New Fave Blog

I read a lot of literature-related blogs, usually ones attached to small presses or groups of writers - HTMLGiant and Big Other are the main two I read, but there are a lot of others - the Millions, the Constant Conversation and Nomadics are also particular favourites. I think it was through one of these that I discovered Kate Zambreno's blog, Frances Farmer is My Sister which is my current fave blog. I like it because of its roughness - her writing seems to flow out of her and she makes all these connections and digressions. She mixes personal experience with literary and academic ideas in a really compelling way. Whenever I read it, I always find some sort of inspiration for my own academic work - the way she connects ideas together, bringing in Deleuze with say, contemporary zombie films (I'm not sure if she did that, or whether that's just the sort of thing she would do) and creates a sort of theme-driven essay/personal memoir that circulates around the same ideas but in increasingly interesting ways. She's currently writing a book of essays for Semiotext(e) which given her blog and Semiotext(e)'s back catalogue, should be absolutely fantastic. Shame we've got to wait til autumn of 2011. Meanwhile, there are her novels to read...

Dissolving and Inventing

The books to read list just gets bigger. David Shields has compiled a reading list, made up of "books, each of which asks what is for me the only serious question: given that we die, and given that there is no god, how do we find purpose in existence?" He "seem[s] to like books that help you get out of bed, but just barely. These books do that, with ferocious and, for me, life-affirming honesty."

We are re-watching the West Wing at the moment, so those quotes are ringing in my ears like the mawkish/inspirational round-up lines at the end of each episode, but if you can ignore that, then they might be useful. Or failing that, the actual books might well be.

Publication Studio

Publication Studio Makes A Book from Mike Merrill on Vimeo.

Publication Studio are based in Portland, Oregon.

Possible Precariousnesses

In a recent review, Stephanie Merritt picks out a line from Javier Marias's Poison, Shadow and Farewell, the third part of his Your Face Tomorrow series. Bertram Tupra, a member of MI6, explains to a recent recruit, Spanish academic Jacques Deza, his view of death: ""We've become very soft, very thin-skinned, we think we should last for ever," he tells Deza. "We ought to be accustomed to the temporary nature of things, but we're not. We insist on not being temporary, which is why it's so easy to frighten us, as you've seen, all one has to do is unsheathe a sword.""

Now, my eyes and ears opened and pricked up at this, because that sounds a lot like precariousness. What's more, it is a particularly contemporary view that is both being attacked and being put forward. The idea being attacked is the contemporary desire to extend life, to make it more solid, to protect ourselves against threats. You may wonder exactly how contemporary that is - surely it's human nature? - but I think what Marias is getting at is the particular fetishisation of permanence that an increasingly decadent capitalism creates. The equally contemporary idea being put forward by Tupra - who has just attacked a young diplomat with the aforementioned sword - is a reaction to these capitalist certainties, an embrace of the precarious which is in Tupra's case both a reactionary turning back of the clock to an age both more primitive and in touch with death as well as a more positive embrace of life in that seemingly solid capitalism which works on a valorisation of solidity whilst simultaneously destablising everyone and everything.

Another recent potential precariousness is Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?, a book composed entirely of questions - how much more precarious can you get? The question itself, as a concept, is precarious - it pitches something out into the ether, the dark, the unknown, without any guarantee of it coming back in the form of an answer. It is a leap of faith, it is uncertain and unstable. Here is a quick snippet of Powell reading from it. It sounds really funny if nothing else!:

of the Year

I've been thinking about my faves of the year for a while, and here they are.

Album
Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca



This is the only album this year that I've listened to over and over again. It's just perfect. "Stillness is the Move" would have got song of the year too, where it not for Al's "Distractions From Studies" compilation with had Noir Desir's gem on it:

Song
Noir Desir - Le Vent nous Portera (Rubber Room re-rub)



Late in the year, Al made me an excellent compilation. This wasn't necessarily the best song on it, but it's the one I've played again and again and again.

Film
The White Ribbon (dir. Michael Haneke)



This, along with his Hidden, could and should easily make any "films of the decade" list someone wanted to write. This film blew me away, it was so, so, so masterful, this is a director at his very peak. It carefully and deliberately builds a case, but so slyly does it achieve this that you don't realise for an hour or two that it's being done, and when finally it hits you what's been happening since the very beginning, all the little hints and clues, it's devastating. Even more so for the fact that nothing comes of it, no resolution, no understanding, it just continues.

Honourable mentions go to:

The Class (dir. Laurent Cantet)



- a really vital, alive piece of film-making, I could have watched the kids for hours and hours and hours

Rachel Getting Married (dir. Jonathan Demme)



- one of the really enjoyable cinema experiences of the year, with the ultimate "if-I-were-going-to-get-married-I-would-have-a-wedding-like-that" wedding

In The City of Sylvia (dir. José Luis Guerín)



- a deceptive depiction of voyeurism and obsession, with a subtle critique of objectification and image-making, all done through a beautifully composed scenes, long, langorous takes and slinky, summery light

Let The Right One In (dir. Tomas Alfredson)



- eerie and scary, it grabs you and draws you in to a Swedish netherworld of snow, murder and puberty

Great films on DVD:

The Antoine Doinel series (dir. Francois Truffaut), watched for the first time in their entirety this year, and absolutely wonderful!

In A Lonely Place (dir. Nicholas Ray)
- fantastic noir with Humphrey Bogart as good as I've ever seen him. (And I don't really like him that much).

The Best of Youth (dir. Marco Tullio Giordana)
- a revelation, an engrossing 6 hour portrait of an Italian family across 50 years of local and international history.

Book
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust



- clearly the book of my year, it took a quarter of it to read, and deserves all those superlatives given it over the 90 or so years it's been around.

BookServer Wow!

I don't really know much about eBooks, and Amazon's Kindle and other things seemed ridiculously specific to me. But this post on the Institute for the Future of the Book's blog, is as mindblowing as the poster says.

"* He then choreographed a series of demonstrations. Raj Kumar from Internet Archive demonstrated how the BookServer technology can deliver books to the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) XO laptop, wirelessly. There are 1 million of these machines in the hands of underprivileged children around the world, and today they just got access to 1.6 million new books."

And as a commenter posts:

"Bookserver is definitely NOT limited to public domain books — the intent is to make it possible for anyone to download ANY book (PD, out-of-print, in-print) to ANY device."

That's pretty wow!

Alicia Martin - Streaming Books

This looks pretty cool...

OK, this is basically it...

...it being my dissertation, PhD, and desired workplace!

Looking for the altermodern in literature, Mark? Why, yes, I am actually! Well, try this for size:

"One major consequence of the shift to digital is the addition of graphical, audio, and video elements to the written word. More profound, however, is the book's reinvention in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress."

Oh yes, that would seem to be it, then, wouldn't it?

"Isn't the reader smart just for opening a book?"

Great little story about an event at the PEN World Voices Festival, which has just finished in New York.

In a discussion between Paul Auster and Enrique Vila-Matas, the conversation focusses on readers being judged in the same way that authors are:

"Then it was time for questions, and a woman's voice piped up from the front: "Don't you think you were a little hard on the reader?" she said. "Isn't a reader smart just for opening a book?"

"That's what I said," Auster retorted.

"But don't they get what they get?" she said, and went on to say that readers shouldn't have to have any prejudices or expectations about what a book is; that reading should be like sex."

"I agree with you completely," he said, and went on again about the critics.

"You should relax; this is your wife interjecting!" she said, and a gasp went through he crowd. It seemed that, just as a character in one of Auster's books wanders into the life of the author, we had become caught in the middle of a minor domestic dispute! But Auster accepted her comments, as Vila-Mates looked on bemusedly."

The rest is here.

Six-Shooter at the Ready

Great quote from Paul Auster, about the task of writing, from The Believer Book Of Writers Talking To Writers:

"In my own case, I certainly don't walk into my room and sit down at my desk feeling like a boxer ready to go ten rounds with Joe Louis. I tiptoe in. I procrastinate. I delay. I come in sideways, kind of sliding through the door. I don't burst into the saloon with my six-shooter ready. If I did, I'd probably shoot myself in the foot."

A Twenty-First Century Twenty-First Century

I just read this in an interview with the writer Colm Tóibín:

"he banishes critical theory texts about texts from the seminar room, preferring, instead, to conduct his class through a line-by-line reading of the classics - Pride and Prejudice, Daniel Deronda, The Portrait of a Lady."

I think Modernities is making me more radical, less content with the mainstream cultural narrative. This quote made me snort with disgust. I don't want a twenty-first century nineteenth century! I want a twenty-first century twenty-first century!

I'm on dodgy ground here because I understand the need to know one's craft, to look back at good works from the past, to be able to learn from them. But a line-by-line reading of them? I'm not too sure about that. I'm not sure about the desire to add to the canon either. Or the canon at all to be honest. This is well-trodden ground of course - the usefulness (or not) of the canon, what and who it includes and excludes, who controls it, and so-on and so-forth. But really, "the classics" are the canon of a white, upper-class, Anglo-Saxon man. (I wonder how many of the students of Stanford and Princeton fit that description ;-).)

I think I want work that ignores the canon. No. I mean work that somehow manages to tread the fine line between learning from the past and disregarding it. And subverting it. I am worried by the stifling potential of the canon, of going through old books line by line, hoping to learn something that is relevant, measuring today's work against yesterday's.

This is not to say they are not good books (although I wouldn't know as I haven't read any of the three mentioned). But why can't they just be the good books of their time - all very well and good and nice to read and everything - whilst we have the good books of our time, that engage with our times and our lives, rather than the canon of past lives?

(I won't even get started on the other irritance from that sentence - "he banishes critical theory texts". That's a whole other blog-post).

World Literature and the Altermodern

A thesis is emerging. Or an area of study at least.

In 1827 Goethe coined the phrase "world literature" to describe the increased availability of writing from other countries and in other languages. Marx and Engels picked it up and used it in describing characteristics of the bourgeois economy. Recently, David Damrosch has asked What Is World Literature? According to Wikipedia, Damrosch "define[s] world literature as a category of literary production, publication and circulation, rather than using the term evaluatively".

I'm wondering whether these ideas can be pulled into an essay about the relevance or usefulness of Bourriaud's altermodern theories (and other, non-literary theories of contemporary twenty-first globalization) to literature.

If I ask myself the question - are there any altermodern books? the first name that pops into my head is David Mitchell. Especially Cloud Atlas.

I await a reply from Bourriaud to the four questions I emailed him last week. Let's hope he illuminates this question for me a bit.