House Arrest: Writing

In the midst of this mad lockdown I have done a fair bit of reading -- though, interestingly, not much more than usual. I think I have a natural limit with reading. I certainly can't do it all day (which I can playing music), and perhaps not even all evening, unless my mind is particularly clear. What I am doing more of is listening to music (and possibly playing a bit less), and I am watching films, which I usually seldom do; yet I'm not watching any television series, which I usually do.

I am perhaps writing less, but this has much to do with becoming fed up of receiving no responses for submissions to publications. I am beginning to realise that Samuel Johnson was quite right to say that no one but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money. Writing an essay is not an inconsiderable labour. It is not like writing a blog post, which at the very most takes an hour (and this doubtless shows). An essay can take a day to write; and a serious essay about a subject, rather than a mere opinion piece, can take significantly longer -- weeks, months, even a year, depending on the difficulty of research.

Say you spend two weeks thinking about, researching and then writing an essay. You then finish it, and spend a few more days reflecting and making the odd adjustment. Then you start sending it to publications; how long this takes can vary greatly. I keep a list of publications that I like and which I know accept unsolicited submissions. This list is not long, maybe 30 publications in total. If I write something, I go over the list and submit the piece to those publications for which it might be suitable. Complications arise, however: some publications do not accept simultaneous submissions, meaning you have to wait for a response from them before you can submit the essay elsewhere. I have waited months for a response before; in many cases I am still waiting.

I have gone through this process maybe twenty, perhaps thirty times, and four times have I been successful. One time I was told my piece was being considered for publication, then several months later I got another email saying thank you, but no. Usually I get no response; and if I do get one, it tends to be a long time after submission. Sometimes, having months to reflect on an essay, I realise it wasn't as good as I first thought; then I am glad it was never published.

One time I submitted a short story to a publication under my real name, and was fairly swiftly rejected. Some time later I resubmitted the story to the same place under a pseudonym which implied me to be a woman from an ethnic minority background. It was swiftly published. I have only tried this once, so it is hardly evidence in and of itself, but I have heard of so many similar examples that I suspect there is a pattern. In fact, I have stopped submitting to literary and political publications unless they are explicitly not left-wing. It just doesn't seem worth the effort.

I haven't written much, then. I am thinking of writing a book. I might not be able to get it published, but I might nonetheless be able to self-publish it, and maybe a few curious people will read it.

I am constantly amazed that anyone seems to have a writing career. Then I read their writing and I am even more amazed. Of course I don't aspire to anything as daft as a writing career, or indeed any career for that matter. In this mad post-lockdown world, I can't honestly say I aspire to anything worldly. Certainly nothing ambitious.

The Two Metre Rule

In the middle ages, church music mostly used a 3:1 metre (think waltzes). Music with a 4:1 metre -- what we erroneously call common time, but was in the middle ages known as tempus imperfectum cum prolatione imperfecta -- was usually considered of lower sort, often shunned. As the Latin title indicates, music in four was considered imperfect, music in three perfect -- owing in part to its association with the Trinity.

For some reason we increasingly do not divide by three. Music remains something of an exception, with most music still usually divisible by either 4 or 3, though 4/4 has undoubtedly become the default time signature. Two, three and four seem to be the most natural divisions for man. Any higher than that is of significantly less use. We think in threes and twos, and so to have any system that would deal only in threes, or only in twos, would be a very limited system -- and indeed it is.

We still have an imperial system which allows for measurements in threes as well as twos, and people still use it informally, even if officially it is, at the very least, not encouraged. Imperial measures are drawn form the body and the environment and the history of a people, not imposed on us artificially from above. An inch is more easily comprehended than 2cm, an ounce more tangible than 50 grams, and six feet more real than two metres. I'm not even sure what a metre is, an abstract term which is only useful poetry or music. Even then, it isn't a measurement in itself but rather a category of measurement -- imabic pentametre and compound time, for example.

The stupid -- and it turns out arbitrary -- two metre rule seems to symbolise the state we are in. This lockdown is foreign to English constitution. It is only natural, then, that it is employed in the measurements favoured by European despots and statist busybodies (guess, if you do not already know, which revolution introduced the metric system to the modern world...)

It is another symbol of our loss of liberty, just as ineffective face masks are symbolic gags. Keep two 'metres' away from each other at all times; cover your mouth with a mask; do not gather together in groups of any number, publicly or privately; do not spread misinformation online; do not attend church; come out at 8 o'clock every Thursday to applaud 'our NHS', then go back into your homes and do not come out.