Cole unfiltered

Emma Brockes interviews Teju Cole for the Guardian:

Art history is a passion, but some way into the course, he started to find academic writing frustrating."While doing the dissertation, I wrote two books – so both of these books are acts of procrastination. They also became acts of understanding a form of address that satisfied me, or that I found more fulfilling. I guess you're never satisfied, really. But as a writer, as a creative person, the very stringent, offensively foot-noted writing that was required to be an academic art historian lost its shine for me."

JP

At the FT, Teju Cole travels to Ramallah (a place I am increasingly keen to spend some time in myself - must explore possibilities along these lines):

How does one write about this place? Every sentence is open to dispute. Every place name objected to by someone. Every barely stated fact seems familiar already, at once tiresome and necessary. Whatever is written is examined not only for what it includes but for what it leaves out: have we acknowledged the horror of the Holocaust? The perfidy of the Palestinian Authority? The callousness of Hamas? Under these conditions, the dispossessed – I will leave aside all caveats and plainly state that the Palestinians are the dispossessed – have to spend their entire lives negotiating what should not be matters for negotiation at all: freedom of movement, the right to self-determination, equal protection under the law.

Stern distinctions (AMNESIA/INSOMNIA)

Aleksandr Hemon interviews Teju Cole at BOMB:

TC Nigeria is an ideal for me in two ways. One, it’s a space of possibility, an opportunity for its people to move beyond the pressures of tribe or ethnic group. This opportunity is often squandered. Two, it’s a soccer team, one that could be one of the world’s best—there’s certainly enough talent to be, at least, on Uruguay’s level. This opportunity, too, is often squandered. So, Nigeria haunts me in terms of being a space of unfinished histories. But my identity maps onto other things: being a Lagosian (which is like a city-state), being a West African, being African, being a part of the Black Atlantic. I identify strongly with the historical network that connects New York, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and Lagos. But, as a subject, Nigeria won’t let go of me.

Like you, I am now in a country where people (convinced of their innocence) sleep well; and like you, I’m still one of history’s amnesiacs.

AH Amnesiacs?

TC I meant to write “insomniacs”! But the error is illuminating.

Also: "yes, I believe in life online, the way a person in 1910 might believe in aviation, or a person in 1455 might believe in movable type: with excitement and apprehension."

Fractions

It has been an extremely busy week, and I haven't yet started my end-of-semester grading, though I think it shouldn't take too long. It will be the middle of next week at the earliest, I would guess, before I can do any of my own work.

Have had some pleasurable distractions in spite of pressures of work. On Monday night, saw my friend Elliot Thomson's little gem of a comedy (he and actor Peter Hirsch call it his "Faberge egg roll"), Le Refuge.

Last night I met up with G. for the highly enjoyable Le Jazz Hot. The documentary joining-together bits are a little amateurish, though the footage is interesting, but the musicians are superb: I would definitely go and see them again. (The Anderson brothers are twins, and I was strongly reminded of my own twin brothers by the way each referred to the other as "my brother"!) Extremely delicious dinner afterwards at Bottega del Vino; I had beef carpaccio and spinach gnocchi before confirming my previous impression that this restaurant serves the best tiramisu in New York.

Closing tabs:

Colin Wilson is dead. Ritual in the Dark is more an artifact of its time than a great novel, I think, but it's a fascinating phenomenon, that mid-century period of British occultism. You get a bit of it in Jonathan Coe's B. S. Johnson biography - I don't think there's a Wilson biography, but there should be.

Teju Cole on truth and reconciliation in South Africa and elsewhere.

Light reading around the edges: several more Eva Ibbotson comfort re-reads; Charlie Williams' excellently titled Love Will Tear Us Apart; Michael Connelly's The Gods of Guilt (the plot is too intricate and the characters too shallow, but fairly readable regardless); Paul Cornell's London Falling, which is so exactly the sort of book that I like to read that I fell into a psychological slump when I came to the end and realized the next installment hasn't yet been published; and Laini Taylor's really delightful novella Night of Cake and Puppets (more books should have the word "cake" in their titles). I am contemplating a resolution for 2014 to read more nonfiction - one does occasionally, especially when reading something like the Connelly, get the feeling that the brain will rot on a diet of so much pap - but I would have to reserve the right to consume a good deal of light reading regardless, perhaps just not the fodder-level books.

Closing tabs

Very tired! Mondays are demanding; it is my preference to schedule it that way, but it leaves me somewhat flattened at the start of the week....

Saw a couple of plays at the end of last week, both quite enjoyable: Job, at the Flea (actually the Book of Job was one of two things I taught in Lit Hum that made me want to write some kind of adaptation, the other of course being The Bacchae - Richardson's Clarissa is a take on Job...); An Enemy of the People, in a new adaptation. 

Went to Philadelphia on Saturday to eat cake in honor of my niece's third birthday. 

Read and taught Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden and Madame Bovary.

Did a lot of exercise here and there (great running weather!) and read a few novels on the side: one more Peter James novel (it was very affordable and there are a lot of them, but I do not think I will read any more, they have a curious air of unreality despite being seemingly well researched); an excellent crime novel called The Eyes of Lira Kazan; the first half of Victor Lavalle's The Devil in Silver, which begins with a sequence that makes me wonder whether it is possible that Lavalle is as obsessed with Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels as I am (I will finish it later in the week when I'm less tired, but it's strangely flat in the writing, and it's not gripping me hard like his last novel did).  Now immersed in Arnaldur Indridason's Outrage, which I will finish reading later this evening once I detach from the computer.

During a quiet office hours this afternoon, I read a couple fascinating chapters in Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree (I was tipped off that Nico features in the chapter on prodigies, and couldn't resist obtaining to read at my earliest convenience); interesting stuff, from a writer I much admire.  Another book I'm looking forward to rereading in its final version is my friend Marco Roth's The Scientists, which I couldn't put down when I saw it in manuscript.

Other links of interest:

Jessamyn West on how not to write about libraries.

Teju Cole on the trouble with Instagram  (includes immortal line "your pug wasn't born in 1979"!).

Charlie Jane Anders on the possibility that science fiction might bring back the epistolary novel.

Levi Stahl on what is possibly my most-favorite novel of all time.

Retinal

Teju Cole's blind spot.

Closing tabs

Feeling a sense of moderate but pronounced well-being I haven't had since probably early November or so.  End of the school year in sight! 

A few links:

Why Kevin Hartnett started writing by hand.

Amanda Hesser's advice to aspiring food writers.  This piece is a must-read for anyone hoping to make a living as a professional journalist: the financial underpinnings of that sort of work have changed radically in the last fifteen years, and almost everything she says here is equally apt for other kinds of journalism as well, including arts journalism.

More on Teju Cole's small fates.

New Haven trip tomorrow.

Shelves, plucking

Supriya Nair interviews Teju Cole:

I privately think to myself of Open City as a response to 8 1/2, which is weird. But it is episodic, it is concerned with structures of consciousness and I think it is immaculately curated. That is what I was going for: the curation of incident that to a careless observer seems like randomness.

On a more personal note, I am alarmed by the revelation that Butler Library won't be open again till Wednesday.  That's just wrong!

Shifting, shifty

At the Guardian, Teju Cole's top ten novels of loneliness. I am excited about this list as it gives me several good new things to read (persuasive to me via the fact that the thoughts on Sebald, Naipaul and Davis are so much what I would choose to note myself, though I dissent from the verdict on Ishiguro's Remains of the Day - I spin out from The Unconsoled as a hub and view Remains and Never Let Me Go as useful clarification of the master project). Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival is surely one of the great underrated books of modern literature, well worth a look for those who have not read it.

(More common style - not criticizing! - on these Guardian lists is to use up several spots, uselessly, on things like Robinson Crusoe - this is more practical.)

Lagos faits divers

Teju Cole's small fates. (Via Sarang.)

The whole context of a person

One further postscript: I am slightly relieved that I do not need to muster my attention to write a proper bit about Teju Cole's fantastically good novel Open City - at the New Yorker, James Wood wrote pretty much exactly what I would have said if I weren't so lazy!

I especially loved the "intensely Sebaldian" aspect of the book, and of course also the narrator's "well-stocked mind" (to borrow a few choice Woodean phrases); I defy you to read the review and not feel that this is a novel that must be read, but that will also be uniquely pleasurable to read! Another of Wood's sentences partly explains why I read this book in a sort of fanatical state of breathless attention, feeling that it had been written peculiarly and particularly for me out of all possible readers: "This is one of the very few scenes I have encountered in contemporary fiction in which critical and literary theory is not satirized, or flourished to exhibit the author’s credentials, but is simply and naturally part of the whole context of a person."

Light reading on the road

The Kindle is a godsend for travel; I cannot imagine what peculiar, unsatisfactory and yet physically backbreaking a selection I would otherwise have been lugging around during the past week and a half. I read a few books that were truly exceptional; I had a frantic downloading session the night before I left, when it suddenly occurred to me that ten days requires a pretty large number of words if I didn't want to have to fall back on hotel pickings, so I had a lot of good stuff to choose from.

The two really spectacular books were Teju Cole's Open City, which I loved so much that I really must write a separate post about it; and Neal Stephenson's Anathem, which I also just loved. I bought a copy of that in hardcover some time after its initial release - an ill-timed purchase, given that the paperback was about to come out, and that it is really too physically cumbersome a book to want to read in the heavier format. Also the opening 15% or so (I am a Kindle reader, the percentages are unavoidable!) is pretty awfully static; it's not unreadable, but it is the sort of thing that a less well-known writer would almost certainly have been made to cut, and I feel sure that there would have been some way to plunge much more quickly into the 'real' action of the book. But truly it is a wonderful novel; I even ended up talking about it in class yesterday (we were reading Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and I was pondering questions about the relationship between dialogue in fiction and the philosophical dialogue - is the coincidence of the name just that, i.e. fundamentally a bit misleading, or do the two genres have something more seriously intimate to do with each other?).

I actually had some very good other books too, only they are slightly diminished by the dauntingly awesome nature of these two. I loved Lauren Beukes's books Zoo City (GENIUS! especially the pastiche material, and its witty and depressing reimagining of Pullman's daemons) and Moxyland. Deborah Harkness's A Discovery of Witches is the perfect light reading; among other things, it is so very refreshing to read a book with a female scholarly protagonist who so completely and utterly rings true to my own experience of the scholarly life. Taylor Stevens' The Informationist is also fantastically perfect reading material - how can this woman just have burst out of nowhere? Really I feel she must have been writing thrillers already under another name, this one is so very perfectly crafted and so very much to my taste; but whatever the deal, it has my strongest recommendation, I found it just fantastically gripping.

Other miscellaneous novels, good in their way but not as well suited to my reading preferences: Jennifer Crusie, Faking It; Ekaterina Sedia, The House of Discarded Dreams (I think well of Sedia's books, but they are not exactly what I like - I'm not truly a Jonathan Carroll fan either, though I have read most of his books and enjoyed a few of them very much indeed - I did really enjoy what she does here with the horseshoe crabs); Robin Hobb, Dragon Keeper (led astray in this case by my panicky search for long books), Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants (this one made me think strongly of my grandmother, who would have loved it).

Hmmm - I had better get a move on with my real day, only inertia has overcome me!