Due to a family medical crisis I haven't been blogging lately, but find I don't miss it at all. In fact, it's shown me how much of a distraction blog chatter can be.
A wonderful internet guru/genie is hard at work on my new website, which will go live within the next few weeks to coincide with serialisation of Corvus. There's also a lovely surprise for those of you who like audiobooks. Almost there, folks!
Absolutely my favourite narrative environment designer, Crystal is someone I've known since she'd crawl under my dining room table in a gorgeous jewel of a dress handsewn by her mum, but barefoot (and to my parents' everlasting horror, sans knickers). Look what's she's grown up to be - and do! And yes, she does match the Portuguese tiles. (I have told you before, haven't I, that every one of my books has an important character with tattoos?)
Go on, explore her website, you'll love it.
Cocoanut Grove, one of Ron Slate's recently published poems, appears in today's Washington Post, where he writes:
I found a reason to return to the story after reading Adam Zagajewski's essential poem "Try to Praise the Mutilated World," which appeared in the New Yorker soon after the World Trade Center attacks. The speaker of that wonderful lyric implores us to remember the world's ruined beauty. Adam's poem not only provoked me to answer, but pointed to something not yet articulated. I wrote my poem as if in dialogue with his, and also as if my daughters were listening in.All poets, nay all writers, are rememberers. Just how do we choose to commemorate loss, the personal inseparable from the communal, in the face of catastrophe? What is authentic, what false? Ron asks us to reflect on the nature of our acts of retelling, recording, reliving; encoding.
So I went into Cologne today to attend a meditation workshop, an all-day event which had me gibbering by lunchtime - not quite what meditation is supposed to do for you. Too many people, too much talk about fundraising for a European Buddhist centre, and I ended up escaping to a café with my book and my personal reader - specs outfitted with watch-the-people-go-by lenses, even more portable than a Kindle. But what I certainly took away from the workshop was the desperate hunger of people, lots & lots & lots of people, for spiritual guidance. If belief is on the wane, it wasn't evident here. And no, these weren't just the ageing New Age hippy sorts (ahem). I spent some time beforehand talking with a youngish software engineer whom I know slightly and who's lent me Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is. A thoroughly rational creature - I think. I had a bit of trouble following his discursion into the nature of temporal logic.
But the best part of the day was a striking moment in the homebound train as it crossed the railroad/pedestrian bridge over the Rhine. Daydreaming tiredly, I suddenly caught sight of hundreds of motley padlocks - without keys - attached to the wire mesh stretching well above reach and presumably meant to prevent would-be suicides from clambering over the guardrails. Either I haven't noticed the locks before, or they're new. From their haphazard arrangement and the variety of sizes, shapes, and colours, it seems fair to assume that many different hands have placed them there. Why, I asked myself. Why take a perfectly good padlock and leave it on a bridge? And that's when I realised that I'd rather not know. Not because I'll enjoy puzzling over the mystery. Exactly because it's a mystery, and I want to keep it that way. We need, all of us, a reminder of the inexplicable in our lives.
The single will be released on 12th June - Gabriel's birthday. (What we do for our children!)
And here's Sina live in Cologne. You won't be surprised, will you, if my next novel is about a (tormented) pop star? (Or maybe his tormented mum ...)
Update: Sina's website, with other songs to listen to, lots of goodies. Keep clicking, you get a new track each time!
An interesting place to be. Try Aimee Bender's Hotel Rot first. This is the direction I might take if I were twenty years younger. Might anyway, who knows?
A few excerpts from an interview with photographer Clifford Ross, conducted by novelist A. M. Homes:
A.M.H. I would love to hear you talk a bit about what music does for you, what literature does for you, and how they affect your process and your work.
C.R. Music and literature serve to rough me up, to shake loose any preconceived notions I have about the medium I’m working in. My favorite book is Moby Dick. It is rough, flawed, and almost fails. But Melville’s wild ambition and his uncanny ability to move from the particular to the fantastic enabled him to succeed. Through his clever use of realism, we are brought into contact with a dream world. It’s an amazing feat.
And
A.M.H. Do you feel that it’s an artist’s job to create their own vocabulary? What about the need to be able to communicate in a way that can be understood?C.R. Well, I think good artists see the world in a new way. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be adding to our store of knowledge. And in order to express their perception, good artists have to expand on existing vocabularies. Good art means new vision, which necessitates new language. But it can’t be so radical that it can’t be understood at all, by anybody, or the artist would have no capacity to communicate. But let’s face it, the best art is always extremely challenging to understand when it first appears. The vocabulary, the form art takes, is tied to its content. If making art was just about the neutral presentation of a subject, and not about new perspectives and insights into the subject, the issue wouldn’t exist. One artist would have painted one apple, just once, and that would have been it for apple paintings. No need for Cézanne. Poof! It would have been done before. Developing a vocabulary unique to your own needs as an artist is critical. And if the content is important enough, people will learn the vocabulary.
Got to admit, this is one hell of a good reason to buy an ereader:
Electronic readers like the Kindle are going to have a huge impact. This will mostly benefit publishers of vampire erotica and books about Hitler. People enjoy both these kinds of books, and now they can read them without fear of creeping out their fellow subway riders.I'm going to have to spring for one soon. That way, I won't even be ashamed of reading my own stuff.
*I first came across this photograph as cover image for The Boat, Nam Le's collection of short stories.Which brings me to a second event that shaped my path in artmaking, and more or less codified the first experience. I read Immanuel Kant’s "Analytic of the Sublime," which Robert Rosenblum referred to in his elegant essay on Abstract Expressionism, "The Abstract Sublime. " Kant describes "the bewilderment, or sort of perplexity, which, as is said, seizes the visitor on first entering St. Peter’s in Rome. For here a feeling comes home to him of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the idea of a whole within which that imagination attains its maximum, and, in its fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself, but in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight."
Kant’s "emotional delight" was similar to my experience in front of the Rembrandt. Seemingly graspable facts become elusive. Knowledge contradicts itself. And the experience of that contradiction is thoroughly and inexplicably life affirming. Life is momentarily heightened beyond normal experience and permanently altered as a result.
For me, that has become the defining characteristic of art, as well as my goal in making it.
As some of my email buddies already know, I've come to the stage in editing when I check my MS obsessively, one feature at a time. There's probably no more irksome character than the humble hyphen, and though I'd love to develop a devil-may-care attitude toward it (got the bugger right that time, I reckon!), my newest coinage is hyphenhate, so you can guess just how I feel after 39713 of them and still counting.
Nevertheless, it's probably a sight easier to hyphenhate or even hyphenventilate than to decide whether 'plummet from reach' or 'plunge out of range' is more suggestive in a particular sentence (stomach plummeting/seal diving from harpoon - ah, never mind, you'll just have to read Corvus, won't you, to see what I finally choose), the latest of my weird obsessions.
This is also about the time when conventional publication, complete with copy editor, begins to seem appealing.
From Notes of an Anesthesioboist, a blue ribbon campaign:
'So I went ahead and borrowed a blue ribbon and am "wearing" it on my blog this week in gratitude for the very fact that I can do so, openly, without fear of suppression, persecution, or death.'
More here about this blog rally. Please join us.
'My advice to anyone in any field is to be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker.'
J.G. Ballard
'Wege enstehen dadurch, dass wir sie gehen.' (Paths are made by walking them.)
This statement has been frequently attributed to Franz Kafka. Google it and you'll see what I mean. Yet nowhere can I find its source in one of his own writings. I'd love to know just how such misconceptions come to be. Not that it's likely to trigger an #amazonfail tsunami of viral outrage, of course.
*Misascription isn't a word in any of my dictionaries, but I like it very much, and maybe I can start my own small ripple. Check back in a couple of years to see if Oxford adds it. (And yes, I do know that I could just as easily use misattribution, but then I wouldn't have been able to write this post, would I?)
for those of us damn fool furriners longing to read Orange Prize-shortlisted Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie: a free download will be available from Bloomsbury for 24 hours from 12 noon, Wednesday 22 April (BST), for UK residents only!
I was originally planning to order the book. Not any longer. Smart promotional offer, isn't it?
Update: The download seems to work even for those who are not UK residents. Perhaps Bloomsbury has changed its mind; perhaps it's just some sort of copyright warning (and you know how I feel about e-copyright, don't you?); perhaps a glitch in the system. Whatever. Try it.
Ron Slate has posted a superb review of Zoë Heller’s novel The Believers, which I haven't read but now simply must. As far as I'm concerned, Ron writes some of the best reviews around, online or off, and this one is right up there in illuminating not only how a text works, but in offering a clear understanding of its context - literary, historical, philosophical, psychological, sociological. Yup, the whole damned works! And what is particularly difficult to achieve - and an indication of hard-won wisdom, a concept rather neglected in our times - Ron leaves enough room for readers to bring their own selves to the text. If envy is an indication of how much I wish I could analyse like this, then picture me with skin as lush an April green as the fields and meadows beyond my house.
Especially interesting is the idea that irony has at its heart a moral imperative - perhaps a good way to distinguish between it and the chic, bitter, caustic sark often encountered as stance and mask these days, particularly online. Literature - and of course I include here good literary criticism - really does have much to do with living well.
I'm trying to remember where I've read that Ezra Pound felt the most memorable prose is kinetic. Eudora Welty seems to be saying something similar with 'Movement must be at the very heart of listening.' (One Writer's Beginnings) She goes on to speak of the inward voice she hears when reading and writing: 'the voice of the story or the poem itself', its cadence. In Africa there was never music without movement, often dance; the whole body sang.
Ideally, both content (a kinetic image, say) and form (cadence, rhythm etc) should move as one.
The reason I read certain blogs is for the daily hit of irritalin they provide me, especially the Old Boys' Blogs whose denizens are often knowing to the point of arrogance. It's useful - and provocative - to be reminded of what I don't want to do, what blogging need not be. Literary criticism is by its very nature judgemental, but the longer I blog, the less certain I feel. Perhaps this is why I'm blogging less and less.
For (strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even) critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken. What motivates so many of us to write in the first place is, to begin with, a great passion for a subject (Tennessee Williams, Balanchine, jazz, the twentieth-century novel, whatever) that we find beautiful; and then a kind of corresponding anxiety about the fragility of that beauty.Mendelsohn is undoubtedly right, but of course 'what we find beautiful' is indeed subjective, and all too often those who are knowledgeable - and articulate - could do with a salutary measure of humility. Fiction is a search, not an answer - at least serious fiction.
(Daniel Mendelsohn, How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken)
