An example of how my mind strays (long)

- 'mounds of wheat and corn, and olives and oranges from the hill orchards, and complaining oxen and fat-tailed sheep.' 

We have wheat and corn here, but have to import olives and oranges. In fact so much is imported, our native grown diet would be entirely different from the one we usually have. Nettle omelettes, leek and broccoli soup, lamb with new potatoes, carrot, kohlrabi and bean salad, Scottish cheeses, Welsh something delicious, raspberry jam, wholemeal bread, oatcakes...so I am now wondering if I could eat UK for a while to explore what comes along from around here, all in season. Edible flowers like nasturtium and borage. 

- '..February 1982, the time of the Muslim Brothers' uprising and of the government's response..' (Hama in Syria, 20,000-30,000 killed.)

So, can I remember anything of that at all? No, I was thinking of other things entirely, plus my first round of A levels. All completely natural. Always this parallel set of lives, my own and whichever one is presented in a book. 

When will North Korea come out of its misery? All my life that has been going on. I have one book by a man who escaped, but I haven't been brave enough to read beyond the introduction. 

I wonder about the many Uprisings and how fated they are to fail. Why not plan carefully from inside the system, be canny, wait, succeed slowly, develop processes which work reliably? Why be so foolhardy and wasteful of lives?

- 'They'd sent him a bearded, turbaned Egyptian to offer stale words and verses.' 

When my Grandfather was ill he had wanted communion in hospital, but had specifically requested a male priest. That deliberate dismissal of women priests shocked me after a lifetime of kindness from him. I guess it was because I hadn't ever challenged the male place in the current set up. 

If I had challenged the male succession for our family title, things might have become ugly. As it is I decided to marry into a non-titled family to avoid it altogether, and I do not use my title at all. Even mentioning it here is counter-productive because I wish to bury and ignore its very existence, an honour imposed on the descendants with no get out.

- 'the past that would outlive him.'

English will live on, the shape of this country, the road network and names of villages, the illnesses we get, the ways that children play, the processes of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, all I have painstakingly learned will have to be re-learned by each person in turn, no short cuts. 

The Iraq + 100 years project concept was about asking people to write about their towns in 100 years' time. I considered life here in this village. All that would remain would be the old things, plus one or two modern elements. I found that a big surprise, but it made sense. 

Fashions would be recorded and the census information. The way the snow falls and melts, the catkins and daffodils, noises of the animals, smells of the animals and cut grass. Thunder, rain, dawn...Maths, languages, literature, the culture of music all around us, older people's ways, how wood burns, the winds.

How can I imagine the future children in my wider family? It is so extended already, I don't have a good way of keeping in touch with each one. I will put in a wish for the internet to come up with an extended family app which is just right :) Each person has a different version of family.

Too many words. The phrases are taken from 2 pages of a book I am reading. This straying is why I read, to remind me of my own life.

Yes, I need to talk to you again (my imaginary tutor)

hi
yes, hallo, what's up?
i am having different problems
ok, tell me then
this is like a doctor, doctor joke...
no, it's not, be serious, don't waste my time
ok, i am trying to read collections of poetry. ones written by people i know, or ones which get to the top of my pile
you do realise that reading a collection is a big ask
yes, that's what i am finding
so, what exactly is your problem?
i hadn't expected it to take so much time and energy
...?
or to be so draining to write about
...?
or to matter so much
...?
or to want to do it seriously
...?
or to see the summer getting hotter and my book stack getting higher too, not smaller
...?
how can i read enough if time just rushes on like this?
...?
how can i, i don't know
have a piece of this chocolate and sit in the garden with a glass of what i am having
you do know that all this is totally normal, it's your problem though and i can only listen
life is swift and can be chopped just like that
how are things with you and your to-do list
great, thanks, i revise it each day, and i have a what's going on section so i remind myself of the big events which are in the background at the moment..actually i have missed out a humdinger of a situation on that list, i will go and add that to my consciousness. it's surprisingly easy to deny that something is going on.
i'm glad it's working for you at the moment. have you finished now?
...yes, thanks, do i have to stop talking about it now?
well, let's pretend the timer has just gone beep, beep, beep and it's now time to be one person again and wander in the imaginary blog garden
...this is falling apart..
end

...

With apologies to Anthony Wilson and his conversations with his book. I haven't meant to copy what he is doing, but it does look like that. Oh well, go and read his blog, it's a mine of treasures.

Happy moment

- sitting on the floor in front of my Arabic bookshelves, deciding what to read next. I skipped over the hot potatoes, the heavies and the histories to choose a book I have wanted to read for ages:

Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here - ed by Beau Beausoleil and Deema Shehabi

I need a tutor

Since I am closest, I'll have to pretend to know what to do. So week 1: Nice to meet you. Why do you need a tutor? Because I am not focusing clearly enough. Ah! That's normal. Where is your to do list? Somewhere. I've lost it. That's normal too. Could you go away and only come back once you have made a simple to do list to show me? Goodbye. That was quick!! She's a good tutor, has seen it all before and doesn't waste my time.

The Road from Damascus - Robin Yassin-Kassab

I am on my second read through. It's one of those books where I don't want to move on from the current page I am on. I am so grateful to be able to read what I want for as long as I want.

The writer's blog.

Empty Roads - The Road from Damascus - Crickets - Giggling

Empty Road - The A34 is strangely empty this week. I think working people without children who are tied to school terms have gone abroad en masse.

The Road from Damascus - Very readable. One paragraph describes my home life to the letter. I didn't know my life was so much a classic case of whatever-it-is. The cause was different in the book, but the result is identical.

I think I need to start again from the beginning, to read about the father/mother/son/daughter relationships a second time. I skipped some sections, but that's ok.

This is getting to be a theme, I have just had a look at another book I want to write some notes on, and I realise I want to start again with that one too. One step forward and several steps sideways!

Crickets - Our latest film was The Lemon Tree. Out of nowhere came the crickets making their endless noises at night, just like they did in the South of France in the summers when I was little. I love it when something arrives from nowhere, a complete surprise, a reminder of something I'd forgotten I loved.

Giggling - Another film I went to recently surprised me even more with the giggling of the men in one section. I recognised their giggles... How can that happen? I don't know them, they are actors, from elsewhere. The film was very serious etc etc, but I came away with that instead.

Contemporary Iraqi Fiction - Shakir Mustafa - Musing on learning French and Arabic (long)

Contemporary Iraqi Fiction - translated and edited by Shakir Mustafa

I had my eye on this for ages. Every time I put it in my Amazon basket the price would rise after a few hours, so I'd put it back again. Eventually I realised I'd have to buy it immediately at the lower price.

It came from the public library in Blue Ridge Boulevard in Kansas City. Now it is in Oxfordshire in my private library. One day I will be lending it out to the Didcot circle of Arabic in Translation readers. I live in hope.

The editor and translator is Shakir Mustafa. How keen, to translate and put it all together? Syracuse University Press published it. Their book list.

I have picked out some stories, but really they need the other stories around them, so I can't single any out. It isn't fair. I could list their names and authors, and just give hints.

Mahmoud Saeed - 'A Figure in Repose' - knock at the door in the night
Salima Salih - 'Those Boys' - growing up in Germany
Mayselun Hadi - 'Her Realm of the Real' - a love story
Muhammad Khodayyir - 'The House of Names' - a birth story
Samira Al-Mana - 'That Thing We Call Age' - observing intimacy

Short stories are far more visual than poems or blogs, my usual reading. Each one could be turned into a screen play, such as the clear one I read recently on the Hall Writers' Forum. Then turned into films. A huge series of experimental mini-films.

They are strangely uniform and universal, no details, just the essentials, the father, the mother, the door, the soldier. Rather like the parables. Timeless. Demonstrating a circularity, opposite to our conviction that progress and change occurs and is unstoppable.

When does our writing become timeless? When it deals with birth, death? Mainly it is set in a time with a political flavour and particular transient ethos and set of explorations of thought. Yes, so different. The whole point is to include elements of Thatcher's Britain and the Poll Tax Riots or London in 2003. Beckett steps outside time though. Now I have lost myself!

Musing

I like the biographical page for each author. It gives a counterbalance to the stories. Since they are all alive, I think, and so am I, there is an interesting potential for seeing them in London or Oxford at some reading in the future.

The bios pretty much all include the move away from Iraq, I'd wait for the phrase 'left Iraq' in each one, or a smoother version of the same fact, 'went to xyz to study'.

They remind me of the calls I received at Standard Life. Always a problem, always interestingly different from the one before, always composed of the same sequence of errors and growing irritation. I'd say soothingly "Hmm, that shouldn't have happened."

Mainly people would calm down and I'd sort the problems out. Apart from one person I hung up on. I shouldn't even have answered the call, it was well after 5pm, but I decided to be generous. The man bawled and shouted, to my shock, so that went very badly!

There it is: stories lead to other stories and life trundles on. I think I could read Middle Eastern stories until I am 80 and find myself treading the same ground, just with ever increasing perceptions of the tiny variations being presented to me.

At some level the evened-out English might be the problem. Once I get to a certain point I will have to shift into Arabic entirely and leave the translators' life work behind.

Unfair on the translators, but it's like leaving a teacher behind, it has to be done. They can be a friend, but no longer the person you show your ignorance to every week. That's rubbish, I'd love to keep all my teachers, but on a 50/50 basis, I teach you x and you teach me y.

When did I ever read French in translation? Extremely rarely, only when I couldn't buy the 2nd hand original. For O level I didn't read texts, but then for A level that is all we did, so I just read and read and read. Easier ones at first, no Montaigne essays or Villon!

I just can't remember being unable to read French text in the way I am with Arabic now. What we did then was perfectly paced, while I haven't had any Arabic literature teaching yet and am muddling along by myself. No wonder it's all a bit home educational.

I have a plan to make my own reader of parallel texts. The first paragraphs of several short stories in E and A. A selection of short poems in E and A. I have several of these to hand, including a book with many small pieces of prose poetry strewn about in the text. Things are looking up, yet again.

Musings

Understandings

You know when you just read part of a page and then you sit there thinking. Two things have been explained to me just now, while I sat with my feet under a hot water bottle by a draughty window reading an introduction to one Iraqi writer.

I have been reading various things without really knowing what I was reading or why. I'm happy with this, I'd rather the understanding came later, not forced on me by some stranger. I am frowning at the thought. Too much university literature study already in my life. I like to read as and when. Person to person, mind to mind.

So

This sentence came along...which explains a huge amount about Samuel Shimon's book about Paris plus pretty much everything else I have read.

'..layers of voices, places, and eras that continuously stir what we know or remember.' and '..at once about the present and the past..'

Then this came along...which explains a blog I read, or rather puts other words to it.

'..dead poets join living storytellers in narrating.'

Ok, those quotations don't seem so special now, but it doesn't take much to set me off thinking.

Pronunciation

So which version of Arabic do I learn? I think I have picked up another non-fusHa word without knowing it. The way I said the word in class was not the way the teacher said it, so I guess that is another from-the-heart-word which had popped out in non-fusHa and went into my mind just like that. Hmm, more layers of this and that.

No English

I decided I would only speak Arabic in the class, which I stuck to mostly. It surprised our teacher and was helpful. She really tried to understand what I was trying to convey. Sitting at the front always helps.