Updike's Easy Terrorist

I'm reading John Updike's Terrorist at the moment, as sort of background reading for the dissertation. There are blurbs all over it saying how great it is, the Mail on Sunday says how "masterly" the prose is, and Ian McEwan saying how he's "the finest novelist writing in English today" and John Banville saying "no one else I know of, simply no one, writes this well" and the publisher's own blurb saying how Updike is "America's foremost writer on the times we live in". It's all so gushy, gushy, gushy.

And when you start reading it, you get this calm feeling, you imagine a sea and a little breeze, maybe you're on a beach and you have a little drink next to you, and every now and again you put down the book, open still but face down on your tummy, and look out to the sea and watch people swimming and people in little boats. Because it's all so easy, this book, it's like Updike wrote it whilst half-asleep. Every word seems to be there so perfectly, like he imagined the whole thing in one go and it just appeared on the page, without any thought or anything, without any crises or deletions or redrafts or shifts from the first to the third person and then back again. It's sleepwalking literature masquerading as edgy and contemporary. There's no questioning in this, no doubt or anything, not of literature's ability to portray things, not of his own ability, not of anything - there are no problems here for Updike, this book was probably a breeze to write. Come to think of it, he probably wrote it sitting on a lounger on a beach every now and again putting his notebook down to look out at the sea to watch people swimming and people in little boats.

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...

New Type

I'm in the new volume of Type Review, along with erstwhile friends and colleagues Henry King (not as kind his listing makes out!), Ryan J Davidson and Tom Coles, who's incredible-looking writing makes him the featured writer for this issue. There are some pretty great pencil drawings in there too.

You can buy here, as well as peruse their always-entertaining blog.

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.

Social Space Filler

Found this on HTMLGiant today:



Looks great, there may well be a blog post about it.

And I finished Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? today, so I will be writing about that at some point in the not to distant future too.

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!:

This Friday

A double-bill of academic wizardry (or downright dilletantism). Me and Derek are giving papers at the work-in-progess seminars in the English Literature department. Either number 4 or 5 Uni Gardens, can't remember. 1pm.

Derek's paper is called something like "Chasing Rainbows and Granite with Virginia Woolf" (Derek, if you read this, please correct me!) and takes up that famous quote in relation to sexual difference. Mine's called "The Problem of the Contemporary: The Altermodern and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland" and will be the finest 2000 words of my longer piece for the Aberdeen publication next year.

Comment Story

In reading this post on HTMLGiant, I found a nice mini-story, tucked away in the comments. Here it is:

I wish I could drink coffee with Werner Herzog after work on Wednesdays and I could listen to him complain about work. I would say, “Yes. It is always like that.” And then he would continue to talk, and I would blow on the surface of my coffee to cool it off while I listened to him talk. If he was your boyfriend, you would interrupt us and make him take you home so he could fix you dinner. And then when you arrived the next Wednesday, I would say, “Hey,” but I would not look at you.

Sunday at 247

Today, we are all writing essays, all in different rooms.

This is Tom, in the kitchen:



This is Lil, in the living room:



And this is me, in the study/our bedroom:



(If you click on them you can make them really big!)

Faber Writers

Lil discovered Faber and Faber's Flickr! Alongside some great book design covers are some equally great photos of their writers. Here are some of my faves:

Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender, originally uploaded by Faber Books.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, originally uploaded by Faber Books.

Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell, originally uploaded by Faber Books.

Auden, Spender and Isherwood

Auden, Spender and Isherwood, originally uploaded by Faber Books.