The Kowloon Diaries

Pretty Patterns

Friday afternoon and it was cool and sunny. Me and James and my camera went for a walk in Kowloon Park. I took loads of photos. Once I got started on close up shots of interesting patterns I couldn't help seeing them everywhere.

Macau diary

We went to Macau at the weekend for the first time in ten years and were dismayed at what it has turned into. It used to be a quaint little getaway, where you step back in time from Hong Kong and get a taste of a more rural, European culture. The old parts are still there, but they're dwarfed by the huge new casinos. We couldn't believe the size of these places, couldn't believe that there are really so many millions of people willing to come here just to gamble. (I never win when I gamble, so I don't understand the allure.)

I thought it might be glamorous like Las Vegas, but it's not at all. Inside, the casinos are opulent in a predictable, cliched sort of way. We took an obligatory gondola ride on a fake Venetian canal, and a Filipino named Guiseppe sang Santa Lucia for us. It might have been amusing, if it weren't so expensive and we hadn’t had to queue for an hour for a fifteen minute ride.

Outside, around the Cotai Strip, it's just messy, with lots of construction sites and long stretches of wasteland. We stayed in the Regency where we also stayed ten years ago. I remembered it as a decent five star place, but now it's falling apart.

We were only there for two days which probably isn't enough time to form an opinion, but I didn't get the impression that all this casino money has filtered down to the local community. The schools are still run down, the local shops and streets are still shabby. The only difference is that before Macau used to be shabby in a charming way, now it looks like it's just waiting to be torn down.

The only thing I liked was the Grand Lisboa Casino. We didn't get a chance to go outside, but from the outside it's so bizarre I couldn’t stop staring at it.

Mitchell, David - Black Swan Green

The last book I read was about a childhood that had nothing in common with mine, this one is practically identical. Jason, the 13-year-old narrator of Black Swan Green lives in an English village in 1982. He watches the Rockford Files, eats Angel Delight, and listens to his older sister's copy of Fleetwood Mac. (I used to listen to the copy owned by the older brother of a friend - we had to sneak into his bedroom when he was out and put it back in precisely the same place so he wouldn't notice.) He's lower middle class – not rough enough to have credibility with the working classes, not posh enough to have respect from the middle classes. Maybe I'm getting old, but reliving adolescence from the perspective of middle age felt very strange to me. That world existed once and it doesn't any more, so what happened to it? It just disappeared, like the Falklands war and the gypsies and Angel Delight.

Definitely, a great book and his best so far. It's like a prequel to Number9Dream where you find out what David did before he went to Japan. That's something else that resonates with me – my life is clearly in two parts, before Hong Kong and after. The longer I stay here, the more the place before seems foreign.

Temperatures Soar

Hot Asians
(Gascoigne Road)

Spotlight
(Queen Elizabeth Hospital Path)

Cool
(George V Park)

Stumped

A new poem inspired by something I saw today.

Not Really

As I'm aware that tourists wander on to this blog from time to time looking for travel information on Hong Kong, I'm feeling obliged to offer the following advice: Don't come in June, July or August because it pisses with rain the whole time.

Look at these rainfall figures: June - 18.8 rainy days per month, July - 17.8, August -  17.4. You think you'll avoid it? You think you'll be lucky? Ask yourself: When are you ever?

The lost art of reading

An article from the LA Times in which the author is moaning about not being able to read with the distractions of technology. It gets more interesting when he talks about reading as an act of engagement with the world and other people. Reading is so often described as an escape, but it’s the opposite. He writes: ‘Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being.’

Sunshine on a Rainy Day

Can't remember the last time I liked a record so much. This is so catchy and expansive and feel good. Come on let's play it again. Living my life at a hundred miles an hour ...

Abandoned Places

I came across a fascinating collection of photos of abandoned places on a website called Unique Scoop. The list includes Kowloon Walled City (below), a coal mining island in Japan an abandoned vacation resort in Taiwan, a coal mining island in Japan, a housing project for Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant workers, a town in Pennsylvania where fires burnt underground throughout the 1960s and 70s, and lots more. The pictures are amazing.

Lethem, Jonathan - Fortress of Solitude

I've been away, sort of. I've spent three weeks in Brooklyn, without leaving home. I've been engrossed in Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, which is about a white boy, Dylan Ebdus, growing up in a black ghetto in the years before Brooklyn became gentrified.

Apart from being white and once being a kid, Dylan's life has nothing in common with mine. I don't deal with gangs of bullying black kids on my way to school every day. My mother didn't abandon me, and my father isn't a reclusive artist. My best friend's dad isn't hasbeen singer turned cokehead. I've never taken hard drugs. I've never broken into a prison, or out of one, or even been in one. There's no point of contact between him and me that I can see, but I've been living his life for three weeks and loving every minute of it.

This total absorption in another world is what makes books better than cinema. Special effects can't hold a candle to a really well written, really long book. It's the ultimate virtual experience. You can live someone else's whole life, not a couple of hours, and you live it from inside their head. And because a book like this can't be read at one sitting, it takes on a life in your head in between readings. True, you need a writer as excellent as Lethem to pull it off. Not many books are as detailed as this one. But when a book is good it wipes the floor with any movie I've ever seen.

So, I've finished the book now and I'll miss Brooklyn. Technically I have been there. A week before 9/11, years before our kids were born, I accompanied S to New York on a business trip. We had dinner and saw a show with one of his customers, who then took us on a tour of Manhattan, which culminated in a drive across the Brooklyn Bridge. We didn't stop, just turned around and came back again.

Twitter

These days, I keep noticing the birds. It started with the black kites which are always circling outside my window. Apparently they're scavengers, and when they do that circling they're looking for dead animals. Then it was the crested birds who sit on top of the high fences round the tennis courts and laugh at my serve. I looked them up and I think they're called crested bulbuls. And there are the fat pigeons who roost on our air conditioners, often getting into fights with each other, and the little sparrows, not exotic but happy little fellows always jumping around on the streets. I never used to understand how people could consider birdwatching a hobby, but I'm starting to understand the appeal. Once you start looking you notice that the city is full of them. I've tried to take photos but there are much better ones here http://www.pbase.com/chan_ysc/wild_birds_in_hong_kong

Meanwhile I've composed two haiku in honour of the kites:

an airplane flies straight
the black kite soars and circles
revealing the wind

black kite with sharp eyes
scours the city and attacks
a pile of garbage

See What Happens

I sit down to change my profile picture and I end up redesigning the whole blog - new banner, new colour scheme, new layout. The only thing I haven't done is upload a new profile picture. I've decided not to have one. I want to make the blog a bit more anonymous now.

This is why I have to limit my blog time. It's not that I don't like it, quite the opposite, I find it completely addictive. Once I start I get stuck here for hours and I end up not doing any real work.

Looks cool though, doesn't it. The windows are from the Man Wah Building in Man Wui Street in Yau Ma Tei, a notorious old estate, used as a setting in a few HK movies.

Coming up for air

Phew, I've finished my novel. Now I'm taking a break before I go back and rewrite it, again. That's not to say that it isn't finished. It's complete with plot, subplots, characters, arcs, beginning, middle and end. It's even written in proper sentences and has been spell checked.

I like it. I'm pleased with the story, theme and voice, but I don't love it, not yet. It's nice, but it's not special and I want it to be special. I've been up to my neck in it for months and now I think the best thing to do is forget about it for a couple of weeks, so that later I can see it with fresh eyes.

So here I am back on my blog, which has been kindly waiting here, not complaining at all.

First thing I'm going to do: change that profile picture.

Why The Road Works

(Hardly a day goes by here, when they're not digging up the streets, so in the spirit of if you can't beat 'em join 'em, I've written a poem of appreciation for road works.)

Today they're digging the roads,
Scraping back the surface of the city,
Revealing how it works.
Lying in the mud,
A mess of pipes and wires.
It looks chaotic, but it isn't.
It's an intricate grid, through which
The power of mathematics brings us everything,
Secretly.
Gas from beneath the South China Sea
Heats the soup.
Water from Dongjiang reservoirs
Falls from the shower.
Pulses of electricity
From an atom split in Shenzhen
Hum down the lines
Like a flock of mosquitoes
To make toast.
The damage is repaired.
The diggers dump the mud back.
Re-tar the road.
The grid is beautiful,
Yet nobody wants to see it.

To Those Who Ask, Give

(Just a little story I wrote after reading about a couple of brothers who found a 140 million year old fossilized spider's web.)

A rare sunny day in the Scottish highlands and Ernest and John were kneeling in the dirt searching for fossils.

'What would your most precious find be?' John asked Ernest.

Ernest sat back on his heels and considered. 'A spider's web,' he said.

They searched a little more, and ate their sandwiches and drank their orange juice. They didn't talk much. It was enough just to be out there on the hillside looking for fossils. They didn't find anything that day, but the next week they were back. In the week in between there had been a storm and much of the surface shingle had been washed away.

Ernest was sorting through a pile of rocks when he found a black lump. Ten years of searching had given him an instinct for these things. He felt the adrenalin surging through his veins-the ancient hunter inside coming alive. He brushed off the dirt and saw a pattern of intricate lines appear.

'John,' he shouted, 'come here and take a look at this.'

Professor MacGonagal of Aberdeen University confirmed it. 'A spider's web,' he said stroking his beard. 'One hundred and forty million years old. I'd say the web became trapped in conifer resin after a forest fire and then became fossilized inside the resulting amber.'

'Amazing,' said Ernest, 'Imagine, the Cretaceous Period. The heyday of the dinosaurs. This web was that old.'

'Actually,' said Professor, 'all matter is that old, even the atoms in your body. Older in fact. It's just that most of it changes shape and your fossil has stayed the same.'

That summer was a whirl of activity. Ernest and John were summoned to fossil conventions up and down the country. A cult who worshipped the past offered to appoint them grand masters. Ernest got tired of the fuss, but John loved it. At the end of the summer Ernest went back to his fossil hunting, while John went on a world tour.

Alone on the hillside Ernest was scraping the ground when a shadow fell over him. He looked up and saw a girl he'd met at a convention during the summer.

'Hi, remember me?' she said.

'Sure,' he said.

'I hope you don't mind. I came out here hoping to meet you again. I really admire your work.'

'That's OK,' he said.

They knelt on the dirt together.

'What would be your most precious find?' he asked her.

'A fish, maybe,' she said.

'Be specific.'

'A really old fish, like from before mammals existed. In fact, make it the first fish with legs, the ancestor of all human beings.'

'OK then,' said Ernest, 'let's look.'

On bananas and Browning

Happy New Year. Yes I know it's almost March but it's taken me a while to catch up with 2009. Partly because of the usual obligations of this time of year - New Year, Chinese New Year, kids on holiday, Sam’s birthday, helper on vacation, parents in town, in-laws in town…But mostly because of the renovation work on my apartment block which has left us without electricity or water several times a week, and makes so much noise that it’s impossible to stay here, and has thrown up so much dust that me and Sam have been laid up with allergic reactions.

Anyway, at the end of Feb, I've arrived back at my blog. I haven't been big on resolutions this year. My only pledge is to eat a banana a day, because they're so incredibly healthy, and because it seemed like a resolution I may actually stick to. So far I have.

As for my great creative works, it's time to get the wheels turning again. I like to think that taking a rest has been a good thing, as this fallow period has allowed new ideas to develop. Now I can't wait to get back and fix the problems which seemed insurmountable before my break. No doubt it won't be so simple when I get started but at least I can enjoy the idea of my great novel. It reminds me of a poem by Browning about a frustrated author who is peeved because he doesn’t get the recognition he feels is rightly his. But in fact this author barely ever gets round to writing anything–he's only convinced that he could do better than the famous writers of the day. Browning is sarcastically sycophantic and says, great works conceived are better than lesser works executed. I’ll have to go and look it up…

Here it is. It's called Waring and the bit I'm thinking of is this:

I'd say, "to only have conceived,
"Planned your great works, apart from progress,
"Surpasses little works achieved!"

Well you have to read the whole thing to get the context. The rest of is about how the author disappears from London, and the narrator imagines him in a series of wonderful places around the world.

I should read more Browning too, possibly as another minor resolution. I have a book somewhere. After I have my banana I’ll look for it.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Part travelogue, part personal memoir and part writing manual from the Japanese master. I was fascinated to see how Murakami connects sport and writing, which is something I've been thinking about recently too. I think, in fact, the point is that if you take on any activity seriously – whether it's sport, or art, or running a business - then you will require determination, guts and, above all, strenuous effort, and that's basically his point. Writing is hard labour, he says. It's a slightly depressing and slightly comforting conclusion.

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

I attempted to read this because of all the hype, and then I gave up and because it was so stupid, cliched and predictable that I couldn't stand it. I don't like to not finish a book, but in this case I made an exception because life is simply too short to waste on utter nonsense. However, since then it has been on my mind and I have found myself at odd moments wondering what happens to the characters. Yes I know I said it was stupid and predictable, and yet … I'm drawn to it. This is really annoying. Now I'll have to go back and finish it.

What is Your Dangerous Idea? Edited by John Brockman

I've been dipping in and out of this collection of essays written by Today's Leading Thinkers who are, apparently, people like Daniel C Dennett, Susan Blackmore and Stephen Pinker. It's not bad, but I've heard most of these arguments before. The authors agonise over stuff like the non-existence of the soul, human inequality, eugenics, free will, consciousness, and the general pointlessnes of the universe. Actually it was quite depressing. Today's Leading Thinkers seem to do a lot of worrying and don't have a lot of answers.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

A delicious morsel of a book from Murakami. The action takes place over a single night in Tokyo. The story moves from an all night restaurant to a love hotel, to a mysterious girl sleeping and being watched by strange man. It's the kind of story that seems random until you get to the end and you see that everything was leading up to the perfect conclusion.

The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Roberston

A great Scottish book about a minister who doesn't believe in god, and then gets kidnapped by the devil. Very funny and full of truth, and the setting in the northeast of Scotland (at one point he runs the Elgin marathon) made me feel quite homesick.

Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem

Nine short stories which loosely feature comic book superheroes in one way or another. I love the concept, and Lethem's execution exceeded all my expectations. In some stories the characters are pretending to be heroes, in others they are actually comic book characters come to life. It's quirky, offbeat and often absurd. Lethem seems to be following wherever his pen takes him, and the results are touching and and brilliant fun at the same time

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

It's not often you find a book that is really, truly funny and a serious literary novel at the same time. It says everything that needs to be said about the state of the world today: fools leading fools with foolish ideas. I completely fell in love with mad, bad Ignatius J Reilly.

How Novels Work by John Mullan

This is a series of articles written for the Guardian. It's very nicely done, nothing groundshattering, but it does lay out all the elements of novels clearly. It's more about literary criticism than a how-to writing book. Mullan's disections of the techniques used in (mostly) contemporary novels made them seem less mysterious. I like that the examples he uses are mostly contemporary, eg Brick Lane, Atonement, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean Dominique Bauby

This is the story of a French magazine editor who had a stroke and ended up paralyzed, only able to move his left eye. It's a short and moving description of how he felt being locked in his body. Sounds depressing but it wasn't, it's just beautifully uplifting. The only thing that bugged me was that tagged on the end of my film tie-in version were several articles about the marketing and sales success of the book. It really took away the enjoyment when I read about how the publisher commissioned the book. You could just imagine them rubbing their greedy hands together and saying, 'ooh, he's trapped in his body and typing a novel using his left eyelid, I smell a bestseller!'

Miss Chopsticks by Xinran

The story is about three sisters,named Three, Five and Six. Three is the artistic one, Five is the stupid one, and six is the clever one. They leave their dirt-poor village and go to the city of Nanjing, and each one of them is remarkably lucky in finding work that they love and kind-hearted people who take care of them. Then they go home and give their mother money, and are the toasts of the village. Didn't find this quite as powerful as The Good Women of China, though it was interesting to read about migrant workers, something I haven't read about before.

Chococats and Birthday Lobster

Recent sightings: the Chococat Cafe we visited in Tsim Sha Tsui, where the cats wander free over and under tables - my kids LOVED it. And the wonderful fresh lobster lunch we had in Sai Kung at the weekend. I have before and after pics of the lobster, which I'll probably never get round to uploading. Being captain of the tennis team is proving time consuming. It was worth it on Thursday though, when we beat the Hong Lok Yuen team 7-1.  Yayy! 

My novel is going along, as it does in fits and starts. I'm rewriting again, but now I feel I'm closer to the end than the start. National Novel Writing Month starts in November. I can't make up my mind whether to rewrite this one or start a new one.

Also I learnt today that bananas are the greatest food known to man and can do everything from prevent strokes to clean shoes. I have resolved to eat one everyday. So far I've had two.

Poisonous milk

There was an excellent letter in the SCMP today about the baby milk scandal in China. I'm posting it here because it bears repeating. The facts about breastfeeding are widely available and supported by the WHO, and yet there is still so much ignorance about, it's frightening.

Tunnelling to the beginning of time

I'm strangely excited and slightly worried about the The Large Hadron Collider project. It would be nice to solve the mysteries of the universe, but suppose they create a black hole and suck us out of existence. Not so good. The really interesting question, as I understand it, is finding out whether the universe has mass or not. I'm betting it doesn't. God isn't a particle, like something you find floating in your soup. You keep on smashing down atoms into smaller and smaller pieces and eventually all you'll find is philosophy.

Doesn't look like much from here

The International Commerce Centre: soon to be the tallest skyscraper in Hong Kong. Click to enlarge, and for more discussion see LottieP's blog Fragments.

Writers visible and invisible

Writers are hidden beings - you have never met one – or, if you should ever believe you are seeing a writer, or having an argument with a writer, or listening to a talk by a writer, then you can be sure it is all a mistake, says Cynthia Ozick in Standpoint.

School daze

We're trying to find a P1 place for S, a process somewhat like trying to swim across Victoria Harbour blindfolded and with your hands tied behind your back. The choices we have are:

International Schools - expensive, snobby, good facilities but teachers not obviously any better than ESF schools. Most don't do much Chinese. Most are not convenient for us.

English Schools Foundation - private, but much cheaper than International, good value for money and generally well regarded, but they don't offer Chinese (other than as a second language).

Local private schoools - fairly expensive, very, very tough academically. English as medium of education but not taught by native speakers, so it's really Chinglish. Substantial Chinese on top of the English.

'Good' local govt schools - tough and traditional teaching, Chinese medium with some English. Free or very cheap.

Not 'good' govt schools - not so tough, not much English, not well regarded by anyone I've ever met. Free.

In other words, I'm not crazy about any of our choices. At this stage it looks like it will be a 'good' local school. I know they're tough but not as tough as local private schools, and going to a 'good' school seems preferable to going to a 'not good' school. Another advantage is that we happen to live directly across the road from one, and both my kids are already going to the kindergarten there. At least he won't have to take a bus, which typically adds an extra hour on to a school day, which IMO is already too long.

Two quotes about writing, and one update on milk teeth

Two quotes about writing:

'Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.' John Berger

I take it that he means that most of the representations of life in the media, in education, in the culture even, bear little or no resemblance to life as it is actually experienced. When someone does scale the gap and say or do something real I think this is what you call art.

And the other one:

'The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with that order.' Henry Miller

In my novel (maybe in all novels) my heroine tries to find order in the chaos of her life. She fails (maybe they all fail) and resolves to go with the flow instead.

In separate news: S has a wobbly tooth. This is his first wobbler ever - he knocked it loose when he fell over playing basketball yesterday. By Bedtime this evening it was so wobbly that we concluded that it probably wouldn't last the night. I'm actually quite afraid that he may swallow it in his sleep, but I didn't share this with him.

From the Believer, February 04

I keep all my back issues of the Believer, little gems every one of them.

An excerpt from an article titled The Possibility of The Search, by Sven Birkerts, which I read by the pool today:

Here it is, the joy and mystery of reading, the whole matter synopsized in this one little ceremony of private renewal, all beginning with the extraction - from underneath pounds of piled up other books – of the slim blue Avon paperback of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a book I'd read and read again some years ago, loving it with a sense of intimate possessiveness each time, but which I'd then, for who know what reason, allowed to subside back into latency, not so much as thinking of it for years (the way you can live without even a thought of some person who was once at the very center of your existence) the business of other books shouldering it aside – or if not just that, then maybe also the possibility that the reading had temporarily done its work, placating or discharging those obscure needs that are at the heart of the secret Masonic life of reading.

It's the last phrase that I like: the secret Masonic life of reading.

TV log

Watched the Celebrity Apprentice. The trouble with Piers is that he's an idiot too. Alien Resurrection is on:

"I've known you so long.

I can't remember a time.

When you weren't in my life."

But I'm not really watching it.

New Laptop

One day when I'm old, I'll look back on this blog and I'll marvel at the strange skewed selection of events in my life that it mentions. Entries are posted randomly because this happens to be what's on my mind when I have some spare time and feel like blogging.

But then again, it's a blog, that's what it's for, right.

Or maybe years from now I'll have lost my memory and I'll think this is all that ever happened. Anyway I have a new laptop and I've been to Starbucks twice this week and worked on it, and I'm finding it pretty cool. I've had an encouraging response from a couple of my submissions so I'm working like crazy on my manuscript.

The assault on reason by Al Gore

S has fractured his foot so we didn't do much at the weekend, I read The Assault on Reason by Al Gore. It's depressing not just because of the scale of catastrophes - war, disasters, end of the world, etc, etc -  that we're facing, but also because even Gore seems to lack the will to follow his own advice: ie use reason and logic to govern his country.

Gore unpacks the causes of everything that's wrong in the world, and, not surprisingly, it comes down to money. The US Government knows what to do to solve the climate crisis and the Muslim conflicts, and it knows how to do it. But Bush won't do what's right because he depends funding from big businesses and it's just not in their financial interests to clean up the environment or let the Iraqis keep their own oil. The US is theoretically a democracy, but because candidates need so much private money to stay in office it's the private money that is calling the shots. In practice, the US is a fascist state run by ExxonMobile, and no amount of switching your lights off or recycling plastic bottles is going to change that.

The thing I don't get is this: if private funding is the root of the problem as Gore says it is, then why isn't this the focus of his campaign? There's not a word on his website about it. It's perfectly clear that you need to break the connection between private funding and public government if the US is to be a true democracy. He does briefly muse that laws could be passed to give a fixed amount of funding to each candidate, but then he quickly dismisses his own idea. And that's it. No exploring possibilities, no opening up to public debate, nothing. Ok so it would be difficult, but does that mean you just give up? Or is the real problem that the limits would have to apply to him as well.

This video on Youtube is a pretty good summary of the book:

This Is Not A Novel by David Markson

This summer I've been wandering forlornly through bookshops, struggling to find anything that I want to read. Sure there's good stuff, but it's nothing that makes me want to pick it up and run home with it. It's all Jodi Picoult, and Richard and Judy selections. It's not that I totally hate them, just that... no come to think of it, I do totally hate them because they're so predictable and never push boundaries or give you anything that you didn't expect. I ended up buying the Fortean Times for the journey home because it was the only thing that seemed honest. (Actually I enjoyed it and and the writers are a lot more cynical than I thought they would be.)

And then, yesterday I picked up This is Not A Novel by David Markson from the KCC library (of all places!) and blimey what a treat - smart, funny, innovative, thoughtful, and yes, surprising. I actually felt like I was reading something new. Where has Mr Markson been all my life? It's written as a series of brief anecdotes. Difficult to describe so here's the first page:

Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing

Writer is weary unto death of making up stories.

Lord Byron died of either rheumatic fever or typhus, or uremia, or malaria. Or was inadvertently murdered by his doctors, who had bled him incessantly.

Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in 1900. Granted an ordinary modern life span, he would have lived well into World War II.

This morning I walked to the place where the street-cleaners dump the rubbish. My God, it was beautiful. Says a van Gogh letter.

Writer is equally tired of inventing characters.

And so it goes on, for 190 pages.

Many of the anecdotes are accounts of how famous writers, composers and artists have died. Others are rather grimy details about their lives, or deliciously nasty remarks they've made about each other. You put it all together and it's a meditation on death and humanity and the nature of creativity. Pretty heavy stuff, but it's also very funny. A quote on the back compares him to Beckett and that's exactly what his sense of humour is like.

I kept wondering, is this really a novel? It's mostly non-fiction, but it's written so creatively it reads like poetry. And, are writers allowed to do this? Apparently we are, because he's done it. 

In an interview here he describes how he did it. 

At Day's Close: Night In Times Past by A. Roger Ekirch

Back in Hong Kong and we're seriously jetlagged, staying up all night and sleeping during the day. Every year it takes us at least a week to reschedule our inner clocks. Seeing as I'm living like a night owl, I decided to read At Day's Close by A. Roger Ekirch, which is about the way people spent night before the introduction of street lighting in the nineteenth century. Ekirch is a history professor and, according to the dust jacket, this is the product of twenty years of research. The sheer breadth of the material is incredible. He draws on diaries, court records, novels and newspapers from the time. Plus there are fascinating illustrations throughout.

Ekirch's research is mostly from Britain, though the picture seems similar all over Europe. The most common euphemism for night was 'shutting in', because people basically bolted themselves indoors to be safe from the dangers outside. Murder, theft, violence, drunkenness and rape were common on the streets. There were so many poor and desperate people that there was anarchy after dark. Just waking outdoors was dangerous, with the risks of slipping on uneven paving, falling down open cellars, or being drenched by urine or feces that was thrown out of windows.

Inside the homes it was one big sleepover: families huddled together for warmth and security, visiting guests sometimes joined the party, masters shacked up with servants, and animals were brought indoors at night.

The most interesting chapter for me is the one about sleep rhythms. Natural human sleep before electric lighting was in two phases. People went to bed at around nine, lay awake for an hour or two and then slept until around midnight. This is what they called first sleep (or Fyrste Slepe as they put it in the seventeenth century). Then woke up for a couple of hours and then slept again till morning - the second sleep or morning sleep. During the waking period, they talked, prayed, meditated, read, had sex, or all of the above, and it seems to have been valuable part of their lives. In laboratory studies of people deprived of electric light, scientists have found that they also fall into the same pattern. And apparently this is common in primitive cultures. It makes me think I should try going to bed earlier, then getting up at midnight for a couple of hours of writing. Maybe it would be easier than trying to squeeze a few hours in at the end of the day when I'm already tired.

It's done

Nine envelopes, each containing the first forty pages of my novel (I know you're supposed to send three chapters, but my early chapters are so short that that wouldn't be appropriate) have been sent to nine agents in the UK.

I wish I could summon up some excitement but I can't because I don’t know if it's any good. I've spent so much time on it I've lost the ability to see it objectively. I'm just hoping that someone seeing it for the first time will find it fresh and interesting.

So I don't feel great, but not so bad either. I haven't won the lottery, on the other hand a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. For some reason I felt I had to write a Hong Kong Novel, maybe just to put my experiences down on paper and get closure on this crazy adventure I’ve been living for the past sixteen years. Now that I've done that it's like I’m free to write whatever I want. I've been going through old ideas, other half begun manuscripts and abandoned short stories that could have been longer, and I have a great idea for a new novel. Best not say anything here though, not until I'm sure it's a keeper.

Where Snakes In the Grass Are Absolutely Free

We're in the country, well right on the edge of a highland town and only a few steps from the countryside proper, and S is making me jog every morning for miles along dirt tracks and past farms and fields. It's fresh and cold and it feels like we're the only people in the world. Clearly I've been living too long in the city, and it was driving me nuts. With too many people around you feel like you're constantly in competition with everyone else (or at least I do). Here I'm much more relaxed. We should spend more time here, we keep saying to each other.

The Forbidden Question

I always buy the New Scientist on long train journeys. The July 26 issue has a feature titled: 'Seven Reasons Why People Hate Reason.' AC Grayling introduces it by discussing the 18th Century Enlightenment, then there are short essays by various other thinkers. The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says that we must pause before assuming that reason is the answer to everything, including how to shape a moral world. The most interesting article for me is 'No one really uses reason,' by Neuroscientist Chris Frith. He says that conscious reasoning is an attempt to justify a decision after it's made. Given our lack of access to brain processes involved in making decisions our justifications are often spurious post-hoc rationalisations or confabulations. This seems correct to me. I'm always suspicious of people who have too well thought out explanations for their actions. I think mostly we're all flying on autopilot. Frith has a book out called 'Making Up the Mind,' which I'll look out for. Also interesting is an essay by Sociologist David Miller who attacks the PR and lobbying industries for subverting reason for their own commercial purposes, eg the tobacco industry delayed action on the harm of tobacco for years with pseudosicence. Coca Cola manipulated the WHO for years by covertly funding scientists who were setting standards for food and water. Miller also has a book out: 'A Century of Spin: How public relations became the cutting edge of corporate power.' Apparently Al Gore takes a similar line in 'Assault on Reason.' Artist Keith Tyson says that reason excludes creativity and intuition. Roger Penrose says that reasons destroys itself and in 1931 Godel showed that if you have any set of trustable rules that are computationally checkable then statements exist that you have to accept as well, according to the rules, but that you cannot arrive at by means of those rules. Interesting, but I've already attempted to read Penrose's books and failed so I won't go further than this. Bioethist Tom Shakespeare says that ultilitarianism excludes what makes life worth living: happiness, fulfilment and positive living. He also says that Spinoza may hold answers because he rejected mind/body dualism. There are also articles by Noam Chomsky and Mary Midgley. On the way to the buffet car to buy some crisps I noticed two other people reading the article.

On Writing by Stephen King

Possibly the best writing manual I've ever read (and I've read a lot) because it sounds like it's been written by someone who actually knows what writing a novel is like, ie 'crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub'. All his doubts and mistakes are in here, and tons of advice. His basic idea is that novels are out there like fossils waiting to be discovered. You as the writer must chip away at them until they are revealed. I liked this and all his advice. I just wish that I liked his books better. Mind you I've only read Carrie and the Rats, and he says that he doesn't like Carrie and he didn't mention the Rats at all. I may have to read some more of his work. It may be better than I thought.

Buzzword rocks

Working in cybercafes much of the time, as I do, I have a problem keeping all my files together, as most cafes don't let you save files and most don't have wordprocessors. I realized some time ago that an online word processor was what I needed and I tried severa: Think, Zoho, Google Documents. They were all useless, full of bugs and kept crashing and making me lose half my work. But now I've found Buzzword and it's the biz - easy to use, looks cool, and, unlike the others, it works all the time.

Snip, snip, snip

Finally I've finished the first draft. I printed out the whole thing yesterday and then sat down in Starbucks to read it from beginning to end. My conclusion: it's not terrible, the basic story and style are ok, but there are too many lumpy bits in it. It works when I stick to direct speech and direct action. Almost all of the narration, editorialising and description is boring, so I'm going to cut it. This is hard, but not as bad as the old days when I used to slash and burn twenty or thirty thousand words at a time. On the plus side, the dialogue is strong, in fact the funniest parts are the conversations, so I'm going to expand these. There's still a long way to go. I could probably use another year on this, but I can't wait that long. There will be one more edit and then it's off to the jury.

Three To See The King by Magnus Mills

Pure genius and it was so close to home I'm sure he wrote it just for me. It's about a man who lives in a desert in a house of tin because he wants to get away from the world and listen to the rain hammering on his rooftop. This and that happens, and it turns into a cautionary tale about leadership. You have a vision and you build it on your own at first, then people join you and it's great for a while, but the more successful you get, the more people join, and they all make demands on you, and eventually they get pissed at you because you're not fulfilling all their dreams the way you were supposed to. And you think, bugger it, I'll go back to working on my own.

Questions for God

SF writer Thomas M Disch committed suicide on July 4, but I only found out today. They seem to have stopped posts on his blogbut here's a link back to one of his best columns, Advice from On High

Midnight's Children wins the Best of the Booker

It's a great book, but come on, it already won the Booker of Bookers, there are other good books out there too.

Bummer

I'm back from the abyss because I've just learnt that the world is going to end on 21st December 2012. It appears that the poles are changing places, massive volcanoes are about to erupt, the sun has turned to mayonnaise, the environment has been destroyed, we've got enough nuclear weapons to blow ourselves up and enough idiots to push the button, and the Mayans predicted this ages ago. I'd like to dismiss it as another kooky theory, but when you consider the evidence it seems reasonable enough. So, four and a half more years.

Live like a rock star, yeah.

Nah, I'm having the time of my life. If I wasn't pushing myself to the edge then it wouldn't be fun. Who wants to play it safe anyway.