Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Our Unique and Transforming Call and Vocation

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We read in the Gospel of Matthew, that as Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon and Andrew, casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.”  At once they left their nets and followed him.

On the same walk, Jesus called two other brothers, James and John, who leave their boat, and their father, and follow him.

 

God is always speaking

His transforming words into our lives

As we still our hearts and listen.

He is, by his very nature, a God

Who speaks. At the start of his great Gospel,

The Apostle John calls Jesus the Word

Who was God, and became flesh

And lived among us.

 

And this speaking, communicating, yearning God

Calls each of us to the work he wants us to do in the world.

We are sometimes called at a particular point of time,

Through specific words or images,

Or else, gradually, through an inner conviction

That this is the task we are to embark on

With all our strength, for the rest of our lives.

The call we hear, or sense, is utterly serious.

And if we say “Yes!,” the moment of response

Is among the greatest and most important moments of our lives.

 

For it is a transforming call.

It changes the whole direction of our lives.

From the day we hear God’s call,

We must begin to restructure our lives

In accordance with this necessity.

What we read, the friendships we invest in,

Our social activities, hobbies, leisure,

Our whole lives…are hitherto

To be shaped in accordance with our calling.

 

The greatest, kindest person in the whole world,

Jesus Christ, has called you to something you

Are uniquely equipped to do, you

With your strengths and your weaknesses,

You have been called, commissioned

To a task in which you will flourish and find joy.

But not just you.

 

Jesus said he would give his flesh, sacrifice

His life for the life of the world.

And while what we are called to will make us fully,

Blazingly alive–mentally, emotionally, and spiritually,

What God calls us to do will also contribute

To the life and the flourishing of the world.

* * *

God wastes nothing.

Your call will use the gifts, experiences, and strengths

Formed in you by the circumstances of your life.

Peter, Andrew, James and John were fisherman

Who sometimes worked hard all night and caught nothing,

Who could row three and a half miles out of shore,

Who were caught in perilous storms, in which waves crashed into the boat

And they almost sank.

 

This hardiness gave them the tough, resilient character of men

Who could not only catch fish to keep themselves alive

But could also persuade humans into a richer,

Deeper, more peaceful and eternal life.

No longer fishermen but fishers of men, punning Jesus said.

The call of God, if obeyed, always leads to a bigger,

Better and more challenging place.

Your call will stretch you, mould you and transform you.

To reject, or to ignore the call is to reject growth.

 

The call gives us a new identity.

The fisherman became leaders,

Writers of the New Testament, poetic and prophetic.

And sometimes, at the point of the call,

God supernaturally puts into us spiritual gifts, strengths,

And abilities called an anointing (Oh, precious thing!)

Which makes difficult things easier.

If you yearn for that, then pray for it.

* * *

 

The call will involve sacrifice.

We cannot simply squeeze a new mission into our crowded lives.

If you hear God call you to write, let’s say,

You must immediately ask yourself: “What

Will I stop doing to help this new thing happen?”

Less time reading the news, or on social media?

Releasing outgrown friendships which drag you down?

Eating more simply, more raw foods perhaps?

Buying as few inessential things as possible?

 

God’s call is benevolent, beneficent, aimed at our flourishing.

And as we begin to obey it, with increasing faithfulness,

Our whole life changes.

It becomes more serious, more purpose-driven.

And purpose is one of the greatest things we humans can have,

(Along with faith, hope and love).

When we have purpose, our eyes are bright with it.

* * *

Having heard a call, you set out in obedience

On a very long journey,

Which will last the rest of your life.

There’s almost always a long gap between hearing a call,

And seeing the fruits of your work.

For God’s call to you is not just for the life and flourishing of the world,

But, also, for your own growth and flourishing.

While you are refining your skills to fulfil your call

God is shaping and refining you–

Your persistence, your ability to follow through,

To get from A to Z, meet deadlines, get organised,

To ask him for guidance, and learn the sound of his voice.

You grow up, you mature, you toughen,

You develop character as you develop your gifts.

 

The precise call may be revealed progressively.

You can only steer a moving car.

If you hear God’s call to write, say,

Begin today, with the words and ideas which come.

Polish and burnish your craft while awaiting

More precise marching orders,

Which may keep coming over decades.

* * *

Now, here’s the hard part.

Being called, as many are,

Does not guarantee blazing success in the world’s eyes,

Or by human metrics. God decides our platform,

Whether our work will reach dozens, hundreds, thousands, or millions.

 

In the Parable of the Talents,

God gives some one talent, some two and some five.

The ones with two and five talents each work as hard as they can

And each double their capital.

But still, one ends up with four talents, and the other with ten.

That’s life. If it seems unfair, it’s because we are characters

In a play God has written. He gives us our roles,

And it’s our job to play them as beautifully as we can.

 

Some writers, for instance, will always have a small audience.

Fact of life.

If that is you, write as truly and beautifully as you can,

With gratitude for your platform, large or small.

But hey, if having many readers or listeners matters to you,

(And it does matter to me!)

Ask God to grant you success,

And trust in his grace to work well, whether

In Milton’s phrase, your success will eventually be

“Less or more, or soon or slow, or mean or high.”

* * *

And what if you have heard a call

But have not been steadily faithful in following it?

And, here, I sadly put up my hand.

Me too.

I have not been single-minded.

I have been distracted.

 

If you’ve half-heartedly focused on your call,

And wasted time in trivial pursuits,

Sprint after Jesus as he continues walking by the Sea of Galilee.

Repent and promise renewed faithfulness to your call,

Renewed seriousness,

For our life is a short, serious and holy experience.

Recommit, and follow your call as intensely

As you wish you had done at first.

* * *

And what if you haven’t heard a specific call yet?

After all, Peter, Andrew, James and John,

Young working men, earning their living

Had not heard a call until that brilliant, costly, priceless day

When Jesus called them.

 

If you haven’t heard a specific call,

Then do the next right thing while you await direction.

Never jump into a ministry or your life work for God

Before you have heard God’s crystal-clear directions.

And while he prepares us, God also speaks through our lives.

What happens in the doctor’s office?

Do you leave resolving to exercise more,

To cut back on sugar, caffeine, white carbs? To meditate?

Start small in forming the good habits you’ll need, but start.

Is your house ready to invite friends over

Without a cleaning-up operation that’s like

Hiding the evidence of a crime?

Create time by decluttering everything inessential from your home,

Anything which slows you down as you run your race.

Do you tell yourself you’d love to wake with the sun?

Then recalibrate with night-time go-to-bed alarms and earlier nights.

All this is preparation.

 

*  * *

So, dear Lord,

Help us to be single-minded and laser-focused,

On being faithful to what you have called us to do.

We love you; increase our love.

We want to always see you before us, Jesus.

Increase our faith.

Amen.

This meditation is inspired by Matthew 4: 18-22

If you haven’t yet discerned your purpose in life, I’d recommend Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life (UK), or on Amazon.com

If you’d like to read my previous recorded meditations,

5 Change Your Life by Changing Your Thoughts

4 Do not be Afraid–But be as Wise as a Serpent

3 Our Failures are the Cracks Through Which God’s Power Enters our Lives

2 The World is full of the Glory of God

1 Mindfulness is Remembering the Presence of Christ with us.

Please subscribe at Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks!!

And, of course, I would love you to read my memoir, fruit of much “blood, sweat, toil and tears.”

Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India in the UK, and in the US, here, well, and widely available, online, worldwide 🙂

Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India. My new memoir

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Friends, I have written a new memoir. I would be so grateful for your support. It is available  wherever Amazon sells books, Amazon.com, of course, as well as  Amazon.co.uk.

Here are some reviews from distinguished writers

A beautifully written account of a childhood.  The textures, colours and, above all, the tastes of a particular world are lyrically but also precisely evoked. But, although Mathias rightly celebrates the richness of that world, she weaves through this magical remembrance of things past a skein of sadness that makes it haunting.  It’s lovely!

Francesca Kay, An Equal Stillness

Mathias invites us into a totally absorbing world of past and present marvels, generously laced with poetic and literary references and Dickensian levels of observation and detail. A beautifully written, important, and addictive book.

                                                                       Jenny Lewis, Gilgamesh Retold

 A dazzling, vibrant tale of the childhood of “the naughtiest girl in school” whose sweet tooth is exceeded only by her insatiable appetite for language and stories. Mathias conjures 1960s India, and her extended family in uproarious and heartbreaking detail.

Erin Hart, Haunted Ground

 Joining intelligent winsomeness with an engaging style, Anita Mathias writes with keen observation, lively insight and hard-earned wisdom about navigating the life of thoughtful faith in a world of cultural complexities. Her story bears witness to how God wastes nothing and redeems all. Her words sing of a spirit strong in courage, compassion and a pervasive dedication to the adventure of life. As a reader, I have been challenged and changed by her beautifully told and powerful story – so will you.

Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford

Anita Mathias’s memoir is a remarkable account of a Catholic childhood in India. A treasure chest of sights, sounds and scents, it is full of food (always food), books (always books), a family with all its alliances and divisions, and many glimpses of a world which is at once exotic and familiar. A feat of memory and remembrance of a moment in Indian culture, still tinged by the English presence, which yet has universal qualities.

Philip Gooden, The Story of English

Anita Mathias’s beautiful childhood memoir reflects the rich complexities of India’s myriad minorities – in her case the Catholics of Jamshedpur, built by the Tata family, the first planned industrial city in India. The Church figures prominently; one of her childhood tortures is family rosary-saying. Secondly, this is a book about “food, always food,” described in mouth-watering detail. Anita’s reading is hugely wide-ranging (from the Panchatantra and Shakespeare to Dickens) and whenever there is trouble with her parents she plunges into her book. Gossip and social scandals run throughout the book, while at school, she indulges in characteristic naughtiness (locking her class into their classroom, for example). India’s wretched wealth-poverty polarisation forms a backdrop to her story. Tormented, passionate and often sad, this book is immensely readable.

Trevor Mostyn, Coming of Age in The Middle East

Rosaries takes us into the psyche of place, from an insider who has lived and breathed India yet stands at a distance from it, both as a constantly alert observer of the human condition, and as a Catholic negotiating a Hindu culture. This subtle balance of insider and outsider means we are treated to fascinating insights and angles on life in India – its tastes and smells, its quirks and eccentricities, preoccupations and prejudices, told with glorious detail, precision and humour.  Mathias reveals her evolution from naughty girl to writer: how she is shaped by inner and outer worlds to become the independent spirit and artist of language so deliciously demonstrated in this memoir.

Professor Jane Spiro, Testimony of Flight

 Born of extraordinary parents and raised in an Indian steel town, Anita Mathias was blessed with no shortage of brains. She spent her first nine years putting them to endless, delightful mischief, but not without making room for some very advanced learning. With an unprecedented appetite for reading, Anita tore through libraries and every volume she could lay her tiny hands on before leaving for boarding school at nine – which incidentally she adored. Her middle class homelife was a rich array of experiences: the copious quantities of gastronomic delicacies – oh the food! – a strict and strong creative mother, a learned and caring father, a close younger sister, and the large hinterland of an impressively accomplished family. Anita was undoubtedly a dazzling star in the red earth firmament of the industrial landscape of Jamshedpur, and her pluck and charm shine through every page of this beautifully crafted, comprehensive, and erudite memoir.

We wait impatiently for the next episode – which will cover her continued rebellions at a Catholic boarding school before her own religious conversion and entry into Mother Teresa’s convent as a novice.

Ray Foulk, Picasso’s Revenge

 Mathias’s prose is lively and evocative. An enjoyable and accessible book.

Sylvia Vetta, Sculpting the Elephant

 A fascinating description of Mathias’s parents, education, and religious bringing. She is an accomplished writer.    Merryn Williams, Six Women Novelists

And here is a longish description of the book

Rosaries, Reading, Secrets: A Catholic Childhood in India is a lyrical account of Anita Mathias’s rebellious Roman Catholic childhood in India. A vivid recreation of a vanished world.

Mathias was born Roman Catholic through historical accident: Portuguese missionaries converted her ancestral South Indian coastal town of Mangalore in the sixteenth century. However, she grew up in Jamshedpur, North India, “The Steel City,” site of India’s largest steel company, a company town benevolently run by the Zoroastrians of Tata Steel.

There the Catholic church run by American Jesuits provided an all-encompassing universe–Mass, communal rosary at the grotto, the small groups of the Catholic Family Movement and a tightly-knit social life. In a pre-TV world, visiting friends was entertainment, juicy gossip flowed with homemade wine, and children sang, danced, and recited for guests. The private clubs were the other nexus of small-town life–screening open-air Hindi, Hollywood, and European movies almost daily; hosting one-act play competitions, as well as the quiz competitions and flower, fruit and vegetable competitions her mother often won. The club libraries were a jumble of well-thumbed books and ubiquitous Enid Blyton.

Reading was a way of escape from volatile fights with her mother–Grimm and Andersen read repeatedly, Greek myths, Norse myths, and Indian epics in tattered editions and, always, British children’s classics. Her father, a Chartered Accountant, who had returned to India after eight years in England to become head of accounts at Tata Steel, read her beloved stories and poems, acting out Shakespeare plays during midnight feasts, from which she recited speeches at school, aged six, earning a “double promotion,” skipping a school year.

Though you woke and heard the birds croak in Jamshedpur, with its jagged industrial skyline and roaring blast furnaces, it was also a city of parks, gardens, rivers, restaurants rendered magical by childhood’s appetite, and sprawling open-air markets with ducks, chicken and crab sold live for the slaughter;  the ecstatic neon geometry of Indian sweets; mandatory browsing in jewellery shops, and the Mecca of a second-hand bookstore where she steadily traded books to build up an aspirational library of classics.

The dreamy one-acre garden which surrounded the house, with trees to climb with a book, was a paradise to escape to with her pet dogs, ducks and chickens–a jumble of bright flowers, rock gardens, thirty fruit trees,  and vegetable gardens.   To a child, the large bright, airy sixteen-roomed house, originally built for British executives and filled with eccentric books, like a repository of the British Raj, was a formative universe of random reading.

Food was almost a character, everything homemade­­–sweets, pickles, ham, ketchup, wines, liqueurs, squash, and our version of Coca-Cola–an enterprise which required a full-time live-in cook, as the daily battle with dust and laundry needed a full-time live-in housekeeper. Meals–five a day–were events, the day’s scaffolding, and local women best known for their recipes.

With her father’s post-retirement academic job, the family moved into faculty housing on the campus of Xavier Labour Relations Institute, an American Jesuit-run business school in Jamshedpur, whose library, well-stocked with classic American literature and contemporary international drama and poetry, provided an intellectual explosion.

Mathias, irrepressible and rebellious, known as the naughtiest girl in the school, was finally expelled from school, aged nine, for disrupting classes with mischief and continual attempts at running away, and went to a boarding school, St Mary’s Convent, Nainital, run by German nuns in the Himalayas. The virtual end of childhood­–and a new adventure.

I’d be so honoured if you would buy a copy. Thank you

https://amzn.to/3qahEn3

 

 

Prodigies of Fast Writing

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How Fast Can You Write?

By Michael Agger 
Illustration by Rob Donnelly. Click image to expand. Hunched over my keyboard, I’m haunted by anecdotes of faster writers. Christopher Hitchens composing a Slate column in 20 minutes—after a chemo session, after a “full” dinner party, late on a Sunday night. The infamously productive Trollope, who used customized paper! “He had a note pad that had been indexed to indicate intervals of 250 words,” William F. Buckley told the Paris Review. “He would force himself to write 250 words per 15 minutes. Now, if at the end of 15 minutes he hadn’t reached one of those little marks on his page, he would write faster.” Buckley himself was a legend of speed—writing a complete book review in crosstown cabs and the like.
 
I remember, too, a former colleague who was blazingly fast. We would be joking at lunch—”Imagine if David Foster Wallace had written a children’s book”—and there it would be in my inbox, 15 minutes later. Not a perfect draft, but publish-it-on-your-blog good. He could sit down at the keyboard and toss off Chopin or Ragtime, while I was banging away at Chopsticks and making lots of mistakes. Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-du-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-du-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-DAH!
It’s no secret that writing is hard … but why can’t I be one of those special few for whom it comes easily? What am I doing wrong? Why haven’t I gotten any faster?

In search of the secret of quickness, I started with a Malcolm Gladwell passage that’s always piqued me. InOutliers, he discusses the now famous 10,000-hour rule—the amount of time it takes to achieve true mastery—and quotes the neurologist Daniel Levitin: “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concern pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.” Fiction 

writers? Really?

Read the entire article at http://www.slate.com/id/2301243

The Art of Parody

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Craig Brown: The Lost Diaries

How do you out-snob Virginia Woolf, out-raunch DH Lawrence and out-rant Germaine Greer? Craig Brown explains the parodist’s art
Craig Brown
Parodist Craig Brown. Photograph: BBC
Some authors appreciate being parodied . . .
  1. The Lost Diaries
  2. by Craig Brown
  4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

In 1912, Max Beerbohm published “The Mote in the Middle Distance”, his parody of Henry James. It begins: “It was with a sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively left it. But just where the deuce had he left it?”
Beerbohm was understandably anxious about James’s reaction. As well he might, since it so slyly captures James’s oblique, elliptical style, a style compared by HG Wells to “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den”.
But after dinner with Henry James, Edmund Gosse was able to reassure Beerbohm that James “desired me to let you know at once that no one can have read it with more wonder and delight than he”.
Later that year, James and Beerbohm were guests at the same party. When an admirer asked James his opinion on something-or-other, James pointed across the room to Beerbohm and said: “Ask that young man. He is in full possession of my innermost thoughts.”
On my own, more modest level, the roster of those who have enjoyed my parodies of them is wholly unpredictable. Marianne Faithfull sent me a thankyou letter, as did Roy Jenkins (his widow found it on his desk after his death, and kindly passed it on to me). WG Sebald also enjoyed my parody of his trip to the seaside (“High above me in the air, the seagull continued upon its vacuous and erratic journey through a sky still glowering in fury at the ceaseless intrusion of the crazed sun”), though, again, I only discovered this after he had died, having spent one shared lunch-party sheepishly trying to avoid him.
. . . while others do not.
Seven or eight years ago, I was at a large party consisting of perhaps a couple of hundred people. At one point, I glanced across the sea of heads to the other side of the room, only to be confronted by the terrifying sight of Harold Pinter staring back at me, his face set in a gargoylish grimace, each thumb stuck to the side of his head while his fingers waggled about in the traditional schoolboy gesture of derision.
It was a scary sight, at one and the same time daft and threatening, not to mention weirdly psychic (how did he know that I would glance over at that moment, or had he been pulling faces for some time, on the off-chance?)
The next day, I heard that he had said to our hostess: “Is that who I think it is?” “Yes. Are you going to punch him?” she said, to which he replied, “I wouldn’t dirty my fists.”
Parody is a remarkably libel-proof mode of abuse.
If you call someone a liar or a crook in print, the next day you are likely to be showered with letters from Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Runne. If, on the other hand, you demonstrate what you are getting at in parodic form, you will probably get off scot-free. Parody is read between the lines. It is as though lawyers, denied humour’s x-ray specs, are unable to see what everyone else can see. A parody gets at the truth by parading truth’s opposite: the reader is left to put two and two together. So as the former royal butler Paul Burrell fondly reminisces about his life at Buckingham Palace, he simultaneously by-passes legal objections:
“Her Majesty was a lovely lady. She thought the world of me. She would often call by on her nights off. I got used to that tell-tale knock on the door. She would drum out the opening bars of the National Anthem with her clenched fist. That way, I knew it was her. I’d open the door, and there she’d be, dressed in casual clothes – a pair of designer denims and a favourite kaftan. Often she’d let her hair hang down, so it flowed over her creamy shoulders. It gave her the more relaxed and carefree look she had always craved. ‘You know, you should keep it like that, ma’am – you look truly fabulous!’ I once ventured, but she looked downcast. ‘My public would never accept me like that, Paul!’ she said. ‘They like me with it up!’ At that point, she got out her guitar and sang me one of my all-time favourite songs – Ralph McTell’s Streets of London. It was a very private moment.”
A parody can be both unfair and funny or fair and funny. But it should never be either unfunny and fair, or unfair and unfunny.
Edward Lear was, I think, one of the great Victorian originals, but at the same time I consider this parody of his nonsense verse by John Clarke, reproduced in John Gross’s recent Oxford Book of Parodies, is indisputably accurate:
There was an old man with a beard,
A funny old man with a beard
He had a big beard
A great big old beard
That amusing old man with a beard.
Often it is the addition of a single, unassuming word that jolts the humdrum into the humorous. In the above case, I think it is the word “amusing”.
Many funny writers don’t have a sense of humour.
Instead of laughing at someone else’s joke, they tend to say: “That’s funny,” and then squirrel the joke away, ready for a crafty respray at some time in the future.
Just as most fishermen don’t like the taste of fish, many humorists don’t have a sense of humour. Jonathan Swift claimed to have only ever laughed twice in his entire life; Alexander Pope couldn’t remember ever having laughed. Like many professional humorists, Keith Waterhouse would never tell jokes in company, saying it was the closest thing to throwing gold coins down the drain.
To make some parodies more credible, the parodist must first make their originals less ridiculous.
I remember reading this passage by Germaine Greer against, of all things, teddy bears, in the Guardian a year or two ago, and feeling bewildered as to how I might parody it:
“Teddies and bunnies are taken into exams and sat on the desks, as if to be without them for three hours would induce hysteria and fainting spells. Soft toys are left along with the flowers at the scenes of fatalities. Wherever they are, they are truly hideous, beyond kitsch. By making our children fall in love with such ugliness, we are preparing them for a life without taste.
. . . I have certainly seen a two-year-old humping her teddy bear. If we persist in decoying children away from demanding relationships with humans by providing them with undemanding animal fetish objects, we should not be surprised if they end up like Big Brother housemate Jonty Stern, who, at the age of 36, is still a virgin.”
It struck me then, and still strikes me now, as a perfect example of self-parody, a condensed lampoon of all that writer’s worst tendencies towards needless iconoclasm, exasperation, sensationalism, exaggeration and the hoovering up of current news items: like so many opinionistas, Greer can never see the wrong end of a stick without trying to grab it with both hands.
The trouble for the parodist, though, is that Greer leaves no room for improvement: it’s perfect as it is. The same goes for Edwina Currie’s diaries, Tracey Emin’s meanderings, John Prescott’s splutterings and Harold Pinter’s poems. In my new collection of parodies, The Lost Diaries, which is arranged along the lines of a calendar, with one or two entries for each day of the year, I have placed a number of such pieces under April 1st, with the asterisked caution to the reader that they are, alas, real.
Every child is born a parodist.
Children learn to speak by parodying their parents. When grown-ups roll their eyes in amusement at children’s remarks and exclaim “The things they come up with!” they are in fact laughing at a skewed version of themselves. The process continues as life goes on: most political speeches, for instance, are parodies of earlier political speeches. President Obama’s oratory has the same rhythms as Dr Martin Luther King’s, and it sometimes seems that every speaker at a British political party conference has come as Winston Churchill.
The more accurate the parody, the more likely it is to be confused with the real thing.
Terence Blacker and the late William Donaldson, aka Henry Root, once published a spoof of tabloid journalism called “101 Things You Didn’t Know About the Royal Love-Birds” by “Talbot Church, The Man the Royals Trust”, to tie in with the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. It revealed that the Ferguson family motto is “Full steam ahead” and included items such as “Fergie wore braces on her teeth until she was 16. When these were removed she blossomed overnight into the flame-haired beauty with an hour-glass figure we see today – but their removal left her with a slight speech impediment and she was unable to say the word ‘solicitor’ until she was 21.”
It was such an accurate parody of tabloid journalism that it was lifted without a by-your-leave by the Sun, who did not realise it was a spoof, and later by the American biographer Kitty Kelley, who inserted Talbot Church jokes into her book about the royal family, presumably in the belief they were hard facts.
To appreciate parody, you must be capable of holding two contradictory ideas in your head simultaneously.
For some years, I wrote the parodic Bel Littlejohn column in the Guardian. It seemed to me that only about half the readers twigged that it was a spoof; the others, whether they liked her or loathed her, believed Bel to be the real thing. In 1997, she was given her own entry in Who’s Who (as was my spoof Spectator columnist Wallace Arnold). After writing a Why-Oh-Why piece on the need for correct grammar, Wallace Arnold received a letter from the chairman of the government’s new Good English Campaign, Sir Trevor McDonald, asking him to join them.
I was reliably informed that the historian Eric Hobsbawm once told someone that he had known Bel in the 70s, but that her writing had gone off a bit. When she mentioned in one column that she had been a student at Leeds University with Jack Straw in the 1960s, she received a letter inviting her to join the Leeds University Old Alumni Association. She once wrote a piece in support of the progressive school Summerhill, which was threatened with closure. “Okay so maybe the kids can’t read and write – but when’s that ever been the point of school? Last year, two of those so-called ‘uneducated kids achieved a Grade C, thank you very much, and an under-matron gained her black belt in karate . . . The school budgerigar, Tarantino, won the underwater swimming competition, for which he was awarded a posthumous trophy.”
A couple of days later, I received a letter from the chair of the Centre for Self-Managed Learning. “Absolutely spot-on – wonderful . . .” he wrote. “We are 100% with the sentiments in your article and are keen to do something practical to address the issue.” I realised with a start that he was not being ironic.
But it was never my intention to fool people. What would be the point? A parody only works if, with one side of his brain, the reader knows that it is a joke but with the other side is able to entertain the idea that it is real. To someone who thought she was real, Dame Edna Everage would just be a bossy, self-promoting Australian vulgarian. To someone who could only see her as an artificial construct, she would just be a man dressed up as a woman saying deliberately provocative things. For the joke to emerge, the brain must be capable of holding both ideas at once. The same is true of all parody and impersonation, and perhaps of all art: those who look at a painting of apples by Cézanne and see a real bunch of apples are as blind to the art within as those who can see only strokes of paint, representing nothing.
Parody represents a collaboration, however unwilling, between the parodist and his victim.
It is sometimes said that the best parodies are affectionate. I don’t think this is always true. Max Beerbohm had a deep loathing of Rudyard Kipling, but his Kipling parody (“An’ it’s trunch trunch truncheon does the trick”) is a thing of joy. The Mary Ann Bighead column in Private Eye is manifestly not enamoured of its real-life target, but remains sublimely funny.
On the other hand, parody is a pas-de-deux, in that the parodist must inhabit the language and speech-rhythms of the parodied while subverting them for his own ends. Thus a certain strange empathy is called for, no matter how cold-hearted.
There is no place with so few good books as the parodist’s library.
Among the books on my shelves are Barbara Cartland’s Love at the Helm; The Crossroads Cookbook; My Tune by Simon Bates; all four volumes of Katie Price’s autobiography; The Duchess of York’s Budgie: The Little Helicopter; the autobiographies of Edward Du Cann, Anthea Turner, Norman Fowler, Tim Rice, George Carey, Max Clifford and Peter Purves; Reg Kray’s Thoughts, Philosophy and Poetry; The Wit of Prince Philip; Enoch Powell’s Collected Poems; My Friends’ Secrets by Joan Collins; Inspired and Outspoken: The Collected Speeches of Ann Widdecombe; and Doris Stokes’s Voices of Love.
They are all heavily annotated, with the most gruesome passages all dutifully underlined. For instance, my copy of Prezza: The Autobiography of John Prescott has multiple markings beneath the regurgitation passages, and my copy of Tony Blair’s autobiography carries heavy underlinings beneath his night of passion with Cherie. In Simon Heffer’s new book, horribly titled Strictly English: The Correct Way to Write . . . and Why it Matters, I have put a double ring around “I once got a job by finding 24 mistakes in a piece of prose in which I had been told I would find 20, and which had been given to me as part of a test during an interview: this was because the person who had set the test, good though his English was, did not know about gerunds.” A double ring tends to mean that a passage can go straight into my parody of it, completely unaltered.
It is the task of the regular writer to pick exactly the right word. The task of the parodist is different: he must pick exactly the wrong word.
“To Chatsworth. Poky.” This was my Woodrow Wyatt diary; at three words, it is probably the shortest parody I have written.
. . . But occasionally the two aims coincide.
“Suicide mass-murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism,” wrote Martin Amis in The Second Plane.
Topical humour lasts only as long as its victims . . .
Like a particularly giggly form of parasite, parody can expect to live only as long as its host. “Who’s Nancy dell’Olio?” a teenager asked me the other day, while browsing through the The Lost Diaries. For a second, I struggled to remember. “The ex-girlfriend of Sven-Goran Eriksson!” I explained. “Who’s Sven-Goran Eriksson?” came the reply.
The book is already 400 pages long, but in 50 years time, the book will require a further 400 pages of explanatory notes by a learned academic. Take the “F”‘s, for instance: Faithfull, Marianne, Fayed, Mohamed; Feltz, Vanessa; Fergusson, Major Ronald; Fermoy, Ruth, Lady”. I suspect Review readers may already be struggling. I can give them just the briefest rest-stop – “Flaubert, Gustave” – before plunging back in with “Fletcher, Cyril; Follett, Barbara; Follett, Ken; Ford, Tom and Fowler, Sir Norman” et cetera.
Like so many things these days, the book is vulnerable to built-in obsolescence – particularly as I have a perverse interest in already-ghostly figures such as Cyril Fletcher and Ruth, Lady Fermoy (whose name, for some reason, always makes me titter). Her full index-entry is “Fermoy, Ruth, Lady: rejoices at the Queen Mother breaking wind 112 (and footnote); begs like dog 182; plays ‘Any Old Iron’ 212-13.” Needless to say, all those jokes are based around the idea of their unlikelihood – but who, in a few years time, will be able to recollect that Ruth, Lady Fermoy would have taken a fierce pride in not breaking wind, or begging like a dog, or leading cockney sing-songs?
Among my Fs, the only entry with an odds-on hope of being known in 100 years time is Lucian Freud, who pops up in Queen Elizabeth II’s diary when he is painting her portrait (“Freud: not a name you hear very often,” she reflects). His closest runner is Lady Antonia Fraser. “Orders Château d’Yquem on behalf of the sugar plantation workers of East Timor; tips the Kinnocks; quizzes Castro about Joanna Trollope; finds Paris ‘very French'”, reads her entry: yet more explanatory toil for our poor, exhausted footnoter.
. . . though there are one or two who get away, and long outlive their host.
Some of the most notable classics of English humour – Diary of a Nobody, Three Men in a Boat, parts of Alice in Wonderland, Cold Comfort Farm – began life as parodies of works that are now forgotten. In the reverse of the normal process, they now ensure their victims a ghostly kind of immortality.
There is no avoiding parody . . .
The greatest writers may also be the most parodiable, as their style and vision are necessarily singular. Alan Bennett, John Updike, Philip Roth are all exceptional writers, and it is this idiosyncrasy that makes them susceptible to parody. God Himself is peculiarly easy to ape: I remember sailing through the Old Testament section of my Theology A-level by making up all the rumbling, hoity-toity and frequently bad-tempered quotes from God and his prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel and Hosea. It was so much easier than remembering the real ones.
In the introduction to his endlessly enjoyable Oxford Book of Parodies, John Gross explains the way in which parodists often rejoice in their subjects. “They are not telling us that we should not write like Robert Browning (or George Crabbe or Henry James or Muriel Spark), still less that Browning should not write like Browning – that he should choose to apprehend the universe in this one peculiar fashion. And how gratifying that he should keep it up – that he can always be relied on to be Browningesque.”
. . . Unless you are a bore. But even bores can be parodied, just as long as they are boring enough.
The only way to be truly beyond parody is to be run-of-the-mill. But you should be careful to be just interesting enough, as excessive tedium becomes a joke in itself. When I read Margaret Drabble’s memoir The Pattern in the Carpet I realised that I had struck gold. One sentence, about her tiresome “dotty” aunt (could editors please declare a moratorium on dotty aunts?), reads: “I maintain (though she queried this) that it was I who usefully introduced her to scampi and chips, at an excellent but now defunct hostelry overlooking the Bristol Channel at Linton.” Indeed, I kicked off my parody with it, and then added some more, for good measure:
“I maintain (though she might, in truth, query this) that it was I who usefully introduced my Aunt Phyl to scampi and chips, at an excellent but now defunct castellated hostelry overlooking the Bristol Channel at Linton in 1973. Or was it 1974? Conceivably (and here I am, metaphorically speaking, sticking my neck out) it was 1972, or even 1971, though if it was 1971, then it might not have been the castellated hostelry that we ate in, as a useful visit to my local library yesterday afternoon between 3.30pm and 4.23pm confirmed me in my suspicion that the hostelry in question was in fact closed for the greater part of 1971, owing to a refurbishment programme. In that case, and if it really was 1971, which, frankly, seems increasingly unlikely given the other dates available, then it is within the realms of possibility that we ate at another hostelry entirely, possibly one overlooking the North Sea, and, if so, it is equally possible that we feasted not on scampi and chips but on shepherd’s pie. Did we also consume a side-order of vegetables? Memory is, I have found, a fickle servant, so I am unable to recall whether, on this occasion, we indulged in a side-order of vegetables, if we were there at all.”
Extracts from The Lost Diaries:
Virginia Woolf
May 7th
Am I merely snobbish in thinking that the lower classes have no aptitude or instinct for great literature or indeed literature of any kind? This morning I went into the kitchen & found Nelly sitting down reading a cookery book. How will you ever improve your lower-class mind if you spend your days simply reading receipts? I asked her, kindly.
Her reply was intolerable. She said that she was reading her cookery book for my benefit & if I did not want her to read it then fine, she would gladly seek employment elsewhere among people who would appreciate her & would not seek to undermine her every move, & do not call me lower class when I am lower middle class than you very much – and you are not much higher if truth be told.
I could take no more & so lashed out at her with a tea-towel, flipping it again & again in her odious fat face screaming at her, You have made me the most miserable person in the whole of Sussex and I shall not forgive you for it.
Unbeknownst to me, Nelly was carrying her own tea-towel about her unduly bulging person as plump as a ptarmigan & as I paused to regain my breath she whipped it out from its hiding place & struck me with it once twice three no four times in quick & brutal succession. She persists; brutally tramples. I asked myself: am I forever doomed to let every worry, spite, irritation & obsession scratch and claw at my brain?
It was at this point that I recalled the disciplines taught so fortuitously at the unarmed combat course at Rodmell village hall in which Vita & I enrolled last year. I set my fingers in a V and, leaping up from the kitchen floor, I poked them into Nelly’s ill-formed, damp & porcine eyes. She howled her lower-class howl & fell to the ground, begging for a mercy which, in my present state, I had little inclination to offer. I remarked upon how underbred, illiterate, insistent, raw & ultimately nauseating she was before retiring from the room to my bed, therewith to restore myself with a little George Eliot.
DH Lawrence,
Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell
November 29th, 1922
Dear Lady Ottoline,
I cannot tell you how thoroughly we both enjoyed staying with you last weekend. Everything was so perfect – the scintillating conversation, the delicious food, the excellent wine, and all miraculously brought together to perfection by the finest hostess in the country!
By the way, I do hope I didn’t cause any undue offence at dinner with your guests on Saturday evening when, just as that lovely soup was being served, I tore off my trousers, pulled out my aroused member and began to chase your buxom serving wench around the dining-room table.
I noticed that your first thought was that the tomato soup in the wench’s great bowl was being tossed hither and thither over your well-dressed guests. How typical of you and your feeble servility towards the pathetic silliness of propriety that you should care more for the laundering of clothes – those absurd chains that keep man from his true self – than for the sex-flow that keeps man alive and is the only honest expression of animal energy that exists on this miserable globe.
And when I eventually caught up with her, and managed to grapple her to the ground, and was struggling to grasp her bountiful delights within my needy palms – then you implored me to forbear, you rang your bell and insisted in your cheap and degraded voice that there was ‘a time and a place for everything’.
Do you realise what a loathsome thing you are? You make me ill. I wanted to light a flame, to warm my body against the heat of a real woman’s naked form, to worship the sun-god of the sex-flow – and all you could think of to do was beg me hysterically to desist! You and your sort have a disgusting attitude towards sex, a disgusting desire to stop it and insult it. You are like a worm cut in half, with one half discarded in a bin while the other half wriggles around in a kind of grey hell.
Nevertheless, the main course was absolutely delicious, and I know that everyone also thoroughly enjoyed the pudding. And the rest of the weekend was every bit as heavenly! You were really extremely kind to entertain us all so extravagantly. Once again, thank you so much for a really wonderful weekend.
Yours ever,
David

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Want to write a novel in a month? Try Nanawrimo!

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This is in my calendar for 2011. What a great project! I have too many pots simmering on the fire, and not enough energy for this year, but am going to get into gear with ideas and research materials for next year. A date, anyone?

What is NaNoWriMo?

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.
In 2008, we had over 120,000 participants. More than 20,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.
So, to recap:
What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month’s time.
Who: You! We can’t do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.
Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.
When: You can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.
Still confused? Just visit the How NaNoWriMo Works page!

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8 Writing Tips from C.S. Lewis

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8 Writing Tips from C.S. Lewis

Posted by Donald L. Hughes in Craft of Writing on April 20, 2010 | 21 responses
cslewisIn 1959 an American schoolgirl wrote to C. S. Lewis asking him for advice on the craft of writing. He sent her a list of eight rules, and I add my own editorial comments to each of them.
1. Turn off the radio.
Today, writers also need to turn off the TV, the iPod or the music streaming over the Internet. I know that some writers claim that background  sounds enhances their creativity, but I don’t believe it for a minute, and apparently Lewis didn’t either. Writing is a solitary activity, where words are formed in a special space of the brain, and anything that competes for that space will result in a decrease in writing quality. Good writers are able to be alone with their thoughts and don’t need filler or distractions.
2. Read good books and avoid most magazines.
If you’re interested in writing good books then you need to read good books. Feed your mind with quality material and you will be more likely to be able to reproduce it. It is very difficult to find good Christian writing today; top selling books like The Shack are inferior in literary quality, so writers end up being torn between producing something good or something that sells well. Ideally, you will want to write something of literary quality that will be popular, and a path to that goal is reading quality books.  Style is important and it is best absorbed though books that have stood the test of time. The writings of C.S. Lewis are a good place to begin reading.

3. Write with the ear, not the eye. Make every sentence sound good.
This is Lewis’ most important rule in my view. There is a cadence to good writing and it is important that you discover it for yourself. This, of course, is another good reason for shutting off the radio, TV or music as you write. Experienced writers know that all sentences do not sound good in the beginning. It is best to get thoughts on paper first and then come back to the draft and tune each sentence.

4. Write only about things that interest you. If you have no interests, you won’t ever be a writer.
There is genius in these words. Too many Christian writers compose their literary work out of a sense of divine obligation, a quest for profit or a deadline–rather than pure godly passion.  Obligation, profit or a deadline often debase passion, but of course it is nice when all three elements can be combined. Sacrifice them all if you must–except for your passion for those things which interest.

5. Be clear. Remember that readers can’t know your mind. Don’t forget to tell them exactly what they need to know to understand you.
In all my teaching and conference work, I emphasize clarity above all things to embryonic writers. There is a direct connection between clarity, elegance and quality in writing, so clarity is always the first goal.

6. Save odds and ends of writing attempts, because you may be able to use them later.
Everything is made out of something. That’s why it is so important for writers to keep a journal.  It is easy to forget thoughts, story ideas, snippets of conversations, events and experiences, so a journal is essential. Most writers have writing fragments–false starts, incomplete manuscripts or unsuccessful submissions–and Lewis is reminding us to save all these things and to use them as resources for other writing projects. I have so many odds and ends of writing that I store them in large plastic bins from Wal-Mart. This article was written from a fragment I first put in my file in 1997.

7. You need a well-trained sense of word-rhythm, and the noise of a typewriter will interfere.
Lewis emphasizes the importance of the cadence of the words again here, and it is a point well taken. Of all his suggestions, however, this one is perhaps the most outdated. Computer keyboards are far quieter than the clickity-clack of old typewriters.  I use many different methods to get my thoughts on paper, but when I want to do my best work I always revert to writing in longhand on yellow legal pads. I think C.S. Lewis probably smiles on those who connect the mind and the hand to the written word in such an elemental way. That’s the way he did it and he came up with some pretty good books.

8. Know the meaning of every word you use.
Make a hobby us learning new words and using them in your writing. The purpose is not to be circumlocutious, but to be able to communicate aptly. A wide vocabulary adds substance to your writing. Some writers use words with which they have only glancing familiarity. Be sure you completely understand the meaning of every word you use. A fat dictionary is a good thing for a writer to own, but for efficiency you may wish to type this into the Google search box– define: circumlocution — in just that format. You will get the definition for any word you input after the colon.

Writing is a craft. You start as a novice before you become an apprentice and then develop into a master like C.S. Lewis.  Since writing is a craft, not a gift, virtually anyone can acquire the skill and become a master over time. Remember, however, that the time must be invested in actually writing (not thinking about writing) and in reading the work of those who have mastered the craft.

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Geraldine McCaughrean on Retellings

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I also do lots of retellings… because what’s the point in keep inventing new stories when there are terrific ones already out there which people have been enjoying for centuries but which are getting forgotten? Myths, legends, folk and fairy stories, famous books (made easier)