Also, I found this scrawled on the corner of a page of a notebook, and had completely forgotten I'd written it, let alone what it was heading towards:

To say that the beloved is beyond the reach of poetry is the oldest trick in the book (or out of it); and to say that it is old and yet it is true in this case, that is the second oldest trick. And yet (at one more remove) this is his beauty and his strength, that he stands calmly to one side of the smooth superlatives of eulogy, he stands aloof from the dance, observing; he will not be verified, he smiles wryly and turns the page, and at that fingertip's touch the page catches fire.

Still true, I reckon.

Tags: writing

While I'm doing reviews... I don't really, deep down where it matters, think of myself as a writer with a readership: I think of myself as just some random broad with a blog, boring my friends over a beer in the corner of some kind of virtual pub. So it came as something of a surprise to find that some of the people who had participated in the choral concert that I reviewed the other week had read my review, and my first thought was to feel a pang of remorse for having been so dismissive about the Harmonia Quartet. Yes, they sounded slightly underrehearsed; but I've sung a lot of the music they were singing, which on the one hand means that I'm more likely to hear tiny mistakes, but on the other hand means that I appreciate the difficulty of what they do. And they were certainly enjoyable to listen to, and at the end of the day, that's what it's all about. All I can say is I'm sorry, guys, and I'll gladly buy any of you a flagon of the finest foaming fa-la-la if we find ourselves in the same pub.

It was probably a timely reminder, though. The lines between performers and audiences and writers and readers and critics seems to be getting extremely blurred (not that that's necessarily a bad thing, or indeed a good thing); I still have trouble thinking of my friends' bands as "real" bands, but there clearly comes a point when you have to admit that they're as "real" as it gets. And, in the other direction, real bands have livejournals and myspaces; they read blogs, they meet people, they make friends, they make typos, they flame lusers. They put their trousers on one leg at a time like the rest of us. Real authors whose books I've read have commented on my blog: that's a bit scary, and it's a bit humbling to be reminded that among the people I'm boring are people who actually know what they're talking about; but it's also empowering: if they can, I can. It's not news that famous people (whatever that means) are real people (whatever that means) too, but it's getting easier to cross the line at many different levels. The fourth wall's been rubble for a long time; now more and more of us are joining in the stage-invasion.

All of which is just my observation, rather than drawing towards some grand theory. Maybe all that separates me from the Real Writers is that they're more likely to bother to finish what they're saying, whereas I'm more likely to think ah the hell with it and make another cup of coffee. Maybe one day I'll finish saying something worth saying. Maybe one day I'll start.

Tags: metablog, reviews, writing

And this is the other angle from which I could have told the story. Needs a lot of work, but if I don't post it now, I never will.

Tags: writing

Remember learning to write? Your parents or teachers make you trace over the printed outlines of perfectly-formed letters time and time again until, after lines and lines of exercise-book pages, your shaky pencil shapes grow so close to the dotted letters that the deviations from the line can barely be seen. Eventually you're ready to write those same shapes without the safety-net of the dotted letters; and when you do so, your letters may well revert to being a little more uncertain, a little more irregular than they were previously. On the other hand, because there's no longer any underlying image to which to conform, it shows less when you do deviate from what is, after all, only someone else's ideal. You're free to form your letters in whatever way you choose. Eventually your printing becomes neater, and your handwriting settles into something fairly consistent, though it slowly shifts and changes over the years as you refine one bit or another; perhaps you try to neaten it, or make it more romantic, or make it more angular; perhaps you change the pen you use and your writing changes a little to reflect that; or perhaps it's not even conscious, perhaps the shapes of your writing shift like the ponderous movements of continents, and you don't even realise anything has changed until by chance you find a memo to yourself from 10 years ago and you can barely believe it's your writing. And, of course, it isn't; in so many ways, both physical and psychological, you're barely the same person now as you were then.

The only way to improve your handwriting is by practising, but only you know what sort of practice works best for you. Maybe tracing letter-outlines helps you, or maybe you prefer to just write and see what happens; maybe you practise in private where nobody can laugh at your mistakes, or maybe you find that writing to other people helps to motivate you to keep improving.

New Year is an arbitrary blip in the calendar, a milestone (or millstone) that's as meaningless as adult birthdays. But I still make New Year's Resolutions: I like to draw the faint outlines of where and what I want to be, so that later I can see how well my subsequent tracings match the suggested shapes; and I like the external accountability of bringing my progress (or lack of it) into the public eye. Sometimes, somewhere along the way, I have (consciously or otherwise) decided to follow different paths from those I laid out; this doesn't necessarily constitute failure, any more than deciding to write in italic script (perhaps because one prefers the look of it, or the feel of it under the pen) signals a failure to write in upright lettering. The important thing is to distinguish between lapses which damage the desired outcome (e.g. writing a 't' without its crosspiece might render it indistinguishable from an 'l', which would make the writing harder to read and hence make communication more difficult) and lapses which don't (e.g. whether your 'w' is a zigzag or two overlapping 'v's, there aren't really any other letters with which it could become confused). I leave the extension of the already over-stretched analogy as an exercise for the reader (and writer).

So how do the letters line up? Here are last year's resolutions, reproduced here with commentary.

( resolved! )

And now this year's Resolutions, with more commentary. This year's are a complete ragbag of resolutions, and there are far too many of them, but I figure that if I aim at the stars, I might just hit a tree. I don't really expect anybody to read all this (though obviously you're all free to do so); I'm writing these out more for my own benefit than anybody else's.

( resolvent )

I haven't really made any resolutions about friendships and relationships, or thoughts and feelings, because it's so hard to quantify things; however, for the sake of external accountability, I do intend to make more of an effort to keep in touch with old friends as well as meeting new ones, and I want to be more reliable about getting in touch with people when I've said I'll do so. I also want to get more of a grip on my self-image, but that's heading out of the realm of New Year's Resolutions and into cognitive therapy. If I think it won't be too navel-gazing, I may write about some of that here.

Tags: resolutions, werke, writing