Trendy But Casual

In Arden

It’s almost a week since TM arrived in London, and it’s been quite a whirl. Within five days of his arrival, we’d seen three plays: Wally Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors at the Royal Court; As You Like It at the Globe; and The Cherry Orchard at the Old Vic. I’ve had two great meetings with agents, and we’ve been out with various friends to dinner at Moro, in Exmouth Market, and Ozer, near Broadcasting House. There’ve been visits, too short, to the British Museum and Tate Modern. Even to the Dickens Museum, which I've never visited before. We’ve had lunch or drinks or ice creams all over the place. Here is the evidence.

At the weekend we had a car, which meant sitting in traffic for hours, without air conditioning, trying to get to Hampshire and back. And this week, without a car, we’ve been wilting in the heat of tubes and buses: TM has brought NOLA-style weather with him.

We’ve been walking a great deal, too – along the King’s Road, along the South Bank, through the back streets of Southwark, around Piccadilly, down from Clapham Common (because our tube stop closes after 10 PM this week), and, a couple of nights ago, all the way from Oxford Circus to Sloane Square, via Belgravia and Brompton where everyone was out in the streets, eating and talking and listening to music. That night we heard scraps of conversations like this:

Woman: I couldn’t believe what that German man was saying!

Man: He was Swiss.

Woman: I couldn’t believe what that Swiss man was saying!

We’ve also become very familiar with Tooting Common and the streets of Balham, because two or three times a day we take Tipsy, the dog we’re sitting, out for walks. Tipsy is a Border terrier with very strong views on preferred routes. In the early evening, we go to the Common with two tennis balls and a plastic flinger, and spend 40 minutes wearing her out.

 

At night she sleeps at the end of our bed. (This is one of the reasons it’s too hot to sleep.) I’ll miss Tipsy when we have to hand her – and the house – back to the owners on Sunday.

We’ve been watching Wimbledon, of course, and using the barbecue in the garden. Shopping at Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, looking at the astounding house prices in real-estate office windows. Today we’re a little low-key, because some friends came over for dinner last night, during which they confessed to voting multiple times for Diversity, the dance group that won Britain’s Got Talent, even though each call cost something like a pound.

I have a short story to finish, and we need to troop back to West Wickham this afternoon for another encounter with the osteopath. The plank seats upstairs at the Royal Court finished me off.

By the way, if you want to see what TM does at work while I'm out of the country, have a look at this slide show created by his office wife, Trina.

In Luxembourg

The tourist office used to call it the Green Heart of Europe, I think.

I’m here for the National Day celebrations, and the Fete de la Musique. On Sunday night, on the Place Guillaume II, the Philharmonic Orchestra plays (a pops concert): the square is packed, despite rain earlier in the day. All over town there are temporary stages, and outdoor bars. In the old town, people drink beer and eat sausages and listen to a band playing Beatles covers; in the Abbaye de Neumunster, late-afternoon sun streaming into its glass-roofed courtyard, a choral group called Voices International perform summer-themed songs; on the Place D’Armes , there are stoic brass players crammed into the bandstand. On Monday night, the dance music on multiple stages around the Golden Lady monument, on the Place de la Constitution, pounds until 3 AM.

Shop windows are decorated with flags, and with photographs of Grand-Duc Henri, Grande-Duchesse Maria Teresa (a Cuban-born American), sometimes pictured with their five children. Some of the photographs are old: all the children look young and toothy. Actually, the oldest son, Prince Guillaume, is almost 28, and son # 3, Prince Louis, got married when he was 20 and now has two children of his own. (One of the children was born before the wedding. European royalty has relaxed rules.)

On Monday night, after dark, the small city fills. There’s a candle-lit procession through the streets. In this photo it looks as though the villagers are rounding up a midnight posse to go and confront a witch or chase a wolf, but it’s really much more benign. 

 

The procession was explained to me beforehand: the participants all belonged to clubs. I had the New Orleans krewe model in mind, so I was thinking along secret-society lines. But really, they are just club members, adults and children: judo or tennis or flamenco-dancing club members, scouts and swimmers. Some wear the folk costumes of other confusing-to-identify European countries. (Bulgaria, someone speculates, as another band dance by.) Some wear sombreros. 

There’s a small windmill, and the local brewery’s cart is pulled by sturdy horses. A tractor-drawn float bears smiling little girls dressed as princesses: one presents a posy to the Grand-Duchess, seated on the viewing stand on the Place Guillaume. There are marching bands, and I could swear I hear bagpipes, though I never see them. It’s hard to see much, actually, in the tremendous crush of people.

Around midnight, there’s a spectacular fireworks display off the Pont Adolphe, over the Petrusse Valley. (Earlier I make the mistake of referring to this as a “gully”.) I watch them from a corner suite at the Grand Hotel Cravat, where I’m staying with my friend Sarah Ehrlich. Sarah is ill, and we open the shutters so she can watch the fireworks from her sick bed, like a long-suffering nineteenth-century heroine, or possibly Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I squeeze into the suite booked by my mother’s dear friend Cynthia, where everyone is drinking champagne and hanging out windows. In the first picture, it looks as though the city is being trashed by Visigoths: it's a waterfall of fireworks, poorly photographed by me.

When my mother lived in Luxembourg, back in the 50s, she came to the Hotel Cravat every Saturday for lunch. My sister, she says, was whisked away to the kitchen to be fussed over. On Tuesday, the national day itself, that first-floor dining room is set up for a white-cloth banquet, and all guests have to eat breakfast downstairs.

After breakfast we must quick-march to the train station before getting entangled in the big military parade, following the exodus of the well-dressed, royal, and embassy-related from the cathedral next-door. This morning all the stages and temporary bars across the street are gone. There’s no litter on the streets, though there were thousands out there drinking last night. It’s sunny, and people are already lining the barriers. Outside our hotel, embassy cars, with the CD license plates, roll up. Black cars, black drivers. Little flags, of confusing-to-identify countries, are affixed to the car bonnets. (Car hood, for those of you think a bonnet is only something worn by a damsel with ringlets and a crook.) As we board the train, big guns in the distance boom in a national-day salute. The guard says we’re being shot at and better leave town.

At the moment, T. Middy and I are in different parts of the globe. He is in New Orleans, and I am in London. We don't like being apart, because (after prolonged exposure) all other people find us unbearable. I don't know why: we are fun! But maybe more fun to each other, as it were. 

Anyway, TM is in NOLA, as I said, stuffing his face. Monday lunch: a po' boy at Frankie and Johnny's. Monday night: red beans and rice at our friend T.R.'s house. Tuesday night: "salad" at Giovanni's in the Quarter. Wednesday: lunch at Cochon. No wonder he is all sleepy.

Meanwhile, I am paddling - being paddled - up a river in Sussex, while drinking wine. Eating like a bird, of course, as ever. Wondering when TM will get himself over here so we can play.

Thanks to my good friend, Sarah Rayner, and her iPhone, for the photo. And to her long-suffering boyfriend, Tom Bicat, who did all the paddling.

It’s the third week of June, so I must be in West Wickham, Kent, and the weather must be incredibly sunny and warm one minute and overcast/breezy the next.

Although the postcode here is Kent, this is an outer suburb of south-east London. And it’s serenely suburban here in this quiet street of homes built in the 30s. The house in which I’m staying was built in 1936, and has been in the same family ever since: it has its original oak doors, fire places, and paneling; a hatch between the kitchen and dining room; an outhouse that still (apparently) functions, though the indoor bathroom and loo were original features as well. The garden is long, broad for an English garden. Its centerpiece is a large oak tree, reaching towards neighboring gardens on both sides.

I know I should be using English spelling, by the way, given that I’m in Kent, AKA The Garden of England, but I’m out of the habit.

I’ve been sleeping well because of the utter quiet of the street. During the day I set up for work at the kitchen table, occasionally wandering out into the garden, or walking down to the local newsagent to get a paper. At least four London taxi drivers appear to live in this stretch of the road. (I see the parked cabs. Great powers of deduction: I will become a detective when the writing thing palls.)

The West Wickham shops are a twenty-minute walk to the south-west; the Bromley shops, bigger and brasher, are twenty minutes to the north-east. From Bromley South I can get a non-stop train to Victoria: it takes 17 minutes. It’s a good thing the shops are a decent walk away, so I’m not tempted to fritter away my days trying on clothes in Zara and lolling around outside the Slug and Lettuce, or – worse – nipping into central London on some research-gathering pretext.

On Friday afternoon I rewarded myself – for a) surviving my course and b) managing to trek from Beaconsfield to Bromley during a tube strike – by traveling into the West End to see a movie (In the Loop). The cinema was the Odeon in Panton Street, one of the places I used to frequent. Sometimes I think that my entire 20s was spent reading The Guardian and going to the movies. Hannah and Her Sisters in Leicester Square; The Double Life of Veronique in Mayfair; Unforgiven on The Haymarket; Cry-Baby in Notting Hill; Meet Me in St Louis at the NFT; Touch of Evil at the ICA; A Short Film About Killing up near the British Library; The Doors at Marble Arch; The Dead on … Charing Cross Road? St Martin’s Lane? I don’t know if that cinema is still there anymore.

Having felt the familiar exhilaration of London the day before, when I caught a taxi from Marylebone to Victoria, on Friday I got to experience the familiar exhausting crush of it all.  After the movie, I marched along Piccadilly en route to Hatchards. Someone was shouting from an upstairs window, and I couldn’t make out what he was saying: something about a bike. What bike? The bike a guy was tugging loose from its lock and pulling off the railings; he grabbed it and ran down one of the arcades. All over, just like that.

In Hatchards, a publishing company rep was carrying around a proof of a new William Trevor book. I asked the clerk upstairs when the book was coming out. He told me he’d never heard of William Trevor before, and hadn’t believed the rep when she said he was a major writer. I did my best to persuade him.

Aside from seeing movies and crime, I’ve been lying low. No social events at all,  with the exception of a lovely wedding in Buckinghamshire last weekend (which meant cramming all that weekend’s screenwriting homework into Sunday). My course at the NFTS was brilliant, but it involved a lot of late nights writing and thinking and scribbling and messing with software I’d never used before. On Thursday I felt a terrible withdrawal from the people I’d been spending long days with in the workshop. I miss my new friends! Now I want to press on with my screenplay, given that I have a semi-clue about how to proceed, but there are so many other projects in the queue, as ever – applications and proposals, chapters and research, synopses and revisions, books to finish, blah blah blah. When will I get my shopping done?

Today: onwards to Brighton, where my friend Sarah Rayner (fellow authoress) lives, for a two-night furlough. I can work anywhere, after all. 

I’m en route again: this is my habitual state, I think, on my way somewhere else. It’s hard being away from T. Middy. After three weeks apart when I was in New Zealand, we’re now facing another four weeks on opposite sides of an ocean. This time it’s the Atlantic. I have six weeks in (or near) London to get a lot of work done, and to take the short screenwriting course at the National Film and Television School. This latter I’m excited about, and dreading, in equal measure.

There’s also a wedding to attend, and friends to see – including the long-threatened Virgin Classics reunion. TM arrives at the end of June for two weeks, and we already have numerous theatre tickets sorted out, and various social plans in place. Before he arrives, I’m off to Luxembourg with my friend Sarah for a couple of days, to see fireworks and a parade. And this weekend I’ll be in Wales, which always makes New Zealand look a paler shade of green, at the home of my good friend, Deborah Keyser. She tells me her daughters associate my visits with gin & tonics, and the excessive watching of property-buying shows on the computer (Location x 3, Property Ladder, Streets Ahead, etc). I’m glad to provide such an educational, non-Welsh-speaking presence.

My trip home to New Zealand earlier this month was great in many ways, in no small part due to my niece, who is very funny, and excellent company. The visit was marred by two things. I’m the editor of the new issue of Landfall. Here’s the cover. It’s called “Flung”, and it’s an expatriate issue, of sorts.

I’m very happy with this issue, but regret soliciting submissions by email. I did this to make it as easy as possible for people overseas to submit; it also meant that I could get submissions directly, rather than waiting for daunting, fat envelopes from the OUP office in Dunedin. (Although these arrived, in large numbers, as well.) 

But it also meant that I needed to send out rejection emails personally, rather than relying on standard letters sent out by the OUP office. This task took me much longer than it should, and the final emails were only sent out a week or so ago. And the fake intimacy of email meant several people wanted to prolong the correspondence, requesting more detailed opinions; announcing their profound disappointment or ongoing frustration with Landfall; and, in one bizarre and semi-coherent case, abusing me for perceived crimes against the New Zealand literary canon, the healthy development thereof, etc. At the airport last Sunday, it was hard not to feel … hmmm, how about: glad to see the back of them?

The other disappointment was courtesy of my publisher, Penguin. Forbidden Cities was one of the few short-story collections that made it onto a Commonwealth Prize regional shortlist.  I was hopeful that it might also wriggle onto the shortlist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. That’s a shortlist with potential career-changing ramifications; the FOC is also one of the few international awards for which obscure short-story collections published only in New Zealand can qualify. But Penguin forgot to submit the book in time, and now it’s too late. I’m upset, and very disappointed, but there’s nothing I can do about it. It looks as though Forbidden Cities will just get to fade away. I know: I need to make much more effort trying to sell my books overseas. Writing them seems like enough of an effort, but clearly I have to hustle harder, become a squeakier wheel. Invest more money and time in getting the books to agents and rights sellers and publishers overseas.

Exhausting just to think of it. I’d rather think about my flimsy tissue of a screenplay outline, sure to be shredded next week at the NFTS course. (Or what movies I’ll be sleeping through on the plane tonight.) Wish me luck.

I’ve spent the last weekend at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, a great event that seems to get bigger and livelier each year. This is my third year at the festival, I think, and I really love coming home for it. There are friends and gossip and drinks, interesting sessions, insane people, intelligent people, good cheer. This year I overdid things a little – chairing three sessions and appearing in two others – but I’ll recover, hopefully by the time I fly back to the US next Sunday. The special addition this year was the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, announced in Auckland on Saturday: this meant a number of free events with great writers from all over the world, and a whole lot of buzz over the prize announcements.

There are all sorts of reports on the festival up on various blogs: Bookman Beattie’s, Vanda Symon’s, and the one written by the indefatigable team at Christchurch City Libraries. But here’s a few non-comprehensive notes on what not to do at a festival. Whatever you do, DO NOT:

Commit to taking part in three sessions in one day, especially when the last one is at 6 PM, because you will be well punch-drunk by then, and unable to speak in a coherent manner, especially when you have also agreed to race up to Radio New Zealand in between sessions one and two for a live panel discussion, and especially when all you had for breakfast was the packet of two free biscuits in your hotel room, because you found out that Friday morning’s hotel breakfast (yoghurt, a mini-muffin, and a stale mini-croissant) cost you $25.

Drink heavily on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, when you know you have to get up early in the morning to read books/write questions/do interviews/appear professional and not smell like a brewery.

Grow disheartened when people don’t buy your books. After the short story session on Friday, with Charlotte Grimshaw, David Malouf, and Owen Marshall, I sat as lonely as a clown at the signing table. Various people came up to talk to me, but nobody wanted me to sign a book. I think I did better overall with international writers than with New Zealand readers. One of my friends told me that this is because all local audience members already have my books. Yes, that’s right.

Grow disheartened when well-meaning people say things that are, essentially, a knife to the heart. Like, “you did such a good job chairing that session  -who are you, exactly?” Or “in your sessions today, try and do a better job than you did yesterday.” Or “you did such a good job interviewing Christos Tsiolkas yesterday.” (Charlotte G was the chair of that particular session.) Or “you don’t mind if we don’t come to your sessions, do you?” (Said by members of my family. Really, I didn’t mind.)

Forget that some people have positive things to say, like the nice ladies sitting in Elliott Stables who offered to buy me a coffee after the Sunday session with Monica Ali; and the three writers I had the luck and pleasure to interview: Monica, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Tash Aw; and the amazing festival organizers, especially Jill Rawnsley and Shona Gow.

Even think about speaking to Richie McCaw in the lift on Saturday, because he is mentally preparing for the Crusaders VS Blues game that night, and because he is an All Black, and because you don’t want to cross his girlfriend, top ballroom dancer Hayley Holt.

Look like a publicist. Apparently I do. At the Christchurch Festival a couple of years ago, walking into the Green Room, I was asked which writer I was “looking after.” This year, when I was trying to sit near the front at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize announcement, an usher told me the seats were reserved for writers and their publicists. When I said I was one of the above, she asked (very nicely) which company I worked for and who I was looking after. At the Creative NZ party later than evening, someone very senior in CNZ was introduced to me and asked me which publisher I worked for. (Doesn’t she know I am like Oprah in my homeland????) I haven’t been a publicist since 1993, but clearly I still give off the vibe. Maybe I need to wear less make-up? Seem more disheveled and distracted? Have my own publicist in tow?

Listen to Guy Somerset when he complains that all my blog posts are 5000-words long and yet I can’t manage to get a 450-word review for the Listener in on time. 

Yes, the Scudder Road Circus is on the road again, taking its animal- and act-free self around the globe to bring pleasure to untold dozens of people, largely by rivaling Frommer’s, Fodor’s, The Rough Guide, National Geographic, The Dead Sea Scrolls, etc, with its insider travel knowledge and up-to-the-moment advice.

The first installment was going to be about Oaxaca, Mexico, until swine flu spoiled everything, so here’s something much more exotic: the old RCC in Terminal Seven, LAX.

1.     On a Saturday morning, the Red Carpet Club is the perfect place to a) get some work done on one of six (count them) public desks; b) to enjoy a selection of breakfast cereals in incredibly tiny bowls, with a choice of skim milk or 2%; c) spot people who may or not be celebrities, because it’s hard to tell if they’re actual celebrities or just people from LA who have expensive clothes and small, taut bodies; and d) spot people who may be important  government figures, based on the number of newspapers they’re reading (three), and the number of secret service guys in good suits and lapel badges lurking nearby (three), and the way they refer to the President as “Barack.”

2.      If you don’t like cereal, don’t worry, because by noon it’s replaced with the RCC’s traditional native cuisine of greasy cubes of cheese, a selection of dusty crackers, and a platter of stunted, torpid vegetables arranged around dip of obscure provenance and gluey consistency.

3.     Do not allow yourself to be distracted by the secret service guys, who stare at you each time you glance over at the mysterious government figure, muttering to each other as though they are about to detonate your laptop and cell phone the second you wander off to pour a cup of lukewarm tea.

4.     Do not allow yourself to be distracted by the desk staff, who are dealing with a long line of upset people wanting to get into the RCC or upgrade or get a different flight.  Sometimes this is hard, especially when the United representative shouts “STEP BACK INTO THE PUBLIC AREA, SIR!”

5.     When you watch episodes of “30 Rock” on Hulu, do not allow yourself to be distracted by the guy at the next desk watching “24” on his laptop, or the way he turns around to glare at you for laughing aloud.

6.     When you watch episodes of “30 Rock” on Hulu, do not allow yourself to be distracted by the ads they stick in for Foundation Rwanda, ads which involve plaintive children, especially if they remind you of the child in Mali who you’re sponsoring through Save the Children, the child to whom you’ve never written despite being urged to do so, at regular intervals, by the guilt merchants at STC.

7.     Don’t worry if a lot of people in the RCC are wearing surgical masks, reminding you that swine flu is rampant across the world, and that you have neglected to take proper precautions – i.e. you’ve got your mini Walgreens-brand  “Instant Hand Sanitizer Spray”, and that’s it, because Walgreens had sold out of everything else, and the woman who was helping you basically mocked you for being the last person in town to wander in looking for pandemic-flu-repellant products.

8.     Resist the temptation to steal a copy of today’s Guardian off a sleeping, snoring man. Resist feeling irritation about the lack of international papers on sale at this airport – the lack, in fact, of anything much aside from the LA Times and pretend newspaper USA Today.

9.     Focus instead on the twenty free copies of Ski magazine displayed on a nearby rack. Wish you found reading about skiing interesting. Wonder if you will ever go skiing in your life, and suspect that you will not.

10. Count the minutes until you can leave the RCC, walk over to Terminal Two, check in for your evening flight on Air New Zealand, and then find sanctuary in the Koru Club. Entertain the usual brief, disturbing fantasy that the rules will have changed since you last flew, and that the Koru Club door police will wave you and your RCC card away. Know that if this happens you will pay, on the spot, for Koru Club membership, because it’s still more than seven hours until your flight, and because this is LAX, with its Jetsons-like unlinked terminals, you will not be able to return to Terminal Eight and the RCC.  Maybe then you’ll realize what you’ve lost, and how early it is, how early.

As some of you know, T. Middy and I belong to different generations. He is part of the worst generation ever, ie the Boomers, and I’m Gen-X, which thinks it invented irony and ennui and slackerdom and cappuccino. Actually, I used to think I was born in the first year of Gen-X, ie 1965, until everyone started saying that President Obama (born 1961) is the first Gen-X president.

Usually our generational difference is not apparent to others, because of TM’s Dorian Gray-like youthfulness. It’s in musical taste that a visible abyss between us yawns. For example, TM has shown no interest whatsoever in the imminent reunion of Spandau Ballet, and the only thing I know about the Allman Brothers is that one of them was married, briefly, to Cher.

Last night we went out to Metairie to a street party: our hosts were our friends (and landlords) Joy and Paul, and they’d provided a long table-load of spicy boiled crawfish. Joy’s brother, Doug, plays drums in a cover band, called Hedley Grange, and they were set up on the front lawn. Hedley Grange’s specialty is Led Zeppelin. We were there for two-and-a-bit sets, and about 75% was L. Zep. Hedley Grange also do Doors songs, and most of the second side of Abbey Road. I like this much better than the bulk of their output, largely because I can sing along.

According to TM, Hedley Grange’s best Zeppelin number is “In the Light”, which involved a violin bow on guitar strings. To me, the conjunction of the words “Led Zeppelin” and “violin bow” are almost as alarming as “Jethro Tull” and “flute.” I suggested to Joy that maybe Hedley Grange could mix it up a little with, say, “Dance Hall Days” by Wang Chung. (After all, it includes the classic lines: “When I, you, and everyone we knew/Could believe, do, and share in what was true.”)

Unfortunately, Joy is older than I am, and does not share my nostalgic affection for early 80s’ hairdresser pop by bands named for Chinese musical concepts, the phonetics of baby-talk, or lines from a Stranglers’ song.

Before we went out last night, we spent some time watching old TV theme tunes/intros on YouTube. T. Middy wanted to show me Hullabaloo, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and Fireball XL5. Because he was a fan of a the latter, I showed him Stingray and Thunderbirds, made by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s ‘Supermarionation’ gang. He especially enjoyed the closing credits of Stingray, over the song “Aqua Marina”, where the lyrics and poignant images make it clear that a) Troy Tempest suffers from unrequited love for Marina; b) Atlanta suffers from unrequited love for Troy Tempest; and c) Marina never speaks, and has both a distant gaze and a fey swimming style.

I also showed TM the intros to Man About the House and The Double Deckers (featuring a very young Peter Firth). For the first time he realized that the song I sing all the time around the house (“Get on board! Get on board!/ Come and join the Double Deckers/Take a ticket for a journey/On our double-decker London bus”) was not an annoying tune of my own devising.

We had our own version of Hullabaloo in New Zealand: it was Happen Inn, hosted by the late Peter Sinclair. It started in 1969, replacing C’mon, which I’m too young to remember. For years my brother and I were obsessive viewers of Ready to Roll (Saturday, early evening) and Radio With Pictures (Sunday nights).

RTR was on early evening, which meant my father was on hand to tell us that “Heart of Glass” and “Wuthering Heights” were “a load of rubbish.” During the Karyn Hay-hosted years of RWP, he would stay up long enough to pass his usual comment on her (“What a mess!”).

These days, TM and I can agree on some music, like Radiohead and Arctic Monkeys, for example. When I’m out, he plays Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Bob Dylan, the Beatles. When we’re both in, he tolerates a great deal of Brazilian music. He isn’t too thrilled about Portishead or Neko Case. (“What is she singing about, dolphins?”) He is also caustic about what he calls “all those bands from the 80s you like.” That’s OK. Not everyone can believe, do, and share in what is true.

 

 

It’s Easter Monday, which means no classes at Tulane and no classes at McMain High School either. The street’s been very quiet today, which I like. Today was the first morning in a long time when I haven’t woken up feeling manic in some way. Maybe our long weekend in Oaxaca just wore me out: it was a stimulating place, especially with all the various Easter pageants and processions, and then there was the heat, and the dust, and the drinks. The delicious food.

And all the writer visits with which I’ve been embroiled this semester, in small and large ways, for better or for worse, are over: Francine Prose, Claire Messud, Billy Collins, Joan Didion. The Didion Reading Series of three events – two lectures and a round-table discussion, which involved much hand-wringing and bullying on my part – is over. There are still a few classes left, and presentations to assess, and portfolios to read. I have three honors students with theses to submit. My two classes will come over here for dinner; on another night, the three faculty will take all graduating seniors out, if I can get around to organizing this. This year I’ll only be able to work the first weekend of Jazz Fest, because on May 2, after our final salon for the spring (we’ll resume social activities in September), I fly back to New Zealand.

I’m conscious that this blog, of late, has been more about omissions rather than inclusions. It’s been a busy and difficult semester. Perhaps that’s the reason. I’ve been to Chicago and Boston and the U.K. and Mexico. I’ve spent too much time waiting to change planes in Houston and Washington DC. The writer visits have been inspiring and energizing, in different ways, but some have been extremely stressful too, because of the level of organization and planning involved. Just walking past McAlister Auditorium makes me slightly anxious these days: I start counting people. In my sleep I count programs.

It’s late afternoon now. Now that parade season is over, there are no band rehearsals in the schoolyard across the street. The students next door are lying low, though by dusk they’ll be out on the porch smoking and conducting loud conversations on their cell phones.

This is my favorite time of day for writing – after four PM. I’m a cocktail-hour writer, I told an interviewer once, and that’s true (unlike half the things I say in interviews, which fool nobody). The day seems to grow more quiet around now, as though the energy’s seeping from the day. When I worked in an office, I liked this time. Nobody wanted to have meetings; the phone wasn’t ringing so incessantly. Some people were getting ready to rush to catch trains, but I never had to rush to leave. That became a problem – the never rushing to leave – but it lent a certain calm to the late afternoon that I’ve carried with me to other places, other desks.

I really liked spending time with all our visiting writers, and I may never get over the thrill of driving Miss Didion. I liked drinking at The Columns with Claire Messud, gossiping over the racket at Cochon with Francine Prose, taking Billy Collins to see Fats Domino’s house in the Ninth Ward. I like getting the chance to ask lots of direct questions of these other writers when I got them alone in my car. I like the things they tell me that are not for publication, which is perhaps why I include nothing of their visits at all here. 

This blog isn’t of much use or interest to writers, in fact, though I hope it occasionally entertains my friends. (My students, of course, despite evidence to the contrary, don’t see me as a writer, just as someone there to crush their dreams and curtail their adverb usage.)

I’ve been feeling down about my writing of late, in a sort of vague and existential way. Writing the novel seems an overwhelming task at times, and I keep looking, without success, for ways to lessen the challenge – unsurprising, given that the challenge is the thing.

Visiting branches of Waterstones in the U.K. is not the pleasure it used to be: it’s all stationery and giftwrap, and tables piled with three-for-the-price-of-two paperbacks. To insist upon your own book as a contender, to demand space and attention for it, seems desperately narcissistic. Blind, and tone-deaf too. There are too many books; perhaps I’ve written too many already – four published since 2003, with the fifth coming out this August. A week ago, a video crew spent six hours filming me talking on and on about the new book. We filmed in my office at Tulane, and at Lafayette cemetery. The highlight of the day for me was, of course, getting my make-up done by the super-artful Kisha from The Make-Up Lab.

It’s easy on a blog like this, with its original purpose of self-promotion, to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. But that’s hardly the whole story for any writer. I’m delighted when Forbidden Cities is shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize in my bizarrely vast region (SE Asia/Pacific), and unsurprised that my short story collection is swept aside, inevitably, by one of the rampaging Australian mega-novelists: it’s still a disappointment, though, however expected. A rejection letter arrives from a journal almost a year after I mailed the story in question; this year Yaddo, which has waitlisted me for the past two years, simply says no. Someone at our salon tells me how much she loved Trendy But Casual, which she’d just finished and passed on to her son in New York; a friend emails me from London to say how much he’s enjoying the stories, noting that it’s the first time he’s ever seen an O-card mentioned in fiction. (That’s one for the record-company old-timers out there.) But none of this changes the fact that these books are not stacked three-for-the-price-of-two on any table north of the Equator.

Some good news from Geoff Walker at Penguin Books today: a book called Floating Worlds: Essays on Contemporary New Zealand Fiction has just been published, and it features an essay on my second novel, Hibiscus Coast. Not only that, but the title is a quote from Hibiscus Coast. I knew it was coming, because one of the editors emailed me earlier this year about some bibliographical information, but I’d forgotten about it. I like the company Hibiscus Coast is keeping in that book. I like Hibiscus Coast, and I want more people to read it. People north of the equator, too. See, there’s the narcissism returning.

The amazing Grendel over at Earthgoat was asking me about the Scudder Road Circus recently, and I realized it could start earning its keep on this blog by giving travel tips. It could rival Fodor’s and the Rough Guide online, particularly as neither of those competitors are circuses.  Now travel tips: these I can write. Watch this space.

 

 

I'm typing this in a Starbuck's in the Bull Ring, the medieval marketplace of Birmingham that now looks anything but.

This is what it looks like now:

Before last year, I'd been to Birmingham (as in England, rather than Alabama) twice. Both times were in the 80s, and I found Birmingham hard to grasp and navigate.

Last summer, when I needed to do some research on Paratene Te Manu and his fateful stay here in the early 1860s, I came back. TM and I stayed in Preston Bagot and made the drive in every day from rural idyll to ring-road idiocy. It was lucky that we did, or I’d have never found my way in, on the Kidderminster road, this time. Well, I would have found my way in, but only to the general area of the city centre: getting off the ring road is another story. The Five Ways roundabout is actually the Five Circles of Hell. You need extreme patience and nerves of steel to enter that roundabout. Last summer we learned that tunnels take you places you don’t want to go – namely, past the exit you needed. The only good thing about the excess of roundabouts here, I’ve discovered, is that you can use the next one to make a massive U-turn and re-enter the fray.

Last year I also learned that practically the only bits of Victorian Birmingham left are the bits built after my characters were here in the 1860s. Everything else was demolished or bombed. Mostly the former, during the 60s and 70s.

I’m liking being back here again, though Birmingham is still confusing. I have no sense of its actual topography downtown, as so much of it seems to consist of concrete hillocks and underpasses. In the city centre I often feel ushered inside, diverted into a giant, multi-armed shopping mall, so as not to interfere with the one-way spiraling roadways. On Monday I wandered into what I thought was New Street Station but turned out to be a dispiriting shopping mall, with no evident access to trains or even tickets; what I hoped would be a lift leading to something external, or near an exit, took me into the bowels of the discount store T. K. Maxx. (And yes, that’s what it’s called here.) From there I had to find an escalator up to escape the shop.

Staying in one of the National Trust’s restored back-to-back houses is supposed to bring me closer to the nineteenth century, and it does, in some respects – cramped, austere, etc. This is a one-down, two-up, one small room stacked three stories high. The staircase is steep and narrow, with occasional handles to prevent plummeting. My house faces the street, and there’s another identical one facing the inner courtyard. Voices outside sound as though they’re inside. I can hear someone in the next house climbing their creaky wooden stairs.  

The ground floor was the all-purpose cooking and living room: there’s a small old range, and a dining room table and chairs. A modern kitchen has been secreted in a purpose-built cupboard, with a mini-fridge under the sink, and two elements which I used to cook my dinner. This is the room where people cooked and washed and sat and ate. The WCs were communal, next to the well, in the courtyard, shared by hundreds of people. Upstairs were bedrooms for families and lodgers.

There’s a cupboard door that might have led to a cellar once. I read that in the poorest areas – not just in Birmingham, but in other industrial cities – the cellar was used as a place to sleep as well. Dozens of people were crammed into these little houses. In the 1870s, Birmingham passed a law against building any more of them. Apparently, the ones like mine, that faced the street, were seen as more desirable than the ones facing the courtyard (the smell, perhaps? The foot traffic?) and rents were therefore higher.

On the first night, in my bedroom upstairs, I couldn’t sleep. It was too hot, because I hadn’t turned down the radiator. (I’m never good with radiators. When I was first living in York, I had my windows open on snowy nights, because I didn’t know how to turn down the heat. Actually, I’m not good with things that turn, generally, especially train door handles.) I lay in my brass bed, with its heavy white covers, thinking that it was very un-nineteenth century to feel warm in a bedroom on a March night. 

Tour buses were parked across the way, waiting for people going to the theatre, and there’s an ad hoc taxi stand at the corner, where Hurst Street goes one-way. The drunk people of Birmingham roll up there shouting and laughing, and their voices sounded strange to me, because I couldn’t quite decipher what they were saying. Sometimes they weren’t speaking English, but sometimes they were. I thought about Paratene going from one English town to the next, breathing its fumes, feeling its damp cold, and hearing its squawking, unfamiliar accents in the streets outside the houses where he lodged. It’s more disorienting, in a way, when you know that everyone is supposed to be speaking the same language.

Here are some pictures of the place, before old newspapers, receipts, books, maps, notes, and things that fall out of magazines were strewn everywhere.

Worlds Apart

At the moment, T. Middy and I are in different parts of the globe. He is in New Orleans, and I am in London. We don't like being apart, because (after prolonged exposure) all other people find us unbearable. I don't know why: we are fun! But maybe more fun to each other, as it were. 

Anyway, TM is in NOLA, as I said, stuffing his face. Monday lunch: a po' boy at Frankie and Johnny's. Monday night: red beans and rice at our friend T.R.'s house. Tuesday night: "salad" at Giovanni's in the Quarter. Wednesday: lunch at Cochon. No wonder he is all sleepy.

Meanwhile, I am paddling - being paddled - up a river in Sussex, while drinking wine. Eating like a bird, of course, as ever. Wondering when TM will get himself over here so we can play.

Thanks to my good friend, Sarah Rayner, and her iPhone, for the photo. And to her long-suffering boyfriend, Tom Bicat, who did all the paddling.

In The Garden of England

It’s the third week of June, so I must be in West Wickham, Kent, and the weather must be incredibly sunny and warm one minute and overcast/breezy the next.

Although the postcode here is Kent, this is an outer suburb of south-east London. And it’s serenely suburban here in this quiet street of homes built in the 30s. The house in which I’m staying was built in 1936, and has been in the same family ever since: it has its original oak doors, fire places, and paneling; a hatch between the kitchen and dining room; an outhouse that still (apparently) functions, though the indoor bathroom and loo were original features as well. The garden is long, broad for an English garden. Its centerpiece is a large oak tree, reaching towards neighboring gardens on both sides.

I know I should be using English spelling, by the way, given that I’m in Kent, AKA The Garden of England, but I’m out of the habit.

I’ve been sleeping well because of the utter quiet of the street. During the day I set up for work at the kitchen table, occasionally wandering out into the garden, or walking down to the local newsagent to get a paper. At least four London taxi drivers appear to live in this stretch of the road. (I see the parked cabs. Great powers of deduction: I will become a detective when the writing thing palls.)

The West Wickham shops are a twenty-minute walk to the south-west; the Bromley shops, bigger and brasher, are twenty minutes to the north-east. From Bromley South I can get a non-stop train to Victoria: it takes 17 minutes. It’s a good thing the shops are a decent walk away, so I’m not tempted to fritter away my days trying on clothes in Zara and lolling around outside the Slug and Lettuce, or – worse – nipping into central London on some research-gathering pretext.

On Friday afternoon I rewarded myself – for a) surviving my course and b) managing to trek from Beaconsfield to Bromley during a tube strike – by traveling into the West End to see a movie (In the Loop). The cinema was the Odeon in Panton Street, one of the places I used to frequent. Sometimes I think that my entire 20s was spent reading The Guardian and going to the movies. Hannah and Her Sisters in Leicester Square; The Double Life of Veronique in Mayfair; Unforgiven on The Haymarket; Cry-Baby in Notting Hill; Meet Me in St Louis at the NFT; Touch of Evil at the ICA; A Short Film About Killing up near the British Library; The Doors at Marble Arch; The Dead on … Charing Cross Road? St Martin’s Lane? I don’t know if that cinema is still there anymore.

Having felt the familiar exhilaration of London the day before, when I caught a taxi from Marylebone to Victoria, on Friday I got to experience the familiar exhausting crush of it all.  After the movie, I marched along Piccadilly en route to Hatchards. Someone was shouting from an upstairs window, and I couldn’t make out what he was saying: something about a bike. What bike? The bike a guy was tugging loose from its lock and pulling off the railings; he grabbed it and ran down one of the arcades. All over, just like that.

In Hatchards, a publishing company rep was carrying around a proof of a new William Trevor book. I asked the clerk upstairs when the book was coming out. He told me he’d never heard of William Trevor before, and hadn’t believed the rep when she said he was a major writer. I did my best to persuade him.

Aside from seeing movies and crime, I’ve been lying low. No social events at all,  with the exception of a lovely wedding in Buckinghamshire last weekend (which meant cramming all that weekend’s screenwriting homework into Sunday). My course at the NFTS was brilliant, but it involved a lot of late nights writing and thinking and scribbling and messing with software I’d never used before. On Thursday I felt a terrible withdrawal from the people I’d been spending long days with in the workshop. I miss my new friends! Now I want to press on with my screenplay, given that I have a semi-clue about how to proceed, but there are so many other projects in the queue, as ever – applications and proposals, chapters and research, synopses and revisions, books to finish, blah blah blah. When will I get my shopping done?

Today: onwards to Brighton, where my friend Sarah Rayner (fellow authoress) lives, for a two-night furlough. I can work anywhere, after all. 

Misadventures in Literature

I’m en route again: this is my habitual state, I think, on my way somewhere else. It’s hard being away from T. Middy. After three weeks apart when I was in New Zealand, we’re now facing another four weeks on opposite sides of an ocean. This time it’s the Atlantic. I have six weeks in (or near) London to get a lot of work done, and to take the short screenwriting course at the National Film and Television School. This latter I’m excited about, and dreading, in equal measure.

There’s also a wedding to attend, and friends to see – including the long-threatened Virgin Classics reunion. TM arrives at the end of June for two weeks, and we already have numerous theatre tickets sorted out, and various social plans in place. Before he arrives, I’m off to Luxembourg with my friend Sarah for a couple of days, to see fireworks and a parade. And this weekend I’ll be in Wales, which always makes New Zealand look a paler shade of green, at the home of my good friend, Deborah Keyser. She tells me her daughters associate my visits with gin & tonics, and the excessive watching of property-buying shows on the computer (Location x 3, Property Ladder, Streets Ahead, etc). I’m glad to provide such an educational, non-Welsh-speaking presence.

My trip home to New Zealand earlier this month was great in many ways, in no small part due to my niece, who is very funny, and excellent company. The visit was marred by two things. I’m the editor of the new issue of Landfall. Here’s the cover. It’s called “Flung”, and it’s an expatriate issue, of sorts.

I’m very happy with this issue, but regret soliciting submissions by email. I did this to make it as easy as possible for people overseas to submit; it also meant that I could get submissions directly, rather than waiting for daunting, fat envelopes from the OUP office in Dunedin. (Although these arrived, in large numbers, as well.) 

But it also meant that I needed to send out rejection emails personally, rather than relying on standard letters sent out by the OUP office. This task took me much longer than it should, and the final emails were only sent out a week or so ago. And the fake intimacy of email meant several people wanted to prolong the correspondence, requesting more detailed opinions; announcing their profound disappointment or ongoing frustration with Landfall; and, in one bizarre and semi-coherent case, abusing me for perceived crimes against the New Zealand literary canon, the healthy development thereof, etc. At the airport last Sunday, it was hard not to feel … hmmm, how about: glad to see the back of them?

The other disappointment was courtesy of my publisher, Penguin. Forbidden Cities was one of the few short-story collections that made it onto a Commonwealth Prize regional shortlist.  I was hopeful that it might also wriggle onto the shortlist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. That’s a shortlist with potential career-changing ramifications; the FOC is also one of the few international awards for which obscure short-story collections published only in New Zealand can qualify. But Penguin forgot to submit the book in time, and now it’s too late. I’m upset, and very disappointed, but there’s nothing I can do about it. It looks as though Forbidden Cities will just get to fade away. I know: I need to make much more effort trying to sell my books overseas. Writing them seems like enough of an effort, but clearly I have to hustle harder, become a squeakier wheel. Invest more money and time in getting the books to agents and rights sellers and publishers overseas.

Exhausting just to think of it. I’d rather think about my flimsy tissue of a screenplay outline, sure to be shredded next week at the NFTS course. (Or what movies I’ll be sleeping through on the plane tonight.) Wish me luck.

Notes on Surviving a Literary Festival

I’ve spent the last weekend at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, a great event that seems to get bigger and livelier each year. This is my third year at the festival, I think, and I really love coming home for it. There are friends and gossip and drinks, interesting sessions, insane people, intelligent people, good cheer. This year I overdid things a little – chairing three sessions and appearing in two others – but I’ll recover, hopefully by the time I fly back to the US next Sunday. The special addition this year was the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, announced in Auckland on Saturday: this meant a number of free events with great writers from all over the world, and a whole lot of buzz over the prize announcements.

There are all sorts of reports on the festival up on various blogs: Bookman Beattie’s, Vanda Symon’s, and the one written by the indefatigable team at Christchurch City Libraries. But here’s a few non-comprehensive notes on what not to do at a festival. Whatever you do, DO NOT:

Commit to taking part in three sessions in one day, especially when the last one is at 6 PM, because you will be well punch-drunk by then, and unable to speak in a coherent manner, especially when you have also agreed to race up to Radio New Zealand in between sessions one and two for a live panel discussion, and especially when all you had for breakfast was the packet of two free biscuits in your hotel room, because you found out that Friday morning’s hotel breakfast (yoghurt, a mini-muffin, and a stale mini-croissant) cost you $25.

Drink heavily on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, when you know you have to get up early in the morning to read books/write questions/do interviews/appear professional and not smell like a brewery.

Grow disheartened when people don’t buy your books. After the short story session on Friday, with Charlotte Grimshaw, David Malouf, and Owen Marshall, I sat as lonely as a clown at the signing table. Various people came up to talk to me, but nobody wanted me to sign a book. I think I did better overall with international writers than with New Zealand readers. One of my friends told me that this is because all local audience members already have my books. Yes, that’s right.

Grow disheartened when well-meaning people say things that are, essentially, a knife to the heart. Like, “you did such a good job chairing that session  -who are you, exactly?” Or “in your sessions today, try and do a better job than you did yesterday.” Or “you did such a good job interviewing Christos Tsiolkas yesterday.” (Charlotte G was the chair of that particular session.) Or “you don’t mind if we don’t come to your sessions, do you?” (Said by members of my family. Really, I didn’t mind.)

Forget that some people have positive things to say, like the nice ladies sitting in Elliott Stables who offered to buy me a coffee after the Sunday session with Monica Ali; and the three writers I had the luck and pleasure to interview: Monica, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Tash Aw; and the amazing festival organizers, especially Jill Rawnsley and Shona Gow.

Even think about speaking to Richie McCaw in the lift on Saturday, because he is mentally preparing for the Crusaders VS Blues game that night, and because he is an All Black, and because you don’t want to cross his girlfriend, top ballroom dancer Hayley Holt.

Look like a publicist. Apparently I do. At the Christchurch Festival a couple of years ago, walking into the Green Room, I was asked which writer I was “looking after.” This year, when I was trying to sit near the front at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize announcement, an usher told me the seats were reserved for writers and their publicists. When I said I was one of the above, she asked (very nicely) which company I worked for and who I was looking after. At the Creative NZ party later than evening, someone very senior in CNZ was introduced to me and asked me which publisher I worked for. (Doesn’t she know I am like Oprah in my homeland????) I haven’t been a publicist since 1993, but clearly I still give off the vibe. Maybe I need to wear less make-up? Seem more disheveled and distracted? Have my own publicist in tow?

Listen to Guy Somerset when he complains that all my blog posts are 5000-words long and yet I can’t manage to get a 450-word review for the Listener in on time. 

The Scudder Road Circus Presents Travel Tips: The Red Carpet Club at LAX

Yes, the Scudder Road Circus is on the road again, taking its animal- and act-free self around the globe to bring pleasure to untold dozens of people, largely by rivaling Frommer’s, Fodor’s, The Rough Guide, National Geographic, The Dead Sea Scrolls, etc, with its insider travel knowledge and up-to-the-moment advice.

The first installment was going to be about Oaxaca, Mexico, until swine flu spoiled everything, so here’s something much more exotic: the old RCC in Terminal Seven, LAX.

1.     On a Saturday morning, the Red Carpet Club is the perfect place to a) get some work done on one of six (count them) public desks; b) to enjoy a selection of breakfast cereals in incredibly tiny bowls, with a choice of skim milk or 2%; c) spot people who may or not be celebrities, because it’s hard to tell if they’re actual celebrities or just people from LA who have expensive clothes and small, taut bodies; and d) spot people who may be important  government figures, based on the number of newspapers they’re reading (three), and the number of secret service guys in good suits and lapel badges lurking nearby (three), and the way they refer to the President as “Barack.”

2.      If you don’t like cereal, don’t worry, because by noon it’s replaced with the RCC’s traditional native cuisine of greasy cubes of cheese, a selection of dusty crackers, and a platter of stunted, torpid vegetables arranged around dip of obscure provenance and gluey consistency.

3.     Do not allow yourself to be distracted by the secret service guys, who stare at you each time you glance over at the mysterious government figure, muttering to each other as though they are about to detonate your laptop and cell phone the second you wander off to pour a cup of lukewarm tea.

4.     Do not allow yourself to be distracted by the desk staff, who are dealing with a long line of upset people wanting to get into the RCC or upgrade or get a different flight.  Sometimes this is hard, especially when the United representative shouts “STEP BACK INTO THE PUBLIC AREA, SIR!”

5.     When you watch episodes of “30 Rock” on Hulu, do not allow yourself to be distracted by the guy at the next desk watching “24” on his laptop, or the way he turns around to glare at you for laughing aloud.

6.     When you watch episodes of “30 Rock” on Hulu, do not allow yourself to be distracted by the ads they stick in for Foundation Rwanda, ads which involve plaintive children, especially if they remind you of the child in Mali who you’re sponsoring through Save the Children, the child to whom you’ve never written despite being urged to do so, at regular intervals, by the guilt merchants at STC.

7.     Don’t worry if a lot of people in the RCC are wearing surgical masks, reminding you that swine flu is rampant across the world, and that you have neglected to take proper precautions – i.e. you’ve got your mini Walgreens-brand  “Instant Hand Sanitizer Spray”, and that’s it, because Walgreens had sold out of everything else, and the woman who was helping you basically mocked you for being the last person in town to wander in looking for pandemic-flu-repellant products.

8.     Resist the temptation to steal a copy of today’s Guardian off a sleeping, snoring man. Resist feeling irritation about the lack of international papers on sale at this airport – the lack, in fact, of anything much aside from the LA Times and pretend newspaper USA Today.

9.     Focus instead on the twenty free copies of Ski magazine displayed on a nearby rack. Wish you found reading about skiing interesting. Wonder if you will ever go skiing in your life, and suspect that you will not.

10. Count the minutes until you can leave the RCC, walk over to Terminal Two, check in for your evening flight on Air New Zealand, and then find sanctuary in the Koru Club. Entertain the usual brief, disturbing fantasy that the rules will have changed since you last flew, and that the Koru Club door police will wave you and your RCC card away. Know that if this happens you will pay, on the spot, for Koru Club membership, because it’s still more than seven hours until your flight, and because this is LAX, with its Jetsons-like unlinked terminals, you will not be able to return to Terminal Eight and the RCC.  Maybe then you’ll realize what you’ve lost, and how early it is, how early.

F-F-F-Fade Away

As some of you know, T. Middy and I belong to different generations. He is part of the worst generation ever, ie the Boomers, and I’m Gen-X, which thinks it invented irony and ennui and slackerdom and cappuccino. Actually, I used to think I was born in the first year of Gen-X, ie 1965, until everyone started saying that President Obama (born 1961) is the first Gen-X president.

Usually our generational difference is not apparent to others, because of TM’s Dorian Gray-like youthfulness. It’s in musical taste that a visible abyss between us yawns. For example, TM has shown no interest whatsoever in the imminent reunion of Spandau Ballet, and the only thing I know about the Allman Brothers is that one of them was married, briefly, to Cher.

Last night we went out to Metairie to a street party: our hosts were our friends (and landlords) Joy and Paul, and they’d provided a long table-load of spicy boiled crawfish. Joy’s brother, Doug, plays drums in a cover band, called Hedley Grange, and they were set up on the front lawn. Hedley Grange’s specialty is Led Zeppelin. We were there for two-and-a-bit sets, and about 75% was L. Zep. Hedley Grange also do Doors songs, and most of the second side of Abbey Road. I like this much better than the bulk of their output, largely because I can sing along.

According to TM, Hedley Grange’s best Zeppelin number is “In the Light”, which involved a violin bow on guitar strings. To me, the conjunction of the words “Led Zeppelin” and “violin bow” are almost as alarming as “Jethro Tull” and “flute.” I suggested to Joy that maybe Hedley Grange could mix it up a little with, say, “Dance Hall Days” by Wang Chung. (After all, it includes the classic lines: “When I, you, and everyone we knew/Could believe, do, and share in what was true.”)

Unfortunately, Joy is older than I am, and does not share my nostalgic affection for early 80s’ hairdresser pop by bands named for Chinese musical concepts, the phonetics of baby-talk, or lines from a Stranglers’ song.

Before we went out last night, we spent some time watching old TV theme tunes/intros on YouTube. T. Middy wanted to show me Hullabaloo, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and Fireball XL5. Because he was a fan of a the latter, I showed him Stingray and Thunderbirds, made by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s ‘Supermarionation’ gang. He especially enjoyed the closing credits of Stingray, over the song “Aqua Marina”, where the lyrics and poignant images make it clear that a) Troy Tempest suffers from unrequited love for Marina; b) Atlanta suffers from unrequited love for Troy Tempest; and c) Marina never speaks, and has both a distant gaze and a fey swimming style.

I also showed TM the intros to Man About the House and The Double Deckers (featuring a very young Peter Firth). For the first time he realized that the song I sing all the time around the house (“Get on board! Get on board!/ Come and join the Double Deckers/Take a ticket for a journey/On our double-decker London bus”) was not an annoying tune of my own devising.

We had our own version of Hullabaloo in New Zealand: it was Happen Inn, hosted by the late Peter Sinclair. It started in 1969, replacing C’mon, which I’m too young to remember. For years my brother and I were obsessive viewers of Ready to Roll (Saturday, early evening) and Radio With Pictures (Sunday nights).

RTR was on early evening, which meant my father was on hand to tell us that “Heart of Glass” and “Wuthering Heights” were “a load of rubbish.” During the Karyn Hay-hosted years of RWP, he would stay up long enough to pass his usual comment on her (“What a mess!”).

These days, TM and I can agree on some music, like Radiohead and Arctic Monkeys, for example. When I’m out, he plays Bruce Springsteen, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Bob Dylan, the Beatles. When we’re both in, he tolerates a great deal of Brazilian music. He isn’t too thrilled about Portishead or Neko Case. (“What is she singing about, dolphins?”) He is also caustic about what he calls “all those bands from the 80s you like.” That’s OK. Not everyone can believe, do, and share in what is true.

 

 

Don’t Mess With Mr In-Between

It’s Easter Monday, which means no classes at Tulane and no classes at McMain High School either. The street’s been very quiet today, which I like. Today was the first morning in a long time when I haven’t woken up feeling manic in some way. Maybe our long weekend in Oaxaca just wore me out: it was a stimulating place, especially with all the various Easter pageants and processions, and then there was the heat, and the dust, and the drinks. The delicious food.

And all the writer visits with which I’ve been embroiled this semester, in small and large ways, for better or for worse, are over: Francine Prose, Claire Messud, Billy Collins, Joan Didion. The Didion Reading Series of three events – two lectures and a round-table discussion, which involved much hand-wringing and bullying on my part – is over. There are still a few classes left, and presentations to assess, and portfolios to read. I have three honors students with theses to submit. My two classes will come over here for dinner; on another night, the three faculty will take all graduating seniors out, if I can get around to organizing this. This year I’ll only be able to work the first weekend of Jazz Fest, because on May 2, after our final salon for the spring (we’ll resume social activities in September), I fly back to New Zealand.

I’m conscious that this blog, of late, has been more about omissions rather than inclusions. It’s been a busy and difficult semester. Perhaps that’s the reason. I’ve been to Chicago and Boston and the U.K. and Mexico. I’ve spent too much time waiting to change planes in Houston and Washington DC. The writer visits have been inspiring and energizing, in different ways, but some have been extremely stressful too, because of the level of organization and planning involved. Just walking past McAlister Auditorium makes me slightly anxious these days: I start counting people. In my sleep I count programs.

It’s late afternoon now. Now that parade season is over, there are no band rehearsals in the schoolyard across the street. The students next door are lying low, though by dusk they’ll be out on the porch smoking and conducting loud conversations on their cell phones.

This is my favorite time of day for writing – after four PM. I’m a cocktail-hour writer, I told an interviewer once, and that’s true (unlike half the things I say in interviews, which fool nobody). The day seems to grow more quiet around now, as though the energy’s seeping from the day. When I worked in an office, I liked this time. Nobody wanted to have meetings; the phone wasn’t ringing so incessantly. Some people were getting ready to rush to catch trains, but I never had to rush to leave. That became a problem – the never rushing to leave – but it lent a certain calm to the late afternoon that I’ve carried with me to other places, other desks.

I really liked spending time with all our visiting writers, and I may never get over the thrill of driving Miss Didion. I liked drinking at The Columns with Claire Messud, gossiping over the racket at Cochon with Francine Prose, taking Billy Collins to see Fats Domino’s house in the Ninth Ward. I like getting the chance to ask lots of direct questions of these other writers when I got them alone in my car. I like the things they tell me that are not for publication, which is perhaps why I include nothing of their visits at all here. 

This blog isn’t of much use or interest to writers, in fact, though I hope it occasionally entertains my friends. (My students, of course, despite evidence to the contrary, don’t see me as a writer, just as someone there to crush their dreams and curtail their adverb usage.)

I’ve been feeling down about my writing of late, in a sort of vague and existential way. Writing the novel seems an overwhelming task at times, and I keep looking, without success, for ways to lessen the challenge – unsurprising, given that the challenge is the thing.

Visiting branches of Waterstones in the U.K. is not the pleasure it used to be: it’s all stationery and giftwrap, and tables piled with three-for-the-price-of-two paperbacks. To insist upon your own book as a contender, to demand space and attention for it, seems desperately narcissistic. Blind, and tone-deaf too. There are too many books; perhaps I’ve written too many already – four published since 2003, with the fifth coming out this August. A week ago, a video crew spent six hours filming me talking on and on about the new book. We filmed in my office at Tulane, and at Lafayette cemetery. The highlight of the day for me was, of course, getting my make-up done by the super-artful Kisha from The Make-Up Lab.

It’s easy on a blog like this, with its original purpose of self-promotion, to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. But that’s hardly the whole story for any writer. I’m delighted when Forbidden Cities is shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize in my bizarrely vast region (SE Asia/Pacific), and unsurprised that my short story collection is swept aside, inevitably, by one of the rampaging Australian mega-novelists: it’s still a disappointment, though, however expected. A rejection letter arrives from a journal almost a year after I mailed the story in question; this year Yaddo, which has waitlisted me for the past two years, simply says no. Someone at our salon tells me how much she loved Trendy But Casual, which she’d just finished and passed on to her son in New York; a friend emails me from London to say how much he’s enjoying the stories, noting that it’s the first time he’s ever seen an O-card mentioned in fiction. (That’s one for the record-company old-timers out there.) But none of this changes the fact that these books are not stacked three-for-the-price-of-two on any table north of the Equator.

Some good news from Geoff Walker at Penguin Books today: a book called Floating Worlds: Essays on Contemporary New Zealand Fiction has just been published, and it features an essay on my second novel, Hibiscus Coast. Not only that, but the title is a quote from Hibiscus Coast. I knew it was coming, because one of the editors emailed me earlier this year about some bibliographical information, but I’d forgotten about it. I like the company Hibiscus Coast is keeping in that book. I like Hibiscus Coast, and I want more people to read it. People north of the equator, too. See, there’s the narcissism returning.

The amazing Grendel over at Earthgoat was asking me about the Scudder Road Circus recently, and I realized it could start earning its keep on this blog by giving travel tips. It could rival Fodor’s and the Rough Guide online, particularly as neither of those competitors are circuses.  Now travel tips: these I can write. Watch this space.

 

 

In the Bull Ring

I'm typing this in a Starbuck's in the Bull Ring, the medieval marketplace of Birmingham that now looks anything but.

This is what it looks like now:

Before last year, I'd been to Birmingham (as in England, rather than Alabama) twice. Both times were in the 80s, and I found Birmingham hard to grasp and navigate.

Last summer, when I needed to do some research on Paratene Te Manu and his fateful stay here in the early 1860s, I came back. TM and I stayed in Preston Bagot and made the drive in every day from rural idyll to ring-road idiocy. It was lucky that we did, or I’d have never found my way in, on the Kidderminster road, this time. Well, I would have found my way in, but only to the general area of the city centre: getting off the ring road is another story. The Five Ways roundabout is actually the Five Circles of Hell. You need extreme patience and nerves of steel to enter that roundabout. Last summer we learned that tunnels take you places you don’t want to go – namely, past the exit you needed. The only good thing about the excess of roundabouts here, I’ve discovered, is that you can use the next one to make a massive U-turn and re-enter the fray.

Last year I also learned that practically the only bits of Victorian Birmingham left are the bits built after my characters were here in the 1860s. Everything else was demolished or bombed. Mostly the former, during the 60s and 70s.

I’m liking being back here again, though Birmingham is still confusing. I have no sense of its actual topography downtown, as so much of it seems to consist of concrete hillocks and underpasses. In the city centre I often feel ushered inside, diverted into a giant, multi-armed shopping mall, so as not to interfere with the one-way spiraling roadways. On Monday I wandered into what I thought was New Street Station but turned out to be a dispiriting shopping mall, with no evident access to trains or even tickets; what I hoped would be a lift leading to something external, or near an exit, took me into the bowels of the discount store T. K. Maxx. (And yes, that’s what it’s called here.) From there I had to find an escalator up to escape the shop.

Staying in one of the National Trust’s restored back-to-back houses is supposed to bring me closer to the nineteenth century, and it does, in some respects – cramped, austere, etc. This is a one-down, two-up, one small room stacked three stories high. The staircase is steep and narrow, with occasional handles to prevent plummeting. My house faces the street, and there’s another identical one facing the inner courtyard. Voices outside sound as though they’re inside. I can hear someone in the next house climbing their creaky wooden stairs.  

The ground floor was the all-purpose cooking and living room: there’s a small old range, and a dining room table and chairs. A modern kitchen has been secreted in a purpose-built cupboard, with a mini-fridge under the sink, and two elements which I used to cook my dinner. This is the room where people cooked and washed and sat and ate. The WCs were communal, next to the well, in the courtyard, shared by hundreds of people. Upstairs were bedrooms for families and lodgers.

There’s a cupboard door that might have led to a cellar once. I read that in the poorest areas – not just in Birmingham, but in other industrial cities – the cellar was used as a place to sleep as well. Dozens of people were crammed into these little houses. In the 1870s, Birmingham passed a law against building any more of them. Apparently, the ones like mine, that faced the street, were seen as more desirable than the ones facing the courtyard (the smell, perhaps? The foot traffic?) and rents were therefore higher.

On the first night, in my bedroom upstairs, I couldn’t sleep. It was too hot, because I hadn’t turned down the radiator. (I’m never good with radiators. When I was first living in York, I had my windows open on snowy nights, because I didn’t know how to turn down the heat. Actually, I’m not good with things that turn, generally, especially train door handles.) I lay in my brass bed, with its heavy white covers, thinking that it was very un-nineteenth century to feel warm in a bedroom on a March night. 

Tour buses were parked across the way, waiting for people going to the theatre, and there’s an ad hoc taxi stand at the corner, where Hurst Street goes one-way. The drunk people of Birmingham roll up there shouting and laughing, and their voices sounded strange to me, because I couldn’t quite decipher what they were saying. Sometimes they weren’t speaking English, but sometimes they were. I thought about Paratene going from one English town to the next, breathing its fumes, feeling its damp cold, and hearing its squawking, unfamiliar accents in the streets outside the houses where he lodged. It’s more disorienting, in a way, when you know that everyone is supposed to be speaking the same language.

Here are some pictures of the place, before old newspapers, receipts, books, maps, notes, and things that fall out of magazines were strewn everywhere.