Time's Flow Stemmed

2011-06-25T16:49:00.006+01:00

I do hate to inconvenience those patient readers that follow Time's Flow Stemmed, but, for all sorts of reasons I may explain sometime, I am migrating this blog to Wordpress.

Please correct your blogrolls, RSS readers and any other tools for navigation. This blog now resides at a new location:

http://timesflowstemmed.com/

Thank you for following Time's Flow Stemmed, and I do hope to see you on the far shore.

Anthony

Discover New Writers with the Literature Map

2011-06-21T20:16:00.000+01:00

In free moments between reading Infinite Jest I've been messing around with the Literature Map. You type in the name of a favourite writer, in the case above, Kafka, and the map displays a list of similar writers. The names closest to the original writer are theoretically those closest in terms of style, voice or content.

At the northern extremes of the map above are a few writers that I dislike, but it isn't a bad snapshot of my perennial favourite writers.

DFW vs. BEE

2011-06-19T16:48:00.000+01:00

Perhaps Wallace’s greatest critique of nihilism — greatest in that it escapes the confines of Ellis and his ilk’s literary purview — is Don Gately, erstwhile hero of Infinite Jest, a recovering Demerol addict and small time thief whose painful day-to-day existence figures as the existential struggle against bleak, overwhelming nothingness. Gately is the heart and spirit of IJ, a big sad throbbing heart that, to quote Wallace out of context (from above), is the writer’s way “to depict this [dark] world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”

If you have interest in either Bret Easton Ellis or David Foster Wallace (I am assuming a taste for both is unlikely), read Biblioklept's outstanding face/off post.

The Schoolmaster's Disease

2011-06-19T11:43:00.000+01:00

I don't know. Some people have gifts, like a friend of mine who can balance a glass on his finger and make it turn round by just looking at it. I have the gift of being occasionally able to put myself back in the past and see what's happening. That's how historical novels should be written. I also have a very good memory for anything I want to remember and none at all for what I don't want to remember. Wife to Mr. Milton—my best novel—started when my wife and I were making a bed in 1943 and I suddenly said: “You know, Milton must have been a trichomaniac”—meaning a hair fetishist. The remark suddenly sprang out of my mouth. I realized how often his imagery had been trichomaniac. So I read all I could find about him and went into the history of his marriages. I'd always hated Milton, from earliest childhood; and I wanted to find out the reason. I found it. His jealousy. It's present in all his poems . . . Marie Powell had long hair with which he could not compete.

INTERVIEWER

I think you describe that precisely in the novel, when they are riding on the heath . . .

GRAVES

He had the schoolmaster's disease. Constipation.

INTERVIEWER

You mean that literally?

From a wonderful interview with Robert Graves.

The Waste Land for iPad App

2011-06-18T07:47:00.000+01:00

The Waste Land for iPad app is the first digital, literary edition that enhances its book equivalent. Before Touch Press's production, the e-book's advantages offered little to capture my attention.

Fiona Shaw's performance of the poem is problematic. Personal, and a touch histrionic, but nevertheless it provides an interpretation of the poem that is revealing. A favourite since I first encountered the poem in my teens, The Waste Land is cryptic and can bear multiple interpretations. Those of Seamus Heaney and Jeanette Winterson are refreshing.

The best bit of this edition are the facsimile copies of Pound's hand-written edits of the manuscript.

Across by Peter Handke

2011-06-15T21:02:00.000+01:00

Finishing Peter Handke's Across three days ago has not ended my engagement with the novel. As in The Weight of the World, what emerges is the writer's gentle attentiveness. There is a dreamlike quality to the writing, but I cannot be certain what gets lost in translation. As far as I can decipher Handke is scrutinising the nature of fiction, of storytelling.

My forehead no longer needed a supporting hand. It wasn't exactly a warmth, but a radiance; it welled up rather than spread; not an emptiness, but a being-empty; not so much my being-empty as an empty form. And the empty form meant: story. But it also meant that nothing happened. When the story began, my trail was lost. Blurred. The emptiness was no mystery; but what made it effective remained a mystery. It was as tyrannical as it was appeasing; and its peace meant: I must not speak. Under its impulsion, everything (very object) moved into place. "Emptiness!" The word was equivalent to the invocation of the Muse at the beginning of an epic. It provoked not a shudder but lightness and joy, and presented itself as a law: As it is now, so shall it be. In terms of image, it was a shallow river crossing.

That paragraph is followed by, "The emptiness became peopled with figures." The title of the chapter is 'The Viewer is Diverted': is the Viewer the narrator, writer or reader, who collaborate to tell a story? What are we to believe from a narrator who asks, "I haven't been teaching lately. Have I been dismissed or given a vacation or granted sick leave, or temporarily suspended?"

The spare narrative is interwoven by an attentiveness to nature; the narrator reads daily a few lines of Virgil's "poetic treatise on agriculture", The Georgics.

On the sloping meadows above the stairs-the archers now inaudible-the densely growing dandelions, interlocking like small cogwheels, had closed with the onset of twilight, and their diurnal yellow gave way to the dark enamel-yellow of the buttercups (more thinly spread, because their flowers were so tiny) on their tall, thin, ramified stems, which, though there was hardly any wind, swayed all along the slops, accentuating the "evening" character of the scene.

The violent central action is quickly over. As in the chapter title, 'The Viewer Takes Action', but I am left wondering the nature of the fictional violence. Who took action? Did the narrator write or fantasise the action? The narrator, an amateur archaeologist, studies thresholds, saying:

The only threshold still remaining to us, says one of our modern teachers, is that between waking and dreaming, and nowadays little attention is paid to that. Only in the insane does it protrude, visible to all, into daytime experience, like the fragments of the destroyed temples just mentioned.

The sense of perplexity never leaves. It could be irritating but I find it deeply satisfying. I don't want linear narrative and tidy plot lines. I want to engage with the irrationality and surreality of life. In Across Handke provokes engagement with a novel at its profoundest level, the nature of fiction, of narration.

A Bibliomaniac Challenge

2011-06-14T19:36:00.002+01:00

When Melville House announced their Art of the Novella series, my initial emotion was one of relief that there was no '1-Click' method of purchasing the entire series. Three months later, ruefully, I spotted a change of heart: all thirty-seven titles, the five Duel novellas and the Bartleby tote bag, at thirty percent off. I wavered for all of three minutes and placed my order. They arrived last week. My "I would prefer not to" bag and I have been seen around town this weekend.

As I pondered a back-to-back reading of all forty-two novellas, Francis of Nonsuch Book devised a plan, it's slightly crazy but that never stopped me sliding down the headmaster's banister for a dare*. The clever marketing folk at Melville House are supporting the challenge. There are several levels of participation:

Curious – Read 1 novella
Fascinated — Read 3 novellas
Captivated – Read 6 novellas
Passionate — Read 9 novellas
Mesmerized – Read 15 novellas
Obsessed – Read 21 novellas
Fanatical – Read 27 novellas
Unstoppable — Read 33 novellas
Bibliomaniac — Read all 42 novellas

I am unable to resist an attempt at the Bibliomaniac title. These are just novellas, right?

*Sliding down the headmaster's banister? My trophy for the dare was a book, a Vonnegut, though which title I cannot remember. And yes I was caught, landing with a crash outside his study door, in which he was working, with the door open. My punishment was writing out all the names and telephone numbers in the letter 'B' telephone directory, a regular enough punishment at boarding school. I was writing in the halls until the house master excused me at two the next morning. If I recall, it was the first time the letter 'B' had been given as punishment.

Paddy Leigh Fermor

2011-06-11T07:16:00.000+01:00

With a few hours to spare I indulged one of my favourite pursuits, scouring the shelves of secondhand bookshops for surprises. My targets were Slightly Foxed and Heywood Hill. I stumbled upon 3 first editions: The Woman Who Was God by Francis King, The Haunt by A. L. Barker (both writers advocated by Rebecca West) and a rare Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

A few hours later, to my surprise, I learnt of Leigh Fermor's death. His travel books are outstanding examples of the genre. We shall see if there is a third volume, long promised, of his legendary walk, as a teenager, from Holland to Constantinople.

The Weight of the World by Peter Handke

2011-06-08T20:52:00.000+01:00

From the pages of Peter's Handke's The Weight of the World appear a isolated narrator, with fears that some of us probably share. A loose structure carries us forward through one or more difficult relationships, a separation, a suspected heart attack, the fear of death, and the anxiety of raising a child. Though there is no narrative, by the end of the November 1975 to March 1977 period there is a sense of redemption, of coming to a close of one demanding period: 'Last night: so happy that I lost all sense of place.A feeling no longer of omnipotence but oneness with the world'.

The collection of overheard conversations, dreams, banalities and attentive observations eventually coalesce into twin themes: a fear of love, and separation from others: 'Which is worse: anxiety or people?', or the Other as Sartre would have it. This next sentence is not from Handke (it is vintage Russell) but I suspect it would meet his approval:

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

Being an assemblage of aphorisms and fragments, it is tempting to sample at length, but I shall indulge the temptation just once more with a single moving anecdote:

The old man in the shop today, who wanted to buy salt. They were out of the small-size box he usually bought, so he took a large one, remarking that the small box had lasted him three years. Eerie silence in the shop. Everyone realised that the old man had just bought his last box of salt.

Though the narrator's anxiety is his own, the power lies in Handke's observing and attending those sentiments and thoughts that usually go unvoiced.

Reflections on The Weight of the World

2011-06-06T09:44:00.000+01:00

The beauty of the world today is unbearable for one person alone, even for two; possibly three might endure it

One after another flow Peter Handke's formulations in The Weight of the World, described as a combination of professional notebook and personal diary. Suggestive of Kafka's diaries, but also of the Twitter timeline or Tumblr blog of a disturbed genius (surely complementary terms).

The danger of being alone, of all this thinking, pondering, "soul-searching," etc., is that one loses one's capacity for opening up to others

But how trustworthy is the description on the jacket cover of this edition? We are wired to look for narrative, to detect a sequence behind Handke's attentive noticing. Can we accept these fragments as merely 'details of Peter Handke's daily life in Paris from November 1975 through March 1977'? Why this particular period? Inevitably the book raises unanswered questions.

In talking with this woman, I must take care not to think, after every sentence, that I've told her off again! ( I must take care that our conversation doesn't become a duel)

These fragments insinuate themselves into sleep and waking thought. Handke observes moments of infinitely small detail, reflections on individuality and authenticity. How do we live with others? How do we live with ourselves?

The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

2011-06-04T19:29:00.001+01:00

There is an almost Sebaldian seriousness to Geoff Dyer's The Missing of the Somme, also like Sebald is the preoccupation with memory and mortality. This being Dyer's non-fiction, this haunted exploration of remembrance is loosely interwoven with the road-trip Dyer and his friends make along the Western Front: 'None of us is quite sure whether we're on a gloomy holiday or a rowdy pilgrimage'.

We lie on our beds, half pissed. Mark is reading Death's Men; Paul, They Called It Passchendaele; I read The Challenge of the Dead. Eventually, the other two drop off to sleep. I go on reading. I 'lie, sleepless, with Ypres on the heart, and then suddenly a grand tumult of explosion, a sound as of the tumbling of heavy masonry'. [..] Paul snoring.

Explaining why he chose to write a 'war book' Dyer explains:

And this book? Like the youthful Christopher Isherwood who wanted to write a novel entitled 'A War Memorial', I wanted to write a book that was not about 'the War itself but the effect of the idea [of the War] on my generation.' Not a novel but an essay in mediation: research notes for a Great War novel I had no intention of writing, the themes of a novel without its substance . . .

Beginning with a meditation on old black and white family photographs, Dyer presents brief 'notes', on the Great War as presented in poetry, memorials, architecture, prose, film, photographs and visitors' books. It might not be the first Geoff Dyer book you should read, but if his writing speaks to you deeply you will want to get to it sometime.

An Author, Less Sweet

2011-06-01T19:27:00.000+01:00

In Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, I came across a Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, of what happens when a poem (or book), once considered beautiful, ceases to be so:

Is this made plain? What have I come across

That here will serve me for comparison?

The sceptic disappointment and the loss

A boy feels when the poet he pores upon

Grows less and less sweet to him, and knows no cause.

What are the books or poems you once loved (in adulthood) and now cannot remember what you found beautiful at the time? Is this memory accompanied by a sense of loss and disappointment

From A to X by John Berger

2011-05-30T20:45:00.000+01:00

Reading John Berger's attentive stories of friendship, oppression and love induces in me a languor, comparable to that of sitting on a beach late at night, food eaten and wine drunk, raging fire ablaze, listening to a storyteller. Something in his depiction of inanimate objects, with so clearly an artist's eye, slows the pace, evokes that staring into timeless night that comes with sitting on a beach past midnight.

They [blackcurrants] stain your fingers read, the blackcurrants, and their taste, not their colour, is black, black and marine, like the taste of something living on the seabed. A sea urchin or some other echinoderms might have the same taste, though it would be less strong, less pungent.

Like Nabokov, I am no enthusiast for epistolary novels. In From A to X we are offered up 'some letters recuperated by John Berger'. Writing of the 'easy epistolary form' in Mansfield Park, Nabokov wrote, "This is a sure sign of a certain weariness on the part of the author when she takes recourse in such an easy form". But this is John Berger, an author whose shopping list I would read if offered. The typical challenges of the epistolary novel are present in Berger's book: a lack of narrative propulsion, and the unreal nature of many elements of the letters, reminding the recipient of his personal history.

Berger chooses to keep ambiguous the identity of the oppressor, or the crime(s) that earned two life sentences for Xavier, the recipient of A'ida's letters. The setting, hinted at in Xavier's notes - a device to allow Berger to be present in the narrative - is non-specific, a fictional Middle Eastern/Central American setting. It is possible to drift through, drowsily admiring the beauty of much of the prose, without truly engaging in the story.

If From A to X interests you, there are very many proper reviews, from the enthusiastic to the uncomplimentary. Take your choice.

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

2011-05-30T07:40:00.000+01:00

Where shall I begin? The very begininning: the title The Penelopiad suggests spoof, comedic writing, not my favourite literary feeding ground. Why not the Penelopesian Wars? But I enjoy Margaret Atwood's books, The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake are serious, intelligent, subtle works. I blamed the marketing department at Knopf Canada for the title. The slaughter of the maids and mutilation of Melanthius is the brutal conclusion to a story I have been reading on and off for twenty years. After the block of the title, I expected much from Atwood: a feminist reading of Penelope's story (putting aside Butler's theory that The Odyssey was written by a woman) - a brilliant idea.

I didn't completely dislike Atwood's story, just found it wanting, compared to her other books. The humour lacked subtlety. Describing the race Odysseus won to secure Penelope as his wife, Atwood writes:

He cheated. [...] He mixed the wine of the other contestants with a drug that slowed them down, though not so much as they would notice; to Odysseus he gave a potion that had the opposite effect. [So far, so good ...] I understand that this sort of thing has become a tradition, and is still practised in the world of the living when it comes to athletic contests.

A single movement: my eyes followed that line, a snort, and the book flew, pages fluttering like a quail, across the room. Is this the Margaret Atwood who wrote in The Handmaid's Tale lines like, "I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will . . . Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping." Has Spike Milligan taken the role of Atwood's Muse?

Spike Milligan, or perhaps the Pythons, are also presumably the inspiration for 'The Anthropology Lecture' and 'The Trial of Odysseus as Videotaped by the Maids' chapters.

But I didn't completely dislike The Penelopiad. It was an opportunity to hear retold one of my many favourite parts of The Odyssey. And, readable in two sittings, it had the virtue of brevity.

Sincere apologies to Dolce Bellezza, who was the inspiration to read this book. Please read her kinder thoughts on the story.

Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film by Masha Tupitsyn

2011-05-29T07:00:00.000+01:00

There was a time when the Duc de La Rochefoucauld's book of Reflections or Sentences and Moral Maxims accompanied me wherever I went. If the Duc were alive today, there is a very high likelihood he would be tweeting, his maxims anticipate Twitter:

If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.

And, of course, there are at present four Twitter accounts just tweeting La Rochefoucauld's maxims.

Other proto-twitterers: Twitter may have constrained the prolixity of Montaigne and Lord Chesterfield, but they may have been tempted, Pascal's ('We only consult the ear because the heart is wanting.') uber-nerd genius would have been unable to resist, Tacitus would have tried but abandoned the attempt. Twitter is a natural home for those that can capture, haiku-like, the aphorism or opinion in 140 letters.

I've read a couple of books consisting of email exchanges, both were dire, and I expected little from a collection of tweets published in book form. Masha Tupitsyn's Laconia: 1200 Tweets on Film is remarkable. Ostensibly a series of condensed thoughts on film and gender, Tupitsyn's 'literary experiment' expands into extended cultural commentary and diary. As she explains in the introduction:

[..] each tweet in LACONIA is a miniature exegesis; an appraisal of the world through film and media since our understanding of the world has become increasingly, if not entirely, shaped and mediated by both.

Masha Tupitsyn, like Geoff Dyer, writes with that tender attentiveness, and perceptive humour, that reveals truths. Here are a couple that made me laugh and had me whispering, 'Yes, yes, that's exactly how it is!'

103. I just can't bring myself to watch Changeling or Wanted because looking at Angelina Jolie's already-dead face is like looking at [2:19 PM July 27th]

104. Damien Hirst's diamond encrusted skull. [2:20 PM July 27th]

And:

141. I think what happened to Christian Bale happened to Mel Gibson. Both actors lost their talent (and their sanity) when they turned into [2:03 PM Aug 18th]

142. "Americans." [2:04 PM Aug 18th]

The Invisible

2011-05-28T06:58:00.000+01:00

Together, on the surface of the rice paper, bamboo and bird have the elegance of a single image, with the discreet stencil of the artist's name stamped below and to the left of the bird. Her name is L-.

When you enter the drawing, however, and let its air touch the back of your head, you sense how this bird is homeless. Inexplicably homeless.

Wittgenstein said that beautiful visual events stir the hand to replicate them. John Berger in Bento's Sketchbook expresses that belief in this way:

We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.

Bento's Sketchbook by John Berger

2011-05-28T06:15:00.000+01:00

In Leonardo's Treatise on Painting (Tratatto) he advises a neophyte artist to 'quicken the spirit of invention' by observing walls stained by damp, or the coloration of rocks, and in them to see magnificent landscapes or scenes of battle. Commissioned to paint a mural in S. Maria del Grazie, Leonardo astonished the prior by spending three days contemplating the wall he was to paint.

[...] standing for days on end in front of the wall he was to paint, without touching it with his brush- an incident Croce quotes as evidence of this "inner" process of expression-we may suppose that the thoughts that occupied his mind were of painted surface, were perhaps images of ever-developing articulation of what he was to set down. Thus a work of art was created that was both in an artist's mind and in a medium. (Art and its Objects - R. Wollheim)

Wollheim writes much of expression in his seminal 1968 book. The etymology of 'expression' is early fifteenth century, originally the 'action of pressing or squeezing out.' It is a word that came to mind frequently last night at a reading John Berger gave of his remarkable Bento's Sketchbook. Interviewed by Sally Potter, Berger often struggled to unearth the precise words to respond to Potter's questions. When, however, he disinterred a satisfactory articulation, Berger expressed himself with remarkable concision and 'tender attention'.

Asked my a member of the audience to 'sum up Spinoza in three minutes', Berger took less time, explaining that Spinoza's accomplishment was to pull down the Cartesian notion of a duality of body and spirit, yet retain space for the sacred.

Bento's Sketchbook begins with plums, 'the quetsch blue is like a vivid but vanishing blue smoke'. It ends with a broadside against economic fascism: ' Narrative is another way of making a moment indelible, for stories when heard stop the unilinear flow of time and render the adjective inconsequential meaningless.' In this beautifully produced Verso edition, Berger juxtaposes Spinoza's words with his drawings, and his deeply attentive stories.

A Literary Renewal

2011-05-25T19:36:00.000+01:00

The text below from This Space is a small excerpt of a terrific assessment of the work of Peter Handke. I urge you to read Steve's quest to revive interest in this writer's work.

When the novel was published by Methuen in 1989, with the paperback of the translation following two years later in the superb Minerva imprint, it completed a series of three consecutive clearing novels: it was preceded in 1986 by Across and by Repetition in 1988. All three are long out of print and a new work by Handke has not been issued by UK publisher since Absence in 1990. Perhaps this fact explains the reason for my sudden need to revive attention for these books and this particular moment twenty years on. The more likely reason is that I want to understand how a quiet, reticent book like The Afternoon of Writer can mean so much more than the overtly worldly and eventful novels that are published instead. How is literary renewal possible?

Whilst I await Across on its journey from a Canadian bookseller, I plan to read The Weight of the World, into which I have dipped but never completed.

Velázquez's Abbess

2011-05-22T20:01:00.001+01:00

Velázquez: Portrait of Abbess Jerónima de la Fuente

Did any portrait artist capture melancholy and resignation as decisively as Velázquez? In his portraits it is always the eyes that bring his subjects to life, here unforgiving, resolute.

Distant Cousins

2011-05-22T11:06:00.000+01:00

Boring or beguiling, Berger's writing invites reaction. Like his protege, Geoff Dyer, Berger is always discursive, roaming where inspiration takes him. Bento's Sketchbook is a delightful indulgence (a folly in the original sense of the word), inspired by Spinoza's sketchbook, an imaginary object, Berger uses it as a vehicle to meditate on art, people and politics.

I am struck with how succinctly the following excerpt captures the 'why' of book blogging (for me, at least), not that this is Berger's intention. A little context: the narrator is unable to borrow The Brothers Karamazov from the municipal library as both copies are out.

I wonder who's reading The Brothers Karamazov here today. Do the two of them know each other? Unlikely. Are they both reading the book for the first time? Or has one of them read it and, like myself, wants to reread it?

Then I find myself asking an odd question: if either of those readers and myself passed one another - in the suburban market on Sunday, coming out of the metro, on a pedestrian crossing, buying bread - might we perhaps exchange glances that we'd both find slightly puzzling? Might we, without recognising it, recognise one another?

When we are impressed and moved by a story, it engenders something that becomes, or may become, an essential part of us, and this part, whether it be small or extensive, is, as it were, the story's descendant or offspring.

What I'm trying to define is more idiosyncratic and personal than a mere cultural inheritance; it is as if the bloodstream of the read story joins the bloodstream of one's life story. It contributes to our becoming what we become and will continue to become.

Without any of the complications and conflicts of family ties, these stories that shape us are our coincidental, as distinct from biological, ancestors.

Somebody in this Paris suburb, perhaps sitting tonight in a chair and reading The Brothers Karamazov, may already, in this sense, be a distant cousin.

We Are Eternal

2011-05-21T08:54:00.001+01:00

On this day of Rapture:

Jacques-André Boiffard - Bouche

We sense and experience that we are eternal. For the mind no less senses those things which it conceives in understanding than those which it has in the memory. For the eyes of the mind by which it sees things and observes them as proofs. So although we do not remember that we existed before the body, we sense nevertheless that our mind in so far as it involves the essence of the body under a species of eternity is eternal and its existence cannot be defined by time or explained by duration.

Spinoza, Ethics, Part V, proposition XXIII

Go and See the Schiele in London

2011-05-20T23:29:00.001+01:00

If you are able, make it to Richard Nagy in London to see the Egon Schiele: Woman exhibition. These exceptional drawings carry immense power.

At the time of his death, aged twenty-eight, Schiele had left a profound impact on a reluctant art world. Being hailed a hero by both artists and sophisticated collectors today would not have surprised the artist who was utterly confident that he would be recognized as the genius he knew himself to be. His drawings, so rooted in their zeitgeist, are contemporary, even timeless.

The Tragedy of the Leaves by Charles Bukowski

2011-05-19T20:18:00.000+01:00

Hearing Voices III (1993) - Andrzej Jacjowski

Charles Bukowski's poetry is new to me. 'The empty bottles like bled corpses' is stunning, but it is the closing lines that linger for hours: 'and I walked into a dark hall where the landlady stood execrating and final, sending me to hell, waving her fat, sweaty arms and screaming screaming for rent because the world has failed us both'.

The Tragedy of the Leaves

I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,
the potted plants yellow as corn;
my woman was gone
and the empty bottles like bled corpses
surrounded me with their uselessness;
the sun was still good, though,
and my landlady's note cracked in fine and
undemanding yellowness; what was needed now
was a good comedian, ancient style, a jester
with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd
because it exists, nothing more;
I shaved carefully with an old razor
the man who had once been young and
said to have genius; but
that's the tragedy of the leaves,
the dead ferns, the dead plants;
and I walked into a dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating and final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world has failed us
both

A Truly Original Writer

2011-05-15T19:15:00.000+01:00

Customarily I expect each book I read to suggest subsequent reading material. Reading Simone de Beauvoir offered up André Gide and William Faulkner, and also lead indirectly to Bernard-Henri Lévy and Stendhal. Geoff Dyer suggested Rebecca West, leading to Henry Green, whom she describes:

He was a truly original writer, his prose was fresh minted, he drove his bloodless scalpel inches deeper into the brain and heart, none of it had been said before. He is nearly forgotten.

Four other writers merit West's favourable mention, each of which I shall try to squeeze into my life:

Now I admire Muriel Spark, for she is an innovator. And I am a fanatical admirer of A. L. Barker. If you cannot read her it is your fault. You should ask your vet to put you down if you do not admire The Middling or An Occasion for Embarrassment. I admire the grand architectural force of Paul Scott, and the subtlety of Francis King, notably his book The Widow.

Don't You Loathe Comedic Writing?

2011-05-15T16:33:00.000+01:00

No genre makes my skin crawl more than comedic writing. I don't mean those puerile books like The More I See of Men the More I Love My Dog.... that congregate by the tills in bookshops, impulse purchases for people that wandered into the shop thinking it was the next door tanning salon. My disdain is for the humorists, sometimes camouflaged as satirists, that lay the humour with a bricklayer's trowel. In this category, this side of the Atlantic, are writers like Tom Sharpe, Douglas Adams, Ben Elton, Stephen Fry; on the other side are Carl Hiaasen, Dave Eggers and P. J. O'Rourke. Is it coincidental that this genre is an all-male pursuit?

Genuine, unforced, subtle humour as an integral element of a writer's voice offers a fresh perspective on what it is to be human. This quality coruscates from the pages of The Essential Rebecca West. In the following passage from The Novelist's Voice, West is writing of her father's tutor, Elisée Reclus, known as a geographer (and in informed political circles as an anarchist):

He accepted the post quite innocently, without any attempt to deceive, because she had told him she was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, and he imagined that this was a small revolutionary body. When he discovered the truth he behaved with great correctness. He said nothing. He liked my grandmother, he liked her sons, and he thought he could teach them better than the next man, and he made it a rule never to recommend to them any idea of which their mother might disapprove; and there was forged a bond between them which never broke. My father used to tell the story with a chuckle, which became to me the sign of his appreciation of the random nature of human life, and the queer ways human beings counter it and impose a kind of order. Out of bigotry my grandmother had engaged the best possible kind of tutor for her sons, in fact the tutor most likely to prevent them growing up bigots themselves.

In the multitude of ways a writer could have chosen to tell this story, West does so with wit, elegance and percipience. The essay itself is superb, dealing with West's conviction to become a writer, and how she discovered her voice. West's humour announces itself on every page, but is satisfied with a gentle smile.

[Is there a better example of British wit that Alan Titmarsh's book entitled Trowel and Error?]

Essays About Moms and Cats

2011-05-13T18:30:00.000+01:00

I had planned to skip Rebecca West's 'Why my Mother was Frightened of Cats.' Essays about mothers are normally too mawkish; combine mothers and cats and nausea is inevitable.

The brilliance and humour of the three previous essays from The Essential Rebecca West carried me forward to, "He [Lord Roberts] would turn and run if a cat walked towards him on the parade-ground; and I quite realised that if Lord Roberts could not control this terror my mother could not be expected to do better. So there was no ill-feeling between us.' Without shame or embarrassment, I admit I finished this essay about mothers and cats. It is a first.

Geoff Dyer shoved me toward West, with the gentle encouragement of Emily at Evening All Afternoon and pages turned.

Geoff Dyer's Motifs

2011-05-09T20:18:00.000+01:00

Shiftless, solitary, sybaritic men occupy the central role in Geoff Dyer's non-quite fiction. Surrounding a central male character is a common cast of supporting roles: another man, more grounded; a dark-haired, sexually adventurous girlfriend ('almost-wife') and an asexual female in a sibling-like role (but not a sister, for the central male is always an only child).

Woven throughout Dyer's writing over twenty years, whether essay or novel, as narrator or subject, is this shiftless, solitary character. More than any author I read (including Sebald), Dyer is retelling and reinterpreting a personal narrative. In Paris Trance he writes, "The events recorded here concerned only a handful of people and, quite probably, are of interest only to those people."

Whether the setting is Paris, London, Venice or Varanasi, the story line remains the same: the doomed love of a solitary and selfish, but not unsympathetic man. His generosity almost redeems his selfishness:

'It's like he hasn't been weaned. The world is just a breast to be sucked.' 'How can you say that when he's just cooked yet another incredible meal for us?' 'Easily. The fact that he's very generous doesn't stop him being totally selfish.'

This haunted character (ranging in age from twenties to forties) inhabits a life without contact with children. In 'On Being an Only Child,' Dyer asserts, "It's not just that I have never wanted to have children; I have always actively hated the idea. Frankly, I can't understand why anyone [his italics] wants to have them." In this childlessness state, the character can live an existence of blameless hedonism.

Dyer's latest fiction Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi carries forward the same motifs: the familiar cast of characters, candid sex scenes and drug taking. It should all become a bit repetitive and 'only of interest to those people' who can recognise themselves. And yet it is rare to uncover such insight into love, friendship, art, music, cinema, literature and life. The author's personality is what haunts long after you have forgotten the characters and setting. Dyer's presence lingers strongly after the carefully constructed sentences have gone out of mind.

Influential Works of Art (Non-Literary)

2011-05-06T22:59:00.004+01:00

Inspired by Steven's post at a Momentary Taste of Being, I've been thinking of non-literary influences; not all today's favourites but some artists or works of art that influenced the texture of my life. Without these and my literary influences I'd be a different person, an Other.

The challenge of compiling this list is to dig deep to recall genuine, not aspirational influences. I can construct a fictional self, inspired by Tarkovsky's Stalker, and the music of Ligeti, but it is not me, or perhaps not the current incarnation. Squeamishly I list Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, but without them there is no connection between a thirteen year-old punk and his ageing father (raised by Victorians). Here's the list:

Beatle's White Album
Walter Hills' The Warriors
Mozart's Don Giovanni
Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns
Richard Misrach's On the Beach series
Tom Wait's Shore Leave
Lost in Translation
Travolta in Saturday Night Fever
Andreas Gursky's Shanghai
True Romance (written by Tarantino)
Dore's Divine Comedy illustrations
Björk's Violently Happy
Henri Cartier Bresson's theory of decisive moments
Laurence Fellow's vintage Esquire/Apparel Arts illustrations
Beethoven's Rasoumovsky string quartets and the Eroica symphony
Sibelius Violin Concerto in D minor
Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK
Bruegel's Fall of Icarus
Nirvana's Smell Like Teen Spirit

Influential Books

2011-05-04T20:27:00.002+01:00

List time: books that influenced me. Influence is defined as either life-changing or transformative in reading patterns (which equates to the same thing). These are roughly in time order. Later I may explain what changed as a consequence. Here's the list:

Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson
Dicken's Great Expectations
Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice
Kem Nunn's Tapping the Source
Winston Graham's Angell, Pearl and Little God
Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London
Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment
Kerouac's The Dharma Bums
J. P. Donleavy's The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman
Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land
Bruce Sterling's Artificial Kid
Sartre's Nausea and Being and Nothingness
Kierkegaard's Either/Or
Proust's Rememberance of Things Past
Roger Deakin's Wildwood
Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night
Mann's The Magic Mountain
Woolf's The Lighthouse
Joyce's Ulysses
Josipovici's Whatever Happened to Modernism?

Metamorphosis v1.1

2011-05-04T06:20:00.000+01:00

The grey background was too oppressive, so I'm reverting to a white background.

A Connoisseur of Non-Time

2011-05-02T20:32:00.000+01:00

[Stroud Photos]

He saw a film a day, sometimes two. He became a connoisseur of the non-time that preceded the films themselves, especially in small cinemas where there were no advertisements or previews, where the audience was made up of four or five people, all of them alone. It is easy to see why, in films, fugitives and wanted men went to the cinema: not just to hide in the dark but because these intervals between performances were out of time. To all intents and purposes you might as well not have existed - and yet, simultaneously, you were acutely conscious of your existence.

[Geoff Dyer - Paris Trance, 1998]

Metamorphosis

2011-05-01T22:53:00.000+01:00

Now, that was geeky.

I've tweaked the template for this blog's appearance over the last couple of years. Today I opted for a more radical transformation. It was metamorphosis or migration to Wordpress.

Working the Room By Geoff Dyer

2011-04-30T08:20:00.001+01:00

Once you've read the essays in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, there is little need to also buy Working the Room, but I am a Geoff Dyer completist.

Additional are essays on photographers Larry Burrows, Jacob Holdt, Martin Parr and Trent Parke, and explorations of: D. H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tobias Wolff: Old School, Richard Ford: The Lay of the Land, and Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty.

The Hollinghurst essay stood out, convincing me that I ought to read The Line of Beauty:

There are literally thousands of impeccably nuanced touches like this in the novel. Hollinghurst, in James' own words, is one on whom nothing is lost.

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition by Geoff Dyer

2011-04-29T19:50:00.001+01:00

My memories of reading Geoff Dyer's first essay collection Anglo-English Attitudes is bathed in the glow of idyllic location. We had driven for several hours from the Massif Central, south-central France, to find we were a day late for our hotel booking. An apologetic host explained that our room was now occupied by the mistress of a French politician, who preferred to sleep alone. There were no rooms available until the next day.

After providing us with refreshments, our host managed to find us lodging at a nearby hotel. This turned out to be the former home of the Marquis de Sade. We had discovered, by chance (it is always by chance, deliberation robs us of the true thrill), the 'perfect hotel.'

Most of the essays I recall joyfully from Anglo-English Attitudes make it into Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. This book also includes all but six of the essays published in Working the Room.

Those I enjoyed most are the longer essays. Dyer is at his best with room to digress, with room for his exuberance to infect the reader. The essay on William Gedney is breathtaking. Dyer bears his erudition lightly, gently rousing Joyce, Coleridge, Walter Benjamin, Marguerite Yourcenar, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller and Fielding to help explore the tragic life of this autodidactic photographer.

Before finishing these essays I have been inspired to order a few photographer's monographs, add a couple of novels to my wish list and listen to some jazz I hadn't heard before. This isn't dry criticism that you read solely to fine-tune your critical functions, Dyer inspires you to share his passions.

The Dodecahedron or A Frame for Frames by Paul Glennon

2011-04-29T06:00:00.102+01:00

Inspired by the deliberate writing constraints of Oulipo writers, Paul Glennon uses a dodecahedron as scaffolding for his collection of short stories The Dodecahedron or A Frame for Frames.

In 'Some Clippings for my Article on Machine Literature', an interview with the creator of Amanuensis, software to create books, we read:

He goes on to describe a novel based on the geometry of the dodecahedron. 'Each of the twelve faces represents a different narrative. The thirty edges represent the relationships between these stories. The twenty vertices . . .' Plunge's girlfriend of five years, who has been coaxed outside to help hold the whiteboard, raises her eyebrows ever higher as he goes on.

'It's a bit much,' concludes the girlfriend. The structure almost gets in the way of twelve superb short stories. Perhaps anxious that readers might not appreciate the cleverness of using a dodecahedron to define the relationship between each short story, Glennon provides an explanatory Afterword. I understood the constraint from the title of the story collection. Knowing the structure adds an allure to reading the stories, but by the end it feels somewhat over-laboured.

The interrelationship between the stories is fascinating. In the first story, 'In My Father's Library,' a young boy consumes his father's 'special' books to keep them from three sinister investigators. The different repercussions of this act, in later stories, is exhilarating. Glennon is an imaginative storyteller who creates memorable worlds.

By the conclusion of the book, we are no wiser about which of the various stories represent the 'true' interpretation. The collection is all the better for that ambiguity.

Thanks to The Wolves for the inspiration to read this book.

The Function of the Arts

2011-04-28T20:01:00.000+01:00

The wonderful quote below is from a Paris Review interview with poet John Hall Wheelock:

Most of us pass through life in a state of semi-anesthesia, with life itself blotted out by the business of living. We shut out life itself in order to carry on and survive, and the function of the arts is to pierce that shield and make us suddenly reexperience something that we’ve always known but haven’t been experiencing anymore.

The Autodidact

2011-04-27T20:42:00.001+01:00

A cliché: he read avidly, Everything he could. Spotting someone reading a book on unfamiliar, offbeat subjects people sometimes ask, "Why are you interested in that?" To which, for an autodidact like [William] Gedney, there was only one reply: because it is interesting. He amassed and hoarded knowledge and then, if something caught his eye-a potential photograph-he would bring to bear on that instant or incident everything he had learned and read. It didn't stop there, though, because his ideal of self-sufficiency was underwritten, naturally, by self-generating curiosity. The more he saw, the more he wanted to learn. The more he learned, the more he saw. It wasn't enough to train himself to see; he had also to understand what he saw, to become more articulate in the language of sight.

'William Gedney' by Geoff Dyer

William Gedney Photographs and Writings
Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gedney/

The Uncanny

2011-04-27T20:22:00.001+01:00

Freud in his famous essay mentions "the constant recurrence of the same thing" as a symptom of "the Uncanny." In [Idris] Khan's picture of every page of the recent Penguin edition, the black gutter at the centre throbs like a premonition of an op art void. It makes you wonder if, as well as psychoanalysis, Freud also invented the Rorschach blot. In the background, two of the paintings discussed by him, Leonardo's Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, peer through a shifting sleet of type like emanations of the unconscious or something. It's only a book-only a photo of a book-but it pulses like a living thing.

'Idris Khan' by Geoff Dyer

Fresh from the Internet: Geoff Dyer

2011-04-26T19:34:00.001+01:00

Reading Geoff Dyer is like meeting an old but dear friend after a long absence. Without awkwardness a close relationship is resumed, with vows not to allow so long a parting again. I'm reading Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, an edition for the American market, which contains selections from two previous collections of essays: Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room. The former selection of essays are rereads and the latter are new, both well-crafted. To my mind, Dyer is the best contemporary British writer.

Over the long weekend I caught up with some recent Dyer material on the internet, some captured below:

John Crace interviews Geoff Dyer for the Guardian:

While his fiction may feel a bit samey and lightweight, his non-fiction is anything but. As ever with Dyer, you have to issue a warning about possible category errors. Non-fiction for him is really just another location on the fiction continuum, and versions of Geoff/Jeff are as likely to turn up there as anywhere else; but, given this, the range of subject matter is prolifically diverse. And, unlike his fiction, there is no sense - apart from a lightness of touch and flashes of comedy - that you are getting a standard Dyer take on a subject. In Ways of Telling, Dyer took on John Berger, a literary hero whom he has gone on to outdo in the range of his output; The Missing of the Somme is a mini-masterpiece on memory and loss inspired by a chance visit to the first world war Thiepval Memorial; But Beautiful is a lyrical, offbeat homage to the jazz greats; Out of Sheer Rage manages to pull off the impossible - an engaging book on Dyer's failure to write a serious critique of DH Lawrence; Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It is part-travelogue, part-memoir, part-history, and should by rights be a total mess but somehow hangs together; and in The Ongoing Moment he came up with a series of scholarly essays on photography that had professional snappers drooling in admiration despite Dyer's flip but frank admission that "he can't be bothered to take pictures himself when he goes abroad because it's too much effort".

Michael Dirda reviews Otherwise Known as the Human Condition for the Washington Post.

In this weekend's FT Geoff Dyer opines on the summer dress:

A summer dress always looks best without tights or stockings. It is about limbs that are either tanned or in the process of becoming so. It is an advertisement for health and fitness (as such it is defiled by any association with cigarettes). The summer dress is only incidentally sexual; as such it is far sexier than the kind of fetish clobber or lingerie on offer in Agent Provocateur. Ideally it is even worn without make-up. In the context of ball gowns, where everything is artificial and heightened, make-up does not look out of place, but the summer dress makes anything but the most discreetly applied make-up look unnatural and unhealthy.

In the New Yorker, Geoff Dyer tells us what he's currently reading, and reveals his next book, Zona, about Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker.

Stephen Burn of the New York Times reviews Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.

David Ulin, book critic for the LA Times reviews Geoff Dyer's Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.

This is the essential tension in Dyer's writing; he is always present, a defining intelligence, a tour guide to the inner life. And yet if this risks seeming self-indulgent, that to Dyer is part of the challenge, part of the point. "[I]t's not what you know that's important; it's what your passion gives you the potential to discover," he writes in "My Life as a Gate-Crasher," an essay that explores his methodology before returning to a familiar touchstone. "[T]he writer's self-sufficient — and therefore ideal — status," Dyer notes, "is expressed with sad and beautiful pride by Lawrence: 'I am no more than a single human man wandering my lonely way across these years.'"

True crime is a genre I instinctively avoid, but People Who Eat Darkness promises a less exploitative treatment. As Geoff Dyer says in his review:

Parry has a knack of tacitly cross-examining his readers in this way, not implicating them exactly, but immersing them in a darkness that thickens as facts come to light.

MCMXIV

2011-04-26T08:03:00.002+01:00

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day–
And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat’s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word–the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Poem Without Forgiveness

2011-04-26T08:00:00.001+01:00

The husband wants to be taken back
into the family after behaving terribly,
but nothing can be taken back,
not the leaves by the trees, the rain
by the clouds. You want to take back
the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel
remains in the wound, some mud.
Night after night Tybalt’s stabbed
so the lovers are ground in mechanical
aftermath. Think of the gunk that never
comes off the roasting pan, the goofs
of a diamond cutter. But wasn’t it
electricity’s blunder into inert clay
that started this whole mess, the I-
echo in the head, a marriage begun
with a fender bender, a sneeze,
a mutation, a raid, an irrevocable
fuckup. So in the meantime: epoxy,
the dog barking at who knows what,
signals mixed up like a dumped-out tray
of printer’s type. Some piece of you
stays in me and I’ll never give it back.
The heart hoards its thorns
just as the rose profligates.
Just because you’ve had enough
doesn’t mean you wanted too much.

Dean Young

What's the Best Time to Visit Nevada?

2011-04-24T07:30:00.000+01:00

Have you been to Black Rock Desert, Nevada? Its source convinces me of the authenticity of this photograph. The caption reads, "Minerals, algae, and cyanobacteria give this geyser in Nevada's Black Rock Desert its brilliant colours." It takes my breath away.

I'm reading Geoff Dyer's latest compendium of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Initially I was irritated that the book is a selection from two collections of Dyer's essays that I already own: Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room. I guess that this edition is for the American market. My irritation was short-lived, Dyer is a brilliant essayist. The 'Visuals' section is best read with a screen to hand to seek out the photographers and places he mentions.

In The Blue Corner

2011-04-22T06:12:00.000+01:00

In addition to a welcome speed boost, LibraryThing's latest upgrades include a host of useless, but entertaining statistics.

Today I've learnt that my library, weighing in at over 2000 pounds, would be worth $35m if replaced by equal weight in gold. If stacked, my books would tower above the Statue of Liberty. End on end I could drive for 41 miles as I inspected my books from the comfort of a car.

Are you on LibraryThing? If so, how high is your tower?

Surface meets Surface

2011-04-20T20:42:00.000+01:00

Growing up in an obscure far eastern country, I never acquired the taste for television. A neighbour acquired a black and white set, bolstered by an obscenely long aerial, and once a week all the kids in the neighbourhood would visit to watch a fuzzy rendering of Skippy. Later the country established its own network, with a diet of six hours of Islamic prayer, followed by two English language programmes: one half hour comedy show and a forty-five minute detective show, then back to prayer. For the English programmes, imagine Happy Days, followed by Starsky and Hutch. After an initial euphoria I lost interest, and watching television went the same way as stamp collecting.

Later on, I became hungry for news. Each day I would read three or four newspapers a day. I subscribed to a politically balanced selection of current affairs magazines. On my train to work I read the Financial Times and the Guardian, on the way home I skimmed the Times or caught up with the latest New Statesman, Spectator, Private Eye or Economist. I never read the sports section, or cared for celebrity or royal gossip, but looked for articles that extended my knowledge of how countries or parties or people functioned. Gradually though, over a period of two or three years, I came to realise there is little of value to be found in newspapers, and as with television I lost interest. Today, my consumption of news is a brief scroll down the headlines on my Guardian and Al Jazeera English apps on my iPad, and the output of a handful of tweeters and blogs.

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. [Thoreau: Life without Principle]

Otherwise, my reading time is reserved for books, a few magazines, a small number of favourite blogs, and the odd article that someone brings to my attention.

Literature with Added Fibre

2011-04-18T20:28:00.001+01:00

The frequently cryptic Umberto Eco, in Confessions of a Young Novelist, explains that, 'whatever postmodernism might be, I use at least two typical postmodern techniques.' On occasion he employs 'double coding' (a term coined by architect Charles Jencks), which 'is the concurrent use of intertextual irony and an implicit metanarrative appeal.' The example Eco provides is from The Name of the Rose:

[The novel] begins by telling how the author came across an ancient medieval text. It is a blatant case of intertextual irony, since the topos (that is, the literary commonplace) of the rediscovered manuscript has a venerable pedigree. The irony is double, and is also a metanarrative suggestion, since the text claims that the manuscript was available through a nineteenth-century translation of the original manuscript-a remark that justifies some elements of the neo-Gothic novel which are present in the story. Naive or popular readers cannot enjoy the narrative that follows unless they are aware of this game of Chinese boxes, this regression of sources, which gives the story an aura of ambiguity.

Eco elucidates other effects used to give a wink to 'sophisticated readers', and concludes:

I admit that by employing this double-coding technique, the author establishes a sort of silent complicity with the sophisticated reader, and that some popular readers, when they do not get cultural allusion, may feel that something is escaping them. But literature, I believe, is not intended solely for entertaining people. It also aims at provoking and inspiring people to read the same text twice, maybe even several times, because they want to understand it better. Thus, I think that double coding is not an aristocratic tic, but a way of showing respect for the intelligence and goodwill of the reader.

The first three sections of Confessions of a Young Novelist provide a compelling, personal insight into Eco's writing practice and an idiosyncratic dissection of the nature of fiction. Questions like this provide sufficient substance for me to debate until sunrise: 'If we know that Anna Karenina is a fictional character who does not exist in the real world, why do we weep over her plight, or at any rate why are we deeply moved by her misfortunes?'

The fourth section, a condensed essay on lists, was disappointing and, I assume, added to extend these Richard Ellmann lectures to book length.

The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal

2011-04-17T12:02:00.000+01:00

Fictional endings disappoint, and the conclusion of The Charterhouse of Parma is perhaps its only true imperfection. Although a highly realist novel, Stendhal manipulates his story lines to a displeasingly tidy conclusion. Nabokov wrote to ask an expert in French literature, 'Did Stendhal even pen a decent sentence?' Unlike Flaubert, with whom Stendhal shares the ability to construct a precise world, Stendhal is not a meticulous obsessive, sweating over his sentences. He is a narrator, a phenomenal storyteller.

Stendhal successfully adopts an 'intelligent tone of conversation'. Though he takes readers through the end of the Napoleonic era, and into the political intrigues of nineteenth century Italian court life, he never bogs the reader down with extraneous historical padding. The omniscient narrator, misleading from the first pages, takes no sides as the reader is told the parallel, deeply intertwined stories of the noble Fabrizio del Dongo and his aunt Gina, Duchess Sanseverina.

Of the two, Sanseverina, is better realised and unforgettable in her passion and percipience. The third protagonist Clelia is more illusive, succeeding more in her relation to Fabrizio. Their love story is one of the most sublime in literature, easily overwhelming that of Jerome and Alissa. After Fabrizio's killing of the 'mummer' (sort of mime artist, reason enough to be killed surely), Giletti, he is imprisoned in a debilitating environment. Though Fabrizio has long dreaded prison, it is here he falls in love, for the first time, with Clelia. Despite the dreadful conditions of his imprisonment and the constant risk of poisoning, he initially resists encouragement to escape:

I would expose myself every day to the prospect of a thousand deaths to have the happiness of speaking to you with the help of our alphabets, which now never defeat us for a moment, and you wish me to be such a fool as to exile myself in Parma, or perhaps at Bologna, or even Florence! Understand that any such effort is impossible for me; it would be useless to give you my word, I could never keep it.

Stendhal's world lives off the page because of the depth of his characters, fully realised, psychologically complex creations. In a memorable scene, Duchess Sanseverina outclasses the Prince of Parma, using contempt and cunning intelligence to apparently win Fabrizio's freedom. The Prince turns to Count Mosca, her courtly lover, and says, 'What a woman!' It is darkly funny at the time but the reader also senses that Sanseverina's victory over the Prince will not be without cost.

I wrote previously about Stendhal's treatment of female characters, quoting Beauvoir, 'He undertook something that no other novelist, I think, has ever done: he projected himself into a female character.' Beauvoir lead me to Stendhal, so it is appropriate I end these thoughts with Beauvoir, from The Second Sex, in a sentence that evokes the strength of Sanseverina:

The day when it will be possible for the woman to love in her strength and not in her weakness, not to escape but to find herself, not out of resignation but to affirm herself, love will become for her as for man the source of life and not a mortal danger.

Stendhal's Women

2011-04-13T20:58:00.001+01:00

What stands out most, two-thirds of the way through The Charterhouse of Parma, is the life that Stendhal injects into his characters. The plot will fade, the nuances of Italian court life will cease to matter, but in years to come I will remember, of course, Fabrizio del Dongo and, possibly, the forlorn Count Mosca, but undoubtedly Duchess Sanseverina.

Simone de Beauvoir, an enthusiast for Stendhal's writing, admired his understanding of women. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir writes [of Stendhal]:

This tender friend of women - and precisely because he loves them in their truth - does not believe in feminine mystery; there is no essence that defines women once and for all; the idea of an 'eternal feminine' seems pedantic and ridiculous to him. 'Pedants have been repeating for two thousand years that women have quicker minds and men more solidity; that women have more subtlety in ideas and men more attention span. A Parisian passer-by walking around the Versailles gardens once concluded that from everything he saw, the trees are born pruned.'

Beauvoir goes on to say:

Stendhal never describes his heroines as a function of his heroes: he provides them with their own destiny. He undertook something that no other novelist, I think, has ever done: he projected himself into a female character.

This is the strength of Sanseverina, true also of Clelia, the second of the duo of women that love Fabrizio. It is through them that Fabrizio learns about the world, but they have a destiny of their own. Allow Fabrizio to fade into the background of Charterhouse, and Sanseverina's story still screams to be told.

Silent Reading in Augustine

2011-04-12T17:49:00.001+01:00

James Fenton rebuts Alberto Manguel's contention that a passage in Augustine is "the first definite instance [of silent reading] recorded in western literature":

I consulted Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (Flamingo), which was published in the same year as Gavrilov's and Burnyeat's articles. Manguel believes that the passage in Augustine is "the first definite instance [of silent reading] recorded in western literature". He is well aware of the evidence to the contrary, but he finds it unconvincing. Thus Manguel: "According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great read letter from his mother in silence in the fourth century BC, to the bewilderment of his soldiers." [My italics.] But these bewildered soldiers are Manguel's importation. They have been brought into the story in order to make it seem exceptional. Manguel shamelessly fudges the argument.

A related post.

[indirectly via]

Another Geoff on the Horizon

2011-04-12T16:58:00.000+01:00

Geoff Dyer recounts what he is reading at the moment; in passing a mention of his next book: Dyer’s forthcoming book, “Zona,” about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker,” will be published next year by Pantheon.

[via]

Stendhal: Prototypical Authentic

2011-04-11T20:41:00.002+01:00

My recent readings of Sartre and Beauvoir provided the impetus to read Stendhal. Both considered Stendhal a favourite writer.

I'm currently relishing The Charterhouse of Parma; strong characters and such pace, though I can understand Nabokov's assertion that Stendhal never wrote a great sentence. The man can tell a story but, in my translation, is patently not a stylist.

I'm also reading, as is my inclination, around Stendhal, and fascinated by the argument that Stendhal was a prototypical Sartrean hero of authenticity. Stendhal, Henri Beyle originally, was much preoccupied with the problem of self, summed up by four personal maxims:

Know yourself
Be yourself
Shape yourself
Hide yourself

Stendhal's goal was to become natural (whatever that means). After failing to live up to these maxims, Stendhal turned, in the second half of his life, to fiction as a way of realising his goal through his characters.

Living up to his fourth maxim, Stendhal used over a hundred pseudonyms. His autobiographical works are Memoirs of an Egotist, his Private Diaries and The Life of Henry Brulard.

On David Foster Wallace

2011-04-10T19:32:00.000+01:00

Two articles on David Foster Wallace captured my attention today: an Observer interview with his widow, the artist Karen Green and an LRB review of Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky and The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel by David Foster Wallace. Both have sealed my decision to read more David Foster Wallace (after chucking aside his first novel).

The interview with Karen Green is deeply moving. Of his suicide, Green says, "[...] that doesn't define David or his work. It all turns him into a celebrity dude, which I think would have made him wince, the good part of him [...]." Of the decision to publish his unfinished novel, Green says, "The notes that he took for the book and chapters that were complete, were left in a neat pile on his desk in the garage where he worked. And his lamps were on it, illuminating it. So I have no doubt in my mind this is what he wanted."

Of the imminent novel: "The theme of The Pale King is boredom and the ways in which a group of young Americans mitigate its effects to get through working life." Green adds, "I'd have been interested to hear what he might have done with the idea of boredom in marriage, though," she says, with a smile. The pervasive monotony of career, marriage, modern consumer-society gets surprisingly little analysis in literature or philosophy (that I've come across), which puts The Pale King to the top of my 'must-read' pile when it arrives. Ballard was the last writer to powerfully deal with boredom.

The LRB review, written by novelist Jenny Turner, is excellent. Turner writes, "When I started reading Wallace, it was this directness that hit me hardest, this effort to speak openly and straightforwardly about things so obvious and so embarrassing that most of us, most of the time, just ignore them; this eager voice reaching out to touch its knuckles to my being, though both of us know there's nothing there, really, apart from printed words on a page."

Book Abandoned

2011-04-06T22:07:00.001+01:00

Usually I withstand the hyperbole about the latest 'must-read' book, but I have been frequently curious about David Foster Wallace. Some readers that I respect influenced me to order the recently published, unfinished The Pale King. In New York last week, I spotted a new edition of his first novel The Broom of the System. The cover of the Penguin Ink edition hooked me. Today, eighty pages in and the novel is chucked aside. It is not for me, a shimmering imitation of Pynchon and Salinger. Am I missing something?

AWOL

2011-04-02T22:50:00.002+01:00

Posting will, of necessity, be even less frequent during the next week or so. Once again I am staying in a wonderful Landmark Trust property, this time a priory, owned at one time by the grandson of Reginald Fitz Urse, grandson of one of the assassins of Thomas à Becket. The architects of the thirteenth century failed to anticipate 3G.

Reading material will be Stendhal or David Foster Wallace.

Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century by Bernard-Henri Lévy

2011-04-02T22:09:00.004+01:00

Towards the end of Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, Bernard-Henri Lévy writes:

This book is not the great book, but the pre-condition for the great book still to come. It is a book for the other books that are crowding in, he can sense it clearly, like a swarm of dreams and, already, words. It's the moment of the last revival, in which we feel that Sartre's thought, freed from it's obstacles, is going once more to spread it's wings.

Not a brilliant book then, and for those untrained in twentieth-century philosophy, occasionally too dense to be rewarding. But worth studious reading for anyone interested not only in Sartre, but also other key modern philosophers. The chapter on 'the Heidegger question' is first rate, illuminating:

And this is what makes it impossible, and absurd, to try and wriggle out of it by saying: 'let's drop the Nazi, and keep the philosopher; let's forget the informer's letters, and remember the meditations on the poets; let's take the ruses or the private acts of cowardice into account-but that still leaves those immortal texts without which it would be the tasks of thought that would find themselves for a long time to come, compromised.'

Heidegger is a block.

On Sartre, BHL is is lucid and frequently perplexed:

He was a man of the nineteenth century whose sole activity would consist in an effort to wrench himself away from that nineteenth century in order, as Foucault put it, to 'enter the twentieth century and think it through'.

After an occasionally hilarious portrait of Sartre the man (drug addict, womaniser, generous acetic), the book explores in depth the 'two Sartres': the first, writer of Nausea and Being and Time ("the most important book of the epoch"), and the writer who was for a long period an apologist for some pernicious idealogies and brutal dictators.

Lévy's love of Sartre is evident, as is his bewilderment; his book is a convincing argument that Sartre deserves a place in perpetuity and continued study.

My time with Sartre and Beauvoir is ended for a while, though I am sure to return to read the third volume of Beauvoir's memoirs when they arrive via Abebooks.

Seven Random Things

2011-03-30T11:57:00.001+01:00

At the wonderfully named Dada doesn't catch flies, one of my favourite bloggers has challenged me to share seven things things about myself. I normally shy away from such invitations but reluctantly accept the proposition, perhaps it will be therapeutic.

A highly nomadic childhood and commuting long distance to various boarding schools meant accruing a lot of air miles. At eleven years of age I became the youngest recipient of the Cathay Pacific 100,000 miles flown certificate.
Near my boarding school was a communist bookshop. Every Saturday for at least two years I stole a book, the first being Mao's Little Red Book. Sometimes I fool myself that the owner knew and let me get away with my crimes. I still feel guilty. Sorry.
The first author that inspired me to read his complete oeuvre was Robert Heinlein, followed closely by J. P. Donleavy.
Inspired by J. P. Donleavy's tales of his home country, I spent three months in Ireland, hitching north to south and east to west.
For reasons I can no longer recall, as a teenager I was drawn to the Middle East. Setting out with three hundred pounds, I spent nine months hitching through Spain, to Morocco, and then through Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, then to Cyprus and Greece. The current turmoil has resuscitated my fascination for the region.
After returning from this supposed 'gap year', for all sorts of reasons that made complete sense at the time, I did not go back to university. I have regretted this at leisure. It is the source of my autodidacticism.
My talisman book, that I have read so many times that, in a sense, I am always reading it, or thinking it, is Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

2011-03-26T00:13:00.000Z

I am a serendipitous reader, allowing chance references to lead me meanderingly from book to book, author to author. The timing of my discovery of Rebecca's Classics Circuit was impeccable, hard on the discovery of William Faulkner's influence on Beauvoir. Sartre said, "The technique of Simone de Beauvoir, also, was inspired by Faulkner. Without him she never would have conceived the idea, used in Le Sang des Autres, of cutting the chronological order of the story and substituting instead a more subtle order, half logical, half intuitive."

Describing Faulkner and, in particular of As I Lay Dying, Beauvoir wrote:

Not only did he show great skill in deploying and harmonising multiple viewpoints, but he got inside each individual mind, setting forth its knowledge and ignorance, its moments of insincerity, its fantasies, the words it formed and the silences it kept. As a result the narrative was bathed in a chiaroscuro, which gave each event the greatest possible highlight and shadow.

The contrasts in As I Lay Dying are intriguing, foremost the language: the vernacular coexistent with the poetic. Whilst reading the viewpoint of confused child Vardaman, after a period of rambling thought interspersed with dialogue, the narrative offers:

It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components-snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is.

Faulkner is, I surmise, not expecting the reader to concede this as part of Vardaman's stream of consciousness. So who narrates here, and on similar occasions elsewhere? I know little of Faulkner and his reading of psychology, but took it to be the voice of the unconscious, 'it, the Id, that never shuts up' that, 'talks even when it is silent'.

The fifteen fragmentary viewpoints on offer in As I Lay Dying include the departed mother; not too much of a stretch that the Id has a voice. The technique is intriguing but somehow works to give us precisely that chiaroscuro of deep contrasts, between speech, thought and action.

Beauvoir finds the dark comedy in As I Lay Dying. Though disturbing, there is a surreal humour in the rag-tag Bundren family traipsing across the county to bury the decomposing, odiferous corpse of the lady of the house. We expect the set pieces, like the coffin almost being borne away on the river , before they occur, but find agony and a smidgen of humour in that inevitability. Beauvoir adds, "If objects or habits were presented to the reader in a preposterous light, the reason was that misery and want not only change man's attitude to things but transform the very appearance of things."

The World is a Book [Edited]

2011-03-21T19:45:00.001Z

A few days ago I asked, "What are your favourite literary travel books?" Thank you for your suggestions, added to mine below to compile a quintessential shelf of travel literature:

Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour - Gustave Flaubert
Rings of Saturn - W. G. Sebald
Travels with Herodotus - Ryszard Kapuściński
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare - Henry Miller
Songlines - Bruce Chatwin
The Motorcycle Diaries - Ernesto 'Che' Guevara
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
In Patagonia - Bruce Chatwin
Pictures from Italy - Charles Dickens
Collected Travel Writings: The Continent and Great Britain and America - Henry James
The Roads to Sata - Alan Booth
The Way of the World - Nicolas Bouvier
Into the Heart of Borneo - Redmond O'Hanlon
A Time of Gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermor
Hokkaido Highway Blues - Will Ferguson
Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It - Geoff Dyer
Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World - Pico Iyer
Riding the Iron Rooster - Paul Theroux
To Noto: Or London to Sicily in a Ford - Duncan Fallowell
Angry White Pyjamas - Robert Twigger
Arabian Sands - Wilfred Thesiger
This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland - Gretel Ehrlich

I've added the new suggestions to my wish list and anticipate reading them with genuine pleasure.

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville

2011-03-20T20:47:00.000Z

Not what I expected, Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. I presumed the story to be revolutionary in tone, a fictional refusal to work sympathetic with Paul Lafargue's The Right to be Lazy:

The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labour: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind. . .

Bartleby though is not an Idler, but more disquieting. At the beginning of his employment as a scrivener, or document copyist, he did an 'extraordinary quantity of writing.' At one request he utters the words, "I would prefer not to." Thereafter his eccentricity becomes unsettling. Aside from Bartleby, Melville conjures up the memorable trio of more consistent copyists: Turkey, Nippers and Ginger Nut.

Part of Melville House's wonderful The Art of the Novella series, Melville crams a lot of story into these 64 pages.

Literature of Travel

2011-03-19T07:50:00.001Z

Yesterday I wrote of Sartre the traveller, whom BHL esteemed above all for his literature of travel:

And I am convinced, be it said in passing, that the day when the ideology of tourism is finally brought to a discourse and a practice which, on the pretext of the right to exoticism and difference, offer a paltry folklore which diminishes at one and the same time the traveller and his or her host, and offers, in place of those original situations which were the passion of real travellers, landscapes whose picture-postcard aspect has a novelty value of zero - I am convinced that Sartre, the homing pigeon, will on that day be recognised as a master. People will speculate about his Queen Albermarle which Simone de Beauvoir said was to be, if he ever finished it, the Nausea of his maturity, and which he himself thought would draw a line under the modern literature of travel . . .

These days, increasingly, we travel to places that resemble an exotic version of home: the same Starbucks, Body Shop etc., as Robert Dessaix wrote:

But I'd seen it all before. At a certain point in life, like Stendhal and Chateaubriand, one has. Everything feels repackaged. The crêpe and ice-cream wagons, the miniature train, the hoopla stall, the Africans selling belts and fake Louis Vuitton handbags - even the gangs of teenagers in T-shirts emblazoned with jaunty slogans in English (I Love Beer, Fuck Work and so on) - I'd seen and heard and smelled it all before hundreds of times. It felt like the umpteenth performance of a circus act I'd thrilled to when I was five. Would nothing transformingly beautiful ever happen again?

Seeing the world through another's eyes can invigorate our experience of travel. BHL writes of Sartre:

Sartre, a man reputedly incapable of seeing a thing, an absolutely cerebral presence who claimed coquettishly, that he had to wait until Simone de Beauvoir had described things for him before he could see them for himself.

Though I love to read great travel literature, I suspect that those worth reading would not fill a small shelf. A top ten of literary travel books, for me, would look something like this:

Into the Heart of Borneo - Redmond O'Hanlon
A Time of Gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermor
Hokkaido Highway Blues - Will Ferguson
Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It - Geoff Dyer
Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World - Pico Iyer
Riding the Iron Rooster - Paul Theroux
To Noto: Or London to Sicily in a Ford - Duncan Fallowell
Angry White Pyjamas - Robert Twigger
Arabian Sands - Wilfred Thesiger
This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland - Gretel Ehrlich

Several other Paul Theroux books could have made the cut, but Iron Rooster is the one that stands foremost in my memory. Missing from my list, because I haven't read them, are renowned travel essays or books by Voltaire and Stendhal. I also chose not to include Kafka's travel writing as it forms part of his diaries.

Now over to you, what are your favourite literary travel books?

An Absence in my Library

2011-03-18T19:10:00.002Z

Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, so prominent in France that he is simply referred to as BHL, is credited with encouraging Sarkozy's support for anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya. His website's subtitle is 'The Art of Philosophy is Only Worthwhile if it is an Art of War.' Who better then to write Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century?

This is not a dry academic study, nor an exhaustive immersion into the seven ages of Sartre. In truth, I am unsure exactly what sort of book it is, but I am enjoying it mightily. So far it is gossipy, a little bawdy, intensely personal, fiercely intellectual and bracingly frank, all of which sums up Sartre and his Café de Flore clique adequately.

There is so much delicious material in the book. What I want to share here is Lévy's writing of 'Sartre the traveller', and the hole in my library now left by the never completed Queen Albermarle (though fragments are published).

I like Sartre the traveller. He was sometimes wrong, of course. But he had an extraordinary eye. He could describe like no one else the 'real life' of Venice, the 'enormous carnivorous existence' of Naples, the 'watery sun' of Rome, the 'moving' aspects of Peking, that city 'too strange for one just to like it', or again, in Hurricane across the Sugar Fields (believe it or not) the 'night' which, in Cuba, 'rustles until daybreak', its 'strange and continual buzz' of 'insects' and 'transparent wings', the 'croaking of a buffalo-toad' that 'rises from the marshes'. And I am convinced, be it said in passing, that the day when the ideology of tourism is finally brought to a discourse and a practice which, on the pretext of the right to exoticism and difference, offer a paltry folklore which diminishes at one and the same time the traveller and his or her host, and offers, in place of those original situations which were the passion of real travellers, landscapes whose picture-postcard aspect has a novelty value of zero - I am convinced that Sartre, the homing pigeon, will on that day be recognised as a master. People will speculate about his Queen Albermarle which Simone de Beauvoir said was to be, if he ever finished it, the Nausea of his maturity, and which he himself thought would draw a line under the modern literature of travel . . .

Seduction

2011-03-15T05:22:00.005Z

From BLDGBLOG, a list of fascinating architectural books, and a photograph (below) and link to conceptual drawings of a proposed new library in Stockholm.

One Thing Lead to Another

2011-03-12T07:11:00.001Z

In between Simone de Beauvoir and William Faulkner, I read Stephen Fry's Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music as told to Tim Lihorean. The book served my purpose, which was to provide a contextual structure for the major composers, who influenced who, etc. The content was exceptional, but the tone of the book I found excruciating. It depends on whether you enjoy Stephen Fry's schtick. I don't.

The subject continues to fascinate me, and like the dangers of shandy or marijuana, Stephen Fry lead to harder stuff, in the form of the wonderful The Oxford History of Western Music by controversial musicologist Richard Taruskin.

America's Lost Generation Tour

2011-03-10T20:43:00.000Z

The schedule is posted for the imminent tour of America's Lost Generation. I am reading Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. There are some first-rate books being read and blogged for the tour.

The Prime of Life by Simone de Beauvoir

2011-03-06T19:41:00.000Z

Halfway into The Prime of Life, Simone de Beauvoir signals to the reader of her autobiography that:

I still believe to this day in the theory of the 'transcendental ego.' The self (moi) has only a probable objectivity, and anyone saying 'I' only grasps the outer edge of it; an outsider can get a clearer and more accurate picture. Let me repeat that this personal account is not offered in any sense as an 'explanation.' Indeed, one of my main reasons for undertaking it is my realisation that self-knowledge is impossible, and the best one can hope for is self-revelation.

With this in mind, it is thrilling to share in her exploration of how a conscious mind examines its acts. In this volume, Simone de Beauvoir relives the achievement of her literary apprenticeship, life with Sartre and the years of Paris's occupation by the Nazis.

The stimulation of this brilliant book comes from reading yourself into the mind of a fiercely intelligent woman attempting to interpret her earlier life with unremitting honesty. The 'I' that gives testimony in this autobiography clearly possesses a knowledge denied to the 'I' who lived through these events. As in the first volume of her autobiography Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, de Beauvoir places her younger self under the microscope with the cool rationality that only the perspective of time allows.

In my reading of Memoirs and her diary of the same period, the diary offered a more emotive reading. The same insight is available in The Prime of Life from the extracts of diaries de Beauvoir provides as narrative of the early years of the war.

It is inconceivable that The Prime of Life is out of print in an English translation. It is superior to Memoirs, a first-rate autobiography in its own right. My intention is to read the remaining volumes, but not for a while. My immersion under the skin of de Beauvoir has been all-consuming.

The Weekend

2011-03-05T23:57:00.001Z

Last night's opera was unfamiliar. I commend the Royal Opera House's commissioning of new opera. They should do it more frequently. The life of Anna Nicole Smith was vaguely familiar to me, but made a suitably dramatic and tragic subject for an opera production. Unfortunately, though the libretto was fine, the music (composer: Mark-Anthony Turnage) was unimaginative, even tedious. The younger demographic of the audience is sufficient proof of the value of commissioning fresh, new operas. Opera is foremost about the music; at times Anna Nicole felt like an overwrought Lloyd-Webber production.

This afternoon, a visit to the National Gallery, not for the compelling Jan Gossaert that will have to wait until next week, but a rare opportunity to see a small selection of the work of the Ashcan school. The Big Dory by prominent Ashcan painter was the most striking work of the exhibition.

Melancolia I and Sartre

2011-03-03T20:55:00.001Z

Inspired by Dürer's engraving Sartre originally titled Nausea (orig. French La Nausée) as Melancholia. Very taken by this picture, I studied a large version in the London Library today. "The basic purport of the engraving seems to be the representation of that melancholy and depression which affects a man who doubts the success of his endeavours."

Thoughts a Third of the Way into The Prime of Life

2011-02-28T20:37:00.000Z

After twelve days I am a third of the way through the second volume of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography The Prime of Life. This 1973 Penguin edition is over 600 pages of small, closely set type, but I am reading slowly, fountain pen in hand scribbling page after page of notes. I have no urge to rush.

Once again, de Beauvoir applies her considerable intellect to observing herself as a young adult. The view is microscopic and unswerving. I love the way de Beauvoir tackles self as a perpetual project.

If the bad habits which I attributed to Chantal irked me so much, that was not so much through having observed them in Simone Labourdin as because I had slipped into them myself: during the past two or three years I had more than once yielded to the temptation of embellishing my life history with false items of information. Alone in Marseille, I had more or less purged myself of this weakness, though I still reproached myself for it.

There's gossip: Sartre and de Beauvoir enjoyed dissecting the personalities of friends and acquaintances. There's much discussion about literature: her love of Stendhal, of Proust and Conrad, and the excited discovery of the translated works of Faulkner, Kafka and Dos Passos. de Beauvoir also explains why she chose literature over philosophical writing:

[...] I did not regard myself as a philosopher: I was well aware that the ease with which I penetrated to the heart of a [philosophical] text stemmed, precisely, from my lack of originality. In this field a genuinely creative talent is so rare that queries as to why I did not attempt to join the élite are surely otiose: it would be more useful to explain how certain individuals are capable of getting results from that conscious venture into lunacy known as a 'philosophical system' . . . I wanted to communicate the element of originality in my own experience. In order to do this successfully I knew it was literature towards which I must orientate myself.

As an aside I came across this wonderful blog that explores "the mind, method and masterpieces of David Markson through the marginalia found on the pages of the books in his personal library." This snippet made me hoot with laughter:

On which Markson placed a checkmark next to a paragraph discussing the sex life of Nelson Algren:

“My introduction stops here. I knew very little about Algren’s sex life (or about my own, for that matter). I subsequently learned from Deirdre Bair’s Simone de Beauvoir (Summit, 1990) that he helped Miss de Beauvoir achieve her first orgasm. (The only person I ever helped achieve a first orgasm was good old me.) In Iowa City, Algren would refer to her as ‘Madame Yak Yak’ because she had given their relationship so much publicity.”

—-

“Nelson Algren, not Sartre, gave Simone de Beauvoir her first orgasm.”

Wrote Markson on pg. 30 of Reader’s Block, utilizing the above information.

Not only did Simone de Beauvoir not achieve her first orgasm with Sartre, but she was also taller than him, as Markson explained in Vanishing Point:

“Simone de Beauvoir was one inch taller than Sartre.” (Pg. 133).

Though there is absolutely no evidence to conclude that these facts are at all related—and how or why would they be?—am I the only one tempted to draw some sort of ridiculous conclusion?

Barthes On the Difficulty of Writing a Novel

2011-02-28T06:18:00.000Z

One to add to the wish list, via ABC of Reading: "I was moved to the center of my being."

Barthes’s lectures move from the desire to write to the actual decision making, planning, and material act of producing a novel. He meets the difficulty of transitioning from short, concise notations (exemplified by his favorite literary form, haiku) to longer, uninterrupted flows of narrative, and he encounters a number of setbacks. Barthes takes solace in a diverse group of writers, including Dante, whose La Vita Nuova was similarly inspired by the death of a loved one, and he turns to classical philosophy, Taoism, and the works of François-René Chateaubriand, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust.

This book uniquely includes eight elliptical plans for Barthes’s unwritten novel, which he titled Vita Nova, and lecture notes that sketch the critic’s views on photography. Following on The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977-1978) and a third forthcoming collection of Barthes lectures, this volume provides an intensely personal account of the labor and love of writing.

Young Person's Hamlet

2011-02-26T21:06:00.000Z

Away for a weekend in Stratford-on-Avon. When H., my ten-year old daughter, asked if she could see a Shakespeare play, where else could I take her but here, and to see nothing less than Hamlet, though an introductory production for young people. It is an outstanding production, H. could barely take her eyes from the action. This is surely the way to inculcate an early love of this finest of Shakespeare's plays. H. wants to see King Lear next.

Most of my favourite monologues made the production, including:

Not a whit. We defy augury. There's a special providence in the fell of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is't to leave betimes. Let it be.

When H. heard this monologue, she turned and gave me a gentle smile, pleased that she remembered my favourite; a memorable evening.

Reading a Lost Generation

2011-02-21T20:03:00.000Z

This evening I added my name to the American Lost Generation tour. I like serendipity to channel my reading, and dipping into William Faulkner seems fitting, given his influence on Simone de Beauvoir's early novels. Sartre is quoted, in 1946:

The technique of Simone de Beauvoir, also, was inspired by Faulkner. Without him she never would have conceived the idea, used in Le Sang des Autres, of cutting the chronological order of the story and substituting instead a more subtle order, half logical, half intuitive. And as for me, it was after reading a book by Dos Passos that I thought for the first time of weaving a novel out of various, simultaneous lives, with characters who pass each other by without ever knowing one another and who all contribute to the atmosphere of a moment or of a historical period.

For the tour I plan to read Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

[Thanks to @sashasilverfysh of Sasha and The Silverfish who's tweet provided the chance inspiration.]

Issue 1 of The White Review

2011-02-19T10:23:00.001Z

My appetite for magazines is limited. Each year I subscribe for one year to a new publication, but I rarely renew that subscription beyond a year. Only three publications have sustained my interest for many years: Cabinet, TLS and LRB. The latter I frequently intend to cancel, but they cleverly publish a brilliant article just at the moment my intention advances, nearly, to the point of action.

I am excited though about a new magazine, my trial subscription for 2011, modelled on La Revue Blanche.

The name – The White Review – is a reference to La Revue Blanche, a Parisian political, literary and artistic magazine which ran from 1889 to 1903. Politically, La Revue Blanche fought against the injustices of its time. In addition to defending Dreyfus as early as 1898, La Revue Blanche also denounced the evils of colonialism and the Armenian genocide amongst other events of political significance. It stood at the forefront of the avant-garde artistic scene, notably promoting the neo-Impressionists and Art Nouveau. Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, and Vuillard were amongst the artists who illustrated La Revue Blanche, which also kept up to date with the wider artistic scene.

On the literary front, La Revue Blanche’s record is equally as impressive. In addition to publicising the ideas of major thinkers such as Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Stirner, the journal played host to a new generation of major writers and thinkers with Marcel Proust, André Gide, Léon Blum, and Guillaume Apollinaire all contributing early writings.

The White Review is following in the footsteps of La Revue Blanche by providing a platform for a new generation of writers, thinkers, and artists to break through in an otherwise saturated industry. By offering a combination of unpublished fiction, essays on the arts and politics and long interviews with significant individuals in their fields, The White Review is reviving the spirit of La Revue Blanche, with its attendant openness to new ideas, art, literature, and radical politics.

Profile II - Foujita

2011-02-19T08:06:00.001Z

Profile II, 1952

A drawing by Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita His work made a rich impression on the student Simone de Beauvoir.

Trailer for Norwegian Wood

2011-02-17T19:44:00.000Z

Anh Hung Tran's adaptation of Haruki Murakami's novel hits British cinemas on 11 March. Here's a taster

Hoppé Exhibition at the Portrait Gallery

2011-02-17T17:55:00.001Z

Rebecca West, as photographed by 'Edwardian Modernist' photographer E.O. Hoppé. West donned the head-dress to conceal wet hair. The exhibition, open today, at the Portrait Gallery is superb, and includes portraits of many literary artists.

Folio Greek Tragedies

2011-02-17T05:52:00.001Z

Though I have mixed feelings about Folio Society editions, these are tempting. All the Greek tragedies in five volumes:

In five volumes, the extant works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are gathered, with newly commissioned prefaces for each volume: Ruth Padel on Aeschylus, Simon Goldhill on Sophocles, and Peter Stothard, Lawrence Norfolk and Germaine Greer each introducing one of the Euripides volumes. The translations used, from the University of Chicago editions, have become the standard texts. A total of 33 great works of art are included, such as Pallas Athene attributed to Rembrandt and The Bacchae by Luca Giordano, with each plate tipped in, facing the title page of the play in question.

Strait is the Gate by André Gide

2011-02-16T20:06:00.001Z

"Who was this Gide whose name [he] uttered one afternoon, almost furtively, and with a smile that seemed to ask forgiveness for his audacity?"

Introduced to the writing of André Gide by an early mentor, Simone de Beauvoir feasted on everything he wrote. This early Gide story takes its title from the King James bible, "Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." Thrown by the blurb on the back cover of my Penguin Classics edition, which reads, "A devastating exploration of aestheticism taken to extremes," I was half way through before I realised the typo: for 'aestheticism,' read 'asceticism'.

Though there are nods toward modernism, Strait is the Gate is fundamentally a Romantic story of doomed love. Gide writes exquisitely; the suppressed agonising of the three primary characters, Jerome, Alissa and Juliette is visceral in its despair; the final chapter is almost unendurable.

Written in the first-person, Gide uses letters and a diary to present contrasting perspectives. During an uneasy walk after a long absence, Jerome narrates:

My head was aching so badly that I could not extract a single idea from it; to keep myself in countenance, or because I thought that the gesture might serve instead of words, I had taken Alissa's hand, which she let me keep. Our emotion, the rapidity of our walk, and the awkwardness of our silence, sent the blood to our faces; I felt my temples throbbing; Alissa's colour was unpleasantly heightened; and soon the discomfort of feeling the contact of our damp hands made us unclasp them and let them drop sadly to our sides.

Days later, when the couple have again parted, Alissa writes:

But when our lugubrious expedition to Orcher came to an end without a word, when, above all, our hands unclasped and fell apart so hopelessly, I thought my heart would have fainted within me for grief and pain. And what distressed me most was not so much that your hand let go of mine, but my feeling that if yours had not, mine would have done so, for my hand no longer felt happy in yours.

Alissa adds a postscript to this letter with the phrase, "[...] your love was above all intellectual, the beautiful tenacity of a tender and faithful mind." I am much taken with the concept of an 'intellectual love,' so devastatingly accurate; I write it in my notebook and repeat it throughout the day.

Slow Reading

2011-02-13T17:34:00.000Z

An essay on 'Extreme Reading': "Extreme reading is liberation by inebriation."

[via]

Diary of a Philosophy Student: A Full Review

2011-02-10T15:57:00.000Z

A comprehensive review of Simone de Beauvoir's Diary of a Philosophy Student, by Toril Moi is the author of Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman.

This diary is published as the second volume of the University of Illinois Press's Beauvoir series, under the general editorship of Simons, who deserves praise for ensuring that so many previously untranslated texts by Beauvoir now appear in English. The first volume in the series, Philosophical Writings, was published in 2004 and contains, among other important early essays, Beauvoir's first philosophical book, Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944). The publishers have announced five more volumes to come: Beauvoir's war diaries; three volumes of essays on philosophy, literature, and feminism; and, eventually, the most exciting volume of them all: namely, the second installment of these student diaries, with entries from 1928 to 1930.

Reading and Premeditation

2011-02-10T14:03:00.000Z

There are book bloggers I admire for their unfaltering dedication to a premeditated sequence of reading. Though I enjoy planning my reading, impulse often overtakes my carefully nurtured plans. This post is a corrective for me, an attempt to continue to read with some premeditation.

In November I stated:

Next year I plan to complete my immersion into Saul Bellow's novels, read my unread Virginia Woolf novels and more of her diaries and essays, and read more deeply of Kafka's non fiction. Also on my list is to sample more deeply the works of Cynthia Ozick, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, Marguerite Duras and Peter Handke. I'm musing with trying once again to sustain a reading of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. Somewhere in the back of my mind I'm also thinking it is time to reread Proust and Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, but we shall see. I hope also to discover a new writer or two from my Reading the Girls List.

In December I declared:

My plan next year is to read a lot more Woolf. I expect also to immerse myself into the literary output of Coetzee, Flaubert, Kafka and Bellow, each of whom, to different degrees, I am mildly obsessed with at present.

In January I asserted:

In my twenties and thirties I read (and in some cases understood) much more philosophy, and I intend to read more in this area this year, particularly keen to reread Kierkegaard. Of poetry, my ambition is to read Anne Carson more deeply and to tackle Wallace Stevens.

Further back, at the end of last summer I declared:

It is with Dangling Man I will start my Bellow immersion in the autumn. Inspired by Bibliographing's Melville project, my intention is to read the fifteen novels, short stories, essay collection and Bellow's memoir.

The year started as planned with some Kafka and Duras, but Simone de Beauvoir has commandeered my attention. Not just her writing but a posthumous influence that is leading me towards André Gide, Alain-Fournier, Henri Bergson and a rereading of Sartre. Along the way, I have adopted a desire to read all Nabokov's novels and to tackle some Muriel Spark. There are also some choices of The Wolves that tempt me, starting with February's Our Horses in Egypt by Rosalind Belben.

Diary of a Philosophy Student, Vol.1, 1926-27 by Simone de Beauvoir

2011-02-09T21:58:00.000Z

Disregard the 'Philosophy Student' half of the title. These diaries of the young Simone de Beauvoir, written at eighteen, nineteen and twenty could be better titled.They are not stodgy tales of the taxing study of philosophy, though philosophers and novelists are discussed and extensively quoted. I am not sure if de Beauvoir intended their publication, but her opening admonition suggests otherwise:

Nothing is more cowardly than to violate a secret when nobody is there to defend it. I have always suffered horribly from every indiscretion, but if someone, anyone, reads these pages, I will never forgive him. He will thus be doing a bad and ugly deed.

Though I sailed past that solemn warning, later I often felt regret at reading these diaries. They are a raw exposition of unsatisfied love. Perhaps Diary of a Tortured Adolescent is more apt. Not that Simone de Beauvoir is a conventional tortured adolescent; her persistent examination into the nature of her angst is frank and penetrative. But it will not leave a reader unscathed.

The voice of these diaries is not the measured reflection of a woman in her fifties offered in the autobiographical Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. In Memoirs, de Beauvoir quotes these diaries extensively, but selectively. Read consecutively they are an intriguing study of the nature of autobiography.

There is much more to these diaries than an adolescent's emotional outpouring. That this represented the foreground of my reading is perhaps a failing of gender, anticipated by this brilliant young woman:

In my intelligence, I am similar to men; in my heart, how different! It seems to me that they have a wider and less profound heart. More cordiality, an easier access, more indulgence, more pity, but also this does not descend into them as in me. For me, to love is the painful thing that Benda describes and blames, this identification with the other, this total “compassion.” This hardly touches them, does not penetrate into their internal universe: a refuge, a pleasure, not an avidity of the soul.

It is the depth of interrogation into her emotions and thoughts (and gender), and the early formation of de Beauvoir's philosophical stance, that is so rewarding. I read these diaries, pen in hand, and filled several dozen pages of my notebook with passages worthy of prolonged meditation.

A Book Feverishly Devoured

2011-02-07T20:05:00.000Z

From her diaries of 1926, Simone de Beauvoir's admiration for a book:

A revelation, an immense help was this book already almost known and whose first half I feverishly devoured. I must finish it and then reread it and meditate on all its pages. No longer dead people like Gide or Barrès; a living example of fever, of ardor, and of beauty. There are things about me I have understood. There are words I would want to have written. There are some I have almost written. There are others I have so often thought. Through their lives, I have seen mine emerge, and desires, hopes, and promises were afloat in every corner of this room, deliciously overwhelming me.

Unfortunately my French is inadequate for reading the Correspondance of Jacques Riviere et Alain-Fournier that inspired de Beauvoir.

A New Glen Duncan: 'The Last Werewolf'

2011-02-07T19:31:00.000Z

There's a new novel due in April from Glen Duncan: The Last Werewolf. I've read each of Duncan's seven books to date, and like his style. He's one of the few contemporary British novelists I can read with any enthusiasm. His fiction has darkness and sexuality, veiled behind perceptive humour.

I've enthused about Glen Duncan before, and recommend The Bloodstone Papers as entry-level.

An Implacable Seriousness

2011-02-06T20:16:00.000Z

Levin Vincent’s collection of the marvels of nature

[From Simone de Beauvoir's Diaries]

What I discover in myself first is a seriousness, an austere and implacable seriousness, for which I do not understand the reason, but to which I subject myself like to a mysterious and crushing necessity [...] Even when it bothers me I cannot hate it; it is myself. It is what controls my life. And first it prohibits me from that which is not essential [...] Simply I am not able to give myself up to pleasure. I carry this refusal in all the words that I say, and that is why I don't speak much. To say useless words makes me suffer like a diminution; at length I weigh each word as well as each act; before going to see a friend, writing a letter, etc. I have to deliberate slowly. I hate conversations precisely because they take me off guard and do not permit me to translate my profound sentiments very exactly. People sometimes believe that my reserve is disdainful; it originates on the contrary out of my respect for others. I am ashamed to give them what I do not consider important (and they ask me for that alone).

Simone de Beauvoir's TBR List

2011-02-05T07:49:00.001Z

Writing in August 1926, Simone de Beauvoir outlines her reading plans:

Read, not enormously if I do not have the time, but read the necessary books whatever the cost. As much as possible, every week I will have to skim through some journals: La Revue des jeunes, La Revue universelle, La NRF, Les Études, maybe others.

Finish Verlaine. Read Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Moréas. All that I can find by Claudel, Gide, Arland, Valéry Larbaud, Jammes.

Continue, perhaps, Ramuz, Maurois, Conrad, Kipling, Joyce, Tagore, Maurras, Montherlant, Ghéon, Dorgelès, Mauriac.

Tackle Arnous, Fabre (Rabevel), Giraudoux,

Wilde, Whitman, Blake, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi,

Romain Rolland.

André Chénier, Leconte de Lisle.

All the Paul Valéry possible.

Inofrm myself about Max Jacob, Apollinaire.

some surrealists.

Maurice du Plessys. Thérive, Chadourne.

Cahiers de la république des lettres.

Anna de Noailles (Les éblouissements) [The Dazzling Sights] Paul Drouot.

These adolescent diaries have much in common with the first published volume of Susan Sontag's diaries.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir

2011-02-02T11:26:00.000Z

Simone de Beauvoir as a child with

her mother and sister Hélène (left)

At the cusp of adulthood I became gripped by Jean-Paul Sartre and his theories of being. The idea that man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself' liberated me. It is my foundation. After reading all of Sartre, inevitably I was lead to Simone de Beauvoir and Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir 1926-1939 and Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Both are stunning and inevitably as much about Simone de Beauvoir as Sartre.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is the first volume of de Beauvoir's memoirs. At the age of fifty, de Beauvoir chronicles her early life from her birth to her student days at the Sorbonne. As she noted in her student diary, 'I want life, the whole of life. I feel an avid curiosity; I desperately want to burn myself away, more brightly than any other person, and no matter with what kind of flame.' This passion illuminates every page of this brilliant book. The perspicacity which de Beauvoir brings to the recollection of her childhood loss of faith and complicated relationships is breathtaking and insightful.

The sentiment that remains on reluctantly reading the final pages is regret that I did not know Simone de Beauvoir in person. The closest I can get is to continue reading the memoirs. Curiously, the other three volumes are no longer published by Penguin, though the next in sequence The Prime of Life is the most widely read in France.

In reading any autobiography I am always very curious about what its subject reads. Simone de Beauvoir was an avid reader, commenting, "Literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion: it absorbed me entirely, and transfigured my life." In these memoirs, de Beauvoir recalls her reading. The book that she mentions most frequently, with love, is Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, considered one of France's literary masterpieces.

My thanks to Emily (evening all afternoon) for the inspiration to read this book.

Norwegian Wood Film Adaptation

2011-01-31T20:13:00.000Z

A favourite book being adapted to film? The very idea makes me clammy. But there are some mitigating ingredients supporting the 'faithful' adaptation of Murakami's Norwegian Wood: author's endorsement and a Johnny Greenwood soundtrack. Due in the UK in March.

New Schocken Kafka Editions

2011-01-30T19:56:00.000Z

Irresistible.

Despite possessing alternative editions of these, they will be irresistible when published in June and July.

These editions will begin coming out in June and July- they are all paperbacks, with maybe a couple in hardcover as well- time will tell. I'm hoping we can do a box set for them after they all come out (which is already designed- and which has the complete parable "Before the Law" printed on the inside.)

[via]

Read and Cold

2011-01-26T20:54:00.000Z

There is a near infinite list of writers that I will never read. There are some few writers who compel me to read everything that I can get my hands on.

A dispiriting, small group of writers are those I would like to read, and have attempted, but somehow their work has failed to engage me. These include Henry James, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Pynchon, John McGahern and Patrick White. With the exception of James, I have read at least one book of the others on the list. Though I appreciate the quality of the writing, the book left me cold.

If you love any of those writers, I would appreciate a suggestion of where to begin.

Between the Word and its Object

2011-01-23T18:09:00.000Z

Degas

From de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

As I had failed in my efforts to think without recourse to language, I assumed that this was an exact equivalent of reality; I was encouraged in this misconception by the grown-ups, whom I took to be the sole depositaries of absolute truth: when they defined a thing, they expressed its substance, in the sense in which one expresses the juice from a fruit. So that I could conceive of no gaps into which error might fall between the word and its object; that is why I submitted myself uncritically to the Word, without examining its meaning, even when my circumstances inclined me to doubt its truth. Two of my Sirmione cousins were sucking sticks of candy-sugar: 'It's a purgative', they told me in a bantering tone: their sniggers warned me that they were making fun of me; nevertheless the word they had used incorporated itself into my mind with the sticks of candy-sugar; I no longer liked them because they now seemed to me a dubious compromise between sweet and medicine.

Gerald Murnane's Barley Patch

2011-01-20T19:03:00.000Z

What do I recall of reading Remembrance of Things Past? Many years later, I remember characters, scenes, moods, but I am unable to quote a sentence. I recall that, in Combray, and in the salon of Duchesse de Guermantes, a non-Proustian observer silently stood. He was a "ghostly fictional character" insinuated into Proust's fiction by this reader.

In the Barley Patch, Gerald Murnane uniquely explores memory and fiction, the images that endure during and after reading fiction, and the existence of fictional characters when they are not being described. His work itself is a fiction. I suspect Barley Patch is impossible to completely comprehend without a grounding in his previous fiction, perhaps not even with that history. I did not use the term 'uniquely' lightly. I've read nothing quite like Barley Patch, possibly it is brilliant.

Acquiring Barley Patch in Europe takes a little effort. This post at Being in Lieu induced me to read Murnane's latest book. Jen writes, "There is a kind of music, or at least very recognisable rhythm, in the writing of Gerald Murnane," and finds echoes of Proust. His meticulous scrutiny into the nature of memory, what it is to remember and what we mean when we 'remember' fiction impels me to question whether I remembered fiction in this way before reading Murnane.

The writing is precise to the point of pedantry. Though occasionally irksome, Murnane's precision has the benefit of slowing one's reading. It is that sort of book that you place on your lap from time to time, stare into the middle distance, and ponder.

The most precise statement (in comments) that I have encountered about Gerald Murnane's writing is, "All books by Gerald Murnane, if you can find them, are fascinating. Obscure and fascinating. One feels as though the grit in one’s reading eye has been thoroughly cleaned out with…something." It is a description that sums up my reading of Barley Patch very well.

A Rebecca West Reading Plan

2011-01-19T20:02:00.000Z

I've long been intimidated, though I've never read any of her writing, by Rebecca West. This intimidation, I suspect, is because I know that I'll read her thousand page plus masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, but am nervous of the scale of the task. I am delighted to come across a less daunting 'progression for newbies to West,' which feels like a plan.

Somehow I'll weave this plan into my parallel plans to read all Kafka, a lot more Duras, all Nabokov and Bellow.

Art Aside

2011-01-16T20:17:00.001Z

Artist Helen Colling prints cuttings of digital photographs onto muslin and silk. These act as ground to be embellished with hand and machine stitching, incorporating applied shapes and transfer printing. The delicate pieces are displayed between sheets of Perspex. I've now three of these in my modest collection. From varied viewing angles and distances, these creations transform and offer much to contemplate. Colling explains:

My work explores whether every presence leaves an intangible echo, a sensation of a being that was once there. Does the atmosphere ripple and sigh when each being is gone? Is it forever disturbed? In the silence and stillness that descends when they are gone it can seem that something has changed forever. They are gone, but their voices, thoughts and deeds reverberate in our consciousness; they leave an alteration, a shift, a memory, and nothing is quite the same.

Now the perennial dilemna of where to hang them?

Intriguing Hook

2011-01-14T08:26:00.001Z

Further reading is required to tell how well Gerald Murnane executes the idea behind Barley Patch, but the hook is mightily intriguing:

One day, I decided not to go on reading one after another book of a sort that could be called literature - that day was only a few months before the day when I decided to write no more fiction. When I made the earlier decision, I intended to confine my reading in the future to the few books that I had never forgotten; I would re-read those books - I would dwell on them for the rest of my life. But after my decision to write no more fiction, I foresaw myself reading not even my few unforgotten books. Instead of reading what could be called literature and instead of writing what I called fiction, I would devise a more satisfying enterprise than either reading or writing. During the rest of my life I would concern myself only with those mental entities that had come to me almost stealthily while I read or while I wrote . . .

Completed Bound to Last

2011-01-13T19:50:00.001Z

Tempted by Steven's review, and drawn to books about books, I ordered Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Books. On receipt I glanced over the contents with despondency. Somewhat of a dilettante reader, my acquaintance with living writers is patchy, and I recognised few of the contributors to Sean Manning's compilation of essays. Aside from Ray Bradbury, writer of the foreword, I recognised only Francine Prose and Xu Xiaobin, though I've read neither.

Initial misgivings aside, after fifty pages the essays had charmed me, and I read the remainder with enjoyment.

In some cases, the writers have not even read the books they hold dear. Joyce Maynard writes ruefully of her father's Bible, given to "the girlfriend":

All my life my father had urged me to read the Bible. Knowing I had never done this, he quoted from it as liberally as a lawyer might invoke the constitution. But in the end, it was not I, his well-loved daughter, but this strange interloper who had taken off with his most precious book. Maybe he's given up on my ever opening it.

In this collection, books are celebrated as objects, often annotated, frequently well-travelled, occasionally dropped in the bath but each a well-loved container of words. The essays are of mixed quality but each possesses a certain charm.

Though none of the essays tempt me to read the books they describe, or attract me to any of the authors, I was compelled to read Poe's short story The Cask of Amontillado, that Bradbury recalls from his childhood.

Obscure Modernists

2011-01-11T05:24:00.001Z

Rhys Tranter's (A Piece of Monologue) response to the recent McCrum piece on Modernism:

All of this begs the question: should we bother with modernism at all? Is it suited to our bedside table, or should it be exiled to obscurity on some distant library shelf? An old cliché condemns it as an experiment that went nowhere, but I suggest that modernism can be more than a discreet title on a top ten list, or the answer to a question at a pub quiz. Reading modernist writers need not be a life’s work, but an enjoyable way to pass the time.

Much as I champion Joyce and Woolf, both favourites, there are other literary modernists worth reading. Cyril Connolly's 100 Key Books offers many treasures, very few that are boring.

Completed Excavating Kafka

2011-01-08T20:45:00.000Z

Persistence was repaid in my reading of James Hawes' Excavating Kafka. My initial impulse was to throw the book across the room. Hawes took a Ph.D on Kafka and Nietzsche, his research is impeccable.

What grated was the tone of the early book, written with a smug, self satisfied cynicism that passes for irony in some English circles. Examples abound in the first chapter, with sentences like, "No wonder the Herr Doktor passed the Royal and Imperial Austrian Army's medical board just this June, for the second time." He frequently refers to Kafka as Herr Doktor, our hero, our lawyer, and it gets a little draining. Thankfully, Hawes eases up on the cynicism as the book progresses.

Drawing on his own research and the work of biographers Reiner Stach and Peter André-Alt (sadly not in an English translation), Hawes successfully deconstructs what he persists in calling K-Myths:

Myth 1: Kafka was almost unknown in his lifetime
Myth 2: Kafka wanted his works destroyed after his death
Myth 3: Kafka's Jewishness is vital to understanding his writing
Myth 4: Kafka's style is mysterious and opaque
Myth 5: Kafka was poor and lonely, or free, and thereby lost
Myth 6: Kafka's father was monstrous
Myth 7: Kafka was crippled by TB for years

The emphasis of Hawe's biography is to humanise Kafka, to lower him from the saintly pedestal on which he is frequently placed by biographers who have been dazzled by the K-Myth machine. Hawes is a good critic of Kafka; the final chapters where he analyses Kafka's best known writing are marvellous.

Kafka thus takes the novel one step further from Dickens and Dostoyevsky. He pushes the dominance of the "unreal" over the "real"-of psychological states over mappable facts-right to the limit. But he never over-steps that limit, though he comes perilously close in The Castle. The Trial, his greatest work, still has the unmistakable smack of a real place. This is what makes the story so endlessly wrong-footing.

Completed Moderato Cantabile

2011-01-07T19:44:00.000Z

Moderato Cantabile is an extraordinary book. It is the book that introduced Marguerite Duras's work to me a lifetime ago. I've read it twice before, but was apprehensive of my third reading. Twenty years on, could it possibly be as brilliant as my recollection? I recall Moderato Cantabile as sublime, enigmatic, just possibly perfect.

I turned the last pages and am awe-struck. Each time of reading, there are subtleties that unfold, that passed me by on a last reading. The blurb is definitive: "A distressed young man murders the woman he loves in a café, watched by a large crowd." As the tale opens up, even this statement is questionable. There are ambiguities, inexactness, space for alternative interpretations for the reader, as for the protagonists. I hesitate to elucidate too much for fear of robbing anyone of the thrill of revelation. But Duras is subtle, no heavy-handed trickery, just a fierce intelligence at work.

Completed Phantoms on the Bookshelves

2011-01-06T20:04:00.000Z

A reader first and collector second, Jacques Bonnet's Phantom on the Bookshelves is a witty homage to the thrill of reading, and tribulations of owning a monstrous personal library - "not one of those bibliophile libraries containing works so valuable that their owner never opens them for fear of damaging them, no I'm talking about a working library, the kind where you don't hesitate to write on your books, or read them in the bath; a library that results from keeping everything you have ever read [..]"

As an enthusiastic reader of Alberto Manguel's (Bonnet quotes Manguel several times) books on similar themes, I lapped up Phantom on the Bookshelves. Bonnet writes of the origin of his reading fever and why he came to own a library comprising tens of thousands of books. He obsesses about the problem of organisation and classification, and what inspires him to acquire books.

Full of anecdotes and wit, Bonnet's book also provides insight; there is a brilliant chapter where he makes the case that fictional characters are more real than their creators:

[..] we carry on believing what we read in biographies. (Curiosity is too strong: I have masses of biographies in my library!) They are simply imaginary reconstructions based on the necessarily fragmentary elements left by someone now dead, whether long ago or in the recent past. And as for autobiography, it is no more than a pernicious variant of romantic fiction.

If you've enjoyed Manguel's Library at Night, A History of Reading or Julien Gracq's Reading Writing, you will find Phantom on the Bookshelves equally rewarding. A warning though, each of these books associate with and discuss the merits of other books. They lead to further book buying.

The Turned Page

2011-01-06T06:06:00.003Z

More to come on Jacques Bonnet's witty Phantoms on the Bookshelves. In the meantime I must share this possibly apocryphal anecdote:

I read somewhere that a man sentenced to death during the revolutionary Terror read a book in the tumbril taking him to the scaffold, and turned down the page he had reached before climbing up to the guillotine.

Completed The Lover

2011-01-04T20:18:00.000Z

Befogged with influenza, shivering slightly despite a blazing fire, reading The Lover, by Marguerite Duras, seemed fitting. Short enough for a single sitting and exotic enough to take me away from 'flu-riddled England, a perfect afternoon's reading.

Duras, a favourite of mine from a lifetime ago, often writes autobiographically.

In the books I've written about my childhood I can't remember, suddenly, what I left out, what I said. I think I wrote about our love for our mother, but I don't know if I wrote about how we hated her too, or about our love for one another, and our terrible hatred too, in that common family history of ruin and death which was ours whatever happened, in love or in hate, and which I still can't understand however hard I try, which is still beyond my reach, hidden in the very depths of my flesh, blind as a newborn child.

Living in Vietnam, our fifteen and a half-year old narrator, wearing a threadbare silk dress, gold lamé shoes and a brownish-pink fedora, attracts the attention of a wealthy Chinese businessman.

I already know a thing or two. I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction or costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.

Duras's stripped-down, forthright prose is perfect for these compact stories, the brutality revealed in layers. The opening paragraph ends with a comment from an acquaintance, "Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged." A few pages on and Duras adds:

Now I see that when I was very young, eighteen, fifteen, I already had a face that foretold the one I acquired through drink in middle age. Drink accomplished what God did not. It also served to kill me; to kill. I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it.