No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference.

‘No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference’ Charles Lamb observed, in his essay entitled New Year’s Eve, and one can only agree. In my case, I tend to arrive in January 1st with a profound sense of relief that December 31st is finally over and done with for another year.

I don’t particularly like New Year’s Eve. It always seems to promise so much and yet invariably disappoints, more than almost any other day of the year. As a child I was convinced that New Year’s Eve must be the most exciting day of the year, as one year changed into another, and adults all stayed up until midnight to see this amazing thing happen. I longed to do the same. The reality, when I finally got there, was disappointing to say the least, and no amount of sherry and mince pies could ever make it better. Even now, I don’t think, deep down, I’ve quite got over it. These days, I am happy if New Year’s Eve looks like any other evening, the one concession to festivity being the now-traditional roast duck dinner. We don’t stay up until midnight any more; the first premature fireworks usually wake me for long enough to note the year’s passing, and to comfort any cats that need comforting because of the noise, before I go back to sleep. I will undoubtedly wake up around 5.30 as I usually do, and be pleased to discover that the world is still tootling along, but that it is now January 1st. January 1st means celebratory champagne and getting on with life.

2011 has been a very uneven kind of year for Paul and for me. Too many bad things happened along the way, and although life has improved slightly during November and December, getting this far has seemed like too much of a struggle for me to want to look back over the year now fading away. So, no highlights of 2011 – it's enough to have survived – just a resolute looking forward to 2012 and the hope that things will continue to improve, globally and locally. 

No resolutions either. I may have plans for Paper Knife for the coming year, but for now I am keeping them to myself, except to note that I am going to participate in a project to read and blog about the works of Alan Garner, and a few related books, something I’m really looking forward to. More details when we figure out what we’re doing, but commentary will be spread between here, Practically Marzipan and Solar Bridge.

Among the related works we will be reading is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, my favourite piece of medieval literature. I oredered the modern versions by Simon Armitage and Bernard O’Donoghue just after Christmas and, almost miraculously, they arrived today; definitely my kind of post.

You will, I hope, recall that after beheading the Green Knight at Arthur’s Christmas gathering, Gawain agrees to receive a similar blow the following year. After spending the Christmas season with the jovial Sir Bertilak and his predatory wife, as the New Year approaches Gawain at last finds his way to the Green Chapel to meet the knight.

Welcome to my world after all your wandering.

You have timed your arrival like a true traveller

to begin this business which binds us together.

Last year, at this time, what was yielded became yours,

and with New Year come you are called to account.

That’s Armitage’s version. Here’s O’Donoghue’s:

You are very welcome to my place here.

You’ve timed your arrival as a true man should,

and you know the terms agreed between us:

a year back you had to take what was yours,

and I was to repay you this New Year’s Day.

At the end of the encounter, Gawain is still alive, if slightly bloodied and more than a little bowed. That is how I feel at the end of 2011.

So now, on to 2012.

Holiday Reading – Words Without Borders

Here in England, the period between Christmas and the New Year is a tangled mess of bank holidays and ordinary working days, no one quite clear which shops and businesses are open, whether public transport is running a full schedule, when refuse might be collected. It becomes difficult to maintain a sense of conventional daily life when the media seems to be convinced we are engaged in one long festive whirl. I welcome the downtime, in particular Paul being on holiday, but I don’t really enjoy the sense of limbo. When you have no family and aren’t doing anything with friends during that period, there is only so much lounging around to be done before it’s back to the desk. So, yesterday, while Paul was sanding the floor of the room we are currently decorating, I was clearing through my assorted online reading backlogs.

I’ve been reading the December 2011 issue of the online magazine, Words Without Borders, a magazine of international writing. I’d not come across this magazine before but the current issue has an extensive feature on fantastic stories from around the world, and another feature on Iranian writers which turned out to be equally fascinating.

The Weird – The White Wyrak – Stefan Grabiński

Stefan Grabiński is another European writer unknown to me but on the strength of this story, I’d certainly like to see more of his work.

‘The White Wyrak is a first-person narrative with something of the flavour of a folktale, the account of a young journeyman chimney sweep working for Master Kalina, and a strange encounter with the supernatural. Yet, reading past the surface of the story, one has the sense that there is something else going on, something not fully articulated.

The Weird – In The Penal Colony – Franz Kafka

As I continue my reading of The Weird, I approach Kafka’s ‘In The Penal Colony’ with a certain trepidation, I must admit. I studied Kafka, including this story, for my German A-level, an experience I can only describe as deeply traumatic, so poor was the teaching, and have avoided him ever since. (The same could be said of my English A-level texts; sometimes I think it’s a miracle I emerged from my school years with my love of literature and reading basically intact, given the way the teachers worked so hard to destroy it.) In fact, I retain almost no memory of reading ‘In the Penal Colony’, so I come to this story fresh, and indeed it occurs to me that I hated Kafka so much when I studied this story I never even bothered to read it in an English translation. Which is a pity as I think I might have appreciated it rather more than my very imperfect German permitted.

The Weird – Unseen-Unfeared – Francis Stevens

‘Unseen-Unfeared’ (1919), by Francis Stevens,  is rather different in character to its predecessor, ‘The Hell Screen’. We are unequivocally back in the USA, in Philadelphia’s South Street, where the narrator, Blaisdell, is dining with his friend, the ‘ever-interesting’ Mark Jenkins, in a little Italian restaurant, and yet something is not quite right. It is a chance meeting, because ‘Jenkins is too busy, usually, to make dinner engagements’ (124), which makes one wonder just a little about the nature of this friendship. A little jealousy in play, perhaps? Jenkins is described as a detective, and when he speaks of ‘little odd incidents and adventures of his profession’ it is ‘[n]othing very vital or important, of course’ (124). Jenkins is not the kind of detective, we are told, who brags about his achievements, though one has the suspicion the narrator rather wishes he would, just a little. The food is highly seasoned, the wine is sour and thin, and the narrator’s account of the meeting exudes a general dissatisfaction, not least when Jenkins has to leave: ‘He so clearly did not invite my further company that I remained seated for a little while after his departure’ (125). Prior to this, Jenkins has offered Blaisdell a cigar, so we must imagine him lighting it before he starts to walk home.

The Weird – The Hell Screen – Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Regrettably, I have been silent for a few days. Last Monday I had the upgrade viva for my Ph.D, which I’m pleased to say I passed without too much trouble. So only another two years, many thousands of words of thesis and another viva, and with a little luck I shall be Dr Speller! But after the viva I had to take a few days’ break from blogging and writing, just to recover from the stress of it all. However, it’s time to start writing again, and today I’m returning to the short stories of The Weird, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, and this time I’m discussing Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s ‘The Hell Screen’.

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By yet another of those peculiar coincidences that The Weird seems to bring with it, it turns out that I am familiar with ‘The Hell Screen’, as it has been read on BBC Radio 4 Extra a number of times in the last few years. However, I have the impression that the dramatised reading was somewhat sanitised as this story seems much darker than I recall (but given Radio 4 Extra’s habit of endlessly recycling the same bits of material, the story must be due for another outing any time now).

Akutagawa (1892-1927) is often called the ‘father of the Japanese short story’. His first story, ‘Rashomon’, lives on in Kurosawa’s film of the same name, although Kurosawa used the setting of ‘Rashomon’ and took the film’s plot and characters from another of Akutagawa’s stories, ‘In a Grove’. Akutagawa committed suicide at the age of thirty-five, and his last words in his will are variously translated as saying that he felt ‘a vague uneasiness’ or ‘a vague insecurity’, and that is perhaps a useful starting point in thinking about this story.