5842/18862
On we go.
Long term Warming Up chronicler Jon Burton got in touch to tell me that the blog is, as of yesterday 4,988,871 words long (though this includes Metro columns and the 1998
Lee and Herring tour diary and how amazing to see the website is still there - go back to 2002 by reading the guestbook). But in any case, it’s getting very close to 5 million words, which someone informs me is well over 5 times the length of all of Shakespeare’s published works (the lightweight). Plus my jokes are better. And he hardly wrote anything about yoghurt or number-plates and only a little bit about stones.
It was a normal and dull day in the countryside today. I walked the dog, did some stone-clearing (identifying a rich seam of stone in the far corner of the field, a few metres from the shore that should keep me busy for a few weeks to years) and then came home to try some light writing. I have been charged with writing a 500 word introduction to my favourite book, Slaughterhouse Five, for a new edition that will be out next year. It’s a huge responsibility and I struggled to work out what I wanted to say and to be worthy of having my words so close to the words of my favourite 20th Century author. How deep could I go in the introduction? Should I discuss whether the fatalism of the book is a positive or negative? Although the book does seem to argue that everything is basically predestined (or at least that it is possible to view time from outside and there’s nothing you can do to change what has and will happen), I don’t think Vonnegut was saying that there’s no point in mourning death or improve your lot. Just that if you could step outside of time you’d realise that there would be nothing you can do and that life is so random and cruel and beyond your control that there’s no point in letting that fact eat you up.
To think how most authors would have covered being caught up in something like the Dresden bombing and how no one but Vonnegut could have taken the genius journey that he does in this book makes me almost believe in fate. That it should be him there and that he should somewhat miraculously survive to tell the tale. But also have the sense or at least the good fortune or writer’s block to wait a quarter of a century.
It’s a remarkable book, which is as much about ways of coping with being involved in something so horrific and circling around the subject to find a way of understanding or at least describing it. The madness of it all can really only be summed up by the story of a soldier being executed for stealing a teapot in the ashes of the city.
Anyway, I will stew over my 500 words for a few days I am sure. And be unable to do the book any justice.
I did make a start on my own Slaughterhouse Five, “The Thriling Threeâ€, attempting to document the closest I have got to a major catastrophe, when some lads up our street were playing snowballs with me and then when I slipped over pelted me in the face with snowballs from about three feet away. It was a personal horror for me and I ran into the house crying from my mum. I was 28 years old. And I apologise to you all for not making that joke about my baby son yesterday. I am slipping. Ironically.
And a dark (in both senses) chapter of
Stone Clearing with Richard Herring went up today. It shows the lows that come with this profession. If you are a bright-eyed newbie to the job who thinks that stone-clearing is all fun and games, then you may want to skip this one til later
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