Dancehall Vol. 2

A shortened and edited part of my dissertation has found its way into my friends' Ben and Hannah's journal, Dancehall. It's got new poems by Peter Manson and a selection of responses to November's Instal festival at the Tramway, which a lot of us as part of the Glasgow Open School took part in. You can order it for £2 or read it on their website here.

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.

Puzzler

"a puzzle piece means nothing - just an impossible question, an opaque challenge. But as soon as you have succeeded, after minutes of trial and error, or after a prodigious half-second flash of inspiration, in fitting it into one of its neighbours, the piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece. The intense difficulty preceding this link-up - which the English word puzzle indicates so well - not only loses its raison d'etre, it seems never to have had any reason, so obvious does the solution appear."

Georges Perec on jigsaw puzzles.

The Interrogative Mood

I finished Padgett Powell's novel (?) The Interrogative Mood the other day. It's rather good, and I'll definitely use it in my PhD, (if the bloody application gets in, but that's a whole other story).



It's constructed entirely out of questions, 165 pages of them, divided not into chapters but roughly 10-page sections. There's no ostensible order to the questions (no theme ties together each section for instance), and they range in style and content from "Do you like paint?" to "Is there a future?" - those two appear right next to each other.

For the first ten or twenty pages, you're figuring out how you're going to read it; the rhythm, the pace, the emphases. The more you read, the more you find your way, and the more you build up a head of steam. You start noticing how the construction and placement of the questions means that you don't read it as a mere interrogative list, that each question has a different tone or timbre to it. Powell mixes it up.

Then you start noticing how questions re-appear in slightly different formations. But they're not "big themes", they're about your love of blue-jays, the fear of a hernia, the comparative beauties of a sunset and a sunrise, whether little rubber army men are still made as toys. They're the type of questions that "characterise", and you begin to wonder about the identity of the questioner. They're the apparently small things that an individual notices or is preoccupied with, and it's in this sense that Powell is very much like Nicholson Baker, (who's new book I'm currently reading). Like Baker, Powell loves those idiosyncracies - "Are you a sweater person?" "Do you take pleasure in cleaning and repacking wheel bearings?" - that always seem to 'say so much' about a person.

This questioner keeps formulating escape plans ("If you were told you could move to a cabin in the Andes, yours for the taking and with some servants on the grounds ready to work for you and that the farm was self-sufficient with their labour, would you go?") and you wonder whether these questions are a self-questioning, some sort of examination. Perhaps this book is an (auto-)biography of sorts, all the questions one asks oneself put together. But perhaps it's not a biography of a person per se, but a psyche, a society, a country even, and perhaps it's not a biography in the sense of a linear narrative from birth to death but a biography in a portrait, a snapshot, and perhaps that snapshot is of contemporary America. I think it is.

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!:

Easter Rabbit Trailer

Here's a trailer for a book I've just ordered by Joseph Young. He writes microfictions, there's a little bit about him here with links to his microfiction blog, and his publishers are here.

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.

Dear Author

"I am delighted to inform you that your paper has been chosen for publication in the 2009 University of Aberdeen CASS Post-Graduate Conference Publication, Voices: Postgraduate Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity."

Out this time next year, I think...

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!)

David Mitchell Attains Japanese Thought. Or Does He?

The paper I'm giving at the University of Aberdeen in July focusses on the contemporary British writer David Mitchell and whether or not he can be considered an altermodern writer. I call him a British writer a little provocatively, because the altermodern, and definitely Mitchell's novels, question the traditional sense of nationality.

In The Radicant, Nicolas Bourriaud discusses Victor Segalen, his book Essay on Exoticism and his ideas of diversity-as-energy and positive experiences of difference. Recounting how Segalen travelled to and through China and came to write a collection of prose poems Steles, Bourriaud defines Segalen's importance to the altermodern as this: "if the book [Essay on Exoticism] encourages us to seek to understand foreign cultures, it is so as to better appreciate what establishes our own difference. One cannot become Chinese, but one can attain the ability to articulate Chinese thought; one cannot claim as empathy what is merely a tourist's clear conscience, but one can translate".

My thought, which came to me whilst doing the washing up earlier, was that Mitchell attains a similar ability vis-a-vis Japan. Having re-read Cloud Atlas, I have just finished number9dream and am now moving on to Ghostwritten. It is number9dream that interests me here.

What struck me initially was how similar to some of Haruki Murakami's narrator-heroes Mitchell's narrator Eiji Miyake is. His thoughtfulness, stubborness and naivete are all found in Kafka on the Shore's narrator, as well as that of Sputnik Sweetheart and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Now, there are quite a few assumptions being made here - which naturally were I to follow this line of thought I would chase up - concerning how typical of "Japanese thought" Murakami's characters are. And there is certainly room for debate, given the obvious debt of influence he and his characters owe to Western culture - Beatles songs, jazz, pasta. But assuming that Murakami is able to articulate a recognisably Japanese mindset, then the similarities to Mitchell would suggest that the non-Japanese writer gets pretty close too.

My gut instinct says that number9dream doesn't seem mannered. Eiji doesn't come across as the character stuck between a British background and a Japanese present that you might expect. He doesn't seem caricatured or two-dimensional. And in those moments where characters use familiarly "British" words like "bloody", the effect is to make them more vivid and memorable. One might even be able to argue that Mitchell's background actually helps him see Japan more clearly: his experience of difference is translated into country-boy Eiji's impressions of megalopolis Tokyo.

These are very much early thoughts, but suggest that there is some mileage in the David Mitchell-Altermodern idea.

A Little Thought About David Mitchell

By rights I shouldn't like David Mitchell. His writing is slightly cyber-punky, Matrix-y and Bladerunner-y; all things I steer pretty well clear of. Whilst not overly elaborate it's not spare - fast becoming my favourite writing style - either. It's punchy and quick and he weaves a good yarn. Now yarnin', as Zachry in Cloud Atlas calls storytelling, is something I do like. And it's probably what makes me like him as much as I do. He has a similar storytelling prowess to Haruki Murakami and weaves in and out of reality much like him. (I'm too ignorant to say whether it's the Japanese connection - Mitchell lived and taught in Tokyo for many years). That not-sparse prose is given to occasional flourishes but not exaggerated ones. It is calm and somewhat measured but reveals a joy of the wriggliness of language too.

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).