good. Where “The Reading List” had the bland taste of a plain wafer, this is red wine and black chocolate …
There is one conclusion at least I can draw about me as a reader and, consequentially, the two books I had been reading. I actually MIND my intelligence being insulted, and this, apart from getting bored, is the one thing I don’t forgive. (As my Stephen Fry experience proves, I quite easily forgive political incorrectness – which annoys me only as long as I cannot see the point.) As I think I had been READING “The Reading List” – not done anything else with it! – I conclude that it actually is a STUPID book with a clever plot and characters who just had the misfortune of being in a stupid book, by no major fault of their own. (In this case I even REGRETTED that I was unable to empathize with any of them because I actually might have in real life. As it often is with mediocre novels: it might work better as a film!)
What makes the book stupid is probably just the fact that it inadvertently insulted my intelligence by not being, just in some respect, CLEVERER than I am. This, and the Stephen Fry success, makes me remember something I knew from childhood about me and books but seem to have buried. Especially at an earlier age, books had been my entry into a more adult, more intelligent world with fewer limits; a world of superior brains and deeper knowledge and experience about life and literature and so on than I encountered in my own environment. And, more than I thought, they still are. It still happens often enough, but Stephen Fry kind of buried my nose in the reassuring experience that I can still fall spectacularly off my judgemental high horse and find out that I don’t know anything at all. And that I should try to have this experience more often.
NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS (apart from the ongoing issue of losing two kilos …):
Continue “liaising” with my siblings
Finally get to the Westend and see some of these amazing new productions
READ more books …
