Over at the Vela blog, I wrote a review (of sorts) of Rebecca Solnit’s new book The Faraway Nearby, which is out soon and very much worth reading:

For almost two years now, I’ve been making a dress. I bought the pattern and a roll of fabric on holiday in Wales, but I didn’t have a sewing machine (or tailor’s chalk, or pins, or enough time, or enough patience) and I didn’t know how to sew, so what I was really buying was the possibility of becoming the sort of person who could make a dress.

For a long time the paper bag full of potential gathered dust in my wardrobe, until finally, one cold winter weekend, I brought it over to my boyfriend’s mother’s house, she set up her sewing machine, and we began to make the dress together.

To see or to help a garment come into being, to witness the transformation, is affecting. I don’t want to put too much importance on this – it’s just an item of clothing – but still: out of fabric springs form. This particular fabric, though, purchased because it felt warm and heavy on a cold Welsh afternoon, has a very loose weave, and unravels easily – forgiving if you need to unpick stitches, but dangerous, likely to fray: at any moment things might fall apart.

To describe something that’s not quite right, or that’s becoming not quite right, we use this language of un-making. It’s unraveling, we might say. She’s come undone. When I was 16 my mother taught me how to knit and I made half of a fog-purple scarf over winter break before I got restless and gave the hobby up. Around the same time I was listening to a lot of Weezer and the line “If you want to destroy my sweater/Hold this thread as I walk away” got lodged in my head, even after I’d abandoned the project. Sometimes it’s easier to destroy something with a thread than to create something with a thread; sometimes, though, a thread is what the whole world is made of: it’s a lifeline.

Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby is a book about threads, and a book made up of threads: “in the old way of saying it, tales were spun; they were threads that tied things together and from them the fabric of the world was woven.” Solnit spins familiar tales. Her mother gets old, and sick. She herself gets sick, and then well. A child falls down a well and is rescued, but ultimately her rescuer can’t rescue himself. An artist paints an escape route and sets himself free. Scheherazade tells her stories to save her own life and the lives of countless others. People die, or are born, or reborn.

“All stories are really fragments of one story, the metamorphoses,” Solnit tells us, and there’s an undertone of resignation or acceptance of this, of the slow march of time, the inevitability and invisibility of change: the soldier survives his war but is not the same man he was, and the cannons are melted down and reconstituted and eventually become a weapon for another war.

Read the rest here…

❧

As I was moving from one study to another last week I started thinking about how dependent I am on the support of a certain set of books. It’s not that I can’t work without them, just that if I am working, I prefer to have them within arm’s reach. It isn’t even necessarily that I’ll need to refer to them (though I might) – more that they’re part of the comfortable scenery, reminders of my own intentions and ambitions (and conspirators in procrastination: if there’s something else I should be doing, you’ll quite often find me flipping through one of these books).

Here’s what’s on my desk:

- The New Oxford Book of English Verse. 1972 edition. Lime green jacket, blue lettering. Chosen and edited by Helen Gardner. Purchased for £4.50 in Hay on Wye a few years ago, during the literary festival, our annual pilgrimage. Once belonged to someone who signed their name (illegible) on the 5th of August, 1978. Some previous owner – maybe the same one – also pedantically (or appropriately?) added “D.B.E., M.A., L.Litt – Prof. of Eng. Lit. Oxford” after Helen Gardner’s name on the title page. I’m not always very good with poetry but it seems important to have some to hand, and I have a sentimental attachment to this particular bulky, out of date volume, because this is how I discovered Louis Macneice: flipping through my new purchase on the train from Hereford, the sun setting outside, the carriage cold, I found “Snow“: “I peel and portion/A tangerine and spit the pips and feel/The drunkenness of things being various.”

- Louis MacNeice’s Selected Poems is, of course, also on the desk. It has soft pages and smooth edges; my mother bought it for me one summer day in Bath and just to hold it, let alone to read it, is comforting.

- Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer.

- Zuleika Dobson. An old orange Penguin paperback (“This edition published…in celebration of the Author’s eightieth birthday, 24 August 1952″) that I bought in Boston, at a used bookshop in Brookline, one hot September night shortly after arriving back from Oxford for the first time. I was using it for research for a while, so it’s marked up and peppered with post-it notes bearing cryptic notes like “‘Mainly architectural…’ + femininity in Oxford” that could, out of context (or even in context) be interpreted to mean almost anything you want. The post-its were bought as a joke from Urban Outfitters and all have obscenities written along the edges, like “Ass” or “Balls” or “Fuck”, so that my attempts at scholarship cannot be taken too seriously.

- The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. I have practically written my own book in the margins of this copy so I hope I never lose it, though in a way to read it fresh (without my own subtext) would probably be a good thing for me.

- The Elements of Style. I only keep this on the desk because I feel I should. I had a professor in college who said we should all own a copy, so I went out and bought one, and I have hardly looked at it since. Still, it lends gravity to the line of volumes, and I do like E.B. White’s essays.

- Graham Greene’s In Search of a Character. Stolen (or rather rescued) from a school library. It’s a slim book but I haven’t read the whole thing; I keep it there because of the introduction – “Neither of these journals was kept for publication, but they may have some interest as an indication of the kind of raw material a novelist accumulates. He goes through life discarding more than he retains, but the points he notes are what he considers of creative interest at the moment of occurrence” – and the first line of the Congo journal: “…All I know about the story I am planning is that a man ‘turns up’, and for that reason alone I find myself on a plane between Brussells and Leopoldville.”

-Brideshead Revisited. We have at least three other copies of this in the house but this is the original, bought at a book sale in Santa Ynez, printed in 1945, with its unmistakable Brideshead smell. In the back is a National Express ticket from January 2009, from High Wycombe to Oxford. I have never been to High Wycombe, so this is a complete mystery to me. Over the years this book has come to mean less to me than it used to, but it’s still inconceivable that I could ever sit at a desk and write seriously without it being present.

-The Origin of Species.

- An uncorrected proof of Isolarian by James Attlee, which I read during my first summer here. I guess in a way I think Attlee has written the book that I would have liked to write. At first I was sniffy about this, because I wanted to write it, but now I find it rather soothing, because seeing the book there reminds me that I don’t have to write that book, – the burden has been lifted! – that I have another book (or other books, I should say) to write instead. Also, it’s very good.

- Heart of Darkness. I remember reading this in my last year of high school. I got really into it (some of my notes and essays from that first reading are tucked in the back of this flimsy copy), and I think I mainly keep it visible to remind me that I know how to read, if you see what I mean.

- Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. I think if Kirsty Young asked me what book I’d like on my desert island in addition to the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, this might be it. I don’t know why but I can’t seem to grow tired of reading it; the delight intsensifies with each re-reading. The book begins to smell worn and right, the pages stained with sunlight.

- Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan. Because the tension described by this line: “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other” is at the heart of (a lot of) what I think and write about.

- Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage. For this line and a million others:

“So I went from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean I went from not working on my book about Lawrence to not working on the novel because all of this to-ing and fro-ing and note-taking actually meant that I never did any work on either book. All I did was switch between two – empty – files on my computer, one conveniently called C:\DHL, the other C:\NOVELand sent myself ping-ponging back and forth between them until, after an hour and a half of this, I would turn off the computer because the worst thing of all, I knew, was to wear myself out in this way. The best thing was to do nothing, to sit calmly, but there was no calm, of course: instead, I felt totally desolate because I realised that I was going to write neither my study of D.H. Lawrence nor my novel.”

- Vile Bodies. There’s a chapter of this book written entirely in dialogue. It’s hilarious and devastating, hilariously devastating, devastatingly hilarious.

- Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. I know this book pretends to be a detective novel, but it isn’t; it’s a love story about Oxford. I can’t remember who, but someone once told me it was “the best of the books about Oxford”, and I’m not sure I could honestly disagree. In any case I do remember that Wodehouse wrote of Sayers that, “It is extraordinary how much better she is than almost all other mystery writers”.

- The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton.

- The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Anyone else have any books they don't like to work without?

❧

Last night, probably because there was something much more pressing I should have been doing, I started rearranging books. I get this urge periodically, but I don’t think it’s necessarily symbolic of anything other than an ordinary human restlessness – “we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper…our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread,” as Alain de Botton writes, and our house is wallpapered mostly with books.

I started to think a change of scenery might be nice. I spend so much time in my upstairs study, looking down on the frozen garden in winter, the lawn overrun with elder in summer. But the last month has been a period of intense unproductivity, and maybe, I thought, there was an unfortunate bedspread in the room, derailing my sense of purpose (also, the chair downstairs is much more comfortable than the chair upstairs). So I started the shift to the downstairs study – another periodic compulsion of mine, and an obvious luxury of space. It takes me a while to move from one study to the other, although ostensibly my only tool is a laptop, because I have to arrange the space with great care: I need to make sure I have all the books I might want to refer to, the irrational little display of shells and pens, the candle I almost never light, the box of wax matches from Kenya with which to light the candle I almost never light.

Anyway, as I was arranging my most crucial books downstairs, I looked up, at this towering shelf, floor to ceiling, 9 stories high, and I was overcome with a fear that it would come crashing down on my head if I worked here. At first I thought the fear was arbitrary: I worry about everything from whether my teeth are stained to whether the world will end in a series of nuclear explosions, so why not this, too, plucked at random from the infinite list of possibilities? But it had infected my consciousness, and now I was imagining all kinds of gruesome scenarios: what if I did light that candle, and the shelf collapsed and the books went up in flames and the house burned down? Investigation seemed not just prudent but necessary for survival, so I climbed up on a stool.

The shelves themselves are just slabs of wood, resting on small protuberances which have been drilled into the wall, and my investigation revealed that the protuberances holding up the 7th shelf had come loose. There did not seem to be any immediate danger of anything collapsing, but I was nevertheless vindicated: I had averted disaster! I removed the books from the 7th shelf, set them out in stacks on the mantlepiece and, when they began to overflow even there, next to the fireplace. And now I am literally surrounded by books and only a little less afraid that they’ll all come crashing down on me.

❧

“The stupidity of being oneself. The unavoidable comedy of being anyone at all.”

I read Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal a few days ago. I hated it. I think it’s fair to say that. I hated it, but I read it anyway. I found a copy of it on the shelf near the bathroom, the one tucked in the alcove at the top of the stairs, while I was excavating the thick stacks of books, searching for more Paul Auster (on the same shelf I uncovered two copies of Man in the Dark and a hardback copy of Travels in the Scriptorium, so not a fruitless endeavor). Anyway, The Dying Animal. An uncorrected bound proof. It was strange to find it in this state – it was published in 2001, why did we have this uncorrected proof, with its flimsy yellow construction-paper cover? I had never read any Philip Roth before. I know I keep saying that – I had never read any Paul Auster before, I had never read any this before, any that before – and if it highlights the enormous gaps in my literary education, let it also indicate a curiosity, a willingness to admit these gaps and then fill them. But I had never read any Philip Roth before and I thought, from the back cover description, that maybe I would like this one.

I hated it – well, if not immediately, then almost immediately. The pleasure of the opening pages – promising! – was diminished by what came after, diminished by my irrational reaction to the white-haired professor’s young lover and her “cream-colored silk blouse”. Why should a cream-colored blouse matter so much to me? The repetition, I guess. Pages and pages of her big breasts and her bowlike lips and her startling self-awareness. None of it ultimately incidental, but all of it seemingly gratuitous. Why do I hate her cream-colored silk blouse? But no matter why: I do, and even so I read the book, the whole book, though I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t simply skimmed the last few pages, coming to the last lines breathlessly and excitedly. At some point during my reading I remembered that Roth had once been shortlisted for some sort of bad sex award.

But it’s this book, not its author, that I object to. And this line – extracted, as it happens, from its sexually explicit setting: “The stupidity of being oneself. The unavoidable comedy of being anyone at all.” This I like.

❧

“The careening interior monologues of Mrs. Dalloway serve as a prescient forecast of today’s hyperlinked, click-through culture”

- Buzz Poole at The Millions

I mean, I haven’t always loved Virginia Woolf, but I like looking at her from this angle.

❧