Mindshafted

I’m not gonna talk about The Thing That Now Dominates Our Lives, or The Thing That Began in 2016 That Hitherto Dominated Our Lives, or The Thing That is Going to Happen in November That May Well Ruin Our Lives, so if you’re looking for a moment’s respite you’ve come to the right place.

In bleak contrast to my last entry, I’m feeling a little blocked at the moment – 15k words into a 100k word project. Some days, words flow like ambrosia, and others, it feels like trying to build the Taj Mahal out of Duplo.

Keep thy mind in Hell, and despair not.

– God, heard by Silouan the Athonite. Used by Gillian Rose as epigraph to Love’s Work.

I have been maintaining a film podcast under lock-down. All episodes can be found here, or on Spotify. Grateful to the talented fight-analyst, IT guy, and Adobe wizard Carl Mounfield for putting together some great promotional images for each ep. Here’s the latest:

I really feel this brings out my murine, bellicose personality.

If you enjoy martial arts or other forms of pugilism, check out Carl’s Blueprint Breakdowns here.

You can read my poem The Burning of Notre Dame at Subterranean Blue Poetry. I wrote it back when Notre Dame being on fire seemed genuinely catastrophic to my still Catholic-inflected psyche, so it’s probably a little quaint now.

Some stuff that’s been keeping me sane:

• My friend, the ex-physicist, literature enthusiast, and medical clinician Dr. Dom Carlin has been maintaining a blog. Recommended if you like food and/or data analysis of Everton’s transfers, and who doesn’t like those things?
• The Liverpool Food Stories podcast by my mate Dr. Pratiksha Paudyal, about whom I enthused here.
• Steve Finbow, whom I still owe a pint or two from last December, has a new book out with Amphetamine Sulphate: The Mindshaft. Here’s a great review by Richard Marshall, in the manner of a Walter Savage Landor Imaginary Conversation.

• “Protein” listening and “carbohydrate” listening. Weekdays, I only listen to new (to me) music, or music I’ve found especially challenging and hard to understand, which I call “protein.” Lately, this has been Nurse With Wound, Ligetti, the Große Fuge, and Amon Düül II. Then at the weekend, I let myself hear old records I couldn’t be without – of late, by Funkadelic, Bauhaus, Big Black, and Hawkwind – which is “carb.” What I like is when protein becomes carb, as happened lately with Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 14 in c-sharp minor, specifically this recording by the Alban Berg Quartet.
• The gym.

On that last point, I find it fascinating how so few great writers or philosophers cover exercise. Gass employs it as metaphor, and the Greeks and Romans obviously refer to it. Here is Epictetus’ practical Stoicism: “If you go to the local baths, expect to be splashed in the face.” And an amusing passage from Seneca:

Conjure up in your imagination all the sounds that make one hate one’s ears. I hear the grunts of musclemen exercising and jerking those heavy weights around; they are working hard, or pretending to. I hear the sharp hissing when they release their pent breath. Add to this the racket of a cocky bastard, a thief caught in the act, and a fellow who likes the sound of his own voice … plus those who plunge into the pool with a huge splash of water.

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium

But when I try to recall serious attempts to explicate in prose the body transformational aspects of intense training, only Mishima and Kathy Acker come to mind. I think Henry Rollins might have written about it too, but when you consider how many essays exist about sex, food, alcohol, smoking, politics, etc., that seems like a rather sparse literary athletics team. Are most writers, disproportionately, noodle-armed pipsqueaks?

Of course, my own commitment to Stoicism, not to mention sprezzatura, preclude me from bucking that trend.

I recently withdrew a review of a novel I’d written for a literary journal because I felt remorse for the poor author I’d savaged. I’m obviously going soft in my dotage. I blame the late string quartets.

Going Pro

Recently, Ricky Gervais said about COVID-19 and lockdown: “You will not hear me complaining.”

As I know several people grieving at the moment and many more suffering in quarantine, this resonated with me. The absolute last thing I’d want to do is trivialise their experiences, and I have no idea if it’s helpful or constructive to share mine. But it does feel helpful to me: I’ve been extremely productive lately writing-wise, and I’d like to selfishly use this old thing to keep my hand in when I’m between projects. You’re under no obligation to read it, but if you do, I’m glad you’re here with me.

Doing my 9-5 from home basically gave me two extra hours I’d normally spend commuting. More importantly, it paid me a psychological wage. That’s probably a strange phrase to use, so let me break it down a bit.

I didn’t appreciate how much of a toll being stuck in an office for 8 hours a day – with people I don’t have very much in common with – took on me until I didn’t have to do it any more. If I was going to design a program to eliminate people’s desire to do creative work in their spare time, it would look a lot like a financial admin job – even one that affords me the flexibility, benefits, and employer-employee respect mine does.

(In fact, I think that respect is part of my problem. When I was answering the phone in a converted shipping container for a company that treated us worse than total shit, I wrote a whole novel in a white-hot fury. It just wasn’t very good. But that’s a different story.)

This has allowed me to “go pro,” which is a phrase I’ve seen artists and writers use to mean “start treating your creative work as work and not a hobby.” I wouldn’t ever say it’s easy to drift along on a muggle wage while submitting the occasional poem or article and getting every tenth or twentieth one published, and if that’s your gig then all power to you. You’re still a writer, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I’m proud of the work I’ve done that way.

After ten years, though, that’s not working for me any more. Why? I’m not risking anything, and I don’t have any incentive to get better. And I’m still too reliant on shitty jobs I don’t really want to do.

So I went back to my old daily word count minimum. I picked 1,000 words on a week day (and 2,500 on weekends, because I had a submission deadline to meet) but it could easily have been 500 or 800 or 250. Graham Greene wrote 500 words a day five days a week, which over his lifetime added up to 50 published books, including novels, poetry, film scripts, short story collections, memoirs, and children’s stories. I was seduced by something Michael Korda wrote about 500 also being Greene’s maximum: 

“Greene’s self-discipline was such that, no matter what, he always stopped at five hundred words, even if it left him in the middle of a sentence.”

The professionalism of that really appealed to me. It’s also freed me from the traumatic memories of 10k-plus-word writing sessions I’ve had in the past, emulating Philip K Dick’s marathon stints at the typewriter. (Dick used to write for 72 hours straight, sometimes on amphetamines, and then collapse in a heap. He published 44 novels and 14 short story collections in his lifetime, which is prolific, but not a significantly larger oeuvre than Greene’s. Greene also had the advantage of not going completely fucking batshit mental like Dick did, although he did once play Russian roulette with a loaded gun.) I’ve maybe strayed a hundred words over a couple of times, but it’s interesting how the maximum limit actually makes you want to write more.

I went into lockdown 15^th March 2020. (I have an underlying condition that puts me at moderate risk, so I didn’t have any choice.) Since then, I’ve started a film festival and an associated podcast – the fourth episode is the best so far. I’ve also written:

– A short story, which is currently under consideration with one of my favourite magazines.

– An episode of television and a series outline, and applied for a bursary.

– A play.

– A 30,000-word novella and submitted it to two competitions. (This took me 19 days of blood, sweat, and coffee.)

– 50 pages of a film script I’m hoping to finish by next week.

– A formal essay on a controversial and topical subject. (Which will never see the light of day after conversations with people I respect, but which I’m still glad I wrote.)

It’s possible – probable, even – that none of these projects will actually come to anything. But that’s okay, because creativity isn’t a limited resource. You can always replenish the store cupboard by reading, thinking, talking, or even just going on a walk. It might even be that the project you’ve been working on for months that you considered finished ends up being cannibalised by another, like how Giger and Dan O’Bannon’s work on Jodorowsky’s aborted Dune went into Alien. Nothing is ever wasted if you don’t want it to be.

The noise at the moment is that I’ll still have the flexibility to do my day job from home once coronavirus goes away, which is good news. Even if they do fuck me on that, I’m confident I can maintain this professionalism now I’ve demystified the process to myself. I think the next step is figuring out a systematic, consistent submission process instead of doing it whenever the feeling takes me. If anyone has any advice or recommendations, please do share.

Just before I go, a shout-out to Pratiksha Paudyal’s new post about Black Lives Matter and how the Liverpool food scene needs to do better. It’s not a subject I have any knowledge or expertise on despite my regular enthusiastic patronage of that scene, mostly because I’m a fat white man who eats and enjoys the fuck out of anything that’s put on front of him up to and including pineapple on pizza, but if any of my seventy-or-so followers are gastronomic aesthetes you need this blog in your life. The polymathic bilingual Pratiksha is not just a neutrino physics PhD., a software developer, and a voracious consumer of world literature, but also the best cook I personally know. She’s also getting a food podcast together. It will be, in the parlance of our times, lit.

Literature and Evil

Just got back from the bi-annual Transgressive Cultures conference at the University of Chicago Centre in Paris, where I presented a paper on Dante and the Shadow Canon. Unfortunately, the city’s transport strikes meant I had to dash for the airport on the second day, so I missed what were doubtless fantastic presentations by my friend Isil Bas on Mishima, and Steve Finbow on his upcoming book The Mindshaft about sado-masochism in the 70s and 80s New York club scene. (Meeting Steve, the author of Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia, was a particular highlight – we sneaked away for a few hours to get progressively pissed, while he told me about working with Alan Ginsberg and talking to William Burroughs on the phone, before attending the brilliant Flying Luttenbachers’ gig in the evening.)

All the papers I managed to hear were excellent, but the two that have stayed with me were Matthew Worley’s Whip in my Valise: British Punk and the Marquis de Sade and Donna K‘s exposition on animal slaughter in documentary film. For some reason I’d never considered de Sade to have held such a huge influence on punk, but like all true revelations it now seems completely self-evident, so I must thank Matthew for that – the weight of evidence and historical analysis he brought to bear over just 40 minutes was intimidating. I wanted, but didn’t get a chance, to ask him if he knew that scene from The Invisibles by Grant Morrison (who, now I think about it, used to pal around with Adam Ant, one of Matthew’s case studies) when the titular heroes have dragged de Sade from the 18th century and sat him down in a 90s fetish club – he says something like “I have become god.” As for Donna, I left her talk genuinely thinking that the random murder of animals is actually a kind of necessary genre trait of documentary film, from Franju’s great The Blood of the Beasts to Disney’s rodent snuff movie (yes, Disney’s rodent snuff movie) White Wilderness.

Organiser Jack Sargeant‘s The Ritual, about Jordi Valls’ (of Vagina Dentata Organ fame) fascination with the drums of Calanda – in which devotees beat drums for 24 hours a day until their hands are bloody ribbons – was also a good one. Jack’s like a one-man encyclopedia of underground culture – if I had a quid for every time a speaker said a variation of “I don’t know if anyone has seen [insert obscure documentary]… I know Jack will have” then I’d have been able to afford accommodation to stay an extra day. At the start, Jack asked us to consider transgression as love and vice versa, citing Burroughs’ (I think final published?) words:

“Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.”

I’m still thinking about it.

Despite my early dash, it was so gratifying to feel part of a like-minded community of transgressive artists, academics and thinkers. And now, back I go to the Wirral, where nobody has ever heard of Bataille, Blanchot, or even Burroughs.

Walter Benjamin’s thirteen rules for writing

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with themselves and, having completed a stint, deny themselves nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this régime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process. Nulla dies sine linea [“no day without a line” (Apelles ex Pliny)] — but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

From “One-Way Street and Other Writings.”

Fragments: The Mosque At the End of the World

Some notes I jotted down while sitting in Jemaa el-Fnaa, the main marketplace in Marrakech. Sometimes translated as “The Assembly of Death” or “The Mosque at the End of the World.”

GETTING AROUND

A cottage industry of misdirection has developed around the city. The system is simple, but brilliant – wherever you are, be it on the walled outskirts or ten feet from the square, you’ll be told in no uncertain terms you are going the wrong way and ushered into the arms of another citizen who will charge you 20 euros for the privilege of being led far from your intended destination. Without forewarning of this insidious local pastime, the false guides can sound extremely earnest and convincing: “Sir! Excuse me, sir! That way is closed!” Perhaps, knowing the Western liberal fear of giving sectarian offence, adding: “Religious festival!” and the coup de grace, “Mosque!” If you are white, you will hear this at least twenty times a day walking around the medina or souks. Even if the first misleader does not stand to benefit from the impending misfortune he has instigated, he is satisfied knowing another of his countrymen will. This gives the traveller the unshakeable and not altogether false impression everyone in Marrakech is trying to scam him, until he can see the dollar signs light up in the eyes of every man who looks at him.

THE MARKET

Smells of spit-roasting lamb; ginger, cinnamon, tumeric, cardamom, perfume, incense, coffee beans, mint and herbal teas; helicopter toys of luminous blue like little shooting stars rising and descending into the tumbling throngs of people; whitehot insect lamps burning under green gazebos, igniting the blues, golds, purples, reds, and yellow-browns of the fruits, spices, tagine pots, pasmenas and intricately patterned steel lanterns on sale. The chattering music of skin drums, guembris, tambourines, and chanting choruses fade in subservience to the prayer call from an amplifier atop a reddish brown adobe minaret, the mighty cry taken up by its fellows around the city until all the towers shake like massive clay hives of bees. Between a cheap restaurant and a jumble of tents selling knock-off La Liga and Serie A football shirts sits the mosque, and from the fruit stalls and escargot stands in the square the salesmen emerge and cut a sliver of the solemn and ecstatic sacred through the commercial profane, remove their shoes and kneel towards Mecca before their former patrons’ bemused gaze.

Towards a Shadow Canon

“The art of shaddowes you must know well… it is only the Darknesse that can give trew Forme to our Work.”
– Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd

My latest obsession is Blake. I’m going through a collation of his poems and prophecies, part of an Everyman library rescued from a condemned building. It’s far from my first encounter, of course; to repurpose Kant’s line on Hume, when I was eighteen The Marriage of Heaven and Hell woke me from my dogmatic Catholic slumbers, and every time I go back to him I think of how he defies categorisation and therefore canonisation. Even though he was a contemporary of the Romantics, nobody with a proper familiarity with their work would ever think “Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake,” nor “Shelley, Keats, Blake.” His urbanism makes “Blake, Leopardi, Byron” a tantalising, but still probably false, trinity, owing to Blake’s obscurity in his own lifetime. As a progression of European “revealed” poetry from Medieval to Modern, “Dante, Milton, Blake” doesn’t seem quite right, either, despite Blake having illustrated one and written on the other, and only Yeats comes near him as a visionary lyric poet. As a visual artist, Blake obviously sticks out like a sore thumb among his contemporaries (and enemies) like Reynolds and the exhibited painters of the Royal Academy, but also seems too idiosyncratic to slide easily into formulation with his acquaintance and influence Fuseli. If he has an equivalent on the continent, it’s probably late Goya of the infamous Black Paintings, but only in the sense that genius is sure to madness near aligned.

Yet there have always been those to whom Blake is central in the history of English imaginative culture: more so than Shakespeare, whether they’d consciously admit that or not. I’ve been thinking for a while about the Canon, and I mean that in the most reified and rarefied Harold Bloom-esque sense, and how it seems to have its own Jungian Shadow. Two souls are housed within England’s literary breast, not so much wrestling for mastery but complimenting each other: the England of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, and that of Blake, Swinburne, and J.G. Ballard.

As this Shadow Canon beyond Britain, whom would it contain? The primary criteria for membership would be that the art cause the effect Nietzsche describes in The Birth of Tragedy:

a phenomenon which is the reverse of a well known optical one: When we make a determined attempt to look directly at the sun and turn away blinded, we have dark coloured specks in front of our eyes, like a remedy. Those illuminated illusory pictures of the Sophoclean heroes are the reverse of that.

Yet the Shadow Canon is not merely Sophoclean, nor narrowly Dionysian. (Much of Blake’s work is Apollonian in character.) One also cannot be wholly excluded because of Bloomian or True Canonicity. Dostoevsky of Notes from Underground, The Double and parts of Crime and Punishment is Shadow Canonical; Dostoevsky of The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler, and The Idiot is not. The John Donne who wrote the Flea or called upon his god to “ravish” him would certainly qualify, as would Melville at his stormiest, Dante throughout the Inferno, and Goethe at his darkest moments of Faustian reflection.

Indeed, the Shadow Canon seems to turn on a Dionysian-Faustian-Orphic access, and its twin motivating powers are Decadence and duende. Yet being decadent or adhering to duende alone does not guarantee membership. With Salomé, Wilde is banging on this dark door, but who would let him enter? There’s too much façade, not enough nave. So a certain amount of raw emotional honestly is necessary, which might actually incline one to perform regular checks on early entrant Mr Swinburne to make sure he isn’t just making off with the club crockery. The inverse of this is Pessoa, who seems the perfect candidate for Shadow Canonicity in his moody idiosyncrasies, and yet his duende is too much the faux-humble proffering of an unsure heart for sacrifice, all sodden eyes and lowered head; the cult of loneliness that formed around him would make access to a vibrant pantheon difficult. We prefer the sheer bleak energy of Lorca – our poets must burn, not smoulder.

Wilde’s mistake was to covet, as an Irishman, a French national sport. The true easy decadence of Baudelaire might be enough to allow him, but one would have no hesitation at all permitting Blanchot, De Sade, Bataille, or the (Argentinean, but Francophone) Lautréamont.

If I tell you that the latter – subterranean, relatively obscure, mercurial, a poète maudit – is as close to a central figure as this canon can get, you might start to understand what I mean. If not, let me list some other names:

Thomas de Quincy
Emily Dickinson
Georg Trakl
Clarice Lispector
Jean Genet
William S. Burroughs
Ishmael Reed
Kathy Acker
Thomas M. Disch
Samuel R. Delany
Iain Sinclair
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Derek Raymond
Eileen Myles
Grant Morrison
Dennis Cooper

Just how you can work out that D E F, despite not containing any of the same constituents, is part of a sequence that began A B C, I hope you can see where I’m coming from. Some of the above are excluded from or are on the waiting list for the true Canon (Genet), others are fully fledged members (Dickinson). Some are counter-culture drug users (Burroughs), others aren’t (Sinclair). Some are there because they have correspondences in the true Canon (consider Trakl as the dark reflection of Wilfred Owen), others are so strange as to have nobody else like them even in opposition (Jodorowsky, who is incidentally the Canon’s greatest representative in film – try going “Welles, Hitchcock, Jodo” or even “Dreyer, Tarkovsky, Jodo” and see what I mean). Some are un-Canonical because of being genre writers (Delany, Raymond, Morrison), others are not. We note that most are queer, but it’s not a prerequisite. (De Quincy was married with eight children.) Some are suicides (Disch) or died young (Lautréamont), others reside in aged vitality (Myles).

Perhaps the only thing that unifies all these names is that they operate at the bleeding edge of culture. If the Canon is a tree, these artists are either the rich, rotting soil beneath or the fermenting fruit at the very tips. As much as I love Shakespeare and admire Milton, there are days when I think these others are the only writers worth reading.

The Fence to Sit on, the Hill to Die On

Whether or not he ever stated it in so many words, that Proust felt the Dreyfus Affair was a definitive test of character comes across strongly during In Search of Lost Time – a test that lots of people, some of whom he liked and admired, failed.

Living through what will surely be seen by historians as a time of global political cataclysm, it’s hard to resist the temptation to think of every big debate or event in those terms, whether it be Brexit, Trump, Russia, Charlottesville, or #Me2.

Maybe it’s because we Millennials fall into the “Hero” archetype on the Strauss-Howe axis, and that the previous “Hero” generation would have been the same if they hadn’t had the literal Nazis to fight; or perhaps Strauss-Howe is a bunch of pseudo-social-scientific hokum and the documented polarising effects of social media, and instant/perpetual access to it, are more likely culprits.

Some of those debates or events are genuine tests, though. Watching a BBC documentary about it this week, I wonder how I would have reacted at the time of the Rushdie Affair. It’s now agreed by all and sundry that e.g. John Le Carré found himself on the Wrong Side of the Argument, which is closely akin to the dreaded Wrong Side of History. But in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015, after my initial reaction of unmitigated disdain and revulsion for the killers, I remember feeling an ambivalence about the victims that will probably seem just as quislingesque in the coming years as Rushdie’s detractors in 1989 look to us now, and publicly (well, on Facebook) compared the cartoonists to John McClane walking around Harlem with a “I HATE NIGGERS” sign.

I’ve watched the Labour anti-Semitism debate unfold with no small degree of horror over the past few years now, and while my left-wing anti-racist instincts have screamed for me to stick my flag in the ground before it’s too late, the (psychological) land seems to shift and bubble up beneath me every time I try to. Because I deeply hate the stupid personality cult that grew and hardened around Corbyn like a jizz-encrusted sock upon his ascension to party leader, I’m constantly trying not to hate the person at the centre of it, who seems as bemused by it all as I am. So when stories of him defending obviously anti-Semitic murals or “honouring” terrorists behind the Munich massacre pop up in the press, I find myself expending an unusual amount of mental energy understanding an explanatory context for someone I don’t have a great deal of regard for. (Also because my brain gets itchy if I ever find myself sharing the ostensible moral outrage of the Daily Mail and the leader of the Conservative Party.)

Usually, it turns out Corbyn is more guilty of stupidity or thoughtlessness than a conscious or unconscious hatred of Jews. That’s simply not good enough, and probably does enable the more insidious forms of “soft” (to appropriate a Deborah Lipstadt word) anti-Semitism that are genuinely present on the British left, and in quantities I, as a Northern socialist, was somehow ignorant of.

And yet, I detect on my side of the debate (almost inevitably the David Schneider position, albeit less optimistic in my case) a flavour of the detestable liberal-left fetish for political self-flagellation that allows centre- and hard-right politics to be so dominant in this country – politics that tend far more naturally towards anti-Semitism. At a time when the far-right is shooting up synagogues in Pittsburgh or gaslighting an entire country of Hungarians into thinking Jews are their enemy, that peculiarly English kind of navel-gazing is unseemly to me.

So here I am, on the sidelines about a potentially generation-defining issue, in a manner I’d find unforgivable had it been on Dreyfus or Rushdie. The sense that I’m failing a test is difficult to evade, but I remain mired in near-Oblomovian detachment from the whole thing.

The Beautiful Stranger

R.I.P. Bruno Ganz.

As I came up the mountain, out of the misty valley into the sun. The fire on the cattle range, the potatoes in the ashes, the boathouse floating in the lake. The Southern Cross. The Far East. The Great North. The Wild West. The Great Bear Lake. Tristan da Cunha. The Mississippi Delta. Stromboli. The old houses of Charlottenburg. Albert Camus. The morning light. The child’s eyes. The swim in the waterfall. The spots of the first drops of rain. The sun. The bread and wine. Hopping. Easter. The veins of leaves. The blowing grass. The color of stones. The pebbles on the stream’s bed. The white tablecloth outdoors. The dream of the house in the house. The dear one asleep in the next room. The peaceful Sundays. The horizon. The light from the room in the garden. The night flight. Riding a bicycle with no hands. The beautiful stranger. My father. My mother. My wife. My child.

What Literature Found

I blew through the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time far too quickly, but Guermantes Way is different. One hundred pages of Proust describing a party during which a glass of water is knocked over tests the patience beyond a Bela Tarr-ian degree. (I’ll never forget the hour-long scene in Satantango consisting entirely of a fat doctor looking out of his window, falling over, and giving himself an insulin shot. One. Whole. Hour.) However, this leads to the Narrator’s first real encounter with the licentious Baron de Charlus, and not long after heavy or incisive critical blows begin to land. What other novel would include powerfully essayistic passages such as this?

“Today, people of taste tell us that Renoir is a great eighteenth century painter. But when they say this they forget Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To gain this sort of recognition, an original painter or an original writer follows the path of the occultist. His painting or his prose acts upon us like a course of treatment that is not always agreeable. When it is over, the practitioner says to us, “Now look.” And at this point the world (which was not created once and for all, but as often as an original artist is born) appears utterly different from the one we knew, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we used to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as women. The carriages are also Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we want to go for a walk in a forest like the one that, when we first saw it, was anything but a forest — more like a tapestry, for instance, with innumerable shades of color but lacking precisely the colors appropriate to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe that has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe unleashed by a new painter or writer with an original view of the world.”

For as long as I can remember, my nan has had a canvas print of Renoir’s Dance at Bougival on her wall. Aside from Rossetti’s Beata Beatrice, it’s probably the first painting I became really familiar with, so it’s difficult to imagine a time when people simply refused to accept the figures he depicted were human beings.

A few pages later, Proust tears apart the discipline of sociology before it’s really gotten started:

“People foolishly imagine that the large-scale dimensions of social phenomena provide an excellent opportunity to penetrate further into the human soul; they ought, on the contrary, to realise that it is by sounding the depths of a single individual that they might have a chance of understanding that phenomena.”

It’s hard not to be reminded of George Eliot’s almost scientific assertion that Middlemarch is “A Study.” Czech sociologist Jan Keller has found this subject fertile enough ground for his as yet-untranslated book Condemned to Modernity, which is subtitled: What Sociology Seeks, Literature Found.

Books I’m looking forward to in 2019

A Day at the Races by Steven Pinker. The world-famous linguist, statistician, historian, and prose theorist turns his hand to picking horses. By analysing form, breeding, weight, jockey and ground, Pinker skilfully weaves a brand new, fool-proof theory for beating the bookies at the tote.

Wash Your Ass by Jordan Peterson. After his mega-successful world tour, the world-famous clinical psychologist and academic doles out invaluable life advice for the billions of fans and admirers he met.

Isaac Newton: Charlatan by A.N. Wilson. The world-famous novelist, biographer and Moria orc brings some overdue balance to Newton’s reputation, unveiling him as a great hoaxer who could barely add up and who offered nothing but comforting reassurances and platitudes to a 17^th century middle class. Foreword by Tom Wolfe.

How My Mates Talk to Each Other by Sally Rooney. The world-famous 12-year-old writing prodigy weaves another precocious novel about young twenty-somethings in Ireland who are so much more emotionally deep and interesting than anyone around them but spend their time doing and saying banal, unimpressive things.

Seriously, though. After shit like this:

2. Prose is a window onto the world. Let your readers see what you are seeing by using visual, concrete language.

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) January 13, 2019

 

…I can now well understand statisticians’ anger at Pinker a few years ago, when he rolled up to their hood and began spraying his foul scent all over the place.

In About Writing, Chip Delaney helpfully distinguishes between good writing and talented writing – only the former is about avoiding errors, sidestepping cliché, maintaining clarity etc. I know for a fact Pinker hasn’t read it, just like I know he’s never wrestled with those page-long sentences in Proust, the un-paragraphed rants in Bernhard, the bitter elliptical fragments of Celine. He’s never read Robert Louis Stevenson on the harmonious sound of delicate prose, or William Gass on Gaddis’ use of alliterative mid-word consonants, or Flaubert’s deliberate avoidance of assonance. He’s probably never even read about Martin Amis’s war on cliché.

He has read Strunk and White, and Fowler. He might have read some Nabokov. He therefore thinks he’s earned the right to lecture us on good prose, as if all writers needed was some jumped up little thug from the language labs to write a book stating the bleeding obvious. Watching a real novelist like Ian McEwan tongue his arsehole, as he did at one of those interminable Intelligence Squared fiascos, is unseemly. Whatever hideous middlebrow shite he’s been responsible for since, McEwan did at least write the Cement Garden.