Autumn reading at Watsonworks

WATSONWORKSblog.blogspot.com
Returning from a summer break, September 2011
Blog 24

Contents:

*Number 4 in a series on ENCOUNTERS
*Notes in Passing: A Book from the Shadows
*Poems of Place…1. Heptenstall for Sylvia Plath
*Correspondence

Enemies Meet Face-to-Face
in the trenches of Catalonia

An edited extract from the Spanish Civil War novel
The Freedom Tree (Puffin, Collins etc.).

In the footsteps of his dead father, Will has joined British volunteers
to fight alongside the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and
against the forces of General Franco. He finds himself, with his
companion Griff, in the bitterly cold trenches of Catalonia, northern
Spain. He has been sent out by the group leader, Candy Sam, to
gather brushwood. In the pitch darkness, Griff and Will lose their way.

In the dark, north, south, east and west wore the same featureless mask. The stars were over- clouded, and anyway neither Will nor Griff could read the stars. They left the limestone parapet of the home trench and dropped in to no-man’s land. ‘When you hear a shot,’ Candy Sam had instructed, ‘drop flat on your faces. It’s a thousand to one against being hit.’

Every footstep, for Will, was agony because he could hear his steel-shod boots designed to make the biggest possible noise over crackly limestone. And if he could hear them, so could the watchful enemy. He might as well have had bells tied to his feet.

Boulders were the chief hazard and Will duly tripped over one. He fell among firewood. ‘Roots!’
‘Drag them up, then.’
He was grateful to halt his progress towards the enemy lines. He hacked at the rough limb of stunted oak. ‘This’ll never burn in a month of Sundays.’ The tree took five minutes’ sawing. It quivered and fought for its survival until Will began to feel sorry for it. Yet he moved on, dragging his prickly victim with him.

The thought of crawling into a trench and finding not their comrades but a scowling enemy, made Will stop. ‘We need to take our bearings.’ Instinctively, they crouched down and at the very same moment the hill halfway up the sky burst into flames. An explosion raised the lid of darkness, and small explosions burst on the heels of the first.

There was one second of silence before the entire battlefront unleashed its armoury. Somehow the blackness made things worse. Distances closed in. Between a machine-gun barrel and the victim was sightlessness – no matter that in daylight you couldn’t see the bullets either.

Head down, smelling the bitter winter earth, hands clamped over ears. A bullet smashed stone close by. Another ricocheted off rocks to left or right. Will raised his eyes as the intensity of the gunfire – and got the very worst shock of his life. His gazes fell on another face.

The enemy soldier lay belly down, pointing in the direction of his own trenches as Will and Griff were pointing at theirs. He was as terrified as Will – and as young: wan faced, pop-eyed, immovable as though his limbs had been driven into the ground with wooden stakes.

If he was armed, there was no sign of it. At the sight of two of the enemy, he rolled sideways like a rabbit springing from the hand about to descend upon its neck. Will said, ‘Please!’ It was all he could think of: please – don’t do anything, don’t shoot, don’t run. But Griff cut words. This was the closest bang, the closest bullet and it drowned Will’s anguished ‘No, Griff!’

Too late. The bullet was straight. The enemy turned half in a circle. His hand was raised as if to some invisible support, some arm held out to him in the last flash of his living mind. His pop-eyed face fell before the rest of him.

‘There was no need!’
‘Him or us.’
‘He’d no gun.’
‘Beggar that!’
Will was across the body. ‘If he’s only wounded –’
‘Forget ‘im, he’s dead.’
The young Spaniard lay as only the dead lie. Yet Will would not let him go. Feebly, he bent over him, willing breath back into him. ‘Sorry. Sorry…’ He no longer heard the flying bullets. He did not care whether they struck him. The pop eyes were in his head. He could see nothing but them.

One life. Sixteen years of caring and loving and feeding, of laughing and crying and running and talking – turned, in a single moment to cold flesh. Will cocked his head. He lifted himself. Great waves of nausea drove upwards through him. He was sick in his throat, sick down his nostrils.

When the nausea departed it was replaced by anger and disgust. His mind had never prepared itself for this. It had imagined other, nobler pictures – all shattered. In these seconds, Will’s hatred was not for the Fascists but for Griff. The look in his companion’s eyes – which again and again reverted to the dead Spaniard – was of pride. He was glad of what he had done.

Will gathered up the firewood they had collected. He felt no fear, for he felt nothing. He was changed. Something – perhaps everything – of his past self lay with the young Spaniard. Back in the home trench with the others, he took out his pistol. He handed it to Candy Sam. ‘Give it somebody else, please. I want none of it.’

Will’s war moves to the Battle of Jarama, where he meets Molly, a medical orderly, and is then followed by a desperate journey north, to the Basque town of Guernica. Encounter 5 in Blog 25 will describe the blitzkrieg of the town on market day by German bombers.

***

Notes in Passing
A Book from the shadows: ordinary people in extraordinary times

To have lived through the 2nd World War and to have actually lived through the war years in Berlin, the epicentre of Nazi tyranny and eventual defeat, was a truly unchallengeable qualification for an author to pen an authentic fictional account of the ‘thousand year Reich’. Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, first published in 1945 and now in a fresh English translation by Michael Hoffman, is a remarkable achievement, historical and literary.

Alone focuses on ordinary people living in day-to-day terror of the Gestapo and the SS; people who were never asked to approve of, or support, National Socialism, who had too much to contend with in their own lives to feel any degree of patriotism, who delivered up their sons to the war effort because they had no choice.

Berlin, for working-class people, was a tyranny of surveillance, ruled by fear – of crossing those in authority, of being reported by neighbours, friends or even family to a hierarchy of monsters in uniform, themselves in terror of those above them.

Otto Quangel and his wife Anna have lost their son in the war. Their bitter response to what they both see as a pointless and tragic conflict is to fight back. They do this by writing postcards condemning the Nazi regime and leaving these in public places; their hope that from acorns oaks of resistance might grow.

It is, from the start, a hopeless aspiration, yet it is one requiring a stubborn courage. In a free society such protestations would be seen as trivial, as amusingly absurd. In the totalitarian state of Hitler’s Germany, where nothing is disproportionate, such protests prompt a remorseless manhunt, equally absurd: there will be arrest, there will be interrogation and torture; and anyone with any connections with the ‘traitors’ will be caught in the trap.

Though the Quangels become an increasingly isolated, withdrawn couple the ripples of their activity sweep wide and darkly. Merely to have known or met them draws the innocent in to the abyss.

The novel teems with characters that could have been drawn from The Beggar’s Opera – petty thieves, bullies, drunks, rarely honourable never heroic; while those in authority, police, Gestapo, judges are straight out of George Grosz (see his ink and water colour on paper, Interrogation recently acquired by the London Jewish Museum of Art, supported by the Art Collection Fund).

Alone in Berlin is a brilliant and gripping narrative, terrifying in places but also verging on the comical as the villains of the piece live a ‘truth’ shot through with insanity and brutality, at once unbelievable and actual. A dull couple in any other circumstances, themselves to a degree unhinged by their hopeless campaign of protest, the Quangels find themselves capable of strategies of resistance far more successful than their postcards; or if not resistance, survival in face of the most horrific treatment.

The reader is offered a glimpse of hope at a personal level, but no assurance about the potential of people-power. Of the many postcards they leave in public places in the belief that they will be taken away, read, noted and perhaps acted upon, the majority are handed in to the authorities immediately on discovery.

Hans Fallada’s novel is loosely based on real characters who campaigned very much as the Quangels do in Alone in Berlin and whose fate paralleled that of Fallada’s characters. He took a mere 24 days to write 586 very readable pages; alas he did not live to see the publication of his book.

Geoff Wilkes in the Afterword to the novel writes that whereas Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) dissects and analyses ‘the banality of evil’, Fallada’s book ‘comprehends and honours the banality of good’.

A five-star read.

***

Poems of Place….1

HEPSTONSTALL:
FOR SYLVIA PLATH

They do not bury those
Dead by their own hand
Outside cemetery walls these days.
So I searched for you among those
Who bore their agonies
More stoically than the poet often does.

For what, I wondered, should I look –
What stone, what shape, what last words
Suitable for one whose brief lines
No overdose could kill?

Not, surely – Much Remembered.
Not – Dearly Beloved.
Not floral with white lilies
Or soothing angels
Eyes fixed on confident eternity.

I guess by now there will be a sign
Saying ‘Sylvia Plath lies this way’
(in Aldeburgh Ben and Pete and Imogen
All lie together in grey-marble convenience
Close enough to play nocturnes and trios
Under the baton of the sea wind).

I am glad I walked in vain
The parade of marble, glad I failed,
Despite a skylark’s company
And rooks reciting their own laments
In the deep thunder of the sycamore,
To find you written up
As ordinary mortals are.

For in truth my search
Was your epitaph
And a little of my own.


***

Correspondence

"I just finished reading your book Ticket to Prague for the third time, and I wanted to tell you how much I love it. You described Prague in such vivid language, I want to get my own ticket to Prague!! I won Ticket to Prague in a book quiz at my local library last year and like I mentioned before, have read it several times. I'm a young writer myself, and books like Ticket to Prague give me something to aspire to. I'm waiting for school to start again, so I can hunt down some of your books in my school library, and I can’t wait!! I suppose you might get this a lot but you are a brilliant writer Mr. Watson and I love your work. ST."

Thanks, ST. It’s always a relief for a writer to learn that somebody has dipped in to his or her work (and kept going to the end!). Blog 23 featured an extract from Ticket to Prague under the Encounters series – DISSIDENT GIRL MEETS DISSIDENT POET.

Dear Jim,
It’s me, Ned Baslow again, just to thank you for agreeing to find space for one (or more) of my Letters to Celebrities. As I’ve explained, I think important people could often do with some feet-on-the ground guidance from the likes of us ordinary folk. It’s been my recent experience that a word of advice from the rank-and-phial is often appreciated by those dazzled by their own greatness or with their heads in the cloud as a result of hangers-on flattering them to the nines.

Anyway, you’ll get my first missile, sorry, missive, in good time for your next Blog (which my Betty says is improving). However, neither of us can make head nor tale of Miro who you seem to admire. For us, a good plain landscape with a cottage, some Derbyshire sheep among the Derbyshire Peaks is more to our liking, though if it’s squiggles you want Benjie, our nine year old, could knock out those till the cows come home. Takes all sorts!
Yours,
Ned.

I look forward to your contribution, Ned. As for Miro, I read in a magazine lately that Miro actually visited Belper on the A6 with the intention of drawing the East Mill that overlooks the Derwent, but gave up on account of the rain and, as he termed it, ‘problems with perspective’.

How sad that letter writing has been on the decline:
why not join Ned in a campaign to cultivate the fast-disappearing art of correspondence?
PS: You don’t have to be from Derbyshire.

Contact: Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

http://www.watsonworks.co.uk/



***

FICTIONAL ENCOUNTERS: Dissident Girl meets Dissident Poet

WATSONWORKSblog.blogspot.com
Blog 23

Contents:
· Dissident Girl Meets Dissident Poet
· Notes in Passing: Miro, another perspective
· Five Haikus for Istanbul
· Correspondence: a regretful cancellation


DISSIDENT GIRL

MEETS DISSIDENT POET

The Power of a Good Book
Number 3 in a series on ENCOUNTERS

An edited selection from
TICKET TO PRAGUE
(Gollancz, Penguin, Collins)

Since her parents were killed in a motorway car crash Amy Douglas has been at war with the world. She has been expelled from school, she has been involved in a violent streetfight which has led to her boyfriend being put behind bars while she has been issued with a controlling order. She has ended up as a part-time carer in a home for men who have either rejected society or been rejected by it.

Josef is a Czech poet. Almost a generation ago he had been permitted to join a group of poets and other writers on a cultural visit to Britain. He absconded, but the decision was so traumatic that the poet, along with all the evidence of who Josef actually was, vanished into silence. All he does, from week to week, month to month, year to year, is stare at an empty television screen.

Neither Amy nor Josef realise on their first meeting that their period of isolation, their seemingly pointless and directionless lives, are about to change. The key that unlocks the door to silence is a shared love – of literature, the enriching power of reading.

***
From a distance, High Lawns does a passable imitation of a stately home. It stands on a pleasant incline among acres of meadow and woodland, all encompassed by high stone walls. Ancient beech trees escort the main drive which stretches through rough pasture to a sunken wall.

Beyond this are lovingly tended gardens, smooth-cropped lawns, a tennis court and an open-air pool…
…
'Whatever you do,' senior nurse Sylvia Benson, had advised Amy, 'never call the place a loony bin. Never use such words as "lunatic", "mad", "round the bend" or "round the twist". These unfortunates are our family. Now they're your family.'
…
'And this gentleman, said Mrs. Benson on Amy’s first morning on duty, ‘is Josef, spelt with an "f", one of our longest-serving customers.'
'Customers?'
'Oh yes, that is what we have to call them these days. It sounds more business-like. Josef is foreign. He smokes too much and hates taking exercise. A lazy old scruff, really – aren't you, Josef?’
Still in pyjamas and slippers though it is past eleven, Josef makes no response to Mrs. Benson. He is around sixty, Amy guesses. He is short, scrawny but still with a generous head of grey hair.
He spares one glance at the tall, handsome girl with blonde hair. There is the dart of a smile from watchful green eyes that seem to say, 'I know secrets but I'm not telling'.
'Josef won't give you any bother, Amy. There is little point, by the way, in trying to engage him in conversation. He's foreign and doesn't seem to have bothered to learn our language beyond "I want", "No" and "Football!" He is what Dr. Parrish calls homo mollusca, someone trapped for ever in a shell of almost absolute silence.'
Amy is wondering, should Mrs. Benson be saying all this in front of Josef?
'Don't worry, he never listens to what anybody says. We call him Sir Stubborn.'
Amy takes to Josef instantly: Sir Stubborn, meet Lady Stubborn.
'Shall I turn the telly on for him?'
'No, he prefers it off.'
'He looks as though he is watching it.'
'Oh yes. If he's watching it, or looks as though he's watching it, and it's off, don't wheel it away or he'll become quite agitated.'
'And if I turn the telly on?'
'He'll walk away.'
Amy grins. 'That means he's got good taste. I'm not struck on telly myself.'
Mrs. Benson isn't used to considering the opinions of young people sent up on Community Service or from the Youth Training, but Amy seems different; brighter, more full of herself. 'You've got a point. All that violence and suffering before your very eyes, well it's enough to make you feel suicidal...'
'Like you want asylum?'
'Yes, I guess that's what we are at High Lawns, a refuge from all the horror and carnage.' Ms. Benson explains that Josef, as a special privilege, is allowed to stay up to watch the late-night football. 'Otherwise he retreats into his shell completely.'
Amy contemplates Josef. 'He looks so intelligent.'
Mrs. Benson drops her voice. 'There's absolutely nothing wrong with Sir Stubborn that a good kick up the backside wouldn't cure. Private opinion, mind.'

After settling a nocturnal fracas between two ‘customers’, Josef and a Mr. Dodds over a packet of fags, Amy is curious to draw Josef out of his shell.

There is this terrible silence. Amy recognises it because somewhere in the building, far off, somebody is crying – a child, a grown-up, it is difficult to say. And the crying goes on and on and it makes the silence in this room and the silence outside so clear; like a frost…
…'You've got a real reputation, Josef. Your friend Mr. Dodds says you killed your kids. I don't believe that... though you were pretty violent just now. He says that's why you never tell anybody about yourself. Because of your guilt.
'I don't believe that either...Do you know what I think? You're afraid. If you just stick with Please and Thank You, nobody will report you: am I right?'
Why did I say that? Guesswork. But it's pressed something in his head. Josef's gaze for a second shifts from the empty TV screen. 'Still, don't think you're the only one. Everybody's afraid – I mean everybody who's ever lost anyone. Or lost themselves, you know what I mean?'
Another flicker of the eye; a recognition. 'Yes, I think you do. I hope you don't mind me talking to you like this. I lost my parents, you know. They were passengers in this car going along the M25. Heard of that? It's the most dangerous stretch of road since the First World War. Then I went to live with my Auntie, who's not actually my real auntie at all. She was kind – so long as I didn't bring home any “darkies”.'
The mournful weeping from a distant ward has continued, and until it slips into silence, Amy keeps on talking.... 'I quite like it here, actually. It's a sanctuary. I think you like it too, Josef. It's a horrible world out there, do you agree?
'I get my meals, same as you. And Mrs. Benson thinks they might take me on, as a temp. Pay me, even...Mind you, I've only got GCSEs. Though I can swim. I used to race. And when I did, when I competed and left others ten metres behind, I was somebody. When I didn't, I was nobody.
'You're very trim, Josef. I bet you did sport when you were a boy. Football? They're very keen on it in Czechoslovakia, am I right? Course, personally I'm more into books these days.’
She dangles a juicy literary worm. 'Now Czechoslovakia – that's where Franz Kafka lived.' A pause; a flicker of recognition, no, more than that. 'A bit morbid, though – that story about a man turning into a beetle. Poor Gregor Samsa!'
Something is happening. Josef's face seems suddenly to melt in the glare from the strip light above; melt, go out of shape, and then re-form, almost into a new face.
'One of your favourites, is he, Josef – Franz Kafka? We could sort of read him together. The Castle, what about that? No? Okay, The Trial then. My English teacher Mrs. Ambler was very keen on him.'
Josef suddenly emits one word. Amy does not recognise it, fears it might be a curse. 'What was that, Josef?'
'Sveyk!'
'Sveyk? Right.' A long pause. Baffled. Sveyk – doesn't sound like a swearword. Josef is reaching out his hand.
'Come. Please!'
Three words! This must have exhausted Josef's usual tally for the year.
'Okay.'
Upstairs, to his room, head nodding now, vigorously. Josef switches on the light, goes to a set of drawers, opens the top one.
Amy waits by the door. 'Sveyk.' She practices it aloud. Does it mean 'bedroom' or 'drawer' or perhaps even a 'secret case' that Mr. Dodds accused him of hiding away?
Josef produces a fat paperback with a flash of yellow on the cover. He holds it up. 'Sveyk.'
At last.
'He's the author?' She receives the book. She reads out the title. 'The Good Soldier Sveyk by Jaroslav Hasek.'
'Hashek!' replies Josef, correcting Amy's pronunciation.
Eyes meeting, eyes aglow now.
On the cover, an officer in a blue uniform is sitting down and smoking a fag. Coming through the door, saluting, is a plump soldier with a stubble beard and a big grin.
'Sveyk?'
Amy points, Josef nods. She turns to the back cover and reads: The Good Soldier Sveyk and His Fortunes in the World War...it says here that it's the "classic novel of the 'little man' fighting officialdom and bureaucracy with the only weapons available to him – passive resistance, subterfuge, native wit and dumb insolence".'
Dumb insolence, eh? Amy gazes across at her new friend. All she says is, 'Sveyk!'
Josef nods again, and now he smiles. 'Sveyk!'
'And you want me to read this to you?' She examines the volume which has suddenly brought her close to this old man full of dumb insolence. '752 pages, Josef, that'll take us a lifetime!'
Another nod. No sweat. She flicks through the pages, pauses at Chapter 4: Sveyk Thrown out of the Lunatic Asylum. She looks up but does not speak, then turns to the opening page.
She reads out the first few lines:

'And so they've killed Grand Duke Ferdinand,' said
the charwoman to Mr. Sveyk, who had left military
service years before, after being finally certified
by an army medical board as an imbecile, and now
lived by selling dogs – ugly, mongrel monstrosities,
whose pedegrees he forged. Apart from this occupation he
suffered from rheumatism and was at this very moment

rubbing his knees with Elliman's embrocation...

Amy's turn to nod. 'It looks as though it might give us a laugh or two.'
Josef is beaming. All at once Amy begins to feel good. She closes the book.
'Sveyk!' says the old man.
'Sveyk!' repeats Amy Douglas, little realising how this one word will change her life.

Amy and Josef become friends and she discovers that far from being the murdererof his kids, Josef is a poet of distinction, almost but not quite forgotten in his own country. Her aim becomes to reconnect him with his past and bring him fully and creatively into the present. In doing so, she comes to terms with her own past and present.

CONTINUES…
********************************

Notes in passing…
MIRO, ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE

Unless you’re an expert it’s so easy to get art wrong, specifically to have an idea about an artist which prevails in the absence of certain significant information. When this becomes known a sort of revelation takes place. You look at the same painting but with new eyes.
This happened to me at Tate Modern’s current Miro exhibition, Joan Miro: The Ladder of Escape. My previous experience of the artist’s work was always when it was hung alongside the paintings of others, and my impression was of verbal wit, fun in a world of surrealist elements; a sort of play theory on canvas.

Pain in Spain
Reading of Miro’s Spanish upbringing and background, of the historical contexts in which his art was created forced an engagement, a link between painting and history which drew me away from former impressions. This history included Miguel Primo Rivera’s military coup in 1923, the suppression of the Catalan language and customs, not long to be followed by Franco’s overthrow of the short-lived republic.

Such events impacted powerfully on Miro, eventually driving him and his family out of his homeland, to settle in Paris where he was soon to witness the Nazi occupation of France. The paintings as seen, not in the memory but on the walls of Tate Modern, studied in the light of history, demand a re-view and reconsideration.

Encoding the serious
Miro does not translate his reaction to repression by becoming a realist, rather he turns reality into a powerful iconography in which the abstract or semi-abstract images are dramatically encoded. What I’d previous read as visual jesting now revealed themselves as charged with a deep seriousness. The passion lies, as it were, beneath the paint’s surface, controlled by Miro’s fidelity to the act of painting itself. Yet even here there is a paradox: what we see on the canvas is exact and painstaking. Its strives after, and achieves, considerable aesthetic satisfaction; but one gets the impression that it was in the act of painting that Miro’s passionate response to events going on around him, is to be found.

Deceived by titles
Perhaps in the first place my take on Miro was over-influenced by his idiosyncratic titling – Dog Barking at the Moon (1926) or Woman With Blonde Armpits Combing Her Hair By the Light of the Stars (1940). Such titles actually belie the paintings’ content and the act of creation, as does the sheer mastery of colour and design. Inside these formalities is an astonishing degree of savagery.

In referring to one of Miro’s series, the Tate Modern guide, written by Marko David and Matthew Gale, refers to ‘heavy encrustation of paint often laden with sand, accompanied by hacking, stretching and nailing – urgent, frustrated action’. No joker here!

Conflagrating
Influenced by the American Abstract Expressionists, Miro stepped out of his precise iconography to produce large canvases some of which he set alight, leaving the viewer to scan both burnt painting and exposed canvas, communicating anger, even outrage, perhaps prompted by events beyond the act of painting or just as likely recording the inevitable pain and frustration when vision rides ahead of application. Burning canvases but still exhibiting them is an apt comment on the creative process.

Miro’s better known (less inflammatory) works may serve as symbolic concealments of his reaction to the world, but they are never wholly hidden. At the same time, as we enjoy Miro as painter, we acknowledge his own pleasure in the creative process; something that took him away from the horror of contemporary events. The title of the exhibition and of a 1940 painting, The Escape Ladder seems to speak for Miro’s art generally.

American dreamer?
Art is escape, the making of marks, the application of colour, but it is the process, not the subject-matter which constitutes the escape. Yet the one does not necessarily work without the other. In paintings done towards the end of his life, content seems to have taken something of a back-seat, somehow losing substance (in the triptychs The Hope of a Condemned Man and the paint-splattered Fireworks) simultaneously with the loss of the iconography that had stood the artist in good stead from his student days.

They are brave canvases, but seem to indicate that Miro, in those final days of success, riches and celebrity, might have been looking over the wrong shoulder. It’s a moot point whether the American art that so impressed him hasn’t something to answer for.

***************************

FIVE HAIKUS FOR ISTANBUL
February 2011, when it never stopped raining

1. B(L)O(W)SPHORUS HAIKU

Fingers frozen, brolly soaked
Finding it hard
To warm to Istanbul.


2. A TIFFIN HAIKU

Muezzin for breakfast
Muezzin for lunch; grant us
A peal of bells for tea.


3. SAYS IT ALL HAIKU

No sink plugs our guide
Points out is down to the Turks’
Fear of still water.


4. A NEITHER NOR HAIKU

No sun in Istanbul
Nor promise of it
In Constantinople.


5. FAMOUS ARAB ARCHITECT HAIKU

Sinan: four hundred and more
Buildings later; what was
His name again?


Correspondence
An urgent notification from Ned Baslow, secretary of the Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven Grand Summer Festival Committee.

Dear Jim
I’m desperate to get this letter to you prior to the publication of your Blog No.23 on account of the fact that we have had to postpone our summer festival till the autumn or beyond. Following my letter to you last month, introducing such items as the Tableau of Womanly Beauty and the Battle of the Titans, I’ve received several inquiries for tickets from your readers.

Very regrettably Gilbert Stokoe (‘Lord Gilbert’) is booked for a hip operation and a carthage operation during what were to be rehearsals for his starring role as Don Quixote in The Spectacles of the Man from La Salamanca. Bearing in mind that he was also lead singer in our Tribute to Wolfy (vocals from the light operas of Mozart) we have decided to cancel rather than let the festivities go off at half-cock.

This has been a disappointment for the scores of actors and musicians who have been rehearsing round the clock for a range of festival events, but also for the local athletic and body-builders clubs. They volunteered their services as Ancient Greeks and Robin Hood’s Merry Men only for us to cancel the Battle of the Titans as a result of the local recreation ground being bought up by a national supermarket (whose name I can’t mention at the moment pending a legal enquiry).

As my wife Betty said – she is studying hard for an Open University degree –
finding time to catch up her on studies is poor compensation for losing out on her chance to play opposite Don Quixote as the Fair Dulcy-Naya, a part she has really got her teeth in to.

We are not disheartened. I know the whole district of Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven is resolute in its determination to put our show back on the road once Lord Gilbert can turn his limp in to a leap following surgery (this of course being dependent on whether recent government cuts won’t extend his waiting time till the next millennium!).

Please reassure any of your readers who feel let down as a result of our festival postponement: their application for tickets will be kept on record; indeed for those who contacted me so promptly, via your good offices, there will be a number of complimentary tickets available for performances by the Under-Sevens Choir and the Garland of Poetry Evening performed by members of the Fernhaven Women’s Insitute, always memorable occasions.

Councillor Stokoe asked me to mention that while for the moment his mobility is restricted, he remains in excellent voice, promising a special solo-event singing a medley of areas from The Magic Flute and Cosy Fran Tootie. He will be accompanied on the piano by his good wife Beryl, though her own health has not been of the best lately.
Kindest regards,

Ned.

A real pity, Ned, but knowing the people of Derbyshire we at
Watsonworks feel confident that the festival will be back on course soon.
We had applied for tickets for the ELVIS RESURRECTED gig
under canvas and were on the waiting list. Keep in touch.

***********************************************************

PREVIOUS Blog topics:

Politics and Fiction (Blog 17)
Fiction and History (Blog 16)
Aspects of Storytelling
Triggers (7)
Props propel (8)
Frames, Codes & Character (9)
Fiction & News (10)
Tale Power (11)


Thanks for reading Blog 23. Watsonworksblog
will be taking a summer break. Back in the Autumn
with more in the ENCOUNTERS series.
JIM.

**************

GIRL MEETS GIRL in a world of snow...

Watsonworksblog

No. 22

Contents:
Girl Meets Girl

Edited extract from FAIR GAME

· Notes in Passing: A Class Act
· Letter from Ned Baslow: on a festival never to forget

Girl Meets Girl

Second in a series on ENCOUNTERS. This edited extract is taken from the opening chapters of FAIR GAME: THE STEPS OF ODESSA (Spire Publishing).

Introduction
Kyiv, capital of the Ukraine; a bleak winter’s night. Natasha, a talented soccer player, ambitious to play for her country, broods on the dangers to herself and her brother Lonya resulting from investigations into government corruption by their father, campaigning journalist Victor Kaltsov. When the SBU, Ukraine’s secret service, call at Victor’s flat, they find Natasha alone and take her hostage, driving her through heavy snow to a ‘safe’ house in the city outskirts.

…There’s a window open and Natasha can smell countryside – a wind that has travelled for hundreds of kilometres across the flatlands, upwards from the infinite Steppe, an ocean of grass crossed by countless rivers…

Snow is coming in through the car window. She feels its coldness on the sweat of the hood. Out there, what? – gentle forests, avenues of linden stretching through a thousand years of history, all of it, the glories and the tragedies, culminating in this: a hostage, hooded, a pistol in her ribs, innocent as snow, but then, in this world – Dad’s words – ‘It’s the innocent who suffer most’.

…Myk has turned off the road. The snow is so thick in the headlights that the Shogun slows to walking pace, then stops. ‘Okay, Comrade, bring her out.’

Sergei’s pistol is still jammed against her side. She’s grateful for the coat they let her have. The ouse seems a long way from where the Shogun has been parked. The wind hums through the trees on bohth sides of her. She guesses it’s a dasha, like Dad once rented, in the good old days when he wasn’t on the bad side of people.

‘Steps,’ warns Myk. Two wooden stairs lead on to a verandah already heaped up along its length with freezing snow. The dacha has no electricity. Myk lights two paraffin lamps. In the first of two rooms, there is a table, bunk beds against the side wall and a wood-burning stove in the corner. Natasha is marched by Sergei into the second room, empty except for a single bed. A small window is shuttered.

Natasha’s captors open the vodka. Myk falls asleep on his arms, but Sergei has other plans, and they involve the fair prisoner.

In the darkness she reaches for the bed. The thin mattress is covered only by a single blanket, and both are soaked with damp. Her legs are shaking. She sits, then lies on her side, her knees pulled up to her chin. Her teeth are chattering with the cold. She stands, moves to the door, listens.

Sergei is in two minds: take the oil lamp or leave it. He picks it up and the room sways with shadows, dizzy as his head. He decides against the lamp, replaces it on the table, fiddles for his torch, can’t find it, but does locate his flick-knife.

In search of a weapon to defend herself, Natasha has darted back to the bed. She stoops, then kneels, feeling the metal legs in the hope that one might be loose enough to remove.
Hopeless: she’d need a wrench to shift the nuts and bolts.

…It’s going to happen. If the idea is in his head, vodka in his stomach, then he’s not going to turn up this juicy chance. Me. Juicy – who’d ever have thought that? She is shaking, like before a big match, or just before taking a penalty. Jock, our lovely coach, calls me Cool Head. I’m not cool now; only maybe I’ve got to be…

Sergei hears nothing above his own nasal rasp. Natasha hears him swallow; and she also hears herself say, almost aloud, I’m no defender. Miss-time my tackles. Gave away a penalty last week. Jock said, ‘Forget it – attack, that’s what you’re born to do.’

Attack. Huh!

A key is thrust into the door, turned soundlessly. Sergei guesses she is asleep. She steps away from the door. Okay, Cool Head – prove it. Jock’s back: rehearse; think ahead what you’re going to do. The door is opening. It brings with it the faintest image of the snowstorm and the outline of Myk asleep and snoring.

Sergei pauses. He should have brought the lamp. He enters Natasha’s room, closes out what light there is as he eases the door to. He almost shuts it, but not quite. He steps forward, his boot scraping on the earth floor. He stops, breathless, sightless.

Natasha is an arm’s length away, to his right, her pulses drumming. She smells the vodka. She could trip him. She could kick him. She could even trample on his head. But there’ll be noise, so she hovers: that’s how the best goals are scored, by slipping silently, swiftly, unseen and unexpected through the defences.

Sergei passes her. He whispers ahead of his conquest. ‘Shush, kid, not a word, this is just between you and me.’

Now!

The door proves no friend. It betrays her with a loud squeak. But the vodka proves her ally: it catches in Sergei’s throat and he coughs, knows nothing of her departure. Natasha is through the door – speed she never needs to rehearse – and across the room.

For a moment her intention is to wake Myk, thinks the better of it, heads for the door of the dacha. Miracle! Neither of the guards thought to lock it.
In the same instant, Sergei discovers his juicy opportunity has taken flight. He yells out in frustration and fury – ‘Myk!’

Natasha is away into the storm, its own fury matching Sergei’s. The snow swirls and blinds. Her trainers sink in it past the ankles – moving ankles, striding ankles, ankles suddenly stuck in a drift, extricated, commanded to move – move! – to put distance between the dacha and the runaway…It’s cold, God it’s cold. The wind’s straight from Russia. It turns crystals into bullets. Need shelter, something till morning, till light.

Natasha struggles on through the snow till she reaches the outbuildings of a farm or large dacha. She has banged her knee in the dark, but the light from a distant window beckons her on.

Well, what are you waiting for? There’s the door – knock. Suddenly a dog barks. A man’s voice orders its silence, but the dog senses a stranger, becomes more excited.
Knock!
The door is so solid Natasha’s fist makes no impact and no sound. Yet inside they know someone is there. The voices are hushed. Natasha knocks harder. The door opens. Her first reaction is to note – they’ve got electricity, wonderful! An elderly man, shorter than she is, holds out in front of him a long-barrelled shotgun.

‘There’s only me. I was out running. Got stuck, and lost.’

The man lowers his weapon. He is joined at the door by a woman of his own age, and a third person, much younger, who does their talking for them.

‘Let her in, Uncle, and close the door, or we’ll freeze to death.’

The elderly man hesitates, suspicious, then nods her forward into blissful warmth. He steps back for his wife who exclaims, ‘Grief, the child’s covered in icicles. Put more logs on the fire, Vanya. Monika, help me brush her down. Hot water, that’s what she needs. Come, child, sit here.’

Normally Natasha would resent being called a child; but not at this moment. If a child gets spoilt like this, they can call her what they like. She grins at Monika as she brings a change of clothes from another room, then hands her a large towel.

Without waiting to be asked, she helps Natasha off with her shirt; offers dry jeans for soaked jeans and then busies herself towelling Natasha’s hair. ‘I’m Monika. This is my Aunt Sophia, and you were nearly shot by my Uncle Vanya.’
‘Uncle Vanya – like in Chekhov. My favourite. Other than Pushkin.’ It’s by way of introduction. ‘And my name is Natasha.’

Monika is fair, taller, a little older than Natasha; blue-eyed. She keeps towelling while Sophia has brought a dish of hot water. ‘Now warm those toes, my child.’
‘Some run,’ Monika observes. ‘This is the wilderness, you must have been training for a marathon.’ There is no suspicion in her voice, only good cheer, as though Natasha’s arrival has broken the monotony of a life in the outback. ‘You’ve hurt yourself.’

Monika has noticed Natasha’s cut knee and the bruise already swelling and turning blue. She dampens a cloth in tepid water, ties it gently round the knee. ‘Keep it on just for a bit.’
Natasha confesses, ‘This is too good to be true. I mean, your kindness.’

…She is invited to the scrubbed table, served hot broth – potatoes, beetroot, leak, flavoured with chervil, and home-made bread. The food warms her throat, her chest, and as she eats, they stare, too polite to ask questions, so she asks her own: ‘Do the trains go straight into town?’
‘Don’t say you jogged all the way from Kyiv?’ smiles Monika. ‘It’s twelve kilometres at least.’
‘Sport’s my thing. I play soccer. Jock, our trainer, says we should do thirty kilometres a week. At least.’
‘You look done in, Child,’ says Sophia. ‘A night’s rest is what you need.’
‘You’ll have my bed,’ says Monika, ‘I’ll sleep in here.’
Natasha is too exhausted to argue. She stands, tries her knee. It’s not so bad.
Monika takes her arm. ‘Lean on me.’

The bedroom is also a workshop, and Natasha gasps as Monika switches on the light. ‘Oh, amazing – pysankys!’ The broad table in the centre of the room is strewn with wooden eggs – pysankys – in various stages of completion, the finished ones painted with images of Christ, the Madonna, angels and saints, glowing with fresh colour.

There are carvings too, brightly painted, while on drying racks against two of the walls are jewel-bright icons. ‘You make these, Monika?’
‘Uncle and me. I’m sort of his apprentice. We make them in the winter, sell them in spring.’
Natasha examines two of the famous holy eggs of Ukraine, one of St Cyril with a golden halo, the other of a long-haired warrior carrying a broadsword.
‘I recognise St. Cyril, but who is this?’
‘Ryurik the Viking, the founder of Kyiv.’
‘He’s wonderful.’
‘He’s yours – if you want him.’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Something to remember us by. Your good luck talisman.’
‘Well, I could do with a change of fortune.’
‘I promise: Ryurik will look after you.’

Natasha is usually slow to take to people, but in Monika’s case it’s friendship, swift and warm and if her expression is anything to go by, reciprocated. She feels suddenly awkward and asks, awkwardly: ‘You make a living out of these, Monika?’

Monika nods. Her nervous smile seems to suggest she is also surprised at her feelings. ‘Well, almost a living. Business has picked up as more and more tourists arrive in the country, especially the Americans. They prefer the icons, though Vanya’s statues of St. George are a nice little earner too.’
‘And when you’re not making pysankys?’
‘I’m a tour guide. Foreign visitors, mainly. Americans in particular.’
‘So you know English?’
‘Enough to explain to our visitors which are the Men’s loos and which are the Women’s.’
‘I’m learning it too – from my trainer. He’s from Scotland. I play for the Kyiv Falcons, the cinderellas of women’s football, though all that’s going change at the international tournament in Zhytomyr’.
Natasha gazes down at her troubled knee, then grins, raises Ryurik into the light. ‘He’s already working his magic – the pain’s easing already!’
‘Tomorrow at first light we’ll ski to the station.’
‘You’ll have to keep picking me up.’
‘What are friends for?’
Friends, yes; it happens that way. How strange, thinks Natasha that in this moment of her fraught life she feels so happy.

CONTINUES…

Next in this series on ENCOUNTERS, ‘Dissident Girl Meets Dissident Poet’, selected from Ticket to Prague (Puffin).

*****************************

NOTES IN PASSING: A Class act
It’s curious how films set among the upper classes seem to have happy closure: they rarely relate to us now. They allow us, if that’s what we’re looking for, escape to a kind of neverland unaffected by the present; a social milieu almost entirety excluding the ‘lower classes’ apart from the servants. Yet with films set among the working class, like Brassed Off (directed and written by Mark Herman) and Made in Dagenham (directed by Nigel Cole, screenplay by Bill Ivory), though they deal with events that happened years ago, have a dramatically ongoing relevance.

Brassed Off, set in 1992, provides us with a moving and amusing story of the Thatcher years when the pits were shut and whole communities forced onto the dole. Made in Dagenham is set in 1968. The machinists at Ford’s Dagenham plant go on strike for equal pay with men. As with Brassed Off we learn about the lives of workers experiencing discrimination and exploitation. In Made in Dagenham the women machinists take strike action and in doing so challenge both the industrial and political establishment, eventually achieving legislation that benefited themselves and future generations.

Apart from a number of insignificant anachronisms (the Triumph Toledo was not introduced at Dagenham till two years after the women’s strike), Made in Dagenham says as much about contemporary British society – its prevailing inequalities – as it does about the events of 1968. We have an Equal Pay Act, but many women still suffer from pay differentials and an array of factors that impede progress towards equality and level playing fields not dissimilar to those experienced by Rita O’Grady, the leader of the Dagenham rebellion (superbly played by Sally Hawkins).

What gives these films both authenticity and relevance is that they are part of a historical continuity reaching back through the centuries – the eternal struggle by ordinary people against those in power and protecting their privileges. At Peterloo the working people poured on to the streets of Manchester in support of a principle; they were shot at and struck with sabres in order that the privileges of the hierarchical few might be preserved.

And so struggles continued, achieving a little and always at snails’ pace, through the struggle against Taxes On Knowledge, Chartism, the Suffragette movement, the General Strike of 1926 up to the London protests of only a few weeks ago. Both films articulate fundamentals of British, Us-and-Them society. Looked at from the present they remind us that progress towards equality in a fair and compassionate society is as likely to suffer retreat as advance and that some set-backs might be permanent.

The characters in Brassed Off or Made in Dagenham would readily recognise the social injustices, the outrageous inequalities of wealth and opportunity that prevail in 2011. They would identify with no great difficulty the ‘usual suspects’ defending and furthering their own interests while at the same time manning the discourses of justification and persuasion.

It is to be wondered whether we today have the courage, resolve and belief in collective action that so characterised the machinists of Dagenham, the Suffragettes, the Chartists, the radical press of the 19th century and innumerable left-of-centre pressure groups down the ages. Digital activism may be offering a spark of hope, though the Net will not further the cause of equality if it falls into corporate hands in ways similar to what happened to the mass media.

Whatever the arguments, if you have not yet seen Made in Dagenham or indeed Brassed Off, please sample them and be inspired.

**************************************

Correspondence
A letter from Ned Baslow

Dear Jim at Watsonworks
Me and my wife Betty were delighted that you printed my letter in your Blog about the sacred site at Dove Holes where we did much of our not-very-sacred courting in and around the Bull Ring.

I’m prompted to write again in my capacity as secretary of the local Panto and Light Opera Society to inform your many readers of the first international summer festival we’ve ever held in Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven. It’s going to be a real humdinger of an affair, I can assure you.
In particular I’d like to draw your readers’ attention to three events which will be a sell-out long before August when it’s all going to be happening.

First, there’s our musical spectacular on the Adventures of Donal Quixote, sponsored by Spexsavers and starring our local big-whig Mr. Gilbert Stokoe MBE whom we affectionately refer to as Lord Gilbert on account of his many financial as well as cultural interests in the region. I personally will be playing the role of Sancho Panzer.

Additionally, we shall be drawing the crowds with an Epic Battle of the Greats, setting the Ancient Greeks against our very own Robin of Sherwood and His Merry Men (all of whom in actual fact originated either from Yorkshire or Derbyshire – Robin Hood, that is, not the Ancient Greeks).

On a more leisurely and fashionable note we are presenting a Tableau of Womanly Beauty that will feature some of history’s most memorable lovelies, from Helen of Troy to Tarzan’s Jane, Ladies Macbeth (whose good looks have been underestimated) and Godiva, Audrey Helpburn, Marilyn Monroe, the late Elizabeth Taylor (played by Lord Gilbert’s daughter Melissa) and Miss Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven 2011 in her own right. The beauties will be accoutred by some of the finest designs by BTEC students at the local further education college and the Wickerstaff Ladies Sewing Circle.

Other highlights will be the Ballet of the Nymphs presented by the Bernadette Stokoe School of Dancing, a concert by the Julian Stokoe Jazz Quintet (made up entirely of the Stokoe family, by the way), a Sing-along-with Elvis (by a very talented look-alike artists from West Hartlepool) and a Grand Knees Up on the final Saturday night to the music of the Belper and Heige Brass Ensemble.

I’m confident this programme will whet the appetite of your readers and it is very kind of you to agree to take the names of those who wish to purchase tickets in advance. Equally my wife Betty, who is in charge of ticketing (despite having her work cut out doing her Open University degree), is delighted you are willing to carry further news of our grand summer enterprise. In short, my message to everyone is – watch this space!

Confidentially yours,
Ned Baslow.

Thanks, Ned. Always glad to give backing to worthy causes.


Contributions please to:Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com

BOY MEETS GIRL...in Medieval Florence

Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com
No. 21


Boy meets Girl
An extract from a new story

Besieged: The Coils of The Viper

Introduction

The mercenary armies of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, called The Viper, have brought terror to Italy. Cities such as Siena, Perugia and Bologna, have either been overcome in battle or been terrified into submission.

Florence alone stands out against him. In the burning hot summer of 1402, the Viper has laid siege to the city, his intention to starve the citizens until they are too weak to resist.

In the refectory of the priory of the Dominican brothers, the Master, one of Florence’s most distinguished artists, and Luca, his teenage apprentice, see no choice but to continue with the great fresco that the Master has been commissioned to paint. They know that once Visconti’s savage mercenaries breach the city walls few citizens will survive the brutality that has become the Viper’s trademark.

While escaping the heat of the August sun and sketching the masterpieces of Giotto in the gaunt but magnificent Santa Croce basilica, Luca has become aware of the girl in a brown robe, hovering in shadow as if compelled to look over his shoulder at what his skilful hand commits to the page. Will one of them pluck up the courage to speak?

The Girl in the Brown Robe
Selected from Chapter 3 and edited

…I’ve been sketching the figure of St. John the Evangelist and the petitioners kneeling around him. Usually, after I’ve been here in Santa Croce for a while, I’m recognised by one of the lay brothers. He pinched my cheek once, and I only smiled and shook my head. Since then he seems to haunt the chapel, and when he sees me he brings out a stool for me to sit on.
He pats my shoulder and leaves me to my sketching.

It looks as though the girl isn’t going to turn up. She’s become almost as regular a visitor as I am; about my age, curiously dressed – a brown woollen robe, complete with hood but cut short at the calf. I guess she bought or stole it from a mendicant friar, took if off his corpse or traded it for services rendered.

It’s that kind of world; everything is possible, and blame is as stupid as it can be unjust.
She usually wears rope sandals but at other times she appears out of the shadows barefoot. That’s how I think of her – a mystery; a sort of spirit. I never see her arrive, never see her depart. Yet I’ve decided her eyes are too bright for them to belong to a ghost. Her skin, though fresh, has the hue of dark leather; and there is the hint of a limp, making her rock slightly from side to side as she walks.

Hers is as beautiful a face as I’m likely to see in these blighted days, for the respectable daughters of Florence are kept indoors, unless they’re in service to the rich and need to chance the city streets to fetch and carry, or if their business is in the tanneries or the woolsheds along the Arno…

Today I promised myself I’d speak to her at last. All it needs is a word, a question, a smile. It’d be worth it merely to have her smile back, for so far she’s been as solemn as one of the angels my Master complains about in Santa Maria Maggiore; ‘joyless,’ he calls them.

I shouldn’t feel so disappointed that she’s not turned up. Only a fool gets his hopes up in these horrible times. My hand seems to lose its motivation to draw, and I realise the only reason I keep coming, poring over the Evangelist’s resurrection of Drusiana, over his Ascension or the Death of St. Francis, is to see her.

I realise I’m talking to myself and this is at the same moment that I sense her presence. She is close enough to see the page of my open sketchbook. I’ve been scribbling devils. She glances up at the fresco where there are no devils, and the drumming of my heart tells me she is about to break our silence.

Pointing up to Maestro Giotto’s fresco, she says, ‘Scusami, excuse me, but is that what you see?’

I amaze myself with my nerve: ‘I was thinking you wouldn’t come.’

The comment startles both of us. We evade each other’s embarrassment by staring up at the flowing robes of Giotto’s figures.

She seems to be pleased at my frankness. ‘You noticed?...I’m surprised, for you seem to concentrate so hard.’ I’m struggling to keep up with her, say the right words that won’t put her off; but she doesn’t need any help. ‘May I look?’

She almost brushes my shoulder as I turn the pages of my sketchbook. I say, ‘All very quick…Just, sort of, ideas on paper.’
‘Why do you like Giotto so much – because you sketch only his figures, don’t you?’
‘Because…well, they have volume, roundness. They’re solid – real.’
‘As if they’re about to step from the painting – alive?’
‘Yes, that’s it, exactly.’
I am pleased. Her interest is welcome, her perceptiveness obvious. ‘You see, so many paintings are just like the old mosaics – everything flat.’ I hear myself going on a bit, but I can’t rein in my enthusiasm. ‘They’ve no space, no perspective. They shut you out instead of drawing you in.’
‘Is that the secret – perspective?’
‘My friend Filippo swears it is. Perspective, he says, is the key to great art. Without it, we are left with pure decoration.’
‘Does it mean the same as having a perspective on life?’
I decide she’s half-teasing me, but I’m grateful for that half-smile and look forward to receiving a whole one. ‘That’s a bit more complicated,’ I manage to say. I return to my latest sketch.
‘That devil could be Gian Galeazzo the Viper, could it not?’
I nod. My pencil shifts to a space on the page and I begin to draw a coiled serpent – Gian Galeazzo’s emblem. There are seven coils narrowing to a pointed tail. Trapped in the final coil is a tiny human figure, struggling in terror. ‘That could be the people of Florence,’ I say, ‘in a few days’ time.’
‘You are very talented.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I suppose everyone tells you that.’
‘They did, once. But there’re no “everyones” any more.’
‘Are you an apprentice?’
‘For my sins.’
She blesses me with a full smile. ‘You look too innocent to be a sinner.’

They are clearing the church, locking up. The great works of Maestro Giotto have faded into shadow. I stand. She is tall, my height if not a shade taller. She is thinner than I remember her; yet close up, her face is truly beautiful, full of character (as the Maestro often describes his madonnas and his saints – ‘depth of character, that’s what counts, in art as in life’).
‘My guess,’ I say, determined to hold on to her company for as long as possible, ‘is you’re not from these parts, neither Florentine nor Tuscan.’
‘You can tell by my accent?’
We are outside in the piazza. Normally it would be crowded, but we are almost alone. The heat is as intense as it’s been since early morning, but now the atmosphere is clammy. ‘You’re from the north, I think.’
‘From Lombardy. Remember the Bianchi? I was one of them. When we marched here, Florence gave us the kind of welcome that made us want to stay.’
I laugh, remembering something the Master had said: ‘My Master approved of the Bianchi, and the city loved them, he says, because they paid their bills!’
‘True, but our cause – universal peace, that was what Florence welcomed.’
‘Peace, my Master says, is good for trade, and trade is Florence’s first religion.’
She takes the comment in good part. ‘Be a cynic, if you wish. But it was much more than that. There was a yearning among the people, for an end to wars and bloodshed. We felt it then and still do.’
…
We’ve strolled down to the river. There’s scarcely a dribble of water. A pale golden light still lingers on the façade of San Miniato high above us. The avenues of pine and cypress are deepening from green to black tinged with the last flashes of crimson along the horizon…
. ‘My name’s Luca, by the way.’
‘Caterina – come sta, how are you?’
‘Sto bene, grazie, I’m fine, thank you!’
We talk about Florence. ‘You are very proud of the city, aren’t you, Luca?’
‘And sometimes I’m ashamed of it. At its best, I love it. It was once beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful city on earth.’
‘Are you forgetting Venice?’
‘Never been, but the Master jokes about his visit there – “Too much water!” he said.’
Her face lights up every time she smiles. ‘Especially if you’re not looking where you’re going. I went there once. It does pong a bit. But as for Florence, it’s what the city stands for, isn’t it, which makes you Florentines proud?’…

Caterina puts her hand on my arm, shakes it gently with what I can only guess is affection. ‘I see Florence being truly great once more.’
I cannot believe it, but we are holding hands. ‘You seem very confident in the future,’ I say. ‘What are you – a fortune teller?’
She stares down at the riverbed where a child in rags is trying to scoop up water in a brass pot. ‘Perhaps I am…something like that. Or just an optimist.’ She glances again at the river. ‘The Arno looks as if it is dying, doesn’t it? But come the spring, everything will be different. The seasons bring hope.’..
I’m not so easily shifted from my dark mood. ‘Yes, and sometimes the floods wash away bridges. Nobody’s safe.’
For a moment we both sense that the floodtide is in ourselves, one of sadness and bereavement. Our fingers slip reluctantly apart. Defeat is in my voice: ‘It’s so difficult to hold on to hope when everything seems stacked against us.’
I guess that she is as loath to depart as I am. Her gaze meets mine, lingers… and I sense that if I had put my arms around her and hugged her she would match the strength of my feelings.
She is now holding out her hand towards me, formally, almost stiffly. ‘Till next time, perhaps.’ We shake hands. It is almost comical when really I would like to hold her and kiss her.
Her smile closes this, the happiest hour of my life. ‘Things to do.’ She turns, strides away, limping a little from the hip.
I call after her. ‘I would like to sketch you.’
She stops, faces me. The last light of the evening adds a splash of scarlet to her face and hair. ‘One sitting will cost you ten soldi.’
‘Can I pay you when I’m famous?’
‘A gold florin if I have to wait that long!’
I call after her one last time. ‘You didn’t say where you live.’
This time she does not look back. ‘No I didn’t.’ She heads towards the Ponte Vecchio leaving me suddenly empty, struck by melancholy as if I’d lost something precious that I might never recover.


NEXT: Girl Meets Girl
From Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa.

****

A good read...

Anna Perera’s first novel took us into the horrific heart of Guantanamo. The detail was so well-worked, so convincing that it was difficult for the reader to believe that the author had not somehow undergone the experience of incarceration and torture herself.

In Anna’s new novel, The Glass Collector (Penguin), we get the same sense of sometimes overwhelming authenticity as in Guantanamo Boy. In both cases we are introduced to a scarcely imaginable world. Teenager Aaron, his family, his friends, his neighbours are Zabaleen Christians scratching out a desperate living in one of the poorest quarters of Cairo.

We gag at the stink. Nothing, anywhere, could be worse, more hazardous; yet Anna’s characters shine out of the ordure of rubbish collection just as do the fragments of glass, the coloured bottles which Aaron gathers and sometimes cherishes.

The Glass Collector punches hard and relentlessly. It deals with the isolation of a neglected community which nevertheless holds together and has a vital function in the greater order of Cairo life. At the same time, it is brave. What is striking among the young people Anna describes, and whose lives she portrays compassionately but with steely objectivity, is their lack of aspiration, the unwillingness to seriously contemplate escape.

True, an artist working on the local church gives Aaron a leg up when things are really down for the young thief, but once things are on an even keel, once his love for Rachel is reciprocated he does not aspire to be an artist, perceive that as a way out of his predicament; rather he returns happily it would seem, to the harsh but strangely rewarding reality of collecting a city’s discarded glass.

We can read here a lesson in belonging, that to be part of a community for all its often traumatising customs and pressures, is sometimes more powerful than western-style individualism and personal ambition. What we have here in Anna Perera’s excellent novel is an antidote to the prevalent values of our times. The life world she creates is impossible actually to desire, but somehow impossible not to admire.

***

As ever, contributions and correspondence are welcome, at http://Watsonworks@hotmail.co.uk

WATSONWORKS Blog 20

The Bull Ring, Derbyshire See Correspondence

Watsonworks Blog 20


Every story is a journey,

every journey an exploration

Stories operate across time and distance; they are exterior and interior explorations. As readers, we take a journey in the hope of resolution, and on the way it’s possible that things happen to us. In the best stories we enter in to the action through our own imagination and the alchemy of the writer. We seek escape, change, pastures new; and often having relished these pastures we return for more.

For the author the terrain that has been covered and re-covered by other writers resembles Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. On the face of it exhaustively worked, minutely excavated, the treasures seemingly dug up and carried away leaving bare patches of earth, there is the risk of accepting that the only new story is Journey’s End.

Bearings
Inspired by the likes of archeologist Howard Carter who persisted in his searches in the Valley of the Kings against learned advice, and came upon Tutankhamen, the dedicated writer spades away until some talisman, however small, however insignificant turns up.

The search itself is a journey and this is aided by tools of the trade – curiosity, alert interest and attention, observations noted and stored, connecting up elements which may have strewn the creative path, unused, scarcely noticed, for years.

So part of the choice of journey has something to do with the market, but chiefly it is about the journeys an author would like to make or has already made, in fact or imagination. It goes back to childhood: what at that time were the journeys at first read out by parents, teachers, uncles and aunts doing the babysitting.

Competition for attention
It depends, of course, on the availability of stories, those books with such magical illustrations that the images haunt the memory for a lifetime; if, that is, the opportunity is there, and the motivation to read and look.

For every writer-in-the-making reading comes first, then comes emulation or even straight copying. In my case I was soon jungle-bound inspired by Ryder Haggard or manning the battlements of Malta in face of the invading Turkoman to a point when reading and writing were almost the same activity.

History as well as myth and legend was stirring the creative genes, and the more this took me away from home base (and British winters) the better. The pen became my Cook’s tour, carrying me on an adventurous journey from London to Renaissance Florence (in Sign of the Swallow), landing me on Crete, isle of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur (The Bull Leapers) or guiding me along the amazing Silk Road to China (Legion of the White Tiger); in fact, anywhere but chez nous.

Not safe for tourists
But there’s more to travel than tourism. The story is where the action is. Tourists may be suddenly caught in dramatic events not of their own making, but they’ve not come on holiday to suffer bricks and bullets. The writer of stories – of adventures – does. Drama and conflict attract the storyteller. It could readily be said that this is pure escapism in that writers in their studies may create chaos and mayhem but at the end of the afternoon there’s still tea and a quiet kip in the sun.

That does not make the process risk free. If, in the action there are messages; if these messages illustrate values, then for writers in a dozen or a hundred countries there are those dedicated to curtailing freedom of expression. Along the route of the journey values lie like stepping stones, sometimes (and often preferably) hidden.

Even if their existence is denied by the author, they continue to configure who the writer is and what he or she ultimately stands for. The clues may be miniscule and fragmentary, but they are still present and in a constant state of activation.

A world evoked
Each sortie into a journey reaches for an authenticity beyond plain fact. At a basic level the process is one of description, what the terrain looks like, feels like, but it soon becomes one of evocation. The sketch has filled in the outlines. Imagination takes up the baton and slowly the evoked world is transformed into a new reality where fact merges into legend; a world possessing its own dynamic.

Journeys take us into the unknown but once there they can become more real to us than our everyday experience. They are dramatically heightened, often scarily so, drawing us in, enfolding us in visions and emotions that frighten us but embolden us to progress, to traverse the minefield of coming events.

No better example of journeying from the real to a fantasy of overwhelming power is Philip Pullman’s masterly His Dark Materials trilogy, not only creating a world beyond the real, but two worlds living side by side. Lyra’s journey to the Arctic is both real and a dream, terrifying yet shot through with examples of memorable humanity, even if far from all the characters are human.

Pullman captures the essence of travel as revelation and discovery in the final words of Northern Lights, the first book of the trilogy: ‘So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked towards the sun, and walked into the sky’.

Being there
Years ago I was interviewed on radio about Talking in Whispers set in Chile during the tyranny of the generals. When I said I had not actually been to the country, the interviewer couldn’t keep out of her voice a sense of disapproval. A little while later, an exile from Chile said after reading the book that it was an accurate portrayal and that she could hardly believe that I had not actually walked the avenues of Santiago.

My response was that imagining things and places is what authorship is all about: you try, you try harder until you hope you get it right. In my BBC interview perhaps I ought to have pointed out that I had not fought in the Spanish Civil War (The Freedom Tree) or been ambushed in the jungles of West Africa (No Surrender).

Also, I doubt whether Philip Pullman has spent much time at the North Pole; nor, I guess, did Michael Morpurgo personally experience the horrors of the 1st World War trenches. He researched and acknowledged the help of Piet Chielens of the In Flanders Museum in Ypres. The proof of the pudding is in the reading.

No place like…
Of course literary travel does not require leaving home shores. What’s home-located gives the opportunity to journey into one’s own life and experience, not the least into one’s own language. The landscape in which stories are set is either entirely personal or more personal. The past may be ‘another country’ but it is one that influences and abuts the living present.

The hills of Lancashire, the Victoria Tower on the highest point above my home town, have featured in a number of my novels and plays; but the literary landscape is a fusion of future areas of habitation, Teesside and the North York moors, and the Derbyshire dales and peaks.

Where Nobody Sees is an amalgam of these but the story is an invention and the characters constructed out of fragments of friendship, acquaintance or simply observation and overhearing. Two young people happen upon the illegal dumping of nuclear waste. They are shaped out of the writing process, growing out of the necessities of narrative but then, hopefully, existing in their own right.

Path hazardous in places
Today perhaps more than ever before authors have to accept the fact that the competition for their wares is immense, that the outlets for their books are narrowing, that the small, attentive publishers of the past, who took the time to nurture talent, have been swallowed up by conglomerates with eyes fixed on what will sell, and sell quickly; all this in a context of cutbacks across the board in education, library closures and bookshops struggling to survive in the network society.

Good book, won’t sell is a familiar mantra. It’s a choice: tailor your work for the market (and possibly become rich) or follow your instinct. In my case, if I’d chosen the former path I’d never have set stories in Chile, East Timor (Justice of the Dagger) or Ukraine (Fair Game: The Steps of Odessa), and I’d certainly not have spent a year developing a tale set in medieval Florence, riddled by the plague and with the armies of Gian Galeazzo Visconti at the gate (Besieged: The Coils of the Viper).

Why such apparently unpromising (and practically unsaleable) choices? Well, as they say, it seemed a good idea at the time. I’m happy: I travelled, explored, discovered and the words on the page, I like to think, spoke the best of myself.

Further reading on Aspects of Writing:

Triggers & Props [Blog 7, 7 January 2010]
Props propel [Blog 8, 15 February]
Frames, codes & character [Blog 9, 15 March]
Fiction and news [Blog 10, 14 April]
Tale Power [Blog 11, 14 October]
Fiction & history [Blog 16, 14 October]
Politics in teen fiction [Blog 17, 17 November]
Storytelling: the pleasures of research [Blog 19, 12 January 2011]

An edited composite of these is planned for posting on Scribd.com
open book site.


Correspondence…
* Jacqueline Christodoulou writes with reference to Blog 19’s piece on Storytelling: the pleasures of research…
"Very interesting blog post. There is a growing interest in visualisation being as good as 'being there' - or is it just filling in schema and, if so, would this be termed as fantasy writing as opposed to fiction writing re the scope of imagination involved? Hmm... On with the research."

* email from a friend: As I'm writing this, news has just come in of Mubarak's resignation. I stopped to take a look at TV showing the crowds in Liberation Square and I must confess that tears came to my eyes. A drop of hope in a seemingly brain-dead world.

* Mr. Ned Baslow writes to Watsonworksblog.blogspot.com about The Bull Ring, Derbyshire.

Dear Jim (may I?)
My wife Betty and I were very pleased to happen on your article about the megalithic sites of the Bull Ring and Arbor Low (in your Blog 15), and you’re absolutely right about the Bull Ring still being the centre of local activities. Betty and me did some of our courting there and any night after dusk you can expect to find the whole site, as it were, under occupation.

The tree in the centre of the site was actually planted from a cutting by my Grandad Barney. It was his intention to propose to my Gran under its leafy shade, only she missed the bus from Macclesfield. However, they made up for the disappointment with a fish and chip supper at Abbot’s Friary in Ambergate.

What’s very true in your comments is the feeling one gets of past generations still haunting the site, though my Benjie (fourteen next month) says his teacher told him there was a lot of human sacrifice going on, especially at Arbor Low – which explains the stones that lie all over the place just waiting for bodies to be laid out on them. ‘People were tied down and cut up,’ says Benjie.

Of course, as my Betty says – she is at present doing an Open University degree and thus knows about these things – this is nonsense, for the stones quite plainly were once upstanding and used as landmarks for weary travellers.

Benjie’s teacher is from Yorkshire, which explains things. Us Derbyshire folk know our history. Incidentally, my cousin Colin was in charge of Bonfire Night fireworks at The Bull Ring for many years – best night of the year he used to say. There was a bit of an accident last year when one of those super rockets, called Jupiters, I think, set fire to the local cricket pavilion, though nothing was damaged except some musty pads, stumping gloves and back copies of Wisden from 1958.

Betty and me enjoyed reading your poem 'Continuities' about these wonderful old sites, though Betty considered it on the long side, believing that anything longer than a sonnet makes her yawn. She quotes her OU tutor who believes there’s nothing in this world that can’t be expressed in a haiku.

Anyway, thanks again for reminding us of our courting days up at Dove Holes. It’s amazing to think just how many hundreds of generations snatched a bit of intimacy on those hallowed slopes.

With greetings from Wickerstaff-cum-Fernhaven (which also has a small megalithic site called Witches Rendezvous).

Yours etc.
Ned R.Baslow & family

Ed: Thanks, Ned, keep up the correspondence. Apparently those copies of Wisden would fetch a fortune these days.

RECENT BLOGS…
Blog 18
14 December 2010
HISTORY’S BACK IN TOWN!
Takes up the theme discussed by historians such as Simon Shama on the vital importance to community understanding and identity of the study of history, and poses the question – which key events in history should young people know about?
PLUS reviews of two novels by Barbara Kingsolver by Tony Willams.

Blog 17
17 November 2010
POLITICS IN TEEN FICTION
Part 2 of the adapted article from The Best of Books for Keeps. Under Correspondence, an email letter from Anna Perera and a photo of a model made in a school to celebrate her Scottish literary prize.



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THANKS FOR READING THIS!
JIM.

STORYTELLING: THE PLEASURES OF RESEARCH

Watsonworksblog 19

In this issue:
* RESEARCHING STORIES: THE PLEASURES OF FINDING OUT

* A LETTER FROM AMERICA

****

Years ago during a school visit I was asked, Can you write about what you’ve not experienced? The question had been asked to another writer who had given a talk the previous week. She had replied firmly, No, you can only truly write about what you are and what has happened to you. Theoretically this would mean that after exhausting biography writers would be advised to take up some other occupation; that, or (good advice, of course) get out there in the world and experience some more.

My own response was in part coloured by the fact that I was also a teacher and an academic; in both instances treasuring the value of other people’s experiences, knowledge and wisdom. Further, as an academic working in the field of cultural and media study, and as a former journalist, I belong to the ‘constructivist school’, meaning that all stories, all texts, are constructs – made-up things based upon the accumulation of events, experience and perceptions, shaped by particular purposes.

News stories are constructs (if not fabrications) in which information is gathered and shaped according to specific expectations. A key process is selection, as relevant for the novelist as for the journalist or the academic writer; and the guiding principle is the same or similar: what you don’t know, you find out.

Something to work on
What the writer needs above all is imagination; but imagination needs kick-starting in order to function. It needs something to work on. Of course if what you are writing about is what you have personally experienced imagination will still want to be on the field of play rather than waiting on the bench. For those preparing to let loose imagination on material which is not drawn from actual personal experience, then the essential helper (in the author narrative) is research.

Just as the reader samples many books for diverse experience so writers scavenge the world of their own and others’ experience; indeed emulating the jackdaw attracted to what glitters and hoarding what it gathers. Writers await the moment when such jewels of experience become, to use a horrid word, ‘marketable’.

Surveillance and substance
The writer, like the artist, watches the world, listens to its big speeches or its trivial chatter; and records. That is the instinctive and unpredictable part of the process, but so far insufficient in itself to drive things on. A vague idea floats about somewhere in the half-conscious. If one is alert, on the look-out, it will connect with other floaters. A story, too early even to be repeated to another mortal soul, begins to tug at the mind, cause a tremor in the fingers.

Time to go out and gather substance. Writer becomes reader with increasingly specific objectives. Yet life-out-of-books is only a start. To cut to the quick, what is both invaluable and often exciting is seeking out and talking to people who have ‘been there’, done it, seen it, felt it, survived it.

The lives of others
The writer borrows real-life evidence from others. In preparing my Spanish Civil War novel The Freedom Tree I put an ad in a national newspaper inviting former veterans of the war to get in touch if they had a mind to talk about their experiences.

The result was research which carried me beyond what books, however comprehensive, could provide. What I learnt in a number of interviews with old British Brigaders was unique to their experience and their vision of that experience.

A simple anecdote, an observation, a way of describing something, became a gem to weave into the author-invented fabric, lending it a sense of authenticity. The patent, as it were, belonged to the speakers recalling (with quite amazing vividness) what had happened to them so long ago; the literary result rested with the skill of the author: a fitting partnership.

Sometimes peripheral, sometimes central
Occasionally a source offers more than vital though peripheral detail. An article in Index on Censorship magazine led me to visit Frances Meacham, a retired nurse in Clacton-on-Sea. She had a wonderful true story of how she had rescued a Czech poet from oblivion.

Ivan Blatny had escaped the wilderness of Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia only to plunge into a wilderness of his own during a rarely-permitted cultural visit to Britain. He chose asylum, was vilified in his own country and ended up a patient in a mental hospital.

The poet became a mute, most of his waking life staring at a blank TV screen – until, that is, Frances heard about his plight and began to visit him.

Slowly she built up trust with Blatny. He began to communicate again, to write again. My novel Ticket to Prague is about Ivan, and it retells Frances Meacham’s resurrection of the poet, only with one major difference: in the book Frances is replaced by Amy Douglas, a teenager almost isolated and troubled in her own life as Blatny, renamed Josef.

It is a story about how friendship between young and old can be mutually beneficial and enriching. A courtcase against her results in Amy being sentenced to a period of social service. She encounters Josef, gaze fixed on his lifeless TV screen.

First base
Like Frances Meacham, Amy turns to books as the medicine for recovery. She reads to Josef and life and meaning return. My correspondence with Frances, and my visit to her in Clacton, enjoying lunch as well as her memories of Ivan, proved precious hours. Of course, that was only the beginning. What I had to do next was take Josef and Amy back to Prague which, at the time of writing, was itself returning to independent life as the Velvet Revolution got under way.

The long trail of research began once more on Charles Bridge crossing the Vltava. There was the smell of roasting chestnuts, the music of strolling players and somewhere at the back of the mind the memory of a simple commemorative plaque on the wall of a small family hotel in Clacton, this recording: IVAN BLATNY FAMOUS CZECHOSLOVAKIAN POET.

Sadly Ivan never got to return home to the plaudits of his liberated people; but Josef did!

Research made Ticket to Prague possible, but I think that what drove the story in to existence was that corny old phenomenon, empathy, the feeling of growing and deepening sympathy and one-ness with the characters and their situation; to the point where the writer is actually living the lives he or she is creating, day by day, month by month.

Synergy
In this sense, the question asked in school – Can you write about things that have not happened to you? may be more Yes n’ No than one or the other. Unless you can live the life of your characters things can go wrong; but there’s no doubt that the required empathy can always do with an ample helping of research. The one seeks out and directs the other, which in turn provides material for shaping, structuring, livening. In short, research serves to prompt and sharpen mind and imagination.

The only danger is that it could prove a comfort zone where the gathering impedes the creating. What is more likely is that impatience to get writing kicks in before research is complete. It happens with me; a fact I celebrate, because I know from experience that once the story is out of the trap, everything else follows in its wake. Where it doesn’t, there’s time to catch up in the second, third or umpteenth draft.

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Related blogs:
Teen Readers: Politics and fiction (Blog 17, Nov. 2010); Fiction and History (Blog 16, Oct 2010); Tale Power (Blog 11, May 2010); Fiction and News (Blog 10, April 2010); Frames, Codes and Character (Blog 9, March 2010); Props in Storytelling (Blog 8, Feb. 2010); Triggers in Storytelling (Blog 7, Jan.2010). An edited version of these under the provisional title Aspects of Storytelling will be posted on Scribd.com in the spring (2011).

LETTER FROM AMERICA

K.G. Melling is an Englishman living in the States whose working life was largely spent in Europe. Below, he offers a view of his adopted country, prompted by the notion expressed on both sides of the Atlantic, that ‘we are all in it together’.

Your comment in Blog 17, "Con-Dems Cuts Coalition would have us believe we’re all in it together" got my attention. It's the same in the US. This is what our politicians want us to believe, when in fact we are not. From my perspective, it's a question of the haves and have nots. The UK and the US are in deep debt and we have just experienced the worst economic crisis in decades. In a nutshell, this was caused by greed and lack of financial market regulation.

Seriously in debt
The US is probably the most capitalistic country on the planet and has serious fiscal problems, not least of which is an enormous deficit. This is a problem in the UK and other countries in Europe and elsewhere. A couple of examples of national debt expressed as a percentage of GDP: UK 10.5%, US 9.5%, France 7.5%, Germany 7.5% on the one hand and Switzerland +2% (no debt!) on the other. Note: the US has a population 5 times greater than the UK with a GDP 7 times greater.

There are many reasons for the above situation in the US, including overspending (governmental and private), lopsided trade agreements, wars, no insight to dubious financial dealings, a decline by design of the middle class over the last 10 years, party politics, and self-serving senators and congressmen.

Middling fortunes
Already during the last decade the middle class, the backbone of the nation, has been decimated. The decline continues. This is the section of the population that is/was mostly in manufacturing industries, significantly contributing to national economic strength and growth. It is this largest sector of the population that suffers most, loses the most and will pay the most when austerity measures bite.

During the last decade, the US has lost 10 million manufacturing jobs and middle class family income has been reduced by 5%. Today, 27% of families are classed as poor (gross income below $22,000). In North Carolina (my own state of some 6 million people) two major industries, textiles and furniture manufacturing, have been devastated. Since 2006, when housing prices were at a peak, average value (based on 72 million homes) has dropped dramatically –a shattering blow to homeowners' equity.

We have 15 million unemployed (official figure 9.8%) and this jumps to 25 million when we add those who have temporarily ceased to look for work. Untold millions are either on short time, or have taken low paying jobs. Forecasts for 2011 suggest 8 to 9% unemployment.

Party bickering
This great country is in decline with little hope of an early recovery. The political scene is a disaster with little expectation of a change for the better. For years our political representatives fight and bicker across the aisle, vote party lines and pass little legislation. A Supreme Court ruling earlier this year allows companies and interest groups to make anonymous and unlimited political contributions to whom they please. Obviously these contributions are used to influence the electorate. The recent mid-term election saw some $3 billion spent by political action groups and others to influence the election outcome.

Targeting the floating voters
There is a large section of the electorate designated as independents. They are not members of either party. This group can be considered as a swing vote and the target for these activities. So-called lobbyists "lobby" congressional members on behalf of companies, associations, large interest groups and others to gain support for their clients. At least to a European, all this doesn't feel right. Is this really government by the people for the people in the sense the phrase was coined so many years ago?

Democrats currently have a majority in the House of Representatives, but not the absolute majority in the Senate (100 members). The house votes on a straight majority. In the Senate there is a procedure requiring a majority of 60 votes in order to pass legislation.

Compromise
As a result of the mid-term election in November 2010, the Republicans will have gained a sound majority in the House and in the Senate the Democrats will have 5 fewer seats (53); no absolute majority.

This is the situation as Congress reconvenes in 2011. The United States of America was created as a result of compromise between the representatives of the 13 original colonies, when they wrote the constitution. We surely need that spirit now.

Not much if any of the above helps the poor and middle class. But there is a glimmer of hope. Both the Senate and the House of Representatives could not produce acceptable legislation to extend the so-called "Bush tax cuts". These were substantial cuts in income tax across the board, valid until end 2010. The estate tax had also been suspended, and this was also up to the end 2010. There was utter deadlock between the two parties, resulting in a compromise: in exchange for Republican concessions President agreed to a two-year extension – still including the rich with an income in excess of $250,000 p.a.(against his party's line and his own conviction).

The inheritance tax will be reintroduced in 2011 at 35% above $5 million, replacing the original inheritance tax of 55% above $1 million. The 6.2% Social Security tax (paid by employees) will be reduced to 4.2% for 2011, $1000 p.a. for an average family. Federal unemployment benefits will be extended by 13 months (a further 2 million unemployed were to lose their benefits).

Modest presidential achievement
Also included are a maintaining of the dependent allowance of $1000 p.a. and tax breaks for parents with children studying at university. Also extended are refunds to householders for installing energy efficient appliances and other related items. Grants to companies involved in renewable energy research and development will receive financial assistance.

In all, the bill signed by the President, will cost $858 billion, none of which is financially secured (adding to the deficit). The US approach is to get the economy growing strongly prior to introducing austerity measures aimed at reducing the deficit, and there is political consensus for this policy. A bipartisan 18 member "Deficit Committee", appointed by the President, recently made its recommendations known. This report, with sweeping spending cuts, will most likely be one of the guidelines for future debate.

All in all President Obama got approaching 90% of what he wanted and the Republicans got what they wanted. However, some members on both sides of the Senate and House voted against the bill for various reasons. Voting in the Senate was 81 for and 19 against, and in the House 234 for and 188 against, a vote to be regarded as one for the country and the people, especially the middle class and the poor.

Hope for 2011
Compromise at last. But will it last? In 1994 President Bill Clinton was in exactly in the same situation regarding the composition of Congress. It turned out to be a successful tenure, with legislation being enacted on the basis of compromise between the President and the Republicans. And at the end of his term as President, he left a balanced budget in place. There is a chance for President Obama and thus the entire country, but don't hold your breath.

Thanks, Ken!

Correspondence…

Hello Jim,
I don't usually respond to your blog, but I agree on the importance of history, and am a Barbara Kingsolver enthusiast [See Tony Williams' review in Blog 18]. The Poisonwood Bible is superb and a 'must read'. I have not read the second book as it has not yet appeared in the charity shops! However her other, maybe slighter, books are all worth reading, and she enlightens one about the life and feelings of native Americans and other rural folk in the USA who do not have the lavish lifestyle we see on the TV etc. Chris Wigzell.

On the themes of research or ‘we’re all in it together’ – comments long or short would be welcome. Blog 20 will be in preparation early February.

THANKS FOR READING THIS.
JIM.