Creativity and Rolling Stones

What is creativity? John Fowles believed that men wrote books in order to extend their lives beyond their lifetimes whereas women’s lives were extended by creating children. But women write and the likes of Jane Austen still live on through their books. Writing books is an acknowledged form of creativity, though I notice a great disappointment, even within the Writers in Oxford club, if it turns out that an author only writes non-fiction: the novel’s the thing, the true creation.

Writing books, painting, composing music, producing poetry, making movies, staining glass, potting, candle making: all of these are clearly creative. Carpentry, blacksmithing, sewing, science, gardening, cooking, photography, pornography: all of these are clearly not – or are they. There is a fine line somewhere here. A candle produced simply to give light is surely not creative, a candle wax creation of a pornographic scene may be.

Me, I roll stones. Some of the stones I use are so heavy that there is no possibility that I can lift them – so I roll them. My friendly adviser who occasionally pounces on my stoney creation, sorry building, saying “incorrecto” or “feo” (wrong or ugly), tells me that Spanish women used to roll the stones to the men who then did the tricky bit of fitting them into a wall. Sounds crazy, but it does take more strength to place a stone in a precise location than to roll it from one location to another.

My woman does not roll stones so I do both: the rolling and the fitting. Is it creative? I’m not sure. My wall is much admired, particularly since it mirrors an existing one and by that measure it is hardly creative. I know of its flaws so am not moved by the plaudits it receives. But the question still intrigues me: am I creating something?

Certainly there is something there now when before there was nothing. That’s true of any building work, yet the average builder is clearly not in the same league as a popular novelist and the builder’s creation is, perhaps, only the implementation of the architect’s conception. I am both architect and builder so I win, or lose, both ways. I have, through this experience, learned how difficult it is to plan a building in three-dimensional detail and how frustrating it is when the plans are just not practical.

When I am writing a novel I do turn my imagination free and follow its inventions, selectively. When I am searching for a particular stone I am thinking only of the hoped for dimensions and shape, though some imagination is needed - particularly how an odd shaped stone might be knocked into shape. When I roll a heavy stone down for an ‘audition’ in my wall my mind is entirely full of the sheer effort of moving and controlling it, a little like the single mindedness of a mountaineer, I believe.

My summit is the arrival of the stone in the right place (often by rolling it up strong planks of wood or stepping it up temporary staircases made of blocks), shaping it, then finally standing back to make sure that it looks right. I then move on to the next. At times I stand looking at my creation (sorry building) planning what to now next and how and what materials I will need. When my mind is not engaged with stone then I sometimes sing. ‘Right said Fred’ fits the bill, but for some reason ‘Winter Wonderland’ and that awful unicorn song take over. Fortunately a song by my friend, Pete Madams is also getting a look in, the chorus goes like this, ‘I’m the man, the man of the moment.’

Is any of this creative? I’m sure that Pete’s song is.

Glamour Girls and Charity Chicks

In Spain one of the words for girl is chica and my Spanish son-in-law (sort of) often called our daughter “the chick of his life”, though sadly that turned out not to be. If he had married her he would have called her my woman (mi mujer) which is normal usage here and not at all offensive to the wives, as far as I can tell.

Most of the women in our tiny village are somebody’s woman and most are not spring chickens. They do have a lot of go though, and keep the heart of the community beating whilst beating up their men if they are not home for dinner at nine: you ought to see the bar empty as the dinner hour nears.

On Sunday last we returned to La Fresneda after a weekend of wine, wandering and song in another village and felt too lazy to go to our own local espectaculo (variety show). But we did, and it was good.

It started late, surprise, surprise. Still, that gave me a chance to talk to our sadly deposed mayor and tell him that I hoped that he would soon be back. He beamed, either because he did not understand my stuttering Spanish or because he was pleased.

The show started with a beautiful young Mexican woman playing the violin beautifully: a hard act to follow. Later an old man played the piano accordion badly, and thought that the laughter was a sign of encouragement to continue. Our best friend, Dolores, led a troupe who recited, sang and told jokes that I had no hope of understanding.

All of this was a mere starter for the main act. This was a play which involved at least ten of the local ladies and two or three men who may have been ladies dressed up. The scene was a beach somewhere and the plot was clearly conceived to allow our local ladies to display. I lost the plot quite early but Margaret (my woman) seemed to understand some of it. Anyway, the couple who started the sketch were joined in the second act by most of the women of the village outrageously dressed and dripping with jewellery and glamour. I barely recognised the friendly lady from the bread shop as she swaggered onto the stage dragging a dog (toy one) on a leash and twirling an umbrella. I certainly did not recognise the lady in the brown dress, a dress so tight that she could not sit down on one seat and had to be offered another. They gushed, simpered, and really enjoyed their own performance as did the audience, their men amongst them.

The plot involved a parrot, but was not the dead parrot sketch from Monty Python. I think it may have been based on that funny story where a couple are distraught when their dog turns up with the neighbour’s pet rabbit in its mouth – dirty and dead. They clean it up and surreptitiously return it to its hutch. Next day their neighbours tell them of their weird experience: their rabbit had died and they had buried the poor thing in the garden. A few days later the thing had appeared in its hutch still dead, but very clean.

The ladies arranged the show in order to raise money for a Spanish charity operating in Africa. We saw a long video on the treatment of aids, tuberculosis and leprosy in that country and I felt that my five-euro entrance fee might help, a bit. I hope it does.

Prostitutes, oranges and burning babies.

I must confess that I did not see the baby burn; I was probably in the bar at the time drinking fizzy beer and sheltering from acoustic overload.

The event that brought together prostitutes, oranges and burning babies is a Falla. This is a Spanish tradition peculiar to the province of Valencia. Terry, who runs the pizzeria in the next village to ours, had told us that he was going to the Fallas at Benicarlo and we decided to go too.

It was a nice journey through our area of Spain, the Mataraña of Aragon, through a pleasant slice of Cataluña and finally into Valencia. For a while we followed the River Ebro and it is here that we saw orange groves and beside the roads sacks of oranges patiently waiting. Later, as we neared Benicarlo, we saw seated ladies beside the road also patiently waiting.

The ladies and the oranges have something in common: they are patiently waiting for clients. The farmers place the oranges there to make a few extra euros by cutting out the middleman. The pimp who, in a sense, is the middleman places the ladies there, though he may, or may not handle the goods. The oranges are a pleasant sight, the ladies slightly disturbing. However, back to the burning babies.

Terry had told us that Fallas are an annual event where Valencian townsfolk build castles and then burn them to the ground, the whole thing accompanied by lashings of fireworks. But we found no castles in Benicarlo. There they celebrate the feast day of Saint Jose by burning people.

Over the year each area of the town constructs complex sets of cartoon-like figures. The figures are very well made and very colourful. They seemed to be made of expanded polystyrene, but how they achieved such a smooth finish I do not know.

My favourite was a Chinese themed display which centred on a beautiful woman (top half only, yet extending to at least the fourth floor of the (very) nearby flats). Her hands seemed to rise from the ground and encircled a pudgy baby that she looked down upon with great love. The baby was unmistakeably a boy, of course. Arranged around her was a series of larger than life figures including a poor coolie dragging a cart loaded with boxes. Each box had a label: Armani, Gucci, Prado, etc. Behind the central figure, a Chinaman was holding a cat in one hand and machete in the other: dinner.

I did not see the Chinese baby burn. In the confusion I missed that particular conflagration, but I did see others which included babies. I also inhaled the black smoke that rose and fell from the burning ensembles and was deafened both by the firecrackers that ignited the figures, and by the fireworks that were stuck into holes unceremoniously hacked into them just before the off.

It was an intriguing spectacle but the real children of Benicarlo also fascinated me. Most of them carried a small box attached to a strap across their shoulders. Every now and then they felt inside the box, extracted a firework, lit it from a wick or gas lighter and threw it into the street, or down a drain, or down some stairs to get an echoing affect. Most of the fireworks were bangers, though not all. The kids ranged from early teens down to four years or so! Spain can be a bureaucratic country, but the stultifying hand of Health and Safety has fortunately not yet reached its heart. 

Almond Blossom

I am now in Spain. The overloaded trailer and the van made it, though there were a few problems: one of the ratchet belts holding down the motorbike broke and the cover disintegrated as the wind and rain in England, then the wind alone in Spain.

We spent the first night in a town called Jaca (pronounced Haca) and the second in Solsona. Both towns are in the foothills of the Pyrenees and both are very cold at night for the poor folks sleeping in unheated motor caravans.

Jaca was pleasant. Its older parts have quite narrow streets and smart building with good shops (I’m told). The first bar we visited was the Old Station. Big and busy it was noisy, had a bar lined with people drinking and chatting and the barmaid gave me free crisps with my fizzy beer. It felt good to be back in our adopted second country. In the morning, out running in the cold sunshine and shorts, I saw the groups of skiers on their way to the pistes swaddled in their puffy anoraks. They mostly looked miserable and askance.

Solsona is not so attractive but, like Jaca, is framed in the distance by the towering Pyrenees so all is forgiven. Besides, we were there to visit relatives especially our middle grandson who talks to us constantly in Spanish which is hard work, but he is a nice lad. That night we took him and the rest of our complex family (don’t ask) to a restaurant of his choice. It was good and we were in our cold bed by midnight. In the morning when we called to say goodbye he was still asleep. He had been out again with friends until three in the morning. Oh to be seventeen.

The last leg of our journey took us through the lakeland of arid Aragon - miles of piercingly green water formed mostly by dams. We stopped at one of the lakes for lunch and there I met a man fishing: he had a copy of the Richard Dawkins’ Blind Watchmaker beside him and came from Pershore. In England we are near neighbours. Interesting to talk to he was, like me, dithering over the next generation of motorcars: hydrogen, electric, etc.

And then we were at last in our own region: the Mataranya. We had seen blossom along the way, but nothing beats the almond blossom of the Mataranya. It seems to float above the dry fields in clouds of pink and white. Hundreds of trees meet the eye, offset a little by the milky green of the interspersed olive trees. The economy is shot, fifty percent of the young are unemployed, the Rumanians are still here, but it looks like being a bumper year for almonds.

It was good to be back. I drove straight to the huerto and uncoupled the trailer. We then stared wistfully at our own almond tree. We only have one and we thought that it was dying. But there it was in full blossom. Lovely.

Last day in UK

It’s about 11 pm and after two well deserved Belgian beers, I am relaxing. I had planned a last pint or two of real English ale, but it was not to be: things closed in.

During the past week I have bought: a motorbike, a trailer to transport it in, a rotavator (biggish one), a cement mixer, a tow bar to pull the trailer, and chains, locks and cables to secure the stuff against thieves.

The trailer is quite low and the motorbike quite high so I couldn’t get the thing into the trailer with the cement mixer, rotavator and so on. I called a friend and he agreed to come around to help at midday. In the morning the fireplace man came to view the blackened, ugly, bricky hole that for some time has been awaiting the stone fireplace that he offered us at a special price. He outlined the problems: the ‘cheeks’ of the fire area project a little too far, also the cheeks are too high and the uprights shouldn’t really sit on a floorboard.

I want to fit the fireplace myself but I sometimes think that the fireplace man really wants to do it. He told me that I would need a ‘throat lintel’, yes a throat lintel, don’t you know what a throat lintel is? I certainly did not, but he told me that most builders’ merchants stock them, though they are often known by another name. Also, I would have to cut off the top of the cheeks with an angle grinder. And I should replace the cracked back plate and I might as well replace the whole fire back while I am at it. I finally announced that I would remove the fire back and then decide what to do next and he nodded – a wise decision, I think. And so the new fireplace becomes a thing of the distant future and our lounge a sooty, no-go area.

I asked the fireplace man if he liked motorcycles, he looked the type. He did and he had sons that did. I asked him if he would help me load my bike onto the trailer. He was more than willing and, while I ponced around deciding how we should do it, he pushed the thing onto the trailer on his own! I felt an idiot, but this man does spend his time lifting fireplaces and dealing with throat lintels, and even his sons ride motorcycles.

I cancelled my friend and continued with the preparations: securing the bike, chaining up the rotavator and mixer, loading in other essential stuff: a curtain rail, a sunbed, flowerpots. By this time the four tyres of the trailer looked quite flat so I had to take it to the garage to pump them up. On the way I noticed that the indicators on the trailer no longer worked. They had done, you get a pleasant beeping from the back which is supposed to reassure that the trailer is still there. However, there was no beeping so I had to spend the rest of the night sorting out the wiring. No beeping, no beer. Hence a late night with an Angel or two – it’s a type of Belgian beer.

Ferry to Spain tomorrow. More adventures, perhaps.

What makes you choose a book?

Buying a book is a bit like buying an orange. You don’t really know what’s in it until you get it home and peel off the cover. You can see the skin of course and, in this creaky analogy, that includes the blurb on the back of the book. And you can sample a book if you are standing in that threatened establishment – the bookshop - or even download a sample chapter if you are considering an eBook. Nonetheless, you have to burrow pretty deeply into a book before you’re sure of it. Like an orange with a rotten segment - a bad ending could spoil the experience.

I was a science fiction fan as a teenager and peaked at a book a day until I moved on (that’s peaked with an ‘a’ by the way). I can’t remember, but I guess I started with the big names: Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, and then branched out. I soon had a favourite publisher – Gollanz. How I loved those bright yellow covers and, you know, they never, ever had a picture on them. I mostly borrowed books from the library though I did buy some. Finding new authors was easy: I simply went to the SF section and leafed through the selection.

Now my fiction reading is less specific: I like a good novel. My favourite writers from past and present include: Graham Greene, George Orwell, John Fowles and Douglas Kennedy. However, I know that there are good authors out there who are not necessarily being pushed by the big publishers. So how do I find them?

Buying a book is a two-pronged investment: first you have to buy it, and then you have to spend a lot of time reading it – even if it turns out to be a dud. I suppose most readers are conservative: only reading authors they have heard of, or books from the Booker shortlist, or stuff reviewed in the Times. Perhaps the most powerful route is through recommendations from a friend or colleague.

I bought a Kindle book by accident recently. Pressed the ‘Buy now with I-click’ rather than the title and ended up with Nuptials for Sale by someone called Virginia Jewel. Not my sort of thing, but it was all right – a bit raw perhaps. It only cost me £2.50 so no great loss. And you never know – a random click of the ‘buy it now’ button might lead to an undiscovered work of genius, or not.

‘Course I am biased in this. All authors want readers to choose their books and most are in a state of depression because no one does. Nonetheless, I am really interested: how do you choose the books that you read?

Tourism, Ants and Hellstrom's Hive

Do you like ants? My father did. He spent a period making little plaster containers with sliding glass tops. In these he encouraged ants to go about their business and watched them at it. My mother raised her eyes a lot during this time: indulgent but slightly embarrassed and slightly concerned, I think. Anyway, the fad declined and he went on to bees.

A few weeks ago I attended a lecture by Tim King. I have his card in front of me as I type. It’s a plain visiting card except for one thing: a very realistic picture of a brown ant alongside his address. He gave a fascinating lecture in which he points out that ants have been about for a long time – much longer than us. He also claims that they, as a community, are highly intelligent (though I wasn’t entirely convinced by this).

Whilst travelling in Turkey I became interested in ants. They have big ones and small ones there and they worked together in teams to clear up the crumbs that fell as I ate my lunch in lonely, forgotten places. This, and the strange underground cities that exist in that country, moved me to write a short story called The Tourist Touch. It’s about the corrupting effect of tourism on a village that lies above an underground city and is paralleled by observation of the cold reaction within a nearby ant colony. It is part of my collection of stories called Turkey Trove.

At the end of Tim King’s talk I went to the front and told him about my story since it seemed relevant to his lecture. We exchanged cards and later I emailed the story to him. He liked it and suggested a few, mostly welcomed, changes. He also recommended that I read Hellstrom’s Hive by Frank Herbert (you remember him, he wrote all those Dune books). So I downloaded it onto my Kindle for £4.99 (more expensive than the paperback!)

 

I enjoyed it. Frank Herbert is a well-respected sci-fi writer and it shows. The book was a bit slow to start - scene setting perhaps - then becomes rather exciting. The plot is simple. For years a group of people in America have been living like ants. Hellstrom is their current leader and they have created a wondrous secret hive that extends some mile or so below ground and contains thousands of specialised people: workers, breeders, thinkers, organisers and so on. Like the insect colonies that they admire they have evolved a community where loyalty to the hive transcends individualism. In the story snoopers from a US government agency discover them and the whole thing unwinds from there. I will say no more because you may want to read it sometime and I could spoil the experience.

The world that Frank Herbert created in the hive is interesting and thought provoking. I found my sympathies edging towards its inhabitants rather than the agents and this may be deliberate since the author portrays the agency as a community torn by ambition, suspicion and intrigue. Still it made me think and that’s one of the things I want from a good book.

Startling eBook Success Story

I now have seven eBooks up on Amazon's Kindle store and one has “sold” 230 copies in five days! I’m rich!

Not really. The novel that has done so well is ‘Lost Youth’. I wrote it a while ago as an exercise in grief dispersion following the death of our oldest daughter. However, as is generally my experience, the story and the characters took on a life of their own and any connection with Sheena’s life is solely in the title.

In ‘Lost Youth’ a young man called Mike enters university after a sheltered life with loving parents. The experience is debilitating and throws him into deep depression: he is friendless and neglected. The only relief in his dark life are dreams of a long dead sister and a strange friendship with a drug dealer who haunts the grounds of the university. It is this man who transforms Mike’s life by converting him into an anti-capitalist activist.

Mike leaves university and lives briefly with a revolutionary group in Germany. These are the most splendid days of Mike’s young life. Meanwhile his parents have discovered that he has abandoned his studies and so the father sets off on a search for their lost son, a search that has surprising, and then shocking, consequences for Mike’s family.

I could not get the book published and put it to one side. Now it is published: on Amazon in the kindle bookstore. Well, anyone can do that, but just how do I get anyone to read it? The answer is to give it away! That’s why I wrote “sold“ 230 copies above, I placed it on special offer for five days (i.e. free).

Of course there is a flaw here: two in fact. First, I don’t get any money for the work I put into writing and editing the book, and second my readers may not value the book since they got it for nothing. Ah but, now I am a writer in waiting. My hope is that some of my readers will like the book, will tell Kindle-owning friends about it, and will write astounding reviews about it. Then others will buy it for a mere £1.98 ($2.99) and like it and so move on to my other novel, “Shaken by China” which is up there waiting in the Kindle store. I should be so lucky.

That’s the plan and, as Mark Twain reminds me regularly, ‘the harder I work, the luckier I get’. So here’s hoping.

If you would like to read ‘Lost Youth’ I can still slip you one for free to view on your PC, reader or whatever. I can explain how to do it if you don’t already know – it’s not difficult. All I would like in return are a few comments, suggested corrections and/or reviews. Just click to email me.

Writing about China

Wise travellers say that someone who spends a week or so in China quickly gains a good overview of the entire place and its people; those who spend a month there begin to have their doubts; and those who spend a year or more in this vast country realise that the place is quite beyond comprehension.

I spent just eight months there in two tranches and still have moments of complete understanding – very, very brief moments. Part of the puzzle is that the country is both old and new: an ancient society with a history that predates that of the West, yet a youthful society which traces its roots to the social revolution of Mao Zedong and the financial redirection of Deng Xiaoping - the latter blossoming into the establishment of the first McDonald’s in Beijing in 1991.

I feel a little involved in China’s history, just a little. Happenstance found me taking a post as a teacher in the remote city of Yan’an where Mao’s Long March ended and the revolution began. No one outside of China is likely to have heard of Yan’an, but, to the majority of Chinese, it is the equivalent of Mecca to the Muslims.

That visit left me with a big heap of notes, blogs and emails written whilst teaching and travelling. It also gave me the urge to write more and, after many false starts, it resulted in the novel Shaken by China which I have recently launched on Amazon’s Kindle and Smashwords as an eBook.

Though Shaken by China is a work of fiction it does rest heavily on my time spent in Yan’an. It is not by any means an attempt to encapsulate China – not at all. But it does, I hope, convey a tangential view of the Republic through the experiences of a young teacher. It allowed me to explore the culture a little: a culture that surprised me in its loyalty to family on the one hand; its degree of corruption on the other; and a culture which to the innocent traveller seems quite open yet is capable of cover-ups on a massive scale.

I am inclined to bring all of my notes together into a book entitled something like “101 reasons not to teach in China”, but I could also entitle it 101 reasons to do so. My recollections of those two periods are sharp and deep. The high point of the second visit was a brief return to Yan’an to marvel at the changes which had taken place in just four years. The low was the abysmal conditions in which the majority of people still live.

Highs and lows aside it all amounted to a great experience which I owe to Margaret, the real teacher of the pair of us.

Identity and economics: Africa viewed from Oxford

I’ve just returned from a lecture at Green College, Oxford. I’m a lucky chap: I can walk to Green College from my flat in less that ten minutes – and I pass two other colleges along the way!

I arrived a little early, yet already a queue tailed away from the underground lecture theatre and it quickly became apparent that the place was full. A couple of academics pushed their way through, mumbling something about taking dinner with the speaker afterwards. Then a number of the queuing students decided to give up and retire to the bar, and that’s why I found myself at the doorway. There an attractive young woman held back the throng whilst admitting the worthy. She took one look at me then, surprisingly, said:

“There is a place for you at the front sir.”

Hallelujah – there is some benefit in being old(er) beside the bus pass. I mumbled a thank you and made my elated and guilt ridden way to the front row, then sat in one of the reserved seats. I covered my stained jeans with my frayed coat, and then adopted what I hope was a worthy pose as I eyed the crush of students standing along each side of the room.

The speaker was my age, had a beard a little like mine, and there comparisons end. He wore a smart sports jacket, thick necktie and well-ironed trousers. His name was Paul Collier and he was introduced as a legend – as they usually are. His subject was ‘What will happen to African states?’It was great: calm, informative and informed, clear, unostentatious, unscripted and without slides.

I could not begin précis the whole talk, but the central theme was identity. Though the idea is probably not new to any of us its treatment as a basis for economic study was so to me. Paul mentioned a book entitled ‘Identity Economics’ by George A. Akerlof which asks the question, “How do you get a good plumber.” Not in the sense of finding one in yellow pages, but in the sense of how does a person get to be a good plumber (let’s say the plumber is a man since most are – at present). And the answer, apparently, is that the plumber identifies himself as a good plumber. He has pride in his work and his results and is self monitoring. He does not need carrots and sticks and constant checking by bean counters.

What’s all that got to do with Africa? Well, there are 54 states in that continent and, according to Professor Collier, they are mostly dysfunctional. The people of Africa do not trust them and there are plenty of reasons not to do so. We in Europe trust our states don’t we? And we identify with them, though we may have many identities (EU, Britain, Scotland...) Africans identify with localised groups within their states and distrust all others. They do not work together for the common good and their state does not work for their common good. Yet, the speaker argued, you need trusted states to do big things. One solution is to make Africa itself the trusted state. But the 54 states will not have it; they do not trust each other! Alternatively power might be handed down through devolution – a dangerous trend that is happening here (dangerous because it may never end – except in war (my comment)). However, in Belgium it seems to have reached  a peaceful end since the place seems to function perfectly well without a government: Flanders and Wallonia, the two sub-regions, keep things going.

In common with many academics Paul Collier asks questions rather than providing answers, but the questions certainly stimulated my limited brain. There was a lot more; it was a good session; and free.

In the future I shall certainly know what to look for in a plumber should I ever cease to identify myself as the plumber. I’m not sure where do-it-yourself fits in to this idea of identity.