Review: The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon

 A few years ago I read The Tale of the Lady Ochikubo and was astonished to find a book that read like an eighteenth century English novel in early mediaeval Japan. I returned to Heian Japan to read Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, which I found a fascinatingly contradictory piece of work. The most obvious contradiction is how it manages to be both a depiction of a culture, alien by both time and place while also being (and a hate to say this) curiously relatable.

Shonagaon writes about the court culture of Japan almost a thousand years ago. Athelstan was the king of England when she was writing this, and the lives of those Anglo-Saxons, even with the information of the chronicles, seem astonishingly distant. Yet, despite that distance in time, place and culture in general, there are so many times when I smiled with recognition at what Sei Shonagon had to say (though I equally had to look up the notes to try and understand what was happening).

This dichotomy seems to exist because the book has two main modes. The first is an anecdotal mode, where Shonagon talks about events within the life of the court. Many of these do feel culturally distant and are the ones where the notes are invaluable. The other is a list-making mode, where she talks about the things that annoy her, fill her with a sense of beauty, make her laugh - these are the ones that have us nodding along with her.

She talks about the frustration that tweezers never seem to pull out the hair you want, that middle management feels more authoritative when housed in a portly frame, that “nothing is more unlovely than a fly” or that “everything that cries at night is wonderful, with the exception, of course, of babies”. (I also wanted to point out that the back of a piece of sewing is listed under ‘repulsive things’.) In being hyper-focused on herself and her experiences, she manages to be universal. She talks about the beauty of dew on a spider’s web and remarks how no-one around her ever seems to see that beauty, thus making her beloved of anyone who’s ever felt like that.

Yet, she is operating in a very structured and alien culture. The whole issue of ‘taboo directions’ was one I could never quite understand, even as it plays a part in many of the anecdotes. There are correct items of clothing to wear, in correct combinations and in correct colours. One anecdote tries to get a laugh out of someone going to court in their lacquered hat, a point of comedy that makes no sense to someone who doesn’t see the lacquered hat as casual wear. There’s a lot of talk of clothes, and while the details of that clothing culture doesn’t translate well, the interest in clothes themselves does.

As well as clothes, poetry plays a role in the court that is different from now. It’s common practice to send beautifully written snippets of poetry on carefully selected coloured paper and wrapped up with a gift or branch that visually ties in with the poem but also adds to the connotations of it. These are highly prized and expected as standard at certain times, especially after a midnight tryst. What’s more, quoting poetry is a highly prized art and there are frequent moments where an apposite quotation is described as a marvel of intellect, culture and breeding. It’s interesting that the writer is known for her skills with poetry, yet also feels incredibly self-conscious about it and it’s hard to know how much she is humble-bragging at any one time.

Another interesting contradiction of the piece is how much it is a performance and how much a private thing. The Pillow Book gets an origin story, she’s given a wad of beautiful, creamy paper to do with as she wishes, writes down all the things she wants before it’s accidentally found, passed around and enjoyed. This story of accidental authorship was repeated a lot in eighteenth century writing and it always comes across as disingenuous. How much does Sei Shonagon write down whatever she fancies and how much is she shaping the work for an audience?

I think this contradiction might be more understandable in the context of the time. The women of the court are often hidden behind moveable screens and show themselves and their personalities by their sleeves. These sleeves were long, drooping and multi-layered, poking out from underneath the screen and often the only way to know anything about a woman was through these sleeves. I think the book is doing something similar, showing and not showing at the same time, an intentional-accidental sort of expression.

It’s not a book that can be read quickly, or at least, I didn’t find it such. The book is a patchwork of lists and anecdotes which hop around timeframes and tone. It doesn’t build up to a climax but can be understood either piece by piece or as a whole. This means the book doesn’t pull the reader forward at any great pace, but invites them to inspect each little section as a jewel in itself, and then to look back on it as a larger tapestry. I very much enjoyed The Pillow Book and it’s one I’d like to visit again, probably at a time when I can sit contemplatively in a garden (and not when I’ve manically hauling boxes about trying to settle into a new house).

Fear of the moment - the hardest part of writing.

 The hardest part of writing for me, isn’t the part where I’m putting words on the page. While I can sometimes sit sweating at that blank space, or feel myself grinding out words as I grind my teeth, the act of writing is typically an enjoyable one - or relatively harmless at least. 

No, the really difficult part of writing, the element that freezes me and has retarded every single writing project I’ve ever started, is that moment before I start to write. That moment, possibly just a few seconds is agony to me and I’ll do almost anything to put it off. It’s a moment where the blood runs cold and I freeze up. 

I think it’s something to do with turning the possible into the actual. That process has always interested me and is a core theme in my self-published novel, Death of a Dream Pedlar. The possible chapter, article or piece, the hoped for one, never translates fully from my head, through the string of words and onto the page. Sometimes it gets close. Often, when I’ve written something and re-read it, especially if I’ve left it aside for a while, I’m pleased with what’s there. No matter how many times i have sat and written something to a standard I feel is acceptable, there’s something inside me which never trusts I’ll be able to do it again. That minute, or even couple of seconds stands as an unconquerable mountain that I have to face each time.

I also find that if I am writing, hit a small bump in the flow, need to answer a phone or a call of nature, I return to the text and have to face that moment again. Even if, while writing, I has a good notion of what the next part will be, I find I have to build up my courage and determination and get over the pain again. One of the reasons I’ve kept writing this blog so long, updating every Wednesday, is to force myself to face the moment at least once a week. One of the benefits of writing theatre reviews was that the deadline was midday the next day and I usually had not time to meet it in the morning and so had to write as soon as I got home. I still had to get through the moment every time I started a review, but I could rely, intellectually at least, on the fact that all the previous reviews had been written.

Another strange thing, is that the times when I am most desperate to write, most fizzing with ideas and lines, frothing at the mouth to get scribbling, are the times when this is impossible. My biggest waves of inspiration or willingness are when I’m at work, teaching children about science or marking maths. I think it\s almost a cheat my brain has with me, that when the prospect of the starting moment is impossible, I’m eager to do it.

This difficulty in getting going is one that I find in much of my life, I’m bad at transitions. I’m terrible at getting up and then getting going, I’m slow to warm up when I get to work, I stay at work a little longer than I need to because I find it hard to transition back into a post-work state. It’s not that I am nostalgic or look backwards, I simply find the shunt between different modes difficult to do, and I suppose the shunt into writing mode is the most difficult of all. 

Generally, the biggest projects I have worked on are novels, but recently I’ve been embarked on the more physical challenge of stripping and decorating my house into somewhere comfortable to live. I’m really getting there now. I’ve had to balance this project with settling into a new workplace (a transition I’ve found harder than I expected), a new town (one I’ve found easier), rehearsing two plays as well as my writing, reading, leisure and bodily needs. It’s been a pretty full on year - and I’ve learnt some lessons.

Back when I was living somewhere else but doing this place up, I’d come here after work, put in a gruelling few hours scraping and then walk back to where I was living. As I’ve worked on the house while living here, I’ve managed to tear myself away from easier pleasures and get working. Last week I balanced painting my bedroom with rehearsing over six hours a week on a play I’m in. This has meant coming home from work, throwing on painting clothes, painting for an hour and a half, cleaning, changing and then going to the rehearsal. Normally, I’d have regarded the hour or so as dead space, but I managed to see the time as something I could truly accomplish a little more to my overall goal.

Writing and novel and gussying up a house are not too dissimilar. There’s an end goal in sight and a seemingly endless series of tasks to achieve to reach it. Just as I was able to transition into decorating mode and get started, reasoning that all little steps get closer to the final outcome, I hope I can apply the same in my writing life and really, finally free myself from fear of that moment.  It’s worth a try, anyway.

The end of Unbound Publishers

 A sad moment in my writing life happened when I turned 35 and could no longer be eligible for the Betty Trask Award, one I’d often daydreamed of winning. Another one happened recently when I found that the crowd publishers, Unbound, have gone bankrupt and gone under.

I got on the Unbound train quite early, being on of the funders of one of the earlier books, The Gin Lane Gazette by cartoonist, Adrian Teal. It was right up my alley, a compendium of an imaginary Grub Street magazine, reporting news from the 1750s-1800. My copy was lucky number thirteen and I had my name in the back of the book in the subscriber list.

I was very excited about Unbound, and subscriber publishing in general because it seemed like a really eighteenth century way to fund a book. I knew, however, it wouldn’t be a platform I’d be able to fund my book on. Many of the authors, especially the earlier ones, were people who already had some degree of celebrity. There were quirky books by people like Stephen Fry, novels by Kryten actor, Robert Llewellyn, and book by people with large Twitter followings like Ade Teal (which is how I first heard of the project and publisher). I was no great shakes as a Twitterer, I’ve had a couple of minor successes on Youtube and this blog, though pushing two million hits now, has never set the internet ablaze. I’d have to wait before Unbound became my publisher of choice.

I was accepted by another subscription publishing scheme, Britain’s Next Bestseller. They are defunct now and, as far as I am aware, only published a handful of books - none of them bestsellers. During this time, I tried to ramp up my social media output, put some effort into Twitter, set up a new Youtube channel with daily videos, I even handed out cards outside the big Waterstones in London. I wasn’t successful, coming a fair bit under the minimum number of subscribers needed to go into publishing.

This turned out to be a good thing. The book would have died a death had it come out under that imprint, and the process of crowdfunding gave me impetus to have the book edited, which lead to a whole new set of drafts and a hugely improved novel. I ended up publishing that book,. Death of a Dream Pedlar, through the Amazon self-publishing arm, where it’s died a death, but one wholly on my terms. I’ve sold less than a hundred copies, but I achieved my aim, which was to put that book to bed so I can work more wholeheartedly on other projects without that in the back of my mind. (Though my recent house purchase and renovation has rather eaten up my writing time and energy recently.)

I feel this new book will be acceptable in traditional publishing and, if it finds its audience, will do fairly well - but I always think that.

There was one other Unbound book I helped fund. This was a project by Shandy Hall, the museum of Laurence Sterne and experimental writing. This was Cain’s Jawbone, a detective book that is also a puzzle. There are a hundred un-numbered pages and the puzzle is to put them all together in the right order to make a coherent murder mystery. It’s fiendishly difficult and although I’ve read all hundred pages, I only have some vague notion of what the ordering (or even the story) might be. 

The copy of Cain’s Jawbone I recieved came in a box, with all the pages printed on separate cards to be reshuffled and re-ordered at will. The book that went out to the bookshops was a bound one and caused a small storm on Tik-Tok when someone bought it, ripped all the pages out and tried to solve it. As a result of the popularity of Tik-Tokkers taking, tearing and re-ordering the book, my review of it on Goodreads is probably one of my only real social media hits. 

But now Unbound has gone the way of Britains Next Bestseller and, from the grumbles and rumours I’ve heard, have pocketed subscriber money without remunerating the authors - I may have misunderstood this grumbles though. I also found out that, while in business, Unbound would make heavy editorial choices with the work and be quite strict about using their own in-house designers. As I say, at least Death of a Dream Pedlar flopped on my terms, with my design, my cover and my editing. Who knows, maybe the next book won’t flop.

No place for Kermit - Likeabilty and Eighteenth Century Literature

 Recently, I wrote a little piece about puppet theatres in the eighteenth century. As a little game, I decided to try and cast eighteenth century works with The Muppets but I quickly came upon a particular problem, there were very few roles for Kermit.

Kermit the Frog is not a complete paragon of virtue. He is easily exasperated (though is given extreme provocation), he can sometimes give in to more boisterous elements and I think he is pretty cruel in his indecision over his relationship with Miss Piggy. He is, however, a decent chap/frog, he is essentially likeable and he needs to be cast as such. In the Muppet adaptations we have, he is Bob Cratchet in The Christmas Carol, Captain Smollett in Treasure Island and Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. While Smollett is actually quite a strict, steely character, Kermit plays him with his usual good-natured charm. That simply doesn’t fit in well with the eighteenth century.

I thought about The Beggar’s Opera. It would seem natural to cast him as Macheath, he’s the main character and it’d be fun dressing him in a little highway outfit and having Miss Piggy and Mary Sue Pig (or Spamela Anderson) fight over him. It’s not a terrible fit, there’s a haplessness about Macheath that Kermit could play, but there’s a harshness too, and although having the two pigs fight over him would be funny, and play to their characters (and it would be hilarious with dozens of pigs coming at the end, claiming to be his wife) Kermit’s romantic nature is indecisive, not playboy. 

Stick him in the world of Defoe - he could make a passable Crusoe, would be sidelined in Roxana or Moll Flanders and I can’t imagine him picking pockets as Colonel Jack. He’d be a decent enough Gulliver I suppose, an okay Tom Jones (though again, he’d lack the vim of that character). He’d make the worst Lovelace possible… though he might be okay as Evelina’s Count Orville and I’d pay good money to see him as Count D’Elmont in Love in Excess.

The reason for this seems to be that Kermit is a decent, likeable kind of frog, and eighteenth century literature is not all that interested in providing its readers with that kind of character. The worlds of Smollett, Swift, Fielding, Haywood, Burney, are not ones full of likeable people. They are worlds where people face tough moral decisions, or are slaves to their unreasons and whims - they aren’t worlds for decent types for the most part. Even decent characters in eighteenth century fiction, like Tom Jones or Parson Adams, have issues with sex, violence or hypocrisy that make them simply more than the bland and likeable. 

This seems to be a problem for modern readers, who seem to expect to like the characters they read about. Reader reviews of modern books often complain about the lack of likeable character.  They say they can’t follow Crusoe’s adventures because of his colonising the island and othering of Friday (even as he learns to appreciate his companion), or that The Beggar’s Opera has no likeable characters because everyone is in it for themselves. To be honest, I think this is a flaw in the modern reader rather than older books, writers of the past wanted to present vivid characters, interesting characters, they didn’t seem to be so interested in likeable ones.

On writer did set out to create an intentionally likeable character, my old frenemy, Samuel Richardson. He wrote Sir Charles Grandison to be good, decent and likeable. Even among those who like Richardson (and I do find him a chore), Grandison is a dull book. Readers have described his goodness as repellent, many have just said he’s boring. Seeing as the book is over 1500 pages long, I shall not be rushing to it.

While it’s unfortunate that our pal Kermit doesn’t have many roles available in eighteenth century literature, I say that’s probably a good thing, and those books are the better for having big, unlikeable characters than Sir Charles Blandisons. Likeable is overrated, I say.

Goldsmith on Puffins

 Last Wednesday was half term and a gloriously sunny day so my parents and I went to Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire to see the nesting seabirds.

The place was packed with guillemots, razorbills and kittiwakes. We saw gannets performing their strange bowing, head-shaking and beak-fencing behaviours, and we also looked for puffins. Those adorable, colourful beaked fellas are really quite hard to see. They’re smaller than many of the other birds, have a tendency to nest deeper in the crevices and didn’t gather the same way the others did, scattered among the rest. I hear this isn’t the case in ‘puffin islands’ like Anglesey and Lundy, but it was the case at the cliffs in Bempton.

We looked and looked, enjoying the antics of all the other birds, the bright, blue sky and the turquoise sea and eventually our patience had results, we saw puffins. A few were chilling on the cliffs, whilst others flew around, their hurried flapping noticeable against the more relaxed flying of the other birds. It was pretty magical. 

Oliver Goldsmith, in his An History of the Earth and Animated Nature describes puffins, and it seems, unlike some of the other entries, that he might have even seen some before. He says that, “words cannot easily describe the form of the bill of the puffin,' before giving a paragraph on the size, shape and colour of it, warning that it “bites most terribly”.

Goldsmith describes how the birds nest in burrows and holes situated up large cliffs but that they aren’t terribly good flyers and sometimes need to make several tries to fly up to their nests. He also describes how a small number of puffins appear to scout out an area before the larger force comes (maybe it was these scouts we saw).

He says how puffins descend on Anglesey, kicking rabbits out of their burrows and making a nuisance. He then talks about a subject which never ceases to amuse me in his natural history book, whether puffins make good food or not. He describes the meat as rank, unless well salted and pickled and says how the church exempted the puffin from being described as meat on feast days.

Moving away from the description of puffin-meat, he celebrates their indefatigability, that after being preyed on and hunted by humans and other animals, they always come back in as many numbers as before.

I love reading An History of the Earth and Animated Nature for the odd and outdated details some of the entries contain, like the description of their meat, but (if Goldsmith’s sources are correct) I did also learn a little of the hard life of a puffin.

It was a pleasure to meet a few. 

Review: Two books by Iona McGregor

 I’m out of Leon Garfields. But this month I did read two novels by an author he recommended highly, Ioana McGregor. She wrote six novels, four of them were set in the eighteenth-century, the two I found were not. One is a historical children’s novel set in the 1500s, and the other a Victorian whodunnit for adults written when she no longer kept her Lesbianism in the closet. 

The Poppinjay is one of several children’s historical novels written by Iona McGregor while she worked as a teacher. it’s set in St Andrews during an invasion of the castle by protestants, following the murder of the unpopular Archbishop - the chaplain to these invaders being John Knox.

David Lindsay is the popinjay of the title. Born in Bordeux to a Scottish wine merchant and a French woman, he has travelled to St Andrews to get a job under the Archbishop. He’s daydreaming of a life of visiting fine courts, reading delightful books and seeing fine art and architecture. He’s dressed to the nines and very snobby about the outfits of everybody he meets. Unfortunately, his prospective employer is killed the day of the interview and he is in the castle grounds when it is invaded.

He sneaks out, but not without being injured and is taken in by an old woman and her grand-daughter, who barely make a living from fishing and odd-jobs. As he heals, he helps out, shedding his fine clothing and finding some satisfaction in doing work well. After Father Anthony leaves some medical texts with him, he begins to interested in medicine.

The town is in an uproar, the forces from the Regent (as Mary, Queen of Scots is four years old at this point) are both late and ineffective. Their attempt to mine the castle is pointless and, worst of all, lets people from the castle out - and they have the plague.

The people are suspicious of the old grandmother, who did curse the castle with pestilence, and David and friends are saved by a friend of theirs dying of plague in their outhouse, so now no one will come near. 

Will they survive the plague, the siege, the anger of the mob?

The Poppinjay is a decent, if slight children’s adventure. David starts as shallow and uncaring, and grows to be a better person through his experiences. The girl who saves him is good fun and she has a pet monkey. The book is full of the fun little Scottishisms that were also in The Edinburgh ReeI. It’s a glimpse into a time and place I know very little of, the Scottish Reformation, and balanced the depiction of both protestants and catholics very carefully. Ultimately, it’s a decent workaday story, without the more interesting post-Culloden implications of The Edinburgh Reel.

Death Wore a Diadem is interesting because it’s the book Ioana McGregor wrote after quitting her job as a teacher, deciding to no-longer write children’s books and embrace her lesbian activism more openly. It’s billed as a ‘maverick historical whodunnit which satirises the snobbishness of genteel society.’ The blurb talks about how the main character, Christabel, ‘enlists the help of her lesbian lover and combs the foggy streets of the capital in search of a brutal killer’. 

Set in 1860, it sounds like a fun proto-Sarah Walters type of lesbian, crime fun. The blurb is misleading, however. The book is far more interested in satirising ‘the snobbishness of genteel society’ than it is being a knockabout crime romp. Christabel and her lesbian lover do very little detecting and it’s discovered pretty early on that the death is not the result of a brutal killer as much as a clumsy thief. The chief antagonism in the book isn’t the forces of law verses those against it, it’s Christabel the school student against the headmistress who wishes to cover things up.

It took me a while to realise what the book actually was, as I found the first half to be a very interesting look at the dynamics of a revolutionary school for girls in Edinburgh. At the head is Margaret Napier, who has detailed lists of all the transgressions of staff and pupil alike. She’s hoping to channel the visit of Empress Eugénie of France into a huge PR coup for the school and to cement herself at the top of it. She rules firmly, pressing her will on all the teachers, ready to bring up minor indiscretions. Her second in command, Miss Erroll, is a firm protestant and gets ill at the thought of the Empress’s visit. Her biggest headache is Christabel, who is defiant and has contracted a friendship with one of the teach assistants that might not be seen as wholesome. The school is leant a paste replica of a diadem, this goes missing.. later on one of the undermaids is found dead with one of the paste jewels in her bag. This seems cut and dry to Miss Napier, but Christabel won’t have the maid, Peggy, blamed for stealing the  diadem.

I assumed all these school dynamics were set up for us to solve the mystery, which they sort of were, but while I thought they were the base for thrills later, the dynamics were the book. The mystery is very supplemental to the politicking within the school. What’s more, the sizzling lesbian romance never gets more raunchy than ‘one thing led to another’.

Had the blurb been more explicit that this was a book about the society of a boarding school, with the theft and death of the maid as incidents within that, I’d have found it more enjoyable. There are many characters and they are all well delineated, with interesting relationships and powerplays, but I kept waiting for the book to get all lesbian girl detective, and it never really did. 

If anything, it seems Iona McGregor was working through her gripes with being a teacher, enjoying creating the monstrous headteacher in all her petty glory, the flighty and pretentious teachers, the vapid schoolgirls. If this was her big, freeing novel (she turned to writing study-guides after this) the demon she wanted to exorcise was not having to write for children, or of concealing her lesbianism, it was how annoying working in a school can be.  

An Afternoon of Eighteenth-Century Delights by The Grimsby Symphony Orchestra

I’ve had a little problem since moving out of London where my blog is concerned. Before, when I was stuck for something to write about, there was also some little building, curio or exhibition to attend and refill the eighteenth-century wells, that’s not really the case here. Grimsby has a fascinating early-mediaeval and later mediaeval history, and came into its peak years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but it had a real decline between those years and was something of a nowhere place. Online, the history of eighteenth-century Grimsby is limited to a sentence. This is also the case for a lot of the local area, they are places that were wealthy and important in the mediaeval era and became so again at the end of the nineteenth century but largely floundered in the eighteenth.

This means there simply isn’t much around to fill up the Grub-Street tank, so my eyes were instantly drawn to a poster advertising, An Afternoon of Eighteenth Century Delights. I knew I was going to go, though I was a little put off by the nature of those delights, three pieces of classical music by a symphony orchestra - I’m more into a broadside ballad, or even a Purcell and not very knowledgeable about the kinds of music played by an orchestra.

But, I went and I had an experience, and these are my thoughts.

The first parts was Overture to Don Giovanni by Mozart. This was my favourite piece, I liked the drama and seep of it. I also enjoyed the little tunes and motifs I picked up. I sat back in Grimsby Minster and let the music swirl around me, lifting me up and letting my thoughts and feelings be taken away and wander.

The second piece was Symphony 101 (The Clock) by Haydn. There were moments of ticking in various parts, but it seemed to smooth and slippery to be a clock most of the time, I have a clockwork watch you can see into and it’s a busy repetition of complex motion rather than long slides. This piece was written by Haydn when he was performing in London and was very enthusiastically recieved. I enjoyed it but it was more mannered than the Mozart and took me less high.

The third pieces was Beethoven’s Symphony No.1. He’d been taught by Haydn and was influenced by Mozart, so it was a fitting last piece of music. I have to say, I frequently find Beethoven rather annoying, he seems to pick an idea and repeat it, or pull it apart and repeat little bits of it in combinations. I imagine, if I were more musically inclined, I’d love this - I love when a writer does something similar, but it frustrates me as a listener and I was ready for it to finish.

That said, I was very grateful to the Grimsby Symphony Orchestra for putting on An Afternoon of Eighteenth-Century Delights. It’s been a year since I reviewed Purcell’s The Fairy Queen and it was  lovely to hear an orchestra play and feel the music fill the space of the Minster - and all that for a tenner, it was a delightful afternoon.