“My new found spirituality made it essential to me that we not battle. So this was my position – I would neither defend myself from him, nor would I fight him. For the longest time, against he counsel of all who cared about me, I resisted even consulting a lawyer, because I considered even that to be an act of war. I wanted to be all Ghandi about this. I wanted to be all Nelson Mandela about this. Not realizing at the time that both Ghandi and Mandela were lawyers.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

The sum of Eat Pray Love is greater than its parts, but the parts are pretty good. Especially the one about the lawyers.

Two days ago I bought Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir. It was newish, ninety-nine cents and in a thrift store.

I read it tonight.

I’m giving it to my mother tomorrow.

I hope she, like me, reads it in the spirit of a certain ninth generation Balinese medicine man – below the neck.

Now, off to yoga. Not because of the book, but because cortisol is killing me.

Namaste.

“The best thing in winter was driving home, after her day teaching music in the Rough River schools. It would already be dark, and on the upper streets of the town snow might be falling, while rain lashed the car on the coastal highway. Joyce drove beyond the limits of the town into the forest, and …”

- Alice Munro

DailyLit’s Big Read: Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday.

Last month Rachel Cusk had a brilliant article in the Guardian on women’s writing. She made several good points that illustrate the conundrum many of us find ourselves in. Importantly, she asked whether women’s writing should seek equivalence or distinction from its male counterpart. She’s inclined to agree with Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf and think the latter. Just as we need a room of our own, we should rightly have a literature of our own. Not simply writing by women, but writing that ‘arises out of, and is shaped by, a set of specifically female conditions’.

She also acknowledged people were sure to question: Why does it have to be politicised? Why can’t we just get on with it?

I’ve managed to misplace the article, so I can’t give proper attribution, but I clipped a quote which might just sum it up. In any case, it gives pause for thought – which is something I plan on doing a lot when my teeth stop hurting.

‘This is an important book,’ the critic assumes, ‘because it deals with war.’

‘This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.’

Eighty years after A Room of One’s Own was first published – and 50 years after The Second Sex – the same value system prevails.

“I hold the blank page headed Friday November Thirteenth to the light of that day. There seems to my eye some discrepancy between the two. There, outside is the day; as it happens, bluish, cloudy, still and fine. Here is the page; white, smooth. How am I to bring about a marriage between them? But let me try, with a pen, dipped in ink.” -Virginia Woolf

I thought it something that I should be reading this on my own Friday November Thirteenth. I’m in America, in the South, but the week has been full of what The Euro calls Proper Northern Weather. And by ‘Northern’ I mean , of course, the North as referred to by the M5 – The North of England.

I was inking in my own diary this afternoon, something I rarely do anymore. My last handwritten entry was over three months ago. I wrote about John Malkovich as The Great Buck Howard.
— — — —

Friday 13 Nov 2009: She stopped remembering today. Or yesterday, maybe. Maybe even before that, to be honest. But I didn’t know it then. I know it now. That she stopped remembering. Today. My lovely little grandma.

B.

Words on monitors, made of ones and zeros, never seem as real as those made from pen and ink or impressions on ribbon.

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays.

I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

- George Orwell

Carrie Ryan, author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth, is sort of a big deal. And when I say ’sort of’ I’m being sarcastic. She’s a huge deal.

I met Carrie two years ago -ish- when she was still a litigator for a city centre law firm. John Hart, another lawyer-turned-writer, had come to chat about writing. At the end of the discussion Carrie mentioned that she had recently sold her YA novel to Delacorte and…well…she had me at ‘Delacorte’.

Fast forward to present and Carrie’s no longer measuring her days in six minute increments. She’s showing up in Manhattan for Random House, making “Best Zombies Ever” lists for MTV and, my personal favourite, having her prose called ‘beautiful’ by The Guardian.

And did I mention the film?? Yeah. So, there’s that.

But back to The Forest…

It’s an on-the-edge-of-your-seat read, poetically put together, and reminiscent of both Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go) and Simon Pegg (he did lose his bestie in Shaun). The only thing to give pause – it might annoy you a little because it ends before you want it to. But that’s what sequels are for. The Dead-Tossed Waves is out in March and, from what I hear, the final book in what has now become a trilogy…is expected in 2011.

Now. Off to watch the aforementioned Shaun of the Dead. And Up. Because I’m nothing if not balanced.

You may have heard of a place in London called Seven Dials, a well-known junction near Covent Garden where seven streets converge. At the centre of the roughly-circular space is a pillar bearing six (yes, six) sundials. By the eighteenth century Seven Dials had become one of the most notorious slums in London and when Agatha Christie penned those mysteries the name was a euphemism for urban poverty.

Author Craig Taylor points out that you’ve probably never heard of a place called Five Dials because it never got to grow up to become respectable.

‘Five Dials was a den of iniquity, a haven for criminals, a slummy, ragged bit of the city cleaved away to make room for the broadening of Charing Cross Road.’

One street had the poorest, the dirtiest, and the lowest houses that part of London could boast of. There was gambling, cards, loose talk, and it was all very close to where Hamish Hamilton now sits on the Strand.

Which is why they chose the name for their new-ish literary magazine.

The introductory issue of Five Dials (featuring Iain Sinclair, Alain de Botton, Rachel Lichtenstein and Gustave Flaubert) is quick to let us know it doesn’t have a real staff. Or proper photographers (doesn’t really need ‘em…has Nick Dewar). Or even stationery. Instead, they make due with a few editors and writers and a large bit of cork they tack interesting writing and illustrations to.

It is, in a word, Divine.

It’s also free.

Virgil asked that Aeneid be destroyed upon his death. Augustus decided to save it for posterity. Kafka wanted a friend to burn a collection of manuscripts on his decease. The friend ignored the request. The Trial and The Castle resulted.

Now to Nabokov.

On his deathbed, Vladamir Nabokov asked his wife, Vera, to destroy a partial manuscript, written on 138 index cards. She didn’t. This week Penguin Classics will publish a facsimile edition of that manuscript – Vladamir Nabokov’s unfinished 18th novel, The Original of Laura. (Otherwise embargoed until 17th November.)

As executor of the Nabokov estate, Dimitri Nabokov defends his decision to hold on to his father’s work. In his introduction to The Original of Laura he writes: “When the task passed to me [on his mother' death] I did a great deal of thinking…I decided that, in putative retrospect, Nabokov would not have wanted to allow [the manuscript] to burn like a latter-day Jeanne d’Arc.”

So here it is. Nabokov’s finale. The Original of Laura. Wherein a wonderfully large man called Philip Wild marries a very promiscuous woman and meditates on the nature of death.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” – Virginia Woolf

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction – what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done.

But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion.

- Virginia Woolf

The Chekhov mood is that cave in which are kept all the unseen and hardly palpable treasures of Chekhov’s soul, so often beyond the reach of mere consciousness.

— Constantin Stanislavski

I’ve talked before about The Sister and how we’re really crushin on our Russians right now. She’s heavy on her Tolstoy and keeps reminding me why I should reread Anna and ‘wow, he writes women well.”

But Anton’s way prettier and his short stories suit my in-between-other-things. One of those things is Nabokov. Earlier tonight I was reading some of his notes…

…in them he called Chekhov an “amateur”. But he went on to say that “Lady with the Dog” was the best short story every written. And it makes sense that he would. Because it is.

I also found this little beauty…Nabokov’s edits of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. If you know me you know I’ve never managed that one. I just can’t get beyond the insect thing long enough to do anything with it. I mean, hell.