There’s some things you own that you’re particularly proud of, objects that give pleasure just from being in your possession. Usually these objects are uncommon, collectors’ items, or they hold sentimental significance, or they just say something about you. I’m considering doing a series of posts on some of my favourite possessions, but I will start with a fairly recent acquisition of mine: Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.

This book is uncommon on account of the obscurity of its subject matter; it’s a synopsis and critical discussion of James Joyce’s final and most difficult work, Finnegans Wake. Outside of literary circles I doubt it was ever widely read and the book’s been out of print for years. My copy is from 1947, making it only slightly younger than the oldest book I own, a 1944 copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

I like this book on two levels: Firstly, it has a very pure bookish sort of quality. The cover is blue, the pages are slightly yellowed, though still in good condition. If it ever had a dust-jacket, that’s been long-lost somewhere down the years, leaving only its plain blue hard-cover. The front and back offer no clues to the book’s identity, the title being printed on the spine only, and there in gold lettering only distinguishable from the sun-bleached fabric by its metallic sheen. It has a charming anonymity.

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Morning, it’s far too early to do much else and I’m waiting for a Dreamcast game to burn so I can see if my new DC will play burned discs. It’s taking ages though, so here I am updating my blog. Today’s beginning was rather too abrupt for me. I had a dream this morning that I was at work (which I was last night) but it was slightly different. And we were trying to close up the shop but people kept coming in because we hadn’t had chance to lock the door or something, then we finally got everyone out and I left. It was light outside, even though I’m sure it was night, and the roads were quiet. I decided to try cycling a different way home, so I set off up the road rather than down it. I went up this road that I thought would lead to my house, but it was a dead end, I think it just led to some locked-up garages, so I turned around and tried the next turn-off. This was like a lumber-yard, and another dead end, but further away. What was strange about this place was that it had flickering flourescent lights on metal posts, about head-height. As I passed them on my bike I noticed that in my hands, resting on the handlebars, I was holding several sheets of paper with dark grey squares on them. Every time the lights flickered, it lit up the squares somehow and they were printouts of CCTV footage from the shop, just of me and the guy I worked with standing around.

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Every now and then I get an impulse to create something or do something new with computers/technology/the internet, usually in the summer when I don’t have any uni work to keep me occupied. I always think this creative urge could be put towards writing, but it always seems to manifest itself as a desire to learn how to write computer code. I always think it would be really cool if I could write games or applications or other things, but I have no idea where to start, or what I definitely want to do, so  I usually spend a couple of days reading about programming languages then give up, since I don’t have the resources or inclination to follow through.

My general philosophy is that life’s too short to learn how to program, because even learning how to do fairly simple things with code takes ages. Two summers ago I did start this site though, and during short bursts over the next several months I taught myself enough HTML and CSS to make it look and work like it does now. I doubt you have any idea how long it took me to work out how to do a front page that displayed the latest post and a random post in a nice rounded border, but was separate to a page containing my last ten blog posts. It took a long time. Sure, I probably could have done it much more quickly with Dreamweaver or some equivalent, but I did it the old-fashioned step-by-step way so I could learn how it worked. I still know next-to-nothing about web-programming though.

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You know how sometimes you get lines from songs stuck in your head? Not necessarily the music, but the lines themselves. Well I do anyway. Lines like “And still we will be here, standing like statues” or “do you believe in magic?”, though they’re much better with the music to go with them, and when they’re sung in a certain way. Lately I’ve had a few literary lines stuck in my head, two of them from James Joyce, one from Simon Armitage. Sometimes the best sentiments come from the fewest words, and some quotes are brilliant not because of what they say, whether they’re a pithy little aphorism or a well-put piece of rhetoric, but by what they suggest, and how they seem to carry a whole weight of ideas that is much greater than the sum of their parts.

Without further ado in this short, sharp little post, the three lines I have stuck in my head, that I thought I would share are:

i. Yes I said yes I will yes.

This, as everyone really ought to know, is the final, triumphant line of Joyce’s Ulysses. I love the emphatic expression of affirmation it embodies. It’s only seven words, and yet it is so enthusiastic in conveying its message. It’s so well-balanced as well, the way two words separate each of the three yeses. It’s probably even my favourite line in the whole novel.

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Look at that picture, why is this the official press shot for the final leaders’ debate instead of a picture of the three of them looking stern and debatey? Perhaps it’s just because of the irreverence with which British people treat their politicians. I don’t think they release press shots like this in China. Brown and Clegg look like they’re doing a little dance, or perhaps the floor is really hot, while Cameron is staring into space, perhaps day-dreaming about his Eton days, or how many butlers he’s going to have when (if) he moves into 10 Downing Street.

I never thought I’d really care about politics, being quite generally apathetic about a lot of things, and until recently, I never really knew anything about the different parties or what they stood for. I’ll tell you what made me start caring about politics though: Nick Griffin. When he was on Question Time, I watched the programme for the first time, and it inspired me. I sat there, and I watched his fat, lop-sided toad face articulate his racist ideologies, his holocaust denial, I listened to the audience booing him, and I realised at that moment that, as a person eligible to vote, I had to do everything in my power to make sure somone like that never got into any position of power.

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Perhaps you’ve forgotten about this blog, it seems I have. Two whole months without a post! It makes me wonder what I’ve been doing, since it certainly feels like I’ve not done any work in months and months. Well, I must have done some: I’ve got my dissertation finished, or very, very nearly finished. I’m not really all that happy with it. It will get a first, I’m quite confident of that, but it won’t be the best among the thirteen or so people who are doing 50% dissertations. It might even be, ugh!, average. Maybe it’s not so bad, I’m just bored of it now. I wanted it to be amazing, but maybe I was too ambitious or, rather, too broad with my scope. It feels somehow awkward.

I’ve had a general lack of enthusiasm this year, which is a shame, since it’s my final year. The writing I’ve done just hasn’t been up there with my writing from last year. But I think I’ve just been bored. I haven’t really been inspired by anything in ages, haven’t felt a spark of electricity, like when I first read Ulysses, or even Remembrance of Things Past or, years before that, the opening page of Mrs. Dalloway. I have read some good books though, and I’ve had some good fictive experiences lately, especially with some really good games. Games like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Far Cry 2. Both of these create feelings in me that just can’t be achieved through books or films. Maybe I’ll write about why they’re amazing sometime.

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I recently read Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in a single day, firstly because it’s short, and secondly because it was really good. It had a wonderful immediacy that very few novels do, certainly not the long, slow novels I’ve been reading lately, like Crime and Punishment and Night and Day. Particularly surprising was the accessibility of the work, for something that was written two-and-a-half centuries ago, a little after Shakespeare was alive.

What I liked most was that it was nearly all action, with only the most economic descriptions in between. On the third page of the novella, for example, after being briefly appraised of the primary protagonists, the son of the prince of Otranto, upon the day of his arranged wedding, is crushed beneath a giant helmet that appears from apparently nowhere. While the origin of this impossibly large item of head-wear is unaccountable, it is not with this mystery that the prince concerns himself, nor even with the loss of his only son: his concern is that the marriage of his son to a girl named Isabella would have cemented his claim to the throne of Otranto by uniting two families. He is then forced to desperate measures to secure this alliance, as he is aware of an old prophecy warning that his family would eventually lose the castle and the true heir would return.

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Oh, this is cool and creepy. I have only recently been made aware of the existence of ‘The Slender Man’ and it is one of the creepiest things I have seen in ages. I watched all the videos last night in the dark, and even though I was talking with my housemate as I watched them, they still rather unnerved me in a way nothing has done in a while.

An explanation of what The Slender Man is can be found here, but if you can’t be bothered to read that, it’s just an urban myth that was fabricated on the internet. Some guy came up with it on this fake paranormal photos thread and attached a little story to it. The story is that there is this being who stalks and kidnaps children, who has no discernible face, wears a business suit and is able to extend its limbs and even increase their number. On the face of it, it sounds somewhat ridiculous and generic, but some of the fake photos of it are pretty good.

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(This is a story from when I was sixteen or seventeen, and so not very good. A discussion of why it is not very good follows in the comments below the story.)

I sighed. It had been a long day, made longer now by the incessant traffic. I was forced to stop once again behind two red lights and a cloud of grey smoke. Another car was in front of this one, and another, and another.

I put my left elbow on the edge of my car door, uncomfortably pressed against the window, then rested my cheek on my knuckle, feeling the bones of my fingers press against my jaw. With my other hand I twisted the dial on the radio. A pop song played almost indistinguishably behind a wall of static. I tried twisting the tuning dial, but all I got was static, sometimes with a song phasing in, sometimes with nothing but the electric crackle.

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I’m not sure if this is the same for all writers, but I have to really feel what I write. I suppose it probably is the same for all the best writing, otherwise fiction is just churned out soullessly. That’s kind of how I felt reading Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. It’s well-written, no doubt, but I didn’t really get any feeling from it, like he didn’t feel anything when he wrote it. If I don’t feel anything when I write, my writing becomes lifeless, and lately I haven’t been feeling anything.

You might recall the work I posted recently, An Unfamiliar Girl (extract from my current work). That seems to have halted production at around the twelve-thousand-word mark, and I still feel I’ve barely begun it. I’m quite sure there’s enough material in it for a novel, but it’s just writing the novel that’s the tricky part. And this one seems to have become tricky because it is based so much on feelings, rather than plot.

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