Like a constipated cat

It’s been so hot here the past week i’ve been soaking mealworms in water to feed to the birds. The mealworms come dry and sort of caramel smelling but get all flabby like cereal if you soak in water. When the earth gets dry and hard, it’s difficult for the birds to dig out worms!

I signed up for Disney plus for one month to watch Rivals season 2 and really wanting the most of my 6 pounds, I browsed through the rest of the channel and got a horrid vertigo looking through it because there are 1) outer space documentaries 2) ancient Egypt documentaries 3) deep sea documentaries 4) dinosaurs

I have not intellectually faced ancient Egypt yet, or started the book on Alexandria I got and I am certainly not going to start with a Disney documentary about it. I think my absolute nightmare would be to go on a Disney cruise and on it be forced to watch Disney produced ancient Egypt documentaries in some glitzy cruise cinema with an in cinema buffet, and having to learn about mummification while surrounded by Americans munching on chicken tenders and pineapple slices. While at university, I worked in the library on a work to study scheme for low income students and one of the librarians, rather pervy, liked to tell all the female students on the scheme about the Disney cruises he took with his wife in elaborate detail, emphasising how the cruises were really for adults and the bedrooms were full of mirrors . I quit the job after he asked me out to dinner (for specifically, schnitzel) which pretty much ruined the librarian career I wanted.

On Rivals the characters are making a sexy Yeats documentary in Sligo and I wish they really would make the whole documentary as a special/spin off. I picked up the Yeats biography by Richard Ellmann again because of it, which I had abandoned when I got too infatuated with Roman emperors lately. (Domitian, I love him, he liked to take walks alone which was considered strange and did some really good things for child welfare by Roman standards) I looked up to see if there were any equivalent documentaries from the 80s, and yes! There is one about Yeats and Joyce starring Seamus Heaney and Richard Ellmann.

Some cello music, and we see Richard and Seamus wandering along the Irish coast.

Seamus Heaney: ‘What do you say to the begrudgers who talk about the Yeats industry and the Joyce industry?’

Richard Ellmann: ‘It’s better than the munitions industry, Seamus.’

Along with the sex fantasies, and book deal fantasies (‘I’ve made more money today than I’ve ever made in my entire life!’ says character Lizzie. A man tells her seductively ‘I saw you in the W.H Smiths’ and holds up her book ) Rivals provides the nostalgia of a past when television documentaries about canonical poets were still made. Will Rivals push Yeats up the book charts?

I read Matilda’s England by William Trevor, a novella in three parts, it’s similar to his Reading Turgenev in that it shows madness from the inside, and I read Concrete Island by J.G Ballard which made me want to drink white wine but also never to eat coleslaw again, as trapped in a wasteland between highways, the architect Maitland has to eat old meat, coleslaw and potatoes thrown down in rubbish bags with the very good wine in his car trunk. In Matilda’s England, at a party the narrator jumbles the food about ‘ dropping meat into the bowls of cream, covering the tarts with salad.,’ and throws her husband’s leather gaiters into the fireplace.

I broke my headphones yesterday, this is really a catastrophe for me and I tried to use tape and gorilla glue to put them back together to no avail and one ear dangles when I put them on, and flaps against my head, so on with the radio more at home. This morning on radio 3 , there was a bit from the Goldberg Variations, but not played by Glenn Gould and I don’t know why you would ever want to listen to a version of the the Goldberg Variations which isn’t played by him and doesn’t have him humming along. I walked into the room where the radio was and actually winced! Perhaps this is how you distinguish Canadians from others. Earlier this week in a writing workshop in Edinburgh I tried to purge attendees of the urge to write a story which begins with the character waking up, and why would you ever want to read a story with someone waking up in the first paragraph which isn’t Kafka’s Metamorphosis. There is too much choice in this world!

My favourite relaxing thing to watch is this National Film Board of Canada doc on Glenn Gould which shows him enjoying ‘respite at his lakeside cottage’ You don’t have to be in Canada to watch the NFB. It’s on their YouTube too, but then you will be interrupted by increasingly nutty AI adverts.

I am editing a new short story which will be out soon and I am halfway through another short novel, so I am hoping the rest of my life will be write a short novel a year or half year. William Trevor is holding my hand. I looked up some video interviews with him, and from one learned that the dead Whitbread award was not pronounced ‘white bread’ I thought it was sponsored by Warburtons or another bread maker.