It's as if Carnival is a phantom limb. A bit of our beauty and wholeness that's been cut off but we still think it's there. We still go through the motions, for reasons of image or enjoyment or economics.

--Attillah Springer, in her column in today's Guardian

As books pile up in vaster and vaster numbers--and especially now, in my sabbatical year, as I work at home and have no office to serve as a secondary storage-and-staging site--I seem to read less and less. Maybe as I age I read more slowly. Maybe I'm simply less patient. Maybe my powers of concentration wane. But it seems that a novel I would once--youth!--have devoured in two days now requires a month of slow mastication. --Hence, longtime readers, all three or four of you, I'd pretty much decided to abandon my four-year tradition, the annual and not entirely unserious Nicholas Laughlin Book Awards for Caribbean books (i.e. books written by Caribbean authors, set in the Caribbean, or otherwise of particular Caribbean interest) published in the previous twelve months. (Refresh your memory of previous winners and note my growing ambivalence about the exercise: 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005.) But it's Carnival Friday, I'm in my foxhole, and in need, it seems, of some distraction. So, for the little it's worth....

The fine print, as it were: the sole justification for these awards is self-indulgence. My sole qualification as chief judge: for professional reasons I try what might be called my best to keep up-to-date with new Caribbean books; I read--or at least flip through--most of the review titles that cross my desk, choke my shelves, and assemble themselves into obstacles on my carpet. My personal opinion is the only criterion for the awards, which are restricted to books published in English. Omissions due to poor memory are inevitable. In early years I named winners in certain categories, but my reading is no longer methodical enough for that.

The 2006 Nicholas Laughlin Book Awards:

Big "prize": University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, by Martin Carter, ed. Gemma Robinson, hands down the most exciting new West Indian book of the year, the definitive edition of the work of a major writer who was inaccessible for far too long. I wish this volume were only the first step in our taking our literary heritage more seriously. (Read a short review here.)

Runners-up, or hon. mentions, or whatever you'd like to call them: Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems, by Lorna Goodison. I Been There, Sort Of: New and Selected Poems, by Mervyn Morris. I include Wilson Harris's new novel, The Ghost of Memory, because if it seems utterly impenetrable to me, that merely speaks to my own inadequacies. I'm glad and grateful to have Jeffrey Chock's Carnival photos collected in Trinidad Carnival, even if the quality of the printing often disappoints; the photos survive mal-reproduction. I was impressed by the title story of the young Kei Miller's Fear of Stones and Other Stories, and I intend to keep a close eye on his career.

Addendum: the most breathtakingly original book I read last year was Naipaul's A Way in the World, published in 1994, and which I hadn't re-read since then. We all have a lot of catching up to do. --At the end of 2005 I resolved to read more funny books. Well, early in 2006 I said to myself, sod it all, and re-read Evelyn Waugh almost entire. I laughed myself into near-rupture of the spleen; then I was astonished and stricken into minor awe by the Sword of Honour trilogy, and wondered why I'd never read that one before.

She began to pace the length of the shelves, up and down, up and down, and as she walked she plucked books out at random, feeling their weight, examining their shapes. She sniffed the pages of one and inhaled the salty ocean air. Another had such glossy, creamy pages she found herself licking it. More and more books were piling up on the floor: books that smelled like roses, books that seemed to shriek when she opened them, books that made her shiver when she turned the pages. One entire shelf was devoted to books that seemed to be singing a quick, frolicking tune.

From Anu Lakhan's story "Unreading", published in the first issue of the new online magazine Caribbean Writing Today, edited by Wayne Brown.

2006 at a glance

In case posterity is paying attention

Key adjectives: overworked, overscheduled, overwrought, exhausted
Published words (print): approx. 42,800
Published words (online): it would take too long to count; est. 40,000?
Month in which I did not blog: December
Months in which I blogged most: February, April, and--over at the Galvanize blog--September and October
Emails written: approx. 6,600
Emails received (excl. junk): approx. 8,700
Photos taken: approx. 3,000
Major authors: John Keats, V.S. Naipaul, Bruce Chatwin, Ted Hughes
Reading highlights: E. Waugh, Sword of Honour; M. Swan, The Marches of El Dorado; N. Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin; B. Chatwin, On the Black Hill; K. Desai, The Inheritance of Loss; rereading Naipaul's A Way in the World, Chabon's Wonder Boys, and Waugh's early comic novels; a flurry of books about India at year-end
Major literary pilgrimage: lunch in what was once Walter Pater's room, Brasenose College, Oxford, 10 July
Books read (at least two thirds of): approx. 60
Soundtrack: jointpop ("King Radio", "After Half Past Nine", "The Water Supreme", etc.); Rufus Wainwright (Want One); Jeff Buckley (Grace); Miles Davis (Kind of Blue); Bach, Mozart, Satie (various)
Favourite work of art acquired: C. Cozier, Available in All Leading Stores, 2006 (gift from the artist)
Best movie: The Squid and the Whale (N. Baumbach), StudioFilmClub, 4 May
Best live musical performances: 3Canal, 6 February (preview night of the 2006 3Canal Show); jointpop, 6 May (their tenth anniversary concert, coinciding with my birthday); jointpop, 26 July (performing as "Jimmy Crime and the Murderer" at the Little Carib); Miriam Makeba, 31 July (the Emancipation concert I "crashed" with the help of Attillah); jointpop, 15 August (the first night of the Anarchy on the Avenue series); Royal Opera Chamber Ensemble, performing Dominique Le Gendre's Tales of the Islands, Queen's Hall, 27 August; 12 the band, 30 September (their Galvanize performance); jointpop, 10 October (at Anarchy on the Avenue, first time I heard them play "The Fool"); jointpop, 14 October (their Galvanize "unplugged" performance, first time I ever heard them play "King Radio")
Best party: Galvanize launch, 14 September, CCA7, Laventille
Trips to the beach: 3
Months abroad: 1.25
Countries visited: 2
Aborted attempts to visit Guyana: 4
Modes of transport: airplane, car, train, auto-rickshaw, feet
Airplane flights: 6
Furthest point south: San Fernando, Trinidad
Furthest point west: Chaguaramas, Trinidad
Furthest point north: Oxford, UK
Furthest point east: Delhi, India
Most visited restaurant: Apsara, Queen's Park East, Port of Spain
Strange beds slept in: 8
Palaces visited: 3
Longest airport security queue: 0.125 miles, Heathrow, 23 December
Key purchases: Sacred Heart Carnival costume (Minshall mas camp, Ariapita Avenue, Port of Spain); favourite blue shirt (H&M, Longacre, London); 75-litre rucksack (The North Face); maps of India (Stanfords, Longacre, London); painted goatskin leather lampshade (Dilli Haat, Delhi, India)
I still do not own: a car, real estate
Most unexpected good thing: starting a year's sabbatical in December
Other misc. highlights: Mariel's dinner party, 28 January; watching "Son of Saga Boy" and "Miss Universe" cross the Savannah stage for the first time at the Kings and Queens Prelims, 16 February; wearing an illuminated tail for J'Ouvert, 27 February; crossing the Savannah stage with Minshall's Sacred Heart, Carnival Tuesday evening, 28 February; being quoted (twice) by Edward Baugh in his address at the West Indian Literature Conference, UWI, St Augustine, 2 March; Phagwah celebrations, Aranjuez Savannah, 19 March; watching the Soca Warriors beat--sorry, draw with--Sweden at our first World Cup match ever, 10 June; visit to Sir John Soane's Museum, 5 July; balmy, blissful trip to Oxford to visit Vahni and David, 10 and 11 July; Galvanize literary events, 29 September ("News That Stays News") and 19 October ("Monsters and Other Animals"); first day of sabbatical year, 2 December; gentle days in Jaipur, 9 to 12 December; Global Voices Delhi summit, and lots of interesting people from all over the world, 16 and 17 December; lunch with Phil and Louise in Islington, tea with Patrick in Tooting, The History Boys in the West End, and Karen and Andy's Xmas party in Tufnell Park, all in one day, 22 December
Encounters with important people from my past who I hadn't seen in over ten years: 2
Hopeless crushes: 3
New pets: 0
Cups of coffee: approx. 380
Cups of tea: approx. 1,200
Glasses of Champagne: 6
Red Bulls: 1
Omlettes: approx. 150
Evenings I attended three different dinner parties: 1
Nights I didn't get to bed till 4 a.m.: 0
Average bedtime: 11.50 pm
Average wake-up time: 8 a.m.
Nights I felt I didn't get enough sleep: approx. 350
Unofficial motto: Don't slow down

[Compare to last year]

"Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry -- we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it."

A pseudo-autobiographical quincunx; or, doing as Oso tells me, sort of *

1. My earliest definite memory is of lying in my little cot in a beach house on the south coast of Barbados, unable to sleep; through the mist of the mosquito net, one of my great-aunts peering down at me. I must have been three years old. It was a hot night, and I could hear waves breaking and trees rustling outside the window. I also thought I could hear hundreds of sand-crabs scrabbling beneath the floorboards.

2. My favourite constellation is Orion. Anywhere in the world, if I can spot him in the sky above, I feel a little more at home. Once, swimming on a moonless, starful night at Blanchisseuse on the north coast of Trinidad, I looked up and realised he was a perfect mirror image of me, floating on my back with limbs outspread. Since then, stars have always suggested the taste of seawater. I have often contemplated getting a tiny tattoo of Orion, a pattern of minute inked stars on my inner left forearm, just below my elbow; only my absolute intolerance of physical pain has stopped me.

3. Is it possible to have an erotic relationship with someone who died a century and a half before you were born? If so, that's how I feel about Keats. In my imaginary correspondence with him, I call him "My dear John". Plot for an unwritten novel: Keats goes to Rome to die of consumption, but instead meets a mysterious doctor who administers a supernatural cure. Side-effect: prolonged life and youth. He never returns to London, and refuses to publish another word. His name fades into undeserved obscurity, now that his biography is deprived of the glamour of a tragic early death. Unread manuscripts fill every room of his little pink house at the foot of the Spanish Steps. Every morning he visits the same cafe round the corner. One day, when he's well into his 180s, he meets there a young Trinidadian who has come in quest of....

4. I've sinned a lot, I'm mean a lot, but I'm like sweet seventeen a lot.

5. Occasionally, for purposes of entertainment only, I dabble in bibliomancy. As often as not, I simply use the dictionary (twenty-year-old edition of the Concise Oxford). About a third of the time, the results seem in some way apt, but that may just be a statistical consequence. This morning, let me pluck from the shelf my Penguin Major Works of Thomas Browne. Page 152, 15th line from the top: "There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosme, and carries the whole world about him; Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus...."

* After two months of silence, this is as good as--as equivocal as--any other way to return to blogging. Thanks, David.

[Nearly forgot: I'm supposed to nominate a quintet of blogging colleagues to perpetuate this stream of revelations. Be good sports: Jonathan; JT; Attillah (who seems to be into making lists these days, when she's not breaking people's glasses); Marlon; and you, Reader, whoever you may be, or wish to be.]

Which is the greater struggle? The struggle to keep moving--get out of bed, into the next room, pick up your bag, why is it so heavy, out the door, into the car, out of the car, up the stairs, down the stairs, to the next meeting, the next task, the next obligation, the next cup of tea, how would any of this be possible without the next cup of tea, one more step, one more sentence, one more minute, keep the momentum, catch up, keep up, stand up, step up--?

Or the struggle to keep still--to be quiet--to be calm--to be clear--to pay attention--?

Attillah's t-shirt says it all:



And I'm wearing black today--specifically, a subversive 3Canal t-shirt.

Turning Four

I missed my own anniversary.

On 15 October, this blog was four years old.

A year ago I mused that "knowing I have no particular audience relieves me of the obligation to be 'relevant' somehow, by blogging about politics or current affairs". I then proceeded, in the next few months, to blog a great deal about politics and current affairs.

I'm not really a blogger at all, I'm far too sometimeish.

Over the sometime of the last two months, what energy and time I've had for blogging has gone into the Galvanize web presence.

And maybe I've once again fallen into a doldrum-like state of wondering what exactly this blog is for.

But what they trying to say about Jack Warner?

A kite tugging on its string gives you a sense of what's up there, / though it is translated, and by a string.

Friday, just after 9 a.m. I'm standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cordless phone in the other, talking to A. At that hour of the morning I'm often a little tottery, so I hear it before I feel it: that deep, sickening rumble like a continent's bones grinding. Earthquakes used to frighten me when I was a child, but for years now I've been nonchalant about them--part of my own personal myth of it-can't-happen-to-me invulnerability. I step calmly into the doorway as A., a couple miles away in Cascade, asks, "Do you feel that?"

"Dammit, this is a strong one," I reply, as I see one of my dogs running past the kitchen door and the floor lurches underfoot. Then I hear glass smashing. A. is about to say something, but the phone goes dead. Then the power goes out. Another smash. I suddenly have a mental picture of utility poles falling over. Car alarms are going off all over the neighbourhood.

The facts, learned later: 5.8, 15 seconds.

A large picture fell off the bookcase behind my desk. Had I been sitting there, it would have crashed onto my head. Instead it hit the little table next to my desk and shattered its green glass top. In another room, a broken vase. When I get to my office a couple hours later, I find the bookcase in the corner has partly collapsed and an avalanche of books and magazines covers the floor.

Admiring one of Bruce Cayone's signs at the launch of Galvanize 2006, 14 September, 2006, CCA7. Photo by Rachel Rochford

"Nothing prevents me from being a writer except laziness. A good writer."

Starts and Stops; or, Notes towards an Autobiography

The time has now come for me to hear a step in the passage, said N. to himself as he raised his head and listened. But there was nothing, or rather there was the swift high-pitched silence that swept through the house and swirled around his head when he paused his breathing, even now in the middle of the afternoon, when the city outside--streets and law-courts and concerts and schools--was rumbling and groaning towards the climax of its daily business. N. had stripped off his coat, but he was stifling. The windows were closed, since they let in nothing but heat. His forehead was streaming. He left damp thumbmarks on the letter he held in his hand, blue smudges.

The clock struck four. He had just set it to the right time.

There would be no one in the house until six. Now, for once, N. wished to be interrupted, surprised, to have the trajectory of his thoughts confounded, to be forced to thrust the letter hurriedly back into its packet, to cram the packet back into the drawer, heart pounding, ears and cheeks prickling, to pretend to be nonchalant. But there was no voice, no step; the silence mercilessly flowed from room to room to the corner where he knelt, washing round the house, till the glass of the windows strained and seemed it would shatter from the press of silence within and heat without.

Starts and Stops; or, Notes towards an Autobiography

N. was not wholly disconcerted, when he reached the hotel, to learn that his friend was not to arrive till evening. They would dine together at the worst, and tomorrow if not tonight. Meanwhile, the note of his arrival had been such a consciousness of personal freedom as he hadn't known in years, such a deep taste of change and of having if only for the moment nobody and nothing to consider, as promised to colour his adventure with cool success. And the city, still strange enough to promise, if not pleasure, then at least that interest of discovery that for some can be taken as a form of pleasure, was also wide enough, crowded enough, that he could safely indulge the subtle satisfaction of declining the possible company of the new acquaintances he had made on his journey. Had he told anyone his real name? For a few hours, for even a few days, he could half wear, half shrug off this new cloak of anonymity. His friend would arrive that evening, said the note he had opened at the desk. But N.'s objects of luggage were few.

Starts and Stops; or, Notes towards an Autobiography

All day, under a wet grey sky of October, N. rode westward. As he stared mournfully out the window at the great raw land so sparsely tilled, his heart went cold and leaden in him. He thought of how he had set out to get order and position for himself, and of the rioting confusion of his life, the blot and blur of years, the red waste of his youth, the warm hours of worry and hot minutes of regret.

By God! he thought. I'm getting old. Why here?

His life had been channelled by a series of accidents--words, sounds, faces, omissions. He had reeled out of warmth and plenty into this cold and barren land. And he felt the strangeness of destiny probe him like a knife.

Why now?

An Indirect Route

The three of us flew to Pisa and then caught a train to Florence. M was reading a book by Graham Greene, Journey Without Maps; he said it was to prepare him for our Guyana trip. One night after dinner, sitting outside a cafe near the Piazza della Signoria, surrounded by holidaying Germans, I sketched a map of Guyana on the back flyleaf of M's book, naming villages and rivers and mountains. I traced the route we might follow, from the coast south to the Rupununi.

The next day we took the bus to Siena. I knew nothing about the city, and was surprised by its beauty, by what seemed the sweetness of the light, as though all the old buildings were stained with honey. We climbed with the other tourists to the top of the unfinished nave of the Duomo, high on its hill. We heard sirens winding through the city, then an ambulance appeared in the square below us. A circle of people formed, too far down for us to guess their nationality or their ages. Someone had fainted, or had a heart attack.

A young man in a violet shirt and a jaunty straw fedora was standing near us, also looking down. We asked him to take a photograph of us, and gave him L's camera. He was American; he was in Siena with his whole family, he said, parents, siblings, siblings' children; he had climbed up here to escape them for an hour.

"Are you staying in Siena?"

"We've only come for the day. We're staying in Florence."

"Where are you going next?"

"We're on our way to Guyana," M said.

"You're taking a very indirect route," the young American said.