Books, glorious books

I've read some great books lately. Am currently trying to eke out the end of Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman. Awesome.

So here is the quick way of working out if you're a feminist. Put your hand in your pants. a) Do you have a vagina? and b) Do you want to be in charge of it? If you said 'yes' to both, then congratulations! You're a feminist.

Now, I already knew I was, but this is such a funny, astute book and Moran is able to word her aruguments on feminism much more succinctly than I ever could. And she made me smother a loud chortle pre-7am on a freezing cold train to Croydon. Anyone who can do that is alright by me. She had me at "vagina"...

Also went through my obsessive We Need to Talk About Kevin phase. My god I can't wait until the film comes out. I have also been reading a lot of teen and pre-teen fiction. There are some brilliant books for kids out at the moment, and since the Harry Potter/ Twighlight years it's really having a renaissance with publishers. I'm very excited that we're providing interesting and ultimately responsible novels for them to read. More feedback on these to come, or check out my Shelfari page to the right.

Morning

I am now leaving the house at 6.15am to catch a train to get to school for 7.50am (I know, horrible commute). This means I leave the house while it is still dark and all the lights in people's houses are off. I obviously venture out of the house when it is dark at night, but the morning seems so different - there is a quietness to the morning, a feeling of intruding. I slink down the road, careful not to crunch the gravel too loudly, creeping along walls and away from streetlights. In the evening you try and make yourself heard and seen, but the deserted morning is a different matter.

This morning on my way to the train I saw a lone man dressed in a reflective yellow vest over his clothes and wearing a hockey mask over his face. It was too out of place for me to feel alarmed, but only after he passed me by did I fully realise he was clearly up to no good. I also, in a presumably unrelated occurance, saw an enormous dead fox splayed out on the pavement in front of me. Its neck bent back at an awkward angle, exposing a white scruff around his neck. His glassy eyes gazed sightlessly into the night.

"I wouldn't say I enjoyed it..." Reflections on first weeks in the classroom

God only knows if I've made a decent career move. I keep thinking about that email from a literary agent. Should I have at least sent them my CV? But the deed is done now and I have started my classroom experience. I am placed in what is referred to as a 'challenging school.' It's actually a well organised academy with lofty ambitions for its pupils, who come from diverse and often difficult backgrounds. I can see how teachers get ground down by the constant abuse and behaviour management, but I keep reminding myself that a badly behaved kid almost always comes in tow with pretty inadequate parents. It's funny, interesting and sad in equal parts. And it's certainly a fertile enironment for fuelling the imagination. Here are just a few things with have stood out so far:

On day one a year 10 threw a paper aeroplane at me. Obviously it undermined my authority, but I do admire the vintage charm in his weapon of choice.

The students aren't the only ones with issues; the number of teachers giving out inappropriate or just plain wrong information is baffling. One teacher in particular regularly provides incorrect meanings of words but I don't feel well placed to correct her (yet).

There is also a regular perpetuation of gender stereotypes such as "Stop talking. You're supposed to be reading and as you're a boy you can't multi-task and do both at once." Had I been a student in that class I would have pounced on that statement and insisted on multi-tasking with my mates for the rest of the lesson. I am a girl, after all.

A teacher also described The Sun as "not a newspaper. It just has sport and photos of women who have no self respect." This was not followed up with any explanation or class discussion. No wonder I hear boys in corridors regularly referring to women as slags, or assuming that IQ level and skirt length are inversely proportional.

School children stink. And I don't mean their attitudes (though, in some cases that is also the case). I mean they reek of adolescence. The heady mix of Lynx and body odour infiltrates every corner of the building.

There is a tiny year eight pupil, a little boy, who can't weigh more than a few stone. He is constantly exhausted and spends most of the lesson with his head on the desk. I mentioned this to his form tutor, who said not only do his parents not put him to bed at a reasonable time but they often forget to feed him dinner. No wonder he can't concentrate when he hasn't eaten for days and is in need of a nap. Made me feel very sad.

If you read a lot growing up your ability to communicate, both written and verbally, increases massively. A textbook asked students to select a newspaper article from home about refugees and one girl wrote just the words "We don't have No Newspapers" in big letters in her exercise book. Says it all, really.

Kids are very adaptable. There is a large number of students at the school with English as a second language. One recent Eritrean refugee is really struggling with his lessons and he knows very little English. However another little boy, with perfect English and a reading age well above his peers told me that when he moved to England from West Africa at the age of seven it took him a whole three months before he could speak English fluently. I was learning French for two years before I could string a sentence together! Sometimes the only giveaways that a pupil has only been speaking English for a few years is that they absentmindedly turn the pages of a book in the wrong direction or write their titles on the right hand side of the page instead of the left.

Kids also like to Do the Right Thing. They have a very strong moral compass when tested, and fights in the corridor often highlight this. They are also proud when they achieve, no matter how uncool they think it is. It is often easier to pretend you don't care and to fail than to admit you do and still fail.

After observing the behavioural problems in the lower school I was entertaining fantasies about how great it would be to teach A-level groups. I imagined we would all sit in a circle, their faces glowing with pleasure at being able to spend two hours discussing books and theories and sharing their ideas. After all, sixth formers are there voluntarily because they want to learn and because they love the subject. I could not have been more wrong. The group consisted of fourteen students who acted more like they were being asked to do hard labour than read an Arthur Miller play. "Sir, it's so boooring" "this is a well shit book" "what's even the point of reading?" and so on. I spent the whole lesson with them pretending I didn't hear their silly chatter that was designed to shock me. However I feel they might be about to get their comeuppance. Today their teacher confiscated a letter that went something like this:

"I like to snort cornflakes in my nose so they come out of my bum. I like to rub jam into my japs eye. I have got a lego brick shoved up my bum. I put my dick in my sister's mouth and shag my mum."

And so on and so forth. I am sorry to say that the grammar has been added in by me (as if these students would know how to use a possessive apostraphe). However I am pleased to say that the punishment will be a photocopy of this letter sent home to the parents of every student involved. It's about time they knew what their little darlings are up to whilst they were supposed to be learning about Freudian readings of Arthur Miller. Well, maybe they can try a Freudian reading of their own work...

I'm not really sure how to follow that little gem. More updates from the frontline next week!

Charlie Kaufman interview

I read this in The Guardian today and had to post for posterity. It's an extract from his talk at the BFI, which I couldn't attend but would have liked to. I love writers talking about writing. (See? Told you I wouldn't quit thinking about it!)

I wrote Being John Malkovich while I was waiting for [the next sitcom] hiring season. My idea was that I would write a script and use it to get work. I had this idea that someone finds a portal into someone's head, and I had another idea that somebody has a story about someone having an affair with a co-worker. And neither one was going anywhere, so I just decided to combine them.

It got a really positive response. I started to get a little known. People would read it and tell me how funny it was, invite me for meetings, tell me nobody would ever make the movie. I had maybe 15 meetings like that, so I wasn't really expecting it to get made. Then it got to Spike Jonze, and he was in a position to get a movie made. I didn't really expect it to be anything. I don't think Spike did either. I remember it going to the Venice film festival, which was the first exposure it had. I wasn't invited, but they went: Spike and Cameron Diaz and Catherine Keener. I just got a phone call saying that it was this big thing, and then all these articles got written about it. It was exciting.

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.

The other thing that happens is adjustment. You find out which part of the story works, which part to embellish, which to jettison. You fashion it. Your goal is to be entertaining. This is true for a story told at a dinner party, and it's true for stories told through movies. Don't let anyone tell you what a story is, what it needs to include. As an experiment, write a non-story. It will have a chance of being different.

I'll tell you this little story. There's something inherently cinematic about it. I run in my neighbourhood, and one day I ran past this guy running in the other direction: an older guy, a big hulky guy. He was struggling, huffing and puffing. I was going down a slight hill and he was coming up. So he passes me and he says: "Well, sure, it's all downhill that way." I loved that joke. We made a connection. So I had it in my head that this is a cool guy, and he's my friend now.

A few weeks later, I'm passing him again, and I'm thinking: "There's the guy that's cool." As we pass each other, he says: "Well, sure, it's all downhill that way." So I think: "Oh, OK. He's got a repertoire. I'm not that special. He's probably said it to other people, maybe he doesn't remember me ... but OK." I laughed, but this time my laugh was a little forced.

Then I pass him another time, and he says it again. And this time he's going downhill and I'm going uphill, so it doesn't even make sense. And I started to feel pain about this, because I'm embarrassed for him and I think maybe there's something wrong with him. And then it just keeps happening. I probably heard it seven or eight more times. I started to avoid him.

I like the idea that the story changes over time even though nothing has changed on the outside. What's changed is all in my head and has to do with a realisation on my character's part. And the story can only be told in a particular form. It can't be told in a painting. The point is: it's very important that what you do is specific to the medium in which you're doing it, and that you utilise what is specific about that medium to do the work. And if you can't think about why it should be done this way, then it doesn't need to be done.

Reflections on reading – a personal reading history.

I don’t remember learning to read. It seemed to be something that was always with me. I can’t imagine living in a world surrounded by alien signs and symbols designed to exclude me. From age two or three I remember clutching my seven paper library tickets every Saturday morning in exchange for seven new books. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Spot the Dog, Topsy and Tim. The joy I felt on my fifth birthday at five slim mauve Puddle Lane tomes sitting on the shelf, glossy and brand new. Didn’t bend over the corner, didn’t crack the spine. Next came the teen section: Saddle Club, Judy Blume. I ploughed through Jane Eyre and Little Women dutifully, but my heart lay in Sweet Valley. During these years I picked up US vernacular, speaking of car trunks, sidewalks and the confusion over ‘pants.’ I hoovered up Point Horror and sheepishly absorbed romances, even at that age knowing them to be trite and formulaic. I learnt of complicated teenage problems: drug abuse, unwanted pregnancies and the mortifying shame of tripping over in the school play.

Once I had finished the available books for adolescents I moved on to adult texts. Most of them looked boring (I did, at that age, judge a book by its cover) but the shiny-covered crimes and horrors drew me in. The Shining and Pet Cemetery gave me nightmares, but the latter did provide the perverse joy of saying ‘fuck’ when asked to read aloud in class from my current book. It was swiftly removed, much to my confusion. How can a word be wrong if they print it in a book? I shrugged and went back to Adrian Mole measuring his ‘thing’ and worrying about Thatcher, whoever that might be. I shunned the school library choices and borrowed, swapped or bought any books I could. I was fortunate enough to have parents who, though not avid readers themselves, were keen to provide their little darlings with as many books as they could read. I imagine they were relieved it was those we were asking for rather than Gameboys or trainers, and every year there were ten new novels wrapped up under the tree. The teachers left me well alone, seeing my reading had developed into an intuitive awareness of form and structure, along with a desire not only to read but to write. I dutifully supplied reams of creative writing when asked to ‘describe, explain or inform’, my imagination running wild and no doubt supplying odd insights into the bizarre mind of a teenage girl. I started on Bliss, Sugar and Just Seventeen. My mum would point out that I was still years from seventeen, but I would just smirk and point out that knowledge is power. She couldn’t argue with that and left me to it.

This reading was all well and good, but by sixth form I was seriously lacking in my knowledge of the canon. I started to adore the linguistic dexterity of Atwood and Amis (the younger), but the stuffy Victorians left me cold. I went to university interview ignorant of all the texts that I did not know existed. Instead I spoke of Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith, touching on the counterpoints of art and science, and picking apart the language of despair. Fortunately my love of the theatre had grown into a love of Shakespeare and my impassioned argument for the compulsory study of Shakespeare clearly warmed the tutors’ cockles. I still firmly believe that Shakespeare should be studied by all students at all schools and that his language and his ability to initiate debate is accessible to everyone on some level. William, you’re my hero.

University opened up a new world to me. Reading became more than a solitary activity, and being constantly challenged by tutors and peers fuelled my love of books. Then came the realisation that English was actually difficult, having spent so many years racing ahead only to be bottom of the Oxford pile. I spent most days skim reading texts, my enjoyment only slightly marred by the time pressure and the twice-weekly essay panic. I discovered that academics even wrote books about books; that I could read other people’s thoughts and theories, parroting them in essays before I had any ideas of my own. The degree-level work took away my fear of complex books, I felt if I could read Poems of the Pearl Manuscript barely in English then no tricksy letters from the council or bank could foil me. Never again could someone assume I wasn’t bright, that I didn’t understand what they were saying, or that I wasn’t well educated because of my accent or postcode or the name of my secondary school. I could read Middle English, complete with Ash and Thorn, and I was proud of meeting the challenge. Every time I think I can’t figure something out I remember the Pearl poem and keep trying.

Post-university I felt out of practice, my brain turning to mush and struggling to find words. I continued to read modern novels (Coetzee, Murakami, Shriver) but missed the stimulation and variation. I took creative writing night classes, dissecting stories by my peers, and started reading TV scripts for production companies and freelancers. I read books about the craft, studying Robert McKee and Russell T Davies. In a day job where texts were limited to powerpoint slides and poorly constructed sales documents tube journeys were essential to catch up on my reading. I am immensely looking forward to having a job where reading is essential, and the idea that I can introduce books to students who have none in their home, or believe they hate reading. One day I hope to run into a student on the tube, who insisted on reading 4-4-2 magazine or Nuts at school, clutching a Chuck Palahniuk or Bret Easton Ellis and reminding me that I once told them they might like it.