the violet

I wrote a little something for the Fall issue of The Violet.

I think this magazine is quite, quite marvellous. It champions everything I think a women's magazine should--so please, please check it out. It will have you baking and decorating and--I am convinced--taking good care of yourself this fall.

on education and staying in it

Things feel a little different, this year. They feel much more poignant and appreciated--in many ways, much more settled and real.

This walk back into school--this metaphorical walk back into school--is important, and it'll take place next week. (We start late, here. So very, very late). It may very well be my last and that, that thought, is frightening. I don't want to leave education. I feel at my best here. I feel grounded and secure and focused. That back-to-school feeling, for me, is energising and invigorating. It makes me produce with a renewed mentality. It makes me soak up and savour detail. (So it is not a bad security at all.)

For a long, long time, I wanted to teach--and no, not just because it was a way to stay in this educational frame. It was all I really practised as a child. Standing in front of my mirror with a white-board marker, I'd write chunks of text on my reflection. My invisible, quiet class would listen--and sometimes, when they wouldn't, I would shout. This want carried on throughout high-school and college (though the physical practise of acting it out, did not) and, until my first few semesters were over, it was there. But then I realised that it was pretty much every student's response when asked what they wanted to do with an English degree. And it was an arbitrary response, at that. It was something they said to fill a gap in conversation and something they would no doubt pursue because they didn't quite know what they wanted to do. And so a faculty of lacklustre teachers begins. How does a generation teach a following generation without passion? (No, really, how does that work?). If I was to become a teacher, I would have passion. I already do in the conversations I propose with friends and family about just what this system needs. (It needs a lot). I want to teach. Some day, but not this day. Right now--this year and next and, probably, next--I do not want to go into that profession. I do not want to become part of a faculty that does not love its act. I don't know how the teachers that do--the teachers that really, really stimulate and inspire--do it. And for that, for every good teacher that there is, I have my admiration.

So for the last couple of months--perhaps a year--I have known this. And I have mulled it over again and again. I have looked at my career options and I have wondered just where this place I am meant to go, goes. The truth is--I don't have the answers. I don't know where, exactly, I am supposed to go next summer. Where, once this undergraduate degree has released me from its grasp, I turn for the next challenge and pursuit. I have my thoughts--my hopes--my wishes. But I cannot say them, out loud, without a nervousness.

But this year--and a year I count from September to the following September, so ingrained in me it is--there are a few things I want to work on. Like getting that degree--and safely. (There is a benchmark of numbers that I aim for: a framework; a border). Like finding a job and earning enough and stumbling across a space of my own--or rather: ours. A space to breathe and flex and stretch in our own way on our own time. Like falling in love with writing, again. Not the idea of it--not the theory or the planning or the thinking of it--but the doing. (That novel is still sitting on my desktop. It has a breath of potential, perhaps, but it needs flesh. A good meal and a good hydration of beauty). Like learning skills, transferable, life skills--but skills I do enjoy. (I want to make dresses--I want to learn how). Like learning a language--and practising it. Like deciding on whether or not an MA is possible, logistically. (And right now: right now the compulsion to do it is wild and fighting and strong).

So September means a little more to me, this year. And I am trying to relish every single one of its little falling leaves--the real ones and, I suppose, the ones of opportunity: the ones of thought.

i'd like to, please

Hope #19.

Write a book...

...and get it published.

This hope is quite a big deal to me. It is something I have wanted to do since I was very, very small. It's something that, everyday, I wake up dreaming of. And there are days when I think I won't make it---there are days when I think I simply cannot do it. But in all those moments, there is the dreaming of it, and then, then there are the little steps made in order to make it happen.

Writing has become---and always will be---a huge part of my life. Whether it is in the multiple books I am reading and evaluating at any given time or in the sense of satisfaction I get when I finish a page, I am simply not sure. But I surround myself with so many brilliant examples of how beautiful and how powerful writing is and can be, that I simply hope I will one day make productive proof of it.

I simply hope I will one day see my writing on someone else's shelf.

(I'd Like To, Please posts are inspired by Someday Hopes. The photo credit for that oh-so-very enviable writing nook can be found here).

by the (tackiest) sea

Whilst I will never profess myself to be a good photographer, I am feeling more and more comfortable behind a lens lately (you just might have guessed already).

So I spent a lot of today, a day out with friends, photographing the little things that make seaside towns tick--the sea, the sand, the (clouded over) sun. The smaller details, I suppose, are where I find my interest--a sentiment that is true in front of any lens of life. I like individual words and subtle movements and isolated memories and strands--mere strands--of inspiration. I look at things less in the sum of their parts and more, so much more, at those very (individual) parts. Because in them I find detail and beauty and care--I find the intricacy of lives so often overlooked.

Today, these snapshots were a lot less profound. They were just parts of a day spent in the tackiest English town I ever did know.

But beneath the creases of that dress and the single grains of sand are the signs of a day spent relaxing. And it was rare--rare in so very many ways.

letterpress

I found this video too beautiful not to share.

Letterpress from Naomie Ross on Vimeo.

Did I mention that I really, really want one?

writing tips from a faithful source

Zadie Smith is a woman I will turn to again and again in the literary world---and here are her top tips for writers out there.

"1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3 Don't romanticise your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can't do aren't worth doing. Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.

5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.

7 Work on a computer that is disconnected from the ­internet.

8 Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9 Don't confuse honours with achievement.

10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied."

And whilst I am never sure how useful these things are, that last sentence gets me every time---too true, I always think, too true.

I keep telling myself that when my exams are done and my work is handed in, I will get back to this thing called writing. I hope, more than anything, that I stay true to my (self-uttered, self-heard) word.

(Source, The Guardian).

libraries (why we need them)

I want to share something with you---but, well, it's a little long. But it's also incredibly worth it.

It is written by Zadie Smith and it is about libraries. (And I happen to think it incredibly insightful and smart and honest).

...

"I GREW up in a London council flat decorated with books, almost all of them procured by my mother.

I never stopped to wonder where these books came from, given the tightness of money generally – I just read them.

A decade later we moved to a maisonette where she filled the extra space with more books, arranged in a certain pattern. Second-hand Penguin paperbacks, then the Women’s Press books, then Virago. Then several shelves of Open ­University textbooks on social work, psychotherapy and feminist theory.

Busy with my own studies, and oblivious the way children are, I hadn’t noticed that the three younger Smiths were not the only students in that flat. We were reading because our parents and teachers told us to. My mother was reading for her life.

About two-thirds of those books had a printed stamp on the inside cover, explaining their provenance: ­PROPERTY OF WILLESDEN GREEN LIBRARY. I hope I am not incriminating my family by saying that during the mid-80s it seemed as if the Smiths were trying to covertly move the entire contents of that library into their living room.

It was a happy day when my mother spotted a sign pinned to a tree in the high road: WILLESDEN GREEN LIBRARY, BOOK AMNESTY. The next day we filled two black bin bags with books and returned them.

Just in time: I was about to start my GCSEs. I’ve spent a lot of times in libraries since then, but I remember the spring of 1990 as the most intense study period of my life, probably because it was the first.

To choose to study, with no adult looking over your shoulder and only other students for support – this was a new experience for me.

I think it was a new experience for a lot of the kids in there. Until that now-or-never spring, we had come to the library primarily for the cafe or the cinema, or to meet various love prospects of whom our immigrant parents would not approve, under the cover of that all-purpose, immigrant-parent-silencing sentence: “I’M GOING TO THE LIBRARY.”

When the exams came, we stopped goofing off. There’s no point in goofing off in a library: you are acutely aware that the only person’s time you’re wasting is your own. We sat next to each other at the long tables and used the library computers and did not speak. Now we were reading for our lives. Still it’s important not to overly romanticise these things. Willesden Green Library was not to be confused with the British Library. Sometimes whole shelves of books would be missing, lost, defaced or torn. Sometimes people would come in just to have a conversation while I bit my pens to pieces in frustration.

Later I learnt what a monumental and sacred thing a library can be. I have spent my adult life in the sort of libraries that make Willesden Green’s look very small indeed; to some people, clearly, quite small enough to be rid of without much regret. But I never would have seen a university library if I had not grown up living 100 yards from the library in Willesden Green. Local libraries are gateways – not only to other libraries but to other lives. Of course I can see that if you went to Eton or Harrow – like so many of the present Cabinet – you might not understand the point of such lowly gateways, or be able to conceive why anyone would crawl on their hands and knees for the privilege of entering one.

It has always been, and always will be, very difficult to explain to people with money what it means not to have money. If education matters to you, they ask, and if libraries matter to you, well, why wouldn’t you be willing to pay for them if you value them?

They are the kind of people who believe value can only be measured in money, at the extreme end of which logic lies the idea that people who fail to generate a lot of money for their families cannot possibly value their families as people with money do.

My own family put a very high value on education. Like many people without money, we relied on our public services. Not as a frippery, not as a pointless addition, not as an excuse for personal stagnation, but as a necessary gateway to better ­opportunities. We paid our taxes in the hope that they would be used to establish shared institutions from which all might benefit equally.

We understood very well that there are people who have no need of these services, who make their own private arrangements, in healthcare and education and property and travel and lifestyle, and who have a private library in their own private houses.

Nowadays I also have a private library in my own private house, and a library in the university in which I teach. But once you’ve benefited from the use of shared institutions you know that to abandon them when they are no longer a necessity is like Wile E. Coyote putting a rope bridge between two precipices only to blow it up once he’s reached the other side – so that no one might follow.

Community exists in Britain. It is a partnership between government and the people and it is depressing to hear the language of community – the Big Society – being used to disguise the low motives of one side of that partnership as it attempts to renege on the deal. What could be better than handing people back the power so they might build their own schools, their own libraries? Better to leave people to the onerous tasks of building their lives and paying their taxes. Leave the building of infrastructure to government, and the protection of public services to government, that being government’s mandate, and the only ­justification for its power.

That the grotesque losses of the private sector are to be nationalised, cut from our schools and our libraries, our social services and our health service – in short, from our national heritage – represents a policy so shameful I doubt this Government will ever live it down. Perhaps it’s because they know what the history books will make of them that our politicians are so cavalier with our libraries: from their point of view, the fewer places you can find a history book these days, the better."

(Actual source).

...

What are your thoughts?

entire act of sorrow

I haven't done the work I intended to do tonight, too wrapped up in listening and watching and reeling the beauty of performance poetry. It is quickly becoming one of my favourite types of writing---so perfectly timed, so poised and collected in words.

This is the saddest thing I have heard and it is something I listen to quite frequently---there is so much beauty in his sincerity.

on other people's words

Every so often I will read or hear or find quotations that sum up my day. And usually they do it with more eloquence and more grace than I could ever dream of doing.

Today it is this one.

"If you have ever loved something so much that you ache when it is gone, then you know."

Casey Lefante, Love Letter.*

I guess sometimes it really is that simple.

*Its source can be found here.

on gertrude stein

This week was the first time I ever truly tried automatic writing.

And I wasn't supposed to be.

When asked to write like Gertrude Stein - with attention not to semantics, but to sound - it was the only method I could find.

And because it was automatic, I am a little less shy about sharing.

Box.

A box is made of the things inside it. No future, only past, pass, passed between times. It is the cave stocked full of prized possessions, memories too endangered to fall, fall, fall out of mind.

Cake.

Nature melted and solidified, shaped and sculptured. It is all taste from one palette and texture from the sun. The comforted dilation of one nostril, a swimming tongue, a tightened tooth. Metallic sounds of a baking tray; tickled heat; diluted. There is expansion and a rise; a swell over a paper casing.

Photograph.

Social interaction is bottled, bunged. A staining of colour undertaken in a darkened room. Why can we not see its immortalisation? Precision reduced to a square frame captured by a sound that clicks and flashes. The senses are blurred, lines crossed, lanes swerved. We do not know what it will see or where we will be when we see it. It is guestimation, a random act of natural kindness.

Pen.

A blue vein, a black bladder. Possibility poised against a paper ledger.

Hammer.

Jerk its movements. Repeat, repeat, repeat into the peat of a wall.

Chair.

It is teak.

Or pine? You don’t know, can’t know, can’t count the rings of the trunk buried in the earth. The earth of our God, your God, my God. The earth of the earth that we both walk upon. Bare feet, two feet, six feet under.

It is brown marbled softly across a skeleton stern with your lazy effort. A posture perfected over years of doing the same thing once, twice, three times. All it sees is different carpet, tile, floor. Its legs break, never under weight, but of age. A snap and a break, splintered like the twig of the branch it birthed from.

~

I probably won't be posting tomorrow simply because I have two essays to write and edit in three days. (And two seminars, under-prepared for).

I hope you have a lovely weekend!

on a bad day

Today I was over-sensitive, under-prepared, naive.

I hadn't yet experienced writing criticism quite so threateningly; I hadn't heard my sentences aloud, in someone else's voice; I hadn't seen the impression that my words gave, the one of cliché and prediction and of not quite making it. And for the few minutes that followed the wrath of critical words and disappointed expression, I didn't know how to react - I didn't know what I was expected to say (do you defend or agree, contest or concede?) or where I was supposed to look.

There was a falter and a deliberation.

Because it wasn't about conceit or arrogance or even pretension. It wasn't about being awarded a higher grade or a worthier compliment, it was simply a case of understanding. Without it, no artist, no academic, no real worker can ever improve.*

So maybe in reading out my sentences, the ones which did not quite flow in a tone of voice which was not quite real, a lesson was forced. Because as much as it stung, scratching at the surface of a pedestalled dream, it showed me just how high and how sought after that very pedestal is.

*Not that I profess to be either one of these.

on stylishly typing

When I was little my step-father gave me his typewriter as a birthday present.* Yet a few years later, when my family made the advancement into the technological world, the typewriter got lost, redundant in the face of a computer that sprinted ahead in its processes. Even if its aesthetics - grey, plastic, blocky - are not, now, the ones I admire in such a machine, I so wish that I had kept it.

A couple of days ago I found this typewriter on Etsy. If its (though appropriate) postage was not so high, I would consider it as a future purchase. It is one of the most beautiful things I have seen.

*I used to, even then, write stories. And menus for my pretend-restaurant.