‘I play the harp, mostly’; a review of most books

So having chastised the sea for failing to deal with the evil that lurks in the hearts of men despite its adequacy re preserving a British sense of being above every nasty thing happening on the continent – I’ve been thinking about tangentially similar stuff.  This is a ramble fyi.  I watched Angel and am reading it too (actually basically went to the library and carried out heap of Virago books – Radclyffe Hall next).

I sort of enjoyed the movie although it was deeply odd.  It isn’t even slightly like the trailer.  I think perhaps the protagonist has become more of a heroine in translation from one medium to the next, but a lot of that is to do with Romola Garai having silky hair and nice boobs (actually, I’m of the opinion that a lot of Romola Garai’s work can be explained with these two factors in mind – I wanted to like The Hour but didn’t care for it at all).  Still, Angel is hugely unsympathetic for a movie character and you spend the entire first half of the film thinking wait, WHAT?  And in the book she’s even worse.

But the main thing is, the main thing that makes Angel unlikeable and briefly successful and at all compelling, is that she’s a tyrant.  In fact one normally does not see such an epic and deep-rooted will to power splashed across a screen unless it belongs to Napoleon or Amin – except maybe in Black Swan, which is why that movie cleared up at the Oscars LOL JK they would have given Best Actress to Colin Firth if they could.

Imma link you to my tumblr, OP seems to be awol

Her books are solely the product of the ‘soul’s delight in playing with itself.’  She finds all experience of the world distasteful, because it gets in the way of her own imaginings.  This is obviously unpleasant; I wonder if it might not even be a little bit evil.  Yet Hilary Mantel is right when she says that all books are, to some extent, the product of this kind of small-scale tyranny, and there’s even a nice Monica Dickens quote to that effect.

I mean VN says as much – his characters do not get away from him, as Forster claimed his own did.  They are ‘galley slaves.’  There’s some Jung about this too – a long-winded German word for it – an author in perfect control of a work is perfectly under the spell of that work.  So firmly under that she imagines she is powerful and free.  I’ve always thought this is true.  What happens for me is that a big gust sweeps me up and puts me down in a place where I feel quite uncomfortable and says WRITE so I begin to write and the thing says NOT LIKE THAT and I have to keep working and working until the idea has been expressed exactly as it wishes to be expressed.  In which case, I have to be in control of every detail.  Characters ‘running away’ or the like could be fatal.

So Angel is a terrible writer, but she is like all writers.  I wonder if the horrific part of her is the part that treats experience as an obstacle, but it’s difficult – one wouldn’t like to be one of those authors who dumbly transcribes from the world and fancies it ‘autobiographical’ or ‘true’ or (shudder, shudder) ‘realistic.’  So then the balance is between experience and invention – there must be a continual transmutation of experience into textures and colours, which I think is what Christopher Nolan means in Inception when Cobb tells Ariadne only to use details, never whole scenes (you can dredge up monsters that way).  But isn’t that a bit horrific in itself?  It’s certainly tyrannical.

Anyway, I have decided to be a worse person and give large swathes of myself over to this thing that I’m writing.  I decided it’s probably worthier of my being conscientious than other stuff in my life right now.  I do worry that this is a bit like watching Black Swan and deciding to dress more like Nina (and presumably eat less and have more psychotic episodes), but what the hell.  But I mean, it will have almost no effect on you unless you are at my workplace being like wtf why does Mairi do less hours surely ninjas have to eat or if you are in my house going no I will not turn down the fucking TV, I work hard all day and want to relax without being forced to comply with the demands of this demi-vegetarian whose existence in my home is accompanied by the stinky presence of kimchi and camembert in the fridge.

So yeah.

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