Okay, after a day of rest and turkey I got all contemplative, so this is going to be a long one.
Today’s audio is a song, “You Lied,” written and performed by Janes Remains, that is, me and Jane, forty percent of the by-then-defunct Janes Plane. It was recorded on an old boombox with an inbuilt microphone in Jane’s bedroom. We’d been smoking. The microphone wasn’t really up to the task (nor, frankly, after a lot of hash, were my vocal cords). I was 22 going on 23.
http://www.nicolagriffith.com/audio/player.swf
(direct link)
To put this in context, here’s an excerpt about those times (1983) from my memoir And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes from a Writer’s Early Life. It includes scans of my actual diary (aged 23). If you can’t read my handwriting (just click the images to get a bigger version), you can see a Word file transcript here.
JANES REMAINS
Jane the guitarist and I started doing music together. We called ourselves Janes Remains. We sang at the Spring Street Theatre bar, during intermission, and after the show. I only have one poor copy of a cassette tape recorded on a cheap boombox in Jane’s bedroom. Some of the lyrics were based on the poems I remembered writing at seventeen, when I was studying for my ‘A’ levels (Corner for You, Fragile Spirit). One was about Charlie’s (Charlie’s). One was a hurt rant for a lover who had left town and was never coming back (You Lied), because while I had many lovers I cared for them all (I really understand those polygamous Mormons: both the urge for many wives and the wild look in their eyes). They were my family. Not to the degree that Carol was, but family nonetheless.
Carol and I started looking for another flat, this time to share, and finally found one, a big, roomy place on Princes Avenue, above a hairdressers. This is where I began to write in earnest, where I realised that writing was what I was born for. I still wrote with a fountain pen. I still wrote on lined paper. I still didn’t know what I was doing, but now I read magazines at the library about query letters, the submission process and so on.
This is a photo of me reading in the front garden outside Heidi’s house. She took the photo.I started writing poetry again–and this time I kept it. “Sometimes” was for Heidi, who had left to get a master’s in theatre at Smith College.
Sometimes
I cry for you
sometimes
when love stalks
panther bright
through my dreams.
My soul flies for you
sometimes
battering at windows I’m afraid to open.DEAR DIARY
A woman called Carmel bought me a beautiful blank notebook. I began to keep an irregular diary. I’d make a short entry, or a long one, whenever the urge struck me: sometimes twice in one week, sometimes nothing for a year. So here, in my own words, are some snapshots of my life between 8th December, 1983 and 16 June, 1986.
I’ve included a facsimile of one entry so you can get a sense of the physical object, but just transcripts for the other entries. Here I realise that writing is not only joy and inspiration, but work. And I understand that work is tiring.
It’s so strange to listen to that song, to read the poem, to read my 23-year-old thoughts on writing, and to view them from my current perspective and story expertise. I want to fix them, particularly the diary exerpt and the song. Oh, god, that song. I hadn’t yet learnt what to leave out; I hadn’t learnt the value of silence. Still, I hope you enjoy it for what it is.
Nicola Griffith 
I did enjoy it. And I really enjoyed reading your diary excerpt from December ’83. It’s so great that you have that stuff to refer back to. But what’s this “Yankeeburger land”? Guess you didn’t have any idea back then you’d end up living here. Ha.
nicola, what a treat! I loved reading your diary. I’m such a snoop. And it’s educational, too. Parts of it made me grin. I’ve always appreciated your sense of humor. It’s great to know you were already funny back then! jennifer, “Yankeeburger land” is right. Even if I ever ended up living there, which is quite unlikely, I’d still want to call it that. The amount of meat consumed in that country, paired with the ignorant starvation-induced-greed of my fellow Latin Americans, is burning down the rain forest and polluting the rivers and lakes in our homelands. It takes great restraint on my part to not snap at proud, self-indulgent, unrestrained meat-eaters. Uh-oh. See how easy it is for me to lose it? I’ll go rant on nicola’s < HREF="http://asknicola.blogspot.com/2008/11/dont-snort-rainforest.html" REL="nofollow">don’t snort the rainforest<> post.
jennifer, if, back in 1983, I’d thought I’d end up living here I would not have applied for Clarion in 1987 and attended in 1988. I was, like most English people at the time–and certainly my father (he got put in hospital by a US sailor during the war)–anti-American. It’s a dreadful irony that in two weeks I’ll have lived here 19 years.karina, the thoughtless consumption I see here every day still occasionally makes me feel desperately sick. It’s appalling. But K and I live here; there’s not a lot we can do about others’ way of life. But you will never see a paper napkin in our house, or plastic plates or cup; we don’t waste food. I do eat meat and fish, but not pounds of it.
Oh, how delicious to read another person’s journal. Thank you for sharing it! I write morning pages, and re-read them and giggle at them…both the profound and the inane parts. “I think I take breakups so hard because I feel like they’re rehearsals for my father’s death.” “I should poop. I didn’t poop yesterday. I hope I poop today.” And so on. You know what…I should tell you a little story about how I read Ammonite. My first lover was a sci-fi junkie, and appalled at how under-read I was in the field. So he recommended Ammonite knowing that it’d appeal to my very feminist self. But then we had an awful breakup – he broke up with me from across the country, refused to speak to me, and I never saw him again. So I didn’t read the book…until two years later. I read it, enjoyed it, loved it; and to me it was also symbolic of how far I’d come since that breakup. So not only the content of your book, but the mere fact of its existence, is weighted with meaning in my emotional life. :)
monica, I’m delighted it wasn’t a disappointment.
The guitar work reminded me so much of a friend of mine-Chris. Chris has a simliar crisp and confident style. Chris is truly a talented but shy song writer. I think of her with a warm smile as I remember her creation referred to as “The Boxer Underwear Song”: “The creak of a wooden floor under bare toes. Coffee in the kitchen with the morning news. Your careless hair. Your boxer underwear. Sleepy and yawning so unaware. You’re so disarming with your charm…” She is no longer in my life and I miss her.I need to go back and read the diary selections but it is late and I will save it for morning coffee time.
nicola, :-) thank you for being one of the responsible people. I know you were vegetarian. And you write those wonderful eco-minded essays and novels. And you and K care for life and are very respectful. If the average US citizen was like you in those aspects, this planet would be a paradise. Or at least the continent of America, all the way down to Argentina.Yay! for not being wasteful. When I was in elementary school, my mom was the crazy lady who always volunteered to bring a whole set of non-disposable plates and glasses to use during parties. That was before being ecological became fashionable. The teachers and other mothers made fun of her, “You must love doing dishes.” She replied she didn’t, but she loved the planet. We also complained because we had to help her with the washing. “Can’t you just be like the rest of the moms and buy throw-away plates?” we used to whine. She kept telling us, “You’ll thank me one day.” She was so right. It’s been more than twenty years and we still have that huge set of plates; my brother uses them when he throws parties at my mom’s.
linda, I’m sorry Chris is shy. It’s such a waste when people use all their energy hiding. I’m glad you liked the guitar work; I think Jane was (no doubt still is, somewhere) very talented.karina, in my household, growing up and now, not wasting began due to poverty–disposable stuff cost money, over and over again–but then became a question of morality. I feel *bad* when I throw stuff away, it feels wrong.
I’ve been a vegetarian for over 25 years. I am from a lineage of ranchers,deer/turkey/boar hunters,and sat at a family table where meals were “not” meals unless a slab of meat was on the plate.I was given a single shot 22 rifle for my 12th birthday. My father took me rabbit hunting. I did not want to go but I wanted to please my father. I shot a rabbit but it did not die. I came up to it and watched it struggle for breath as it bled. My father wanted me to shoot it again but I could not. I still have the rifle but have never used it for hunting after that day.I have a nephew,also a vegetarian, with an interesting theory. He proposes that all the growing aggression in adults and in children is, in part, a result of the manner in which animals are slaughtered. It is not a humane process. Animals at the slaughterhouse sense fear and smell the scent of killing. They cannot take “flight” so they pour adrenaline into their bodies in a last futile attempt at survival. They are slaughtered and this “adrenaline imprint” is consumed by humans who get all the other toxic crap fed and injected into them as a mass product to supply Yankee burgerland. The methane gas alone produced by grazing livestock pollutes our air as their meat pollutes our bodies.And I will not continue on with how foie gras is at the expense of gavaging ducks and geese…I eat only organic eggs from free range chickens,drink organic milk, and use cheese products that are made without animal rennet.Those that choose to eat meat and other animal products need to at least stop and consider the “real” process in getting it to their plate.Okay,I really “will”stop now…deep cleansing breath. :)
I liked it all, but most of all I loved the picture.
Kelley’s v. fond of that picture, too.