Mapping La Maupin

Thinking about travelling around France in La Maupin's footsteps in September, and needed to get it clear in my head.
So I made a map: it includes the main sites, some of which, like Avignon, still contain the buildings she lived in or performed in  - or tried to burn down, like this one:



Tried to trace her route while on the run from the police, but drawing in Google Maps drove me so crazy I gave up.

Nothing on but air

Dance, Lalla, with nothing on
but air. Sing, Lalla,
wearing the sky.
Look at this glowing day! What clothes
could be so beautiful, or
more sacred? 


~ Lalla, or Lalleshvari
A Kashmiri poet, circa 1350


Here's another:


I didn't trust it for a moment,
but I drank it anyway,
the wine of my own poetry.
It gave me the daring to take hold
of the darkness and tear it down
and cut it into little pieces.




(from Naked Song Lalla, translations by Coleman Barks, Maypop, Athens, GA, 1992)

List of lists

The time for best book lists is here.
Here are just a few:
Publishers' Weekly (US) includes Patti Smith (which I still can't find anywhere) and [sigh] Freedom. This is the test for each list - does it include Freedom?

Anis Shivani at the Huffington Post calls it one of the year's several notably "ponderous, bloated, eminently editable books". He prefers Orhan Pamuk.

Closer to home, the Fairfax papers asked a whole lot of clever people what they liked. Christos has discovered Margaret Yourcenar. Colm Toibin loved David Malouf's Ransom. And Geraldine Brooks adored- surprise, surprise - Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

The Guardian did the same thing, with rather more mixed results: Philip Hensher loved Freedom. Can  that be right?

Finally, The Daily Beast added up the votes and came up with a list of lists - with Room at the very top, which is splendid. This list saves you having to read all the others. Nice.

Mine?
Wolf Hall. No contest.

Democracy in action

Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.

~ E L Doctorow

Lately I've been...

Reading

• Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword, by Ellen Kushner. Mannerpunk novels with lots of swordfights. Swordspoint, in particular, is delicious. And I get to claim I'm reading them for research, too.
• Opera, or The Undoing of Women, by Catherine Clément - gorgeous critical writing.
• The Slap. Finally. And I don't know why it's so compelling either, but it just is.
• Occasional Writings, by Margaret Atwood. I meant to save it for my holiday but couldn't.

So instead I'm taking to the beach:

• Timepieces - Drusilla Modjeska on writing
• The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver, about which I've heard mixed reports, but I know it isn't The Poisonwood Bible, so I'm prepared for anything
• The Red Shoe - Ursula Dubosarsky
• Notes from the Teenage Underground - Simmone Howell 
• And Bleak House. Just because.

Watching

• Teddy Tahu Rhodes in The Marriage of Figaro
• Firefly on DVD
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1) about which I feel better as the distance between us grows. 

The sixth HP film was always going to be slightly problematic, since it is largely about the trio and their quest/conflicts, without the usual ensemble, and all the big battles will be in the final instalment. But it really does work, not least because the three main actors are now so much better than they were when they were younger.
I've heard numerous stories of small children sobbing in the cinema. It's not a little kids' film by any stretch of the imagination - please, if your kid is not old enough to read the book without help, don't take them to the movie.


Writing
Of course I'm writing my PhD novel. But also making scribbles for a sort of fantasy something.
And doing last minute proofing things to Act of Faith, which is now coming out in July.

Great things: at stake right now

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope.

~ Winston Churchill

Toast

Made a rough timeline of La Maupin's life - on timetoast - these are just a few dates of performances etc where I know the specific date:

Hearing voices

Here's a (short) paper on writing La Maupin, presented today, including a couple of brief extracts from the draft - it's here on my website.

Proof of life

Proofreading's all done on Act of Faith.

Those sharp eyes at HarperCollins spotted a few howlers, thank God. That's what happens when you chop and change, which you inevitably do. You lose track of whether you are just before dawn or just after dawn and make your characters do a bit of time travel - not a good thing when it's not science fiction or fantasy. Or you move a sentence and then find it swinging in the breeze, alone and without meaning. Anyway, I hope we caught them all.

That's what editing's for.

I love being edited. As someone who is also in the business of publishing other people's content (albeit online), and often trains people to write for the web, I'm always astonished when people say "Don't change a word". Meaning, "I don't want my pearl-like prose to be touched by some talentless hack". Don't you mess with my text. You'll ruin it.

Madness.

This book has been well edited and I'm very pleased with both the process and the result. Other people see things you simply cannot see - you stop seeing - especially words or phrases you use too often. Other people ask sensible questions like "Did you mean for that to happen?". It all goes to make the reading experience as smooth as possible. Don't you hate it when you're caught up in an adventure or an argument and your mind trips over a typo or a logical gap?

Of course, we all make mistakes and sometimes editors do too. Have you ever seen those websites where people dissect in minute detail any bloopers in the Harry Potter books? Well, life's too short to spend time documenting them, but they are all good fun - just the other day I was reading Deathly Hallows and was stopped yet again by the fact that Dean has no father on one page and parents a few chapters later. It's easy enough to do, especially with that many characters and details.No doubt there will be something, even with all this wonderful editing, in Act of Faith. I will find it the day after it comes back from the printers.

But never you mind. Which is one of those phrases I used far too often in it.

Skippy

I try to leave out the parts that people skip.  

~Elmore Leonard

Ink on paper

Sneak preview of the new book: opening paras. All typeset and loverly. Though you can't tell that from here - sorry. But anyway...

My first love was a book.

It was a tiny thing, made by my father’s hand to fit into my own; inscribed in his strong, sloping letters and with a title page illustrated by him for me, with sketches of angels, horses bearing knights and red banners, roses and snowdrops and holly, and, in the centre, a unicorn.

I believed then that it was a picture of the whole world.

I remember every line of that book – even the creases in the pages – though it is many years since I held it. The year 1640, it must have been, or thereabouts.

‘In the beginning was the Word,’ he’d written on the cover and, inside, the first few words of Psalm 100: ‘Make a joyful noise.’

That's all. You can read the rest in August.

History/fiction

History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities, surface towards us then sink away. Some we hook out, others we ignore, and as the pattern changes, so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time which returns everything, changes everything.
~ Jeanette Winterson

From the Hudson River to the Kapiti Coast

I never quite expected the words "Camus" and "Paraparaumu" to appear in the same story, but trust Bookslut to get there first.
An interesting post from Elizabeth Bachner on being transported by the legendary Margaret Mahy all the way from Manhattan to Paraparaumu, as an adult reader of a young adult novel. Margaret Mahy can do that to you.
Bachner has been scouring The Ultimate Teen Book Guide: More than 700 Great Books, and spends some time discussing the nature of best books - the books to which you return, no matter what age you were when you read them:

It makes me expect some new book [which will] thrill me, and heal me, and mutually love me, and make me safe. It reminds me that being full-grown doesn’t mean I have to be stolid, untransformable, bored, or dead. Beginning and ending things does not have to be teenage.

She touches on the question of whether the YA novel's success in a crossover market is because it allows time travel by the reader back to their own adolescence or simply across genre. Or simply about finding a bloody good read.
I was wondering the same thing this morning, as it happens, having downloaded the new Scott Westerfeld, Behemoth, a ripping steampunk yarn set in World War One. Sure, I can put it down as research of my own, but the truth is that the first book in the trilogy, Leviathan, sucked me in good and proper as a reader of any age, so that I felt I had to get the ebook immediately instead of waiting to be able to locate a hardback in the shops.
My critical author brain reads it out of one eye, my breathless twelve year-old self reads it with the other.
I don't even pretend when reading some books - for example, Harry Potter. If I think about the words on the page too much, I wish for a more heavy-handed editor. So I don't think about it. It's not hard. The story and characters inevitably carry me away from my adult self.
Mind you, my adolescent self largely had to get by without young adult novels and spent a great deal of time angsting with Camus too.
So maybe we're just catching up on lost opportunities.

And then you get wrinkles in time

"The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself. He has thrown himself completely into whatever it is that he is doing. A child playing a game, building a sand castle, painting a picture, is completely in what he is doing. His self-consciousness is gone; his consciousness is wholly focused outside himself.

"When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves.

"A writer may be self-conscious about his work before and after but not during the writing. If I am self-conscious during the actual writing of a scene, then it ends up in the round file."

~ Madeline L’Engle

Mixing metaphors

Reading some nice posts over on the AFTRS blog about genre films and television: 

Karen Pearlman argues that "Genre is Necessarily Metaphoric", including a claim that:

The purpose of Australian feature film production, I propose, is not to tell our own stories.  The purpose of our feature film industry is to make our myths.

and follows it up with "Genre is not a Dirty Word", which surveys classic genre films and argues:

...when we say Genre is not a dirty word we are not saying “sell out”, we are saying pay attention to audience expectations, create them and fulfill them.  We are saying pay attention to the history and techniques of cinema.  We are saying make stories that are bigger than yourself.  And finally, we are saying: consider the role of myth in storytelling and what stories are for.  

It doesn't seem to be an argument against realism as such, but rather a vindication of the use of myth and metaphor in film, and especially of genre film - and television. We hear the same discussions about genre writing in print. Attack, dismissal and defence.

I wonder whether genre writing has a much healthier future on TV than in film in spite of all the death knells. It certainly seems rosy at present. Period drama, space, procedurals, westerns, even musicals are thriving.
Never mind all the vampires.