Old Farts Smell the Best

I have hit a wall. Not literally, obviously, or I would be a flattened sort of creature with fingers of rubber.

My writing has collapsed into a litter of consonants and vowels that drift across the carpet to clutter in the corners ( how I love alliteration). My novel remains buried somewhere in the recesses of my computer awaiting the final polish from my magic duster. An idea for a series of inter-related short stories remains eleven pages of an idea for a series of inter-related short stories.

Nicola Morgan has posted on the issue of hitting walls and hit a nerve. (Well, you would, wouldn't you, hitting a wall at speed?)

The particular wall I hit was erected by the masons, Expectations, I could say Great Expectations but Arrogance may be more accurate. I had assumed I would be welcomed on a very prestigious course with rose petals strewn before me by the Dean; he turned up with thorns.

Collapse of the stout party, as they used to say. But do not weep on my behalf: the point I want to address is not the one entitled 'Managing Expectations', but 'Managing Growing Old'.

There, I've said it: I am growing old. Not a problem in itself, indeed, I read somewhere that older people are more content than at any other times in their lives. To an extent this is true but, being an awkward sod, I still have ambitions, the major of which is to write a novel worthy of serious consideration.

But what happens when you reach a certain age? All the sins of your past assemble in a single spot and assault you at once. It was once possible for me to breeze through life no matter what was thrown up with no other help than a nose-peg and cunning intelligence. Now, laxity is itself the problem.

Life, it seems to me, is an accumulation of habits and behavioural patterns. What suited when young and becomes comfortable through use is not easily dislodged in later life no matter how inappropriate

F**k it. I will now behave inappropriately. Inappropriate to my age and expectations. This is not say I will suddenly become an eccentric. That was my norm, i.e. to question the status quo, but now I will conform. I will vote Conservative and wear what few strands I have in a perm. I will get heated over issues of immigration and the collapse of English identity. Shiny faced posters of David Cameron will adorn my bedroom. Nick Clegg will be the custard on my pudding.

I will join the rich. Ha! You may laugh but all my life people have told me I would be rich. Now is the time. Personally, I am not a fan of the rich - and I know a few who are mega-rich - but it is time to join their ranks, if only to mock them for their narrow-minded, greedy assumptions.

How is this to be achieved? I don't have a clue but, believe me, it is not rocket science. It is a combination of nonce, greed, exploitation, ruthlessness, and testosterone - all qualities I have in abundance. (I would invite you to view my testicles if this were not a public domain.)

Why this sudden ambition?

i want to move back to London only to discover that all I can afford is a cupboard in a garden shed. Now, woodlice I count as among the best of my friends but I am allergic to rudimentary pots (aesthetically they cause me hives). So money is necessary.

Am I joking?

No. I will, despite others' expectations of what should, could, can be achieved by an old burst of wind like myself, find a means.

Sir Richard Dearlove - Tom Phillips?

This article on Sir Richard Dearlove's evidence to the Chilcot inquiry caught my eye in the Guardian this morning, to quote:

Never let it be said that Britain's spies do not have a sense of humour. Ninety-three pages of evidence (pdf) given in private to the Iraq inquiry by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, have finally been released. Unfortunately, they have been so heavily redacted by the censors that some are entirely black, save for a lone, enigmatic question mark.

It reminded me of the work of Tom Phillips on whose work I posted earlier. It makes you wonder if Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, has secret longings to be an artist.

The Blue Tit Faction

One of the few pleasures among my duties as a tempaculturalist is to watch with the same fascination of the cats, though perhaps not their appetite, (see final pic in my last post), the antics of the gang of little masked bandits who mount relentless raids on the Balcony Precinct of La Haute Houssais.

This CCTV pic gives little clue to the constant hustling of these would be jailbirds, for they be Blue Tits, one of a very small group of villains who make all their demands for mere peanuts.

Country Matters

This week I am house-sitting for Stuart and Gabrielle, professional permaculturalists, in La Haute Houssais, Brittany, a hamlet so small it is easy to drive straight through and never notice it in your rear view mirror.

While here, I am also chicken-sitting:

 Sheep-sitting:

Rabbit-sitting:

And cat-sitting:

I feel I can now justifiably call myself a man of the soil.

Santa Amy

Overhead on Christmas morning, Katie, aged two, sitting up in bed addressing her still sleeping sister.

"Thank you, Amy," she said. "Oh, thank you, Amy. Thank you. Oh Amy, thank you."

Katie had discovered the stocking at the foot of her bed.

Frozen Fingers

You may wonder why I have not posted recently but I find it difficult to type with fingers frozen to the keyboard. So instead of a blog, a couple of tracks on the subject currently closest to my wrists.

Life: A User's Manual, Georges Perec

I smell like poo. Allegedly.

It was my birthday recently and I woke to a big dump of snow together with the information that I smell like poo. This news was sung to me over the phone by a gleeful Amy. It made my snowbound day.

So wrapped in layers of clothing and huddled around a candle - there's no heating in my flat  - I spent the day reading Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec.

Perec, who died aged 46 in 1982, was a French novelist, filmmaker and essayist, as well as a member of the Oulipo group.

Founded in 1960, Oulipo, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, continues to bring together intellectuals and masochists who enjoy making the art of writing even more difficult than it already is. They bind themselves with constraints so tight their vowels bleed. For instance, in a lipogram, the writer will deliberately exclude using a number of predetermined letters; in one variation, the prisoner's constraint, the writer will not use any letter with a descender or ascender, the letters b, d, f, g, etc.

Vist Yelena's blog for more of her excellent work

Perec, who among his many accomplishments compiled exacting crosswords for Le Point, once wrote a univocalic novella,  Les Revenentes, in which 'e' was the only vowel he permitted himself. In contrast, his novel, La Disparition, was written without once using the letter 'e'.

You could say he was an eccentric. Or an ccntric.

La Vie Mode D'Emploi, or Life: A User's Manual, is his best known and most admired work.  Needless to say, Perec did not make the work of writing his novel simple but an exercise in lexical acrobatics

I read somewhere the claim that Perec was a structuralist. Having studied the subject, I am less than sure, unless the writer is referring to the structure of the novel in which case Perec is less a structuralist and more an architect.

In Life: A User's Manual, Perec takes as his starting point the imaginary elevation of a building with rooms, including the stairwells, that form a ten by ten grid. The whole is imagined as existing in a single moment, as if a painting. The book travels around the building in a series of chess moves known as the Knight's Tour with one chapter devoted to each room. The stories relating to each are constructed by the use of a mathematical device: over the ten by ten grid of the building Perec lays a Graeco-Latin bisquare. From the little I understand, Graeco-Latin bisquare is an instrument whereby from a given number of elements or themes all possible combinations are revealed on the different squares without any repetition. To quote from Frieze:

Each box in which the knight landed gave coordinates referring to the ‘schedule of obligations’. These lists provided the objects, emotions, places and periods in time which would feature within each chapter.

In a scholarly paper, Memory and Oulipian Constraits, Peter Consenstein identifies '42 themes [that] were divided into ten groupings of four each, leaving room for two extra "themes." He goes on to suggest that Perec employs the constraints he imposes as the means to create the themes, 'In essence, the constraint determines the novel's themes; the theoretical consequences of working under constraint are such that the novel is "constraint-driven" not "theme-driven."

This may make the Life: A User's Handbook sound as joyous to read as John Harrison's Principles of Mr. Harrison's Time-Keeper, but joyous it is. To quote Paul Auster, who reviewed the book for The New York Times shortly after its English publication:

To read Georges Perec one must be ready to abandon oneself to a spirit of play. His books are studded with intellectual traps, allusions and secret systems, and if they are not necessarily profound (in the sense that Tolstoy and Mann are profound), they are prodigiously entertaining (in the sense that Lewis Carroll and Laurence Sterne are entertaining).