What Makes Vampires so appealing?: Audio interview with Patricia K. McCarthy

Posted in AUDIO:Critics on October 10th, 2008

Philip Burne-Jones

Patricia K. Macarthy is author of The Crimson Series, three books, to date, about vampires. We talk here about what makes Vampires so appealing to so many people, about their being symbolic of man’s desire for supremacy, women’s desire to be consumed, about the fringe elements of society, the attraction of eternal youth and immortality, confidence, the perfect villian whose weapon is seduction, alpha males, power, the lack of conscience, film, Halloween, the draw of fantasy, the defiance of death and the preciousness of time.

During our conversation reference is made to poems by Byron and Goethe. Both example early literary treatment of Vampires [see vampires (and vampire fiction)].

The Vampire Female: "The Bride of Corinth" (1797) by: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

(1) Once a stranger youth to Corinth came,

Who in Athens lived, but hoped that he

From a certain townsman there might claim,

As his father’s friend, kind courtesy.

(2) Son and daughter, they

Had been wont to say

Should thereafter bride and bridegroom be.

But can he that boon so highly prized,

Save tis dearly bought, now hope to get?

They are Christians and have been baptized,

He and all of his are heathens yet.

(3) For a newborn creed,

Like some loathsome weed,

Love and truth to root out oft will threat.

Father, daughter, all had gone to rest,

And the mother only watches late;

She receives with courtesy the guest,

And conducts him to the room of state.

The Giaour by Lord Byron was first published in 1813 and the first in his Oriental romance series. It proved to be a great success, consolidating Byron’s reputation critically and commercially. Here’s how it starts:

No breath of air to break the wave

That rolls below the Athenian’s grave,

That tomb which, gleaming o’er the cliff,

First greets the homeward-veering skiff,

High o’er the land he saved in vain;

When shall such hero live again?

Please listen here:

 
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Stendhal’s Four Kinds and Seven Stages of Love

Posted in Authors and Books on October 9th, 2008

 

Thanks to a post over at obooki’s site, I’m prompted to put up this brief summary of the first part of Stendhal’s On Love. I’ve lifted it from the first draft of a novel I’ve written about two people who fall in love whilst discussing great books about love via email. Please find a lengthier, slightly different, at this point shoddily presented version at Merely a Madness, excerpts  here. 

D l’Amour by Marie Henri Beyle/ Stendhal 1783-1825

Stendhal had two conflicting sides to his nature: the deeply sensitive and the coolly analytical . Fused in his greatest novels, uneasily juxtaposed here. While correcting the proofs he wept. ‘I nearly went crazy’. Music, by giving precise form to elusive emotions, by expressing the inexpressible, satisfied both sides of his nature. Sought happiness unremittingly: not mere pleasure or the satisfaction of desires, but a rapture accessible only to natures of rate quality. ‘the happy few’; the delight that comes from intense felling, lucid awareness, passion and energy; the happiness of reverie, of response to beauty, of the free imagination - and such happiness he found in loving, even without return….

Preface: It is of little use for an author to beg the public’s indulgence, for the very act of publications gives the lie to this pretence at modesty.

Intro: a book that would express all that Metilde Dembowski had made him feel. His was an unhappy, diffident hopeless passion.

Publisher complaining about unsold copies: ‘They must be sacred, for nobody will touch them. 16

Book One Four kinds of love:

  1. Passionate: carries us away against our real interest.
  2. Book concentrates on amour-passion: intense, romantic, generally unrequited and perhaps impossible to requite.
  3. Mannered: nothing passionate or unpredictable about it. It’s always witty. Cold. Respects ‘real’ interests. Take away vanity, and there’s little left.Physical: self evident.
  4. Vanity: men both desire and possess fashionable women, much in the way one might own a fine horse. Sometimes physical but not always
    "In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future" 44


The Birth of Love: seven stages. Here is what happens to the soul:

  1. Admiration
  2. You think "how delightful it would be to kiss her, to be kissed by her" and so on…i.e. from simple to tender admiration.
  3. Hope. You observe her perfections, and it is at this moment that a woman really ought to surrender, for the utmost physical pleasure. Even the most reserved women blush to the whites of their eyes at this moment of hope. The passion is so strong, and the pleasure so sharp, that they betray themselves unmistakably.
  4. Love is born. To love is to enjoy seeing, touching, and sensing with all the senses, as closely as possible, a lovable object which loves in return.
  5. The first crystallization ("a certain fever of the imagination which translates a normally commonplace object into something unrecognizable, makes it an entity apart"). If you are sure that a woman loves you, it is a pleasure to endow her with a thousand perfections and to count your blessings with infinite satisfaction. In the end you overrate wildly and regard her as something fallen from Heaven, unknown as yet, but certain to be yours

Solitude and leisure are necessary. Leave a lover with his thoughts for twenty-four hours, and this is what will happen: At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they pull it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable.What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.No sooner do you think of a virtue than you detect it in your beloved….but his attention is still liable to wander after a time because one gets tired of anything uniform, even perfect happiness. This is what happens next to fix the attention:

6. Doubt creeps in. First a dozen or so glances, or some other sequence of actions, raise and confirm the lover’s hopes. Then, as he recovers from the initial shock, he grows accustomed to his good fortune, or acts on a theory drawn from the common multitude of easily won women. He asks for more positive proofs of affection and tries to press his suit further.7.The second crystallization, which deposits diamond layers of prove that ’she loves me’. Since love casts doubt upon what seemed proven before, the woman who was so certain, before intimacy, that her lover was entirely above vulgar promiscuity, no sooner remembers that she has nothing left to refuse him than she trembles lest he has merely been adding another conquest to his list. Only at this point does second crystallization begin, and much more strongly, since it is now accompanied by fear.


7. Every few minutes throughout the night which follows the birth of doubt, the lover has a moment of dreadful misgiving, and then reassures himself, ’she loves me’; and crystallization begins to reveal new charms. Then once again the haggard eye of doubt pierces him and he stops transfixed. He forgets to draw breath and mutters, ‘But does she love me?’ Torn between doubt and delight, the poor lover convinces himself that she could give him such pleasure as he could find nowhere else on earth. It is the pre-eminence of this truth, and the road to it, with a fearsome precipice on one hand and a views of perfect happiness on the other, which set the second crystallization so far above the first. The lover’s mind vacillates between three ideas: She is perfect. She loves me. How can I get the strongest possible proofs of her love?

Mill and Ricardo

Posted in Authors and Books on October 8th, 2008

 Thanks to Wyatt Mason’s recommendation I have been dipping into John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography during the past several days. What an elegant pen he possessed:

During this first period of my life, the habitual frequenters of my father’s house were limited to a very few persons, most of them little known to the world, but whom personal worth, and more or less of congeniality with at least his political opinions (not so frequently to be met with then as since) inclined him to cultivate; and his conversations with them I listened to with interest and instruction. My being an habitual inmate of my father’s study made me acquainted with the dearest of his friends, David Ricardo, who by his benevolent countenance, and kindliness of manner, was very attractive to young persons, and who after I became a student of political economy, invited me to his house and to walk with him in order to converse on the subject.

And of course he’s right. Look at Ricardo’s lovely, sympathetic eyes. 

Bruch - Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra

Posted in On Music on October 8th, 2008

Thanks to piony for the link. What a wonderful source of enjoyment she provides! And from the same CD here’s one of my father’s favourite composers: Massenet and his - Meditation from Thais.

Barnes and Noble in Katmando?

Posted in Photographs on October 7th, 2008

As some of you may know, I like to shoot photos of bookstores. My brother was recently on an assignment in Nepal and took these beauties for me: 

 

 

 

No Borders you say?

Federal Election: Who Hates the Arts in Canada?

Posted in Authors and Books on October 6th, 2008

Image from the National Post.

I haven’t really looked too hard into the allegations hurled by opposition party leaders Stephane Dion, Jack Layton et al, at Stephen Harper’s cutting 50 million from Canada’s arts funding budget. What I have seen however is documentation that shows funding for the Arts in the last year of the previous Liberal government, 2006 I think, at 20% below what that same funding now is two years later under the Conservatives.

So who hates the Arts? Bashing gala attending artists…fat from the public purse…is probably what pollsters have told Harper to do in order to appeal to his natural constituency. And yet most artists are pulling in between 20 and 30K a year if that…since when can they afford to pay for gala tickets? Let alone the duds required to wear at them. More likely it is the corporate elite attending these functions…most of whom vote Tory…

Quite illogical this. All I know is that on the Arts, as on most public policy issues, the Canadian public is being fed a pile of half truths. Half truths are what we are expected to base our whole vote on. The manipulation of language in this election, as in politics generally, makes one truly cynical, in a poetic sort of way.

Here’s James Wood in the New Yorker on the subject:

"…the [Republican] campaign that claims to loathe "just words" has proved expert at their manipulation, from reversals of policy to the outright lies of some of its attack ads ("comprehensive sex education") and the subtle racial innuendo of a phrase like "how disrespectful" (used to accuse Obama of making uppity attacks on Palin). Karl Rove-along with predecessors like Lee Atwater and protégés like Steve Schmidt-long ago showed the Republicans that language is slippery, fluid, a river into which you can dump anything at all as long as your opponent is the one downstream. And, to be fair, those who affect to despise words have been more skillful than their opponents not just at amoral manipulation but at the creation of what Orwell called "a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech."

Here’s Randall Jarrell from Poetry and the Age:

We can learn more about poetic structure from logical fallacies than from logic; go to the political orator, the advertising agencies, thou critic, but let the logician moulder in his icebox.

Lewd Fruit or Plum Bums

Posted in NB Photos on October 6th, 2008

NB

And the coco de mer, of course…

That Time of Year…

Posted in NB Photos on October 6th, 2008

 NB

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

 

Do you Pencil when you Read?

Posted in Authors and Books on October 4th, 2008

From Mark Sarvas interviewed at Bookgeek via Books Inq.:

"I’m a hopeless book geek. I try to be mindful of not fetishizing books too much - after all, they are not, finally, about the objects but about the content. But I assiduously collect signed first editions by my favorite authors (as well as galleys and other obscure materials), I treat books with probably excess care and reverence and I generally don’t write in them. I feel like I should, like I ought to be free enough to scribble with abandon in the margins but, other than when I’m reviewing and working with advance copies, I can’t quite bring myself to set the pen to the page. Probably the most geekish thing I’ve contemplated is ordering those library-style subject bookplates to affix to my shelves - Philosophy, Reference, etc. The only thing that’s stopped me is time, not shame of my unwholesome book love."

Similar to Mark’s, my geekiness extends to wincing every time I see ink underlinings or markings in the margins of a book…I do however use pencil extensively. Not of course in First Editions which I too collect, but in pretty well every book I read…very light pencil…lightly pressed pencil that is (the example above is not typical; this book contains quite a few markings from others so I obviously felt fewer qualms about pushing a bit more emphatically)……in fact I have great difficulty reading without having a pencil handy…don’t want to come across something of interest and miss making note of it…this way, if ever I want to return to the book I can quite easily get a handle on what originally captured my attention…all about efficiency don’t you know…

I’m of mixed opinion when it comes to other people’s underlining in books I own…there is a level of interest in seeing what appeals to them…but also a desire to come at the text fresh…

As for shelf labelling, I have on rare occasion thought about doing it, but hell, I know where everything is, so it would be for the benefit of others and this isn’t a public library, damn it; I don’t want crowds of people indiscriminately pawing at my proudly positioned collection… knowing my dirty little secrets…where I keep the good stuff…

Critic James Wood Speaks to Eleanor Wachtel/Colin Marshall, and Clarifies

Posted in James Wood on October 3rd, 2008

Another masterful interview conducted by Eleanor Wachtel, characterized by her patented questions about the parent child relationship, this time with James Wood. Many of the issues discussed on this blog are covered. Greys are blackened. Incisive Qs, As and similar clarification  are also found here.

My rough combined summary:

Early, intense desire to write creatively. Writerly interest in explaining fiction from the inside. 

Role of the critic: ‘the correction of taste’ A passionate redescriber for the common reader. One who brings the text alive for readers, many of whom may never encounter the text; who tells the story again. Who says to the reader: I’ve had this amazing experience in this alternate world, and I want to share it with you; so ‘a passionate redescription, making the text live again in new language on a new page. 

Critics want to share things they’re excited about, one way or another. Wood’s 3000-4000 word New Yorker pieces enable him to take a third path, between the journalistic review and the academic treatise, one along which he can provide context, and take things apart; analyze style.

Wood chose grub street instead of academia because of a ‘romantic wish to earn a living by the pen.’ Excitement about being paid by the word.

Free indirect speech: natural narrative that bends around character, away from the author. Quotation marks are removed, as is he said, she said/thought. David Lodge’s example: Cinderella looked at the clock, midnight. Time to go. The author’s words effortlessly drift toward and become Cinderella’s words. Jane Austen leaves formality, uses dashes and short sentences, and puts the reader into the agitation of her heroines’ heads. Almost stream of consciousness. The narrator is nonetheless still in control. Blurring of character and author allows for irony: ‘The big bird was too proud to reply.’ It’s actually a boat shaped like a bird, but the mallard in the story doesn’t understand this.

We get the hang of the unreliable narrator as we continue to read a work. The pattern is particularly evident when we re-read. This is the fun of Wodehouse. Jeeves always cleans up after Bertie who we come to realize is always unreliable.

The unreliable unreliable narrator - the out-and-out liar - is rare, perhaps non-existent. The ‘wilder’ unreliable narrator can be found in Hunger, Notes from the Underground, The Loser, Confessions of Zeno: we are here dealing with a level of insanity. (Eleanor challenges Wood here on Zeno. He responds that all examples are challengeable). Who’s in charge, as Amis once put it, the author or the stylish character?

Evangelical household in his youth: Literature provided a place for him to think about this form of Christianity instead of accepting it on blind faith. The sense that literature could bring alive an issue, where both sides could be argued. This was lacking at home. Fiction served as a way of picturing and dramatizing. Parents didn’t have any great appreciation of the novel. His love of it resulted from rubbing up against them. Wood does think perhaps that the love, passion and zeal he feels for the novel, the capacity for, and strength of these feelings, may be a familial inheritance.

A friend’s mother died. Literature provided him little consolation. It does however provide two things according to Wood: Company. With Tolstoy for example we are in the presence of someone who has seen and lived a lot. And the deliciousness of feeling that the world is being described accurately and precisely. The right words have been found for the right things. This ‘privileged language’ makes Wood a better noticer of life. The novel has tutored me. Life is full of telling detail. Literature is the great engine of selection. Orwell’s brilliant observation of a condemned man avoiding a puddle on his way to the firing squad.

Literature also makes us better citizens. More empathetic. The Death of Ivan Ilych for example is assigned medical students in the States because of how accurately it depicts a sense of dying and being alone. Tolstoy can put you in another’s place. Augments our lived experience. (I’d add that it deepens our capacity to feel. Enables us to get more from our experiences).

Wachtel mentions Harold Bloom. His idea that we read characters to cultivate ourselves, understand others. Freud read Dostoevsky to read his patients.

Character. Henry James doesn’t fill in every aspect of Isabel Archer’s character. He leaves it up to the reader. I can’t do it all. I can only do what I do with words. You have to participate. We know people in life imperfectly too. This is good fiction because it respects the limits of the knowable.

Two things decided Wood against belief: the impossibility of prayer being answered, and the existence of pain and suffering in the world.

Plot versus Character: Wood didn’t want to call his book How Fiction Works. He favoured George Eliot’s line: The Nearest Thing to Life. This said, he doesn’t like being manipulated by heavy plotting. By the neat wrapping up of things. It’s contrived and unrealistic. Tolstoy wrote without use of coincidence or Hardy’s terrible past coming back to haunt the present. He has a fondness for fiction where not much happens. Ian McEwan should loosen his plots, avoid the pull of writing mass market thrillers.

Realism versus the Avant Garde: Much of the antagonism between the two is expressed on the Internet. Those who say anything contra Delillo or Pynchon are immediately labelled reactionary. Each side tends to caracature the other. Wood attempts to expand the idea of the ‘real’ in How Fiction Works by examining the creation of true experience, regardless of how an author might produce it. He also attempts to steal some of the avant garde’s ground. Looks at how life is brought to life by artistry on the page, without necessarily demanding verisimilitude or ‘credibility.’

His own novel: The Book Against God: Accused of demanding nothing less than masterpieces from others, and yet, as the critics said, he fails to produce one himself. Wood felt it lacked a spacial, formal 3D sense. Focused more on sentences, scenes, and vivifying the odd character. It was overly essayistic. ‘The reason first novels exist, is so that second ones are written.’ Many writers fail to get into the mind of their characters. Updike’s Terrorist is cited. The challenge is to pursue your themes subtly, without showing your hand too obviously. It is a mistake to have characters formally present them.

As a critic he’s hardest on writers who don’t write to the best of their abilities. His current interest lies in finding new writing that he can really like. Finding books and authors that will bring him delight.

Just as he has brought delight to many of us.

Camus, Gardens, Sense and Soul

Posted in Authors and Books on October 2nd, 2008

 NB

Robert Pogue Harrison in his charming Gardens, An essay on the Human Condition, quotes from an early essay by Albert Camus:

"For a moment — and Camus’s affirmation of life is all about moments of intensity, rather than the continuum of experience — the fusion between state of mind and garden is so complete that the former upholds and keeps in being the latter:"

"In the sharp sound of wingbeats as the pigeons flew away, the sudden snug silence in the middle of the garden, in the lonely squeaking of the chain on its well, I found a new and yet familiar flavor. I was lucid and smiling before this unique play of appearances. A single gesture, I felt would be enough to shatter this crystal in which the world’s face was shining…Only my silence and immobility lent plausibility to what looked like an illusion"

Pogue Harrison goes on to say that this passage "suggests that in some cases a state of mind is consubstantial with an external element or place, rather than merely correlated with it according to rules of analogy or representation. This is especially true of gardens, which conjugage life and form, or soul and sense, in ways that transcend the formula of objective correlation.’ (Objective correlative is defined by T.S. Eliot, we are told, as ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the forula of that particular emotion’ i.e. the emotion or inward state of mind that the artist seeks to convey).

Bites from Beckett

Posted in Authors and Books on October 2nd, 2008

Louis le Brocquy

These morsels from Norbert Blei’s blog:

–Readers would seek him out in Paris, ring his doorbell, and when he appeared, snap his picture and run. (He hated being photographed.) Once, spotted in a favorite Parisian café, a photographer continued shooting photos of him. Beckett approached him, inquired how much he expected to be paid for those photographs… doubled the amount and walked away with the film.

–Marcel Duchamp (surrealist, lover of chess) was a friend and inspired Beckett’s "Endgame."

…The Paris pimp who stabbed Beckett in the street in l938 was named Prudent. Beckett was rescued by a woman, Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil, a pianist, which led to a life-long relationship. (He married her in 1961. A mother figure?) She dies in July, Beckett in December of 1989.They are buried in the same grave in Montparnasse, Paris, covered by a large slab of polished black granite.

…He smoked too much, drank too much, suffered from insomnia, experienced at least one nervous breakdown (became fascinated with psychoanalysis), never learned to drive, hated his possessive, puritanical mother, and flew a kite the day his father died.

"My characters have nothing. I’m working with impotence, ignorance…that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable-something by definition incompatible with art."

Clowns, misfits, derelicts, failures-Beckett’s people. "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."

I went to Happy Days about a week ago. Plan to interview the lead actress shortly. Please stay tuned. 

Movie Review: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008)

Posted in On Film on October 2nd, 2008

For whatever reason, I thought Polanski directed this work himself. He might as well have. 

The verdict? A potent, persuasive bottle. Nicely aged, with an exceptionally smooth finish. A very good show with one drawback: a bitter after-taste. 

The film documents Roman Polanski’s life. From childhood and parents killed in concentration camps, to early directorial success in Europe and London, the swinging 60s, lots of chicks, marriage to Sharon Tate, her awful slaughter at the hands of the Manson cult, Polanski’s pain, his frenzied high living in response, sex with a 13 year old, a media circus trial overseen by a purportedly star struck, media hound, more concerned with his reputation than the letter of the law, fleeing the country for asylum in France, and eventual vindication in the form of state honours, and an academy award. All this sandwiched between drinks with critic Clive James.

The film is ‘compelling’. A real page turner. Lots of cool photo angles and clever use of period music. Evidence of Polanski’s maltreatment at the hands of the ’system’ is typed throughout the film on the screen, The most affecting scenes have Polanski shattered by the murder of his truly beautiful young, pregnant wife. Excuse enough, one thinks, for his subsequent behavior: the seduction of and sex and sodomy with a willing, evidently experienced, drugged young gold digger, served up by her mother to the mindless one. What on earth was she thinking…other than stardom for her darling daughter.

Everyone in the case, save the judge who I think is hard done by in quite a smear job, appears on camera, including the now grown up, paid off 13 year old. A powerful, impressive piece of propaganda this film. If he weren’t now dead, it would be interesting to see another version, one from the judge’s perspective. Polanski served only 42 of a 90 day term in a detention-type centre where he received psychological assessment. A difficult decision: an artist who admits breaking the law, despite being enticed to it. A narcissistic judge concerned more with appearance than justice. A glamorous victim who cheats the system.

Definitely worth watching, despite a lingering sense that this is about payback. A very stylish, fuck you.

The Complexity of Gratitude: Audio Interview with Margaret Visser on The Gift of Thanks

Posted in AUDIO: Authors on October 1st, 2008


Margaret Visser
(born May 11, 1940) is a writer/broadcaster who lives in Toronto, Barcelona, and the South of France. Her subject matter is the history, anthropology, and mythology of everyday life.

Born in South Africa, she attended school in Zambia, Zimbabwe, France (the Sorbonne) and Canada. She taught Greek and Latin at York University for 18 years.

Her books include Much Depends on Dinner, The Rituals of Dinner, The Way We Are, and The Geometry of Love; all have been best sellers. Many have won awards. Her most recent work is called The Gift of Thanks, published by HarperCollins. It asks: What do we really mean by Thank you? What are the implications of gratitude, and why are we so enraged when we meet its opposite?

In this Biblio File conversation Visser tells us, among other things, that gratitude involves thinking, that gift giving takes the place of war, that apparently simple actions and behavior are in fact surprisingly complex, and that gratitude and gift giving are natural because humans beings are innate imitators. Oh yes. And we also talk about freedom and sexual gratification!

Please Listen here:

 
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Suicide as Pension Plan: The Poor State of the Antiquarian Book Trade

Posted in On Collecting on October 1st, 2008

 

Ran into, but didn’t injure, Steven Temple at the Montreal Antiquarian Book Fair this past weekend. Among other  - always interesting - things, he informed me that he’d been asked at the last minute to sponsor the Rooke-Metcalf Award – and had agreed. I chided him for not insisting it be called the Steven Temple Rooke-Metcalf Award. Still. People should know what Steven is doing in his patently low key manner to support new literary talent in this country. 

On a less sanguine note, we spoke about the demise of the antiquarian book trade. He firmly believes that the next generation,, of readers will — because of multiple multi media distractions — show even less interest in collecting books than ours has, which, judging from the poor performance that prices for collectible books, especially Canadian ones, have shown during the past several decades, isn’t saying much.

 A case in point. I picked up a copy of Auden’s The Dance of Death for $15.00 on Sunday.

 

A second edition printed in September 1935.

 

 

The First was printed, a run of 1200, in 1933. In VG/VG condition it goes for about $200. Given its scarcity, and Auden’s canonical status, this is really hard to believe. If indicative of the business, I can only sympathize with Steven, and express gratitude that he has chosen to keep his doors open for as long as he has.

We joked, in black, about suicide as a pension plan.

Nothing Childish about pushing One’s Creative Curve

Posted in Authors and Books on September 30th, 2008

 

Following on Steve Mitchelmore’s negation of Ursula Le Guin’s contention that the Modernists declared fantastic narrative to be intrinsically childish, I was unable, with Steve, to find anything supporting Le Guin’s claim. What I did find however was this quote from Ezra Pound’s Literary Essays, on Henry James’ ‘Fantasias’: 

"All artists who discover anything make such detours and must, in the course of things (as in the cobwebs), push certain experiments beyond the right curve of their art. This is not so much the doom as the fuction of all ‘revolutionary’ or experimental art, and I think masterwork is usually the result of the return from such excess. One does not know, simply doesn not know, the true curve until one has pushed one’s method beyond it. Until then it is merely a frontier, not a chosen route. It is an open question, and there is no dogmatic answer, whether an artist shoudl write and rewrite the same story (a la Flaubert) or whether he should take a new canvas."

I suspect Dan Green would approve. 

James submitted some of his fantasias to The Yellow Book.

Dale Peck on Infinte Jest

Posted in Dale Peck on September 26th, 2008
"What makes the book’s success even more noteworthy [than it's size, popularity, critical success, etc.] is that it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and — perhaps especially — uncontrolled. I would, in fact, go so far as to say that Infinite Jest is one of the very few novels for which the phrase "not worth the paper it’s printed on" has real meaning in at least an ecological sense; but to resort to such hyperbole would be to fall into the rut that characterizes many reviews of this novel. It seemed to me as I read through Infinite Jest’s press jacket that most of these reviewers didn’t merely want to like the novel, they wanted to write like it. I think, if I’m not mistaken, that the psychological term for this condition is mass hysteria.

As the preceding paragraph should make clear, I found Infinite Jest immensely unsatisfactory, which is a polite way of saying that I hated it."

 

Yes, but tell us what you really think Dale.

The Incommunicable Glory

Posted in On Poetry on September 26th, 2008


Paradiso: Canto I

The glory of Him who moveth everything
Doth penetrate the universe, and shine
In one part more and in another less.

Within that heaven which most his light receives
Was I, and things beheld which to repeat
Nor knows, nor can, who from above descends;

Because in drawing near to its desire
Our intellect ingulphs itself so far,
That after it the memory cannot go.

Character: Likeability versus profoundly Important Actions

Posted in Literary Criticism on September 25th, 2008

Juliet Annan at The Penguin Blog quotes James Wood on foolish Amazon "reader reviews:" "with their complaints about "dislikeable characters", confirms a contagion of moralising niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader "couldn’t find any characters to identify with", or "didn’t think that any of the characters ‘grow’".

She then posits that "For fictional characters to work on the page, for them to grip you with their antics, they’ve got to fascinate. That’s far more likely to happen with flawed or even dislikeable characters."

I’d say flawed yes, but perhaps more accurately, complex characters are the ones who best hold reader interest. Those who must grapple with difficult issues, live through traumatic situations, solve dilemmas, act, and deal with consequences…

…and to some extent, I think we readers must, contrary to what Wood says, be able to identify with these characters in order to empathize and connect, and care about what happens to them…this explains why some great works may fall flat on first reading, but sing the second time round, years later, after a requisite amount of life experience has taken its flesh.

Staying with Wood’s Guardian article, one finds this on vital literary characters:

"…it often seems that James’s characters are not especially convincing as independently vivid authorial creations. But what makes them vivid is the force of James’s interest in them, his manner of pressing into their clay with his examining fingers: they are sites of human energy; they vibrate with James’s anxious concern for them.The vitality of literary character has then, perhaps, less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence and even plain plausibility - let alone likeability - than with a larger, philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character’s actions are profoundly important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters."

…which approaches I think, Matthew Arnold, following Aristotle, who names seriousness a tenet of greatness, where the import of the work is clear, the depth of the author’s commitment to ‘truth,’ to an honest rendering of an important message, is written into every character.

Book Review of: The Idler’s Glossary

Posted in Beale Book Reviews, etc. on September 24th, 2008

 

It takes little labour to love this book.

Mark Kingwell’s  substantial, splendidly informative introductory essay tells us much about the multifarious benefits that accrue to those who idle; it alone makes The Idler’s Glossary worth reading. 

No respite, we are told, can be had from boredom merely by exciting new desires to replace absent ones. The solution, quite simply, lies in idling, which, contrary to what you may think, has little to do with the avoidance of work — for the idler isn’t lazy — and lots to do with the construction of a value system entirely independent of work. For The Idler is no slave to the clock. In truth, he holds lucre in complete contempt.

It is in following the solitary path of inward contemplation that this enlightened loner, we are told, cultivates the most divine part of human life, and in so doing, comes closest to the gods. Do or do not. There is no ‘try’ with this effete elite. The strength of the water that finds its way past any obstacle is his most profound truth. 

And in informing us of this and other profundities, The Idler’s Glossary stays true to its roots; for there is, Kingwell tells us  "no more idle text than this with its refusal to offer complete sentences, its principled Flaneur’s resistance to linear or extended thought, its marvelous Borgesian textual circuity — where terms seem forever bending back upon other terms resisting mastery and completion."

Though you may not master the Idler’s art in one reading, completing this book requires little effort. Along the way you’ll find plenty to delight in and ponder over, plus, possibly, if you don’t work too hard at it, a profound truth or two. 

Here are several favourites from Joshua Glenn’s Glossary:

IDLING: is not the opposite of working hard, but is instead a rare, hard-won mode in which your art is your work, and your work is your art.

QUATORZIEME: A professional 14th guest, who can be hired on short notice by a superstitious hostess who discovers that her dinner party numbers 13.

TRUANT: R.L. Stevenson writes that "while others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men."

USELESS: Lin Yutang’s maxim that "a perfectly useless afternoon spent in a perfectly useless manner" is what makes life worth living.