All dressed up in Christmas gift dress and the crown I made for her birthday, the lass attempts to put spread on her “polar” bread herself. She will accept help, after a while. Soon, relatives will be arriving for a small family birthday celebration. Big girl now.
It was rainy and sleety and the melting snow made puddles everywhere. I remembered to dress for the weather, for once.
The local bus company has finally got its act together – in cooperation with the other companies running public transport in Trøndelag – and issued electronic passes. I’ve been using mine since the start (July last year, if I’m not mistaken) and it’s mostly problem free*, and all in all a great development.
However, the posters advertising the system on the buses: Not so great. They read: “Nå kan du reise elektronisk i hele Trøndelag.” (You can now travel electronically in the whole of Trøndelag.) Yes, well, all fine and dandy, but how do you “travel electronically”? Sounds like teleportation to me, and if they have invented working teleportation, why is there a complete mess when the weather turns unfriendly (like it has over the last few days)? Yesterday it took me almost an hour and a half to get home, despite the buses (for once) corresponding in the centre of town. Teleportation would have been a great improvement.
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* Well, except for one thing: If there is a problem with your renewal/payment and the card registers “no travel product available” when you scan it on the bus, you have to pay the normal ticket prize (bloody expensive, too). I suppose you migth be able to get a refund, but that would involve standing in line at the office in town, and the tickets are not THAT expensive. And with the old cards you paid, got a sticker on the card and were good to go, now there is a 24 wait before you’re guaranteed that the card system has registered the renewal, which, if you’re ever so slightly scatterbrained (*puts up hand*), is a problem.
The lass is two today. I have no idea how this happened.
There is a picture, but it’s friends and family only, if you’re registered as such on Flickr you can see it here, if you’re not, but would like to be, get in touch (firstname or nick @ domain name works, or leave a comment).
Also, it’s Elvis’ birthday.
My grandfather died last night. He reached the respectable age of 93 and he’s been quite ill for some time, he had prostate cancer and only a few days ago they found it had spread to the skeleton. So it was hardly unexpected, but there is sadness obviously. Though in many ways I’ve already mourned the man he used to be, it’s been years since he was anything like the grandfather I used to know who’d take me walking in the woods near his house and convince me that Colargol lived there. So more than sadness, there is a sort of emptiness, someone who’s been part of my life “for ever and ever” is no longer here, and there is relief – for his sake, because he really wasn’t very well towards the end and I think he was ready to go on to whatever comes next, and for myself, because I had a constant guilty concience about not visiting often enough – and there is guilt at feeling relief.
And then there is joy and excitement, because tomorrow it will be all of two years since the lass arrived in our lives, and it is really very difficult to feel sad. Life is a very mixed-up sort of business.
But I rather thought a church was appropriate today. This is Vår Frue Kirke, one of my favourite churches, still lit by the Christmas lights in the trees. At Christmas the church became Norway’s first 24 hour open church, if you’re in Trondheim and need someone to talk to or somewhere to sit quietly for a while, this is the place. A noteworthy, and praiseworthy, initiative.
There was a thaw and I walked the lass to daycare and myself to work, wading in ten centimetres of slush. I got wet.
And then later it started snowing again.
The lass was kneeling on her chair yesterday and leaned too forcefully on the back, so it fell over. She hit her face on the corner (mercifully a rounded corner) of a table, and I was fully expecting her to have a pretty ghastly black eye this morning, but luckily this little blue spot on her cheek and a small red mark over her eye is all the result there is.
As a mixed-race novelist (hell, just as a novelist), I would like to say to your leader writer (The trouble with Brick Lane, October 27) that I reserve the right to imagine anyone and anything I damn well please. If I want to write about Jewish people, or paedophiles or Patagonians or witches in 12th-century Finland, then I will do so, despite being “authentically” none of these things. I also give notice that if I choose, I intend to imagine what your muddled writer quaintly terms “real people” living in “real communities”. My work may convince or it may not. However, I will not accept that I have any a priori responsibility to anyone – white, black or brown, let alone any “community” – to represent them in any particular way.
If Monica Ali isn’t brown enough or working-class enough or Sylheti enough for you, then, well, that’s your weird little identity-political screw-up. Presumably she’s not white enough for someone else. I’m sick of all this cant about cultural authenticity, and sick of the duty (imposed only on “minority” writers) to represent in some quasi-political fashion. Art isn’t about promoting social cohesion, or cementing community relations. It’s about telling the truth as you see it, even if it annoys or offends some people. That’s called freedom of expression, and last time I checked we all thought it was quite a good idea.
Hari Kunzru
London
Though it’s not Kunzru’s subject as such, he succintcly summarises most of what I feel is wrong with political trends in literary criticism and theorising (such as feminist literary theory or post-colonial literary theory).*
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* The other problem, of course, is that political literary theory is political, not literary. It hardly ever says anything useful about literature and tends to just rehash political truisms that all intended readers agree with anyway.
I stayed up too late finishing this, as I didn’t want to start out being late. I decided to do the layouts weekly, preferably Sunday evening (with Mon.-Sun. pictures), which leaves week 1 and week 53 with only four pictures. I am planning on using Impressions of Imagination for colour throughout the year and sticking to the same font(s) and white background, with a clean and simple layout. What with the nature of the project, I’m thinking the images will have such diverse colour schemes that finding a background that works for a whole week’s worth would be tricky, and the white will help draw everything together and at the same time prevent over-fussyness. I hope.
