Writing By Hand

I don't know about you, but I would be completely lost without the BBC and consider it one of the major blessings of civilisation.  In one manifestation or another it is on in this house most of the day and living in a time or place where that would not be possible is something I prefer not to contemplate.  As I expect most of you know, the BBC publish a range of magazines to complement the superb programmes that they put out both on radio and television and we in the Senior Common Room take three of them, BBC Music, BBC History and BBC Focus.

As you can see, the Focus magazine concentrates on issues to do with all branches of the sciences and technology and those of you who live in the UK won't be surprised to hear that the current edition is packed with articles to do with Brian Cox's series on The Wonders of the Universe.  However, it was a much smaller item that caught my eye over breakfast this morning. (I hope you're duly impressed - reading about science over the breakfast table - of course, you might not find that impressive at all, just terribly sad, but if that's the case I'm sure you'll be too polite to say so.)  The article was a report on findings from Norway and France about the neurological impact of writing facts down as opposed to reading them on the computer screen.  And I quote:

it's thought that writing is better, because when jotting down letters with a pen, the brain gets feedback from these 'motor' actions.  This is turn helps fix what's been written in the memory.

Well, I would have to say to start with that I'm not sure that like is being compared with like here.  Surely the comparison should be between writing notes with a pen on paper and typing those same notes onto a computer, however, I do have some sympathy with the view being expressed.  I have always claimed that, unlike those people who don't know what they think until they hear what they say, I don't know what I think until I see what I write.  Writing has always helped me clarify my thoughts and I find that that is the same whether I am writing by hand or typing onto a computer screen.  In fact, thinking about it, because I can do the latter faster I think it is possibly more helpful here.  When it comes to remembering things, however, having the experience of shaping the letters is, I find, extremely helpful and this has really been brought home to me lately by the arrival of my Kindle.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love my Kindle and I have no intention of being parted from it, but I am finding that when I make an electronic note while I'm reading I don't remember what that note was about in the same way as I would have done when I was jotting things in a notebook.  Oh, yes, it's very convenient to have all those notes collected together for me in one place, especially as the passages I've highlighted are there as well, but somehow I don't seem to remember the points I was making as well when I do it in this form as if I had written them, rather more slowly but with that additional kinaesthetic element, by hand.  Lately, I have found myself going back to the notebook even when I am reading electronically because the salient points of whatever I have been reading are proving to be less firmly fixed in my mind.

Clearly this isn't just my experience or the article wouldn't have been written, but I found myself wondering how other e-reader users felt about this.  Are you using the annotating function to any large extent and, if so, do you find it as easy to fix points in your mind this way as you did when you were writing them down?  I would be interested to know.

And, an additional note for those of you of a certain age who might feel that you are finding it difficult to remember anything.  Yesterday morning that same wonderful BBC brought us Professor Lewis Wolpert, himself eighty-two, explaining that it isn't that we forget things but simply that the act of recall takes longer.  I don't know about you, but I find that incredibly comforting.  

In the Bleak Midwinter ~ Julia Spencer-Fleming

I have never quite been able to decide whether the way in which one is constantly being introduced to new writers is one of the blessings of belonging to the blogging world, or one of its major curses. Practically every day, it seems, I go hurrying over to the library site to see if I can locate either a specific book or anything by a previously unknown author that I would never have thought about requesting had it not been for something one of you had recommended. (As you can see, I'm putting the blame fairly and squarely where it really lies.) Ultimately, this way lies madness. I walked out of the library this morning struggling under the weight of no fewer than seven volumes. It's a mile and a half walk home!

Nevertheless, sometimes there is no doubt that such recommendations are a blessing. So whoever it was pointed me in the direction of Julia Spencer-Fleming, thank you. You always know you are onto a good thing when you reach the end of a book and automatically look for the next in the series because you don't want to leave the main characters behind. This was definitely the case with In the Bleak Midwinter, the first of Spencer-Fleming's novels about Clare Fergusson, the newly ordained Episcopalian priest of a small upstate NewYork community and Russ Van Alystyne, the local chief of Police.

Being the first woman priest in this small town is going to be difficult enough for Clare, especially as it is clear that she is as different as can be from her predecessor; she doesn't need anything that is going to make life even more complicated than it already is. Cue disaster in the shape of a newborn baby abandoned on the steps of the church and the discovery, hard on the heels of this event, of the body of a young woman. These two incidents bring Clare and Russ into close contact and they find it easy to collaborate having both come from military backgrounds which have shaped their minds to work in pretty much the same sort of organised way.

Who is the baby? Who is the girl? Is she the baby's mother and if so who might want her dead? Why was whoever left the child on the church steps so insistent that he be adopted by a particular family from the congregation? Spencer-Fleming develops a convincing plot line that kept me guessing almost to the end.

 However, good though her plotting is, I think her really strong points are her ability to create realistic settings and to draw extremely believable characters.  Clare has come from much warmer climes and the New England winter is a real shock. It was to me as well. I really felt the cold and most particularly the difficultly of day to day life in a countryside that is almost impossible to penetrate once the snow comes down. I thought we'd had a difficult winter this year, but it was as nothing to what the people of Millers Kill have to face. If we have another bad spell next winter remind me not to complain before I've re-read this, will you.

Clare herself I found really attractive. As someone who was brought up in the Church, but no longer belongs, she struck me as the sort of priest the ministry could do with encouraging. She leads her congregation in the ways she feels are moral without actually judging them. When I am screaming at a character, "And you call yourself a Christian?" Clare is trying to find a way of helping that person see for themselves that what they are proposing is not acceptable. The best thing I can say about Clare is that I would like her for a very good friend.

Something that I will be interested to see is how Spencer-Fleming develops the community in which her novels are set. I'm seeing her here in relation to Louise Penny, who has created in Three Pines a group of individuals every bit as important and as central to her work as Inspector Gamache and his police team. So far I haven't felt that there is anyone among the inhabitants of Millers Kill who is going to become a recurring and important character but that may change further into the series.

All in all then, this is a mark in favour of being introduced to new writers and a book worth adding to the pile as I struggle home from the library.  Thank you.

Annie

This Year 'Don Quixote'?

I'm still working my way slowly though Susan Hill's book of reading delights, Howards End is on the Landing, and this morning, curled up in one of my favourite coffee shops, I came across her piece about the books with which we form a special relationship despite the fact that they have been standing unread on our shelves for decades at the very least.

They become known in a strange way, perhaps because we have read a lot about them, or they are books that are part of our overall heritage. I think I know a lot about 'Don Quixote'. I do know a lot about 'Don Quixote'. I have just never read it. I doubt if I ever will. But I know what people mean when they talk about tilting at windmills; I recognise a drawing of Quixote and Sancha Panza. I believe Cervantes to be a great European writer. Why do I believe that? What possible grounds do I have for believing it? Other people's opinions, the fact that it has an honourable and permanent place in the canon? So, 'Don Quixote' has an honourable, permanent place on my shelves. It would be wrong to get rid of it.

I feel exactly the same about Don Quixote. I too have a copy and, like Susan Hill, I have never read it. Nevertheless, this doesn't stop me from being convinced that I know what the novel is about. After all, I did once, long ago, see a stage version at the National starring Paul Scofield. That has to count for something, surely?

Well, two people who we know did read the book were William Shakespeare and the up and coming star of the King's Men, John Fletcher. I don't know about you, but I always find it astounding that Shakespeare and Cervantes lived at the same time, however, that is, in fact, the case. Indeed, they died on the very same day, April 23rd 1616.

Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605 and the first English translation, by Thomas Shelton, hit the book stalls outside St Pauls in the early Summer of 1612, just in time for Shakespeare to pick up a copy and decide that one of the stories it contained would be ideal fodder for his Christmas production for the company he had been part of since its foundation in 1594. By this time most of his work was being done in collaboration with the young Fletcher and this was no exception. The play, Cardenio, was written, the music composed by Robert Johnson, who also worked with them on The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII, and the whole entertainment presented at court over the Christmas period 1612.

What, you've never heard of a Shakespeare play called Cardenio? Ah, well there's the rub. We've lost it. Careless, I know, but nevertheless, a fact. What we do have is a bowdlerised version from the eighteenth century by one Lewis Theobald called Double Falsehood which he claimed was based on the Shakespeare and Fletcher original, but if he had the three copies he said he did they almost certainly went up in flames in the Drury Lane fire of 1809. Please, don't ask me to say any more, it's just too painful. If it's any sort of consolation, what does still exist is the music for that first production and you can see it, I believe, in the Bodleian Library.

Recently, however, there has been considerable interest in both the Theobald play and in attempts to use it as a basis from which to reconstruct the original Cardenio. There was an Arden edition of Double Falsehood published last year and there have been two university attempts, one here in the UK and one in New Zealand, to stage a version of what scholars have thought might be something like the original of 1612. Now, we have the first professional production opening at the Swan Theatre in Stratford next month. As you can imagine, this has caused considerable interest, not to say controversy, and I can't wait to see how Greg Doran (a director, for whom I have the greatest respect) has set about rebuilding a script from very little original material. Fortunately, there are going to be several opportunities during the coming months to talk with him about the process, including an afternoon workshop in June that I've managed to wangle myself a place on.

There is no way that what we are going to see on stage this summer can possibly be thought of as a reliable reconstruction of the performance King James and his court saw during those seventeenth century Christmas festivities. Theobald must have completely gutted the original. For instance, there is no subplot in Double Falsehood and I am reliably informed, by someone who definitely knows, that there is only one play from that period which doesn't have at least one subplot and often more. Shakespeare certainly always liked an extra line of plot development knocking around. Nevertheless, if even just a few lines are reliably by Shakespeare that has to be worth something.

And now, I have to decide whether I am going to celebrate this event by making this the year in which I change my relationship to the Don. Is this going to be the year when I finally take my copy down from the shelf and actually read it? Maybe, we'll see.


Annie

Lasting Damage ~ Sophie Hannah

I have been a fan of Sophie Hannah ever since I picked up her first crime novel, Little Face, and made the acquaintance of Sergeant Charlie Zailer and DC Simon Waterhouse. As I suspect is true for many crime addicts, I am intrigued and gripped as much by the developing story within the police team as I am by the individual cases that are the subject of each of the books and I am definitely gripped by the cases. Sophie Hannah certainly knows how to write a thriller that keeps the reader on tenterhooks to the very last page. Lasting Damage is no exception.

Connie Bowskill is worried and, as we very soon discover, she's been worried for sometime. That worry forces her out of bed in the early hours of the morning to surf the net for details of a house she's seen that is up for sale. Bringing up the estate agent's website she finds that there is a virtual tour available and so she clicks on the button in the hope that she will find evidence that will settle those worries one way or another. Well, she finds evidence all right, but it isn't what she was expecting, because what she sees is a woman lying face down in a pool of blood. However, when she brings her husband downstairs and gets him to search the site, the woman has gone. What is more there is no sign of the blood either. The carpet is perfectly clean, the room perfectly normal.

And so the process of investigation begins and as usual it isn't until the very last pages of the novel that it becomes clear which of the many twists and turns in the plot will finally reveal the truth. Inevitably, it will take a mind that can see past the obvious and join dots that are so far apart as almost to belong to different puzzles to solve the mystery. Which is another way of saying that it will take Simon Waterhouse. And this is a problem because as the story begins he and Charlie are hundreds of miles away on their honeymoon. But then you surely didn't ever expect that to be the proverbial bed of roses, did you?

This is a very good book. They are all very good books. However, I am beginning to have a 'but'. While each of Hannah's books works extremely well as a single novel they all follow exactly the same pattern, not only in respect of the way in which they are structured but also in terms of the type of crime and the nature of the victim. Now, I am a great believer in pattern. To quote Kenneth Pike, man is a pattern-making, pattern-seeking animal. But, having shown that we know how the pattern works the trick to keeping an audience's attention is to break it without having the structure fall down around our heads, especially when the chosen pattern is as obviously signalled to the reader as it is in these books. Hannah is a good enough writer to do that and I am beginning to wish that she would find a way of making her work fresh. For me, she is starting to sound the same note rather too often.


Annie

Romeo and Juliet ~ Royal Shakespeare Company

For one reason and another I spent most of last week in Stratford including, on Saturday, going to see the RSC's current production of Romeo and Juliet in the newly rebuilt main theatre. I am not going to go into what I think about the new theatre here, mainly because no one is going to want to read a rant. Surfice it to say that I think they made a mistake trying to put a new stage in the old theatre building. They should have pulled the whole lot down and started afresh. It's too late now to do anything about it, so I'm just going to have to learn to live with it.

The production of Romeo and Juliet, is however, worth revisiting. It started out last year in the Courtyard theatre, the Company's temporary home a hundred yards up the river bank and I very much enjoyed it then. During the intervening year it's consolidated its better points and dealt with some of the problems and is now a very polished theatrical experience indeed.

I always feel with this play that there are no half measures. You are either going to like the way the director decides to approach the production or you are going to hate it. I have seen more performances of Romeo and Juliet that have left me seething than any other play in the canon. In fact it is the only play I've ever walked out of and I've lost count of the number of times I've wanted to stand up about twenty minutes in and say to the uncomfortable looking cast something along the lines of "Okay, you've got this wrong, haven't you? Shall we go back to the beginning and try again?"

But when a company get it right it can be so good and Rupert Goold has brought this production together very successfully, although I'm not sure it is for quite the reasons he intended. There are a couple of very erudite essays in the programme, one about the Counter Reformation and the other an exploration of suicide in the arts, but although they are both extremely interesting they don't signal what is, for me, most obviously successful about the interpretation. The production works for me because they have managed to find a way of exploring a universal aspect of human nature in a way that keeps it firmly rooted in Shakespeare's time and yet also ties it to our own. For what is the quarrel between the Montagues and the Capulets but a sixteenth century manifestation of gang culture and even more specifically, knife crime?

For the most part the play is presented in Elizabethan Verona, but it begins with a streetwise twenty-first century youth, complete with hoodie, listening to a recorded tourist guide. This is Romeo and the costume choice works as we slide into the sixteenth century setting partly because of the colour and the materials chosen and partly because of the Universal nature of the teenage uniform of tee-shirt and jeans. When Juliet appears in something very similar, she works in both time periods as well. And that is all it takes to bring home to you the disturbing fact that one tribe of teenagers, turned against another tribe by elders who ought to know better, are exactly the same now as they have ever been. Whether it is on the streets of Renaissance Verona, or amongst the tower blocks of modern day London, the murder and mayhem that is unleashed is terrible to behold.

A second feature of the production which helps to hammer home this disturbing fact is the attention that has been paid to ensuring that the lovers come over as very young teenagers. I don't know exactly how old Mariah Gale and Sam Troughton are, but I would have thought early thirties and yet they both manage to communicate that frantic, explosive switch from one extreme of emotion to the other, that is  the hallmark of teenagers everywhere. Gale in particular does the sulky thirteen year old so well there are times when you want to slap her. And the fact that you know wouldn't be the sensible way to handle the situation is neither here nor there. Like all the 'best' teenagers, she just gets to you.

The production closes in Stratford very soon and I'm not certain if they are taking it anywhere else, but if you do get the chance to see it then it's worth looking out for. The new season gets underway next month with Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice. I know they have to fill the theatre, but it would be nice to break away from the obligatory exam texts once in a while. I wonder when someone is next going to be brave enough to give a season of Timon of Athens?

PS. Sam Troughton is a very good actor, but I find it hard to forgive him for making me feel very old indeed. I remember watching not only his father, but also his grandfather. Damn him!

Annie

Shared Fetish

How do I manage to do it time, after time, after time? Here I am again running rings round myself in order to try and catch up with everything that needs to be prepared for this week. Actually, I know why it's happened this time. I was involved last week in the appointment of a very senior academic position (which I would love to gossip about, but to do so would definitely be unprofessional) and I underestimated just how much time and energy it was going to take. So, here I am battling away to finish a lecture on the relationship between The Taming of the Shrew and The Taming of a Shrew and read David Nicholls' novel, One Day, both of which I need for meetings on Wednesday.

Fortunately, the Nicholls is hardly the most demanding of works, in fact I'm not certain how we are going to sustain an hour and a half's discussion on it. It's taking time, but not much brain power. And, every now and again it makes me smile in recognition of something that strikes a chord in me, like this.

[Emma] drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.

If there is such a thing as a fetish for stationery then I definitely share it. I love the feel of a clean sheet of paper that has still to be marked in anyway. I can get tingles up and down the back of my spine just remembering the thrill of having a new exercise book at school, a book that has, as yet, not even been sullied by so much as a ruled margin. Friends buy me notebooks as presents because they know I will go all gooey-eyed and drool my incoherent thanks as I imagine all the world shattering observations I will record in them.  I don't, any longer, hanker after the 'best fountain pen' because I learned a long time ago that the surest way to defile a beautiful sheet of paper was to turn me loose anywhere near it with real ink. But it does have to be a very particular make of biro and always, always a fine nib and black ink.

And, do you know what? I reckon I'm not alone in the blogging world in sharing Emma's fetish. I suspect that there are a lot of closet stationery obsessives out there right now. Have the courage to come out and admit your addiction and we can form a blogging branch of stationery fetishers anonymous. Just as long as no one ever really tries to wean me away from my notebooks, pens and rulers that is. This is a fetish I'm actually happy to claim as my own.

Annie

Twisted Wing ~ Ruth Newman

Browsing round the library the other day, a seriously dangerous occupation which should definitely carry a health warning, I came across a book by an author I hadn't heard of before but which had a recommendation on the front by Sophie Hannah.

Scary, tantalisingly unpredictable and very, very hard to put down.

As Sophie Hannah is one of those few writers whose works I automatically read, I thought it was worth a risk and took Ruth Newman's first novel, Twisted Wing, home with me. It was a good move.

Set in the fictitious Ariel College, Cambridge, the story begins with what appears to be yet another in a series of killings. A third student, June Okewano, is found horrifically butchered in as many years. However, this time two other students are found with the victim. One, Nick Hardcastle, becomes the immediate suspect given that he is discovered attempting to replace June's intestines back inside her body. The other, Olivia Corscadden, is in what appears to be a catatonic state, unable to respond to anything.

Detective Chief Inspector Stephen Weathers calls in his old University friend, forensic psychiatrist, Matthew Denison to try and unlock the evidence that he feels sure must be in Olivia's mind if only she can be reached and helped to communicate. Over a period of weeks and eventually months, Matthew pieces together not only all that has happened since Olivia and Nick arrived at Cambridge, but much about Olivia's early life that will prove relevant to the investigation as well.

The reader is encouraged to fit the pieces in the puzzle together at the same time as the investigative team and consequently makes as many false moves as they do. In fact, I pinned the culprit very early on, but was repeatedly made to think that I had got it wrong and that I was doing that individual a disservice. At least my mistakes didn't directly lead to an innocent individual being accused of murder. Matthew Denison is not so lucky.

Newman is a real find. I was completely gripped by the story from the very first pages and thoroughly convinced by the characters she has created. The atmosphere of menace is deftly evoked and the eventual denouement both realistic and terrifying in its implications. I thought at first she was looking to build up a series, and would have been happy to go on developing a relationship with Weathers and Denison. However, given the metaphorical coup de grace delivered in the final pages I don't see how that would be possible. Nevertheless, I have her new book, The Company of Shadows, on reservation from the library and hope it will live up to its predecessor. If you like Sophie Hannah, or even more, I think, if you enjoy S J Bolton then it would be worth your giving this a try.

Annie