NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Hurry, Hurry: To celebrate The Walrus’s annual summer reading issue—featuring stories by Lee Henderson, Rivka Galchen (listen to our conversation here), Stephen Marche & 2008 Giller Prize winner Joseph Boyden (ditto here) — the mag is pleased to announce The Walrus Guilty Pleasures Writing Contest!

To enter, write the first paragraph of a novel in one of the following genres: Science Fiction, Romance, Western, Ghost Story/Gothic.

"Make it the most gripping, titilating, and action-packed read of the summer!" Send submissions to guiltypleasures@walrusmagazine.com by July 31, and you could win a prize package from Fairmont Hotels & Resorts or a Walrus prize package, and have your work published at walrusmagazine.com!

Steve Mitchelmore delivers a post worthy of Beckett, about epiphany, and impossibility, during recovery from a serious bicycling accident. From which:

"Akhenaten had ordered that the capital city be moved from Thebes into the desert 200 miles away. The documentary featured new archeological discoveries that revealed the disastrous consequences for his subjects. What stirred me was not these human facts but the glorious and terrifying absurdity of Akhenaten’s project. It demonstrates the same impressive or horrendous folly as those in fictional works: William Golding’s The Spire for example, and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and, more familiar to me, those of the many characters created by Bernhard: Roithamer who builds a cone-shaped house in the middle of a forest, Reger who studies every masterpiece in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna until he finds a flaw, even Bernhard himself aged eight deciding to cycle to his aunt’s house in Salzburg, twenty-two miles away. A creative writer may respond by sketching a novel idea based on the crazy plans of an individual – perhaps Naguib Mahfouz’s Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth is it as far as the pharaoh is concerned – but, in my sedated condition, I imagined a writing project that would itself be the absurdity, something itself animated by impossibility."

Read and relish the rest here.

Check out this fun site for more corrections to common errors in English. More? Go here. And/or here.

Diary entry for April 28, 1935:

"All desire to practice the art of a writer has completely left me. I cannot imagine what it would be like: that is, more accurately, I cannot curve my mind to the line of a book: no, nor of an article. Its not the writing but the architecting that strains. If I write this paragraph, then there is the next & then the next. But after a months holiday I shall be as tough & springy as – say heather root; & the arches and the domes will spring into the air as firm as steel & light as cloud – but all these words miss the mark. ‘

from The Faber Book of Diaries, edited by Simon Bret. (1987)

As Mr. Wikipedia, in quite a extensive summary, tells us:

The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. However, unifying features often coincide with Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of the "meta-narrative" and "little narrative," Jacques Derrida’s concept of "play," and Jean Baudrillard’s "simulacra." For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this quest. This distrust of totalizing mechanisms extends even to the author; thus postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine the author’s "univocal" control (the control of only one voice). The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature. A list of postmodern authors often varies; the following are some names of authors often so classified, most of them belonging to the generation born in the interwar period: William Burroughs (1914-1997), Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), John Barth (b. 1930), Donald Barthelme (1931-1989), E. L. Doctorow (b. 1931), Robert Coover (1932), Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991) Don DeLillo (b. 1936), Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937), Ishmael Reed (1938), Kathy Acker (1947-1997), Paul Auster (b. 1947)^[1], Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952).

This from The Elegant Variation’s Interview with Joseph O’Neill:

TEV: …It’s interesting that you have brought up Zadie Smith because I was going to ask about her next. I think that a lot of people draw the wrong kind of conclusions with a piece like the one that she wrote. I think that it sets up some false oppositions. I feel like this form of the novel is capacious enough to accommodate all different styles

Joseph O’Neill: Yes.

TEV: And the notion that one has to chose between Netherland or Remainder just seems silly. I liked Remainder a great deal, as well. I don’t feel that they’re mutually exclusive, that one must declare an allegiance.

Joseph O’Neill: I’d actually read and liked Remainder before that piece. And I thought it was a perfectly good piece of writing. I’m not sure I would describe it as unconventional, not least because that description, as I’ve said, would not mean very much.

TEV: Yes. But I think that some of the sentiments that she expresses hold sway among this younger generation of writers, whether it’s people coming out of the McSweeney’s School or the purveyors of the uber-ironic, the tendency toward a hip nihilism or something like that that. That they mistrust, in essence, the idea of a beautiful sentence. Some people find that corny, the notion of a beautiful sentence.

Joseph O’Neill: Well, it depends on how you define them as beautiful. I mean, you know, Foster Wallace wrote many beautiful sentences. I mean, there’s nothing but beautiful sentences in his work. Even though he had a particular way of doing it. What makes a sentence beautiful, for me, is its conscientiousness. A hip, ironic sensibility is not necessarily conscientious. Neither is a sensibility that latches on to dusks and dawns and roses."

Which of course begs the question: what is a sentence’s conscientiousness? Its painstakingly, careful, thoroughly organized structure? I suppose if what O’Neill means is that time and thought have been put into its construction, I might agree with him, but really, what makes a sentence beautiful is the creative instinct, flare, fire, good fortune that visits itself upon the author, empowering him or her to put words together in ways that perfectly express what demands expression at that very time and place in the text; in ways that few others can or have; in ways that make readers sigh with delight; shake their heads in awe; grit their teeth with envy. For some this entails a lot of hard work, crafting; trial and error. For others it comes like a gift, a wave, a visitation.

As for DFW…his work may have been conscientious, but beautiful? Perhaps at times, but mostly: boredom undermines beauty.

 It’s open to everyone, globally. "The contest has run every Labour Day Weekend since 1977 and now attracts writers from all over the world. It has been responsible for dozens of published novels, thousands of first drafts, countless good ideas and even a reality TV series. It’s a thrill, a grind, a trial-by-deadline and an awesome creative experience." This year’s contest is set to run from 12:01 Saturday Sept. 5 to 11.59pm, Monday Sept. 7, 2009.

So, go ahead. Sweat a bit. Visit 3daynovel.com for rules and details.