He's had his time!

I missed blogging on one anniversary back on the 25th: the birthday of Anthony Burgess, my favourite writer. I was not sure how to commemorate and celebrate it this time and I had, talking of time, little of it to blog about the birthday anniversary, so in the end I decided to have a think about it. Then it struck me that I saw a few months ago in a nearby library the second book of his biography, You've Had Your Time. I think it was on sale for charity. I did not buy it, because I already have it, both in French and in English. That said, thought I would encourage you to read this book and the first volume of Burgess' Confessions, Little Wilson and Big God. They are autobiographies, but they read like a novel, mostly because a lot of it is completely fabricated. So yeah, read them.

Anthony Burgess on Liverpool

I knew Anthony Burgess had written about Liverpool, I even read it in his autobiography years ago (which I read in French), but I didn't remember much of it. I rediscovered it via Wikiquote. It is a strange feeling, reading this after having lived there. I know he is my favourite writer so I am biased, but I think he is spot on:

"The view of Liverpudlians that they are a race apart is well-founded. There is the unanalysable genetic mixture of a great port and also Welsh from the south and Irish a jump across from Dublin. The speech is distinctive. ‘All got your furs, love?’ cried the tram conductress, who kept warm with a bit of moth-eaten fare. The energy is immense and explains the gratuitous violence. ... Generosity could lead to violence. If I asked a direction I would soon have a crowd around me giving contradictory instructions. I would leave a fight behind and have to ask again. ... Of all the British cities that deserve the curative attention of the British government Liverpool comes first. The Bootle Beatles were taken too seriously, but, in their modest way, they exemplified the combative energy of the great decayed port. Guilt pricked me when I began to feel a larger loyalty to it than to Manchester."

Pleasure and comfort

The temperature is grey these days, I mean really worthy of November, I get bored easily after a day looking for jobs and just looking at the window puts you off going out. So I try to enjoy myself as much as I can. Not much is needed to be happy, really, if you think about it and have a bit of good will. It is achieved by mixing pleasure and comfort, both things that can be easily found. When the weather is miserable, like today, I just need and a good book (here on this picture Little Wilson and Big God, although I am not reading it at the moment) and to wrap myself in the blanket I bought at Marks&Spencer in Liverpool, which is not only one of the most comfortable blankets I ever had, but also has a sentimental value to me. As I doubt you can see it very well on the picture at your left, I think you can find it here (but as far as I remember I had to pay more for it). The content of the book matters (there is nothing more frustrating than reading a bad novel and feeling forced to go through it because you started it), but the circumstances of reading are almost as important. Some people enjoy reading in a café, I prefer to be at home and feel warm, dry and hear the weather roaring from outside.

A reflexion on the nature of Vraie Fiction

For a start, I will quote Anthony Burgess (in the first book of his autobiography Little Wilson and Big God):

"The delineation of oneself at such length must look like egocentricity, but an autobiography has to be egocentric. On the other hand, what do we mean by the ego? It is an existential concept, I believe, and the ego I examine is multiple and somewhat different from the ego that is doing the examining."

I recently did an entry (in French) about the nature of this blog. It was bound to happen, as I don't feel always very inspired to write about my uneventful life (the heat, the heat of this Summer just turns me numb), so self-analysis was the way to go. I want to freely rewrite in English this entry here, as my life is still uneventful and I am a bit of an egocentric.

On the 25th February 2008, I started this blog. Strange thing a blog, I learned that quickly. First no one knows who will end up reading it, and quite often you end up writing to yourself. it is a form of personal journal or autobiography, something that will interest nobody, or just a few people. I started to blog wanting to tell the story of an experience that I considered (and am still considering ) of interest: the life of a Quebec expat in England. I had no idea what I was going to write about or if I was going to be able to sustain this blog. It seems that I managed to write quite a lot, about practically anything, and if I sure don't have much of a readership, I at least gave the virtual world something to read. Then again, I did get some readers. My rant against Christian fundamentalists gave me a bit of exposure, my entries on Paul McCartney got the attention of a troll and a couple of random entries got visited quite often. That said, I didn't create this blog to start and take part in controversies. My main intention was to write about myself...sort of. I say sort of, because my life in itself, as lived, is not very interesting. That said, once told, through the exercise of rewriting, when the meaningless has been taken off, when the boring stuff has been excised or transformed by the account/writing, it can be of some interest. There is no such thing as a truthful autobiography, that genuinely says what happened, how it happened, exactly . All autobiography is fiction, because the memory of the writer is faulty, because he twists a few things to make a better story, because he interprets his life, because he reconstructs the events to give them significance. In effect, this is what I am doing here on this blog. So I gave it the name "Vraie Fiction" as it is not reality, yet it is a genuine account of fragments of my life, fragments that I made meaningful. Anyway, that's what I tried to do, that's what I managed to do between entries about beer, food and weather.

I also tried to make this blog about fiction itself. As I studied literature, it keeps me connected with my studies, and I think I can make people discover or rediscover works such as the Fantômas stories, Nero Wolfe or the TV series Omertà. Because it promotes works that deserve to be better known and because it is fun to write about such things, I want to keep this aspect.

Okay, enough about the egocentric and pseudo-philosophical observations, let's try to write about something more concrete next time.