Blood Harmonies

As some of you may recall, a few months back I launched myself into adventures in pink home-brew.  This involved a lot of roses, and a lot of patience, but as you can see from the photo opposite, it turned out just as you might expect Barbie’s favourite tipple to look.

On the whole, I am very pleased with it, although it is slightly more botanical tasting than I anticipated (a friend suggested next year I should be a bit more ruthless about cutting away the yellow and white bits of the rose petals).  We ended up with a bigger batch than expected, and so have been giving it away.  So far, I’ve been using it to make Rose Petal Champagne Cocktail (or cava, to be fair) which just involves adding a small shot to a fizz flute and topping it up with cava.  But others have survived drinking it neat (saying it tastes like liquid Turkish Delight).  This has given me the idea of mixing it with some sort of chocolate liqueur to develop the Turkish Delight martini.

In the end, I was worried that I might not have enough roses on hand for the final mix stage, so I ended up freezing petals as they bloomed, and then proceeding to the sugar syrup stage straight from frozen.  All in all, I think it’s a first batch even Wilma J. Pickering might happily lay her pruning scissors down to consider further.

Whenever I stand at the front tables/shelves of any bookshop it’s inescapable that I am performing a sort of unconscious triage of what’s on offer.  First and foremost, the cover art reaches out to draw me towards the titles before I’ve even had a chance to register the words of the titles – or critically – the author’s names.  So I was particularly interested to read this article by Charlotte Strick, who has a great stash of tricks up her sleeve from her time as art director at both Faber & Faber, and the paperback line at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as being art editor and designer for The Paris Review.

Like every successful writer I’ve ever heard interviewed, Charlotte Strick takes the view that nothing is ever wasted.  You can read more in Where the Cover of Your Favourite Novel Comes From.

Each time I see this clip it’s like basking in the glow of inspiration.

Ira Glass on Storytelling, part 3 of 4

An exquisite video post by filmmaker Andrea Dorfman, and poet/singer/songwriter, Tanya Davis.  I wasn’t feeling lonely at all when it started, but hearing such a distinctive Canadian accent has toppled me into homesickness this afternoon…in a good way though.  Hope you enjoy it.  I’m off to whip up some poutine for our tea and work out what we can have with maple syrup for afters…

How To Be Alone

Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A revelation of a read, and no mistake. It’s the first Peter Carey I’ve read and I was bowled over by the combination of sublime storytelling, with prose that lights up the sky. I cannot believe it has taken me so long to get around to it. Vivid, thought-provoking, an emotional roller-coaster without ever being sentimental. Beautifully judged.



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True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I heard about this on John Mullan’s Culture Show special for World Book Night and was intrigued by what they had to say. In particular, I was interested in the way they all seemed hugely impressed with it, and yet also that there was something not quite right about it.

This novel has been called ‘The Bell Jar’ for the 21st century. I know the ‘Bell Jar’ apostles out there are having trouble with this comparison but, personally, I think this is a really apt and useful comparison.

The narrative is essentially the first person narrative of a young woman who is quietly (at first) coming unraveled. We meet her at the point when things are starting to seep out and be noticed by others, and at the point where she falls madly (with a capital madly) in love with an unsuitable Svengali figure, and it’s pretty much all downhill from there.

In many ways, this novel does a much better job than The Bell Jar, of conveying the sense of an alienated and isolated character spiraling out of control. Unfortunately, this means that as a reader, you can sometimes feel alienated and isolated from the character. At the same time, Davies manages to convey the worry and shock of those around the narrator, even though this is all filtered through her obliviousness to how far things have gone wrong.

The main problem for me was that, unlike the Bell Jar, no real thesis is advanced as to the how/why of what’s happening – although, the more I thought about it, the more it struck me that perhaps, in a post-Bell Jar world, we don’t need telling twice.

This novel is ambitious, technically brilliant, insightful, disturbing but not an easy read. But I am off to see what else she has done, and am very much looking for what she does next.



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Naming the Bones by Louise Welsh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

From the back cover, this novel seemed a bespoke fit to my own preoccupations. The story moves initially between Glasgow and Edinburgh, two cities I spent the better part of twenty years toing-and-froing between. Then, as things gain speed, it moves to a remote Scottish island. The main character is an academic, at Glasgow Uni, who is overly involved with his subject – the life and work of a dead poet. As a postgrad at Glasgow uni I spent several years walking in much the same footsteps as Murray, albeit with far less havoc unraveling around me.

The core strand of the book, which is played out with great philosophical and, crucially, narrative success, is the question of whether or not our understanding of a writer’s work is enhanced by knowing more about his life. It’s a question I find endlessly fascinating, and never have I seen it developed so astutely in fiction.

There’s so much to admire and enjoy here, that I was quite surprised I’d not heard more about this book until now. It confirms everything her earlier novels promised would be the case. Louise Welsh consistently delivers intelligent, challenging, and ultimately highly satisfying work. More please, Louise!

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The other day, while trying to find my way out of the labyrinth of a mixed metaphor I’d been torturing, I turned, as one does, to Google to stock up on more paraffin to throw on the fire.  A few clicks later and I was reading about Beethoven’s Konversationshefte, or conversation notebooks, which are said to provide an invaluable historical record of his thoughts on music.  In essence, Beethoven used these notebooks as a written hearing-aid, passing the notebooks to friends and family so they could write down whatever they wanted to say.   It seems there were a staggering 400 of these jewels, although less than half now remain.

My initial reaction was, wowsa, what a fantastic resource for scholars.  Imagine having the definitive answers to all sorts of questions you’d love to ask Beethoven helpfully written out by his own hand. Then I read on, and discovered Beethoven’s notebooks were much, much more interesting that this.

For although Beethoven’s friends and colleagues frequently wrote to him in these notebooks, he didn’t always write back, preferring to reply orally.  So, in some cases, what has been preserved is a written record of one side of a fascinating dialogue in which key questions are put to the great man and then…well, that’s sort of it.  For pages at a time, other people’s questions are interspersed only with their own comments – while there is only frustrating silence from Beethoven himself.  Presumably, his friends and family never bothered to write down Beethoven’s side of the story because they were too busy scrawling off their supplemental questions.

Can you imagine the pain of those poor scholars?  To be soooo close and yet…

Needless to say, this has meant that mining all the nuances and crevices implied by the supplemental questions has kept Beethoven obsessives busy for centuries. This, presumably, unintentional outcome of the notebooks appealed to me for several reasons, not least that it means that, like the best novels, if you want the Konversationshefte to reveal its secrets, you cannot simply read line-by-line.  You must approach it ready, willing, and eager, to read between the lines.

Meanwhile, back in my earlier tangled metaphor, I had started out by wondering what creative limits, if any, Beethoven himself felt were imposed by his deafness.  Luckily for me, it turns out there is no real shortage of specialists who have winkled out the nuances of the Konversationshefte on this score.  In 2002, Dominique Prévot polled a range of specialists for their views, and published them on his helpful site www.lvbeethoven.com.

In his reply to Prévot, Willem Holsbergen, cites ‘the following remarks by nephew Karl: “Precisely because of that [your deafness] you are famous. Everyone is astonished, not just that you can compose so well, but particularly that you can do it in spite of this affliction. If you ask me, I believe that it even contributes to the originality of your compositions.”‘

I gasped and read it again.

Was I just imagining quite how wounding this arrogance of youth must have felt to Beethoven?  Both horrified and thrilled by this twist, this promise of drama to come, I read on, eager to hear the great man’s scathing reply.  Unfortunately, young Karl’s dismissive comments seems to have sparked one of those moments when Beethoven was moved to eschew the notebooks and just go with the sound of his own voice.  Which leaves us trying to guess at what he might have said by reading between the lines of Karl’s follow-up entry in the notebook.  “Nevertheless, I believe that even the greatest genius, when hearing someone else’s compositions, subconsciously copies ideas. In your case that doesn’t happen, because you have to create everything from within yourself.”

As Holsbergen points out, ‘Karl’s “nevertheless” suggests that Beethoven did not agree with his previous remark, “that it even contributes to  the originality of your compositions.”  Because we don’t know Beethoven’s exact answer, one can of course create different interpretations    for this passage.’

I’m sure Holsbergen is right about this.  In my own ‘different interpretation’ of this passage I had no real trouble imagining Beethoven’s reply being delivered while chasing poor Karl around the room with a whip and a chair.  Not that this was getting me anywhere with my garbled silence/deafness/sound pressure metaphor, which by then I’d decided to cut anyway.

But later that evening, as my thoughts returned to Beethoven and his notebooks, it struck me there was a helpful metaphor here.  For what are these one-sided conversations of his, if not a masterclass in POV and how it can be wielded to keep everyone guessing, to make sure the reader is right where you want them, reading between the lines.