Reading, Watching, Thinking

This is a place for me to hold forth on matters both serious and silly. You are invited to participate.

Throughout March I had the disquieting sense of having overlooked something of importance – you know, that feeling of having left something behind (like my handbag in the ladies’ loos) or missed a date of significance (I kept imagining a large speech-bubble over my head reading: ‘Surely it can’t be our anniversary already, can it?’) – and in a way, both scenarios were correct, but I need not have worried because Dewithon (as was) is now in the capable hands of BookerTalk’s splendid blogmistress, Karen. Happily, the event was an enormous success. Still, it was an odd feeling, if immensely liberating to realise the entire month was mine to write as I wished.

Reading, Watching, Thinking: An Amalgamation 

I today finished reading Mac & His Problem, a curious book by Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas (translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa and Sophie Hughes) about a character called Mac Vives – former owner of “a rock-solid construction company” that went bust. Newly unemployed and now in his sixties with a point of sorts to prove to himself as much as his wife (on whom he is financially dependent), he has started keeping what he insists on calling a diary, describing it as “a daily exercise” allowing him to try his hand at writing “preliminary literary scraps” but with his “sights on the future.” He hopes this will save him “from losing all hope in the depths [he’s] been left in by [his] financial and professional ruin.” In truth, he appears to be rewriting an early work of fiction by his illustrious neighbour, the successful Barcelona novelist Ander Sánchez.

I confess it took me a while to settle into Mac’s comedically pretentious outpourings, but I stuck with it and eventually found myself chuckling away at his more grandiose pronouncements. It cannot be denied he is exceptionally well-read and knows his Baudelaire from his Hemmingway, but as he strolls through his neighbourhood seeking “noteworthy” episodes to record and obsessing over the minutiae of falsification and repetition (his pet topics), while every so often sloping into a bar for a few gins while eavesdropping on other drinkers conversations, I did occasionally drift. Not that I disliked the book, but I doubt I will remember much about it in six months’ time. 

It will surprise nobody to learn I am still wading through the same ‘slow book’ on my nightstand, which has lozzacked there since I first mentioned it in TT #5 – though, ‘wading’ is perhaps too strong a word, since in the case of this biographical boulder (No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami), it is more a gentle splash-about in familiar waters than a wearisome crawl across the English Channel. I was already familiar with the author’s work, having read several of her books on the life histories of various 20^th century women, and was well acquainted with most of the influential lesbians covered in this book, so I was hoping there might be a fresh slant or new information on their lives.

Fortunately, I found myself engrossed in Souhami’s take on these personal histories, but one individual I previously knew little about was Annie Winifred Ellerman (1894-1983), the daughter of a British shipping magnate, better known by her adopted name of Bryher (after her favourite island in the Scilly archipelago). The equivalent of a billionaire in modern money, she is now considered one of the cornerstones of modernism despite her historical novels and other written works not being widely read at the time. Like so many women of her era, she felt stifled by society’s gender expectations, adopting a masculine (i.e. ‘butch’) image and often wearing men’s suits, but nevertheless entered into two ‘lavender’ marriages (unions of convenience), though the great love of her life was the American poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).

Novelist, poet, memoirist and magazine editor – but most significantly, benefactress, using her considerable fortune to promote modernism in literature, film, politics and psychoanalysis – she was patron to numerous struggling authors and artists. If you would like to know more about her life and work, I would suggest you start by reading the literary historian and editor, Kate Macdonald’s super piece about her from 2020: Bryher (the writer, not the island).

As for articles and essays that didn’t make it into my weekly wind up but still piqued my interest (see TT #5 for a full explanation), I should like to draw your attention to a couple of features I found especially interesting.

As a person with a deep and abiding love for the sea (that is to say, a thalassophile), I was intrigued by Nasrullah Mambrol’s 15^th February piece for Literary Theory and Criticism: Introduction to Blue Humanities. Partly a consideration of Towards ‘Bluer’ Humanities: Oceanic Meditations in Art, Literature and Culture, a book edited by Razeena P R and Sheeba M K with a foreword by Professor Steve Mentz (“the literary scholar [who] coined the phrase” ‘blue cultural studies’), the essay describes this interdisciplinary field as “one of the most enthralling and important areas of emergent research […] ranging from history to visual arts, to cultural and literary studies.” The “ocean has always captivated the imagination of poets, writers, and artists alike,” says Mambrol, and this area of study has encouraged “a deeper engagement with the ocean as a living, dynamic space,” aiming to push beyond “fascination and investigate the material realities of ocean life, including its role in shaping human history and identity.” The book quite clearly has my name written all over it (I wish), so naturally I’m keen to read it. Unfortunately, a fleeting poke around revealed it’s likely to be a tricky one to find. It isn’t available from Blackwell’s (my online bookseller of choice) or, it would appear, from any of my preferred indie stockists, so I will need to search further afield.

I was entertained by Gabrielle Schwarz’s February piece in Dirt (the ‘daily-ish newsletter about entertainment and culture’), Highly Sensitive People – An aristocracy of the considerate. Back in the unenlightened ’80s, while “struggling to recover, physically and mentally, from a medical procedure,” and having recently been informed by a family doctor that “she was overreacting” (them’s were the days), Elaine Aron’s therapist uttered the solemn words: “But of course you were upset. You are a very highly sensitive person. As are most of the people who really strike me as worth knowing.” This, in time, led to the publication of Aron’s “1996 self-help book,” The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You, which set out her “thesis of sensitivity as a feature, rather than a bug, of some people’s personalities.” It seems, what she terms HSPs (apparantly, a “15–20% subset of the human population”), have nervous systems “more easily stimulated than the average person’s” by “everything from loud noises to […] beautiful works of art”. The phrase went on to spawn “something of a cottage industry in the form of pop-psychology books and support groups” – even featuring in an episode of the American comedy drama, The White Lotus. Please do read the whole article if you would like to know what caused Schwarz to compare the “HSP label” with “astrology” and the reasons why she thinks it so “irritates people”.

Shifting now to a memorable evening at Venue Cymru with Mrs Jotter and friends: 

🎶Let’s do the Time Warp again… and again… and again…🎶 Now celebrating its 50^th anniversary (52^nd if you take it back to its original 1973 opening in London’s West End starring the iconic Tim Curry, who famously reprised his role in the 1975 film), Richard O’Brien’s rock ‘n’ roll musical, The Rocky Horror Show came to town in early March complete with ‘sweet transvestite’ Dr. Frank N. Furter, played by a beefy, six-foot-something Adam Strong. As ever, audience participation and the cast’s witty off-the-cuff comebacks played a huge part in the enjoyment of the show, but the whole performance lived up to expectations and we had an uproarious evening filled with raucous singing, daft dancing and the silliest outfits imaginable. 

I will also reveal my ‘meal out of the moment’ since the winter favourite, veggie stir fried crispy ‘duck’, was callously dropped from our local watering hole’s spring menu. The fresh flavour-fest on the chopping block is served at Signatures, a restaurant only a five-minute waddle from home, which is incentive enough for us to nip in when passing. And the in dish? A rich, fragrant vegetable korma with basmati rice, fresh coriander and onion bhajis. No description I can cook up does justice to the sheer deliciousness of this creation, so I will refrain from further adjectivizing. Suffice to say, it is nom nirvana. 

Just when you thought it was all over… An aggravating adjunct 

Forgive me if you will for this (not so) brief bristle about book classification. (Steps on to soapbox.) Please feel free to skip this section if it becomes tedious or offends you in any way.

I find myself increasingly irked by the now commonplace practice of using the ever-expanding 2SLGBTQ+ tag to denote… What exactly? Herein lies the problem.

Allow me to explain. As a single genre, these combined letters (of which there are a considerable number) can represent anything from characters involved in a gay relationship to a protagonist who identifies as a cat. While admittedly amusing, its now widespread use has rendered a once familiar category almost meaningless, or so it seems to me. In effect, since this letter get-together has morphed into something resembling an over-seasoned alphabet gumbo fused with a multitude of sexualities, lifestyles, beliefs and fetishes, often bearing little or no relation to each other, classification has become increasingly challenging. So unwieldly is it now that almost anyone can find themselves included on the present list, which renders it of little practical use to the bewildered reader with something more specific in mind.

Would it not be simpler to split the letters into groups representing similar types, thus making it easier to track down a required title? Perhaps, then, for those keen to read fictional or factual literature about almost anyone or anything (without necessarily knowing in advance who or what this might be), a one-size-fits-all genre could be introduced – maybe something along the lines of HUG+ (Human Umbrella Group plus self-identifying animals, vegetables and minerals). We could then retain the original LGB abbreviation to denote adult human same sex attraction – though, having said this, I’m acutely aware even in its shortened form, the lesbian, gay and bisexual identifier tells only part of the story. Nevertheless, you must admit, it would narrow down a book-search considerably.

I could easily fill the next few TTs with my thoughts on this indexing niggle, but I will refrain. So, my final words on the matter are: Please, for everyone’s sake, let’s keep it simple.

Why not let me know what you’ve been doing with your days, or better still, compile your own Three Things-type post.

Categories: Three Things

Tags: #ReadingWales25, #ThreeThings., Annie Winifred Ellerman, Blue Humanities, Bryher, Dewithon, Diana Souhami, Elaine Aron, Enrique Vila-Matas, Environment, H.D., Hilda Doolittle, LGB Literature, LGBTQ+, Maritime Literature, Modernism, Nautical Literature, Psychology, Reading Wales, Spanish Literature, Steve Mentz, The Rocky Horror Show, Three Things, Venue Cymru