Against This Fantasia Is This Place And My Time

From Second Terrace, via Ochlophobist, comes a superb post on locality. I wasn't familiar with this blogger's blogging until now, but first impressions are good. In my own self-centred way, what I of course mean by 'good' is 'I identify with it'. And it's well-written, which is a nice change. You wouldn't believe the syntacto-grammatical wrangling in academia!

Here's an especially 'good' snippet. Change Pittsburgh for London (or Norwich, hmmmaybe) and it's something I could have written.

"I fear not a Mayan 2012, a Palin/Beck ticket or Obama's embrace of a muezzin. I fear no socialist or fascist or even a wahhabist/salafist putsch. These are all stupid fantasies – science-fiction nostalgias if you will. What I fear is the coming of an anti-Jerusalem, a dis-mental no-place where memory is vanquished and the Word – the principle of all thought – is expunged.

What I have, against this fantasia, is this Place and my Time, and my memory of all the places and times before and a history that strings them together. What I have is a real embrace, a vision of certain smiles, and a field of stars projected from a little yard. What I have is an amateur garden and a church where iron sharpens iron with full communion. What I have is a glimpse of the One Place, the New Jerusalem, which glimmers through this Pittsburgh in which I live."

Poetry Wednesday Vol. I: Fulbright Scholars

Where was it, in the Strand? A display
Of news items, in photographs.
For some reason I noticed it.
A picture of that year's intake
Of Fulbright Scholars. Just arriving -
Or arrived. Or some of them.
Were you among them? I studied it,
Not too minutely, wondering
Which of them I might meet.
I remember that thought. Not
Your face. No doubt I scanned particularly
The girls. Maybe I noticed you.
Maybe I weighed you up, feeling unlikely.
Noted your long hair, loose waves -
Your Veronica Lake bang. Not what it hid.
It would appear blond. And your grin.
Your exaggerated American
Grin for the cameras, the judges, the strangers, the frighteners.
Then I forgot. Yet I remember
The picture: the Fulbright Scholars.
With their luggage? It seems unlikely..
Could they have come as a team? I was walking
Sore-footed, under hot son, hot pavements.
Was it then I bought a peach? That's as I remember.
From a stall near Charing Cross Station.
It was the first fresh peach I had ever tasted.
I could hardly believe how delicious.
At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh
By my ignorance of the simplest things.

- by Ted Hughes. See Enanoslivo for Poetry Wednesdays.

Memory Eternal Father Pavle!

Via Father Stephen, I learned today that Patriarch Pavle of Serbia has died. It so often seems that we - or maybe just I - only learn about these saintly people when they die. Memory eternal!

The Bleak Cold Of The Universe Might Whistle Through

I'm sitting on my bed. The window is wide open to the night, which is black and rainy. A canvas bag hangs out of the window, suspended from the latch; in it are two red bell peppers and a pint of milk. They are there to keep cold overnight.

My writing has degenerated into blank, straightforward description: He sat, he watched, he ate. If I try to vary it, nothing comes out. So I keep typing rubbish because rubbish does make a difference to word counts, which is about the only good thing that can be said for rubbish.

It is comforting to remember that before there was anything worth doing anything with, JCO wrote several 'practise novels' which she just threw away.

Having the window wide open and the wind crashing in reminds me of this from I'll Take You There:
"A hole in the heart through which the bleak cold of the universe might whistle through."

ACK, why is she my hero? She's so unattainably excellent. Aim lower, Marigold, aim lower!

___

A custom Christmas message from Dominic (available to all, for a small fee):
But it is true that Bad Things rocks almost as much as the programme from whence it came.

You Are Part Ninja, Part Monkey, And Part Stairmaster Cyborg

For now, stop thinking about 50K. Just sprint thousands. Visualize each writing session as a tall staircase made up of 1000 steps. You are part ninja, part monkey, and part stairmaster cyborg. You were born to fly up those steps.

- from the NaNoWriMo Week 2 pep talk email.

From Dostoevsky

"I shall be told, perhaps, that Alyosha was stupid, undeveloped, had not finished his studies, and so on. That he did not finish his studies is true, but to say that he was stupid or dull would be a great injustice. I'll simply repeat what I have said above. He entered upon this path only because, at that time, it alone struck his imagination and presented itself to him as offering an ideal means of escape for his soul from darkness to light. Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our last epoch - that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal - such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them."

- from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

To Thee, The Champion

My confidence has suffered a blow after following Abbi's prolific WriMo progress for a couple of days and tonight reading what Lucy posted of her novel. My own progress is small and painful because
- that's how I am, I am determinedly small and painful about things
- I'm still unsure about which 'voice' to use: when I dreamt up the novel ages ago, I was going through a phase of writing in a very chopped-down, clear, precise way. Now I am back in my normal rambly flowery way, and there is a discrepancy  between the two conceptions of the story.
- The protagonist isn't very likeable
- I don't have time for NaNoWriMo.

To make myself feel better, here is some gorgeous hymnography. What is so loveable is the unexpected line breaks in the way it is sung, depicted here with /s.

To thee, the champion / leader, do I offer thanks of victory! / O Theotokos, / thou who hast delivered me from terror, / but as thou that hast that power invisible. / O Theotokos, thou alone can set me free / from all forms of danger, free me and deliver me / that I may cry unto thee, / hail O Bride without Bridegroom!

(Yeah, I got out my battered old copy of I'll Take You There. It makes me feel better about the way I write. And about life generally.)