Happy birthday to me.

Just yesterday I was thinking about how much fun it is to write: what a privilege, a luxury; how hilarious it is, that I actually get to do this thing. I laughed even more when I read Garrison Keillor’s piece on Salon in which he takes a swipe at those who constantly remind us how deeply they suffer for their art:

I have had it with writers who talk about how painful and harrowing and exhausting and almost impossible it is for them to put words on paper and how they pace a hole in the carpet, anguish writ large on their marshmallow faces, and feel lucky to have written an entire sentence or two by the end of the day.
It’s the purest form of arrogance: Lest you don’t notice what a brilliant artist I am, let me tell you how I agonize over my work. To which I say: Get a job. Try teaching eighth-grade English, five classes a day, 35 kids in a class, from September to June, and then tell us about suffering.
The fact of the matter is that the people who struggle most with writing are drunks. They get hammered at night and in the morning their heads are full of pain and adverbs. Writing is hard for them, but so would golf be, or planting alfalfa, or assembling parts in a factory.

Last night I re-read The Silver Sword, by Ian Serrallier, a book I read at about nine and have ever since considered to be a moving indictment of war and a harrowing story of children’s survival in the face of utter destruction.
Well … maybe.
I’m reading it now, obviously, having read a great deal of WW2 and Holocaust literature, and as someone able to deal with much more harrowing events than the nine-year-old. But knowing that, I still can’t help but see how Serrallier has sanitised much of the action. Yes, these Polish children caught up in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation are starving, homeless, and so are many around them. But everyone they meet just seems to want to help them, even the post-war Germans are all friendly and there’s no hard feelings on anyone’s part.
I imagine he was striving for some kind of reconciliation at that critical point in post-war history (late 50s), and interestingly the Red Army is portrayed as mildly as the American and British occupiers. But while the only hint of ongoing anger is personalised in the hostile attitude of the boy Jan to any German, it’s clearly because he’s simply disturbed and will grow out of it eventually.
Now. Far be it for me to suggest that there were not many German people or occupying soldiers who would have helped a group of starving children find their way to Switzerland, but this is rather extreme.
Funnily enough, I remember feeling a bit let down by the book when I read it all those decades ago because I thought it went all God-like and preachy at the end. That turns out not to be the case either.
My other trip down memory lane this week has been through a couple of books by Henry Treece, the Viking adventure expert, whose books sent me into several years of fierce determination to grow up to live in Norway, if not be an actual Viking. This is something from which I’ve never quite recovered.
Recently I’ve read a few learned assessments of that era of historical fiction for children in which Henry Treece doesn’t measure up to the other great favourites. I bristled. But now I admit those critiques are quite right.
Sure, there’s some good Berserker battle frenzy in Horned Helmet but the storyline jumps all over the place and the characters barely develop at all. You know when development has happened because the boy suddenly becomes tall and muscle-bound and miraculously learns how to wield a sword.
Hounds of the King is much worse, with great leaps in time and heavy dollops of Anglo-Saxon politics, incomprehensible even to me. The main character misses all the big battles (otherwise he’d be dead, but still it’s an anti-climax), and King Harold’s character is so confusingly drawn that we are not sure whether he’s great or bad, and therefore why our protagonist is fighting for him.
This is a tragedy. I feel somehow bereft.
Ronald Welch, whose Carey books inspired me to start fencing and whose great swordfighting scenes are still in my mind when I write swashbucklers, is also often criticised nowadays. I think his work still stands up pretty well. Yes, they are all about blokes, but he was a man of his time and you can’t really expect to have feminist heroines leaping about. And the swordfighting is just as sharply-drawn as I remembered (in fact, really much more technically detailed than I would write).
Happily, I’ve found that most of the work of Geoffrey Trease and Rosemary Sutcliff is as fine as I remembered, sometimes even better, and easily measures up to the historical fiction written now for children – although I find we can no longer assume that any young reader has heard of the Roman Empire, let alone Caesar’s conquest of Britain. But that’s another story, and makes me sound terribly old.
Tomorrow I am officially middle-aged. (There was some debate about this over breakfast, as nobody could quite remember how old I am and we had to get out the calculator – a sure sign. And the paper announced subsidies on medical care for middle-aged people, that is 45 to 64. I wonder if it’s worth paying the doctor an extra $25 next visit if they promise to pretend I’m not that old?)
Anyway, as I advance into middle-age, I can accept that I might not grow up to be a Viking.
I might have to write a Viking book instead.

– Blogging
– Coffee
– Books
– More books
– Staring into space
– Researching obscure historical details
– Lunch
– Corinne Bailey Rae
– Email
– Deciding which book to write today
– Deciding everything I’ve written this morning is crap
– Deciding everything I’ve written this morning is so brilliant I may as well stop and have a coffee to celebrate
– Web surfing
– Chooks
– The Secrets of World War 2 on the History Channel
– Gallipoli on the History Channel
– Poring over the History Channel programme
– Dishwashing (but only in emergencies)
– Trying not to eat chocolate

This morning I have had the blinding realisation that it might be better to actually write something, instead of getting so carried away with complicated research matters that I forget where I started and where I meant to be.
And so I am. This is my lunch break. Honest.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
– Jorge Luis Borges

Publishers Weekly reports on a new study in the US which found that interest in reading declines as kids get older. “Children ages 5-17 like to read books, but they read significantly less after the age of eight,” says the Kids and Family Reading Report, a national survey of children ages 5-17 and their parents, sponsored by Scholastic.
The good news is that 92 percent of kids say they like to read for fun. But while 44 percent of children age 5-8 were classified as high frequency readers (reading every day), that number falls to 29 percent for ages 9-11, down to 25 percent for ages 12-14, and ends up at 16 percent for ages 15-17.
46 percent of 15- to 17-year-olds are characterized by the study as low frequency readers (reading no more than 2-3 times per month), while only 16 percent in that age group are high frequency readers.
One reason for the drop-off, the study found, was the poor role models parents set as readers. Only 21 percent of parents are frequent readers. One might also argue that life starts to intervene around the same age, and any 14 year old who can find time to read for fun every day between piano lessons, basketball training, homework, school concerts, talking on the phone, Saturday morning sports and horse riding is doing pretty well. It’s hard enough to find time for sleeping and eating.
Interestingly, and running counter to common – and learned – opinion, the study did not report a huge disparity between girls and boys on the topic of whether or not they like to read.
49 percent of boys said they enjoy reading for fun “a lot”, while 57 percent of girls said the same; 26 percent of boys said they read books for fun every day while 36 percent of girls do. Some difference, but not as much as is generally feared.
However, just 5 percent of girls called reading “not at all” important, compared to 14 percent of boys.

In the Times, Jeanette Winterson roos the day she ever admitted to thinking there was such a think as a damp squid:

I feel very sorry for the child who nearly choked on his biblical cord, and for the gentleman who feels “out on a limbo”. I think we have all felt out on a limbo sometimes, perhaps especially the lady who “has a milestone round her neck”.

Her mother is, as always, the champion of the spoken word:

Mrs Winterson used to talk about an interfering madam she disliked as a “proper Cleopatra”. On further inquiry I discovered she had “a rod up her asp”. When I asked what this meant, Mrs Winterson replied: “she won’t let sleeping snakes lie.”

The Index librorum prohibitorum – the dreaded Index – is the official list of books once prohibited by the Catholic Church.
The Index dates back to the momentous years of the Counter-Reformation, when the church (and many state) authorities felt themselves to be in the midst of the ultimate battle for the souls of humanity – or their lucrative power base, depending on which side of the Reformation you’re on.
One of their bright ideas, along with torture and burning people at the stake, was to compile a single list of books that no God-fearing man (and I use the term advisedly) should possess or read.
The idea was first formally introduced in 1557 with the publication of the Index auctorum et librorum prohibitorum under the direction of Pope Paul IV. The Pauline Index, as it became known, was the first in a long succession of papal indices, forty-two in all.
The 32nd edition, for example, published in 1948, contained 4,000 titles, including many that were banned on the basis of politics or morality, rather than heresy.
Authors who made it onto the ultimate A-list include Hugo, Rabelais, Balzac, Zola, Flaubert and Voltaire – basically the golden ages of French literature. Pierre Larousse, compiler of the Grand Dictionnaire Universel, found it banned after all those years of work. Words, it seems, are dangerous even if only in dictionaries.
Perhaps more significant in terms of the effects on other writers and thinkers were the bans on Copernicus and Galileo (for trying to understand the universe), Spinoza (expelled by the Jewish community as well), Erasmus (perhaps the greatest mind of all) and Bruno (who burned along with his books). Those of you who suffered through Milton at school may be shocked to learn he made the list (he was a die-hard Puritan), as did swashbuckler Dumas, pirate enthusiast Defoe, and Swift of Gulliver fame. They were in good company, along with Descartes, Machiavelli, Locke, Hume, Paine, Rousseau and even Madame De Stael: perhaps the only thing these names have in common is that what they wrote was banned.
More recently, of course, the Index has included books by Gide, Sartre and Joyce but, strangely enough, not Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Even more amazingly, recent research indicates that the inquisitors in the Sacred Congregation of the Index never had a problem with Darwin.
It was in force until a mere forty years ago this week. Another Paul, Pope Paul VI, abolished the Index on June 14 1966.
As we know, there are plenty of people who wish it were still in place – with JK Rowling’s name high on the list.

Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
~ Heinrich Heine (who was also on the Index)

History for a greedy novelist like me is just one more place to pillage. What we’re after, of course, is stories, and we know that history is bulging with beauties. Having found them, we then proceed to fiddle with them to make them the way we want them to be, rather than the way they really were. We get it wrong, wilfully and knowingly. But perhaps you could say that the very flagrency of our ‘getting it wrong’ points to the fact that all stories – even the history ‘story’ – are made. They have an agenda, even if it’s an unconscious one. Perhaps there are many ways to get it right.
– Kate Grenville
(Interviewed in The Telegraph)

David Dale in the Sydney Morning Herald looks at the latest publishing figures and suggests:

“If you want to create a bestseller in Australia, here is this year’s formula: ‘The Magic Bum Cleaning Diet Code for Cricketers’. To maximise your sales, you will need elements of self-help, suspense, fantasy, autobiography, spirituality and a film tie-in. Plus fart jokes. And you should change your name to Dan Brown.”