Scoff. Cuss. Loathe.

Somewhat of an argument over the intellectual merits of Elizabeth Gilbert lately with close friends. I was on the side of non-corniness. So somewhat of a relief to read this review of the movie in the Guardian latterly.

Sit, watch, groan. Yawn, fidget, stretch. Eat Snickers, pray for end of dire film about Julia Roberts's emotional growth, love the fact it can't last for ever. Wince, daydream, frown. Resent script, resent acting, resent dinky tripartite structure. Grit teeth, clench fists, focus on plot. Troubled traveller Julia finds fulfilment through exotic foreign cuisine, exotic foreign religion, sex with exotic foreign Javier Bardem. Film patronises Italians, Indians, Indonesians. Julia finds spirituality, rejects rat race, gives Balinese therapist 16 grand to buy house. Balinese therapist is grateful, thankful, humble. Sigh, blink, sniff. Check watch, groan, slump.

Film continues, persists, drags on. Wonder about Julia Roberts's hair, wonder about Julia Roberts's teeth, wonder about permanence of Julia Roberts's reported conversion to Hinduism. Click light-pen on, click light-pen off, click light-pen on. Eat crisps noisily, pray for more crisps, love crisps. Munch, munch, munch. Munch, munch, suddenly stop munching when fellow critic hisses "Sshhh!" Eat crisps by sucking them, pray that this will be quiet, love the salty tang. This, incidentally, makes me plump, heavy, fat. Yet Julia's life-affirming pasta somehow makes her slim, slender, svelte. She is emoting, sobbing, empathising. She has encounters, meetings, learning-experiences. Meets wise old Texan, sweet Indian girl, dynamic Italian-speaking Swede who thinks "Vaffanculo" means "screw you".

Roberts eats up the oxygen, preys on credulous cinemagoers, loves what she sees in the mirror. Julia shags Billy Crudup, James Franco, Javier Bardem. Ex-husband, rebound lover, true romance. Crudup is shallow'n'callow, Franco is goofy'n'flaky, Bardem is hunky'n'saintly. We hate Crudup, like Franco, love Bardem. Divorced Javier is gorgeous, sexy, emotionally giving. About his ex-wife we are indifferent, incurious, uninterested. She is absent, off the scene, unnamed. That's how Julia likes it, needs it, prefers it.

Movie passes two-hour mark, unfinished, not over yet. Whimper, moan, grimace. Wriggle, writhe, squirm. Seethe, growl, rage. Eat own fist, pray for death, love the rushing sense of imminent darkness. Scream, topple forward, have to be carried out of cinema. Reach life crisis, form resolution, ask editor for paid year's leave to go travelling. Editor stands up, shakes head, silently mouths the word: "No". Nod, turn, return to work. Personal growth, spiritual journeys, emotional enrichment? Not as easy as 1-2-3.

 

Tony Martin on Lee Child

Wilcox (we're still friends — in fact, when he moved out, he really just moved round the corner) alerted me to this rather old — in technology terms — article Tony Martin wrote on The Scrivener's Fancy about popular fiction and the author Lee Child.

I rofled like a maniac rofler who was kicked out of Rofling University for being too damn good at rofling. In a sea of favourite bits, here's my favourite bit:

So, hang on, these literary cunts, they’re…what? Lazy? Slacking off? Leaving the reader to ‘do all the work’? I assume he’s referring to that half-arsed concept ‘ambiguity’, a concept that is, according to Child, completely devoid of enjoyment. Actually, I remember reading a lot of books where you didn’t have to ‘figure anything out’ and where ‘the work’ was already done for you. I used to love those books…when I was fucking five!

P.S. I inspired myself and got Less Than Zero from Blockbuster. I'm sick, so I got five movies to watch in bed after I finish a chunk of work I have to do. Review will follow. (Of the movie, not of the chunk of work.) 

Blogged down.

Does anyone blog anymore? All Twitter now, innit?

Sadly, I'm not quippy enough for Twitter. My real strength lies in long strings of various muddled strands of psychotherapy — Freudian, Jungian, Gestalt, psychodynamic, narrative, expressive, integrative — intertwined with my own beastly sadness (well, whose else is there?) and an unrelenting need — a need I've never not known — to unburden myself in writing of My Terrible Secrets. All swinging underneath a soundtrack of nose blowing, Labrador snores and Harry Neilsson.

But apparently people do still blog. In fact, three of my dearest have just produced blogs. Which made me miss this freaking nuthouse.

But then I have this inherent problem with my blog in that I want to tell the truth, and yet so many of the things I do are really quite against the law. Or, at the very least, morally ambiguous. I deleted a lot of, well, startlingly moving and ... jeez, I don't want to sound like a wanker, but what the hell ... life-changing writing on this blog already, because it was about drug use. But I'd still quite like to talk about [things that were probably too personal. Sorry, but I've deleted what I wrote here earlier. Because it was too personal.]

So I continuously ravel and unravel my security settings, stewing over whether my employers could possibly find me, which could in turn lead to a shameful cautionary tale on Snopes.com about employees and TMI on the internet. You know, stuff like this. Blerk!

If I could just be me it would be ok. If I was a proper writer, if my publisher wasn't giving me the "How about never? Is never good for you?" treatment, if I was a little less nutty and, more pertinently, if I got of my arse and wrote more stuff, then I could be me. (Although reflecting on the blog so far, I may have to thesaurus my way out of the words "shit" and "stuff".) But I'm a jobbing writer, and editor, and an occassional trainer in writing and editing. (An example of my training: "Listen up people! Don't do fancy nouns. Most nouns can be replaced by 'stuff' or 'shit'.") I write copy and I copy-edit clever books written by Important People.

[More deleted bits. That's why this post doesn't flow.]

My parents gave me a book my 26th birthday. I was not in a good state then — it was 1994; I was depressed, saving to go overseas in a McJob, drinking, shagging, experimenting, using my abandoned box of the pill (I switched to condoms) as a morning after pill, full to the brim with delayed adolescent defiance in, simultaneously, the uselessness and the importance of every object in the world, in opposition to what "the man" thought.

The book was The Penguin Book of Women's Lives, given, poignantly and hopefully, from my desperately worried parents. It is an excellent book full of extracts of women's autobiographies — I still have it.

My favourite extract was Emily Hahn's. It began:

Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as the reason I went to China. The opium addiction dates back to that obscure period of childhood when I wanted to be a lot of other things, too — the greatest expert on ghosts, the word's best ice skater, the champion lion tamer, you know the kind of thing. But by the time I went to China I was grown up, and all those dreams were forgotten.

[You guessed it! Gone. It was juicy too.]

But all I have is my stories. I don't want to give them up; I want to write them down. Shall I say, "Fuck employers! I have made steps to anonymise myself. I've tried. What the fuck more? Hey? What the fuck more?" Shall I?

This blog helped me once when I was very, very sad. The fact it's been so long between posts is because that sadness then became depression. A nice, old-fashioned breakdown. Wilcox left me — an effect of the breakdown rather than the cause, but the cause of a deeper breakdown.

Slowly, slowly, with therapy, and the unexpected love of dear friends, the low fog is rising. I want to move again. I want to adventure again. Emily Hahn did.

"Chances are, your grandmother didn't smoke cigars and let you hold wild role-playing parties in her apartment," said her granddaughter Alfia Vecchio Wallace in her affectionate eulogy of Hahn. "Chances are that she didn't teach you Swahili obscenities. Chances are that when she took you to the zoo, she didn't start whooping passionately at the top her lungs as you passed the gibbon cage. Sadly for you, your grandmother was not Emily Hahn." 

I will never be someone's grandmother.

Enough of all this. Back to my mates, and their new blogs. Zigsma has produced Ope Shope Hope, a brilliant ode to her op-shopping, a pantheon for super-duper discarded stuff. Zigsma has impeccable, pitch-perfect taste, which I envy and admire.

George McEncroe is my funny friend. I know she's funny because she has a job at being a comedian. She's just started her blog and is promoting  her new show, which everyone in the whole world should see.

It's on at Trades Hall from 28 Setember to 2 October. That's FOUR NIGHTS ONLY. Book here.

Then there's my friend Erica's new website  and blog. She's an artist who does complicated things with mathematics and x-rays and plastic toys.

Hey, that felt good. I might come back here. Even if no one reads it. In fact it's better if no one reads it.