Musings on the Book, Literature, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Collecting, Media, Life and the Arts, and Audio Interviews from The Biblio File radio program pertaining to same by a writer, broadcaster, bibliophile.
Don’t miss these two interesting posts by Dan Green on Susan Sontag’s essay ‘On Style’ (in Against Interpretation): the struggle between content and style, moral and aesthetic readings, and the relative importance of will versus words. Here’s how it ends:
"Sontag seems correct to me when she concludes the essay by reminding us that "In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable," that "Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable."
In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . ., of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.
I would only add that the "silences" cultivated by great art are "present" because the work makes room for them in a concrete way. They are incorporated into the work as "ineffable" but real. (The New Critics might have called this ineffable quality "ambiguity," something half-said but not fully said.) The specific way in which, through its style, the work of art invokes a fruitful silence is always still worth attention."
Which recalls Beckett in Endgame: " Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of."
Terry Griggs is the author of a collection of short stories, Quickening, which was nominated for a Governor General’s Award, and two novels, The Lusty Man, and Rogues’ Wedding, shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Award. She has also written two books for children, Cat’s Eye Corner, shortlisted for a Mr. Christie’s Book Award and a Red Cedar Award, and most recently a sequel, The Silver Door. In 2003 she received the Marian Engel Award. Born on Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, she currently lives in Stratford, Ontario.
We met recently in Ottawa to talk about her latest ‘farce noir’ comic mystery novel, Thought you were Dead, and, as a result about: cartoons, dead flies, Nabokov, Pnin’s zany, self-mocking speech and ways, fending off intimacy, how comedy sharpens your judgment, wordplay, names and book titles, the male-female divide, ambiguity, contained chapters, Philip Larkin, naked women on book covers, and The Monkeys’ Michael Nesmith’s mother who invented liquid paper.
Poetry of Departures Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph: He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.
And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said
He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I’d go today,
Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.
"Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?" George Eliot
The Government of Canada is hosting a nationwide consultation on copyright modernization. Tony Clement, Minister of Industry, and James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, are encouraging Canadians to join the discussion and express their views on copyright. Consultations – nicely buried in the lazy crazy hazy days of Summer – run until 13 September 2009. Interested parties may participate via an online discussion forum and/or a submission centre.
Ha Jin was born in China in 1956. After Tiananmen Square, he emigrated to the United States. Unlike most exiled writers Ha Jin was not established in his native language; he had no audience in Chinese, and so chose to write in English.
He has published three collections of poetry, including Between Silences and Facing Shadows, and three collections of short fiction, Ocean of Words, received the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Under the Red Flag, won the Flannery O’Connor Award. His novel Waiting won the National Book Award for fiction as well as the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. In 2004, he published War Trash, which also won the PEN/Faulkner Award.He lives in the Boston area and is a professor of English at Boston University.
We met recently in Ottawa to talk about his first book of non-fiction The Writer as Migrant (University of Chicago Press). Adapted from The Rice University Campbell Lecture he delivered in 2006, the book consists of three interconnected essays exploring the experience of migrant, ‘exiled’ writers in relation to their ‘home’ countries and languages. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lin Yutang, Homer, Joseph Conrad , Vladimir Nabokov and others all contribute to the conversation. Please listen here:
Write in long-hand: when you scratch out a word, it still exists there on the page. On the computer, when you delete a word it disappears forever. This is important because usually your first instinct is the right one.
Minimum number of words to write every day: no "quota": Sometimes it will be no words. Sometimes it will be 1500.
Use any anxiety you have about your writing — or your life — as fuel: "Ambition and anxiety: that’s the writer’s life
Never say ‘sci-fi.’ You’ll enrage purists. Call it SF.
Don’t dumb down: always write for your top five percent of readers.
Never pun your title, simpler is usually better: “Lolita turns out to be a great title; couldn’t be simpler.
At Manchester (University, where he teaches creative writing) my rule is I don’t look at their work. We read great books, and we talk about them … We look at Conrad, Dostoyevsky.
When is an idea is worth pursuing in novel-form? “It’s got to give you a kind of glimmer,
Watch out for words that repeat too often.
Don’t start a paragraph with the same word as previous one. That goes doubly for sentences.
Stay in the tense.
Inspect your ‘hads’ and see if you really need them.
Never use ‘amongst.’ ‘Among.’ Never use ‘whilst.’ Anyone who uses ‘whilst’ is subliterate.
Try not to write sentences that absolutely anyone could write.
You write the book you want to read. That’s my rule.
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) The Pencil of Nature
Plate VIII, A Scene in a Library
Salted-paper print from a paper negative
London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1844
Museum no. L.149-1939
"The Pencil of Nature was one of the very first photographically illustrated books. To make ‘A Scene in a Library’, he arranged the books outdoors, where the light was stronger than it would have been in his actual library."
"During a recess of Parliament in October 1833, he had his famous intellectual breakthrough. In the company of his sisters and his new wife on the shores of Italy’s Lake Como, he found himself in the frustrating position of being the only one in the group unable to sketch the scenery. The camera lucida (a drawing instrument unrelated to photography) was of no assistance. As he explained in the introduction to the Pencil of Nature in 1844: "when the eye was removed from the prism – in which all had looked beautiful – I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold." A decade before, also in Italy, Talbot had tried to sketch using the common artist’s tool, the camera obscura, but with no better success. This led him to "reflect on the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature’s painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focus – fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away… the idea occurred to me… how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper." And thus was the concept of photography born."
Talbot could not conduct his experiments while travelling and was immediately plunged back into Parliamentary duties upon returning to England. At Lacock Abbey, sometime later – in spring of 1834 – he began to convert his dream into reality. By coating ordinary writing paper with alternate washes of table salt and silver nitrate, Talbot embedded a light-sensitive silver chloride in the fibres of the paper. Placed in the sun under an opaque object such as a leaf, the paper would darken where not defended from light, producing a photographic silhouette. Talbot called the resulting negatives (a term devised later, by Sir John Herschel) sciagraphs – drawings of shadows"
"I wanted to thank you for your many generous and intelligent words about my new book How Fiction Works (and other stuff)...I get great pleasure from reading your blog."
Critic, James Wood, The New Yorker.
"You can find very bad writing and sloppy impressionism in literary blogs, but also incisive, fresh, thoughtful criticism from voices unencumbered by the politics of Grub St". I would put your blog in the latter category, which is why I’m responding here…Congratulations on a very fine blog."
Scholar, Dr. Ronan McDonald.
"You ask the most brilliant, thoughtful questions, it's really a pleasure to do an interview where someone actually wants to talk about writing and literature in general."
Novelist Margot Livesey.
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Novelist Jane Urquhart.
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