From The Front Line

How do I describe "The Writing Life" by Annie Dillard? It´s a book about writing, but it does not tell you where to put your commas. Nor does it tell you how to organize your papers, what software to use or how to beat procrastination. It´s a report from the front line of the writer´s life.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. When I furnished this study seven years ago, I pushed the long desk against a blank wall, so I could not see from either window. Once, fifteen years ago, I wrote in a cinder-block cell over a parking lot. It overlooked a tar-and-gravel roof. This pine shed under trees is not quite so good as the cinder-block study was, but it will do.

Bastard photograph of The Baltic Bees in Luleå, 2011.

Here are stories about effort - like rowing and towing a log all day and all night against a current threatening to drag you out into the vast Pacific Ocean, because you want to salvage a fine piece of wood. There are stories about courage and endurance - like the one about the artistic pilot who risked his life doing impossible spins in the air for his audience. There are stories about faith, love and sheer bloody-mindedness, all the qualities an artist must possess, struggling for years with the exploration and realization of ideas that may never come to anything - and not going crazy. 

Dillard´s prose is challenging for someone like me, who is not a native English speaker. Actually, I think it´s probably challenging for those who are (and hurrah! for Kindle´s built-in dictionary) native, too. It is beautiful prose, though, and I feel that I´m on a learning curve on so many levels when I read her. Dillard has recieved a Pulizer prize for one of her books and I´m not surprised - I would guess that anything she writes is valuable, as well as beautiful. She writes mainly nonfiction, and when she wrote this book (it was published in 1989) she had yet to write a novel. Not surprisingly, she started as a poet.

Not all writers are terribly interested in language. I confess that being taught my basic language skills at a time (the 70´s) when punctuation and spelling was out of fashion (my teacher did not think we needed semicolon at all, and was adamant that the comma would be extinct within a few years), I have leaned pretty heavily on my reading experience and a "feel" for what is right. My interest has also been very much focused on story, on plot. Lately, however, it has become harder and harder to find something inspiring to read. It seems I have become tired of plot; there are only so many variations, after all. Surprisingly, sentences are beginning to intrigue me. Who knows, maybe I´ll be reading poetry next...

I like this book a lot, and I´m sure I will return to it often. Dillard is refreshingly honest about the whole writing experience:

you are wrong if you think that in the actual writing, or in the actual painting, you are filling in the vision. You cannot fill in the vision. You cannot even bring the vision to light. You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins. The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work. 

That´s bleak, and still, this book is so encouraging. Reading it is like sitting in a bar with an experienced and jaded older friend, or with a fellow postman after having worked through a snow storm, getting all those letters out there no matter what it cost you - with a well deserved pint in front of you, knowing that tomorrow it´s likely to be thirty below and hope to god the car holds up. You know. War stories. I have already bought my next Dillard book.

Word by Word

I have found that whatever else I am reading, it´s a good thing to have a book at hand that is about writing or some other kind of creative art that I can relate to. It´s a good thing to surround yourself with people who do what you do, but are better at it, and it´s not always possible to actually have real, live, people around. I have participated in writing groups over the years, but at the moment, I prefer to work alone, for a number of reasons. But, as any reader knows, good manuals are like preserving jars of great teachers. It also makes good sense to return to these books after a few years. You can´t really learn what you are not yet ready to learn. And so, when you return to the same teacher (and the same teaching) but from another level, you will find other lessons.

Or stitch by stich.

Lately, I have been reading "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life" by Anne Lamott, who is a creative writing teacher and author from San Francisco. I haven´t read anything by her, she is not translated to Swedish at all as far as I can see. Her subjects seem to be death, alcoholism, and christianity. And writing. I know she is very funny and insightful about writing, and I have a feeling she is funny and insightful about all those other subjects as well. She says she tries to write stories that are "funny and sick and therefore true".

This is a snippet of how Lamott describes what it´s like to sit down to work every day:

"...the panic mounts and the jungle drums begin beating and I realize that the well has run dry and that my future is behind me and I’m going to have to get a job only I’m completely unemployable,[...]. First I try to breathe, because I’m either sitting there panting like a lapdog or I’m unintentionally making slow asthmatic death rattles. So I just sit there for a minute, breathing slowly, quietly. I let my mind wander. After a moment I may notice that I’m trying to decide whether or not I am too old for orthodontia and whether right now would be a good time to make a few calls, and then I start to think about learning to use makeup and how maybe I could find some boyfriend who is not a total and complete fixer-upper and then my life would be totally great and I’d be happy all the time, and then I think about all the people I should have called back before I sat down to work, and..."

And this is what she suggests for a solution:

"There may be a Nurse Ratched–like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk."

If this does not make you smile, it probably means you have never tried to write; it probably means you have never failed to write. Yes, there are authors who say they have no problem writing, they do it from eight to five and then make dinner for their families, and don´t believe in writer´s block and procrastination (Jan Guillou and Peter Englund comes to mind), but most of us struggle. I think it´s because we don´t really understand the process. I have lately learned that if the process is what is tripping you up, you must begin with the process. You must mend your machine where it´s broken. I have known so many aspiring writers who said they don´t feel like they work unless they are typing. And typing is just a small part of the writing process. This misconception is probably cultural, perhaps even class-related, and to do with concepts of work ethic. "If you´re just going to sit there, you may as well - [fill in whatever fits]." If someone says this to you enough times, you may internalize that voice, and delude yourself that you will be able to make yourself useful and think about and decide what you are going to write later, at the same time. And then have the energy to do it. Right.

The crux is, for me at least (and this may be the introvert-thing), that the big part of writing - the long walks, the playing with images, the research, the daydreaming, the silent pottering with domestic chores - is something that must be done in solitude. It has seemed to me like a good idea to spend all afternoon in long chats on the phone or long sits in sofas drinking liters of tea, listening to and telling stories about the shit that happened. Ok, doing this can actually be a good thing, I mean, we all need to vent, all need to mull through stuff with sympathetic friends. But sitting in sofas hour after hour talking about shit that happens very easily becomes a lifestyle, something that you do with your friends because that´s what your friendship is all about. So, you may find yourself digging pretty deep for the shit. Or make shit up. Or worse, make shit happen. This is an excellent way to fuck up one´s work, not to mention one´s life. In the end, the only serious shit happening to me was that nothing was happening to me. No writing getting done. I have been more productive this last year than in the previous 12 years I supposedly devoted half my working hours to writing, because I finally realized that my big complaint was that I wasn´t getting any writing done. It was a case of ergo, if you see what I mean. I had to get up from the couch.

I´m not saying I´m any good at it yet, but I am practicing. Lamott is suggesting that I will never be any good at it and will struggle for ever. Fair enough. I´m not planning on turning into a recluse and my life is an equation that isn´t quite balanced and may never be. And, this process is involving a surprising amount of grief. There is the lost time, there are all the comfy habits I´m giving up, and all the things that I thought were true that turned out not to be, many of which were rationalizations to boost my ego. It´s just like any other big transition, except this transition is happening while everything is seemingly the same. I have always been attracted to stories about people starting over, walking out or being chucked out, and making radical new lives for themselves. I have done it myself once or twice. It´s a lot easier when you start with an empty canvas, it really is. Ok, so you can never walk out on yourself, but that´s true whatever the circumstance.

In all probability, a staggering majority of all of us with aspirations of writing one or twenty good novels, are delusional. But whatever the worldly success that may or may not come, I think I am a better person for trying to do something that is truly difficult - impossible even.

"it is not going to happen for very many of them. I still think they should write with everything they have, daily if possible, and for the rest of their lives. When I suggest, however, that devotion and commitment will be their own reward, that in dedication to their craft they will find solace and direction and wisdom and truth and pride, they at first look at me with great hostility. You might think that I had just offered them membership in my embroidery club. They are angry people. This is why they write. So let me go further. There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal. It is spiritually invigorating, says a friend, who converted at eighteen from Christianity to poetry. It is intellectually quickening. One can find in writing a perfect focus for life. It offers challenge and delight and agony and commitment. We see our work as a vocation, with the potential to be as rich and enlivening as the priesthood. As a writer, one will have over the years many experiences that stimulate and nourish the spirit. These will be quiet and deep inside, however, unaccompanied by thunder or tremulous angels.''

I want to put Lamott next to Brooks Jensen on my shelf. They both teach that for the artist, the process is, or should be, more important than fame, fortune, or any particular piece of art. They offer instructions, encouragement, and good advice for that perculiar kind of person that an artist is. If that sounds like you, I can´t recommend this book enough.

Norwegian Wood - Part I

Saturday, I did as I had intended and popped in at Studio 31 to check out the place and the vernissage of Natalie Avigdor. The artist was there of course, a very nice young woman with a very interesting project. Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a rush, and didn´t really have time to look properly, but I will return next week. (She has said it´s ok to take photographs so I will be able to show you more later.) In fact, I have decided to make a kind of parallell project to Avigdor´s. I will return to that later.

Natalie Avigdor and painting "Norwegian wood".

Avigdor has spent part of her youth in Luleå and Boden, and studied at the aesthetic programme at Luleå´s gymnasium (equivalent to high school in the US). She has then studied one year at Munka Folkhögskola in Skåne, the south of Sweden. Now she is at the Academy of Arts and Design, Bezalel, in Jerusalem.

She explained to me that this project is about three months of her life: August, September, and October of this year, that suddenly (a quote from her diary suggests a break-up in Oslo) was empty, without any plans. She decided to build a new life, make new friends, and create an alternative life to - I suppose - her life in Israel. During this time she has also travelled to Japan. The title of her project, and one of the paintings, is "Norwegian Wood", and this immediately made me think of Haruki Murakami´s novel of that name, which was also filmed a few years ago.

Avigdor is also participating in a performance with the art collective PAiN (Performance Art i Norr) at Galleri Syster the 16th of October. On PAiN´s website she says:

"I am fascinated by performance art and think the boundries between real life and performance can be very diffuse." (my translation) 

She has done more performance art and one piece (is that the right word?) I found interesting is called "Projector", where she projects images on her body. Being interested in clothes and fashion (the media has been full of fashion weeks lately, as you may have noticed) it makes me reflect on how blurry the line between dressed and bare can be when one dresses with real intent. What I mean is, naked bodies are all the same - more or less. But choice of dress can be very individual and expressive. So in a sense, the intentional dresser can bare herself while putting clothes on, as well as hide herself. (And I suppose the same goes for the unintentional dresser...) Clothing can be a form of carapace, particularly perhaps for those who are in jobs where one is very vulnerable and sometimes has to be brave, like policemen, doctors, nurses, soldiers. Of course, I refer only to the aesthetic side of the garment in this line of argument; clothes naturally have functional aspects, as well as being tools of communication.

On a side note: If you have access to Swedish television and are interested in clothes as communication, you may want to watch a new series called "von Svenssons kläder" (= von Svensson´s clothes) about how we dress and why. The first episode was promising.

I am attracted by many things in Avigdor´s project: the diary, the paintings of trees and woods, the photographs from Tokyo, drawings by ballpoint pen (which is an instrument associated with writing and not so much the visual arts), the references to literature that I haven´t read but is on my reading list (the long list...), and also the way she has limited her project in a rather strict time frame. I mean, seriously, this girl is getting a lot done in just three months! I want some of that energy, I suppose, and I have also been thinking a lot this last year about what art means to me and how I let it work for me, with me, and through me. There is no doubt that really engaging with art in a deliberate way is good for my overall well-being, creativity, and not least, my writing.

So - how far can I take this? I toyed with the idea in my own diary and decided that there are several doors I can take in, out, or through Avigdor´s project. I will work on this for three weeks, and I have an idea that it would be interesting if it would end in a story of some sort. However, I´m trying to not have any expectations, not to make any plans, just to follow inquiries. Ask questions and see where they take me. It will not be anything like a three-month parallell life, but a three-week adventure, that´ll do me nicely.

Free Fiction by Me

As some of you might now, I have for the last few years struggled with a novel. I got the idea in 2000, started it in connection with a Creative Writing course at the university in 2007, and have given up about three times since then. However, I keep returning to it. I´m not sure if it´s masochism or just that it gives my life meaning, somehow.

Anyway, last time I threw in the towel was last spring. I realized I wouldn´t be able to do it again any differently if I didn´t work for a while at my process, and that´s what I spent all last winter doing. At about half-time, I decided I needed a project to focus on that wouldn´t be too important to me, that I could keep some distance to and actually finish. I decided to write a bunch of short stories - in English.

It was a good decision. It short-circuited the perfectionist in me, and allowed me creative freedom. At the same time, it was a bit like starting to use large crayons instead of 5 mm pens. In the end, some of the stories seemed to fit together, and I added illustrations, probably - I realize this now - as a way of making up for the lack of nuance. I did learn a lot from doing it. It´s not perfect, but good enough. My friends have been kind enough to correct spelling errors and offer encouragement. Thank you all! I see all kinds of improvements I could do, but I also see new ways to go about my novel, which is the main thing, after all.

I also decided to really step out of my comfort zone and publish it, in a small way, here on the blog. I have made a pfd that I hope is suitable for most e-book readers. Of course, it works on the computer as well. I don´t have an Ipad or a smartphone, so I wouldn´t know about those.

You find it here: Village Assembly.

Var så god! In all probability, it will be the only piece of fiction I´ll ever write in English. This may not be a bad thing, haha...

Autumn Allure

I found this gallery of stationary for fall in the Guardian. It´s like that quote from the film "You´ve got mail" with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks where he woos her with talk of bouquets of freshly sharpened pencils in the fall or some such thing. I whole-heartedly embrace this spirit of new beginnings, and last week I gave in to this life long (or at least since I was about seven) conviction that the year actually starts in August, and bought myself a school calendar. It´s very well laid out too, with plenty of space for notes and to-do-lists.

Never having cared much for pencils, I have, however, newly opened a fresh bottle of black ink and bought myself a new desk lamp, coincidentally named Newport, like the town where we just happened to spend what was possibly the best days of summer vacation. Add a few fresh notebooks to that and I´m ready for the cold months!

The Process of Creativity

For the last twelve weeks (or fifteen, I had two weeks holiday and one week off sick) I have been working with Julia Cameron, and her course on how to balance the creative process: "Walking in this World" (Sw. "Konsten att vara kreativ. På vandring genom livet."). Her most famous book is perhaps "The Artist´s Way", which I have also read, some years ago. Cameron started out as a journalist, married Martin Scorsese in the 70´s and got into writing for film. She has also published novels, poetry, written plays and musicals (yes, music! which I find super-impressive), but perhaps she has been most successful as a teacher.

I have had this book for some time, I have read it twice right through. Now, as I knew I had to make some changes to the way I spend my own time, and I knew it was going to be a difficult process, I decided to read her as she has intended to be read, as a twelve-step, twelve-week program. I needed to hold someone´s hand, and she has proved to be the perfect companion.

Cameron doesn´t exclusively adress writers, but writing "morning pages", a kind of warm-up exercise to any type of creative craft, is a practice that she calls "the bedrock tool of a creative recovery". The second tool that she advocates is the "artist date", where one goes out, alone, once a week, to play in a way that pushes one´s comfort zone a little. It´s like filling your fuel tank with inspiration. Some of the blog posts I have written lately has been reflections on such exercises. Playing, or allowing oneself to play, is not easy, though. As she points out, either in the book or perhaps somewhere on her website, the work ethic often over-rides the need for such frivolities.

It´s interesting how the layout of the book seems to anticipate what´s going to happen in the consciousness of the student. Cameron is a recovered alcoholic, and no doubt her partiality to the twelve-step method is based on some real profound insight into how we overcome ourselves. She writes a lot about the Great Creator, and how making art, any art, good and bad, makes us more human. I totally think she is right. And honestly, from a rational standpoint, making art is the most useless occupation in the world. A bit of faith - a lot of faith! on whatever it is founded - is essential. I found myself caught up in a wave of syncronicity and flow, and have made some surprising discoveries about how I work, and, perhaps more importantly, how I sabotage for myself.

A writing friend of mine has this book also, she keeps it in her bathroom and reads a bit of it every day. When I said I have started working with it again, she said "shit! that woman is wise!". I can´t say it any better, really. Julia Cameron is very, very wise, and any creative, ambitious, aspiring artist can learn a great deal from her. She offers courses over the internet, and that may suit some, but I also find that there such a thing as too much sitting in the classroom. In the end, practice is the best teacher of all, and one must get one´s feet wet at some point. I know a lot of people who get stuck in the self-help swamp (for whatever reason), and that´s no good either. Some, I think, even become teachers because they feel so comfortable in that situation. Or so the number of aspiring teachers I have met over the years lead me to believe.

Bottom line, I have learned that a good teacher is her best when I allow her to teach me at her own pace. Because a good teacher knows a thing or two about my pace as well. And most of us are lacking in the patience department. I certainly know I am.

Reader Involvement

As I mentioned, I had tickets to go see Krister Henriksson at the Culture House (which is the building that holds our library, our art exhibition hall, two stages, a restaurant, a café, etc). Unfortunately, I was too ill to go, and gave my ticket to a librarian (I had to go in to get a book I had ordered anyway), who took it with some delight, sure that he could find a person who wanted it. So I hope it made someone happy and enlightened, as the show was sold out weeks in advance.

I read the reviews in the paper the day after, and either it was a disappointment, or the poor journalist they sent had no idea what was happening. I´ll put a penny on the latter. She writes that Henriksson got his first taste of "Doctor Glas" (from 1905) when he was doing Wallander in Ystad and had to spend most of a year living in a hotel. To begin with, he spent his evenings in the bar, drinking, snacking and gaining 25 pounds. Instead, he started reading Hjalmar Söderberg´s novel in his room. He read it about a hundred times. Which seems a bit excessive. But, when I read "Doctor Glas" myself, as part of a course in Creative Writing I took a few years ago, when I had finished the last page, I immediately turned to the first and read it all over again. At once. I had never done that with a novel, and I haven´t done it since. I imagine a text like that must be like cocaine to an actor.

In short, "Doctor Glas" is a monologue, a diary of a misanthropic/depressed medical doctor who "helps" a young woman he falls for. He murders her aging husband, the pastor Gregorius, so that she can be with another man, with whom she is having an affair. Ironically, she is jilted by him. End of story.

I can´t really say if everything Söderberg writes has this quality. I intended to read "The Serious Game" before I went to listen to Henriksson, as he was supposed to talk about that as well (he has recorded the book for radio), but I just didn´t have the energy for it, and now I have put it aside for later. I did, however, read "Hjärtats oro" (= the worries of the heart, not translated as far as I can see) from 1909, which is not a novel, but a tankebok, "book of thought", something that is popular to publish by men of a certain intellectual standing. It is almost impossible to read, as much of it is polemics directed towards another intellectual of the times, Vitalis Norström. He was a conservative philosopher and member of the Swedish Academy, and so much of the 19th Century that he is never refered to these days. Not in popular culture, anyway. Söderberg also has some ideas about women´s right to vote (in Sweden, women got that right in 1919 and voted for the first time in the 1921 election), and for a latter day reader like me, it´s impossible to know if he is serious or joking when he says that women´s lib supporters want to be like men, because they are failed women, something he arrives at after having seen an ugly woman bathe in the sea. 

Söderberg´s novels, however, are very much in circulation these days, and always have been. They have been continually dramatized and filmed and read, and he is considered a great depicter of women. I understand that Swedish actress/director Pernilla August (mostly known as Anakin Skywalker´s poor mother) is going to adapt "The Serious Game" to film some time in the near future. The play "Doktor Glas" is being performed to full houses in Stockholm, and Henriksson will take it to London in April and May, where he will be performing at the Wyndham Theatre - in case you are interested and in the neighbourhood. It will be performed in Swedish with English subtitles. I saw the performance only last week on television, having recorded it about a year ago. I also have a film from 1942 with Georg Rydeberg, that I have seen twice. I think Rydeberg, who was younger, is closer to Söderberg´s Glas, whereas Henriksson is a bit too old to play the 33-year old doctor. On the other hand, Henriksson´s performance really makes a case for psychological projection - that the doctor hates himself, really, and therefore does away with Gregorius. That way, the play is perhaps even more up-to-date, a comment to racism, sexism, and any kind of hatred of the other.

Anyway, the reason I started writing this post in the first place, was that when I read "Doktor Glas" as part of that course in Creative Writing, we also read another book as part of the same batch of homework, and it was Elisabeth Rynell´s "To Mervas" - a very different creature of a book from "Doktor Glas". Her novel was very much an emotional, partly dreamlike tale of a woman on the edge. (I didn´t appreciate it very much, I confess.) It seemed to me, and I argued this in our discussions, that Söderberg´s story, being very rationally presented, evoked more emotion than Rynell´s, as when reading her, I had to engage with logic and reason, to make sense of all her emotional eruptions and poetic digressions. To me, this was a combination reading experience that really demonstrated clearly how a reader is invited into a story by an author, and how it´s not what you put down on the page, but what you leave out that really decides what type of response you will bring out in a reader.

As I remember it, most of my classmates had no idea what I was talking about, but at least one wanted to talk about it all the rest of the day. I still think a lot about this when I read something really engaging, on whatever level.

Institutions and Thinking

This morning, there was an article in Dagens Nyheter, Sweden´s largest national newspaper, about how institutions push social evolution. It was written by Lena Andersson, one of the more original and sharp thinkers of the Swedish cultural and political arena. She took newsreporting and newspapers as an example of how we create an institution to serve a certain need (to dispute, to inform, to communicate), but when the institution is there, it also constitutes a challenge every day to do just that, even if the need is less pressing, thereby pushing us further into a constantly changing, developing society. She also compared the western culture, which can be said to have been a forerunner in this, to cultures that have stayed almost the same for thousands of years, and argues that this permanence is due to a lack of written language and the tools that develop from there, tools that promotes new thinking. It amused me when she wrote that as a little girl, it fascinated her that everyday, just enough things would happen in the world that it would fill the half-hour that the television newscast lasted, no more, no less.

Of course, this is a thesis that can be disputed, and with any hope it will be, but it made me think of a private institution of mine, that takes up quite a bit of shelf space (so much that I have had to assign a special cabinet for it, and it´s growing out of that, as well). I´m talking about my diary.

I have diaries from when I was very young, but I didn´t really get into the habit until 1992, when I spent a few days at a retreat in connection with a course in "project and leadership" at the university. Some of the things we did there I still refer to, the lessons on group dynamics was really profound. We had a very good, very insightful teacher, who encouraged us to keep a diary for the days of the retreat. It was such a powerful experience for me that the habit stuck, beginning with a kind of memoir that lasted the entire first volume.

The diary has been invaluable to me, as a way of distancing myself from my own thoughts and feelings, and it has, I think, promoted my growth as a human being, on every level. I even typed out the first eight years of diaries, really going through every aspect of the way I was living and thinking, as a way of working myself through a tendency to become depressed and anxious. Events, thoughts, feelings, dreams, hopes, challenges, insights, twists and turns - it´s all there. At times, I have wanted to free myself from it, associating it too much with problems having to be solved, thinking that the day I had arrived (whatever that is) I wouldn´t need it anymore. But lately, I have come to realize that I will never arrive, and that the diary is my friend, a wonderful tool to structure my thoughts and get things into perspective. It can be anything I want it to be, do anything I want it to do (almost).

There are lots of famous diaries in literature. When I was in my 20´s, I loved Anaïs Nin and her literary and erotic adventures in 30´s Paris. I lapped up all of it and was quite shocked when I read her biographers. Her diary was, to put it mildly, a glorification of herself and her life. It was a powerful piece of self-promotion and it got her famous alright. Now I think of her diary as everything I don´t want my diary to be. It´s not for others to read, it´s there to encourage honesty, which is not entirely straight-forward even when you talk to yourself, as any self-reflecting person would agree.

Actually, I think that a diary´s usefulness to it´s author is in inverse proportion to its publishability. Writing for yourself is a world apart from writing for others. It´s not meant for anyone to ever read, even you yourself might not. The value of the diary is in the writing, readability is of no importance at all. Which is why I stick to my pen.

Perhaps we were the last generation to be taught some level of penmanship. I have noticed that some of the young ones I introduce at work, can´t even read cursive handwriting, which can be a serious handicap. Even more oddly, the computer-savvy generation doesn´t seem to have been taught typing either. But I imagine voice-manipulated wordprocessors für alle are not far away.

I wonder if that will change the way we think in any way? Tools, like institutions, created by us, also creates us. I suppose that is the point.

The Importance of Being Edited

This week, I have read a local author. The book was recommended to me, or no, not recommended, I was informed and a bit warned. My friend said, "I read this book and suddenly I realized that it was set in Piteå, at the School of Music." Which is where she grew up and my husband works. And I instantly knew who had written it, a former music teacher who quit to focus full-time on his writing.

KG Johansson is mostly known for his sci-fi and fantasy books, which are, I believe, written mainly for younger readers. I have seen his work at the e-library, but haven´t really been that tempted. Sci-fi and fantasy is something I was very keen on as a kid, but not so much any more. However, this is a novel for grown-ups, and well, I just had to take a look.

"Kärlekssekten" (= the love sect), is centred around two young women, who are sisters but not friends. We get to follow them both during a year when a religious sect seduces a majority of the Swedish people. It starts out all love-y and nice, but quickly turns nasty as the sect turns out to really be some kind of cross between the mob, Hells Angels, and neo-fascism. The older sister, Anna, a music teacher at the school, stays firmly out of it, and gets into trouble for that, while the younger sister, Viktoria, gets involved both spiritually and financially, and gets in just as much trouble. As if that wasn´t enough, they both also become involved with the same man, for whom Anna even leaves her family.

The novel is 453 pages. That´s about 200 pages too many. I get the impression it hasn´t been edited at all. Perhaps the author was keen to publish and didn´t let it cool long enough to look at it with fresh eyes. Perhaps too many words are his style. A quick look at one of his sci-fi novels seem to indicate something in that direction. The most common advice given to writers starting out is to "show, not tell". Well, Johansson shows and tells, then explains, then shows and tells some more. I keep mumbling get on with it! to the pages. Very little is left to the reader, and as a result I don´t feel engaged.

Also, the plot is not particularly realistic. Which in itself is ok, I´m fine with fantastical stories. But you have to at least have believable characters, saying believable things, to get away with an improbable scenario like a religious sect converting more than half the population and even turning university professors into biggoted, spineless citizens of the village of the damned. Still, there are some pretty good scenes in here. Only a bit more work would have made this book a lot better.

In one segment of the story, the older sister Anna is assigned a tin-eared accompanist, a student at the school. She complains to her superiors, but is told that "no one else hears that", the idea being that most people in an audience, who are not specialists, will be oblivious to the nuances that separate a quality performance from a run-of-the-mill one. I can´t help thinking that it´s the same with literature. That even a ferocious reader, like a well-practiced musician, isn´t necessarily sensitive to the difference between, say, Umberto Eco´s "Foucault´s Pendulum" and Dan Brown´s "Da Vinci Code".

Again, I think stern editing would have made a big difference. Actually, I think the ability to edit is what make great writers great and most writers not so. One of the most celebrated authors in Sweden constantly says to reporters that he writes "a heck of a lot of crap" and I believe that. Everyone does. A first draft is almost always crap. That´s when the real work starts. And, of course, there is that small matter of taste.

A Bit of Wisdom

”Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.” 

Ray Bradbury

I´m reading less and writing more, which is why I´m blogging more book-unrelated stuff. This may be a good thing, I don´t know. It´s harder, but I have my friend Ray to encourage me!

Meta Level Literature

After having marathon slept night before last, no wonder I couldn´t sleep. I finally dozed off at half past ten in the morning, and made sure I got up at two in the afternoon, to prevent becoming too freakishly out of touch with any form of normal life.

The upside of insomnia is that one has what seems like endless hours of silence and stillness to read and think. I finished Gerald Murnane´s "Barley Patch", an unexpected and truly original find, thanks to a favorable review in some newspaper or other. I really can´t say I have come across anything like it. It´s not really a story, as such, more like an exploration of a mind, a consciousness, that may or may not be the author´s own. He paints pictures with his words, of flat landscapes with mostly grass, some trees, one or two storey houses; he dwells on men with an obsession for horse racing, convents, boys trying to meet girls, the nature of reading, and whether or not one should write.

Some readers might find him repetitive. There are turns of phrases that keep coming back, in different ways. They are elements of his imagination that he uses like a child uses building blocks to make different structures. One gets the impression that he is showing us how he works. I´m sure I would have much more to say on that subject if I had read anything else by him, but he is a completely new aquaintance for me.

I keep returning, throughout the reading, to the photo of the author himself. Looking for clues, perhaps. I find none. He is rather handsome, I think. He seems unaware of himself. He seems not to pose for the camera.

I know I will read more by him, I know this book will mean a lot to me and perhaps I will return to it later. That does not mean that I recommend it to anyone. If you´re looking for a story, an adventure, something that has a beginning and an end, look elsewhere. This is a book for those who are interested in literature and the mechanics of it, if you will. It´s solid stuff, a real nugget of preciousness in an ocean of mediocrity. They say he is on the short list at the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize, and I can´t think of a more worthy recipient of that award.

The Truth Game

I am currently reading two books that I´m struggling with, for different reasons, so what do I do? I pick up a third!

The other day I say the film "Infamous" with Toby Jones as Truman Capote and Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee, and not least: Daniel Craig as Perry Smith. If you know your history, I don´t need to say more, now you know the film is about Capote´s writing that one famous fact-fictious novel of his, "In cold blood". Which I have owned, but never read. Passed it on, actually. I have read enough about the case though, and Capote´s involvment.

Truman Capote is an interesting character, a self-made man who kind of imploded after that book was written. Harper Lee was his best friend, and she apparently never even attempted another book after "To kill a mockingbird", which is considered the American novel of all time, or so one might think, considering every American (that is, citizen of the USA) seem to mention it as the best (perhaps only) book they ever read. I have not had the pleasure, nor have I seen either of the films made on it. As far as I could tell, Bullock played her very well, as a very nice, feet-on-the-ground kind of lady, just the type of best friend someone like Truman Capote should have.

Anyway, watching that film made me curious about his failed, uncompleted, last novel, "Answered prayers", and I promptly picked it up from the library and found it was a quick read, only took me a few hours.

I can see how it failed. It really isn´t badly written, but it lacks something. Heart, maybe. The three completed chapters were eventually published in magazines and most of his close society friends (Capote loved hobnobbing with New York society´s most luminous stars, he called them his "swans") dropped him like a hot plate after that. No wonder. "La Cote Basque" is really only about a man (a thinly veiled Capote himself) sitting with a female friend in a restaurant, hearing all kinds of juicy gossip about the women sitting at the tables next to him. Apparently, all those stories were true, told Capote in the strictest confidence. I would have dropped him, too.

Now, if people like Capote were to be believed, the priviliged classes think of nothing else, do nothing else, than sordid sex, particularly with people they are not married to. Sex as power games. Across every kind of "normal" boundry. I don´t know. Perhaps this tale says more about Capote than about any of his social circle. In the film, Perry Smith says about his books that they are "cold". Capote is annoyed and says something like "the man is a killer and he accuses me of being cold?". Well, I don´t know if that really happened, but I agree with Perry, Capote is cold. There is no heart in this story, there is no sympathy with anyone. If the people he betrayed really thought of him as their friend and confidant, they must have been devastatingly hurt.

There is one passage in the novel that seems key:

””Because something is true doesn´t mean it´s convincing, either in life or in art. Think of Proust. Would Remembrance have the ring that it does if he had made it historically literal, if he hadn´t transposed sexes, altered events and identities? If he had been absolutely factual, it would have been less believable, but” – this was a thought I´d often had - ”it might have been better. Less acceptable, but better.” I decided on another drink, after all. ”That´s the question: is truth an illusion, or is illusion truth, or are they essentially the same? Myself, I don´t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn´t true.””

A page further down, he settles for "truth as illusion". "Illusion as truth", he says, is another matter. Fact-fiction on one hand, parables on the other, right?

Food for thought, eh? And isn´t this what has been discussed so passionately on the Swedish literary scene for the past decade? How much truth are you allowed to write if you call something a novel? This spring alone, two candid stories about growing up with famous and crappy parents have been published and both are called novels. Perhaps only for legal reasons, or because everyone now knows that our memories are ficticious, or perhaps mythological in the way they structure themselves. Doesn´t mean they don´t contain any truth though. One true fact is related to truth like one single letter is related to a sentence. Isn´t that well put? 

Skeletons and Scandals

I have not been reading much lately. If you live in Europe, you know it´s damn cold everywhere, and our barometer is nearly through the roof. The atmospheric pressure has gone from 976 to 1055 (1070 on our meter) this last month and I have been experiencing headaces of a most stubborn sort. It´s like someone is sitting on my sinuses.

However, last night I took a pill and went to bed with Somerset Maugham´s "Cakes and ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard".  I have been recommended to read his "Of human bondage" but never really felt inspired to do so. But when I saw this one, the title intrigued me. It sounds like a farce, one of those where there are lots of running through doors and hiding in cupboards and under beds. And to some extent, it is. It´s a very funny book. Maugham is a sharp satirist when it comes to the quirks of English snobbery and class awareness. And while that is a good enough reason to read any sort of book, it´s far from all that this novel is.

According to Wikipedia (the source of all knowledge, haha) it´s considered to be a roman à clef about Thomas Hardy/Edward Driffield and his first marriage, and Hugh Walpole/Alroy Kear trying to write a biography about him. The narrator of the story, William Ashenden, is clearly Maugham himself. I don´t know enough about either of them to say whether there is anything in it or not. Maugham himself denies it in his introduction, and really, it doesn´t matter. This novel is, not unlike Kerstin Ekman´s latest, a story about literature. On the one hand, what it takes to write a great novel. On the other hand, what it takes to become a great novelist. It´s the introvert versus the extrovert. The content man versus the social climber. The absorbed artist versus the manipulating ass-licker.

It´s also a story about great tragedy, and great love. And about every person being a bit of an island, a mystery even to those closest to them. The narrator sympathises with both Kear and Driffield, and I imagine Maugham could have identified with both. A huge role in this drama is played by Driffield´s first wife, Rosie, also his muse. What is it that inspires an artist to do his best? Rosie doesn´t really do anything, she just is. Totally mindful, to use a modern concept. She is loving and inspires love in others. Even when she behaves badly (according to the moral of the times) she is wonderful. And when Driffield looses her, he has his best work behind him.

And anyway: what kind of cake goes with ale?

I read somewhere that "Cakes and ale" was Maugham´s favourite work. I can see why. There are so many layers to this story, and it´s a bit of a declaration of what he wants his art to be about, what he aspires to. You could say that it´s a writer´s skeletons in the cupboard that becomes his cake and ale. It´s the shady parts of his experience that he can turn into literary gold if he can look at them straight, with an empathic eye, and tell it like he sees it without the opportunistic judgement that may please his critics but makes literature obsolete within a generation.

I love love love this book. It´s complex and serious and funny. Great stuff. I suppose I have to read "Of human bondage" next.

A Layercake of Fiction

The other day I started seeing a film called "Sleuth" with Michael Caine and Jude Law. I thought the premise (two men meet in the older man´s grand home, and it´s about a woman, of course) reminded me a lot of a novel I read years ago, when we were in Budapest, "Embers" by Sándor Márai. And, in one of the first minutes, the older man asks the younger if his name is Hungarian, by any chance. No, says the younger man, it´s not. Really? says the older, I could have sworn it was Hungarian. Or something like that. I think they mentioned Hungarian three times, so one would not miss it. A wink to Mr Márai, I imagine, or anyone who is aquainted with him, more like. It made me feel very clever. I didn´t watch "Sleuth" to the end. Where Márai´s novel was subtle, spooky and understated, this film was violent and kind of screamy. I didn´t much care for it.

I have heard somewhere that there really are only about seven ideas for stories, and the rest are variations on them. I can well believe it. I think most novels are written by someone thinking "I can tell that story better" or "I know something more about this". In that sense I think literature is a slow conversation between writers, who are, in essence, readers who wish to respond.

I´m not sure why this leads up to the latest of my reads. I was recommended Håkan Nesser´s "Himmel över London" (= sky over London). He is not someone I would read, as I have not liked his crime novels about van Veeteren (these are translated to English) much. Or at all. However, I started it, and really, I find the story fascinating.

The sky over London.

 Nesser invents an author who is a bit like himself, an author who is beginning to believe that his creation exists in reality, that the people he has invented are real people. He convinces himself this is true. It takes a while to understand which parts of the novel are "real" (relatively speaking) and which ones are the novel (within the novel). And when that is clear, Nesser pokes another hole in his fiction/reality construct and pushes his author into another layer of fiction, under a new layer of (fictional) reality. It´s like a play with mirror images in mirror images.

It reminded me of a funny film I saw, "Stranger than fiction" where Emma Thompson plays a depressed writer trying to find a good way to kill her main character. He finds out what she is doing and tries to stop her. What is real? What is not? I think most serious readers would find this interesting.

I also can´t help thinking what another writer than Nesser could have done with this idea. I know it´s unfair to compare every novelist to Tunström, Coetzee or Kundera, but I can´t help myself. There is something about the way Nesser writes that makes me feel that he is too much in a hurry, that he does not take the time to really, really write well. Not as well as he should, with his experience, anyway. But perhaps it´s just a matter of taste. Bottom line: I heartily recommend it.

Memories & Memoirs

I proudly present a new author: Anna Bergh. My mother-in-law. This is her long awaited, by the nearest and dearest anyway, memoir, that she has been working on since the late 90´s. She calls it "Som jag minns det" (= as I remember it). It´s all about the way she grew up in the middle of Swedish Lapland in the 20´s and 30´s, how she started a family and moved south in the 40´s, came to Luleå in the 60´s and all about what she has done, people she has known, things that have stuck in her mind for different reasons.

Anna has lived a very long life, at 92 she is still in possession of all her wits (more than enough of it!) even though her strength isn´t what it once was. She has makular degeneration, and because of her inability to write, she has used a tape recorder and I have transcribed all her texts (being an old secretary and rather fast at the keyboard, it has not been too hard work). After ten years of turning out one story after another, we finally sat down and read through it all and did some editing. And it´s a real book, all right. Almost 300 pages of it. There are also some great pictures, since her much older brother owned a camera and he took photos not only of his family standing in front of the house in their Sunday best, but there are images of horses plowing fields, snow shoveling, picking berries in the forrest, Anna´s father making a boat, and things like that.

The family harvesting turnips, circa 1932.

I really like the idea of making sure the stories survive for the next generations. She has 11 great-grandchildren (so far) that will never truly get to know her, and this way they can still get a sense of who she is and where the family comes from. The thing about using tape recorders is that the voice of the writer really stays intact, the text really comes alive. And she has, in a way, lived the life of two generations of women. First, she had kids in the 40´s, was (more or less) a stay-at-home-mom, as women were back then. Then she had a new baby in the 60´s (my husband), got an education, burned her bra (no, just kidding), started working as a teacher and was all into politics in the 70´s. She has always been, and is still, interested in what is going on at all levels of society and uses what influence she has, whenever she feels it appropriate. This is really a woman with a voice of her own.

As you can tell, she is a great influence on me, a great inspiration, and we have always got along swimmingly. Not least, being a fully trained seamstress, who once had her own studio, she has influenced whatever style I have. She really is the perfect companion on a shopping trip.

I think all retirees with too much time on their hands and memories and reflections of the past, should write something about their lives. It´s not difficult, it doesn´t have to be perfect. And it doesn´t have to be a "real" book either. Just save your text to a pdf-file and anyone can read it on their computer, on their e-book reader or surf pad or smartphone or whatever. It´s the easiest way to publish, a pdf on a blog, I bet you can post it on Facebook or mail it to friends and family. Just do it, it is more valued than you think. And will become more and more of a treasure when you are not there anymore, even though we don´t like to think too much about that, no no.

The delightful art of reading

I have just got through a thin little volume, Umberto Eco´s "PS till Rosens namn" (Eng. "Postscript to The Name of the Rose"). Now, "The Name of the Rose" is one of my favourite books of all time and Eco has written some of my other favourites, like "Foucault´s Pendulum" and "Baudolino". I own (I just discovered) "The Island of the Day Before" but I haven´t read it! Gross negligence on my part!

Some parts of this book I only looked at. Eco is an academic (philosophy and literature) and he often refers to Italian classics that I have no idea what they are and honestly, no real interest in reading. My loss perhaps, but life is short and literature is plentiful. That said, he is not really difficult to understand, he writes with humour and ease and some of the things he has to say about his novel are fundamental to writing. And this is about how he wrote "The Name of the Rose", not about how it should be read.

Actually, he refers to a lot of his reader´s comments and delights in every new way the story is interpreted. For instance, a 17-year-old boy said he was completely lost in all the theological dispute (there is a lot of it!), but for him, it became a literary extension of the maze theme. It hightened his reading experience of being trapped in that labyrinth of a library. Probably it did for many other readers ("naive", Eco calls them, with no hint of contempt whatsoever), who would not have been able to put it into words though. And perhaps that is why Eco´s books are so very re-readable. You can read them at many levels and in many ways and get something new from them every time.

Eco is one of those authors who makes their readers feel smart, and smarter for having read him. He is hilariously funny, extremely learned, offers a good story with width and depth and when I try to describe him words like delightful and enchanting come to me. He claims to write only for the joy of it, for fun. I believe him. There is no angst here, no tortured artist. He seems to be a perfect match of wise and learned man and giggly child. At least as an author. And I recommend his books to anyone, really. I believe any reader (at least over fifteen) could have great fun with Umberto Eco. 

Who we think we are

It may look like I´m consciously searching for books that has something to do with diaries. This is not so. But they are queing up, it seems. I have just finished Jan Henrik Swahn´s "Mitt liv som roman" (= my life as a novel) and you may think, as some critics seem to, that here is another memoir with the word "novel" stamped on it to avoid lawsuits from friends and family. However, I can´t really detect any gossip. Colleagues are generally mentioned by first name, and sure, if you are really familiar with the Swedish literary "scene" in the late 80´s, then maybe, but I´m not. No, this is focused on the writer. Most, well, ALL others are little more than shadows in the background.

My first reflection is that this is a very funny book. Swahn reminds me, somehow, of Claes Hylinger. There is something very passive about the lead character (supposedly the author himself) and his passivity puts him in a string of situations where he becomes highly dependent on the kindness of strangers. Seemingly, nothing in his life happens as a result of ambition on his part. Except for the writing, of course. Or, well, hardly even that.

The premise is that the author (now in his early 50´s) has lost his diary, and he is now trying to recapture what memories he still has of his life. It´s an excavation into the memorybanks, not primarily to tell the story of his life, but to see what memories are there, which ones are not there any more, and he is trying to understand why. On the back cover it says that in reality, losing the diary was the ficticious part of the story, but once the book was finished, the police called him and told him all his diaries had been lost in a fire. And while I can well imagine that a lot in this book is not any more true than that fictitious loss, what I do believe is that Swahn is a diarist. He thinks like a diarist, is occupied with the obsessions of a diarist.

He is persuasive, he wants the reader to believe that he is honest (though perhaps not always truthful). When the going gets tough for him and he is saved by a series of outrageously unlikely circumstances, he turns to his audience and says "do you really think I could have made this up? do you really think I would have expected you to believe this? but seriously, this is how life is, this is just how fantastic it can be sometimes". And we believe him. It might be reverse psychology, though. Whatever. It´s a good story.

And he reflects on how the story of one´s life can change in an instant. After a very bad year in Copenhagen, when he has frozen and starved after having been thrown out by his girlfriend, he escapes to a free month in a friend´s house in Provence, with hardly any money in his pocket. He lives hand-to-mouth and manages to get a story on paper. When the publisher hands him the contract he signs it and instantly, his "life of extreme destitution" has turned into "the year when he wrote his second novel". And his hardships become amusing anecdotes from the artist´s life instead of worrying signs of failed ambitions and a life going terribly wrong.

This is not a novel about a life. This is a novel about the idea of storytelling. And not primarily the elevated technicalities of the novelist´s writing or poet´s creations, but the storytelling that we all do when we interact with other people. We all have different versions of our life´s story, depending on our audience, and our stories change over time. The versions we rarely use, we forget. I bet we all have stories we´d happily entertain our friends with over a pint, but wouldn´t mention to dad or mum. It´s all about who we want to be, how we percieve our identity. Who are we? Swahn asks the question all throughout the book, who is he? He, and all his family, have black hair. (They are constantly pulled aside in customs.) Where did they come from? No one really knows, but there are several stories that run in different branches of the family tree. The point is, I think, that that is what matters. Not the truth, but the story.

And why do people become diarist anyway? Is it because they want to keep the memories with them or because they want to be able to let them go? Perhaps it´s a bit of both. It´s like a back up, like an external disc that´s there in case you want to look something up. And why are so many diarists fantasizing about loosing their diaries? Why does the loss of it make them free? Because too much memory weighs us down, restricts our creativity to re-shape our identities. But only if we believe in the fiction, only if we actually believe that what happened to us was the god-honest truth. If we think of our diary as a work of fiction from start to finish, then perhaps it will give us only pleasure. Then perhaps we can flip the pages and say "look, this is who I once thought I was".

"Mitt liv som roman" is the story of Jan Henrik Swahn´s life as he wants to believe that is was. He is now a middle aged author, and it suits him to mythologize that he once was that starving young boy, sad, but brilliant. All autobiographies are a certain kind of fiction, of course, but Swahn is honest about it, and that is what elevates his book from biography to novel. He does not believe his fiction, not entirely anyway.

If I were teaching creative writing, this is the book I would choose for my students. I can just imagine the discussions!

On the art of friendship

What happened to my project of reading the classics coached by Harold Bloom? New books, that´s what, and suggestions that come my way like pixies luring wanderers into watery swamps (this image comes from something I´m reading now, see next post). Being a great believer in synchronicity, I am easily led astray.

I have just finished a superhot-from-the-presses compilation of Olof Lagercrantz´s diary, "Vid sidan av" (= on the side), a gossip-fest for anyone interested in Swedish literature. All the greats from the 20th Century are here: Karin Boye, Lars Forsell, Eyvind Johnson, Pär Lagerkvist, Artur Lundkvist, and more. Lagercrantz was perhaps the most influential literary critic and a powerful editor at Dagens Nyheter, the biggest morning paper in Sweden, during the mid-decades. I have read him before, a fine little book called "Om konsten att läsa och skriva" (= on the art of reading and writing), that I often re-read.

Reading Lagercrantz diary, with personal portraits of his friends, who were also the people who´s work it was his job to criticize, you get the image of a very small community of people, feeding on each other. It was, of course. Sweden is a small country and was even smaller in the 50´s and 60´s. They seem as normal as any circle of friends, sometimes they agree on everything, sometimes they irritate the hell out of each other, there is even a knife drawn at one point. Sometimes he seems closest to the ones that are the most difficult to be with and for sure, Lagercrantz didn´t have it easy (and no doubt he could be difficult, too). The longest chapter is about Erik Lindegren and it must have been a very passionate and complicated friendship. The way Lagercrantz is always noting Lindegren´s beauty, the shape of his body, his eyes, the way he is with him every day for long periods, particularly at the end (Lindegren died only 58 years old, from hard living I imagine), kissing his hand - it is very moving and it seems like there´s an attraction that goes a bit beyond the regular "bromance". I had to google Lindegren, to see what he looked like, and indeed, he seems to have been a very attractive guy.

The book makes me curious about other things by Lagercrantz, he wrote a few books about authors like Nelly Sachs, Proust and Ekelöf, and he was a poet, too. But what I really take with me is the afterword by his son Richard Lagercrantz, who describes himself as the family´s archivist. He also used to be, like his father, a keen diarist. Three years ago his house burned to the ground, and the archive with it. Luckily, Olof Lagercrantz´s diary had already been digitalized, but his own was completely lost. As a diarist myself, I find the thought of loosing all my notes a bit worrying, but he writes (in my own translation):

Olof´s journaling was a way of living. It´s funny that it became that for me, too. I have written all my life. Not that I have been bad at living, but the diary has been there as an anchor. Now that I have no notes left I have not only lost my urge to write. I also feel strangely freed, almost cleansed. It´s like the wind no longer blows at me - but right through me.

I don´t know how many times I have tried to stop writing, for different reasons. A few days later I´m always at it again. I´m not sure why. Anchor? I don´t know, I think it has more to do with setting boundries between myself and the world, by making my thoughts solid, by turning them into words. It´s a sort of book keeping: this is mine, this is yours, this is his and hers and this is what I can do and what I can´t. I am, I think, writing myself out of being responsible for everything. I imagine most diarists have similar reasons.

Unexpectedly, I hear music

A week ago I went with a friend to see Eva Dahlgren´s one-woman-show, "Ingen är som jag" ("No one is like me"). It´s not something I would have thought of doing myself, Eva Dahlgren´s (one of Sweden´s most loved singer-songwriters) music has never really touched me. Her voice makes my mind drift. But this was a monologue, this time she had something to say, and I was curious. And I was looking forward to seeing my friend.

The show was not bad. Most of the audience were women my own age, forty-plus, and after the show, as we were waiting for our coats, I heard a lot of them saying it was "nice". A nice show. The review in the paper the next day quoted one woman as saying "she laughed until she cried", and no doubt she did, but no one I heard or talked to did. The all smiled, however. It was a really nice evening. It´s hard to dislike Eva Dahlgren. She is beautiful but not annoyingly so. She is not trying to be cleverer than her audience. She is not making a big display out of being a lesbian and married to the most celebrated jewellery designer (former fashion model, former singer) in the country. She makes a cute dance on stage dressed in a tutu, and it does not make her look ridiculous. What she says makes sense and we like her for it, even though we have all thought it ourselves. "That´s right", we think. "That´s just how it is." Even for Eva Dahlgren.

When I got home I googled her and found out she has written a book called "Hur man närmar sig ett träd" ("How to approach a tree"). The tree is a metafor for the creative process and this book is a diary, from 2003 to 2005, two years when she was working on a new album and on her monologue, the one she is touring with now. I read it pretty much back to back, stopping only to eat, sleep and work. Again, the word "nice" comes to mind. And dare I say it, it´s a bit like reading my own diaries. A lot of complaining about things not getting done, about things turning out wrong, or turning out right but not the way one planned, about people being annoying, about pains and aches, about being tired and hungry and feeling fat. As much as I wish that Dahlgren (or any other woman) would never ever feel fat, I still am greatly comforted by it.

And, as I get near the end, the album is recorded, she is planning a few concerts, a tour, I get this urge to listen to all these songs that I have read all about, that I have almost taken part in the creation of. And thanks to Spotify, I can. And unexpectedly, the songs on the album "Snö" ("Snow") open up to me and I realize Eva Dahlgren´s genius. I am swept away by her voice and the lyrics and I have to put the book away even though there are just a few pages left and I repeat some of the songs, dim the lights, take off my glasses and just listen. I haven´t listened to music like that in a long time.

No sparks

Some writers I have every intention to like, but can´t. Joyce Carol Oates is one of them. I have read a few of her books, "Blonde", of course, "Middle Age: A romance", and long ago, "Solstice". While I didn´t exactly dislike them, there are scenes I still remember quite well about the first ones, their contours seem rather, well, loose in my memory. I also read her essay "On boxing" and perhaps that´s the one I liked best, because I read it twice, although it´s been too long ago for me to remember why just now. Perhaps I should put it on my list of things to re-read.

Now, I have a collection of essays called "The faith of a writer: Life, craft, art" in my hands. I find the process of art interesting, and I will much rather read books about, say, Kafka or Virginia Woolf, than actually reading them. Some artists just interest me more in that sense, as works of art in themselves, in the way they lived and worked. And Stephen King and Elisabeth George has written some excellent books on writing that I learned a lot from. Still, they are not among my favourites of authors.

Oates, however, can´t seem to say anything about her art that interests me. She recalls her childhood, her first influences, like Lewis Carroll and Robert Frost. She goes on to give advice to young authors (she is, after all, a teacher) and I suppose it is fine advice, but I just can´t find anything really interesting. Perhaps she isn´t personal enough. Or perhaps her person just doesn´t grab me. It just doesn´t happen with her. Perhaps it´s just chemistry.

I can only call this a failed read. Oh well. It happens. Move on.