There is balm in Gilead

I'm reading Marilynne Robinson's Lila, third in a sequence of novels after Gilead and Home. These books are extraordinary. Sometimes, reading a brilliant book makes me feel a sort of irritable envy, a "wish I could have done that" resentment. But Robinson's work is beyond that sort of response. It leaves me awed, moved, and full of gratitude that she exists, and that she has made these books.

They do what books should do: illuminate the ordinary moments. ("Oh, I will miss the world!" says dying old John Ames in Gilead). Bring to life, through real, flawed people, the power of kindness, faith, and love ("Nobody deserves anything, good or bad. It's all grace," says Boughton, forgiving the son who has given him endless sorrow, in Home). Show redemption, resurrection even ("Strange as all this is, there might be something to it, thinks Lila in Lila). But never preachingly, never cloying or sentimental, and looking unflinchingly at the hard things too, so the flashes of grace are well-earned. These books may have spiritual implications, but they make you love the very stuff of physical life.

I've always been drawn, in reading and in writing, to matters of the spirit. My background and inclination are Christian, but my beliefs, not that I have anything so firm as to merit the word, are more and more open-ended and wide-ranging, and I flee from dogma. Paul Elie says, of psychiatrist and author Robert Coles, that he "was the very archetype of the secular post-modern pilgrim—not a believer himself, but a person who is attracted to belief, prone to it, often covetous of it in others, and who is brought to the threshold of belief imaginatively through his reading." I recognise something of myself here, though I have done so little with my own pilgrimage. 

That quote is from Paul Elie's fascinating book, The Life you Save May Be Your Own: an American Pilgrimage, which looks at four writers, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, and Flannery O'Connor, and they way the sought the truth in their lives, in their ways of living but also in the way they wrote: "Their writing was the most personal way of all, for in the act of reading and writing one stranger and another go forth to meet in an encounter of the profoundest sort."

Years ago, I was asked to participate in a conference at DeSales University about writing and spirituality. As I listened to the other speakers, I felt an overwhelming sense of homecoming: this is my place, my territory, this intersection of writing with the search for something "beyond", and although I've been forgetting about it, this is where I belong. Similarly, when I read Parabola magazine, which examines "the search for meaning" and explores the world's spiritual traditions, I feel at home and enriched there (and glad three of my essays have contributed to its archive). The writers who excite me often inhabit that borderland where twin yearnings, to make something well with words and to find meaning, flow into each other: Annie Dillard, Madeleine L'Engle, Darcey Steinke, Frederick Buechner, Michael Mayne, Ronald Blythe...

That borderland is my natural habitat, though I could never shed the kind of light on it that they do, and that Robinson does. Apart from anything else, my "faith" in anything "beyond" is at present a feeble and wavering flame. But then, perhaps that is when I most need to spend time there? At any rate, I know that's the territory where I want to walk, and work. 

                                                                                *****

Note: The reason I'm reading Lila now, and about to re-read the earlier Gilead books, is that my wonderful local independent bookshop, The Suffolk Anthology, is running a seminar on them on March 23rd.

A Blank Page

Spring is in the air; there are greening leaf-buds on the trees. Crocuses, snowdrops, daffodils are at their peak or even beyond, and the next wave of new growth and flowering is almost ready. The days are longer; and there's a subtle excitement, a sense of potential for something new.

I'm sitting looking out of the window at the morning sun beginning to break through cloud cover and I'm thinking about my idea for a new book. It's still very much unshaped...like a water-colour artist's paper covered only in a hint of wash, with faint forms beginning to appear, but still undefined. I have become fascinated by the mid-Victorian era, 1840s and 1850s, and I know the book will involve that time frame somehow. I know some of the themes, am formulating an idea of character, a sense of place; but it is all happening so slowly.

Spring comes quickly; soon the bluebells will be here, azure mist on the woodland slopes ; and one spring follows another faster and faster for me now. This book idea has been simmering for a few years already, though I find that hard to believe. It was the same with Inscription; and even once the idea took shape, my perfectionist way of making draft after draft, of rewriting over and over, meant the book took still more years to create and complete.

Time's wingèd chariot is snapping at my heels, to ruin Marvell's metaphor; and I berate myself for being such a slow writer. Months to write a poem? Years to write a book? Why? Why am I so ridiculously glacial in pace, when my bones know, every day more deeply, how brief this life is?

I can change some of my habits, I can exert more self-discipline. I can remind myself of what it felt like to write journalism, with no leeway.  I can give myself deadlines. And with the new impetus of spring, I'm determining today to do just that.  But I don't think I'll ever be a speedy, prolific writer, turning out a book a year, as some authors do, or a finished poem a day.

And I realise that, as usual, I have to find a balance; once again, it's that tightrope we writers walk. I must indeed get a move on, if I want to finish another book. But I shouldn't panic about it, as that leads to paralysis. I need to forgive myself for being slow and perfectionist. It can be modified, but it probably can't be fundamentally changed. I need to accept that it's just the way I am.

Yet I am an impatient person, at the same time. I have to remind myself that it's not a race; remind myself to relax; to rediscover the play of making something, the enjoyable puzzle.

Here's a bit from a book that is moving so many readers now, When Breath becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi, a writer and doctor who died a year ago at 37: when he held his newborn baby, her weight in one arm, gripping his wife's hand with the other, "..the possibilities of life emanated before us. The cancer cells in my body would still be dying, or they'd start growing again. Looking out over the expanse ahead I saw not an empty wasteland but something simpler: a blank page on which I would go on."

Laughter in the Bath

I started this post last night because of something that made me laugh while reading in the bath. It was about people in a boarding house during the war: "Mr Thwaites...spent much of the time writing embittered letters in the Lounge. These, after he had put on his overcoat and cap, he took round to the Post Office and posted in the most acid way. He passed pillar-boxes on the way, but did not trust them, as not going to the root of the matter."  

That last bit is what elicited the chuckle: Mr Thwaites is a thoroughly nasty man, but I admit I share this trait with him. I too hesitate to consign a letter to a pillar-box, much as I like them—and we even have an octagonal Victorian one five minutes' walk away, the VR elegantly adorning its front, the (admittedly small) mouth leading to a perfectly responsible cavity emptied regularly by employees of the Post Office. It was apposite that I was reading this in last night's bath; earlier in the day (which of course was Sunday) I'd posted a letter in a box that proclaimed its last collection was at 5:30 pm, but "there may be" other collections during the day. That half-promise was annoyingly vague. Immediately after dropping the envelope in, I was assailed by regret: surely it would have been better to go to the post office next morning, Monday, when my letter would have been pretty imminently dispatched, rather than leave it in a box which quite possibly would not be emptied all day. (My regret would have been greater if I'd remembered then what I've only just recalled as I write, that I could have gone to the Post Office anyway because it's open on Sundays now! This is quite a recent development; perhaps a hearkening back to earlier times, for example 1841, when post offices were open on Sundays—except during morning religious services—and from 6:00am to 10:00 pm during the week.)

All this reminds me of a British book about a British man in England, who for a reason I forget was looking at or thinking about a pillar box. It was seen from his point of view, through his thoughts. Because I was reading the American edition, I found him thinking about a "mailbox" instead. This man would never have thought that, and I'd bet millions that the author didn't write that. The editorial tampering destroyed the credibility of the character and his world.....I'd better stop, this is a hobby-horse of mine. Of course, after years of living in the States, I learnt to say "mailbox" myself, instead of "pillar box" or "post box." Now that I'm back in England I find I've sometimes forgotten the vocabulary I grew up with.

But to get back to the bath, where I laughed, recognizing myself in the ghastly Mr Thwaites.  He comes from Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton (1947); it is bleakly funny, and brilliant. Hamilton is like a sort of grimmer Pym (and this is an accolade, for I deeply admire Barbara Pym, and she can often, beneath the surface cosiness, be very dark—see Quartet in Autumn). Slaves of Solitude is about a disparate group of people who for one reason or another—bombed out of their London flats, suddenly impoverished—have to live in a boarding house. Trapped there, enduring ghastly communal meals rife with awkward and even cruel conversations, they struggle through their days as best they can. I'm only a third of the way in, but I am awed by the writing of this author whose work I've only now discovered, on a friend's recommendation.

In fact, she lent me her copy; I hope when I give it back it won't be too wrinkly. I approach a bath like Dodie Smith's Cassandra in I Capture the Castle: "I bask first, wash second, and then read as long as the hot water holds out."  Unlike her, I have the luxury of being able to top up the water greedily to extend the bliss....how wonderful that the blessings of hot baths, and of books whether in or out of them, never grow stale.

Glorious mud

Follow me, follow, down to the hollow, where we will wallow...you know what comes next, and we have certainly seen enough mud in the last few weeks to serve us for a very long while. Maybe I shouldn't have written about the sun last time.

Today I'm concerned about a practical issue: how you may follow me, or rather follow this blog, should you wish to. All three or four of you. So this post is just a test one as I try to work on that. I may try to link this blog with my old blogspot blog...watch this space.

Anyway I will be back soon with more about really important things like books, reading, and writing.

The sun!

It does make a difference. The sun is out, the sky is blue; and although it was frosty this morning and is still chilly outside, the clarity of the day is invigorating after all that rain and cloud. Not that I mind the rain and cloud so much, as long as the temperatures don't drop to the insane cold I knew in Pennsylvania. When I lived there full-time, winter dragged on remorselessly through February, March, and often into April, with nothing green visible; just cold and ice and unmelted heaps of grimy snow. But here the daffodils are already up and in bud, and in parks and gardens there have been flowers of some sort without interruption since autumn.

There are some long-tailed tits frisking around and chirruping busily in a tree outside my window. Although it isn't nest-making time yet, I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his anguished spring sonnet. "Birds build, but not I build..." I've been between projects for a while, and I'm uncertain of where to move next. This is scary: I am afraid full-fledged spring will arrive and I'll be echoing Hopkins, watching the creation all around and not making anything myself.

Paul Muldoon, at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last year, spoke about pattern, shape, and structure in his poetry. He said—admitting it's a truism, but it bears repeating—how the traditional patterns of form can allow for more emotional openness in a poem. Some people call poetic forms "artificial," but they are not: as he said, there are patterns everywhere in nature—in the structure of DNA, of crystals, of snowflakes.  

He also spoke about putting together a collection of poems. He doesn't start out with a theme, but over the four to five years of writing it, he said, "your obsessions are of a piece; themes appear."  He is interested in the sequence we read poems in, and how the experience changes accordingly. This concern with shape and structure is natural: "It's the urge to construct, to build things."

I know this urge. But sometimes it's so hard to begin. I plan to make a collection of my poetry, but far from representing Muldoon's "four to five years," it represents over two decades. (I'm a slow writer!) Where to start, and how to shape it? At the same time, I have a new prose book in mind, but my ideas, like Meg's jelly in Little Women, are reluctant to gel. 

It's hard to combine patience with gentle self-prodding; to keep the playfulness of writing, while not neglecting it. Long ago, aged about fifteen, on just such a bright day as this, I wrote a short poem about branches against a blue winter sky so intense it seemed it could spark the tree into spring life. I belonged to an arts centre for young adults, run by an amazing woman, Elizabeth Webster. She encouraged self-expression, while also inspiring us to work at the craft. We read our poems for the public, and she printed some—including my midwinter spring one—in a magazine. She is dead now, but I will never forget her.

Today I'd like to recover her special balance of encouragement and inspiration; and even—is it possible?—the same fresh excitement I had at fifteen about making something, building it, giving it a shape.

Return. In your cellar is the salt of life.

The words of this post's title come from a wonderful book: A Tour of Bones by Denise Inge (Bloomsbury, 2014).

I discovered it almost exactly a year ago when exploring Worcester cathedral with my husband and with our son visiting from the States. When I lived in the USA, the churches and cathedrals of England, with their layered history, were among the things I most missed. So I particularly appreciate every small old church or huge cathedral that I have the chance to visit now. It was in the cathedral bookshop that I found this book; Denise Inge lived in Worcester, right next to the cathedral, because she was married to John Inge, Worcester's bishop. In the cellar of their old house was a collection of bones, and it was this that started Denise off on her "tour." She travelled to four European charnel houses and looked at why they were created and what these gatherings of bones mean.

Bones and skulls, of course, are frightening, and it was to address that fear that she began the book. At first, her fear of death was like that shared by the healthy: there, but not always sharply felt—until we're confronted by bones or bereavement—because none of us really believes it will happen to me. But then, while writing the book, the fear comes all too close: she is diagnosed with an inoperable cancer. She died in 2014 at the age of 51. Here's her husband's obituary of her:    http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/15/denise-inge

She's an excellent writer (and an authority on the extraordinary Thomas Traherne, whose words I quote at the start of Inscription), and her book would have been brilliant anyway. But inevitably her numbered days give an added poignancy to her impressions of charnel houses in Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland.  And yet, the book isn't grim, but life-affirming. When she returns to her own bone-filled cellar, her fear of it has shifted towards reverence and wonder. She writes: 

"I do not know how much more time I have to live my questions out, but I am glad I started asking them even before the cancer came for, although they cannot be rushed, these are questions that must not be avoided. This is true whether or not you have been diagnosed with a frightening disease. The questions these charnel-houses asked of me stirred me to life-enriching responses. Are the broken parts of your deep self being healed? Get rid of the bitternesses. Mend the bridges. Seek and receive forgiveness. Let yourself be loved. Have you found a lasting hope? Anchor yourself in the eternal and abiding (for me this is God). Feed yourself something stronger than optimism. You are in a constant state of growth and transition, so let change transform you. What are the things for which you will be remembered? Cut the crap in your life. Do the things that matter. Find and exercise your gifts. Are you on the path of true humility? Submit to a truth that is bigger than yourself. Become part of it. Let it be your story. What I have been surprised to discover, as these questions chase and wash over me, is that preparing to live and preparing to die are in the end the same thing."

Wise words for any time, and perhaps especially for the start of a new year. I wrote them down in the reading journal I'd started keeping, which is why I have been reminded of them now, because I was looking back over its pages. Also, I was so struck by A Tour of Bones that I signed up to Twitter expressly to tell people about it. (And because I thought it was about time I joined the twittersphere. Now I am fighting the addiction!) My first tweet, almost a year ago, was to praise Denise Inge's book.

The richness of books and writing is never-ending. I look forward to a new year of reading, and writing; of writing about reading, and reading about writing; of using my reading journal to help me remember books I've loved; and of sharing some of my thoughts here for others who also love the world of words. 

Independent publishers—hurrah!

I write this on the day after Thanksgiving (I refuse to give it that shopping-related name. And I am beyond horrified that said name has now infiltrated Britain, although Thanksgiving itself is not a thing there, for obvious historical reasons. Since we don't have Thanksgiving and the last Thursday of November is just an ordinary day in Britain, why on earth have British retailers adopted the American concept of this Friday as a day to do manic amounts of shopping? Well, to make money, obviously. But it is ridiculous on so many levels…..)  

There is much to be thankful for in my life, but today, almost on the eve of the book launch my publisher has organized in Philadelphia, I want to sing the praises of independent publishers.

My publisher, Sowilo Press, is an imprint of the arts foundation Hidden River Arts. Publication by Sowilo Press is part of the Eludia Award prize. Inscription was the second recipient of the award, and the first winner was Sleepers Awake by Tree Riesener.  Both these books are being celebrated this Sunday at the Book Launch Party.

What I want to say to all aspiring writers is, you may dream of a contract with one of the big houses, and it's fabulous if you get one; but there are advantages to being with a small publisher. You might have more input into the cover design than you would with a big house. The editor is perhaps less likely to make you change things in your book for the sake of commercial appeal. And small publishers do what they do as a labour of love. That's not to be sneezed at. Not to say people who work in larger houses don't love books, and working with them. But it takes a particular courage and passion to be a small publisher in this climate of tight economy and short-lived shelf life.

But as I write this, I realise with some degree of guilt that I don't actually buy that many books from independent publishers. I sometimes get emails with lists of indie books, and I see ads in various places for indie books; but I don't often respond. This is something I plan to rectify. 

My own book might never have been brought into the world if it weren't for Hidden River Arts. I have a new-found respect for publishers like this, who, whether through a contest or in some other way, seek out the less mainstream and more unusual work.

So, I am grateful. And looking forward to the party!

Meeting readers…mine!

It is almost surreal, this incarnation of a long-standing dream. Now Inscription is out, and I've had a couple of book-related events, I meet people who have read it and who tell me they liked it, and why. I will restrain myself from actually repeating any of these accolades here! But I never fail to be amazed when I'm told that my book has succeeded in doing what I hoped it might do, but never fully believed it really would: it has succeeded in interesting, pleasing, and even, mirabile dictu, moving a reader.

And after the years of being stuck, over and over again, inside the tangled labyrinth of its creation, this is the sweetest reward. 

Yes, the readers are (so far) still very few. Only word of mouth can bring this book, from a small publisher by an unknown author, into more hands. But, for me, every single reader is precious and important. Each person the book reaches is one more person in a group I could hardly believe would ever exist.  And yet, simultaneously, while writing the book I did have to believe in the reader, I did have to write for that eventual imagined person who one day might turn the pages of the eventual, imagined book.

So, to any first-time writers of book-length work out there, I can't stress enough the importance of persevering. Yes, I know you've heard this before. It's easy to say; so hard to do. You are writing, often for years at a stretch, in complete isolation. No-one cares whether you write the next page or not, let alone finish the whole book. When I was in the throes of it, and read published writers saying this sort of thing—don't give up—I used to feel a degree of irritation mingled with my gratitude for their encouragement.  All right for them, I thought; they are published, and respected, so their work must have been good all along, and they probably knew it, or had some eager agent already waiting, or an editor was sending them the sort of frequent exhortations Maxwell Perkins sent to Scott Fitzgerald.  I couldn't, somehow, believe that they had ever really been labouring in obscurity, riding the seesaw of one minute actually being able to hope the book had some merit, the other being convinced it would never even be finished; of one minute thinking the ideas and characters were fascinating, the next feeling sure everything was flaccid and feeble and dead on the page; of balancing the confidence necessary to sustain the project with the humility to keep revising over and over again….I couldn't believe, in short, that they had ever been lost and stuck and groping in the dark, like me.

And yet, here I am, my book published (albeit by a very small press) and enjoyed (albeit by a handful of people). And although it may never go any further than this very modest reception, it has already touched more people whose opinion I respect in ways I could hardly dare to dream.  Yet I really was in that place back there, the labyrinth, the seesaw, the morass, the cave (you can't mix metaphors enough to convey what that place is like). I really was stuck, not once but countless times. I really did have to, not merely revise, but radically rewrite the book, not once but many, many times, also without number. And I really was doing it in the dark, with the encouragement not of agents and editors, but of a few friends and family members who probably just wanted an end to the whole sorry "I'm trying-to-write-a-book" saga.

Yes, I know I wrote about this in an earlier post, and said how important the comment by well-known writer Kevin Crossley-Holland was to me. And it was; but today's post is more about the importance of every ordinary reader.

And I keep saying "Don't give up," because an essay is brewing about it all. How to give believable encouragement to the unpublished, labouring, obscure writers out there. How to really convey what it was like inside the labyrinth, with some tips for survival. How not to give up. And, paradoxically, how allowing myself to think about giving up saved the day…..I would like to tell the readers of the magazines I used to comb like a dying person seeking a remedy—Poets and Writers, Writing magazine, and so on—that there is an end in sight. And I'd like to share the things that helped me in the depths, candles that illuminated the dark. 

Thank you to everyone who has told me, or told someone else, or posted on amazon, or just mentioned in passing to the butcher, baker, or candlestick-maker, that you enjoyed my book.  

"She Can Safely be Discarded…."

The words in this post's title are from an excellent book about the emperor Domitian by Brian W. Jones. He is talking about a woman possibly belonging to Domitian's circle, one of several women named Flavia Domitilla. Three women, Domitian's mother, sister, and niece, all bore this name. As Professor Jones writes, "Early Christian writers argued for a fourth, niece of Flavius Clemens (i.e. daughter of a supposed sister), and have won acceptance from some scholars. She can safely be discarded."                                       (The Emperor Domitian, Brian W. Jones, Routledge, paperback 1993, p 48).   

And these words triggered in me a desire to salvage her. This was one of many interconnected stimuli for my book Inscription.  I started to explore the story of these women in Domitian's family, and to see why some scholars accepted the view of those early Christian writers about the existence of this fourth Domitilla. (Whom it's simpler to call the second Domitilla, because Domitian's mother and sister were dead before he became emperor).  And the more I delved into this enticing gap in the historical record, where it's not even known whether the well-known historical person Flavius Clemens, a consul, had a sister or not, the more I found myself leaning to this minority view. 

Professor Jones could be quite right that she never existed, but I read all I could find on the subject, and some respected scholars, for example the late Professor Marta Sordi, made a good case for the fact that she did. What fascinated me about this controversy was that the history of the Christian church and the history of the Roman empire became tangled together in it. Which one would expect, considering that the church was growing at exactly this time, the late first century AD; but these two fields of study are often treated separately, by different scholars, historians of the growth of Christianity and historians of the Roman Empire. I wanted, in my book, to make connections.   

The island of Ponza has two patron saints; one, Saint Silverio, was an early pope who became a victim of politics and was exiled to a smaller island in the Pontine archipelago, Palmarola, where he died of starvation in AD 537.  I was fascinated by the other patron saint of Ponza, Saint Domitilla, who lived in the first century AD, and about whom there are various fanciful stories. But there seems to be a kernel of historical truth at the heart of these hagiographical legends, because non-Christian writers also mention a woman, or women, exiled to either Ponza, or Palmarola. The problem is that the earliest records contradict each other; there is a confusion of women, and a confusion of islands.

In my earlier post about Ponza, I mentioned that this historical controversy of the two Domitillas, and whether or not the second one can be discarded, is a node at which Christian and secular history intersect. It's also a puzzle that has never been solved. I took the fiction writer's liberty of solving it, in a way that reconciled the conflicting historical accounts. I preferred the unfashionable opinion of the minority-view scholars to that of the mainstream ones.  I probed the interstices of what we know, and found an answer that, while totally my invention, is the way it could, possibly, have happened...

From the gaps in the net of the distant past, a person emerged for me, a young woman, Tilla; and then her (eventual) friend Marina, a female scribe, originally from ancient Britain. All the delving into ancient volumes in library stacks and tracing of historical controversies—which I so much enjoyed!—finally yielded something that started to come alive.

And when I finally saw, in a Roman church, an ornate reliquary labelled caput flaviae domitillae, "the head of Flavia Domitilla," and stared at the skull behind the glass, my breath was taken away by the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, this was a remnant of someone who lived two thousand years ago and who had become, for me, a real person.

Many thanks to Professor Jones for his—entirely reasonable and authoritative opinion—that "she can safely be discarded." 

Seductiveness of the Blank Book

What is the seductive appeal of a blank notebook?  Whenever I see them offered for sale, whether in a traditional legatoria in Florence or on the shelves of that discount store ending in Maxx, I have to stop myself, remind myself that I already have at least ten unused ones at home. (Actually, on the one occasion in my life so far that I found myself in a bindery in Florence, with marbled papers and leather spines and age-old craftsmanship all around, I did not in fact stop myself. I bought, after ages of agonizing decision between ravishing marbling here, or tooled leather there, a notebook which is, of course, too beautiful to use. So it is more truthful to say that when I see them on sale, I am tempted, always. And manage to resist, usually.)

It's to do with several things.  First, the shape of the book itself, the codex form. The way lifting the covers is like lifting the lid of a treasure box. The way the pages are nested, with the gatherings stitched safely into the spine, yet the leaves are free to move. They can be turned, forwards, backwards; when reading a book, you can see from the stack of pages ahead, how much longer you have to remain in that world. You can turn back to an earlier part of the story, re-enter the past, or anticipate the future, as we cannot do in life. The book holds past, present, and future in a capsule. 

And there is more, there is so much more one could say; I have said some of it in an essay exploring the evolution of the codex from the book-roll, and the importance of nursery rhymes, and the delights of early reading, and why we love books, their physicality, their heft. An essay rather longer than is usual in these sound-bite days (it's available for publication….anyone out there interested? Anyone?  Ah well….) because there is so much richness in the subject of the codex book.

The essay is a love letter to the codex book, and so is my novel Inscription. So it's ironic that I am currently in an agony of impatience because it is taking longer than expected at the printer's for the words to undergo the transformation into a physical volume, on paper, with pages, that you can hold and read, and pass (in my dreams!) from hand to hand.

Part of Inscription's story takes place at the end of the first century AD, around the time when, in Rome, a new object appeared in the shops: a gathering of parchment pages, literature on leaves of skin instead of in the traditional scroll. As Martial said, this made a good Saturnalia present; easy to travel with, long works compressed into a small space. Before that, there had been (it seems, though the mists of history obscure all this) parchment notebooks used by artisans; but a scroll was the proper place for any decent bit of writing. The codex did not catch on immediately, but over the next few centuries it grew more and more popular. (All this refers to the story of the book in Western Europe, of course; elsewhere, it is different). Now the codex has been our preferred book form for almost two thousand years. But for how much longer?

To return to the blank book, it's also seductive because it invites the act of writing. Writing by hand. There is such a physical pleasure in taking a pen, forming the letters, the little curlicues and upstrokes and dots and loops that mean something; in making something, in progressing through the pages. But the unwritten book, the book of the imagination, the book I think I will write when I contemplate the porous blank field of the page, that unladen ship that is a blank book, is always far superior to any scrawlings I actually produce. In fact, quite often I hesitate to mar the pages at all.  I open the book, riffle them a bit, and then (as I say in a poem about that moment, which, since this is an informal blog post, I can shamelessly, or almost shamelessly, haul into the discussion) I let the covers scallop shut.  Which is why I have so many unused notebooks.

Check out      here    my earlier blog about France, language, living….

Lost, found, and moved!

Well, well. The last post was a year after the previous one. This post is more than a year after the last one. This does not look good at all!

I neglected to post for so long that when I tried to find this old blog, I couldn't; it seemed to have been lost or deleted or evaporated into the ether. So I just assumed it was no more…

Now I have found it and so I can officially announce the transition, just for the sake of that important if hackneyed concept "closure,"  and on the off chance that anyone is still out there.

For I have not been totally idle all this time.

I have set up a website which can be found here:

christine-whittemore.net

and there is a blog page on that site where I have posted the odd musing and wofflement:

www.christine-whittemore.net/blog/

It makes more sense for it to all be in one place, so I will henceforth be posting from there only.

I am not sure (sorry, still learning!) if there's a mechanism there for you to automatically be notified when a new post appears. But each time I post, I will mention it on my public facebook page:

Christine-Whittemore-Inscription-Such

(called in full Christine Whittemore Inscription and Such)  and also on twitter.

On the website blog, I am currently writing a lot about the imminent appearance of my novel, Inscription, because that is the exciting thing that is happening now.

But I intend (ha! road to hell, etc) to post pieces about various bookish and word-related and poetic things, about reading and writing and so forth.

So, see you there!  And thank you if you have been reading, and even more if you continue to do so….

Ponza: island of history, and mystery

Off the coast of Italy, in the Tyrrhenian sea, there is a small archipelago: the Pontine Islands. They are Ponza, Ventotene, Zannone, Palmarola, Santo Stefano, and Gavi. The largest is Ponza. I first visited it in 1979, when the man who soon became, and still is, my husband planned a surprise trip there from the central Italian city where we lived.

I hesitate to tell what a magical place this is…..even to my small but loyal (!) readership. White volcanic cliffs, clear blue-green waters; pale-washed houses climbing the steep rocks, church with its cupola at the heart of the main town clustered round the harbour.

We returned many years later, along with two of our children, now almost grown up. On this second trip, I was looking at it differently. By then I was thinking about a book.

Ponza and Ventotene (then called Pontia and Pandateria) were, in Imperial Rome, places of exile, where emperors sent family members who annoyed them, or political enemies. Today, an island in the Mediterranean is a holiday dream, but in ancient Rome these were dreaded destinations. To be banished from the Empire's heart, in utter disgrace, living on a parched and primitive rock with fishermen, under supervision of soldiers, fearing every moment the emperor's assassins—this was a terrible fate. Augustus sent his daughter Julia to Ventotene; Caligula's mother Agrippina the Elder and his brother Nero (not the emperor) were exiled to Pandateria and Ponza respectively, and died on those islands, probably murdered or forced to starve themselves to death; and the list goes on. Among the names of famous exiles in the ancient world is that of Flavia Domitilla.

But there is confusion about Flavia Domitilla; ancient sources contradict each other. She is variously a mother of seven children sent to Ventotene, a young girl sent to Ponza, a Jew, a Christian; exiled for this reason, or for that. And from some kernel of historical truth there arose, over centuries, the hagiographical romance of Saint Domitilla, virgin martyr, one of Ponza's two patron saints, still celebrated with festival and flowers and the loyalty of the islanders. A loyalty that is recorded since at least the fourth century AD, and probably goes back to the first.

On Ponza, you can still see Roman ruins; parts of the old imperial villa, the remains of the fish-pools where the Romans raised fish (interconnected with sluice gates that could be dropped and lifted between the ponds), cellars that were once Roman houses, and Roman tunnels, including one that goes right under the island's rocky spine, at its wasp-waisted narrowest point, from one side of the island to the other.

Climbing the island's narrow paths, for it is a steep place with the main town clinging to the cliffside, I tried to imagine myself two thousand years ago, when Domitilla was sent here by an emperor who hated her, for reasons history has not made clear.

To walk down the Roman tunnel under the island's rocky mass, seeing on the tunnel walls the diamond-shaped traces of Roman brickwork, opus reticulata, reticulated or "net-like" work, is to dive back into the the past.

For years I traced the interconnected filaments. The book that came out of all this probes the places where history and hagiography meet, explores the gaps, and finds a way to reconcile the conflicting stories of the two exiled Domitillas. And from long ago emerges a companion for the exiled Roman girl, a woman with strange blue tattoos and unusual green eyes, a woman originally from distant Britannia. She has worked as a scribe (for there were some female scribes who took notes and acted as secretaries in ancient Rome.) On Ponza, in the heat and dryness of exile, she writes for comfort's sake, using parchment pages, an early version of the codex notebook.  And what she writes has survived…as the Nag Hammadi codices survived...or as the lists and letters written on thin wooden tablets were found two thousand years later in the mud of northern England at Vindolanda.

The scribe's parchment pages are read two thousand years later by a modern person, a woman who had also been to Ponza; a tiny scrap of land in the blue Mediterranean connecting them across the centuries. And as the modern woman reads the story of that long-ago scribe, she finds there is much more that links their lives. So much more that the voice from two thousand years ago has power to change her now.

A place can, sometimes, be a catalyst, even years later. One day I will go to Ponza again, and give thanks for the twisting paths—narrow, rocky and difficult, like those of the island itself—that finally led to a finished book, Inscription.

Covered in Glory

Well, perhaps that's an overstatement. But it is undeniably an exciting moment when the cover of your book (especially a first book, especially a book you've worked on for more years than you care to admit) is ready, at last. 

Here it is, and I am delighted with it.

Being published by a small press has meant, for me anyway, that I've been involved in the cover design and also in the internal design of the book.  Of course, the process was in the hands of experts, in this case Miriam Seidel for the cover, and Douglas Gordon for the internal design; but I was able to make important choices. I've known of writers published by big houses whose books have had covers conveying completely the wrong impression, so I count myself lucky.

There's so much more to a book than I, bibliophile that I am, had ever thought about. For example, what is written at the top of each page?  Often, it's the book title and the chapter heading alternating. But what if your book (like mine) doesn't have chapters? Book title on both pages? Or your authorial moniker on one and the title on the other? These are matters I'd never even considered before.  

Then, do you have a line separating that running title or chapter heading from the text below, or just a space? Where do you put the page numbers—at the top or bottom, on the right or on the left? Do you want any little squiggly symbols separating the sections of your immortal prose? 

Of course, as soon as these issues were drawn to my attention, I started looking in a new way at the books I have around me, and noticing the effect of different designs. Often a book is visually satisfying and harmonious, but as we turn the pages, we're only subliminally aware of this, and don't even realise why. Yet the design affects our aesthetic experience.

For the cover there is even more so to think about, from the main image to the typefaces to the layout.  All the elements involved, and the way they work together, are more complex than I'd ever realised. In fact, the whole book design thing is a specialised world, and I'm so glad the professionals were there.

Anyway, it's done.  I've had visions over the years of what might be on the front cover of the book, if it ever achieved a physical life: leaping dolphins from a first-century mosaic; an ancient Roman ink-pot; a stylus (antique, not the kind you use with some modern hand-held devices); Odilon Redon's painting "The Mystical Boat";  a notebook half-bound in leather with a marbled paper cover, like the one my modern protagonist writes in; an very early codex, like the Nag Hammadi books, leather-wrapped and with trailing thongs; and more. But in the end I am very happy with this cover as representing—hinting at? echoing?— my double-stranded story of two women connected across two thousand years.

Never Lose Hope!

While writing my book Inscription I kept a notebook about the process. In it I thrashed out with myself ideas for how to proceed, recorded the many, many times I was stuck, agonised about how the thing was utterly impossible, followed myriad false starts and twists and turns and ideas for the structure, and wrote many times that I simply couldn't see how to do it and was on the verge of giving up.  The notebook spans years. A lot of them.

Years later, the novel was complete. It's incredible to be able to say that. Often, I thought it never would be, I thought I couldn't manage it. Not only that, but the book is on the verge of publication. The proofs are done, and the cover design, which should very soon be unveiled to the world (!). This too was a moment I thought might never come. My wonderful agent submitted the book to many publishers (a process we began just as the economy started to flounder badly!) and despite complimentary comments from editors, and optimism at first, in the end no-one felt able to go to bat for it against the publishing house bean counters.

It was never quite the right time and place…eventually I submitted the book to two contests: in the UK, the Cinnamon Press Novel/Novella Award, and in the USA the Eludia Award run by Hidden River Arts. The book was long-listed for the first award, and it won the second. Part of the prize is publication, and so the book is now being published by Sowilo Press, one of the Hidden River Arts imprints. 

I've read accounts like this by other writers, and, while they did help me to keep going, I could never really grasp that they had actually ever been in that place of almost no hope, of being unable to visualize the ending of the book and the writing of it, far less a published volume.  That place of rewriting the whole book over and over and over again. Of being in a labyrinth with no visible exit.  Of waiting and waiting for an editor to take it on.  And of course, there is a tendency in us to want to make it look easy. The tightrope walker runs lightly across the rope, as apparently easily as walking down a lane, and the art is in not letting us know how many falls and failures and practices there have been. Vladimir Nabokov said that showing anyone else unfinished work is like passing round samples of your sputum. 

But I was there in the midst of it, in that labyrinth.  Already deep in the process, I wrote things like "I feel I am back to square one" or "I feel such fear that I can't do it at all. Then I realise that I must just try anyway…"  I really was in that place, over and over, and I am here to say that it is worth it to carry on regardless, to persevere.

It's a difficult tightrope. You have to find a balance between humility and self-confidence. Enough self-belief to keep going, even when no-one cares whether your book lives or dies; enough modesty to realise finding an agent is hard, a publisher even harder, and accolades hardest of all. Self-confidence that you can do it; humility in accepting that (speaking for myself) I am not Nabokov, and the input of others during the process—though not too early—is really helpful. 

It's an impossible balance really, and I found myself ricocheting between extremes. As for accolades, I don't expect my book to be widely read (though I'll try my best!).  Outside family, friends, my agent Julia who loves the book and had faith from the start, and my publisher Debra, I may never have an accolade that means more than the one from Kevin Crossley-Holland. This poet, memoirist, author for adults and children (The Hidden Roads: a Memoir of Childhood; The Seeing Stone; Pieces of Land:Journeys to Eight Islands) picked a poem of mine for first prize in a contest years ago. He's a writer I've long admired. Out of the blue, I asked him to read the book, and not only was he kind enough to do so, but he wrote this:

"Clean, lean, superb prose; the quality of research; thoughtfulness; the subtle interweaving of the stories of two women divided by two millennia but drawn together by circumstance.  It's not difficult to praise many components of this unusual and deeply moving historical novel, but what is less obvious, and in the end more profound, is Christine Whittemore's conspicuous achievement in writing a novel about both the consolation of fiction and of writing fiction."

 Gosh. In the heart of the labyrinth, I may have dreamt yearningly for a response like this, as one dreams of winning the lottery or inheriting a castle; but I could never have imagined it actually happening. That my book not only somehow got done, but touched a chord like this with a reader of this calibre, makes it all worth-while.

Rediscovering the Music of Poetry

The 2015 Cheltenham Poetry Festival, held in the spring, was an exciting event in these parts. The tireless volunteer directors brought some amazing poets to Cheltenham. Listening to some of these poets and their work, I was captivated all over again by the power of poetry; by the force of language to move me, enthrall me, make me laugh or cry.

I was honoured to be in the line-up too, reading with Sue Johnson.  It was very rewarding to be reading our poetry to a smallish but nonetheless apparently appreciative group of kind souls who came to listen. 

My novel, Inscription, took many years to write, and during that time I didn't write very much new poetry, especially towards the end. The actual composition involved some of the same creative functions that poetry does, but in the latter years I was concentrating more on revision and structure and similar issues, and using the editorial bit of my brain more than the intuitive.

Now, for the last year and a bit, I've been working on rediscovering poetry and making it once more part of my life as a writer and as a reader.

How to do this? Well, poetry prompts with other poets can help—giving each other a small exercise and a deadline.  Also, a workshop can trigger all sorts of creative impetus. I was so lucky last year to be able to do a weekend-long workshop with fiction writer Amal Chatterjee and poet Jane Draycott. It was inspiring, stimulating, and reconnected me with myself.

Sometimes I enter contests, as I find (procrastinator that I am!) that the deadline marvellously focuses the mind. 

Going to local readings and short workshops is also worthwhile, and I enjoy doing that and participating in the local poetry scene.

And then there's reading poems in books! It's embarrassing how easy it has been for me to slip out of the habit of reading poetry regularly.  The new books I bought at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last year and at the Poetry Festival this year have really helped here. Poets I've been especially enjoying recently are Robert Peake, Michael Symmons Roberts, Daisy Fried, Jo Bell, and Sue Rose….to name but a few.

And of course you don't need to buy books to read poetry. So much classic and contemporary poetry is available online. For new work, there are now many well-respected online poetry journals, like Antiphon where my first poems to be published online (instead of in print) appeared.

 I've found out about some journals from unexpected sources. For example, I didn't think Twitter would lead me to poetry, but it has. Just today, I saw (because of the kinds of accounts I follow) an announcement about the online journal The Compass. Browsing around in its "pages" I found a lovely poem called "Against Hate" by Pippa Little. I haven't read the whole journal yet, but I'm sure there's more to enjoy there.

What I'm finding is that it's just a question of nurturing the poetry mindset. That used to be a place I lived in; but I drifted away from it. Now I am coming back.

As for the actual writing of poetry, I have been finding, as I return to it, that it's important to remember the sense of play, the delight of making something. This can be such an important part of the process. In all the endless revising and editorial work on my book, I'd lost sight of the actual joy.

"You need to rediscover the music,"  as one of my poet friends said.

Introducing myself

Thank you so much for visiting this website.

Here's a personal note, a sort of "who I am and how I ended up where, in various senses, I find myself" piece. It may—indeed should, as it's called "blog"—be the first of several conversations I'll have with whoever might happen to drop in. But, knowing myself as I ought to by now, I make no promises.

And so:  I was born in England, and I was lucky to grow up with nursery rhymes, songs, and books. Reading was my great pleasure.  A Wrinkle in Time, The Little Prince, the Narnia books, the stories of E. Nesbit, The Eagle of the Ninth and all Rosemary Sutcliff's books, A Dog so Small and others by Philippa Pearce, the work of Leon Garfield,  Alan Garner….others who once were bookish children will have many of the same favourites.

As a child I wrote poems. In my teens I joined a young people's arts centre, a formative experience where the love of language was encouraged and nurtured, and we could read and discuss poetry. I will always be grateful to the centre's director, the late Elizabeth Webster.

Going to university, living in Italy, teaching English, getting married, starting a family, moving to America, teaching English some more….in the business of life, writing sank away into the background. I rediscovered it in my early thirties. At home full-time, with two, and then three, children, I began snatching moments to write: essays first, and then I returned to poetry.

It wasn't only because of the demands of living that I had let writing slip away. It was also because I knew I could never hope to emulate the writers I admired. But now I came to recognise the truth of what Jean Rhys said to David Plante, as he records in Difficult Women, though I think I first saw it quoted by Madeleine L'Engle in Walking on Water: 

"All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake."

Since then, I have published poetry, essays, creative non-fiction. And I've written journalism about the arts, and about local history. I also enjoy teaching and have led writing workshops in schools, community colleges, and at writing conferences. I like giving talks, too. On one challenging occasion, I was asked to talk about poetry to a group of business people during a networking breakfast at 7:30 in the morning. It seems they liked it. 

I am very excited about the forthcoming appearance of my novel. Inscription will be published this year by Sowilo Press and will be available in the US, UK, and elsewhere. I will be keeping you updated here and on the Home and Books pages.

What a strange journey it was, being immersed in a book-length project for so long (longer than I care to admit to). Especially a project that took me into another time and place, or places—ancient Britain and ancient Italy, two thousand years ago.

The book isn't a "historical novel," though. It's a novel with a historical strand. It is told in  the voices of two women, one living and writing in the first century AD, the other in our own time (or almost; the end of the twentieth century). Their stories interweave across two thousand years.

I've also co-written, with Harriet Dronska-Feitelberg, the memoir of her experience as a hidden child in World War II. My Father's Promise: a hidden child survives the Holocaust is an extraordinary story. Almost all the Jews of her city were killed. Thanks to her father, to a Catholic neighbour, to her own chutzpah, and to luck or providence, she survived this traumatic time disguised as a Catholic child, living under an assumed name. Exposure meant death.

Today she is in her eighties, like the others who are left of her generation. She has found it painful to think about her past, far less to tell her story, until now. But at last she has been able to remember. These stories must be told before it is too late. I've been honoured that she entrusted me with hers.

---

After twenty-seven years in the States, and three in France, I am now spending more time in my native England.
I keep on trying to feed the lake. There is always so much more to know and to discover about working with and celebrating language, in all its mystery. 

Some tutelary spirits, in no particular order:  
W.G. Sebald, Vladimir Nabokov, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Paul Metcalf, Denise Levertov, Virginia Woolf, e e cummings, George Herbert, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Jean Rhys, R.S. Thomas, Madeleine L'Engle, Penelope Fitzgerald, David Markson, Charlotte Mew…. .

Some living writers whose work I love—an ever-changing and incomplete list:
David Malouf, Julian Barnes, Geoff Dyer, Colm Toibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Richard Wilbur, Derek Walcott, Jeanette Winterson, A.S. Byatt, Linda Pastan, Frederick Buechner, Marilynne Robinson, Annie Dillard…...

That's enough for now. More soon.

Plus ça change....

....plus c'est la même chose.

It's still me. But a year (almost) since my last blog post. What excuse do I have? I just ran out of steam for blogging, I think, in the last of the three lovely years I spent in Lyon, France. The language became more familiar, so there was less bewilderment to write about. And then, suddenly, it was time to plan our departure, with all the ghastly logistics of moving.

I doubt there's anyone still out there at this point, but if there is, you may have noticed that the blog now has a very boring title, viz, my name. That's because I have no website and this is sort of instead of that.

Something exciting that's happened since I last posted is that a novel I wrote before going to France has now won an award and found a publisher. The book is called Inscription and it has won the Eludia Award. It will be published by Sowilo Press, an imprint of a foundation in Philadelphia called Hidden River Arts, which does wonderful work encouraging artists who are outside academia and the mainstream publishing world.

Since coming back to my home town I've attended two poetry events, and read a bit of my poetry at "open mic" sessions at both; which is coming full circle, in a way, as this is where I first read poetry aloud in public, as a member of the Young Arts Centre, when I was a teenager, eons ago.

But not a closed full circle; rather, a spiral. I hope to move outwards, onwards. And in this space I'd like to continue talking about words and language, but now to include books and writing and homecoming and Englishness and...well. Whatever, really.

Merci beaucoup for reading.

Sinister Street

Re my last post on bac, a reader very reasonably asked why I hadn't mentioned bac as the abbreviation for baccalauréat, the school leaving examination.  The answer is simple--I intended to, and then forgot! I'm glad she reminded me; I suspect it's the first association a French person makes on hearing bac without a context.

Context is usually crucial in understanding a word, but sometimes it doesn't give enough help to grasp the nuance. I've just read the lovely novel by David Foenkinos, La Délicatesse (2009). (Also a film, screenplay by Foenkinos himself and his brother Stéphane, starring Audrey Tatou). It's the first book I've read by this prolific young author (born in 1974) but it won't be the last.

I found certain key words and themes running through it, including sinistre. This didn't seem quite the same as English "sinister," but its shade of meaning wasn't clear. The heroine Nathalie congratulates, with surprise, Markus on making a joke. Markus, Swedish and phlegmatic, replies, "Thanks. Do I seem as sinistre as that?" He says in Sweden he is considered a boute-en-train (a live wire), and "being sinistre is a calling" there. Another character, Charles, thinks he hasn't made the women in his life laugh enough, and wonders, as his wife hasn't laughed for two years, three months and seventeen days, if he has the power to turn women sinistres. Markus and Charles have a dinner which seems to Markus the most sinistre of his life; Charles, disappointed in love, feels oppressed, feels his life is sinistre. 

I should mention that the book contains joy and optimism as well as sadness. But as these examples suggest, and as the Robert & Collins dictionary confirms, sinistre means "gloomy," "lugubrious;" sometimes "miserable" or "creepy"--c'est vraiment sinistre ici.  It can also mean grim--une sinistre réalité. It does sometimes mean, as in English, "ominous," "of ill omen;" the dictionary adds a special note explaining that this is the only sense in which it translates English "sinister."

In the historical dictionary, Alain Rey says that since the nineteenth century sinistre is often used in a weakened sense to mean "sad" or "boring"--as in La Délicatesse. This weakening is reflected in slang usage: une réunion sinistre, a deadly boring meaning; un sinistre imbécile, an absolute imbecile, with sinistre an intensifier, much as we say "he's an awful idiot."  It's the weakening of sinistre that makes it hard to understand for an English reader, since "sinister"is still strong,  as "awful" used to be.

As in English, the origin is ultimately Latin "sinister," meaning "left" as in "left-hand," "left side." The Romans originally thought the left-hand side was lucky, but then switched to agree with the Greeks that left is bad. This idea has permeated folk-lore and superstition ever since.

I'm Bac!

Though by now you have probably, and understandably, gone away. However, it's just about spring, time for this space to re-flower, after a pause that turned into an unintentional winter hiatus.

Bac means a bin; it's used for the open bins in which records--now CDs or DVDs--are displayed and sold, for rubbish bins, for recycling bins on which one sees written Ce bac est réservé pour le tri, and for various other sorts of containers and tubs, such as a vegetable bin in a fridge--bac à légumes--or the tub of a sink--évier à deux bacs, for example.

It also means "boat," especially a flat ferry-boat type of vessel, but I haven't yet come across this in context. Here on Lyon's rivers we have barges or péniches.

Somehow I thought bac was a modern word, but it has ancient origins. From vulgar Latin baccu or baccos, recipient, it seems to have originally been a Gallic word for "boat," and it has a Breton cognate, bag, plural bigi, boat/s.  Over the centuries it expanded from "boat" to other kinds of containers.

I started wondering whether our modern English "bag" comes from an ancient British cognate of the Breton bag. A bag is also a kind of container, after all. But not so, according to the OED. The early Middle English word bagge "possibly" came from Old Norse baggi. There was also Old French bague and Provençal bagua, "baggage," and medieval Latin baga,"chest" or "sack."  But it's not clear where any of these came from, nor their relationship to each other, and there seems to be no connection with the Breton bag at all.

More etymological mystery. But back to bac and ce bac est réservé pour le tri: le tri is a short form of triage so of course means "sorting," used particularly of sorting rubbish for recycling. In my building there is a rubbish room with grey bacs for rubbish and green ones for recyclables. This not-so-fragrant locale poubelles--first mentioned here last February, a year ago, heavens!--is used by the restaurant and shoe shop workers as well as by other flat-dwellers, and so there's rubbish of all sorts. Cardboard boxes and bits of card from inside boots seem to be thrown willy-nilly into the bacs pour le tri and it's not clear whether you are meant to separate paper from plastic from cardboard or whether it's Ok for it to just all go in pell-mell. As it does.

Glass, however, must be taken to special big oval containers--not bacs but silos, I learn from the city's website--on the streets. You push your bottles and jars piece by piece through a rubber-edged hole in the container's side; each one makes a satisfying crash on impact. This process takes quite a long time when performed by bleary-eyed young men emptying bags full of bottles the morning after the night before.

Mince!*

Sapristi!** How sadly neglected, this space.

The new Tintin film is here and several companies have appropriated the film's language to advertise toys and other merchandise on posters around town. Spielberg's film is in English, so Hergé's French has been transmogrified once more into the "Blistering barnacles!" and other vivid expressions that we've known since the first Tintin translations, comic books, and TV shows. Anyway, the film is great fun.

The expressions used by Tintin, Captain Haddock et al are not typically used in France, of course, but it's been a delight to discover that others one has read in books are still employed in everyday life.

For example, I've been so pleased to find that people do really say Oh-la-la! I've heard it in a variety of situations, once by an elegant elderly lady when nearly pushed off the pavement by a skateboarding youth, and just yesterday by a waitress at a café when I asked her what kinds of tea she had--she wasn't a regular waitress and was just lending a hand, so the question flummoxed her--Oh-la-la, tea? I haven't the faintest idea, I'll have to ask the owner.

People also still say dis donc! or dites donc!  --literally "say then" and meaning "fancy that!" or "goodness me!" or "you don't say!" One hears it on the street quite often as people talk to each other. I haven't yet heard sacrebleu! or zut! to name a couple of expressions I learnt years ago. Well, perhaps even then sacrebleu! was old-fashioned, because now it's marked in Robert & Collins as archaic; zut is not thus designated, however, so should still be in use--I'll keep my ears open.

What one does hear a lot is merde and many variations thereof, as well as chier, to crap, and expressions using it such as ça me fait chier! "It pisses me off!" or, "It's a pain in the arse!" And I am sure there are many other vulgar expressions I'm simply not recognizing, because they are used much more now than when I was in France at sixteen and seventeen.

Exclamations, expressions, and swear words represent one of the greatest difficulties for a foreign speaker of any language: one doesn't know exactly how they sound and feel to the natives. One doesn't have an accurate sense for what linguists call their "register," which is why Robert & Collins kindly append one asterisk for "informal language," two for "very informal language," and three for "offensive language."

For example, the word foutre always confuses me, because I thought it was the same as "f**k," but it turns out that's not really the case. In some usages--for example, je suis foutu, "I'm screwed," it has pretty much lost its sexual connotations and is far milder than "the f word."  (On the other hand, it must be admitted that my own sense of register for "the f word" is probably very much out of date; it still has shock value for me and still seems very strong, but it's used so often by so many people these days that I suspect its register has shifted.) But I'm afraid to use foutre because I'm just not sure enough about how it sounds.

Then baiser, which means "to kiss" and is still used thus, also has a sexual meaning--three asterisks in Robert & Collins--translated by "to screw, to f**k, to lay." So I am terrified of using it is its first sense.

Ciel! Mais c'est difficile, le français! And how I love it.


* Not chopped beef, but an exclamation--Drat! Darn it! or sometimes, Wow!
**Good heavens!