Don't be deterred by the gross English title. 'Kaerlighed på film' is a love story, but also a thriller and a story about strange occurrences in ordinary lives. To be honest, I would have preferred had they kept it a love story rather than add a thriller twist to the end, but I think it's still a very good film. It's full of marvellous acting, scenes that have potential to be ridiculous but somehow seem credible, and characters that are real and raw. It mercilessly drives home the message and accepts that lies have consequences, no matter what the underlying motivation. The main character doesn't ask for pity when his lies catch up with him; he offers no excuses, merely his actions. Such maturity I find rare on- and off-screen, but it fits the character and the actor.
There are no metaphors here, just sunlight coming through my window at 3am. Visitors complain they can't sleep; I love falling asleep at dusk and waking up to dawn three hours later. The energy I get from the sun makes up for the sleep I miss. In winter, I hibernate; in summer, I'm alive.
20 Jun 2011 03:54 22:50 18h 55m 46s 21 Jun 2011 03:54 22:50 18h 55m 55s 22 Jun 2011 03:54 22:50 18h 55m 53s
I recently did a count, and I've studied ten languages during my life. There's something about wrapping my tongue around unfamiliar sibilants and alveolars that keeps luring me back into introductory language classes. I've been fascinated with the 'dark l' of Gaelic, the reflexive constructions of German, and most recently the fact that 'aime', 'aimes' and 'aiment' are pronounced identically in French.
I rarely get past beginners' level, and I sometimes wonder what the point is. I wonder if it has to do with growing up speaking a small language and feeling keen to reach out to other languages: we are here, we're not English but we exist in our comfortable cocoons, happy to stay huddled in but sharing a shy smile whenever our eyes and tongues meet - kiitos ja hei. I wonder if it's militant multilingualism; I certainly used to harbour dreams of defending Gaelic from being worn down like old smokers' teeth on pipes made of clay.
But languages aren't ours to protect, to police, to deepfreeze. Lately I have been falling in love with internet English. I shows what a vibrant organism language is. A 'zomg n00b' can carry a tone, a register, a sense of us versus them - or nothing. I am merely dabbling in it, but it's been a pleasant dip into a new language.
I am very much a library linguist, but there are moments when the world pummels in and reminds me there is more to languages than phonetics and syntax trees. One such moment was in Greece last summer. I hiked for hours to reach a monastery on a mountain, only to find the hustle and bustle of a few busloads worth of tourists. I joined everyone else, and queued to buy a CD of hymns sung by the local monks. The sales clerk told me in Greek, in a rather resigned manner, that the songs were for a particular service. I nodded and mostly pretended to understand. He asked me where I was from; I told him. His eyes lit up from just that one word showing I had understood. He started asking me if there were many Orthodox people in my home country. I managed to stutter out in Greek that can't have sounded anything short of barbaric that there weren't many but some. He latched onto my arms and said, 'Κατάλαβες!', 'You understood!' And for just a brief moment we were out of our snail shells, me teetering in my 80's style skirt required by the monastery's dress code, him reaching out until his Greek was stretched into baby talk. It was an awkward lean, but we made it, and just for a moment the tips of our fingers touched.
Over the years, I've had numerous penpals. Until recently, I only had one of them remaining. We have never met, and I doubt we ever will, but I have been graced with glimpses into her life since she was fifteen and I, seventeen. It is a strange friendship, knowing I wouldn't recognize her on the street, but having witnessed her - and myself - grow up, find a partner, live in various cities as well as an outback town that made Deadwood seem like the suburban dream. Strange, but a friendship nonetheless.
My best friend sometimes writes me letters. Not too often, but I do remember reading about her tiptoeing her way into what would become the love of her life. She dropped a card into my letterbox before I returned home after the most taxing goodbye of my life so far. Through my haze of jetlag, longing and fury, her card made me feel like I was coming home as opposed to having left it.
Now, I have a new penpal. He doesn't write me often - we talk enough as it is - but he sent me a Valentine's letter that was grossly late and filled with the most devastatingly true and beautiful things I've ever read. I'd thank him, but I'd run dry of words halfway through or never find the right words or not have the courage to say them. I guess that's part of the wonder of letters, that gentle buffer of time that allows us to look each other straight in the eye across the distance.
Several years ago, I sat an entrance exam for university. While waiting for the test to start and fiddling about in my stripy socks after not having slept in thirty hours, I started talking with a boy waiting to sit the same exam. We both agreed we were not going to get in and would spend the year bumming around.
He got in; I flunked the test. He started his studies and built on his previous preparation and knowledge in the field. I worked in a factory, learned to flirt with boys and travelled around Europe on my own for the first time. The next year, I resat the exam and this time got in. He continued to study diligently, started dabbling in projects run by the department, networked with the faculty and top-of-class students. I started my studies from zero, drank heavily, joined the students' society, and dedicated my time to organizing parties and editing the magazine for the society. In the process, I made friends and slowly carved out a life for myself in an unfamiliar city. Our paths with the boy swerved away from each other; we would meet for coffee once a year to exchange pleasantries, for him to tell of research trips to Rome and for me to sweat while trying to make my sorority-esque life seem remotely respectable.
I continued my merry lifestyle, and in the end it took me five years to get my BA. I finally did get involved in university policies (if not politics) and alienated some faculty members while gaining the respect of others. I spent three summers on projects that had nothing to do with my department but which in the end proved elemental in making me realize what I'm interested in and that opportunities to study it exist. I drank retsina, met people, talked about beer breweries as well as research.
I last met the boy a year ago. He told me, much to my surprise, that he was fed up with our department, our field of studies and wanted to get a degree in Business and get an actual job. I told him I wanted to study in the US because I similarly was not happy studying what I was; however, I was determined I could find my niche across the pond.
Now, I hear he's been accepted to Princeton to study History, a dream spot for the research he's interested in. I am fortunate enough to have a choice between several of my dream programmes in the US. I do not know what happened to change his mind over the past year, but he seems excited in a way I don't think he's been in many years; I don't know what happened to land me where I am now, but I am excited in a way I haven't been in many years.
The moral of this story is not that I am a shameless braggard. Nor is it to spend five years getting drunk every week. It's not even that studying hard will get you into Princeton.
The moral of the story is that everyone can win. Detours are not in vain, and two very different paths can lead to happiness. Your happiness does not reduce mine, nor does it make the choices I've made any less valid.
Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I've got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.
Writing fiction is not "self-expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.
So I'm not actually going to talk about arts and crafts. I'm going to talk about art as crafts. As a teenager, I went to a school filled with - and targeting - wannabe artists. There were more berets and angsty meltdowns than you could shake a finger at. There was much talk about students "having" something inside them that should be lured out on stage. There were excercises designed to bring out traumas that might be helpful when playing roles too big for us. Ultimately, though, there were very few artists. Most of us have gone on to study law or languages, to become parents, or to struggling our way through work.
The more time passes between high school and now, the more I appreciate hard work and crafty artists. Sure, arts come easier for some, but I really took to heart what my dance instructor said recently when talking about showing emotion on stage and expressing instead of just moving. She said something in the lines of "Showing emotion can be learned. Longing is an extended arm, a head-tilt is an emotion. Everyone can learn it. All you need is courage." Courage and a lot of practice.
We can glorify art - or anything else, for that matter - all we want, but what it boils down to simple stuff. Dancers move their bodies, singers move their vocal cords, guitar players move their fingers. This isn't to deglorify the process - to me, it makes it all the more miraculous how swinging your leg through air can bring such satisfaction and so much feeling to both the one moving and the one watching. And it's taken me an embarrassingly long time to realize that practice shows. There is a difference between doing something "alright" or adequately and mastering something.
I love the idea of craftiness also because it gives me hope. I am (re-)learning to dance, and instead of moaning over not being able to do this or that, I try to rejoice over every little sign of progress - which are many if one just has the eye to see it. I am learning to play a new instrument, and I'm realizing that things I thought nigh-on impossible can be achieved - through practice. There is no arcane magic equation, just starting with simple things and progressing onto more difficult ones.
Here are some artists and pieces of art that I think are wonderfully crafty:
Johnny Depp is delightfully physical. His characters have tics, mannerisms, outward expressions of what they're feeling inside. He's not afraid to create caricatures, which often makes his characters seem oddly realistic. I'll always remember the scene in The Secret Window where the character is having a moment of utter confusion and fear, and all of a sudden makes weird "rah-rah" sounds that fit perfectly. Apparently this was a mannerism Depp took from one of his children. He observed, he thought, he acted.
'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' actually isn't my favourite song of The Smiths' by a long shot, but I do think Morrissey is at his cleverest in terms of vocals. I really love all the slides and cracks. It sounds very effortless and more "earnest" somehow than his vocals in general, but I don't doubt this is because of hard work and attention to detail.
The prologue in Donna Tartt's The Little Friend will always stay in my mind because it is the craftiest passage I have read. While the student of literature in me can't help but marvel at the vehicles she's using, the reader is swept away: run-on sentences forcing a faster pace of reading and a disjointed feel similar to that of the characters. The novel wanes a bit after that, but those few pages are brilliant evidence of how hard work can manifest as effortless and effective.
And then there's stuff like this:
Remember: The only difference between a beginner and a genius is 10,000 hours of practice. The only thing separating normal from insane is 100 hours without sleep. And you know what they say about insanity and genius.
There is a woman who takes the same bus as I do in the mornings at least a few times a week. She never fails to say, "What wonderful weather!" - regardless of whether it's sunny, rainy, -30 degrees Celcius or hailing rats.
What a wonderful way to live your life.
"Hollywood shows people panicking, but my research shows that 9.9 times out of 10, people don't turn into crazed individuals, but behave quite rationally. They tend to help each other, too. -- The knowledge that most people react in a humanist way helps me to get in up in the morning – I come to work knowing that people tend to behave in a supportive, helpful way in emergencies, so any way we can help inform intelligent building design and disaster strategies will help them to survive."
- Ed Galea, a researcher in disasters Quoted from The Guardian
