This Itch of Writing

Blood for Breakfast

Settle down now, everyone, settle down. Right, now, as you know, I´m giving two big lectures this week. (What did you say, George? Well, they´re important to me, and there were a lot of people there at the first one. No, not just idiots. Now that´s enough, George, or I´ll send you to sit outside the Head Mistress´s office...) Where was I. Oh, yes? I´m going to have to leave you to be very sensible and quiet while I´m away. And what I´d like you to do is think about the relationship of symbols to reality. (What´s that, Alicia? Yes,... Read more →

Pure noticing and the slippery double

One of my Darwin cousins who I've not yet met (there are a lot of us) is the poet Ruth Padel. Her mother was a biologist, and her grandmother Nora was a botanist in the days when botany was more or less the only acceptable science for women. Apparently Ruth took her mother to a poetry reading, and afterwards her mother said, 'I see the point of poets now. They notice things.' Don't laugh - though poets are allowed a wry chuckle before they open the email which tells them their publisher has gone bust because their Arts Council funding... Read more →

Listening to Copernicus

Litlove's comment about self-belief in The Muse, if you like has sent me back to wondering about where self-belief in writers actually comes from. All the writing gurus, and all the other gurus too, keep up a chant about believing in yourself: whole careers have been founded on such 'inspirational' talk (talking of which, what ever happened to 'inspiring' as a perfectly good word for exactly the same thing?). But believing in anything - from God, to your being about to swim your personal best time - is by definition something you can't choose to happen: so either you believe... Read more →

Seeing a hundred colours

I was reminded today of something my great-aunt, the artist Gwen Raverat, once wrote which is just the kind of counter-intuitive idea which I love: The whole of a long life is spent learning to see, to know what one is looking at with one’s inner mind: not in gaining experience, but in losing it. It is counter-intuitive, isn't it, the idea that experience makes you see less well, but I think there's something in it. I know that to take photographs well I need to clear my head out, shed preconceptions, words and analysis. Really seeing the way light... Read more →

99% boredom, 1% Barbra Streisand

I got home yesterday evening, after a day spent doing things other than writing, and switched on the computer. When at last it was ready to chunter off and pick up the day's email, one that came in was from my publisher. Now they don't bombard me with stuff, and I'm not expecting anything this week, so was this big news or small, good news or bad? Either way, it and a whole lot of other online stuff would need dealing with, so I had an excuse for not sitting down at the computer straight away. I changed out of... Read more →

Looking for the hammer marks

So if there's a difference between scientific truth and artistic truth, I was thinking yesterday, gazing out over an audience which included three Fellows of the Royal Society, is there also a difference between scientific (one might more broadly say 'academic') creativity and artistic creativity? No one who's read any good popular science, or something like Simon Singh's extraordinarily lucid account of the detective story that led to the proving of Fermat's Last Theorem, could doubt that creative thought - inspiration, if you like - is very much part of what makes science happen. (Perspiration too, of course, but then... Read more →

The golden sovereign

I've been delighted by an exasperated quotation from the poet Frances Cornford, describing her family's habit of discussing everything, even personal matters, in 'a thoroughly weighing Darwinian manner' which the family always assumed would, as the artist Gwen Raverat's biographer Frances Spalding puts it, 'inevitably arrive at an authoritative truth.' 'But the truth of art isn't the same kind of truth, as Gwen and Frances knew better than most,' I found myself writing. 'And there's always a risk that one's more a-rational, intuitive, un-logical creative processes are broken on the wheel of rational analysis and ruthlessly reasonable thought.' And then,... Read more →

Jumping the gap

I was startled, and slightly dismayed, to see that my normal 'Hm, must be about time for another blog post' reflex hasn't kicked in on time: it's been a longer gap since my last than I meant. Normally another idea starts to knock on the door quite soon, sparked by something that happens, someone else's blog, some conversation I've had. Maybe it was partly absorbed by putting some thoughts together on internet reviewing for Vulpes Libris. Maybe it was the fact that Wednesday evening, when it was already rather overdue, was very nicely taken up with a writing friend and... Read more →

Sometimes you have to stop

A couple of days ago I stopped working for lunch. My head was still full of the plans I'd been making for the last stage of my PhD. With A Secret Alchemy finished, I now have to hold onto the whole of it, mentally speaking, and write 'a commentary on its structure, its use of narrative technique, its relation to other literary works and an exposition of the aims and concerns that lay behind its composition.' When you learn that according to the university regulations I must also make it clear that I am 'well acquainted with the history and... Read more →

The Ancestral Elephant

Writing of the elephant in the room, in my last post, reminded me of something I've been dodging ever since I started this blog. Down our way he's called The Ancestor (though isn't that also a character in Moomintroll?). Yes, him, Charles Darwin. Okay, there, I said it. I guess most readers of this blog aren't surprised, but it's what many people think but don't ask when they meet me and my name, while others do ask immediately. (If you're wondering, he's my grandfather's grandfather, and I'm named after his cousin and wife, Emma Wedgwood) The thing is, I've been... Read more →