books, art, rant

My reading lately has been short mid 20th century crime fiction - Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Christiana Brand, Josephine Tey - sort of escapist, easy to read, not very annoying... Not quite escapist but I find nothing really is. Keep coming up against weird assumptions and attitudes in the books, and for instance, one book set in 1938 mostly ignores the political situation in Europe apart from one minor character who comes across as rather interesting and I wanted to read more about her, her perceptions of the upper middle class English circle she found herself in. That was Ngaio Marsh's Death in a White Tie.

And now I am reading a book about sculptor Eva Hesse. One of her drawings jumped out at me in a modern art history book. So I've investigated her and used that drawing as an inspiration in my own art. (In my own practice in art college speak.) I now find her work evaluated using a little-known psychoanalytic article, one that my own therapist mentioned to me last year as something very relevant to my own issues. So feel quite excited by this - I was drawn by an image that unknown to me at the time was part of her own work to deal with something, the very thing I have been working on in therapy and in my art. And I am not going to tell you about the specific issue because it is still really intense for me and also I want my visual images to speak for themselves.

And finally a rant. I have just had it up to here with people saying "we are all people, mentally ill or not" and "we all have mental health struggles" which yes, are true. I know people often say this sort of thing to break down barriers. But I experience it as a way of silencing our different views, of erasing our experiences... Maybe I am clinging to my own sense of being special that I feel I have by having these experiences of distress, medication, pathologising, struggle, community. And these people say "we are all special" which to me means "no one is special, especially you, Anne".

I know some people with similar experiences to my own feel this is great, their humanity is being seen over their mental health status. Maybe I haven't had that depth of experience of discrimination that I feel that need to be seen as the same as everyone else. Maybe my own "pathology" is about differentiating myself from the mainstream in whatever way I can.

I don't know. But I don't like it. I see it as naive and uncritical and simplistic and silencing.

Beat in View by Margaret Millar

Last week I read Beat in View by Margaret Millar. It's a suspense novel written in the mid-50s in the USA

I liked it - it is short, well paced, well written, interesting. There is a twist which I didn't see coming, but I never do. It was reasonably well sign-posted. I am going to use the word killer because I don't want to spoil it for anyone who does want to read it.

However, mental illness is the reason that the killer does what they do. Multiple personality disorder, to be exact.

Which makes me uncomfortable. It always does, even though some peopel do kill and commit other crimes because they are mentally ill. But in life, it is uncommon, and in fiction, it is very common.

I think Millar handles it well, better than many other novels. There is an understanding of the killer's psyche and it is not rammed home either.

One of the characters is homosexual and the relationship between him and his mother is a bit stereotyped. Very much of its time.

A third thing that jarred was that one of the characters seems to fall in love with another, offering some sort of heterosexual resolution of some of the issues in the novel. There's a dynamic of an older, male, sane saviour of the younger, female insane character.

There isn't much online about the novel, and not much about the writer. I have reserved another of her books from the library.

Infectious reading

Been quite busy but a chest infection has laid me low. Well, slowed me up. So I am reading, short bits of each book in between whinging and knitting.

(Remember when library books had stickers about reporting the presence of infectious illnesses in the house when returning the books so they could be fumigated.)

I am currently reading

• Melissa by Taylor Caldwell
• It's Lovely to be Here – The Touring Diaries of a Scottish Gent by James Yorkston 
• http://www.jamesyorkston.co.uk/?page_id=125
• Bad Vibes : Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall by Luke Haines (contrasting review in the Observer)

Haines is vitriolic, Yorkston is gentle. I know I would prefer to hang out with Yorkston, especially as he is vegan. I think Haines is the better writer. What they have in common is that they show touring as a musician to be awful. I hate travelling anyway so it is nice to have it confirmed that it sucks.

Mental health connections: Haines hears voices due to drink and drugs and his behaviour and attitude suggests there is something shit going on under the surface. He does say at the start that he is writing as he was thinking back then, implying that he isn't like that anymore, or not so much anymore.

Melissa is the daughter of a psychopath, not the serial killer kind, but the kind who manipulates those around him in very destructive ways. Her reactions after his death, and that of her mother and her relationships with her siblings, show that she is still under his spell. My partly digested reading on object relations is helping me make sense of her behaviours. Caldwell was one of the first adult writers I read circa 1980, though I didn't read Melissa. It's readable.

Of course, I am currently reading these three books so who knows what I will think of each of them by the end. But so far, they are all good reading for me in my current state.

(BTW, Caldwell was a right wing anti-semite and had a FBI file because she was forever reporting people for involvement in the Kennedy assassination and other things. The FBI seemed to take it all with a pinch of salt.)

Consequences by E.M. Delafield

Yesterday, I finished reading Consequences by E.M. Delafield, published in 1919. She wrote the more well-known Diary of a Provincial Lady which is (on the surface, at least) an amusing novel. Not so Consequences. It is the story of Alex, an upper-middle class girl growing up in late Victorian London, who constantly fails to live up to the demands of her family and class. She isn't a feisty character who stands up for herself and forges a life for herself. She is the opposite. A sad, misunderstood girl, who never finds someone who will care for her, and this dooms her to ongoing misery...

(I do get sick of the feisty heroine, especially in historical fiction, where the writer can't let go of her/his 21st century perspective and allow their character to be of their time in more than their clothes.)

It sounds so depressing, doesn't it. It is. I couldn't stop reading it, and I sobbed yesterday as it became increasingly obvious what Alex's fate would be. The tragedy of it is really how she tries to make sense of her life, and how she interacts with other people, just make things worse. She is both innocent and culpable.

I did think at one stage that she would be admitted to a mental hospital. I sort of hoped that would have helped in some way!

You can buy the book in paperback from Persephone. Or read it for free on Project Gutenberg.

recently read

I've been struggling a while to read - social media and google reader have been distracting and they damage my concentration. And on the bus, I usually listen to podcasts. Often about books I will never find time to read. So I've taken myself in hand. 

The last five books I've read are A Fisherman of the Inland Sea by Ursula Le Guin, Your Voice in my Head by Emma Forest, On Drawing by John Berger, Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym and A Lie about my Father by John Burnside. 

I liked the Le Guin the most. A collection of short stories. The last three are great - about faster than light travel: it's not the technology that's interesting but the impact on people. 

Of the memoirs, Your Voice in my Head was disappointing. I had expected more. A Lie about my Father was better. I think Burnside is the better writer, and is older. I think one of the things that bothers me about Forest is that she is very on the surface, despite the painful things she tells us. She seems not to want to know why she has a mental illness. Burnside knows why - and he's trying to understand his father in this book. Forest is all about her. 

Currently reading on my iPod: Penny Plain by O. Douglas and Night and Day by Virginia Woolf. The Woolf is taking ages. The Douglas is an undemanding, cosy read which suits me right now. 

Currently reading in physical book format: The Mammoth Book of 20th Century Science Fiction (table of contents - scroll down a bit); Bliss and other stories by Katherine Mansfield. 

mad books

I've been reminiscing - again - this time about the books which have shaped my ideas about madness and mad people.

I don't mean the serious books I purposely read to learn about it e.g. A sociology of mental health and illness by Anne Rogers and David Pilgrim or Users and Abusers of Psychiatry; A Critical Look at Psychiatric Practice by Lucy Johnstone or Mental Health Matters: A Reader edited by Tom Heller.

Or the many self-help books I've poured over in search of answers. (I particularly like Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway by Susan Jeffers - the title alone is brilliant. I wouldn't be doing this blog or involved with Oor Mad History or CAPS or anything if I didn't recite that mantra a lot.)

I mean the books I primarily read for pleasure, before I was particularly interested in mental health issues, services, theories...

And the books I read when I did get interested, the fiction and autobiography.... the books that moved me, stirred me, comforted me, angered me.

I didn't read The Bell Jar until quite recently and I have never read (or watched) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I did try The Bell Jar years ago, but the protagonist annoyed me in the first chapter so I didn't persist.

It's hard to remember after about 20 years of reading, thinking, talking, rereading.

But I thought, if I put this out there, it might stir some distant memories.

Books, the arts and me

I wrote this on April 11th, 2009

When I was a child and a teenager in the 1970s and 1980s, I thirsted for news of a wider world. Not the adult world of politics and responsibility but a world of ideas and sex and love and adventure. I searched for it in the right-wing newspapers, in the occasional arty film on the new tv channel, in the music press and in the music itself and most of all in books. Books on the narrow school curriculum, shabby paperbacks from even shabbier second hand shops, worn plastic-wrapped hardbacks in the local library. High literature from the past, texts of plays by Russians and Norwegians, or second-rate fiction with near-naked women on the cover. It didn't really matter. 

I found bits and pieces, hints and promises that life did not have to be like the dull future which seemed my destiny. I wanted something more than and different to that. Not that I could imagine anyone employing me or marrying me but these seemed the only future - a job and a husband. I was told often enough of my faults and my lack of ability.
But I was a good enough student at school, not obedient but interested. Physics experiments, French essays, the history of the Irish language, the Romantics, Bismarck, calculus - they all absorbed me in different ways and to different degrees. (It is satisfying now to think of how many of those interests, in different forms, still interest me.) 

But now I have the internet! Since my early thirties, I have been messing about online, finding more and more to read and watch and listen, almost drowning in words and images. I still feel the compulsion to seek out all the new things I can find... It chokes me sometimes. There is so much that I skip from site to site. No time or inclination for the close reading of a story which made my legs weak or the close listening to a song which made me gasp on the rare occasions I heard it on the radio. I am still the same child as I was in the 80s with the same thirst. But I am older and slower and there is so much to connect to still. I will never reach all that I yearn for. That saddens me and excites me.

Over two years on, most of this is still true. I am a bit more focused when I make myself focus, but I am still easily distracted by the internet and overwhelmed by all it opens up to me. But I am a bit more relaxed about it.