A wonderful thing

I'm not quite back to blogging as normal, as I still don't have the internet at home. I have my fingers crossed for next week.

In the meantime, here comes another handful of stray bookish thoughts drifting across Christina's mind:

One of the most wonderful things about reading is that sometimes, sometimes, you are hanging out with a friend, and mention something you've read, and they know what you are talking about. Suddenly, you have just that much more common history, that many more esoteric references. This happened to me last week, and it was an absolute delight, but I'll get back to that.

Common interests in reading and film have always been important to me, but over the last few years I've become increasingly distrusting of other people's ability to judge my tastes. I have books recommended to me often. Friends, relatives and customers all think they know exactly what I want to read (usually, they think I want to read whatever they happen to enjoy reading). I don't very often come across people whose recommendations I trust. (V, I love you for your unfalteringly good suggestions!)

Last week I attended a philosophy conference in Sydney with a few friends. I've begun to think of the whole week as an exchange of ideas. The philosophical debates went back and forth, and I enjoyed that, but I equally enjoyed the conversations about the books, films and TV shows we loved. We exchanged must-sees and must-reads. For the first time in a long time, I'm actually looking forward to tackling some fiction that has been recommended to me.

That's what friendship is for.

I remember exchanging 'homework' with friends in high school- "I'll watch this if you read that..." I really must get back into the habit. Perhaps I'll even end up less niched.

An office!

As you will recall, I moved house last weekend. I don't have internet in the new place yet, so please forgive me if this blog flies under the radar over the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I will be enjoying having my own library/office/study area! Finally! The place is still a work-in-progress (pictures to go on the walls; a couple of pieces of furniture still need to be moved in) but my office is pretty much done. =D

Before:

After:

The one where I gush about Neil Gaiman and think about the rebirth of the author

So if you don't already know that I'm a Neil Gaiman fan, welcome to my blog for the very first time. Those of you that have been here before will understand that when I bought tickets yesterday to seem him in Sydney in August I was BESIDE MYSELF. At work yesterday, I kept saying "I'm going to see Neil Gaiman!" to anyone who would listen (and quite a few people who wouldn't).

I'm not the sort to be star-struck. I think Neil is probably the only person on the planet who could send me into a fluster. I've already started stressing about what I will say if, for some reason, I have the opportunity to shake his hand at one of the events I'm attending. A man as talented as Mr. Gaiman hears strangers tell him how much they appreciate his work all the time.

If you haven't heard of him before, you'll have to take my word for it. His writing talent and his imagination are awe-inspiring, and he has a cult following of over a million fans worldwide. His creativity is matched only by a kind of intellectual rigour rarely found outside academia. When you read a work by Neil Gaiman, you know you are in the presence of a keen awareness of mythology and tales most of us have long forgotten. I think it's telling that a quote from his Sandman comics was recently misattributed to Shakespeare. I'd like to gush some more but I won't, because a.) I would probably bore you and b.) Charlie Orr has already said it anyway.

Instead, I'll just mention that I've been thinking a lot lately about the similarities between William Goldman's The Princess Bride and Neil Gaiman's Stardust.

Neil has said in interviews that Stardust was partly inspired by The Princess Bride- or by a lack of book similar to The Princess Bride. Both are fairy tales sold primarily to an adult audience, and they have a similar humour about them. Both were made into films with plotlines more romanticised than those in the original books.

There is, however, one significant difference: The Princess Bride is metafictional. Goldman continually interrupts the story to say what he thinks of it, and this is part of the story. He talks about his wife and son, their reactions to the text and the process of abridging the original text of The Princess Bride. This is all part of the fiction, though Goldman mixes in enough truth to confuse the reader a little.

I've been thinking about this because I'm writing my Honours thesis on a certain philosophical problem regarding fiction, and I'm using metafiction (specifically The Princess Bride) to illuminate the problem. It occurred to me the other day that while Stardust the text isn't metafictional, it was created in a postmodern world where we have access to authors' opinions of their work. Fans interact with Neil all the time, on Twitter or on his blog. They ask him questions about his work and his life and he answers them (though I've never seen him offer an authoritarian interpretation of one of his works).

It's a joy to read, mostly because it's well-written and he's such a nice guy. And it makes me wonder. There are lots of authors with blogs these days. How does this affect they way we see their work? Roland Barthes famously told us that the author is dead. Could it be that when authors enter our online communities and interact directly with the fans of their work, the author is reborn? Not as a authoritative figure, but as a member of the community discussing the work he happened to create.

When my desk goes, I go

You may remember from this post that I am awfully attached to my desk. Until this week, I didn't realise quite how much. It's a nice big desk, about two metres wide, with a return (a bit that juts out) on the left hand side which houses my laptop, dictionary and notebooks. (As pictured. I insisted on these paint colours when we moved in seven or eight years ago- now I can't wait to see the back of them!) Even though the desk is mostly used for study now, I still think of it as my 'writing desk'.

I mentioned earlier that I am soon to move. This is good: I am leaving behind my shoebox of a bedroom for significantly more space, including my own office area. I'm essentially going to be a boarder, so I have taken advantage of the fact that the space is already available and have started moving boxes over, bit by bit. My thought was that I would move in gradually, and eventually change home addresses once most of my things were in the new place. A casual, relaxed move.

It's not to be.

This week, I realised that my desk is too large to easily transport, so I'm going to need a few helping hands and will actually have to set a date for moving it. Then I realised that I can't bear to stay in my old place once my desk has moved. I simply cannot be without my beautiful desk, with all its space for thinking, writing and imagining.

So. The move date is set for the 27th. In the meantime, I promise I will blog about actual books soon.

22 boxes

I'm moving house in about a month, so naturally I've started packing. I started with my books, mainly because once I've cleared the books out of my room there will be much more space to move around and pack everything else! So far I've packed 22 boxes of books. There are another four or five boxes' worth that I can't afford to pack just now...

Yes, they are labelled by category. This is because I hope to have help unpacking and organizing them at the other end (HA, that means you!). I need it, because otherwise I will waste an entire week pouring over books I'd forgotten I had.

I already got distracted by my picture books whilst packing. (I collect picture books. I also collect perfume bottles and handbags. Contrary to popular belief, I do not collect shoes. I just happen to have quite a few of them.)

Language and the self

I’m a bit of an anglophile, much to the bewilderment of my parents, who brought me up to be keenly aware of my Finnish heritage. My interest in all things English, however, stems from a deeply-rooted conviction that culturally, I am a product of England as much as I am of Australia or Finland.

I ardently believe that language, far from being a simple tool for communication, is one of the strongest forces in shaping our consciousness. Even though Finnish was my first language, my whole education has been conducted in English. I first encountered the alphabet, that magical cluster of characters with the capacity to create worlds, in English. My obsession with the English language began then.

The folk tales I heard as a child came to me via England (did those adult storytellers ever really understand the power of Red Riding Hood’s cape or Cinderella’s shoe?). My dragons are dragons of flight and fire, they are not the Scandinavian crawling wyrms. The legends I read in primary school were English (are there any stories as wonderful as the Arthurian legends?). The fantasy I grew up on was written by Oxfordians. My sense of humour, even, is quite English (think Gaiman, Pratchett, Adams). In high school, I studied Shakespeare in three separate disciplines. The turns of phrase employed by the English, with their delightfully extensive vocabularies, have always made me proud to speak their language.

How can I begin to unravel this bundle of influences? How can I explain how King Arthur’s court shaped my impressions of the world more strongly than anything I ever saw on TV? How can I account for the fact that my imagination soared in response to black letters marching across the pages?

I’m not sure I can unravel it, and I don’t really want to. If you took away the influence of English, what was left wouldn’t be me anymore. I couldn’t tell you why it’s so important to me, it just seemed apparent from the start that the English language is one of the parameters of my universe. I am defined by this language and this literary heritage, by my responses to it and my passion for it, and I like it that way.

Princesses and Pornstars

In my eyes, my mother will always be the ultimate feminist. She never campaigned for her right to work or vote, she never wrote essays or participated in protests. But she is a passionate advocate for women's rights to their own bodies. She has worked alongside many women who have had those rights violated. She is a homemaker, but she is a homemaker because that's what she wants to be. She is not a homemaker because she feels societal pressure to be so. If anything, she has had pressure in the opposite direction. Her greatest life ambition was to raise children and to devote her time to her family, and she did this despite the disapproval of her pro-career generation.

My mum would never call herself a feminist, though. To her, feminism is embodied by single career-women with little respect for family. To her, feminism means man-hating.

Emily Maguire, in Princesses & Pornstars aims to debunk exactly these kinds of myths. She discusses why feminism is about equality, and why equality is still something we need to strive for. In recounting her own experiences and those of many friends and acquaintances, she shows that feminism is not a dirty word and it is not a fight that is behind us.

I was especially drawn to the chapters about marriage and child-rearing. Compared to women in generations gone by, I am exceptionally lucky. I have political rights. I have intellectual rights. I have rights in the workplace.

But.

I am a young woman with no desire for a white 'meringue' wedding. Or domestic 'bliss' of the suburban white-picket-fence sort. Or children.

People seem to find this extremely threatening.

Unblocking the writer

Writer's block.

Sometimes we get it because we have no ideas. But lately I've been encountering it for a different reason altogether. Could it be that sometimes we are afraid of what we need to say? When we write fiction we must acknowledge the ugliest parts of ourselves... and we must acknowledge that they are ugly. The struggles of our characters are played out in miniature within ourselves.

Here, then, is the challenge:

Dare to set pen to paper. Dare to face what we are and always have been. Dare to express what flows out of yourself. Dare to devastate, to destroy. Dare to create the deeply flawed. Dare to give a face, a name- a beating heart- to cruelty. Dare to dream of danger. Dare to imagine that somewhere is an ordianry person with the passion and the fierceness to stand and say: this is wrong.

In which I attempt to explain one of the reasons I read

I am one of those empathetic types they call a bleeding heart, a softie. My conscience is permanently in hyper drive. Not that I always do the right thing. I know I should buy fair trade; I do. I also know I should be a vegetarian; I’m not.

I grew up being described (by parents, aunts, uncles, family friends, etc.) in terms which indicated that my good traits are of the ‘soft’ variety: gentle, sensitive, quiet, tender-hearted.

In some ways I’ve changed a lot in the last few years; in other ways I haven’t changed at all. My friends would say I’m tougher. I don’t really think that’s true. I think I was always tough, it just took a while for me to realize it and act accordingly. Some of the things I have wanted to believe have crumbled in my hands; some of the clichés I wanted to reject have persisted. I have surprised myself with my own toughness, my own ability to withstand.

I have retained my bleeding heart. And that, I think, is the toughest character trait I have. It’s not easy to keep beliefs when acting on them takes great effort. It’s much, much easier to stop caring and go with the flow. If you ask me, jaded cynics are the soft ones.

I buy fair trade because I’m tough enough; the reason I’m not a vegetarian is that I’m too soft.

What has this got to do with reading?

Fantasy and Philosophy

It happened when I was six. It was lunchtime at school, and we were acting out the narrative of a story we all knew (I can't remember what it was anymore), and this one boy just would not get his part right. I distinctly remember my frustration. I hit him over the head with the book (the one we were acting out), and thought 'I'd rather be reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe anyway.'

After that, I spent a lot of lunchtimes reading the Narnia chronicles. I was too young to understand that this was social outcast behaviour; I just genuinely preferred to be reading them and that was that.

I was six when I fell in love with fantasy.

I did, however, fervently deny being a fantasy buff until I was twenty. I was at university, taking a unit about fantasy fiction when it eventually clicked: You know, fantasy is a lot like philosophy.

The wonderful, the amazing thing about philosophy is that it's about clarity. Pick a topic, the kind of topic that is hugely important but which most people are vague about (when pressed, they will mumble something about gut feelings and 'just knowing' or 'everybody knows'). There are philosophers who have wrestled with it, separating concepts which most people conflate, applying logic, exposing fallacies, pinning down what we mean by certain terms, laying bare what it is that we really think. Clarity.

Beautiful. Clear. Complex, but sensical.

When you apply philosophy properly, you address old, familiar, confusing issues with clean, crisp, ordered thoughts and the issues become as clear as if they were brand new. Philosophy has a way of sweeping away the muck of familiarity and mistaken associations.

Then there's fantasy fiction. Any fiction, really, but especially fantasy fiction. Fantasy is always about the hugely-important-but-difficult-to-define things, but it deals with them through narrative. It presents them in all their muddled complexity, it acknowledges the human impossibility of understanding. It provides little paradigms, dancing around the real issues by presenting us with the points of view of flawed and limited characters. It involves messy and mistaken actions and prods at the big consequences of these.

But it does all of this in a way so unfamiliar, in a world so unlike ours, that in the confusion we see with clarity issues and ideas which, in our own lives, are obscured by their familiarity, their uncomfortable closeness to ourselves. Fantasy has a way of sweeping away the muck of familiarity and mistaken associations.

Now, I am unashamed to call myself a fantasy buff.

It's not about gaining a level of great enlightenment. It's about always understanding just a little better. It can be as hard-won as a difficult philosophical proof, or as easy as getting carried away by a story.

The joys of a new notebook

I've mentioned my love of notebooks before, but I don't think I made it quite clear how much I love notebooks! In the absence of a diary, my notebooks are the quiet carriers of my day to day thoughts and inspirations. I use notebooks for everything.

I have notebooks for:

• Lists (what to pack, what to do today, people to call, things that are bugging me, things to buy, etc.) - these are my mongrel notebooks, the ugliest, most functional ones which end up with random addresses, phone numbers, mathematical calculations and automatically allocated internet passwords scrawled into them.


• Ambitions - well, I only have one of these. I write down my most important ambitions, just for a place to keep them. (Go to Egypt; Learn to bake bread; Become a good essayist; etc.) This one is a lovely, cloth bound notebook with a silk tie. It lives on my desk.


• Thoughts on books - of course. The larger kind of notebook, pretty but functional.


• Random venting - for those times I wish I kept a diary. I hope that when I'm gone, somebody does me the service of burning these because most of the time, I only write down the things that aren't worth remembering. This is the only use I have for large notebooks.


• Quotations - I have a quotation fetish. I collect them. And for this, I reserve the tiniest, most beautiful notebooks I own.

Paperblanks makes gorgeous notebooks. I also picked up one today by a new Australian brand called Rasberry- keep an eye out for them.

The strangest thing about my notebook obsession is that I never finish using one. The last quarter or so is always blank. I think this is because they're so personal, so attached to my day-to-day life that when I move to a new place mentally, I can't stand to keep using the same old notebooks.

No two I own are the same.