graham stewart

Just a Wednesday night – and a picture from France

February 3, 2021 By graham stewart

It’s almost time to put the bins out and I had nothing prepared to post. So, here’s a picture of somewhere that means a lot to Laura and me. We haven’t been there for over a year. I miss it.

I love the mountains and their clear air. I miss sitting in the sun on a cafe terrace adjacent to a snow-covered slope, with the temperature below zero, and feeling warm enough to strip down to a t-shirt.

We’re lucky we found this place and we’ve been going there for over ten years now. It’s a part of France we didn’t know at all before we ended up in Valloire. But our visits there are coming to an end. There are many reasons for this — and Brexit is not really one of them — but, if Covid restrictions are lifted, we’ll make one last trip before the summer to recover some stuff and that will be that.

We’re sad tonight but we have great memories of Valloire. Things change. New circumstances bring new opportunities.

I was never very good on skis anyway.

I’ve moved to Naples with Elena Ferrante

February 2, 2021 By graham stewart

In the wake of the recent news about huge job losses in closing retail chain stores I had started a post about guaranteed jobs. But it will take a bit more research and thinking to make it hold as an article worth reading.
So, instead, here’s a post about Elena Ferrante. Or, to be more precise, about how I’m enjoying the first of The Neapolitan Novels.
My Brilliant Friend is wonderful.

It was my elder daughter who read the books first. A few years ago, while she was spending a year at home between university and moving to Malta. Then my wife read them. All four books sit on the shelf above the TV in the living room and I have looked at them from time to time and thought that I ‘should’ read them.

My wife watched the first series of the TV series in a binge last week. She said how good the series was and it reminded her how much she had enjoyed the books. “You really should read them,” she said.

In our house I am the self-appointed recommender of books. (I like to think I may even have recommended the Ferrante books to my daughter on the back of a review in the LRB or something — but that may be stretching my memory into the realms of pure fantasy.) Not that anyone takes much notice most of the time. Fair is fair, though.

I picked up the first of the books and started reading.

Wow.

I’ve been moaning recently that I have not been reading as much as I usually like to. I can see this book causing more problems disrupting my reading. I have had to ration myself for the last three days but I have still ripped through the first part of the book.

Not only is the prose wonderful — and credit must go to translator Ann Goldstein — but the characters of the children who populate the first section are perfectly drawn. It is a difficult task to make young children so interesting when their worlds are narrow and their experiences so limited. Ferrante conjures a narrow world that is somehow more than enough. Part of this, for me, was that it brought back so many memories of my own childhood. (And no, I didn’t grow up in Naples and I wasn’t a girl. Ferrante’s children are marvellously universal.) Unless I’m mistaken, the first mention of a date is in the second part of the book, just as the children are becoming adolescents. This timelessness of the first section only increases its universality.

And I’m going to stop there. I want to finish the book before I rave any more.

Being original means being yourself. End of lesson.

February 1, 2021 By graham stewart

There’s a long tradition of proclaiming there is nothing new under the sun. From the seven basic plots from which all stories are built to countless films and TV series whose characters, settings, and storyline seem interchangeable.

It’s enough to make a creative despair. Until, of course, you realise that it is not a new story that makes something unique but the way it is told. No two people are the same. No two people telling the same story will tell it the same way. The originality lies with the teller, not the tale — with apologies to D H Lawrence.

I was reminded of this today when I was looking at coming up with titles and themes for a possible podcast in my Podcasting Workshop. Taking a look at the ideas of the other participants, it would have been easy to waste a lot of energy going “That’s been done,” “Hardly unique”, or “Not interested” to many of them. But just like all other forms of creative enterprise, what’s important in these ideas is how the person behind the podcast will make their podcast unique. Humour, interesting guests, a kookie slant on the topic, or just sheer professionalism.

I have to come up with an idea of my own for tomorrow. I want to find a heady mix of politics and books and create something that will be full of lively and stimulating discussion. Think Our Time but with passion rather than a whiff of the academy. Neglected books, important books, books that have changed the lives of my guests, books that help us make sense of the world, and books that may help us change it for the better.

And with an almost book club sensibility. The discussions will be trailed a month in advance and the audience can read the book in preparation for an in-depth discussion, mailing in question and responses before the episode itself.

I think I’d listen to that. How about a name? And maybe it’s being done elsewhere. That doesn’t matter. My take on it will be slightly different and appeal to different people. That’s the way things work. You can’t find an audience if you don’t put it out there.

I stuck to my resolutions – that’s a first

January 31, 2021 By graham stewart

Here’s a brief report for January:
17600 words of the novel written (at a minimum of 500 words every day)
30 days of yoga
30 days of posts to this site
Books finished (from the list of 10):
• The Case for a Job Guarantee — Tcherneva
• Knife of Dreams — Jordan

That’s an unusually fallow month of reading for me but, because it’s a result of more writing and setting time aside for yoga, I’m prepared to accept it. It’s not the only reading I have been doing but it feels slightly disappointing nevertheless.

And here’s the plan for February:
Inspired by Anne Lamott’s story about the writing of her second novel (Rosie) which she retells in Bird by Bird, I’m using the next month to write a full treatment of the book I’m working on. Part of the problem is that I have been working on it a long time and I have taken breaks and attacked it at different places at different times. It is a bit of a mess and is getting harder and harder to hold complete in my head. Time, therefore, to get the story down and the way the characters change, who they are, why they act like they do, and what happens to them. More or less. I’m aiming for a full forty or fifty pages of treatment in the next 28 days.

I’ve joined the Seth Godin Akimbo Podcast Workshop, which starts tomorrow. I’m looking forward to learning some useful stuff from people also keen to ship a podcast. I joined the workshop rather than some normal hands-off course because a hands-off course would be my first choice. The Akimbo workshop stresses the necessity of joining in, of sharing knowledge, of engaging. I’m not someone who naturally plays well with others. So already I have the chance to learn something over and above whatever technical details I may glean about podcasting.

I want to complete more books from the list of ten. (I had thought I was going to add Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune as a replacement for the Tcherneva but my wife has convinced me to start Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and, after 90 pages, I’m hooked. Sorry, Olivia.)

I’m going to continue with yoga. This month, though, I’m going to watch and follow a session for complete beginners every day until the moves and poses and flows become second nature — and I can feel myself improving. Still with Adriene, though. Given that the month of ‘lessons’ I just did with her is free, I thought it was only fair to download her FWFG app and subscribe to her channel. It still comes in at a ridiculously reasonable price — far cheaper than a class a week at a local yoga studio, were such things still open.

I’m also going to add some weight training this month. The combination of yoga and refraining from sugar in all the most obvious forms has had some impact on my weight and my BMI but I want to add a bit of additional strength and tone where yoga may take a bit of time getting there.

So, that’s the month ahead. I’m looking forward to it.

A pre-update update

January 30, 2021 By graham stewart

Getting ready for tomorrow

Just a water buffalo with closed eyes: Photo by Alex Parkes on Unsplash

On the 16th of January I wrote a post about the things I have committed to this month. I promised to give an update at the end of the month. That’s tomorrow. I’ll roll in an update about books read and bought, too.

Today’s post is a little preparation. It’s Saturday evening and I want to post this too my personal blog because I want to post something and I have little to say. What I have noticed this month is that I have read a lot less than usual. In addition to my book reading, I usually get through the TLS, Private Eye, and the LRB.

I also subscribe to print versions of Red Pepper and Tribune. At the moment, my in-tray is piling up with back issues of all of those. Not good. It makes me unhappy. Or stressed. One of the two. I hate skipping articles, essays, or reviews in these magazines because it gives me a bad case of FOMO. I really do fear I shall miss something important if I don’t read everything. Interesting, at least. Or useful. Not healthy.

After taking stick of what this month has given me — or taken from me in the case of reading — I will make some resolutions for February. I don’t know yet myself what I’m going to decide. That will have to wait until I’m typing tomorrow.

And on that note … until tomorrow.

Stop hiding behind mannered writing

January 29, 2021 By graham stewart

Come out from behind your disguise

“Still learning”: Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

The more I read Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing, the stronger it resonates. I am even reading the book front to back. Richard Ford, in a review of the book, wrote “You don’t even need to read it front to back (probably you couldn’t, anyway).” I took that as a challenge, obviously, because I’m an overgrown teenager when it comes to that sort of thing. (Then again, I tend to read books front to back.) And from what I’ve read of the Klinkenborg, I think it’s meant to be read from the start, following the sentences like a carefully crafted argument. The sentences build one upon the other. One after the other. Dipping into the book at random would offer meagre rewards unless the book had been previously digested whole.

Klinkenborg has at last made clear to me why I love reading Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg on writing. It’s not just the subject matter. What Klinkenborg has explained in his wonderful little manual on sentences is how sentences can express sincerity and honesty. How they are used to build trust. And with Goldberg and Lamott trust is what I feel when reading them. I trust them because I believe them. I believe the sentences they build. I recognise in their sentences and the vocabulary and structure within those sentences that they are sincere.

I can look to apply this to my own writing. The most frequent criticism I had about my writing when I was younger — much younger — was that it was mannered. Mannered writing is a sure sign that the writer is trying to both hide emotion and to make extra claims for his writing at the same time. The sentences read as if they were written to sound like writing rather than to express thought honestly and openly. Mannered writing, in short, fails to convey sincerity.

This was true, of course. I was writing in a style that I thought made me look clever. Made me look and sound like a writer. It was more important to look flash than to say what I meant in a form that allowed people to discover what I meant. Writing, in other words, as a form of disguise.

And the bad habit of mannered writing is a hard habit to kick.

There is a certain irony in this. One of the freelance writing jobs I’ve done from time to time in the past twenty years or so is as a consultant helping business executives break away from ‘corporate speak’ in emails and websites and press releases. Coaching them to find their voices. To try to be both genuine and human enough to connect with their readers, whether inside or outside the company. Anyone who has ever read ‘official’ company emails or scrolled through yet another corporate website full of ‘services’ and ‘offerings’ without ever quite discovering what the company does will understand the problem.

But, as with many things, it appears it is easier to teach than to learn.

It is both heartening and distressing to realise that at my age I am still learning things. Heartening because learning gives you new life; distressing because some of the things I learn I feel I should have learned a long time ago. Many of these things make me sit back, sigh, and say to myself “how come you didn’t know this?” The only way to move forward from that is to shrug.

Is it a good sign that I’m doing a lot of shrugging these days?