Lovers in the Age of Indifference

by Xiaolu Guo

Five emails from a woman to her lover, left without response.
Address Unknown
Several articles for the Beijing newspaper before and after its Chief Editor’s gentle touch.
Beijing Morning Star
Six emails to “undisclosed recipient”.
Junk Mail
A series of letters from a Berlin resident to five different addressees in Beijing, her hometown.
Letters to a City of Illusion and Hope
A love story told in SMS text messages.
The Third Tree

These are not your typical short stories. But they work — at least for me — brilliantly. I hope they will work for you too.

Floodplain

by Kronos Quartet

Another pointless addition to the Kronos Quartet catalogue of pretentious concept albums. Or: another masterpiece from those wonderful Kronos guys. It depends. Personally, I never was a fan of KQ, finding them too hoity-toity for my taste. Floodplain is different. I liked the first three tracks the best: Ya Habibi Ta’ala (Egyptian tango); Tashweesh, a collaboration with Palestinian hip-hoppers Ramallah Underground; and traditional Lebanese song Wa Habibi. After that, I thought the album lost its momentum a bit. (Mind you, I am listening to it for the third time and may change my opinion on that; it is difficult to give the uninterrupted attention to almost 80 minutes of music.) The final composition, ...hold me, neighbor, in this storm... by Aleksandra Vrebalov, sounds like a score for a short film.

Adams, Barker & Camara @ The Junction

“Small but perfectly formed”, as Justin Adams said about his band — or was it about the audience tonight? I thought calling tonight’s gig “Justin Adams & Juldeh Camara” was unfair to the remaining one third of the trio, Martyn Barker. Throughout the two-hour set, he did an excellent job on cajón, drumkit and assorted percussion instruments. Justin Adams — who looks like a time traveller from the late 1950s — plays a mean guitar, I really liked his style. I was not as impressed with his singing though. However, Juldeh Camara was a true star of the show. His command of riti (a one-stringed fiddle) is truly phenomenal. He is also singing, dancing and playing some other instruments I know no name. Nor do I know the names of the songs they played, except for Ya Ta Kaaya (you may wonder why is that).

There are many ways of playing blues, but these guys do it in a way I never heard before. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Cam Bridge Peace Event

Today is the International Women’s Day. To support Women for Women International’s Join me on the Bridge campaign to “build the bridges to peace and development”, Arco Iris were drumming at the Magdalene Bridge at 1 pm. In a nice touch, Caffè Uno staff presented us with a bunch of helium balloons! More pictures to follow.

Willing Slaves

by Madeleine Bunting

You’d think that by now everybody should know that working long hours is a sign of poor time management and low productivity and is generally bad for your health and your family. Especially if you are not paid for overwork. Why are we doing it then? (“We” means people in general, although Willing Slaves mostly focuses on Brits who, surprise surprise, work the longest hours in Europe.) Greedy corporations, government’s fixation on targets, low union membership, technological progress and, naturally, transatlantic influence all play role here. Jolly good; but shouldn’t we also look at ourselves and, instead of just grumbling that the country is going to the dogs, try to change and reclaim our lives back?

This kind of paralysis is common: those endless conversations with friends, colleagues and partners which go round and round searching for some accomodation or some way out of a situation which seems unbearable and inescapable; the job change which never quite comes off; the postponed dreams of a different life.

Willing Slaves was first published in 2004. Is it outdated by now? In the last chapter, the author expresses cautious optimism as she sees the alternative work ethic finally emerging in Britain:

We’re getting there; it just needs a big kick in the right direction, and in a decade we’ll look back at the overwork culture as we now look back at the power-hunger, flashy wealth and shoulderpads of the eighties generation, as an emotional dead-end.

Alas, there is no indication that the overwork culture is going away. According to the recent post from workSMART,

With many employers and staff agreeing to reduce hours in order to avoid job losses, it seems the reduction in working time has had a knock on effect on the number of people working paid and unpaid overtime. So whilst this <£27.4 billion in 2009!> is a record value for unpaid overtime, the number of people doing it is actually down by 168,000 on last year, meaning the 5.07 m remaining are putting in even longer hours.

Are you working long hours? Do yourself a favour: read this book.

Poison Sweet Madeira

by Sophie Solomon

Tonight, Yuri and I went to the parents consultation evening. As we were waiting in the school hall for one of our appointments, Yuri suddenly said in a solemn voice:

The night, the street, the lamp, the chemist shop.

Which, of course, was a quote from a famous poem by Alexander Blok, but, more immediately, from A Light That Never Dies.

The only drawback of Poison Sweet Madeira is that it is way too short. But that makes every second of it precious, and every one of the nine tracks here is a wonder. Listen how effortlessly Sophie Solomon shifts from tango to waltz to gypsy dance to fugue on I Can Only Ask Why. And could there be a better song to close the album than Pin Pricks & Gravy Stains? Listen and play again.

Thaw

by Fiona Robyn

Ruth’s diary is the new novel by Fiona Robyn, called Thaw. She has decided to blog the novel in its entirety over the next few months, so you can read it for free.

Ruth’s first entry is below, and you can continue reading tomorrow here.

These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo. It’s a close-up. Her emaciated arms emerge from the top corners of the photo and the background is black, maybe velvet, as if we’re being protected from seeing the strings. One wrist rests on the other, and her fingers hang loose, close together, a pair of folded wings. And you can see her insides.

The bones of her knuckles bulge out of the skin, which sags like plastic that has melted in the sun and is dripping off her, wrinkling and folding. Her veins look as though they’re stuck to the outside of her hands. They’re a colour that’s difficult to describe: blue, but also silver, green; her blood runs through them, close to the surface. The book says she died shortly after they took this picture. Did she even get to see it? Maybe it was the last beautiful thing she left in the world.

I’m trying to decide whether or not I want to carry on living. I’m giving myself three months of this journal to decide. You might think that sounds melodramatic, but I don’t think I’m alone in wondering whether it’s all worth it. I’ve seen the look in people’s eyes. Stiff suits travelling to work, morning after morning, on the cramped and humid tube. Tarted-up girls and gangs of boys reeking of aftershave, reeling on the pavements on a Friday night, trying to mop up the dreariness of their week with one desperate, fake-happy night. I’ve heard the weary grief in my dad’s voice.

So where do I start with all this? What do you want to know about me? I’m Ruth White, thirty-two years old, going on a hundred. I live alone with no boyfriend and no cat in a tiny flat in central London. In fact, I had a non-relationship with a man at work, Dan, for seven years. I’m sitting in my bedroom-cum-living room right now, looking up every so often at the thin rain slanting across a flat grey sky. I work in a city hospital lab as a microbiologist. My dad is an accountant and lives with his sensible second wife Julie, in a sensible second home. Mother finished dying when I was fourteen, three years after her first diagnosis. What else? What else is there?

Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. I looked at her hands for twelve minutes. It was odd describing what I was seeing in words. Usually the picture just sits inside my head and I swish it around like tasting wine. I have huge books all over my flat; books you have to take in both hands to lift. I’ve had the photo habit for years. Mother bought me my first book, black and white landscapes by Ansel Adams. When she got really ill, I used to take it to bed with me and look at it for hours, concentrating on the huge trees, the still water, the never-ending skies. I suppose it helped me think about something other than what was happening. I learned to focus on one photo at a time rather than flicking from scene to scene in search of something to hold me. If I concentrate, then everything stands still. Although I use them to escape the world, I also think they bring me closer to it. I’ve still got that book. When I take it out, I handle the pages as though they might flake into dust.

Mother used to write a journal. When I was small, I sat by her bed in the early mornings on a hard chair and looked at her face as her pen spat out sentences in short bursts. I imagined what she might have been writing about; princesses dressed in star-patterned silk, talking horses, adventures with pirates. More likely she was writing about what she was going to cook for dinner and how irritating Dad’s snoring was.

I’ve always wanted to write my own journal, and this is my chance. Maybe my last chance. The idea is that every night for three months, I’ll take one of these heavy sheets of pure white paper, rough under my fingertips, and fill it up on both sides. If my suicide note is nearly a hundred pages long, then no-one can accuse me of not thinking it through. No-one can say; ‘It makes no sense; she was a polite, cheerful girl, had everything to live for’, before adding that I did keep myself to myself. It’ll all be here. I’m using a silver fountain pen with purple ink. A bit flamboyant for me, I know. I need these idiosyncratic rituals; they hold things in place. Like the way I make tea, squeezing the tea-bag three times, the exact amount of milk, seven stirs. My writing is small and neat; I’m striping the paper. I’m near the bottom of the page now. Only ninety-one more days to go before I’m allowed to make my decision. That’s it for today. It’s begun.

Continue reading tomorrow here...