I’m 22,663 words into the first draft of novel#2, which is about an old lady, Mrs Vuillemeyer, who runs away to sea. It is unlikely that she will really get to the sea until the end of the book, though you never know. It is a silly story, a bagatelle, and I suspect that I’m going to have trouble even getting it published. I fear my agent will disown me when I drop it on his New York doorstep like a dead rat in a little terylene frock. So dubious do I feel about it, in fact, that for three years I’ve resisted writing it at all and have been trying to make a book out of one or two more Serious and Important(tm) ideas. However, Mrs V insists. She is going to have her book and it is going to be, bless her, completely batshit.

So I’m writing, and she’s at the station - she’s running away by train - and first the train is decorated like a gentleman’s club with flock papers, bookcases and stag’s heads over the compartments, then as it is pulling out from the station “There were an unusual number of giraffes waving us goodbye from the platform, many of them weeping, so that I wondered if we were going to war, which worried me a little, as I didn’t think I’d be much good at the front. I hoped they’d give me a desk job somewhere behind the lines.” But the conductor informs her that giraffes are just particularly lachrymal animals. I don’t know what an “unusual number” of giraffes would be - one would appear to be unusual enough - so that wording may have to change, but I shall feel very loathe to dismiss the giraffes entirely. They are there, and so solidly presently there that I would fear upsetting some important, subtle cosmic balance if I were to remove them. I’ve never felt so much at the mercy of a character and so little at liberty to change what I see through her eyes. The most I can do is try to make the writing good so that at least a few readers will forgive me for the rest.

Oh, and the conductor has told her that she’s the guest of honour on the train and will have to give a speech after luncheon. All this would seem fine, somehow, if the character were a kind of everyman. Then it could be like a Haruki Murakami novel. But because it’s a somewhat crazy old lady the chemistry of the whole thing is changed. It remains to be seen whether the chemistry will work at all. But I’m curious, I want to find out, which means, keep writing…

Had another quite busy night in dreamland. Since I’ve been taking the melatonin more of my dreams - or the ones I remember - have been set in daylit, non-threatening environments than previously. I was having one dream where I was driving around with my mother (she was at the wheel), for some reason to do with my late grandmother on my dad’s side. We were travelling through very pleasant semi-rural countryside, and Mum didn’t seem to be paying much attention to where the roads were - she was driving over paddocks and through front gardens. Then the dream switched to one about Star Wars. Darth Vader was looking for Han Solo. I seemed to be in Vader’s role as well as watching from outside - unusual for me, as I tend to be just myself in dreams (n.b. I was still my own size, so imagine a character more like Dark Helmet). Vader was climbing around in a ventilation shaft or something, which got filled with flames or poison gas - can’t remember which - but his suit protected him. Then he made it to a communications room, where a woman wearing a headset informed him that there was a message from Han Solo: “I ain’t the sheriff of Mexico, and if I were, I wouldn’t be illiterate”. From my omniscient perspective I understood that Han had been masquerading as the sheriff of Mexico, but had been discovered. Then I woke up as my phone beeped to tell me it needed charging. It’s probably thanks to the sudden wake-up that I remembered the dream. After I went back to sleep I dreamed something about a place like Milan central station (one of fascism’s best architectural monsterpieces) and a shop selling pirated music.

I’ve been taking melatonin before bed for five nights now. I’ve noticed that I’m sleeping better, am less tired during the day, and am more productive and in a better mood thanks to the improved sleep. I’ve also had somewhat improved recall of my dreams, though they were quite boring until last night. This is one I had after getting up for a drink of water at about quarter to four.

The setting was a fairly close facsimile of our apartment. There was an enormous jar sitting on Stu’s desk with a large beetle flapping around inside. There was also a toad. I can’t remember exactly what order things happened in next, but every time I looked at the jar there was something else in it, or something had escaped - a giant green frog, one of Patrick Woodroffe’s elephant snails, an even bigger toad, etc. I left the apartment for some reason and came back to find two foot-long cocoons in the room next door. When I looked again these had hatched into two little people, male and female, apparently made of stockings stuffed with white filling material. The male wore a toga and glasses and looked older than his partner. He explained that the life cycle and marriage customs of their kind, with the male being much older than the female, served to aid the preservation of written knowledge - or something to that effect. I don’t think we were talking verbally; we were writing our conversation down somehow. Meanwhile the elephant snail had taken its shell off and was waving it around with an air of triumph. The female stocking person didn’t say anything, just smiled a lot. I went out and came back again to find several strangers exercising in the living room - a man with a rowing machine, a woman on a treadmill, and a couple of others. The man started advising me on how to stay in shape. I found this annoying. Then I woke up.

The snail reminded me of my vampire snail period, which I went through somwhere around year 8 or 9. Leering snails with enormous fangs and top hats. A large, winged species of vampire snail was used as a mount by a clan of gothic warriors.

Thanks to Christian Read for the black, mauve and plaid and to Scott for inspiring thoughts of big, scary lesbians.

Edit: via Christian’s journal, the news that Drew Hayes, the creator of Poison Elves, has died at the age of 37. I’m sorry to hear it.

There was a bit of excitement in the park this morning as no less than eight water monitors came up on to the bank, lured by the fragrance of a dead turtle one of their number had scored for breakfast. I must remember to take my camera one day and get some photos of these handsome creatures. Most Thais seem to think them ugly, but as I said recently to a friend, to my eyes they have a sleek, rugged charm, like amphibious Clint Eastwoods. Or Gul Dukat, who I always found inexplicably attractive.

Some of the other sights around Lumpini:

The red hot kung fu gang. Mostly young, male and female, this group wears red t-shirts with yellow writing and does kickass stuff with broadswords, daggers and glaives. They remind me of my naginata days, except that they use metal weapons and don’t bother with armour.

The hooting runners. All male, they wear light blue shorts and tops and look Japanese. Possibly a corporate group. One of their number holds a horn which he honks without pause - in case, perhaps, someone lags and gets lost in the wilds of Lumpini park and never turns up for work again.

The Tai Chi master. Solitary, middle aged, bristle-cut grey hair. Moves like an eel in water.

The female Tai Chi master. Solitary, middle aged, flowing black hair, crimson pyjamas. Moves like water in water.

Sword lady. Thai-Chinese, retiree, plump, has a shopping jeep laden with martial arts weapons for sale (I bought a couple of fans from her). Sometimes she practises with a sword or broadsword. My friend Pao says that when he sees the women do their sword routines he hopes his wife doesn’t see it and decide to take it up. I told him he’d have to learn too and they could have fencing bouts.

The inverted farang. Attractive young European male. Does yoga on the rocks in the palm grove in front of which our group practises. He impresses us by doing a headstand on the rock without any padding for his noggin. Looks intense. Does not smile.

Latin ballroom dancers. They tango, salsa and rhumba in the little pavilion behind the palm grove.

Today I distinguished myself in the eyes of my classmates by saying “I will not eat my knee”, when I meant to say “I won’t have breakfast”. Thai grammar is quite simple, so it isn’t hard to say a grammatically correct sentence, but forget or mangle the tones and the opportunities for madlibs are endless.

Back home, practising while listening to music, I discovered that “Man of Constant Sorrow” from O Brother Where Art Thou? is excellent for doing to 42-form to, and “He’s In the Jailhouse Now” from the same soundtrack is quite good for the Grasshopper Fan routine, though I found myself unconsciously adding uncanonical foot-taps, pelvic thrusts, an occasional Michal Jacksonesque crotch-grab and that thing John Travolta does with his finger pointing in the air. Stu said I should put it on Youtube but I don’t think I will, somehow.

Wow. I’ve outdone myself in inconsistency on this page. If it isn’t a jarred baby it’s Gwynn. Or Gwen.

page 1
page 2
page 3
page 4
page 5
page 6
page 7
page 8
page 9

After talking with Laurie and Dave recently about their interesting dreams, I decided to try to improve my rather lacklustre dream life, which tends to resemble a hectic version of real world life without much in the way of fantastic or entertaining elements. Hence: a couple of nights ago I went to bed early so that I wouldn’t fall asleep too soon, lay on my back and actively visualised scenes, concentrating on images until they became narratives rather than letting them fly randomly by.

I can’t remember the dream I had, except for the last part. I was standing at a window, trying either to pass through the window or get out of my body, or both. I suddenly felt a cold, somewhat clammy arm wrap around my neck with irresistible strength. (I rarely have sensations of temperature or physical contact in dreams - this was unusually vivid.) The arm was pale grey. Its owner was behind me, out of sigh. I formed a mental impression of a grey, coarse featured male demon. I struggled rather feebly, invoking the Virgin Mary, who did not come to my rescue. The assailant was behind my right shoulder. He was pulling me around to my right, staying always behind me. I felt his cool moist hand hold my right hand - quite gently - and his teeth bit the back of my neck. His teeth were blunt, however, and the bite was not hard. Then he said in my ear, “Everything must fail”, or possibly “Everything must fade”. I woke up with hammering heart and the sensation of his hand lingering in mine. I actually thought Stu was there in the bed holding my hand, but only an hour had gone by.

I went back to sleep and woke in the morning knowing I’d had more dreams, but I didn’t remember them. The grey demon reminded me of a figure I met in a dream years and years ago. He was tall, sinister, in a grey robe with a hood that obscured his face. He said to me, “You don’t know how dead you are”. For some reason I quoted Labyrinth at him (yeah, I’m a nerd). “You have no power over me,” I said, and woke up feeling scared out of my skin. That turned out to be a life-changing dream. Despite his cornily evil appearance, he had actually given me a message I needed to hear. At the time I concluded that as I’m not good at remembering my dreams unless they’re nightmares that wake me up, if my subconscious - or something else - really wanted to tell me something it might use a nightmare as the only way to get the message through my thick head. And on this occasion there was the sweet hand-holding thing to consider. I decided he’d just been trying to tell me something, so I looked up “Everything must fail” and “Everything must fade” on the internet, and found a couple of interesting things. One I particularly liked for “fade” was this by Maurice Blanchot, on friendship:

“We are only looking to fill a void, we cannot bear the pain: the affirmation of this void. Who could agree to receive its insignificance – an insignificance so enormous that we do not have a memory capable of containing it and such that we ourselves must already slip into oblivion in order to sustain it – this time of slippage, the very enigma this insignificance represents? Everything we say tends to veil this one affirmation: that everything must fade and that we can remain loyal only so long as we watch over this fading movement to which something in us that rejects all memory already belongs”.

More Googling led to more Blanchot, on Romanticism from which this wise quote: “In the end, the writer has no power over the power of language; the poem must fail; literature falls short of the Work. What matters is only the trace of the Work in such failures, the break in the poem which indicates the whole.”

I also liked this, from here, by Mormon mentor Howard Salisbury, referring to Jean-Paul Sartre:

“For one to comprehend this experience he must have had its equivalent, and the equivalent doesn’t require submission to an invading and occupying army or any other kind of physical submission. The equivalent may be found in being cast out, in being isolated, from the structure or institution through which the self has found easy, ritual, predictable, communal expression.

“To be totally thrown back on the self so utterly that even his faithful and confident and loyal friends cannot restore his losses is to achieve that condition through which every value is tested for its compatibility to the self as separate entity. Everything must fail. Whatever then emerges is known by the self to belong to the self, intimately, indivisibly. All that is known is known only for its earned, realized, actualized meaning. The only meaning there is has been experienced. I think of Oedipus, Job, Lear.”

I can’t claim to have had this experience, but the thought is interesting to me at least partly because I don’t quite grasp it and suspect I wouldn’t grasp it unless I were to go through what it’s talking about. Which I’d rather not, I suppose, despite my curiosity.

Finally, from this essay on George Orwell, “everything must fail if it is to be measured against the unattainable.”

There are personal, self-interrogating thoughts that came to me in reaction to these quotes, but this isn’t the place for posting such ruminations. It is, however, the place for posting a link to this dream of Dave’s, which ends on a note of amusing lunacy that could win his subsonscious a place on the Goon Show.

Thanks again to Michael Cisco for this link to rather gorgeous art by Laurie Hogin. The work references animal portraits, still life, nature illustrations and allegorical paintings of the past in strange and amusing ways with the colour saturation turned up to 11. Those reds and blues look so rich I think they might actually be fattening.

In case you haven’t already seen it. You really need the sound on.

http://santasm.net/

It’s been a weekend of tonsilitis, nightmares and driving the porcelain bus. Which are all good reasons not to write, and to draw doujin instead. In autumn tones this time.

p.9

Thanks to Roz Kaveney for letting me use the “female virtue” line.

page 1
page 2
page 3
page 4
page 5
page 6
page 7
page 8