old sweets, sweet dreams

A few days ago I bought Ann Quin’s Passages, not just for the novella itself but also the introduction by Claire-Louise Bennett on what it means to be an avant- garde working class writer in Britain, and it was very very good, it really should be required reading for everyone who writes or publishes. I also bought Patricia Highsmith’s guide on plotting suspense novels, as I fear I may have to write one, then I went and bought some pontefract cakes from a sweet shop. if you eat too many you can die so i gave half the bag to a friend. Edinburgh doesn't have many old sweetshops, I think because of the Presbyterianism, and this one had lots of empty jars which looked like they had been empty for a long time. ( I am not including the new sinister ‘American sweet shops’ where everything is either electric green or orange, inedible and over 15 pounds) Pontefract cakes are a very old sweet, the design on them is of Pontefract castle in Yorkshire which was dismantled by parliamentarians during the civil war. Yorkshire has a liquorice festival, as it was famous for growing and producing it, I really want to go next year, people dress up as All Sorts.

Just before waking up the other day, I had a dream that I lived in a very thinly walled house( the walls about as thick as a dollhouse’s are) and it was populated by cats the size of mice I couldn’t let outside because a rare type of grasshopper lived in the surrounding forest. In the dream Claire- Louise Bennett, or rather an embodiment of her books’s narrative voice, visited me at this house and told me to write a book about famously smelly poets, a chapter for each one and their different smells, not their poetic aptitude, that wasn’t relevant at all, just focus on whatever stench they gave off. It made me think of an art installation i saw in toronto many, many years ago which was a scented room which was supposed to smell like 19th century Paris but it just vaguely smelt of Chanel perfume, how disappointing it was, and really the artist was probably too afraid of offensive smells.

I feel like I can’t ever meet the real Claire-Louise Bennett now, because of the one I met in the dream, though maybe it was Ann Quin wearing the guise of Bennett as its much easier and believable for the dead to visit you in dreams but Quin is hard to visualise because I haven’t seen many photos of her or heard her voice. It’s sinister and unnerving to dream about real people you don’t know, but I think as I have been reading CLB’s new novel Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, a kind of version of the narrative voice crept into my unconscious, the narrator talks about her dreams quite alot (which I love in novels if the novelist’s work is interesting enough as it is here ) and therefore felt the need to step into mine. The creepiest dream I ever had: in the background of the main action of the dream, which took place in a park, there were two large men were sitting with dogs, and I knew they didn't come from anywhere in my unconscious, were completely untraceable to anything in my waking life and I said basically to myself ‘they are outside of me, and not from me and have their own consciousness’ which spooked me so much I woke up.

Did I dream of writing about poets too because of two great short stories I read by Janet Frame? Was the woman in my dream who chatted to me an uber combo of Bennett, Frame and Quin? The Chosen Image is about a crappy poet who buys seeds without realising they are tropical and can’t grow in his cold environment so he decides to breathe on them daily.

There is another story about a failed poet, The Triumph of Poetry with this line I love so much

I would love to edit an anthology of prose pieces about poets, mostly 20th century stories, including The House of the Famous Poet by Muriel Spark. I wrote two T.S Eliot fan fictions in my last story collection but you don’t get many stories about poets these days- visual artists are the de rigueur thing to have and are treated as an allegorical stand in for writers, poets are too smelly and swarmy but their lives often as juicy as the poems. Writing about writers has to be earned I think, like riding a bicycle before you take up the unicycle. You can’t do it from the beginning and the problem is if the writer takes the poet character very seriously. Janet Frame will teach you not to!

You don’t often get stories about musicians either these days ( is it because our culture is so visual now, that writers unconsciously choose to write about visual artists?) but two I read in the past year, about classical music, I think about a lot are Bachmann by Nabokov and Mr Botibol by Roald Dahl. They are both very funny. A piece of writing about any type of artist which isn’t funny is just ridiculous instead.

I have an epistolary essay here to Angela Carter, which I wrote for Waseda University’s Haruki Murakami library. They asked me to write a letter to someone and I chose Angela Carter as she lived in Japan for a time.

Yesterday, I was very lucky to to chair Sayaka Murata for her new book, Vanishing World. It is compulsive a novel about artificial insemination and wombs, loneliness, nostalgia, sexuality, conformity. It is very much a must read. It made me realise how nostalgic I am, in a rapidly changing world.