Track of the Day

This is a quickie to plug a new up and coming folk singer/songwriter. You may note after a while that this is not my usual style of writing as I have the proud Mum looking over my shoulder telling me what to write. Anyway, I've known Dylan since he was twelve (bloody hell that makes me feel old). He blew balloons at one of those mile stone moments in my life (still he wasn't to blame). Anyway tomorrow he is the 'Track of the Day' in the Up and Coming Folk Artist on Gargage Band. If you like what you hear, then go visit him on his MySpace page too.

Jane has just asked me why I haven't typed in the addresses. These link things are all new to her...

STOP PRESS!!!!
Not only is Dylan featured Track of the Day tomorrow (Friday), but he's apparently BEST MALE FOLK VOCALIST OF THE WEEK! Cooee hey. Do you think he'll remember me when he's rich and famous? I guess he'll have to, because Jane will still be sending me texts telling me all his good news. Still it's kind of sweet that Jane is such a 'proud mummy'.

Dust and Delhi

Like my stuck washing machine, it seemed that the words to describe Delhi just wouldn't come out last week. But really, all I can say is that it's like no other place I have been before. At night you are engulfed by the most profound darkness. The world around disappears into a dusty, dimly lit twinkling impression. I arrived at night and when I left the hotel room the following morning, it was like stepping out into a mystery that was about to be made starkly clear.

Delhi is a multisensory experience. At the end of the day, I almost felt as if I was wearing it; that the dust had impregnated itself into my every pore. The volume of the city rang through my head leaving no space for private reflection. Though completely surrounded by hoardes of people I felt completely alien within the crowd.

The experience of a day in Delhi left me, the seasoned traveller, reeling. I am used to hopping onto a form of transport in one country and getting off in other. Despite different culture, language and climate, there are certain constants. There are ATM's at the airport, there are taxis at the airport, you look in your guide book and you follow the map. It's not that these things were not there in Delhi, it was just that to find these constants you had to fumble through a curtain of chaos. After a while it became apparent that the chaos could be drawn back. It's true that the tuktuk drivers hurtled around as if they had a permanent death wish, but the fact was they got you from a to b (with a few extra grey hairs). I never found a plaque that announced a street name, but if you told people Arakanshar Road, they flew over pot holes to get you there.

And once I realised that to describe India is to forget the constants and allow yourself to be transported to another world, the words began to gush out.

*The photos show scenes around Chandi Chowk in old Delhi, the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid - the largest Mosque in India.

Thoughts, Temples and Tombs - A whirlwind tour round Rajasthan

So as the last hundred or so photos upload and the first load of washing churns away, I'll begin my first post of 2008...

Introduction

Midnight's Children, An area of Darkness, The God of Small Things, various other Salman Rushdie novels, various Indian school friends as I grew up, a Punjabi friend who travelled around Mexico with me once, an engagement party a long time ago, Friday night curries, a small handful of Indian students over the years, the 12th edition of the India Lonely Planet; up until two weeks ago that was my experience of India. None of which prepared me for what I was about to experience.

My first impressions began to be formed before I even arrived. As we boarded the plane at Moscow seat numbers became optional and one person's act of change caused a wave of seat swapping and mass rearrangement of overhead luggage. My eyes grew wider and wider as the chaotic scene unfolded before me until I too was asked to change seats. From then on I expected everything to continue to be chaotic.

On the surface India does appear to be chaotic. As we passed the clock tower in Sardah Market, Jodhpur our driver said placidly: "Oh look, elephant." And we replied equally calmly: "So there is." A few seconds later it registered that I had never seen a bloody elephant wander by me and I madly scrambled for the camera. The thing is by then we were already acclimatised to the fact that as we negotiated the weaving streets of India, as you turned each corner you could be confronted with a hoard of tuktuks (autorickshaws), a cow just sitting in the middle of the street chewing calmly and ignoring the cacophony of klaxons around it. Dogs milling about and puppies running after the teats of their mother. Town traffic could range from bicycles with the most amazingly huge loads, rickshaws, autorickshaws, ambling pedestrians, cows, dogs, horses, camels and well, elephants.

The other thing that hit me straight away was the level of noise. I remember my eyes popping open at 4 am, I think it might have been Jaisalmer and wondering what had woken me. As I listened I realised that for the first time since I had arrived it was silent.

That impression was swiftly followed by the volume of people. India's population is just over 1 billion and is set to overtake China by 2035 to become the world's most populated country and boy can you tell. There are people, people everywhere. So many people that it was only when we began to hit the smaller towns that we began to notice the amazingly vibrant colours of the beautiful saris. And then the next thing hit us; women are virtually unseen on the streets of India. We saw them in the fields, we saw them perched precariously, sitting side saddle on the back of a motorcycle, we saw them with their scarves carefully covering their faces, but we saw them because amongst the male dominated crowd we were looking for them.

Aaaachtuk - another sound that filled our days from morning to night. As the clearing of the throat began, we would locate and identify the hawker himself for these men can break world records as they hurl their spit about. You really didn't want to be in the line of fire.

And finally as the trip drew to an end we began to realise how everything we planned had worked. We had ordered tickets, the tickets had come through. We asked for taxis and bus tickets, they came through. We were in a bit of a pickle booking a hotel in Delhi for our return there, the hotel manager where we were staying organised us an alternative in case we couldn't find anything. As we waited for our guide to turn up on the last day, the autorickshaw drivers introduced us to the locals and advised us to call the guide again and again: "Because sometimes people book the tour, but then they don't show up, so you have to call to say you're here." Nod, nod, nod, that funny wiggle of the head which is particular to Indians and can mean anything in the shades between yes and no.

I came to realise over the course of the trip that India was like a haze of different intermingling layers, the past and the present merging together, it's histories never forgotten. It was as magical as I thought it would be, it was as startlingly different as I never thought it might be.

A wandering I will go...

Yesterday one of the kids said to me: "I know why Wonderland is called Wonderland."

"Oh really," I replied. "Tell me why."

"Because there is lots of wandering in it."

"Did you say wondering or wandering?"

"Wandering. The characters wander about a lot."

"I wonder if they wonder too?" I asked.

So this little intro is to offer my readers a bonafide reason for not blogging for the next two weeks. I'm going to India. To me India is a bit like Wonderland, I may meet a blue Elephant or a tiger or a Maharaja or a beautiful bescarfed princess and then again I may not. I guess I've been reading too much magic realism related to India and now I will be confronted with nothing but realism and I am hoping it will be magical.

I fly out at 00.30, which confuses me because officially that is early Saturday morning, but I will be leaving my home on Friday evening and will spend 7 hours in transit at a Moscow airport! I have a crappy book that claims that 'if you loved the Da Vinci code dive into this'. I did not love the Da Vinci code, I made a mental note of every single bit of writing that pulled me out of the plot and made me question whether Dan Brown had ever actually been to Paris. Despite all this, I couldn't put the bloody book down, so I am hoping that The Rule of Four will have the same effect: disengage brain and read on.

Other holiday reads are: Kiran Desai - An inheritance of Loss and Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (that one was recommended by Claire, but I am a bit dubious about it, we'll see).

The camera is packed - actually I better check that is charged, but no worries if it isn't there is plenty of time to do that.

And my early christmas pressie to myself is also charged. I finally decided that the old poddy with the average battery life of 30 minutes had to go and I replaced it with a new Nano model! He He.

Oh and before I forget I have been awarded a roar from Kimy over at Mouse Medicine. I feel kind of unworthy because I have really neglected the old blog recently; there's the WIP, which has taken lots of time, but there's also some other stuff going on, good stuff, I assure you it's all good at the moment. I'm not going to pass on the roar just yet as I want to think carefully and be as thoughtful as Kimy when I pass it on, so that's a future post to do...

Other future posts will include piccies and roving reports.

OK, I think I'm leaving the blog in order, all I have left to do is to wish you all a very happy Winter Solstice. Remember that after the 21st the days are getting longer and longer (if you live in the same hemisphere as me. If not I guess it's the opposite). Have a Merry Christmas if you celebrate that and basically rest up guys and I wish you all the best in 2008, I hope next year is a good and peaceful one for all.

Banned

Claire sent me a review for The Golden Compass film today. It appears the religious right are up in arms for the books anti-church stance and the atheist left are disgruntled because they feel the film has been toned down in relation to the book. I can't really give my opinion either way on this point as I have not seen the film yet. But this wee intro does lead me into giving my opinion; quite forthrightly at that too.

When I first arrived in Paris, many, many moons ago, I didn't know about a young wizard with a lightning shaped scar on his forehead, and I didn't know that books were banned, but I was struck by the enormous tomes that my young students seemed to be dragging around with them. Having been open-minded enough to let one of my reading groups force me into reading a Redwall saga, I had then rather narrowmindedly shoved all those books in the 'large' category into my slush pile of 'never to be read' books.

I asked a colleague to tell me about the Harry Potter books, and while she lovingly stroked the cover of her book she did nothing to convince me to read it. Meanwhile 'His Dark Materials' was doing the rounds. I picked it up one day when I found it on one students table and couldn't get my head round the first page. It was Oxford, but not as I knew it. And what were these daemon thingies?

What did finally encourage me to pick up a copy of 'Northern Lights' was when the Librarian informed me that she was thinking of sending the set to the High School.

"Why?" I asked.

"I think it's too difficult for the students. If they don't read it, they are big books and it takes up room on the shelves. I could get other books."

It seemed like a convincing argument except I had seen many a student reading it. So I asked the students about it. They described the worlds and the characters and what they really liked about the books. I became a little more interested.

"The kids seem to understand the books." I told the Librarian the following week.

"Oh." The Librarian got shifty. "One of the parents brought it back. She didn't think it was suitable for her child."

I shrugged. "That's her choice as a parent."

"It's on the banned list in the States."

"Excuse me!"

We had a rather heated debate which may have involved a few words I shouldn't have been uttering even in hushed tones in the library, but the upshot of it, was that I would read it and decide whether the set should stay or not.

Nowadays, I don't think I would have agreed to the last bit of that agreement. Having said that, I am glad that I got past the first page of the book, because I thoroughly enjoyed it and having to wait three weeks to get the Subtle Knife was hellishly long. But that's not the point.

The point of libraries are there to encourage reading and to help a child develop. Think of the child who does not have the privilege to buy a brand new book, but can borrow it from their local library. Is it then the role of the library to decide if it is acceptable or not? No.

I don't think a public library is too different from a school library, it functions under the constraints of budget and space. And if it isn't being read then, that might be a reason to not keep a book. But should it be swayed by the views of minority extreme groups? No.

The hope is that the Library is the one place that is there as a neutral ground to provide the reading material and it is up to the readers to choose whether they want to read it or not.

I'm glad that I managed to get through life for so long without realising that books were banned (well apart from 'Lady Chatterly's Lover'). I'm also glad that having scanned a most Banned Books list that I have read quite a few of the books.

Meanwhile, I will continue to encourage children to read 'quality' literature and they will continue to check out 'Garfield' books. And when I look down the stairs and wonder why Martin hasn't made it up with the rest of the class I will smile when I see him with his nose stuck in the Garfield book, chuckling away.

Neglect

What with life, things and whatnot, it appears that I have been neglecting this poor blog woefully. I know that if it were a plant and my words were water, that after 13 days it would be looking a little on the brown and dried up side. But on the whole the neglect has been because of good things.

The strike ended the day after I started a strike inspired series! Having said that the word on the street is that the negotiations will collapse, so I may have to bring the series back.

I also went to the Alberto Giacometti retrospective at the Pompidou. In fact it was the 2nd time I had been that week. The first time I went I discovered this view over Paris...

The 2nd time I discovered portions of Giacometti's atelier that had been cutaway when his wife was finally forced to move out in 1972. When I first moved to Paris, I lived round the corner from where Giacometti's atelier once was. I kept hoping that by passing that scruffy little door with the tiny plaque, that creativity would pour out and fill me. I don't know if it did, but I do remember that the first time I saw a full sized real life Giacometti in Venice (don't ask) I was blown away by the strength of emotion contained within those scratchy lines. Seeing so much work together made me feel as if I had a new depth of understanding about this artist. I knew which pieces of work I wanted to see, but I also felt that I understood his journey more and who he was.

Apart from that as I mentioned before I have picked up the MS/WIP, bloody mess of a book and started ploughing through that first draft. Chapter 1 (now Chapter 2) was critiqued by a group made up of several members of the 'Paris Chapter' of SCBWI. When I first opened up the critiqued document my initial reaction was: WHAT THE F... Hang on...

I've described the process of writing the first draft as verbal vomiting onto the paper. I spew it all out and then sift through it to see what is good. With short stories that tends to involve a fair amount of cutting. This time though I realised I had written half a story. Well not half exactly, more a skeleton; I got it out so quickly that sometimes I forgot to get the characters to sit down.

That initial critique has turned on a different part of my writing brain, the 'Who are you? What do you see?' part. The writing process is so different to the first it's almost like writing the book again. It's exciting all over again.

Also at first I felt that I needed to have every chapter critiqued to the extent that the first one was, but the critique gave me so much food for thought that I sailed through 2, 3 and 4. At Chapter 5 the brakes screamed as I came to a halt. I've managed to write it, but I now see how this group is going to work for me. These red light chapters, they are the ones that need critiquing.

So, blog I apologise for the neglect. I really will try to water you more often, but you understand why now, don't you?