Blitt snooping ?
The blitt snooper is of the same species as book snooper, bane of the smarty-party. One idle finger run along a row of books can stop one's host in her tracks as she turns a wondering eye - mid-flow on holidays, house-prices and grandchildren - to the question if her books come up to scratch. Her, "Find anything you like?" comes no way near to expressing the fear of losing her control of the do, or of retaining the intellectual high ground. Vid. Stephen Potter {1} {2). My finger once came to two different volumes by David Icke: it came off pretty quick. I had no intention of engaging in a conversation about second-comings. Did make me think in a different light about the host and hostess.
I have repeatedly fallen into a terrible hole - to the extent of being repeatedly diverted away from what I am reading, planning to read, or thinking about - by revisiting blitts on a regular basis, temporarily shifting into others' mindsets: their literary preoccupations and curiosities. No problem if you are genuinely learning something new in the process, or if a mention of something sets you off on a fruitful path: you should be able to get back to your chosen reading and writing interests without having completely disrupted the ideas that run in train with them.
I have fallen in a series of holes - admittedly more pleasant than the average hole - with, for example, Sandra in her struggle with Cervantes: you know in your heart, and by the vast number of books she has already got through, she will climb this Everest. Your problem is recognition of the abysmal lack of knowledge of the author, which keeps you in this literary hole until satisfied you can climb out with enough knowledge to make sense of him, without actually knuckling down to read him.
A link to Matthew Kirschenbaum's two part Technologies of Writing put me right into one of my favourite topics while at the same time providing me with some useful background on El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha, as we are supposed to call it.
It was only a short step, via Google, to the concise, majestic comprehensiveness of the Catholic Encyclopedia's entry on Cervantes, which should answer all but the trickiest questions on Spain's greatest writer and his master-work.
And here, at www.donquixote.com,
the wherewithall to use FIND to heart's content in a similar way as for Proust, where endless hours of harmless pleasure and instruction can be had from checking the relative frequency of occurence of the word bell in all its volumes.
My only disappointment - while watching El Cid on TV for the seventh time, with one eye and one ear - was not to find some connection between Signor Rodrigo, or El Saeid, and Cervantes! Having still the smell of Andalucia in my nostrils, a strong awareness of the deep religiosity of the Spanish people, a new knowledge of the intertwined Christian-Islamic history, and a hint of the Civil War from visiting such places as Ronda, it is only a matter of time before I find some link or other.....
Zut alors !
From
The Martin Amis Web[Site manager's note: I encouraged Peg Eby-Jager to submit her account of the April 20 2004 Amis-Hitchens appearance at UCLA after reading an early draft written shortly after the event. In her own words, Peg Eby-Jager "has been a habitué of author-talk venues for ten years, a librarian for twenty and an avid reader for forty." Although she added that "she only recently read Martin Amis," her acute perceptions and discriminating judgments deserve a wide audience. Her essay is divided into five sections, linked by navigation buttons to the left on this page and at the end of each section on subsequent pages].
Reading Martin Amis I II III IV V Strange conection between this and previous 4 pages. It includes 'fellow panelists Robert Conquest and Simon Sebag Montefiore' who I didn't notice mentioned at the beginning?! The debate is nonetheless fascinating.
[1] Fun to watch/listen to /read writers with massive egos slagging each other and rival writing off. In this case a writer who started off apolitical, then tried politics in his novels and failed, talking to a 'former'-Trotskyite, renowned for debunking TV documentary on Mother Teresa, made long after the famous documentary on her by Malcolm Muggeridge, in which fault in film print Muggeridge insisted was angelic halo, divine presence et cetera, et al. And there, St. Mugg., a man who said TV was lies! Well yes, but only because people chose to film man opening door, stop shooting, move camera inside, re-shoot door opening....
[2] The talk of Stalin has strange parallels with writer's world. An attempt to formulate something along those line fizzled out but you get the idea: Dacha, Stalin, evening, vodka, pipe smoke, lists, the ticking of...writers acting like God with their words which are a world of specific creation. They believe they alone control their words, yet when read something else happens [see quotes in previous post]...how writers go to inordinate lengths, sometimes, to defend the words they have created when others can see the defences are suspect...
Other notes, which will be appended and amended later, included:
* 'report' of a meeting: also a fiction. Every report loses something with the reporting, like the retelling loses the dream. Pitty no snippets of dialogue scribbled down...
** It is interesting to see their views on Stalin. A recent docu-drama on Stalin's last hours by Simon Sebag Montefiore, on BBC TV, gave a hint of some of the things these people were discussing: the idea that Stalin's subordinates did not believe he was capable of organising the Terror, hints at the perpetual waiting, waiting. In the same way as the Berias of this world, we can see a good writer waiting for the better writer to pass away or give up writing, while at the same time the top man doing his best to 'torture', 'obtain confessions', 'imprison' and 'kill' his lesser writerly foes by using yet more words.
[25 march 05]
And, of course, Hitchins - his ways now 'mended' - a man who, one imagines, (was it he I sat beside at that strange party in South Ken. in the late 60s, when first went out with that French girl who later became my wife?} might have spent many a drug- fuelled evening in the Swinging 60s on a downward dialectical spiral. I wonder who the bright spark was who mentioned Koestler's,
Darkness at Noon and how loud the shouting down...
[25 March 05]
Noel Annan,
Our Age, p. 214
(What is it then that makes Waugh a deviant in the history of our culture? Not surelt that he was a man of the right, an apologist for Mussolini and Franco, who despised parliamentary politics.} After all, the generation before his, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, Shaw and T.S. Eliot, despised democracy.
This book needs re-reading. If you have never read
Our Age, it is a must, on the lists of books to read or not.
The theme of the novelist and his beliefs is one I need to return to. It reminds me of Michael Harrington's
Accidental Century, for some reason: conjuring up the words decadence, ennui, accidie. Even if his thesis is no longer relevant, Harrington is must: no quicker way to bone up on certain areas of the scoiology of literature. Mann is comprehensively covered, for example.
After much aggravation I find my disintegrating paperback copy to find it spliced by a dozen blue book marks: p. 53 Hetaera Esmerelda in Dr.Faustus. So, do novelists try a bit of mimicry (in their lives or in their work?) when the chips are down?
*** Suggestion that Stalin was well read seems incomprehensible set side by side with his control by killing. And yet and yet....think of the western writers like Bernard Shaw who said everything in Russia was hunky-dory, going along with Webbs et al, returning to say had seen the future. Did he write any plays or fiction following his trip to Russia?
Coming immediately to mind is how Amis turned towards apocalyptic themes (and how he got it so wrong...) after many apolical bnovels. And now (have I got this right?) is aguing for the demise of the novel...he was in central America recently according to my newspaper doing a piece on the downtrodden...
**** Image (again): Dacha outside Moscow: study. Desk, lamp, tobacco smoke, arbitrary ticking of names on lists. Many of these condemned he didn't even know! Suddenly it becomes what a a few writers attempt: complete control over every word on the page turns into a feeling of omnipotence. Delusions and illusions.
**** Did nothing Stalin read (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky? Classic literature? ) tell him it would all end in tears? No amount of killing and torturing to maintain leadership would amount to a string of beans in the eyes of history. Or did it work this way: history didn't matter. He wanted - had - to stay on top [as all gangsters do... caught in a trap of own making..] and knew that unless he killed and killed and killed, someone in his entourage would recognise they were more ruthless and get the courage to take over? Perhaps some writers keep on writing not because they have something new or special to say - or need the money - but to grind other writer down...we tend to assume writng adds to the richness of the culture....
Proustian peregrination II
My task, to write a book which will inspire people. I don't want to call them my readers, but readers of their own selves. My book will be a sort of magnifying glass: it will offer them a means of seeing what's inside them, so that at the end of it they will not say, "This a good book or a bad one", but rather they'll say, "Yes, this is how it is. This is what it's like."
Where to begin? I know, I know. I can hear the little bell on the garden gate at Combray...
Marcel
Paraphrase in the six-part BBC Radio 4 dramatisation In search of lost time, by Michael Butt, Part 6: Time Regained.
Schiff's translation of Time Regained, volume 7
Á la recherche du temp perdu
Lionel Trilling:
The writer who defines his audience by its limitations is indulging in the unforgivable arrogance. The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them.
C'est ceci, c'est cela
[added to/ altered 20 March & 22 March]
'First one thing, then another', or just 'one thing after another'? French has a concision I was not fully aware of. Latin is pretty good too. I'm no French expert - just have a old-fashioned Cassell's English-French dictionary which puts the words in their context in a variety of ways. The problem: modern day common usage.
In the space of little more than a week the journey has been from Proust to Sebald and back - reading neither, but in there with them so-to-speak. A pleasing feeling valuable lessons have been learnt.
About Proust, something else too. Rooting in one of my infrequently visited bookcases I found a very slim OUP paperback
, Proust by Derwent May, amongst a selection from a Fontana series. I see Camus, Chomsky, Laing, Levi-Strauss, Marcuse, McLuhan, Orwell, Popper, Russell, Reich, Weber, Wittgenstein: my post-graduation attempt, too many moons ago - with a science degree in my hand and an empty head about the future - to catch up on what I should have been studying rather than dry biology texts with their interminable graphs and data tables. The fly leaves claim others were to be published. The one that takes my fancy is Merleau-Ponty. {
1} {
2}
Le monsieur lui meme est intraitable. From these two pages, it seems I was interested in the phenomenology of perception: looks as if I am going to have start all over again!
Way back I must have run through the Proustian basics, maybe promising to read
The Book. I do remember, at the time I bought the Fontana series, reading Mann's
The Magic Mountain, which mightily impressed me. A two or three day "sun rise, sunset" reading, in my recollection. And then you feel disorientated, like when you come out of the movie-theatre into the daylight, not wanting to let go of what ou have experienced.
It would be a very good writing exercise for anyone attempting something substantial but who hasn't found a style, to try' doing a Proust'. Take the period of you own life to date. Use the author's voice and the narrator's voice. Try to cleverly dovetail the author's God-like commentary into the narrator's desciptions. The most difficult thing: to introduce loads of character which become more than two-dimensional in the short space you have, say 300 pages. It doesn't have to be complete. Try a fragment. If you don't have loads of characters, at least use the method. I was reading a theory of how the brain worked the other day: intelligence was about the recovery of memories, not re-formulation from simpler building blocks.
I am too ignorant of the canon to know who has 'done a Proust' since Proust. If you can offer up an example or two obviously Proustian in style, I would be grateful to learn about them.
Since my memory is poor, most of my 'In Search of Lost Time' would be fiction. Try to remember a time: a place, a small set of events. Now try to remember what you were thinking and remembering at that moment! Get your Marcels (God-like author plus narrator) to think along those lines. If you can't do that you won't be writing
A la Researche.. Well, you might. I don't find it difficult to imagine a character taking points in time and being able to run everything through, back and forward, as if filmed. It is said that proud planned his work with the aid of photographs which is telling. Came across a 2002 cutting of a newspaper review of the Prendergast translation which mentioned a book, 'The World of Proust as seen by Paul Nader, which has photos of the real people on whom the characters were based. MIT Press.
Although
A la recherche has not been successfully filmed, it is obvious it was constructed with a filmic eye. Its prolixity makes it very difficult to script. The 1973, Joseph Losey inspired Harold Pinter 'Proust Screenplay', which was never made into a film, played on BBC Radio 4 in a shortened adapatation by Michael Bakewell, boiled everything down to less than two hours. Anyone wanting to learn how to script-write should get hold of a tape of this.
If I was an English teacher I would encourage this Proust-type of writing in my 12-14 year old charges. Perhaps they do it naturally. Or is this too young? Maybe it only kicks in when you get to 16-17? Someone ought to do a survey of writing styles. Just get your tape-recorder, get in you car and go round to lots of schools and interview kids...
...
The interview with Markson below suggests another wonderful writing exercise: an interview with a fictious author, in which he reels off absolutely fabulous fictious people, places, food, books, films.....try it! I might even dare to put up an attempt of my own. No cheating : leave that copy of Mann's
Dr. Faustus where it is gathering dust. Do not resort to transcribing sections of that less than successful - was it an Ishiguro? - novel based on the musican holded up in Paris. If you know the title and author let me know. When I think of it, that was Proustian. Though is Proustian more than going back and forward in time? The bell in
A la recherche is instructive : thinking in real-time; bell sound evokes memory; memory contains bell sound; second memory (backwards or forwards) evoked; bell sound in second sequence returns narrator to starting point. Include a separate dialogue amongst the sequences which is hard to connect to the other sequences.
...
We can only know what other people tell us they remember about their lives. Apart from what we know from standing there with them, that is.
...
There are no conversations in my memories. I do recall the three words my father said before he died. The wider memories amount to two or three dozen short, silent movies. What I want to know is why, later in life, do I keep on watching just these films and not others that I must have made?
Apparently the Gestalt theory of forgetting argues memories undergo qualitative changes over time rather than being lost. Memories are distorted over time in order to become more regular, symmetrical. I would say - thinking of Dennett's
Consciousness Explained - that the mind tries desperately to tally what it already has with what is is continually accummulating. The brain is said to be a differentiator and an integrator. Image: a relative. Who hasn't got one with the tendency to cut out people from her family photographs? You ask who the cut was. The photo is pulled firmly from you hand without a comment. Or the explanation: "I can't remember". These people, rather like the one's who were censored from the famous photograph of Lenin, are no longer needed to tell the story. I don't like that: everyone in one's life story has to be left in there, in my view. You're free to say what you like about the one's who 'fell out of your story' through some misdemeanour or other, or to keep mum, but don't pretend they didn't exist by cutting them out of the edge of the photo..
This takes me neatly to Stephen Poliakoff's
Shooting the Past (1999) about the photo archive threatened with destruction by developers.
...
If you have read throughout your life, various references to authors keep on popping up on a regular basis anyway. And - if only I could remember - I expect I have read a lot more about Proust than the recent excursions, which have been more to do with learning to write than reading for pleasure.
With all this in mind, a few ideas of my own brewing, and a return after a week or so to
pas au dela, I notice Matt's 16 March 05 post which runs by
Wittgenstein's Mistress, a title which is bound to halt in their occular saccades those who know anything about our inscrutable Austrian friend.
The author in question is
David Markson interviewed by Joseph Tabbi at Center for Book Culture.
Stephen Mitchelmore writes about Markson's later,
This is not a Novel,
{...aah, yes, I remember it well...Margitte's, Ceci n'est une pipe*}
under the question,
What is the point?, briefly mentioning
Wittgenstein's Mistress. While
Joseph Tabbi runs through
Mistress comprehensively, with sufficient quoting to let you to get away with claiming you've read the book, providing plenty of information and opinion to decide whether you would want to read it.
I probably won't read it: though not ungrateful for the primer. If you have I would be grateful for some more extended quotes to try to understand the methodology, as it were.
*
The Essential Surrealists, Tim Martin:
Magritte has commented that this image is not a pipe. 'Just try to stuff it with tobacco!', he said, 'So if I had written on my picture, "This is a pipe," I would have been lying!' After the philosoper Michel Foucault published his book about Magritte, This in not a Pipe, he received several letters from the artist. They dealt with the difference between the words 'resemblance' and 'similarity'. For Magritte, two peas in a pod are similar. Only objects could be compared for their similarity, whereas thoughts could be compared for their resemblance. This difference was important because he felt it allowed him to paint his thought, not what his eyes saw. Although thought was not an object, he felt it could be represented through pictures. He wanted to draw attention to the link between language and the world. Signs, such as the word 'pipe' were in fact rather randomly assigned to an object. A Russian, for example, might have a very different word for this object. What then is the link between sound, word and object? For Magritte, this link was the mysterious operation of thought itself.
Writing and reading
I shouldn't do it. It happens often enough to be called a habit, though hopefully not a fetish. A new, unread book - not fiction - with an index, here
A History of Reading by Stephen Roger Fischer, gets the treatment.
If you flick with the with left thumb it has to be from back cover backwards. This means you will probably be left-handed. You may not have realised right-handers can't do it. In this one regard books are designed for left-handed people. But there is something else: from the left thumb flick to index, to the gathering of a reference and page number, and the follow on to the actual page is a smooth flow.
Perhaps a survey is in order here. Is sinestrality implicated in propensity for index checking? What of the ambidextrous? Teachers (or even as you lounge after the diner party with the coffee): start by handing out a book. Task: "You are being given this book for 1.5 minutes. There is no instruction for what you should with it." When the books are back you tell them how many flicked the books and of those who were left handers. Then the fun starts: they have 5 mins. to design an experiment to examine whether left handers flick indexes more than right-handers. This could be done in an English lesson - there will be a roar of "this isn't science!" - in order to draw the students minds to books from a different angle. Ultimately it will lead to discussions of what books are for, etc.
Here, it would be handy to mention what Sartre said in
Les Mots:
Like Plato, I passed from knowledge to subject. I found more reality in the idea than in the thing because it was given to me first and because it was given as a thing. It was in books that I encountered the universe: digested,classified, labelled, meditated, still formidable.
By flicking
A History of Reading left-handed it was naturally the index which came to hand first. As I flicked I recalled almost like a flash memory the nagging urge I had had the other day to remember the name of the book that the character Charlotte Rampling was playing in
Under the Sand quoted to her new lover. Virginia Woolf, but which? Before the Woolf entry's number arrives it comes to me,
The Waves, but it doesn't matter because I am already turning to the single Woolf entry in this book to find something very useful to me:
Though a writer can create a text in an infinite variety of ways, she usually - but not always - limits herself to one language, style, social register, message. A reader of her work, however, remains unlimited. A reader can chose to understand, react and interpret the author's work however the reader wants. Even unintentionally: what one reads in Hamlet at age 20, for example, will certainly not be what one reads in it at age 50. Indeed, as British novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) once remarked," To write down one's impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year would be virtually to record one's own biography". A literary text is not Scripture. Depending on context, it is at once mirror and prompt. No text, not even the most fundamental [sic] religious, dictatates to the reader. It is the reader who choses how to react, what to think. The wonder in reading is that the writer is never in control.
It is the reader who plays God.
In Greek mythology Narcissus was the beautiful youth who became enamoured of his reflection in a pool and pined away, eventually becoming the flower that still bears his name. Each book, each play, each poem we read is that pool. We find in it, and admire in it, only ourselves. As we change, the pool's image changes, and so we admire in the re-read text the rediscovered us. If truth be told, each text, independently of one's unique existence, contains a cosmos of potential flarreries. With all respect to Socrates, there is no 'correct' or 'authoritative' reading of anything. A written text lives its own life, from century to century and millenium to millenium, discovered or rediscovered for what it says differently to each changed society and each changed individual. No reading is ever definitive, as a reader reinvents herself or himself with every reading.
We are what we read and what we read is what we are.
My major pre-occupation has been to answer the question: Iis writing more 'successful' than film? Perhaps too simplified a question, but that's the gist. In an open folder which holds some of the fragments which I am beginning to compile to stir more thinking writing on
Le grand project, there is, on top, a Sunday Telegraph article by Andrew Graham-Dixon, in his series
In the picture. He is considering a Toby Glanville photograph,
The Plaster's Mate (1992). His final sentance says:
...what every photograph is: a ghost of someone who will never be the same person, at the same moment, ever again.
This sends strong messages to me again, as it must have done before: there is a Post-It note which I have stuck at the top saying "It is the last sentance which I like".
But the bigger question goes back to the author. Can his text be treated in the same way as the photograph (or the film) ? Whatever, it seems the ability to write and re-write on a website has something to ask and answer about this.
Amplifimeme
I'm as busy as a spider spinning daydreams,
I'm as giddy as a baby on a swing,
I haven't seen a crocus or a rosebud,
Or a robin or a bluebird on the wing,
But I feel so gay in a melancholy way,
That it might as well be spring,
It might as well be, might as well be,
It might as well be spring.
It Might as Well Be Spring
Nina Simone
A straight rip from journalismo.
Do reading and writing have an annual or biological rhythm? Does inspiration rise with the sap and disappear with the Fall ? Or contrariwise?
bibliomeme I
Bloggers gravitate towards bloggers who thinking along the same lines. After literally years of checking out a broad spectrum of blogs on science, creativity and the arts, I suddenly realised one day it was the British Bloggers who were thinking and writing in a way I recognised and felt comfortable with: not exclusively, but as a general rule. I decided to put UK blogs on
norfolkskies blogroll, as I found them, in order demonstrate to myself this 'two countries separated by a common language' {the majority of blogger being American} idea was true. Though not keeping the blogroll regularly updated, I do tend to stick to reading UK blogs for this reason.
An example:
Brain Micklewait tends to post photographs of architectural features in London. But his comments are, to me, quintessentially British or, shall we say, English. No American would say the same things about photographs he had taken in London. Obviously? There is comfort to be obtained from reading someone who comes from the same cultural milieu. And from feeling one can contribute meaningfully to this meme pool, which is not so easy for me with foreign blogs. True, not a unique observation, just something I realised rather late.
Brian's site did not load today, but in Googling for him I came across
One Man and his Blog, who in his two sentances seems British. The JPEGs and the blogroll give it away. Maybe he got the pic idea from Brian. It is not difficult to understand why 'pic & comment ' has become popular. Anyway, the blog is the perfect home for this method of communication!
Random Acts of Reality is the blog of a paramedic working in London. Though not, so far, having found a paramedic blogging from downtown Manhatten to compare with, it is clear, me being English, that he writes in an unmistakeably English way about what he sees and does.
The money quote (a phrase I don't like but it's succinct) :
Human endeavour is caught in an eternal tension between the effectiveness of small groups acting independently and the need to mesh with the wider community. A small group can innovate rapidly and efficiently, but this produces a subculture whose concepts are not understood by others.
Coordinating actions across a large group, however, is painfully slow and takes an enormous amount of communication. The world works across the spectrum between these extremes, with a tendency to start small-from the personal idea-and move toward a wider understanding over time.
An essential process is the joining together of subcultures when a wider common language is needed. Often two groups independently develop very similar concepts, and describing the relation between them brings great benefits. Like a Finnish-English dictionary, or a weights-and-measures conversion table, the relations allow communication and collaboration even when the commonality of concept has not (yet) led to a commonality of terms.
Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila [2001] discussing the Sematic Web.
People have an instinct for conglomerating ( coagulating!?) - with people who think - or they think think - like them. They might to start with spread out very wide on the web but eventually they narrow down to a core from which they can they expand out from.
...
Sandra with with her dislay off bookshelves has done what I though of doing long ago, but dare not because of the jumble of books in what can charitably described as a rough order. Perhaps frightened this might be extrapolated to the state of my mind?
The meme is
The Sheila variations. Make sure to read the comments to both posts.
The Rings of Saturn
Checking out the prices at Amazon, I winkled out the journey Sebald took was from Lowestoft to Southwold to Bungay, making my guess that he lived on the Suffolk/Norfolk border even more likely!
...
A review by Fin Keegan at The Second Circle: " A Reader's guide to modern fiction"
This :Conrad landed in Lowestoft.
Silk reference reminds me of a small Norwich Museum which had a display about silk. Maybe my mind is playing tricks with me.
Guardian obituary of Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald, writer, born May 18 1944; died December 14 2001
Out of Novemberland: The New York Review of Books: 3 December 1998, Andre Aciman
The Boston Review: review by Edwin Frank
New Directions, Joyce Hackett, associate professor of creative writing at New York University.
Brothers Judd
Piles of links including Chapter I extracts, interviews, essays, profiles
e.g., long extract:
Ch. I The Rings of Saturn
Searching for Sebald: essay due for publication Autumn 2005
Review Robert Macfarlane of posthumous Campo Santos
general look at his ouvre and claim that he would have won the Nobel Prize if he had lived.
With us, without us: in memoriam W.G. Sebald, by Alan Lockwood
Where no friends are buried nor Pathways stopt up
By Thea Abbott in Spiked Magazine: local Norfolk Arts mag.
Nurture to Nature to Nurture
The omens are looking up. The sun shines in freezing air. Whittling away on a senseless repetition of ideas following the death of a wren, which I decide to call, Disquietation on the Death of a Wren, without even knowing if there is such a word as disquietation, I suddenly switch on the radio, lucky and delighted to hear the last 10 minutes of the Book of the Week, Richard Mabey's, Nature Cure, which has been well reviewed: a book I want to read soon. It makes me shine, too, when Norfolk is mentioned: nothing better than to listen to someone talking about or to read of what you already know well.As the story is read I try to pinpoint where he might be describing with his talk of a house in the upper Waveney valley. What about the radio play (a thriller) - there is a tape somewhere - based on my local market town? What a shock that was to hear the names I knew so well incorporated into a thriller! How I tried to find out who had written this script! I just had to know whether this person was a local and if not why chose here. And also wanted immediately to use my own piece by piece local knowledge to write something similar.Richard talks in his first episode of a woodland he bought in the 80s - which he later had to sell - and what it taught him. I recognised this at once: my own nature rambles, through local woods or on the famous coastline between Wells and Scolt Head Island had taught me so much more than books. The thing itself: except you always get the books out afterwards for confirmation.I could not have learnt so effectively about the way salt marshes form if I had not cut a whole through mud sprouting samphire to find the layers of gravel and silt like the rings of a felled oak.
Proust to Sebald
The New Yorker interview with German novelist W G Sebald makes me feel a lot better: fragmentary writing is more common than one imagines. And therefore is not a sign of madness. That is if was Sebald was not mad. Was he a manic-depressive though ?
Don't feel annoyed dog-sniff writing analogies and metaphors come from the mind of Sebald raher thanb your own. He remarks on the fragmentary nature of his writing method, adding the observation dogs have a strange way of following a scent. I have written privately of this based on a newspaper report of scientific research.
Scent dogs appear to wander about because the scent both disintegrates over time and is an archive of a gradient: itself representing a direction. The odour on the bottom of the man's boots is laid down time determined and linear. When the dog sniffs over the traces, he has to work backwards and forwards to determine the direction: as soon as he feels sure of the gradient/direction, he then moves on in a more purposeful manner.
What is odd is not having read any books of either of these authors but be writing about them and their work. This evening I found two web pages one by
Arthur Williams of the University of Bradford and another
A Symposium on W.G. Sebald, at The Threepenny Review.
Reading
Sandra's description and quotes from
Rings of Saturn, that he has lived close to me - I might even have walked past him at the UEA Library since he had been a fixture since the 70s - and a hint of a memory of the local news of the his death, in December, 2001, it was the this from the Three Penny Review which make me think hard about how one can slip into synch with a writer - even if in an uneducated and ill-formed way.
Sebald was “Proustian,” people often said. Since his tone was elegiacal and his sentence structure was serpentine, this pigeonholing arose predictably. Furthermore, Sebald and Proust were alike in their creation of a unique format; one might aptly say of Sebald’s books, as Walter Benjamin once wrote of Proust’s, that “all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one.” That said, it strikes me that the differences between Sebald and Proust are more instructive than the similarities. When people call something “Proust-ian,” they are usually referring to Proust’s fascination with involuntary memory, the way in which sensory associations conjure up the past. Yet the French writer elaborated just as extravagantly on the joys and tortures of anticipation. (The present moment is what disappointed him.) Sebald, temperamentally, preferred to keep his eyes averted from the future, which for him impended heavily with disaster. And he accumulated his recollections not in windfalls, but through diligent dredging and mining. Having been born in Germany in 1944 and raised in a society that willed itself into amnesia, he regarded remembering as a moral and political act. When I said offhandedly that by now his mother, in her late eighties, could probably no longer remember the war years, he replied quickly, speaking of his mother’s generation: “They could remember if they wanted to.”
Arthur Lubow
Learning of the walk from Southwold to Dunwich in
Rings of Saturn was as if I had been with him on that trip. Remembering a visit to the Orwell estuary I had made 18 months ago with my son on a trip to get some details and atmosphere for a fiction I was creating, where we had wandered back north along the coast, stopping for a rest at Orford Castle, sitting entranced at the shimmering sea across Orford Ness, eventually winding our way along narrow, empty lanes, slowly up till we reached a late afternoon panoramic view taking in Iken Church and the muddy flats of the widening River Alde. This was not the same place, but it was a landscape of similar evocations. I could see it, visualise it : and see, too, the glistening mud flats and muddy gulleys in David Lean's "Great Expectations", the Essex marshes lit to make the mud look black. Dickens Dickens and his chum had marched mile after mile along these coasts in search of the details of gory stories he had read about.
No I had not read the book, but wanted desperately, immediately, to set off to find the book and do the walk, though mid-March would be too cold. Late summer, with the sun low in the sky to the west, as it had been for us on our magical mystery tour between Felixstowe and Aldeburgh, would be good, or sun on backs after a good lunch, across the Walberwick ferry or the foot bridge further up.
Reading
Anne M. Wagner :
As anyone who has ever driven it will tell you, the Norwich/London road cuts, slack and dull, through low-lying fields. I say fields, knowing that the word might imply ample vistas. Not in Norfolk. In Norfolk it is sometimes hard to think there is a landscape present in any ample or comforting sense. If you see twenty feet ahead, you count yourself lucky. Fog and rain are as frequent as landmarks are few. Towns are fewer. Coming or going there is only one road, whose two lanes quickly clog with traffic. The fast follow the slow, and vice versa. The carts and tractors do eventually pull over, slowly yielding to speed, but there isn’t much of anywhere for their concessions to lead.
I finished reading Austerlitz on the day Sebald died. This is true. I was on a plane (which has its own hazards), and did not learn at once that “he was gone.” I know the phrase is dramatic, and Victorian: I hope it captures how it felt to register that something as vast as Sebald’s writing was at an end.
At first I was angry that the end came, of all places, on the Norwich/ London road. His was a mind that was anything but linear; it could switch lanes, jump in time and place, and maybe not bother to signal that something new (really new) was on the way. Lapses and leaps are frequent in his pages. Chaos threatens—think of the untidy piles in Austerlitz’s study—and patterns are agonizingly hard to find. They demand endless details—large facts, faint traces—and time is essential for connections to emerge. I was angry that such a mind, such a way of understanding time and thought and history, could have been so fatally boxed in. Now, however, when I think of Sebald’s death, I realize how much its irony fits with the very patterns his writing taught us to perceive.
made me think he had lived on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, Bungay or Beccles, perhaps. This would make walks along this strech of coast a sunday afternoon jaunt. These places would have been visited and revisited many times, as all lovers of the East Anglian coast would do on their favourite stretches of Essex, Suffolk or the North Norfolk Coast.
It is possible to lead yourself into an authors work in gentle stages, as I am with Proust, reading more and more about the person, putting off the books themselves.
Though Sebald was said to be affable, I don't think I was far wrong in guessing, from the way he researched and constructed his essays and essay-novels, a hint of melancholia. No sign of mania so far!
Proustian peregrination I
It wouldn't be a crime if you never read it from cover to cover. So many people have commented, analysed and quoted from The Book that one knows it intimately quite quickly.
Half way through Jonathan Wallace's essay, Proust's Ruined Mirror, it seemed many who have had a nagging itch to write a novel, play or film script, have - without the benefit of the knowledge of how and why this book was written in the way it was - attempted to do exactly what Proust has done: run back and forward in time; or, as it is described, against the flow of the stream. It is quite surprising to read the techniques used were considered ground-breaking, since the human mind works this way: the story-teller might interrupt herself by recall of a sub-story, feeling an obligation to slip this in before continuing with the main narrative.
What is this if not the expansion of time at anyone one moment Proust is concerned with? Start drawing a horizontal line then, rather than continue straight on, descend in a loop, returning to the point where the straight line left off, finally continue the line. An invagination. From above, the 'detour' wouldn't be visible: from the side it is apparent there is a small gap in the line, but that it is continuous. Along the route of the circular diversion, which just happens to swing backwards first, then curve round the right way, then go forward for a while before 're-joining' the main line, put a few extra loops. It now looks like a diagram in a biology text book of a cross-section of some gland or other: perhaps a section of alveoli in the lung.
Another way to represent this is by drawing a line with the same loop but, instead of the miniscule, almost imperceptible gap, a slight over-lap - or, say,even an overlap plus small upward loop - on the the return journey. A fold over in a piece of string -no knots allowed! Or maybe....
In either case, in Proustian terms, you have diverted into 'expanded time' by running along the loop. In the second case - with the slight overlap - there would be a return to a part of the story that had been dealt with just before the diversion into another memory. Proust repeatedly uses the hearing of bells ringing {surely a reflection of him writing in a room where he rang for 'Francoise'? [And don't forget the other two inevitable constants: the sounds in the street and the view from the window] } which summon memories of bells rung in the past and their attendant stories. Proust often does this by going over this small section of the loop - covering the same ground - from a different angle. An example: the same incident is done using dialogue. Even during this another memory may interrupt the remembered dialogue. The inturuption could be from before of after the current memory.
Coming to mind is how an image can be totally re-created even in a small shard of the glass that was used to create a three-dimensional holograph.....Proust seems to be viewing the image in a mirror, then deliberately breaking it, attempting to view the same scene from the fragments, with the problems of the reflections between the individual pieces causing distortions, anomalies and other effects, which, of course, he proceeds to analyse at great length!
Considering the vast amount that has been learnt about the brain's workings in the last 100 years, it would be surprising if this knowledge was not used in fiction. How memory is dealt with in a high school text books demonstrates how sophisticated the understanding now is. Science has demonstrated not only ways in which it might work but, by doing so, pin-pointed the limitations of memory - what we can trust and what we can't, amply demonstrated in experiments on something such as eye-witness testimony.
Wallace points out that Proust was also tackling forgetting. Tulving and Psotka's 1971 comparison of cue-dependent and interference theories of forgetting are just one illustration. The results are recognisable in every day experience. When facts are emedded in a story - a linear 'narrative' - they are recalled far better than when jumbled up and without categories.
Those with a poor memory taught to mentally place objects in virtual art galley, a fridge by the entrance, a gun next to the sculpture in Room 1, a sandwich on top of the Picasso in Room 2, are amazed at the facility of their recall. This, of course, leads to the oral stage of human development, wHere stories were told around the fire, memorised to be passed down the generations. Tribes were able to pass on their whole history pretty accurately by this means. When writing arrived, the oral history was tranferred to texts. In the case of the Bible, research has shown how many of the myths have turned out to be historical facts. A story retains integrity over a long time. And these were stories which were learnt before writing.
Family oral histories, many taken to be just stories, are often shown to be accurate by genealogical research. My cousin told me he thought all his side of the family had been from one major city, but a story had been retained that one branch came from a rural area many miles away. He found this to be true from the documentation.
My style of writing is to create a series of almost random fragments. You might discover my Kumran cave with piles of dusty scrolls: unrolling the parchments - full sheets of paper or scraps hole-punched - some might only contain a sentance or two: a line might be neatly draw through a sentance, or a later dated comment added, or - palimpsest-like - the whole thing scratched out and rewritten. Each change showing how it has been re-visited, sometimes a number of times.
It is encouraging to read Wallace talking about Proust. It is possible to stitch together a set of texts that might seem impossible to join. I always believed this, but feared it might seem, done poorly, to be the mind-set of a mad man.
Extempore
A knock at the door downstairs. Four knocks to be precise. How I know it was four when the noise made me rise off my seat in fright, I don't know. A friend? No, a delivery. Books. And before the eager cutting of cellophane, trying to remind myself what I have bought and forgot about, there comes into my mind: "These won't be read , they'll go on the shelf to be referred to from time to time."Once the package was open my theory proved correct. Weakening a week or two before, I had ordered the three volume: A History of Language, Writing, and Reading by Steven Roger Fischer, without recommendation. My habit with a new book is to flick through it from end to beginning then sample the index to confirm or deny if I have wasted my money. I am an index man, having created a few myself, though none, I suspect, appreciated.
The next most important thing for quick assessment of a non-fiction book is the bibliography, evidement. All three have reasonably long ones. The guilt at spending on books which I am not going to read immediately subsides. My mind moves to other things. Back to be precise. In particular to the recording I made last night of part 4 of the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of A la Researche de Temp Perdu starring amongst others Corin Redgrave.As the knock came to the door I had just begun replaying the Proust tape, resolving, as I recognised in the beginning section the whole technique Proust employed displayed there in a nutshell, to transcribe the beginning for a post.
You wake in the silence. A moment. Who are you? For a moment you don't know. For a moment. Until memory. Your bedroom in your parent's apartment in Paris. Ring for the maid, Francoise. The bell reminds you of another bell. It's the one on the garden gate at your great auntie Leonie in the Combray house. This bell still rings in your ears, though it happened in the remote past, your childhood. You're terrified. You realise this bell has alway been inside you. These moments are your life. You feel giddy as if you are looking down from a height of the long series of the years, not separated from you, inside you.
"Your hot milk."
"Ooh, Francoise."
"Some air in here wouldn't go amiss."
"Mmm....Francoise, what sort of a day is it?"
"Its a day. All you need to know."
What to do? An invitation to the party of a Prince's this evening. Its silver writing on the creamy card against the mirror. And though the bright charms society people once held for you seem to be tarnishing, you'll go. She's a princes after all. And between then and now? You'll start your novel. That's what you'll do. Its only a matter of will-power.
[...]
It's the Baron Charlus' voice in the courtyard outside your bedroom. And Joupien. You go to the window, some instinct draws you.
"Perhaps you need to sit down for a bit?"
"Did I see you once in Zurich?"
Portly Charlus tilts his body.
"Zurich. I've never been there."
"Do have a light? Want a cigar?"
You are waiting for something you suspect is going to happen.
"Im afraid I've left my cigars at home."
"Oh, well, why don't you pop into my shop then?"
Now the tailor places his hand on his hip. Sticks out his behind. Poses like a cocquet[te].
"You can get everything you want there."
Or like some orchid in front of the providental arrival of a....
Another knock at my door. It is rare for two close calls. The book man has been. Who could this be? My mind must be replaying all the visitors I have had with four firm knocks, and is busily setting them out in order so that I may take my choice.When I open the door, it is someone I have never seen before...."Hello..."
"Hi..."
"Can I give you one of these catalogues?"
I know I will accept it though I ought to be strong enough to say no. The end result will be another visit.Returning upstairs to the three books, I remember, before going to the door, I felt only one, The History of Reading, would be worth reading straight away. Having to buy all three had made the guilt in the first place. Within a short space ot time, flicking and reflicking all three, I see it is true: The History of Reading will be my next read: a quote at the top of Chapter 1 is too enticing:"Be a scribe! Engrave this in your heart
So that your name might live on like theirs!
The scroll is better than the carved stone.
A man has died: his corpse is dust,
And his people have passed from the land.
It is a book which makes him remembered
In the mouth of the speaker who reads him."
[Egyptian scribe about 1300 BC]
Blockers write without an apostrophe
Another strangeness of writing is the universal temporarily blocked writer shifting into displacement activities, drifting into writerly thoughts completely disconnected from his task which are nonetheless a 'text':
"He could no longer stand to write another word. The familiar mood came over him: a mixture of irritation and an anger he knew, from experience, could lead to a strong desire to break things. Displaced a few steps to the window, he leant his elbows on the high sill, lowering his chin onto his folder hands. At once, as if by some magic his mood shifted because he noticed something. A greenfinch was taking a black sunflower seed from the dispenser he had tied to the dogwood tree, planted many years before for this purpose. What had completely drawn him away from his writing concerns was his recognition the bird, rather than taking the seed away to eat it, was turning and opening the seed in its beak as it stood on the perch. He remembered the more frequently visitors, the blue-tits and great-tits, had to hold the seeds with a foot in order to open them. Further, he remembered - thought it had not occurred to him before while watching these familiar visitors - finches had a beak specially designed to do just such a trick. The tits' more pointed beaks might, he guessed, be less specialised and confer other advantages.
In a flash he saw - a mixture of pleasure and relief - he had been taken right out of himself but was, in this recognition, returning to the frustration-mode that had stopped him typing. While now seeing a fast-forward of everything running through his mind's eye, he also had something else: putting aside thought of finishing the dialogue sequence he set himself as task of the day in favour of an impromptu essay, which - though a distraction from this designated task - would surely benefit him in the long run? Was writing always to be a time-limited chore which gave no real pleasure in execution? He thought of the number of times he had come to know the mentation preceeding the writing was the best part of the creativity: almost film-like. Sometimes he could consciously make himself into a editor with the editing-machine whirling in front of his mind's eye. From time to time he took up segments of film and reviewed them, one after the other, perhaps removing a few superfluous frames, splicing two pieces together: all the while aware of the totality of the text he was trying to formulate in the film he was imagining."
The block is not comprehensive. It is possible to write, but not his novel. So he choses to write this fragment down. Then he might begin to think about how there could be a way of incorporating it into the novel he hopes he is only temporary incapable of writing.
embrace embarras
Stewing overnight was the thought: despite the many
blogs litteraire, they do not provide enough sustenance. The general concensus is that they are 'a jolly good thing'. The expectation was there, but in fact there are frequently
que des morceaux. This is not to say that I, as someone who has set up a
blit, is in anyway in the same league as most
blitteurs, or, as might be said in the English:
bliters. This is certainly true. I am a simple guy without a literary education: a scientist by training, without even the basics of my own language. Don't ask me to define every part of speech, or to know the terminology that goes with poetry. You will be wasting you time. I will write what I think to be a poem believing it to work
qua poetry only to be told it doesn't scan. I am at a loss to know what 'doesn't scan' means. I proceed to draw little hops and skips between each phoneme, to little avail. Ignorance of this type is never an excuse: it is more about the inability ever to grasp certain things and notions through dint of lack of brains -or inability to apply oneself in certain areas - or all that and some deficit of temperament or personality. Fundamental ignorance, similarly, is built into artistic and literary types who squeal about the difficulty of science and technology. There would be little with which to tease each other over boozy diner parties, were this not so.
Going through a selection of
blits last night, which I have already linked to, I was presented either with highly intellectualised , cumbrous, quasi-dissertions; not easily disernable notions; or reviews of books I was almost certainly never going to read. It is amusing how people who are intellectually curious [such as me] still want to know what the books are about, and whether others thing them worthy, even if they doubt they will ever read them! Hence the way book reviews are devoured.
Though I may alter these words here or there, later, my conclusion is simple: it is probably wiser to write more and read less. This, despite being told the more the read the better you will write. Writng for public consumption is quite unnerving because there is always the ever present sniffing of those who consider one's efforts to be paltry and light-weight. Every writer must naturally both write to a n audience in mind and be interesting to only a certain proportion of possible readers.
There had to be a title for this post: the French
embarras de choix, or
richesses, came to mind. Checking the French dictionary, it was surprising to see how many examples there were for 'embarras'. I felt sure that the English embarrass would have nothing like as many entries: I was right. The French has, for example,
embarras de choix ,
ce n'est pas d'embarras [that's easy enough],
Je suis dans l'embarras [I am at a loss]. It is obvious the word stretches meaning far more in French than the English embarrass. In fact we usually use other words to cover these cases. The etymology shows the word to be of foreign origin: embarrasser in french means to hinder, though it appears to have come from the Spanish. So our useage has resulted in a contraction of meaning.
It is generally considered affected in today's writing style to include foreign word or phrases: I use them as a form of sarcasm and self-mockery as well as because I think they are sometimes more concise and exact. It is also just great fun to discover them and try them out. So often the
mot just is clearer than its English equivalent. Using long German compounds is considered to be a hanging offence, but what better than Wust's
Verstand and
Vernunft, when you are trying to explain the difference between discursive, analytical reason as against super-rational intuition? The roots of these words are easy to work out then build on. Saying wunderkinde, schadenfreude, gemeinshaft, zeitgeist almost slows meaning down and re-clarifies it by dividing it into its components in a way an English equivalent would not.
I am totally against someone who writes thinking he is making things clearer, when by letting himself go with words, he is only making it more difficult for his reader to understand what he means. I will come back with examples later.
The Balkan Trilogy -Volme 2 - The Spoilt City (2)
Must remember not to try book review as I read. The blurb on the back of my copy says:
'She is revealed as one of the the most considerable of our women novelists: The Balkan Trilogy itself is, besides being one of the most massive, one of the finest fictional productions that Britain has seen since the war...Her gallery of personages is huge, her scene painting superb, her pathos controlled, her humour quiete and civilised...'
Anthony Burgess
'So glittering is the overall parade...and so entertaining the surface that the trilogy remains excitingly vivid; it amuses, it diverts and it informs, and to do all these things so elegantly is no small achievement'
Frederick Raphael
which covers pretty much what I would say, so far, if I could have found the words. What I can say, without fear of contradiction: the historical facts will drive you on if the novel itself won't.Mentioning the Iron Guard leader, Cordeanu, as a result of a web search in the previous Trilogy post, and linking to his speech, I then find he comes into the story thirty pages on! One of the major themes is the treatment of the Jews. It briefly mentions something I am pretty sure many people of 'genral education' will not have known: that Jewish students were thrown out of windows in Bucharest in a pogrom in 1937. This is something which is going to hold me up finishing the book, as I do some study.It is suggested in the book Romania was always anti-Semitic.Reminds me of that wonderful book 'Last Waltz in Vienna' by George Clare. If you haven't got time to read the book, at least read the epilogue.Further research, as much as for me as anything: but you are welcome.It could do no harm, if you were thinking of reading this book, to bone up on the history beforehand. Though it has proved quite good fun to read the story and the facts together, piecemeal, as names and events came up.History of the Iron Guard - Deals with Codreanu's background and deals with follows the story through
- Pictures of Condreanu and Ion Antonescu
'Corneliu Codreanu’s end had come because King Carol, who had a Jewish mistress and several close Jewish friends and advisors, believed that the Iron Guard was a threat.'
chronology of Jews in Romania
since Roman times
Names of the remaining 60 Jews in Romania
A Chronology for Iron Guard
1910-1942. Shows early roots of anti-semitism
Short excerpt from The Long Balkan Night [1944]
Author Leigh White:
'...deals with White being the first reporter to break the story of the hideous Iron Guard pogrom in Bucharest in January 1941. King Carol II had fled the country several months before, and Marshal Antonescu was ruling the country. The Iron Guard (who he also calls Legionaires and Greenshirts) were Romania's homegrown fascists, and were then under the leadership of Horia Sima. Guardists attempted a coup to overthrow Antonescu, but failed.'
Side links to excerpts from The War against the Jews 1933- 1945 done by country category, including Romania.And finally, an article on recent [2004] Romanian acceptance of responsibility for fate of Romanian Jews in war, and some of the background, including fact that in May 1991:legislators observed a minute of silence on the anniversary of the 1946 execution of Romania's wartime, Nazi-allied leader, Marshal Ion Antonescu, for war crimes. Such a shameful performance was repeated in June 1999.
Amazing!
I can't remember when the revolution which overthrew Ceaucescu happened (was it pre-or post 1989) but watched it on TV thinking it was a set-up job, which it proved to be, with Ceauscescu's communist underlings taking over. Do they still rule?
Where did these come from?
Stammtisch Beau Fleuve A multidisciplinary collaboration for Communication, Research, and Lunch..........Well, that is what it calls itself.
Here is the
glossaryBig Soccer Forum Off-topic:
Russian Literature threadThis is long but pretty funny in parts.
