Doing something with good intentions: Women Writers

A recent epiphany: there’s no point worrying about things you think you ought to do.

If it’s worth doing, do it. If it’s worth doing, but not just yet, then find a place for it where you’ll be reminded in the future – a list you’ll review, a calendar – and move on to the next thing. If it’s not worth doing, if you care less about it than you’d like to, forget it. (This approach heavily influenced by Getting Things Done.)

For years I’ve felt like I should read more books by women, but somehow this feeling has never grown into action. It’s not just sexism. I don’t explicitly think, “that’s by a woman, I won’t read it”. It’s more that most of the books I’m excited to read are by men. Some of that might be an assumption that the writer will have a better handle on my concerns, but it’s largely marketing and living in a society which still treats the experiences of one half of the population as universal and voices from the other as niche.

So I’ve tried to shape this vague guilty thing – read more books by women – into something I can get on with. For the past couple of months I’ve been alternating between male and female writers, and it’s been great. This affirmative action has ensured I pay attention to writers and books that otherwise wouldn’t have quite elbowed their way into my hands – Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel, Charlotte Brontë, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter… I always knew these were great writers, it’s just that now I’m having the pleasure of reading them.

But my pile of unread books doesn’t have many women left. Any recommendations of interesting female writers? I’ll take fiction, non-fiction, poetry… Educate me!

The Weekly Amish

I have a problem focusing and getting down to things.

For most of my life I resisted lists and plans. I thought they were for plodders and bores, that they crushed the freewheeling and imaginative. I was sneakily proud of leaving everything until the last minute and of my messy desk: signs of my creative spirit!

Now I struggle with this tendency to disorder. Allowing it free reign kept me dull and slow to adapt, made my work worse and meant that I was always troubled by the hum of anxiety – what should I be doing right now? What am I forgetting? 

Most people instinctively know what took me 30 years to work out – having some structure and rules allow you the time and energy to do the things you enjoy doing. It’s not about putting oneself in a box, it’s about boxing up the distracting stuff of life and freeing space for the creative and enjoyable.

As for admin so for fun. Having easy access to the internet on a smartphone is great, but tricky for the likes of me. Any few minutes spare and I’ll automatically reach for my phone instead of thinking about what I need or want to do. Knowing that information is updating keeps me from losing myself in what I’m doing. Not even serious things, I don’t mind being distracted from those, but books, films, music – the good stuff!

Recently we’ve started to live one day a week like it’s 1993 and unplug our wireless router. It’s my favourite day of the week.

Throughout the day I keep reaching for my phone and thinking, ‘oh, I’ll just check… No. No, I don’t need to do that today.” It’s a relief not a sacrifice; an opportunity to do the things I actually prefer, like reading, cooking and listening to records, but which have slightly higher barriers to entry than Twitter.

Oscar Wilde said:

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.

He was half right – cigarettes are unsatisfying and unpleasant – but he could have been speaking of Tweets, emails and status updates.

The morning after our Amish day I glance at what I missed. There’s never anything that deserved immediate attention. For a few hours I’m more mindful about my internet consumption; by the end of the week I’m again a neurotic.

Maybe next week I’ll turn my phone off entirely. Rarely do I receive an urgent call or text (is there such a thing?), and some relief from the slight, though constant, feeling of expectant insecurity that comes from being always available outweighs any risk that I’ll get an urgent message while my phone’s off.

One of the great pleasures of being on holiday is disconnecting from your self-imposed obligations to “keep up with things”. Now I get a little of that feeling every week. If, like me, you’re a bit weird I recommend it.

Herzogovia

In case you’re curious about Herzog’s films and looking for a way in, here’s a list of my favourites. I’m no expert, but have seen most of the more famous ones.

He hasn’t made a flawless film (though Grizzly Man comes close) but you make allowances as the good bits are so very good; those good bits also ensure that even his worst films are worth seeing. Herzog makes no distinction between his narrative films and documentaries (so neither have I): both serve to illuminate some ‘ecstatic truth’, something profound beyond realism.

Let me know if you disagree. Which are your favourites?

The essentials:

• Aguirre, the Wrath of God
• Grizzly Man

And to be watched together…

• Fitzcarraldo
• Burden of Dreams

Highly recommended:

• Little Dieter Needs to Fly
• My Best Fiend 
• Cobra Verde
• La Soufrière

Recommended:

• Wings of Hope
• Woyzeck
• Lessons of Darkness
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Worth watching, but don’t go out of your way:

• Nosferatu the Vampyre 
• The White Diamond
• Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
• The Flying Doctors of East Africa
• Encounters at the End of the World

Update: the nice and short La Soufrière is available on youtube here, here and here.

WWWHD?

Parents name their children’s first toys, often in a hurry or by default. Thus, “Ted”, “Teddy”, “Bear” etc. When we’re feeling energetic we try to avoid that. I give you Billy’s teddies, Klaus and Werner Bearzog.

Werner Herzog has become relatively well-known lately. His voice, literal and artistic, is so distinct that he’s easy to parody. Here he is talking about the jungle:

We watched a lot of his films around the time we moved away from London. Most of them are about egomaniacs turning their backs on society and taking up a ludicrous scheme. I have no idea why they appealed so much.

The defining Herzog image comes from Fitzcarraldo: the pulling of a boat up a hill.

It is spectacular (the weight of the boat! the jungle! the moustache!), inspiring and ludicrous, a perfect visual metaphor for the enacting of dreams.

I was back chipping plaster today, listening to a podcast to pass the time. On came a recent interview with Herzog. Though currently the work is boring, and the future of the project uncertain (i.e. scary), it was a nice reminder that I’m not dragging a boat up a hill. It was also a reminder that if you do the same things all the time, things you’re comfortable with, then where’s life?

This renovation is a a labour-intensive, freezing cold, groping in the dark. I’m unqualified and unskilled. If I feel the motivation slipping I’ll mentally recast myself as a Herzogovian hero, and the doing-up of a 1.5 bedroom terraced house as a glorious folly.

If you’re interested in more Herzog here’s a selection from the excellent documentary Burden of Dreams, covering the making of Fitzcaraldo.

[The investors] said to me, ‘Well how can you continue, can you… do you have the strength, or the will, or the enthusiasm, or so…?’ And I said, ‘How can you ask me this question… it is… if I abandon this project I would be a man without dreams and I don’t want to live like that: I live my life or I end my life with this project.’

Family plug

Oh, and speaking of imminent collapse, my excellent and multi-talented sister is running (in her words) “A series of talks about the end of the world, taking place in London through Sunday afternoons in February 2012.” More information here, and on Twitter.

If you’re near London, I demand you get a ticket. It will be brilliant.

Can I please go back to chipping-off plaster?

Just a quick update as I’m knackered.

Now things have been stripped back we have to start putting other things back in. This morning we had a damp course fitted.

A treat for fans of my extremely labour-intensive method of plaster removal: turned out the two ground floor walls I’d left intact needed the bottom foot of plaster off before the damp course. Now the bottom is denuded I’ll have to strip them to the top.

You may think I’ve cheated getting in a pro, but this wasn’t something I could do myself (although with a lot of these jobs you wonder how much of the skill is “owning the tools”). I did get it done on the cheap by saying I’d sort out the rendering (putting on a special plaster) and replastering. He explained what I needed to do: I blanked over somewhere around “cement mixer”. Well, that’s another one for future me to worry about. I don’t envy that guy.

I also had a harrowing visit from a roofer/builder who came to give a quote on replacing some tiles and left prophesying the imminent collapse of the whole house (though not to worry, his quote would cover the necessary preventative measures). I’m going to blithely assume it’ll come out in the wash. This is the most important stage to get right. Once the structure’s sound the rest will seem trivial (easy little jobs like a compete rewiring, installation of plumbing including central heating, new bathroom, ceilings, floors, kitchen…).

In other news, in an effort to escape from the tyranny of ‘big bakery’ I have a sourdough starter on the go. I’ll let you know how that pans out.

A Cost Benefit Analysis of Ownership

I’m startled whenever I remember I have an economics degree (signed up in a panic, quickly realised my mistake, too self-conscious to change subjects – it was only determining the course of my life, after all). I found my old scientific calculator the other day and had no idea what it was for (science?).

Still, there were a couple of useful concepts that have stayed with me, in particular, trade-offs. If you’re doing one thing, you can’t be doing another. If you spend your money on something, you can’t spend it elsewhere.

As I mentioned in my book giveaway posts, I’ve been thinking about what I actually need to own. Our new house is small, and we have two children. How should I decide what to keep? I’m now going to do some made-up economics – stick with me.

What you paid for an object is irrelevant when deciding whether or not to keep it. That money has gone either way. What matters is your life now, and from now, and how best to optimize that life.

A very simple model might be that if you expect an object to provide any future benefit to you at all, keep it.

 

If EFB > 0, keep the thing. (Where EFB is Expected Future Benefit.)

 

However, this ignores the costs associated with ownership. Things use space: you should charge them rent: they may pay in usefulness or beauty.

They also use space in your head – keeping a mental inventory, taking responsibility for your possessions’ upkeep, a nagging sense that you should use something more, or at all…

Adding these to our model we should keep something if the benefits outweigh the costs:

 

If EFB > EFC(external) + EFC(internal) , keep the thing.

(Where EFC is Expected Future Cost.)

 

There are other costs and benefits you can add in – the benefit of looking a bit cool, the cost of holding on to the idea that objects confer cool on their owners – you get the idea.

This technique worked for me while the alternative to ownership was giving away to a charity shop. Then I glanced at Amazon marketplace and realised that some of the pile had resale value; they could be converted into cash.

This changes things. There is now another cost to consider, the opportunity cost of ownership (value of the next best alternative, i.e. having the money; I’m playing a bit fast and loose with definitions here).

So…

 

If EFB > EFC(external) + EFC(internal) + OC , keep the thing.

(OC is the opportunity cost of ownership, or what you could sell it for.)

 

Adding in the opportunity cost tipped a lot into the not-worth-keeping pile.

I have a trip to London planned for a couple of weeks’ time, and I’m hoping to go with friends to Madrid this spring to see a bullfight (and just like that, my female readership, carefully nurtured with pictures of babies and stories subtly depicting me as decent, evaporates…). I’m looking forward to these future experiences and adventures even more knowing they are funded by the conversion of relics. The old me is paying for the new me – cheers, old me!

I might aim to reduce my possessions to what would comfortably fit in two Victorian trunks, one for clothes, the other for books, the better to take train journeys across India.

Tour of the shelled house

This morning I filled another skip with house detritus. I thought it was a good opportunity to show what it looks like now we’ve got rid of most of what we don’t want, and before we’ve started putting in what we do.

As a comparison, here’s the house before I started working on it:

A long long way to go, but we’ve taken the first steps.

On Emerson and Jobs

I’ve been reading Emerson’s essay, ‘Self Reliance’.

Emerson

It’s available for free online though I took it out from the library to save my eyes. It takes some time to adjust to the mid-nineteenth century rhythm, and there’s more aggression, and more about the clergy and American views of nineteenth century Europe than you probably need. Still, you’ll probably agree with some of it and it’s fun to hear those sentiments expressed loftily.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.

It’s the mid-nineteenth century version of the famous Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech. Where Steve says, on following his heart to a calligraphy course he later credits for the Macintosh’s fonts:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Emerson writes:

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.

This kind of stuff is good for a pep talk when you need some reassurance, but you shouldn’t take it too seriously as the last word on how best to live. Steam-rollering, sharp-elbowed, no-truth-but-my-own gut-thinkers are all very well, but they’re a pain in the arse to live with. Such single-mindedness does not guarantee success, but memoirs aren’t written by those who tirelessly follow their truth into poverty and madness.

Still, cynicism is too easy. You only have the present moment: living in it excitedly and optimistically beats grinding along in fear.

Skips and Ceilings

Booked a skip for the day. It filled up fast, despite my struggles lugging leaking bags of dust down stairs to wheezingly heave them over the skip’s lip.

I have left some rubble, and a load of tiles, wood, doors: varied jetsam. I’ll get another skip booked for next week.

While I was down there I had a poke at the ground floor ceiling and decided it had to go. It felt good to have the wrecking bar (£1.65, and still giving) and cold hammer back in hand; a coating of dust and grime has pulled me out of my mid-winter decadence.

For a quick video of the day’s adventures, see below: