on the life of a new author...

Read it and weep (but, literally)

Read the incredibly powerful Dragonslippers: This is What an Abusive Relationship Looks Like a couple of days ago. It's a quick read but unputdownable (that over-used publishing ersatz adjective, but really true in this case). Started reading in bed at 1am thinking I'd look at a few pages and then go to sleep, finished at 2.15am, sat in the dark shivering till 3am.

It's not the kind of book I'd usually read: I guess I feel like I've seen enough documentaries/episodes of ER and Eastenders to understand what domestic violence means and to go, in a fairly detached way, 'oh yes it's terrible, and so often these women stay with their abusers.' But this is a totally different level of understanding: of the way that a relationship like this is essentially a kind of slow brainwashing, that it breaks down the will, that behaviour that, if it happened at the start, would have made the woman call the police can come to seem, drip, drip, drip, normal.

I was shocked that, at the start of her relationship with 'Brian', 'Roz' (all pseudonyms) was 35, a successful businesswoman, winner of the Woman of the Year award from her local chamber of commerce. I really had - it turns out - presumed that women who get into these relationships are badly-educated, poor, unable to find other economic options for themselves. (This despite the fact that I have a friend whose husband was also physically violent to her who is successful and brilliant.) Roz's website contains a list of warning signs of an abusive relationship which I really think everyone in the world should read: both to spot it if it begins to happen to you, and to understand why some 'romantic' behaviours can actually appear very threatening and scary.

The book also made me think about the ways in which our social construction of relationships, and of women's roles, facilitate abuse. Several times in the book, Roz - having been emotionally and physically abused - comes out with cliches about relationships. 'Relationships are about forgiveness', or 'he must love me, otherwise why would he get so jealous?' And Brian emphasises, and she agrees, that relationships mean 'becoming one', 'being absorbed into each other', 'not trying to be so independent'.

It made me think that an abusive relationship is just a relationship that really follows some of these pieces of hideous folk 'wisdom' to their logical conclusions. If a relationship means 'becoming one', then surely it's OK for your husband to ask you to give up friends he doesn't like? You're one now, so you shouldn't be trying to pull away from him by having hobbies he doesn't enjoy too. Or by going on vacation without him, or by taking a job when he'd really like you to be home.

The truth is that however close you are to someone else you will NEVER become 'one' with them, and a good thing too; we remain wonderful individual beings with our own hopes and dreams and likes and dislikes. But the rhetoric of relationships is that 'becoming as one' is somehow supposed to be a good thing.

And everyone knows that women are more 'verbal' than men. So, like those books say, you can't always expect him to be able to tell you what he thinks in words. Sometimes he might have to storm off into his 'cave'. Or shout. Or throw something. Or hit you.

The truth is that everyone, both men and women, sometimes need to be quiet and uncommunicative. If you are in a relationship, though, it is a good idea to be able to say this quite clearly. "I need to be quiet for a while. I need to be on my own for a bit." [Of course if you believe that you have to 'become one', even voicing that idea can be difficult...]

Looking back through the book, it seemed clear that from the very first moment they met, Brian was breaking Roz's boundaries. They met at a friends' house at a pool party. He picked her up bodily and, even though she was saying 'no, no!' [but we all know what it means when a woman says 'no', but keeps smiling, don't we?] he threw her into the pool and jumped in after her. Flirty behaviour? Or a total inability to respect her autonomy?

In the 1990s, Peggy Orenstein did some amazing research into how boys and girls are treated in the classroom. Essentially, it goes like this: a teacher asks a question and some kids put up their hands and others shout out. If a girl shouts out the answer, whether it's correct or incorrect, the teacher says "don't shout out, put your hand up". If a boy shouts out the answer, the teacher responds saying either "yes that's right", or "no that's wrong". Boys are rewarded for being impetuous, breaking the rules, going aggressively for what they want. Girls are rewarded for obeying the rules, and being placid and accepting.

This goes on in all areas of society. Babcock and Laschever did some research in 2007 that investigated why women don't push as hard for pay rises as men do (which is always what's blamed for the pay gap: of course, it's women's fault). The researchers found that there's a good reason for women not to ask for more money: they receive stiff social penalties when they do.

"women who do rebel against these standards by pushing more overtly on their own behalf often risk being punished. Sometimes they're called "pushy" or "bitchy" or "difficult to work with." Sometimes their skills and contributions are undervalued and they're passed over for promotions they deserve. Other times, they're left out of information-sharing networks."

Plus, women don't even get very far when they try to negotiate, because employers simply don't respond in the same way as they do to men.

"They make worse first offers to women, pressure women to concede more, and themselves concede much less."

We live in a world that rewards men for aggressively pushing for what they want, and rewards women for accepting what's given to them uncomplainingly. It's a world that says that relationships involve self-sacrifice, and giving up autonomy. It's a world that says that women's autonomy is less important than men's. It's a world that tells men 'if you don't get her the first time, just keep on pushing', and tells women 'don't make a fuss'. And although of course there are women who are violent and abusive to their male partners, it's far more common the other way around and one can see why. It's not because men are 'just more agressive' any more than women are 'asking for it'. We live in a world that is set up for abusive relationships; that's what I learned from Dragonslippers.

The library at the moon under water

Some internet rambling recently led me to this - an essay George Orwell wrote about his ideal, platonic perfect pub, The Moon Under Water. Apparently this is where the Moon Under Water chain took its name from, which I didn't know. I don't think they follow all his rules anyway! Carraway seed biscuits?

And then yesterday I was interviewed by Mslexia magazine, an excellent publication can highly recommend it. They asked me about my 'writing day' and I realised that I'm actually quite superstitious, or ritualistic in my writing-in-a-library practices. [I find a desk, I leave my things at it, I wander the shelves, find a book that I like the look of, take it back to my table, read a few paragraphs and then I'm off.] And also that I have a very good idea of what my ideal platonic library would be. So here we are. The library a few streets over from the Moon Under Water.

1. It should have open shelves, with a good collection of both modern and older books covering all the academic disciplines but with a special emphasis on fiction, poetry and drama of course, and history, classics, psychology, religion and anthropology. There is an excellent collection of medical books, and several shelves of photography. At the Moon Under Water Library, skillful and well-educated librarians have chosen the best of modern works, but haven't weeded out older books hard. A Victorian edition of Ovid rubs shoulders with a modern commentary. Occasionally one still finds books with the pages uncut.

2. The librarians know what they're talking about. A reader in trouble can turn up at the front desk and say 'help, where do I start on Byzantine architecture?' and they know where to point you. For more esoteric questions, they know who to ask and will take your details and get back to you.

3. There is no cafe in the Moon Under Water library - food smells do not penetrate its halls nor is there any danger of spillages on the books. However, one is permitted to take in a bottle of water and there is a charming refectory in the Moon Under Water university building next door where readers are admitted on presentation of their Moon Under Water library card.

4. The building is large and its bookshelves are serpentine. There are plenty of little corners with a desk next to a tiny window (and next to a power supply and a good light source. Although the library has existed in some form for centuries, it makes sure that every desk is adequately supplied with power and light.) Although there is a large central desk space, it is easy to find a more private area in which to work. The seats are comfortable. They do not, in general, have arms.

5. There is wi-fi, it is fast and easy to access but - and this is important - the password changes every day and must be picked up from a box of small slips on the front desk. Writers completing a manuscript are grateful that they have to make a conscious decision to be able to log on that day.

6. All the members of the library understand that silence is not a forgotten virtue. Any member found conversing on a mobile phone outside the designated 'conversation area' on the fourth floor knows that they face immediate expulsion.

7. The library is open every day from 8am to midnight. The loan period is typically three months. Loans can be renewed online, reservations can be made online, you will receive an email when your book is in.

8. Although the library allows some leeway to its members - and the members are in general completely trustworthy - those who are found to 'reserve' a desk at busy times by placing a jacket over the chair and then go for a three-hour lunch will be sternly reprimanded. However, this reprimand rarely has to be issued - the miracle of the library is that there always seems to be a quiet desk for those who need it. There are also a number of private lockable carrel rooms - big enough for a desk and a chair - which can be rented by those who want them for a minimal charge. There is a waiting list, but progress along it is brisk.

9. The library is a part of the community, with a noticeboard and an interesting speakers' programme in the evenings. It also has an excellent children's library - well-stocked, with an array of storytellers, reading times, beanbags for lounging and toys for the not-reading-yet children to play with. The children's library and the speaker's area are soundproofed.

10. I'm amazed I didn't mention this first. The library is beautiful. The proportions of the rooms are elegant, the desk-spaces simple and workmanlike but with a grace to them. Even though the library is extremely easily accessible from north-west London (it only takes me 20 minutes to get there from my house) it has glorious views of rolling countryside. How lucky I am to work there.

Sigh. If only if only.

[picture stolen from the Trinity College Library, Dublin website]

Just to prove I've been leaving the house

Even though I haven't written anything about it, I actually have left the house and gone places recently. Went to the very civilised Kalendar cafe in Highgate. Great food, plus this wonderful arrangement of dogs (sadly I think not a permanent fixture).

And if you're ever invited to a bookshop's birthday party, my advice is to arrive early. I was invited to the 10th anniversary party of Waterstone's Piccadilly the other day, in their very swish 5th floor restaurant. But, the party was 6-8pm and I arrived at 7, which apparently is *not* what the famous authors do. Michael Frayn was just leaving, so I got to dash up to him and say "I really love your work! I really do!" But I had *missed* Zadie Smith and Joanna Trollope. Sob. Also, there was a cake, but they didn't actually... serve it? Perhaps the senior management had decided it was all for them.

A stolen poem

I found this poem in the London Library's Summer magazine (I have a pile of magazines, I work through them slowly). I worry about posting the work of writers online without permission - I know Wendy Cope is quite against it - but as Clive James posted it on his own site himself I hope he won't mind too much. And if he does, I'll take it down!

In searching to see if he'd put it online, I found lots of scurrilous articles about James' extra-marital affairs. Of course if these weren't sanctioned by his wife (and some wives do), they are quite reprehensible. And yet this seems to me to be a poem written by a man who likes women. Which is an attractive quality in a man. So often men seem to talk about how much they dislike women and then in the same breath wonder why no woman will go out with them (and the same applies to women who say they dislike men of course). But this is quite the opposite of that.

A Message From the Moon
Clive James

Ming fruit dish, swirling Jackson Pollock tondo
From Wedgwood, just because you’re so much bigger
Than I am, don’t you lord it over me,
The frail outrigger for your fat canoe.
My seas are dead but I control your tides
And stir your women on a monthly basis
To their blood sacrifice. It isn’t you
That liquefies them for their absent lovers,
Churns their insides, puts highlights in their faces
On hot nights where the sun no longer lingers.
With my lost air to breathe they lie bereft,
Touching themselves for hours beneath thin covers
As I lean down to them and pull them open
Like little oceans I can close at will.
You think them satisfied but I know better.
Those men you sent me were too small to feel:
A pin-prick when they came, and when they left
One tiny splash of fire I hardly noticed
While they went home tin heroes. Next time send me
Someone who’s known me since she was a girl.

-- London Library Magazine, Summer 2009

Among other things I have failed at

Look at this. After all that creative energy on my August project, it's been nearly three weeks since I last posted here. I think the only answer is *another project*. I am brewing ideas. Ca ira.

In the meantime, though, another attempt to turn a spoken-word talk into a post. I spoke a few weeks ago at a Royal Society of Arts event on 'The Glory of Failure'. I've been a member of the RSA for about 18 months now - originally joined to use their library and, as a subsidiary point, to make my father proud. I don't really use the library that often - not enough space for working on one's own computer, but the paternal pride element is stopping me de-joining so I thought I should go along to one or two of their events.

'Glory of Failure' grabbed me as a concept because it seemed so playful, so delightfully English, and so wonderfully undemanding as a topic. In fact, I started my talk by commenting that I wasn't sure whether, at a Symposium On The Glory Of Failure I should try to give a really good talk, or a really bad one...

Many of the other talks had been about learning from failure, and using it to propel oneself toward success. And in some fields I can quite understand this: we had a talk from a representative of the Royal College of Nursing. He spoke very powerfully about how, for him, every failure must be a learning experience, each one must highlight the failures in the system that allowed it to happen, and show how that can be plugged. Because when he and his colleagues fail, people die. Perfectly sensible for him to try to avoid failure at all costs.

However, I think this attitude towards failure is not so helpful when it comes to the arts, to creativity, to my particular thing, writing. In fact, the subject of my talk was, perhaps, now I come to think of it:

ALL WRITING IS FAILURE

Which I proved via the following quotes.

1. "Happiness writes white" - Henry de Montherlant

No one ever wrote fiction who was completely happy. Why would you? Fiction is what you do when your life's miserable, or when you're recollecting past miseries. In fact, as Aristotle said, 'conflict is the essence of drama' - there'd be no fiction if there weren't conflict, unhappiness, distress. You couldn't have an episode of Eastenders where everyone went around feeling very fulfilled, calm and full of love for one another. You simply can't write about perfectly happy people - it's incredibly boring. [Even Julie & Julia spend time being creatively frustrated, even with their lovely marriages.]

Therefore: all fiction writing is a symptom of failure. If one were perfectly happy, one wouldn't need or want to do it.

2. "All writing is rewriting" - Ernest Hemingway

This is the thought that tortures me when I'm hacking away at a first draft. All this, all these gallons of words that I'm expending such energy on flooding onto the page - pretty much all of them will end up trickling away to nothing. I'll have to start again. And then again. And then again. With my new novel, The Lessons, I had to throw out the first *50,000 words* and rewrite them from scratch. It's demoralising. You have to write many many many words to find the good ones. Most of what you write won't end up in the finished book. This is the way with most writers.

Therefore: most sentences that one writes are failures.

3. "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." - Paul Valery

Oh how true this is. I still get ideas for how to improve Disobedience. No one ever feels completely satisfied with the work they've produced. There are always ways to improve it, maybe even to start again and completely redo it. The trouble is: when you first envisage a novel, it's a glittering, delicate, beautiful, perfect thing in your mind. Just an idea, shining and golden. And then you have to drag it into the mire of words - bringing it into the real, so much is lost. The plot becomes a little awkward, the characters who you found so charming begin to grate. The themes which once seemed sublime become trite. Everything that we create fails to come up to our deepest hopes and visions for it.

Therefore: all creations are failures, when compared to the vision that began them.

4. "There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer." - Graham Greene

Yes. Sad but true. Writing fiction is a way of escaping real life because, at any moment, at the point that the worst possible thing has happened to you, in the midst of grief, of loss, of misery, of anger, of fear, of bitterness, of hatred, in the middle of all these real emotions, a writer always has a tiny inner voice saying "I must remember how this feels so I can write about it later". It's very useful; it means that you never quite have to feel what you're feeling. There's always a journalistic platform to stand on, one can always be - just a little bit - an observer of one's own life.

Therefore: the writer is to some extent a failed human being.

Should we worry about all of this? Certainly not! Writing wouldn't be 'better' if we eliminated these failures, in fact it would cease to exist at all. This is one thing I know for certain:

the search for perfection kills creativity.

Therefore let us embrace the glory of our creative failures. They are also our creative successes.

Meeting your heroines

Went to see Julie and Julia this evening, a movie which I rather expected to love since it combines two great passions of mine: writing and cooking (I really must write more about cooking here) and even Mark Lawson on Front Row had to admit that he'd loved it. Written by Nora Ephron, starring Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci, if it were an acerbic comedy about the breakup of a marriage it'd be an Oscar nomination certainty. As it's only a movie about happiness and joy all I can say is: go and see it at once, and if you know me do not be surprised to receive a copy of the DVD as a gift sometime this year.

One wonderful thing about this movie is that is is about happy marriages. This is so rare a thing to see on TV or film that it seems almost shocking. Furthermore, they are marriages in which both husbands and wives get to have their own independent lives, pursuing their passions and joys, supporting one another...

It made me contemplate the way feminists seem to be described: man-hating, domineering, pursuing careers at the expense of the family (as if there were anything more expensive to a family than a frustrated, bored, depressed mother or wife). The thing is, feminism doesn't mean that a woman wants to be better than their husband or partner. All we want is what's portrayed in this movie: support, love, companionship and some hot lovin' while we both pursue our dreams. Mutual support. Mutual companionship. Mutual hot lovin'. It's not so unattainable, really. People are doing it all the time. As far as one can tell from Julia Child's life story, they have been since the 1940s at least. Maybe even earlier than that! Of course the movie is a fantasy, but at least it's a healthier fantasy than 'some day my prince will come'. When I was working on the Golden Notebook Project last year I wrote that I wished there were more feminists writing about how to make happy, feminist heterosexual relationships: this is just such a work, and I loved it.

I was also fascinated by a thread running through the movie: the nature of heroes and heroines. The 'Julie' of the movie's title is Julie Powell, an office worker, who spent a year cooking her way through the cookery book of TV chef Julia Child. Over the course of the year Child comes to represent something to Powell: a joyfulness, an exuberance, a dedication to life's pleasures, a gutsy, earthy-yet-refined, bright-side-seeking way to live. Child becomes almost a god to her, in the sense of being a member of a pantheon, a spirit or idea to call on in times of need.

Trying not to spoil the movie too much... Powell has a brief contact with the real Child, then in her 90s which of course fails to live up to this idealisation. Well, how could anything live up to the idea she has of Child? There's a lovely scene where Powell and her husband discuss this. It's not the Julia in the world who's important, he says to her, it's the Julia in your head.

It's true of course. Heroes can never live up to what we hope for them to be. They're just people. I've met some of my writing heroes over the past few years and even though the experiences were often wonderful (especially meeting Neil Gaiman, he really is lovely) nothing short of a full telepathic mind-meld could have really expressed the passion of that relationship on my side. Not everyone has heroes - and I suppose I don't really do hero-worship, I don't think my heroes are perfect, I don't want to be just like them or imagine that they could solve all my problems. But I do have people whose work I admire intensely, often because I think that maybe, if I worked very hard, I could get to be a bit like them one day. Heroes become part of us - they seem to meet us just where we are (because of course we have partly invented them) and walk beside us on the journey. They're like a story we tell ourselves about who we are and who we might be. Meeting the real person is often just fine, but... the real person is often actually less important than the idea of them. What a beautiful, subtle, interesting message.

Meryl Streep and Nora Ephron should make a movie together every three years from now till they keel over. They're both wonderful. And if I ever meet them, although I might try to tell them how much they mean to me, I can pretty much accept that they won't understand.

Welcome to October and indeed the New Year

Oof. This part of the year is *full* of Jewish festivals. As full, to steal a Douglas Adams metaphor as a pomegranate is of pips, which is an apposite image because pomegranates are one of the symbols of the season (I think it has to do with fertility). So I am quite busy but in a good way - socializing, a bit of praying/meditating/thinking-about-stuff, making foods... Making the most of the season before winter comes to get us.

For Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year which was 19th and 20th September, I attended the Grassroots Jews services. This is a wonderful new venture - services focused on spirituality and community rather than the strict letter of anything. It neatly avoids the whole problem I talked about when I went to the Liberal Synagogue - that liberals can be quite as dogmatic in their beliefs as the Orthodox. My best example of this: in the email that went around giving details of the arrangements for the services, they had *both* of the following:
a) details for people who wanted to bring prayerbooks and food to the venue before the Sabbath started (because Orthdox people don't carry on the Sabbath)
*and*
b) details about parking on the day (Orthodox people don't drive on Sabbath, but non-Orthodox do).
Neither set of arrangements was presented with a slight snigger (how silly these people are) or a note of disapproval (of course the *best* people won't do this...) as it might have been elsewhere. I was very impressed.

Anyway, I delivered a sermon of sorts on the second day of Rosh Hashanah. I began by announcing that it would be an atheist sermon. Or an agnostic one. Perhaps. Maybe. I'm not sure whether it's agnostic or not.

I've written it up into some notes, so you can get the gist - it's hard to write down talks though, they inevitably lose something in the translation. But here's broadly what I said:

1. When I was a child, my parents took me to this 'spiritual' synagogue in London (Yakar), where people seemed more concerned about talking about their relationship to Judaism than about arranging a ladies' guild. And therefore when I was a teenager I thought my parents were crackers and in my early 20s joined a shul with a ladies' gallery and a kiddush rota etc etc. And of course now here I am back in a place much like where I started - a service committed to egalitarianism, to tolerance and to, yes, spirituality.

2. This is a natural development of our relationship with our parents. We start off thinking everything they say is right. And then we go through a stage of thinking everything they say is wrong. And then we reach a place of forgiveness, where we can say "this was right, but this was bullshit". We're grateful for the things they got right, and at first we're angry for the things they got wrong but later we can forgive them.

3. This is the first time I've been in a shul on Rosh Hashanah for eight years.

4. Why? Because eight years ago, I was living in Manhattan. Rosh Hashanah was two days after 9/11. 9/11 was the Tuesday and Rosh Hashanah was the Thursday night. And I stood in that shul, with the stench of death and destruction in my nostrils, and read the prayers about how God is a just God and a righteous God and I thought: fuck this.

5. At that shul my parents used to take me to, the Rabbi Mickey Rosen, of blessed memory used to talk a lot about his spiritual problems. And at the time, as a child, I thought "my god this is boring". Children don't really have spiritual problems. (This got a good laugh, although I'm not sure why...) But with the understanding that some of you might be bored by this, I'm about to talk about my own spiritual problems.

6. There is evil in the world and it is a problem. It is, in fact, the problem of evil. Why would a good, loving, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful God allow it? If God were truly good and just and merciful surely he would prevent terrible evils like 9/11 and the many daily tragedies that surround us. Some people are satisfied with the answer to the problem of evil that goes "ah well, we can't see the whole picture. God causes plagues and floods but there's a giant tapestry and we only see a small bit of it." I'm not satisfied with this at all. I don't accept that there can ever be a justification for the evil things that happen in the world.

7. So, here's a thought that I've had. Not a solution. A thought. It's based on the therapeutic insight that often we end up giving other people what we need ourselves. Maybe we want to be nurtured, so we end up nurturing others. Maybe we want to be listened to, so we spend a lot of time listening to other people. I was thinking about this as I was contemplating the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur service, with all of its emphasis on forgiveness. "Forgive us!" we cry to God, and God says "I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you." And it made me think...

8. Perhaps, if you have a spiritual problem like mine, you could try what I'm trying. Perhaps we can try to forgive God.

9. Maybe this is a mature relationship, a two-way relationship. We talk about God as a parent, a father. Maybe like a parent, we can be grateful for some things we've been given but for others... all we can do is try to forgive.

10. Thank you, and Shana Tova

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/canonsnapper/253623561/)

In which I wax philosophical

ITV3 is rerunning Brideshead Revisited at the moment and I've been watching it with a great deal of pleasure. I stayed away from watching or reading it while I was writing my novel. Working on a novel about Oxford, I thought it was important to steer clear. But I know that some elements of the book are a response to Brideshead. Or perhaps not a response to the book as much as a response to the way that Oxford presents itself post-Brideshead, the way that Oxford students think of themselves post-Brideshead, the experience students hope to have at Oxford having read or seen or heard of Brideshead Revisited.

[I had a conversation about a year ago with someone who I knew distantly while I was at Oxford. The kind of person who, when I said I was writing a novel about Oxford immediately said “oh, it’s about me then,” even though I think I literally never had a conversation longer than three sentences with this person the whole time I was there. Anyway, when I made my suggestion that Oxford itself is now a response to Brideshead Revisited and that the experiences students have there now are partly based on expectations created by the novel, this person immediately said “oh no, you’re totally wrong, because I never read it.” Which is, charmingly, exactly what I had a character in the book say in an early draft of my book – later deleted for being far too postmodern. I think that people who say this are even more vulnerable, in a way, because they have the yearning without knowing that's what they're yearning for. I think that Brideshead taps into an English nostalgia for a between-the-wars perfection that probably never existed and hooks it onto our oldest university. I think that, whether you’ve read the book or seen the series or not, your idea of what it means to ‘be an Oxford student’ has been shaped by it because those ideas are ‘wild’ in our culture now, no longer needing to be transmitted by print or film. Oxford is not a place which exists comfortably in the present anymore; it is full of people pretending consciously or unconsciously to have stepped back in time.]

 So. Watching Brideshead collided in my mind with having spent a few hours at The School of Life recently, and I started thinking for the first time in probably a decade about my experience in studying Philosophy at Oxford, what I had expected and why I was disappointed.

 At all my ‘safety schools’ I didn’t apply to read straight Philosophy, I applied to read Philosophy and English. Which actually still pretty accurately sums up the locus of my interests: I’m interested in writing and words and I’m interested in ideas and that philosophical cliché, the Meaning of Life. The School of Life feels like a perfect place for me because there are people there grappling with the same issues that I thought I’d study at Oxford: how does one make meaningful relationships? what is the right way to think about death? how far ought one to go for a friend? is suffering improving or just pointless?

 Maybe studying philosophy at Oxford now, one gets to deal with some of these questions. Or maybe I would have got to deal with them if I hadn’t become disillusioned quite early on and started ‘phoning it in’. But in my memory, there was never a point at which studying philosophy touched on the questions I’d imagined would be at its heart: the questions about how to live.

 Instead, we read a lot of ancient philosophers and tried to find flaws in their reasoning. I am still grateful to have a bank of useful philosophical ideas in my mind, grateful to have read Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz and Aristotle and Hume. They’re good writers with interesting ideas. But I remember wondering at Oxford, with increasing desperation, when we were going to start discussing our * own * ideas, our own lives. When we were going to start talking about something real. Which, of course, never really happened.

 In my third year, I finally had a tutor who I felt I could raise this issue with. She (the only woman who tutored me during my whole time at Oxford) told me that the problem with philosophy was that it had had its wings clipped. It used to be a huge discipline of reasoning, in which philosophers would start by using their reason to work out truths about our physical universe (are we all made up of small particles which cannot be divided? How do mind and body interact? Does God exist?) and, using that as a base, would reason all the way up to “What is the good life? How is it best to live?”

 But slowly that territory had been diminished. Physics now took all the questions about the physical universe. I remember being incredibly frustrated during a tutorial on Leibniz, that neither I nor my tutor knew * what modern Physics actually said * about whether his ‘monads’ – tiny indivisible particles – really exist. All we were doing was examining his reasoning, without knowing whether reason had in fact led him to the right answer. And religion – or despair – had taken away the questions about how to live a good life. It was no longer considered something about which one could reason one’s way to a conclusion.

 So Philosophy was left with the stuff in the middle. Theoretical questions that almost never touch the ‘real world’. Not ‘how should we use language?’ but ‘what is language?’ Not ‘what is the right way to live?’ but ‘what is the meaning of the concept ‘right way to live’?’ Not ‘is there a God?’ but ‘is there a coherent way to understand the idea of God?’ And while it’s certainly useful to be able to parse concepts like this with clarity… I eventually found this approach frustrating and dull.

 It’s not the way those philosophers intended to be read, and it’s not the way to grow to love them. It’d be like reading Jane Austen purely in order to learn about punctuation and being set essay after essay critiquing her use of semicolons. Or like reading music scores and debating their merits without ever actually listening to or playing the music. Like reading recipes without tasting the food. Like reading sex manuals without… well, you get the drift.

 So, The School of Life – it feels like home to me, because people are finally using the philosophers I read as a teenager in the way they themselves intended to be used. Not as objects for reason or examination of arguments but as guides to living. Not perfect guides; there’s no such thing as a perfect guide anyway. But writers who practise an art as much as a science and who must be responded to with the emotions as much as with reason.

 I remember feeling almost overwhelmingly excited when I first read Alain De Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy because I suddenly saw what I had missed at Oxford; someone who treated these philosophers seriously and wanted to think through their ideas and then * use them *.

 Perhaps I started the wrong way round. Perhaps when I was a teenager I was too fundamentalist about my Orthodox Judaism to have been willing to entertain ideas about the right way to live from Greek philosophers anyway. Perhaps I needed years of therapy – or just years of living – to begin to understand what any of them really meant. But I find myself now, finally, free to read philosophy again and simply to love it, to appreciate it on the level of the writing and ideas.

 This is how Marcus Aurelius’ second book of meditations starts: “Begin each day by telling yourself: today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will and selfishness.” Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t it inspiring, and funny and somehow magnificently calming? I honestly do not care what reasoning led him to say it and whether or not it was flawed. It is not about pure reason, it is about living.

Wool, do you hear me? Wool.

Now, see, I *have* been to some new places lately. But I haven't written about them, so maybe they don't count. And I've given a couple of talks, one at the Interesting conference and one at a colloquium on 'The Glory of Failure' which I really have to write up and honestly intend to do here but... haven't done it yet. And it's Rosh Hashanah tomorrow, so can't promise to write anything then either, oh the disgrace of it.

But today I did go somewhere new. It was a wool shop. Knitting and crochet - skills my grandmother taught me - have become rather super-trendy of late. And thus they have super-trendy shops to go with them, shops like iKnit and Loop (neither of which I've been to, but I'm sure I'll love them when I do go). They seem unlike the wool shops of my youth. They are in trendy parts of London. They appear to have sofas and chairs. Apparently you can drink wine or coffee there and 'hang out' as these young folks say. It's all very chic and I'm looking forward to exploring them sometime.

But these are not wool shops as I remember them. My mother used to take me to the Colindale Wool Shop, on the Edgware Road, next to the bag shop that smelled richly, almost overpoweringly of leather. I loved that wool shop. I think it might have been the first shop I remember, certainly the first one I asked to go back to. It was small, dark, staffed by an extremely kind and knowledgeable lady who occasionally, if I was very good, gave me one of the cartoon-character buttons from her button tubes. (Possibly my mother paid for the buttons, it just occurs to me. But at the time I thought they were a gift, and maybe they really were.)

Those wool shops of old were not trendy. There was no coffee. And today I was delighted to discover that although the Colindale Wool Shop is now sadly gone, replaced by the Colindale Cash Converters, such shops are not entirely replaced by the chi-chi. For here is the Borehamwood Wool Shop:

I love this shop. I love the window display that clearly *hasn't* been designed to appeal to 30-something yummy mummies but instead to grandmas. I love the eclecticism of the contents inside, discount wools and feathers and sequins, stands of zips, a corner of rubber stamps and, best of all, hundreds of button tubes. I would have adored this shop when I was a little girl, and I wouldn't have had to worry about knocking over someone's coffee. The shopkeeper was incredibly knowledgeable, giving me loads of help converting an American pattern to UK wool and needles.

Best of all, the shop is called a *wool shop*. Americans, you see, call the chunky thread-like stuff you use to knit into fabric 'yarn'. Stitch and Bitch, in fact, is quite insistent that it is *entirely wrong* to call it 'wool', because wool is the stuff that comes from sheep whereas yarn is the generic term for all such thread. To which I say: phooey. In the UK, we call it all wool. It is both the description of a particular kind and the generic term. As in "I'll do the hoovering with my hoover that is made by Hoover." If you want to specify that the particular wool you're using comes from sheep, you say "pure wool".

Anyway, having got that off my chest, here is a picture of the cushion cover I finished off today. With toggles (they were Esther's idea) from the button tubes. I love those button tubes so much.

Tough Jews

So I'm just sitting around on a Sunday watching 'Lucky Number Slevin', a movie so complex that, by the time I was 40 minutes in it was very clear to me that I'd have to read the wikipedia entry if I hoped to understand it without multiple viewings. It's a cute film though, and wins many bonus points with me for having Josh Hartnett spend 20 minutes wearing only a towel (see above). But I'd really forgotten why I'd mentally bookmarked it to watch until we arrived at 'The Rabbi', a gangster played by Ben Kingsley who has a team of hardcore Chassidic Jew assassins working for him. I love this stuff; not so much purely tough Jews as tough, comic, highly-identifying Jews. One day I want to write something like this, but in the meantime it reminded me of a piece I wrote for Jeneration for last year's Jewish Book Week when they asked me for something on 'my favourite fictional Jew'. I think they printed it on handouts but never put it online, perhaps because of the high levels of swearing, so here it is for your enjoyment.

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To describe my favourite fictional Jew, there's going to have to be some swearing. I make no apology for that. It's the whole point, really. When do you ever hear people swearing about their Judaism? When do you ever hear them ranting, and raving and shouting and screaming about how much they love being Jewish? Nowhere. Except for one character. I'm talking about Walter Sobchak, the ex-military bowling fanatic  played by John Goodman in The Big Lebowski.

Walter converted to marry his ex-wife but he's still passionate about his Judaism. This is what he says when his bowling team has been slated to play on Saturday:

Walter: I told those fucks down at the league office a thousand times that I don't roll on Shabbos!
Donny (a schmuck): What's Shabbos?
Walter: Saturday, Donny, is Shabbos, the Jewish day of rest. That means I don't work, I don't get in a car, I don't fucking ride in a car, I don't pick up the phone, I don't turn on the oven and I sure as shit [he roars] DON'T FUCKING ROLL! SHOMER SHABBOS!

The first time I saw this scene I almost leapt out of my seat in excitement. I grew up Shomer Shabbos but no one I'd ever met had talked about it so openly. We debated when to tell a prospective employer about Shabbos; not too early in case they turn you down, not too late, lest you should look secretive. We learned to slip out of work quietly on a Friday afternoon. We learned to apologise, and speak softly, and if someone asked us to a party on a Saturday to murmur "sorry, Shomer Shabbos." It had never occurred to me that one could angrily demand respect for one's Judaism. But now I know. We need more people like Walter Sobchak, ranting and raving and not being afraid to cause a scene. More people, please, who are Shomer fucking Shabbos.