Back from Glasgow

So I'm back in Washington now, though not quite back at full capacity: the broadband gets installed at the ancestral pile in around a week, and so for the moment I'm stuck using the PCs in the recently-renovated Washington Library. To which I was going to include a link, but the OS these things are running won't allow me to c&p URLs, it seems. Whatever.

Glasgow was pretty good. GOMA has two fine exhibitions on at the moment, one a survey of LGBT art which includes a couple of Mapplethorpes, a piece by Pierre et Gilles, and a sculpted hermaphrodite tree, the other a really nice exhibition of abstract art which has something like five or six Bridget Riley pieces. I never really got Riley before, but seeing those massive op-art canvases up close is quite an experience. Some of them are actually physically difficult to look at - by which I don't mean they have unpalatable subject matter, I mean the arrangement of lines and colours on some of them makes it really difficult to take them in, visually. Like a fugue: you can look at one detail of the picture, like an individual line or pattern, but when you do that you literally lose the rest of the piece.

I've also got started on The Way By Swann's. I was expecting Proust to be one of those hyped-up writers who I would take an instant dislike to after five pages of the book, but I'm actually enjoying the experience. There isn't time for a detailed critique here, though I suppose I'll put one up here when the nice men from BT have given me my HomeHub; but the best way for me to point you to the brilliant thing about it is to suggest that you pick up the new Penguin translation (which is the one I'm reading), turn to page 122, read the description of the asparagus, read it again, and notice the point at which, while never being less than perfect, the description pivots from being a fairly standard description of the glories of nature, to something far more, um, physical. And the way he even inserts a tremendously backhanded Shakespeare reference into it. Marvellous.

Also finished off Exit Ghost recently too. Patchy. What Roth is really good on is the failure of the body and the torments inflicted on it by the mind during the aging process, and those bits of the novel are well worth reading - but there's some obvious recycling of other stuff going on in the book, such as the long obituary for George Plimpton that takes over the narrative for about five pages halfway through.

In conclusion then: meh. This whole business recently certainly hasn't killed me, but it doesn't exactly seem to have made me any stronger or, indeed, stranger. I am writing, though. The work's getting done which is, I suppose, the important thing.

Now to see if this library PC'll post this without mucking up and deleting half the

The Loneliness of the Low-Impact Writer

Middle of August, I'm going to Glasgow. Never been to Glasgow before, but that's not important. What's important is that I'm travelling alone.

Haven't gone on holiday alone since 2004. Scarborough. In the off-season. That was an exercise in boredom tolerance, but at least I got some poems out of it. And I got to come back to see M, my then-future, and soon-to-be ex, wife.

This time, I go alone, and I come back to my old room back in my parents' house. While I'm there I'll be spending time in the company of some good friends, and I'm sure there's a hell of a lot more to do in Glasgow, but...five years. Part of me is worried about how I'll handle it, and this is an easy trip. A couple of days staying on a friend's couch and exploring the city with them. What happens when I'm having to deal with being properly on my own, rushing through dinner in strange cities and coming back to an empty hotel room?

Get back to basics, I suppose. Hand luggage only. Don't draw attention. Short trips: do what you came for and get out. Keep yourself to yourself, don't strike up conversations with strangers and for god's sake don't introduce yourself to women. You're a 32-year-old lower-tier poet who works in a bookshop, not James Bond.

And take a notepad. Write. You never write anything of lasting worth while travelling, but the exercise, stretching your mind to describe something outside of the usual comfort zone, observing and reporting, keeps the muscles limber for when you do have to write something important.

Keep quiet. Keep yourself off the radar. No-one cares who you are. No-one cares where you came from. No-one cares why you're here. They have stuff to be doing. So do you.

Write.

That's how you deal with it.