Thursday 27 July 2017

Sunday 16 July 2017

#AMREADING EDWARD ST. AUBYN’S A CLUE TO THE EXIT.

Charlie has been given six months to live. What’s the best way to use those last months? Spend all your money? Have torrid sex? Find your authentic self? All of the above, and if you are a bestselling author, shock your agent by writing a serious novel.
First then, find your authentic self, but that's not easy when it is buried under your surrogate self, the carrier of some cherished quality, the vehicle for a certain story that needs to be shaped.
Another problem: friends who will not leave you in peace, friends with a psyche like a wildcat prospector, producing eruptions of unwelcome insight.
But at least Charlie succeeds in finding love/sex with Angelique who also helps him to get rid of his money, gambling on his behalf, while he watches the gamblers drifting past like fish in an aquarium.
Yet he cannot find peace and is plagued by thoughts like a cloud of gnats at sunset, made visible by the dying light. In the end, however, his torment is replaced by the congealing powers of resignation and habit.
Meanwhile the characters in his novel take shape: a woman loyal to her husband who is in a coma (are those feelings akin to necrophilia?). The woman and two fellow philosophers discuss the nature of consciousness while stuck in a train stopped at Didcot. What else was there in the end? A man’s biography was the history of what he had given his attention to, and so it seemed worth knowing what attention was, and how it related to other types of knowledge.

Angelique spends all of Charlie's money and departs. He muses whether it would be better not to wait out the six months and to commit suicide instead. It was less upsetting than this limitless white terror, bleaching every object in its universe …It’s always the same story: if you want something done properly, you have to do it yourself.

Tuesday 4 July 2017

AT THE COBOURG WATERFRONT FESTIVAL

My writers' group, Spirit of the Hills, rented a booth to draw attention to our collected works. Here we are -- Reva and I -- doing our stint minding the table.