September process

It helps when I wake at 3am and can’t get back to sleep and sit reading James Frey’s hyperbolic Million Little Pieces and then lie in the cold darkness feeling diminished and belittled and angry and useless, it helps to know that I am sober and haven’t got a hangover on top of all the uncomfortable feelings. Which are just feelings and nobody ever died from just enduring the feelings. On the other hand, many have died from attempting to avoid feelings, especially when the escape turns into a motherfucker of an addiction, as James Frey would put it. (What a pity he didn’t just tell his story without exaggerating, lying and playing for extra sympathy.)

September is getting underway, the beginning of spring and my natal birthday month, a Libra air sign of a month. Looking out of the study window I see that some of the snow on the mountains has melted, although it is still very cold.

I’m making a large white-and-blue pot of grated ginger tea, which is not tea at all but grated fresh ginger and boiling water, with a squeeze of lemon. For lunch I shall have some lentils with cumin, garlic, chilli and fresh rosemary. Is rosemary the right herb? There’s some origanum but no more coriander. When I’m not reading Frey and wanting to go out and sit over coffee wth suffering alcoholics, I’m also reading Julie/Julia, which I first read as a blog. Julie spent a year saving her sanity by cooking every single recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, one day at a time. She saved her marriage, her sanity and landed a publishing contract. I wouldn’t choose Julia Child myself (Elizabeth David or Maddhur Jaffrey or Claudia Roden maybe) but the therapeutic value of cooking is nothing new to me. I see that lovely cookery writer Elisabeth Luard has also just published a memoir recounting how living with her brilliant charming adventurous and philandering alcoholic husband, Nicholas, made her take up cooking in order to survive the terror and misery and shame of his chaos. Cooking is a metaphor for so much in life…

So I am going to spend a couple of hours working, then go for a walk in the frosty spring air, then make lunch and do some more work. And hopefully the bloodyminded mood will lift somewhere along the way.

And that the alarming new twinges of toothache will resolve themselves quietly because I can’t afford a dentist. Dentists and therapy tend to be crucial at those times when they are out of the question. The dentist may not be optional and I am going to have to ‘make a plan’ as we are so fond of saying here in Africa.

But in the meantime I can browse my recovery bloggers and borrow a little es&h (experience, strength and hope) because, well, it could be worse and any day sober is a miracle. Whether or not it feels that way.

The agony and the boredom [and the stray pleasures] of writing

A watched pot never boils. A journal subscribed to never arrives.

 

My partner decided to subscribe to the London Review of Books. He doesn’t know it well. I read it avidly online, especially if there is anything written by Iain Sinclair, Hilary Mantel or James Wood (pf whom more later). All of last week I waited for the Royal Mail postman to drive up in the red van with insignia and deliver the latest issue. It didn’t arrive. It may not arrive until we have made a great deal of fuss. I still watch for the postman though because I have a naive and childlike notion of postmen being reliable and likeable men in quaint uniforms. ‘Postman Pat/Postman Pat!/Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat!’ That kind of thing.

 

The Private Eye has not arrived either but it is the London Review of Books that I long for. I may have to go out and buy a copy, prompted by the funniest quote I have read in years from the LA Times:

 

‘But there is vast anecdotal evidence of subscribers to the New Yorker and the London Review of Books reading Wood’s essays huddled in entryways, coats and keys and umbrellas still in their hands. He has earned a rare and awesome cultural authority.’

 

That’s me! Well, no, it isn’t. I couldn’t finish reading Wood on Rivka Galchen in the New Yorker online. Vast anecdotal evidence? Hilarious. And now he is writing on Aleksander Hemon’s fictional lives and I have to work out how to roast a Barbary duck breast for supper and can’t manage both Wood and duck. Too mentally exhausting. But I do like to read the London Review of Books and wish it would arruve.

 

For one thing it would mean that I could stop trying to write fiction and just read about fiction for a day or two. The odd thing is that I enjoy writing. I blog and post and do emails and work out features articles without too much distress or procrastination. But fiction is my own personal demon. If what I wrote was no good, I could cheerfully think, ‘That’s that!’ and move on to nonfiction and write  that. But some lines and paragraphs are tantalisingly satisfactory. So I persist.

 

The low-level depression is still there but shifted or displaced a little by a lively phone conversation with a new friend from the rooms. And an exchange of emails witha nother transatlantic friend from the fellowship. And a slice or two of locally cured ham, mild but spicy, lashed with Dijon and piled on buttered bread.

 

Another friend, a blogger,  wrote and said.’Are you lonely, sweet thing?’ And instantly Sweet Thing was less lonely. The human community’s collective miracle, that we need one another.

 

But now I must be thankful I have not read James Wood on the Making of Fiction — so intimidating! — and can get back to a short story that began as a novel and may end as an epigram.

 

Wondering too why somebody who typed in ‘sexual life’ on Google arrived at my blog. Technorati seems puzzled too. It isn’t that my sex life is not hot (she said coyly) but I don’t think it is anybody’s business but mine. The mysteries of blog-conspiring in the Aquarian Age of the Internet…