Wendy House Wednesday

This is the first in a series of Wednesday household hints and tips. I'm going to try to follow them myself. The instructions are:

• Don't over-think.
• Spend no more than 15 minutes.
• It doesn't have to be perfect.

Clean out your bread bin. Empty it. Give it a wipe and an airing. Re-wrap anything that needs it. Chuck anything that isn’t going to get eaten and dispose of empty wrappers. Check the freezer for bread that should be defrosted and used soon. Note anything you’ve run out of on the shopping list. Now go and feed the ducks.

In which I become a mushroom farmer

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Here is @CourierGo's mushroom farm all laid out, complete with the end-of-life book from Oxfam that will act as the field. It has a broken spine and looks like a historical romance, in which a young woman becomes pregnant after the local laird forces his attentions on her. Meanwhile, his wife is desperate to conceive but can't. @OxfamBooksTW  offered me several options from the recycling heap -- a Roget's Thesaurus and a copy of Middlemarch with a torn cover (both of these were too thick).

I thought it would be a fun activity to do with Alec,  but when I invited him to come and help he ran away shouting about Rastamouse. His loss.

First I soaked the book. It bubbled a lot and I left it in for longer than the recommended 15 minutes because Bettany started rooting and chewing on her fists so I had to bub her, and then she needed a nappy change and then Alec wanted help with the pot and would I find him another episode of Rastamouse.

Next I had to spread the spawn on the pages -- every 40 pages or so. It's mixed in with millet seed. I'm sure there's a good reason for that and before I had children I would have researched it and reported back. These days, I just accept most things in the same way that I accept all the physics stuff that stops us flying off into the sun. I think I'm happier for that.

The last stage is elastic banding the sodden spawn-stuffed book so it stays shut and stuffing it into the bag provided. I don't have a photo of that because Rastamouse finished.

Botanising and ghost-busting with Meredith

Meredith has very kindly agreed to run a spin-off of her World of Warcraft Tuesday Knights campaign for my character the night elf Galatea Dusklight. This means that Galatea will keep up with Panril and the guys in terms of level, skills and character development; and it means that I get a fortnightly dose of gamey goodness.

Two weeks ago Galatea was dismayed to find herself framed for murder in her own home town. She put on her gumshoes, enlisted the help of her fiancé Tyrion and walked the streets of Darnassus until she caught the murderer. It turned out that the murderer was their childhood friend who had gone mad from jealousy. She abducted poor Tyrion and Galatea had to rush in and save him. I was surprised at how irritated I felt about the whole relationship with Tyrion -- he's apprenticed to Galatea's father and is eager to settle down. Galatea, it seems, now has a taste for adventure and is not happy with the idea of laying aside her druidic path in order to please him.

The next adventure, played out yesterday, had Galatea's mother, a herbalist, sending her out to a distant ruin to collect some rare purple lotus flowers from the ruins at Emet Erith. The adventure started with a few embarrassments: she had to borrow three gold off her mother; and then hired a big cat to ride, tried to mount and ended up facing the creature's tail. Time for some riding lessons. The flower-picking was complicated by banshees in the ruins and a distraught druid named Sirilian who had woken from the Emerald Dream to find his wife a troubled ghost. 'Can you free her by severing the connection between her body and spirit? I can't bring myself to do it.' Galatea, it seems, can't resist a love story so she signed up. She dispatched three banshees and was surprised to find that when slain these dishevelled horrors turn into solemn, grateful High Elves ghosts who bow and then vanish. Fighting banshee was OK; fighting two was a close-run thing that needed a fair bit of luck and lot of Cure Light Wounds.

The quest turned up a goodly haul of loot: a necklace giving +1 to armour class from Sirilion; and a robe that gives +1 to Galatea's healing spells from the Archdruid who was impressed by Galatea's ghostbusting and was grateful to hear news of Sirilion. Also, she managed to flog some surplus purple lotus to a herbalist in Darnassus which much improved her cash flow situation.

I only played a couple of sessions with the other Tuesday Knights and I'd been finding it hard to get a handle on Galatea: she doesn't have any stand-out flaws (like Clodius who with his low, low intelligence would hit first and ask questions much, much later) or any strange gifts like Sister Justinia's singing. Playing Meredith's more character-led games (I'm not a huge fan of combat rounds, although playing them out with Alec's toys helps me to visualise it) has really helped to flesh out my night elf druid. I knew that she was reckless -- when we met her she was hugely in debt after a bet that went wrong. I didn't really appreciate the effect this would have on the people around her -- her... I suppose the Archdruid is technically her boss does not get on well with her, but is now gaining a grudging respect from him. I feel rather sorry for her fiance -- but not so sorry that she will eschew her adventuring ways!

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

April's prescription is a poet who is well known and much loved in the USA, but less so in the UK. Sarah lent me a collection of Mary Oliver's work from the UK poetry publisher Bloodaxe Books

I came across the title poem in 2009 when I joined a group doing The Artist's Way that Sarah co-ordinated. It came up because of this quote which has become a bit of a touchstone for me:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves.

The soft animal of Mary Oliver's body loves to lie quietly in wild places and watch wild things. Because she watches and waits patiently she sees marvels, like a fox playing in a cranberry patch, which she polishes up so that less patient and watchful people can appreciate them too.

Wild Geese includes prose as well as poetry -- I love reading about how other writers work, so it was a joy to find occasional pieces like 'The Swan', which gives a behind-the-scenes look at the poem of the same title (the true nature of the bird made me laugh out loud).

I found I couldn't wait to get back to this book. It moved around the house with me at first, but soon settled in the attic where I could read in peace. I think perhaps I need to follow Oliver's example and spend some time sitting still and watching. This is another book that I am feeling sad about returning -- I'll have to buy some Mary Oliver collections of my own.

Wild Geese (Bloodaxe World Poets) is available from Amazon.

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

I have a history with this book: I received it some years back as a review copy, started it and failed to get into it -- my thoughts were "This is a prose story chopped up into short lines to fill a novel-sized book. And I don't like werewolves." However, it's not the sort of book I forget -- my memory tends to file away odd combinations of form and genre -- and the fear I felt when I got it as my poetry prescription for March was tempered with a lot of curiosity. I was afraid because I was prejudiced against this book; and because of its length and what with one thing and another I only got my poetry prescription in the last days of the month.

So -- the genre is horror > werewolves; and it has elements of hardboiled detective (I would say that Peabody is too vulnerable to be truly hardboiled, but there is something noirish about his determination to see his case through, despite its baffling, disconcerting nature and its unprepossessing victims). And the form is free verse.

The endeavour as a whole calls to my mind another bonkers combination of form and genre from my past: Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, which I studied at university. Lucretius, for reasons best known to himself (and much discussed on our course), presented to the Roman audience the principles of Epicurean philosophy in 7,400 lines of hexameter.

From my own experiences as a writer I know that form can be a matter of expediency rather than choice. I do wonder what chance and circumstance led Toby Barlow to tell his story in verse form. It must put people off picking up the book -- but I can see it helped generate a lot of the buzz, and I'm sure that people who thought they didn't like poetry, or verse novels, have been sucked in by the fast-paced, visceral reading experience. Talking of visceral, I wondered if another reason for Barlow's choice was that verse allows him to take a more direct route into the sensory parts of the reader's brain. Dogs aren't known for their skill at verbal expression -- but they are known for their deeply sensory, physical experience of the world. Of course a skilled prose writer evokes all sorts of feelings in his audience; but readers of verse are more attuned to the sounds and the rhythms of the words they are consuming. And perhaps they are more open to the magical connections sparked off by metaphor and simile.

This is a brutal, bloody book about brutal people doing bloody things to each other. There were scenes that really troubled me, which is why I don't normally consume hardboiled crime or horror unless I think it's going to be worth the flashbacks. This book was, thanks to skilled writing oddly likeable characters (hats off Cutter and Blue, the bridge-playing gangster dog men).

Sharp Teeth is available from Amazon and probably your local indy will get one for you.

Don't Wear it on Your Head, Don't Stick it Down Your Pants by John Siddique

This is the second book I read in February, and it was supplied by Sarah with an instruction that I should share it. It is subtitled "Poems for young people". I did try some on Alec because he loves wordplay and rhymes -- particularly rhymes with a song -- but he wasn't terribly interested in John Siddique's verses. I think perhaps the rhyme structure was not rhythmical enough for his taste, the imagery is not concrete enough and he doesn't yet have enough of a handle on the abstract. (Do I sound like an terribly over-ambitious mama? The book is recommended for three and up. Alec might be only two, but I try very hard to avoid underestimating or patronising him and just occasionally these experiments do work out).

I was thinking back to the poetry I read as a child -- mostly anthologies. Off the top of my head I can't think of many books by a single poet -- A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson and the only contemporary collection I had was Gargling with Jelly by the Liverpuddlian poet Brian Patten. This last impressed the young me with its range: from the title you'd think it was a collection of shouty daft poems, but several of the verses are very dark, some are very sad and even the laugh-out-loud poems have a sinister undercurrent.

I went into Don't Wear... assuming that it would be daft. It's not -- not all, anyway -- (even the title poem is (I think, anyway) a warning about managing your public and private identities). There are, of course, poems featuring bums and trumps -- Siddique knows his audience. But there are poems dealing with identity (this theme comes up again and again), with bullying, with complex relationships, with immigration.

When I started reading I felt a bit squirmy -- I was a suspicious child, never quite sure about adults who tried to get down to our level. I suppose I was used to being spoken down to, I think. Some of the poems seemed a bit... simple, a bit odd. 'Apples' in particular sounds as if it had been written by a child -- but as I read on I understood that this is actually the point. Siddique is imitating and raiding children's thought processes and speech rhythms, the way they create poetry by almost by accident. I know how magical this can be: every day Alec reminds me to look again at the knee-high world, and his make-do phrases have worked their way into our household vocabulary (particular favourites are "bubby noses" for nipples and "mucmic" for music.). But as an adult who no longer has a child's unselfconsciousness, to use a childlike voice as your professional voice takes a special kind of fearlessness and as I read I came to value this more and more.

You can order Don't Wear... directly from Salt or you can get it on Amazon by clicking the picture above.

The Departure by Chris Emery

I ended up reading two poetry books for February (actually, I read some others as well: it appears that reading poetry is addictive). This was the one I said I was going to read and then my poetry mama Sarah Salway supplied me with a second contrasting book. 

I found it hard going -- "difficult to access" is the official term, I'm told. I talked over my fears with Sarah she said not to worry because sometimes you feel your way into a poem before you understand your way in.

At university I from time to time found myself in a roomful of people all competing to find something clever and intelligent-sounding to say about a poem that I really didn't understand. The Greek lyric poet Pindar is tremendously highly thought of by respectable ancient sources, but his verse is difficult to penetrate. I wept frustrated late night tears over the fragments we studied -- and you can imagine the mixture of relief and exasperation that swept through the seminar the next day when our tutor said (only half joking) that he suspected Pindar was on drugs and that we weren't to try to hard to understand.

This project isn't about being (or sounding) clever. It's not even about trying hard to understand. It's about the experience of reading poetry. I feel very vulnerable admitting here that I struggled to unlock this book (I feel just like the traveller in Walter de la Mare's poem The Listeners). But that was my experience of it.

I've read poetry (and short stories and all kinds of writing for that matter) before that just lies there like a dead fish and this was not my experience with The Departure. Images and tiny fragments of narrative flipped and flashed before my mind's eye -- and just occasionally I felt as if I might almost be swimming with the shoal.

The poems made me feel and put images in my head, but I never understood why I felt that way, or how these quicksilver pictures fitted into the narratives. There is something about the quality of the images ('Snails' silently drowned in "forest tears" and awkward 'Sunday Fathers' "wasting time by the swings") and of the atmospheres conjured up (for me the book as a whole has a feeling of carparks and gritty sodium lights, isn't that odd!) that tells me I should trust Chris Emery and that there are more treasures to be found. In a month or six I could revisit and find that I'm more experienced or wiser or older. Or perhaps layer upon layer of readings will help me to scribble in the details I need to make the poems complete (I once did a drawing class where the teacher told us to keep adding information to our pictures until they were complete: that phrase, to  my mind, was worth the course fee).

You can buy a copy on Amazon (click the picture) but it's more efficient and pleasing to buy it direct from the publisher, Salt.