"After great pain. . ."

In a single sitting the other evening I read Christina Crosby's A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain. It is not a perfect book - I liked least the more intellectual or academic discussions of literary texts that are interwoven with the memoir (they are all well-chosen and apt, but I think these pages and the poststructuralist moments will limit the audience of a book that otherwise should be read by huge numbers of people). But it captures the feeling of living in a profoundly damaged body in the aftermath of catastrophic accident better than almost anything else I have ever read.

I was worried about whether I should read this book at all - I am already phobic enough about riding my road bike that I don't need to read about someone's accident! But afterwards I thought - yes, I did need to read this book, for reasons that have nothing to do with cycling, and others should read it too.

Here is the statement of purpose:

Because of my condition, I've been pondering the reality that everybody has/is a body. Your body emerges through the perception of others as different from yourself, at a touchable distance, and selfhood is not self-contained. What you want, who you are, how you feel are all brought into being over time and in relation to others, and those thoughts and feelings are repeatedly inscribed, creating powerful circuits that organize a sense of embodied self. Such is human interdependency that my self-regard depends on your regard for me. I need and want a more fully livable life, which turns importantly, if not exclusively, on this play of recognition. Spinal cord injury has cast me into a surreal neurological wasteland that I traverse day and night. This account is an effort to describe the terrain. I want you to know, and I, myself, want better to understand, a daily venture of living that requires considerable fortitude on my part and a great dependency on others, without whose help my life would be quite literally unlivable.

For a short book, it manages to touch on an amazing range of subjects, all of which speak very strongly to me even in the places where Crosby's experience least resonates with my own (it is one of the sharpest ironies of the story that in her previous life Crosby was supremely embodied, a sensualist with a strong sexual dimension and a feeling of power in an athletic body - I just don't have that relationship with my body, I don't have gender or body dysphoria as such but I deeply believe that I should be existing not in a body at all but just as a pattern of intelligence and information in the cloud!). Siblings, chronic pain, the relationship between humans and dogs, death via melanoma, love and loss, motorcycles and the pleasure of the open road, breasts (one's own and those of others), the dilemma of relying on wonderful caretakers who are themselves victims of structural inequities that create shame in those who take advantage of them, the value of friendship and community, the Anabaptist tradition and how an adult seeks out versions of communities left behind - anyway, it's really gripping from start to finish. Highly recommended.

Greaves and pauldrons

Mark Kingwell on Paul Fussell. It was at age thirteen or fourteen I think that I first read Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. (I also had a treasured copy of Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, loaned to me I suspect by my singularly inspiring teacher Deborah Dempsey!) I had the electrifying sense of reading a book that was something like what I wanted to write myself someday - I had already had that feeling very strongly based on novels by Robert Graves, Anthony Burgess and a few others (Gore Vidal?), but this was a new vision of what might be possible....

The best thing about Mark's Hilobrow shout-out to P. Fussell was that it reminded me of the existence of a book I heard about on its first publication but never read, and which was perhaps more perfectly suited to my current state of mind than anything else imaginable: Sam Fussell's Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder. Happily for me, this book has just been reissued, and I devoured this week (again, curiously, thinking - this is inspirational in terms of a book I might write myself one of these days!).

Here are a few snippets. First, on coming across a copy of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder in the autobiography section of the Strand in September 1984:

As for his body, why, here was protection, and loads of it. What were these great chunks of tanned, taut muscle but modern-day armor? Here were breastplates, greaves, and pauldrons aplenty, and all made from human flesh. He had taken stock of his own situation and used he weight room as his smithy. A human fortress--a perfect defense to keep the enemy host at bay. What fool would dare storm those foundations?
--
Pre-iron, I'd spent my days convicting myself of avarice and envy and sloth. To become something else seemed the only alternative. As long as I covered myself with the equivalent of scaffolding and labeled myself a "work in progress" I could escape the doubt and uncertainty that plagued my past and spend every second of my present concentrating on a pristine future. I hated the flawed, weak, vulnerable nature of being human as much as I hated the Adam's apple which bobbed beneath my chin. The attempt at physical perfection grew from seeds of self-disgust.
--
It had begun to dawn on me that the whole building thing might be merely a parody of labor, and I myself a well-muscled dilettante. What would Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, think of bodybuilding? He had to be turning over in his grave. After all, the iron we lifted didn't help build a bridge or a battleship or a skyscraper. It enlarged our biceps and spread the sweep of our thighs. The labor of farmers and factory workers and longshoremen had a kind of dignity and purpose that ours didn't.

Here's an excellent interview with Fussell about the bodybuilding, the book and the paths his life has taken since.

Bonus link: Lionel Shriver on the body as a trench coat.

Baton Rouge, New York, Miami

At Bookforum, Wayne Koestenbaum considers Hervé Guibert's unbridled eroticism:

A born diarist, Guibert regarded the genre of “novel” with a fatigued, valedictory suspicion: “It is perhaps preferable to circle around the idea of the novel, to dream it, like in Gide’s Marshlands, and to botch it, rather than succeed, since the successful novel is perhaps a very banal form of writing.” He wants writing to be a form of physical adventure—a leap, a plunge, a way to befriend the abyss: “I would like one day to throw myself into a narrative that would be but an event of writing, without a story, and without boredom, a true adventure. . . . The other day I wrote that it was necessary to surrender to pure events of writing (just as the most pure photos are pure events of light).” What is a pure event of writing? Certain French thinkers called it “writing the body,” a phrase that doesn’t get sung a lot these days, though I hope that Guibert’s journal will bring this philosophically inclined subset of body-smeared literature back into prominence. What else is there to write but the body? “Pains in my left eye where it seemed I let a bit of semen penetrate by rubbing my eyes after having jerked off . . .” As in Monique Wittig’s pronoun-slashed The Lesbian Body, every organ within Guibert’s literary body intramurally huddles with its mates; his journal invents a body where “semen” and “left eye” belong to each other, even if their spunky wedlock causes distress.

The gesture life

On the off chance that you are a Rochesterian (in terms of geography rather than primarily of literary preference), please consider coming to hear me talk about the relationship between Restoration theater and the eighteenth-century novel on Thursday, March 3 at 5pm!

(Fatigue and ignorance make me currently unable to figure out how to convert the PDF of the poster into a format I can post here, but you may be able to access a version of it here?)

Story-telling

Aside from the story I am trying to tell in my novel, I also have a story to tell in each of the two classes I'm teaching this semester. I'll post the novel syllabus tomorrow after the first class has met, I think; I still need to put together the course reader for that and drop it off at the xerox shop in the next day or two.

The reader for the drama course is done, though; I dropped it off around 8pm on Friday night after a rather frenzied day of running around town. In addition to these required books (that's about eight plays altogether) and various stuff that we'll read online through the Columbia library system (including DNB entries for Garrick and Colley Cibber and a good chunk of Cibber's landmark autobiography), the reader includes these materials:

Erving Goffman, chapter one (“Performances”), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Doubleday, [1959]), 17-76.

William Wycherley, The Plain Dealer (1677), from The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Aphra Behn, The Second Part of the Rover (1681), from The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, vol. 6: The Plays, 1678-1682 (London: William Pickering, 1996).

William Congreve, Love for Love (1694), from The Complete Plays of William Congreve, ed. Herbert Davis (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1967).

John Dryden, All for Love: or, The World Well Lost (1678), from The Works of John Dryden, vol. 13: Plays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).

Excerpts on acting styles given in David Thomas and Arnold Hare, eds., Restoration and Georgian England, 1660-1778 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 166-173 and 341-358.

[David Garrick], An Essay on Acting (London: W. Bickerton, 1746).

Denis Diderot, “Paradox on Acting,” in Diderot’s Selected Writings, ed. Lester G. Crocker, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 318-329.

Joseph Roach, chapter two (“Nature Still, But Nature Mechanized”), The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (1985; rpt. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1993), 58-92.

Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body,” in Techniques, Technology and Civilisation, ed. Nathan Schlanger (New York and Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. 77-95.

Peter Holland, “Hearing the Dead: The Sound of David Garrick,” in Players, Playwrights, Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660-1800, ed Michael Cordner and Peter (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 248-270.

David Garrick, The Country Girl (1766), from The Plays of David Garrick, Vol. 7: Garrick’s Own Plays, 1757-1773, ed. Harry William Pedicord (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982).

David Garrick, The Jubilee (1769), from The Plays of David Garrick, Vol. 2: Garrick's Own Plays, 1767 – 1775, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).

"Now I know how Joan of Arc felt"

I read the first third or so of Patti Smith's Just Kids with increasing hardness of heart. I had thoughtlessly imagined I would love the book, but in fact I am not its ideal reader - I have never idealized Baudelaire and Rimbaud, I find Art irksome (as opposed to the hard yet playful discipline of craft or making things). Patti Smith seems to me to reside at the horrible intersection of the trajectories of Jim Morrison and Susan Sontag BOTH OF WHOM I LOATHE!

A good example of the sort of passage in the opening pages that just makes me shake my head and throw up my hands in temperamental disaffinity:

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed.

It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

For a time Robert protected me, then was dependent on me, and then possessive of me. His transformation was the rose of Genet, and he was pierced deeply by his blooming. I too desired to feel more of the world. Yet sometimes that desire was nothing more than a wish to go backward where our mute light spread from hanging lanterns with mirrored panels. We had ventured out like Maeterlinck's children seeking the bluebird and were caught in the twisted briars of our new experiences.

Robert responded as my beloved twin. His dark curls merged with the tangle of my hair as I shuddered tears. He promised we could go back to the way things were, how we used to be, promising me anything if I would only stop crying.

Ugh! It is intolerable!

I stopped feeling so antagonistic around midpoint, though. There are glimpses even in the first third or so of a more appealing insight and self-awareness (the description of her own response to seeing Jim Morrison perform is spectacular - "I felt both kinship and contempt for him. I could feel his self-consciousness as well as his supreme confidence" - and I also love the notion of Robert Mapplethorpe having to purchase the porn magazines he used for his collages while they were still sealed and returning to their room at the Chelsea hotel to "unseal the cellophane with the expectation of Charlie peeling back the foil of a chocolate bar in hopes of finding a golden ticket"). A bit more of a sense of humor develops as Smith narrates the trials and tribulations of her early attempts to perform before a crowd (it is not one of the more humorous books I have ever read, however, and it compares very poorly in this and other respects to Keith Richards' autobiography - the main mention of Keith Richards here, I note in passing, is in the admittedly compelling yet depressing and perhaps inadvertently hilarious scene in which Smith attains social prominence in the Max's Kansas City circle by giving herself Keith Richards' haircut!).

Patti Smith is an artist of the body, that is what it comes down to - she expresses her frustration with writing ("it wasn't physical enough"), it is force of will and personal charisma that lead to her success as a musical performer (and I still think that the cover of Horses is a greater collaborative creation than anything on the album - in the 1920s she would have been an Isadora Duncan, she is that sort of innovator). She says elsewhere of Mapplethorpe "Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph" - this seems to me a fair description. But the love for Mapplethorpe and the way the book works as an elegy, these are very unusual and striking, I will grudgingly admit that I was won over by the end...

Testimonials

From Sterne's Sentimental Journey:

The old officer was reading attentively a small pamphlet, it might be the book of the opera, with a large pair of spectacles. As soon as I sat down, he took his spectacles off, and putting them into a shagreen case, return’d them and the book into his pocket together. I half rose up, and made him a bow.

Translate this into any civilized language in the world--the sense is this:

‘Here’s a poor stranger come in to the box--he seems as if he knew no body; and is never likely, was he to be seven years in Paris, if every man he comes near keeps his spectacles upon his nose—’tis shutting the door of conversation absolutely in his face--and using him worse than a German.’

The French officer might as well have said it all aloud; and if he had, I should in course have put the bow I made him into French too, and told him, ‘I was sensible of his attention, and return’d him a thousand thanks for it.’

There is not a secret so aiding to the progress of sociality, as to get master of this short hand, and be quick in rendering the several turns of looks and limbs, with all their inflections and delineations, into plain words. For my own part, by long habitude, I do it so mechanically, that when I walk the streets of London, I go translating all the way; and have more than once stood behind in the circle, where not three words have been said, and have brought off twenty different dialogues with me, which I could have fairly wrote down and sworn to.

The pro-zoo camp

Death by fox: penguin cover-up at the London Zoo.

I write from the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Buffalo, New York; I am about to go and register for my conference (I am speaking on Saturday afternoon on Sterne and novelistic conventions for the notation of human gesture) and then investigate the purported rooftop swimming pool...

Mind the gap

From Georges Perec, "Reading: A Socio-physiological Sketch," in Thoughts of Sorts, trans. David Bellos:

Hands are now used only for turning pages. The spread of the fully guillotined book has robbed today's reader of two great pleasures - the pleasure of cutting the pages (if I were Laurence Sterne I would now insert an entire chapter in praise of paper-knives, ranging from the humble cardboard cutter given away by booksellers to every purchaser of a book, to bamboo, polished stone, and steel paper-knives, not forgetting the scimitar designs (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco), the matador-sword paper-knife (from Spain), the samurai-style cleaver (Japan) or those ghastly things in imitation-style leather sheaths which together with diverse other objects of the same ilk (scissors, pen-holder, pencil-box, universal calendar, memo pad, leather-clad integral desk-blotter, etc.) constitute what is known as a "desk set"); and the even greater pleasure of beginning to read a book with uncut pages. You will recall (for it wasn't that long ago, really) that books were made of signatures folded in such a way that the cuts needed alternated thus: eight pages needing, first, the upper edges cut and then, in two pairs, the side edges. The first eight pages could be read almost entirely without a paper-knife; of the next eight you could obviously read the first and last, and, by lifting them up, the fourth and fifth. But nothing more. The text came with gaps which held surprises and aroused expectations.

People and books

At the NYRB, Timothy Garton Ash remembers Tony Judt:

Tony had a couple of characteristic gestures. There was a motion of the hand, as if cooling it down after touching a hot saucepan or shaking off water. This denoted that something was silly, toe-curling, inauthentic. And there was a sideways inclination of the head, accompanied by a quick, wry lifting of one end of the mouth and a twinkle in the eye. This had multiple applications, ranging from satire and self-deprecation to an attitude that might inadequately be verbalized as c’est la vie. As motor neuron disease (ALS) relentlessly immobilized him, he could no longer make these characteristic gestures; but somehow he still managed to convey them with his eyes.

Monday round-up

Ghosts of the Leningrad siege (via my father).

Bits and pieces of light reading: Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim, a recommendation from Brent that I enjoyed quite a bit (I've read other books rather like it - it is along Dresden Files lines - also we are in the thick of an angel-demon zeitgeist, and I was struck by similarities to the TV series Supernatural - but it is really appealingly well-written, with a fresh and lively and distinctive first-person voice); and Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, which seems to me flawed in various respects but so energetic and interesting and engaging that I was willing to forgive various implausibilities and awkward handlings of narrative point of view.

I got a good haul of books on Saturday at the Hobbies & Books store in Grand Harbour, which is unfortunately closing - but all books were discounted 30%, with an additional free fourth book for every three purchased. A few of the ones I walked away with are true local curiosities, which I will perhaps post about anon...

I'm looking at a funny situation vis-a-vis work. I'm very tempted to plunge straight into drafting the new novel, but have decided it is impractical and that it will be better for me to leave it on the boil for a little while and come back to it later in the fall. I'll be in Ottawa for ten days or so in September, and then I'll be in New York for about four weeks in October, with side trips to Maine (for a friend's wedding) and Buffalo (for a conference).

The talk for NEASECS will be a preview of the ABCs of the novel project in the form of an argument about Laurence Sterne and novelistic conventions for the transcription of human movement and expression, and I'm also giving a talk earlier that month at the Fordham 18th-century seminar on Richardson's Clarissa; so that's two high-quality talks to write.

I also have two tenure letters to write this month, the first ones I have done (I turned down a few before I had tenure and I also turned down one or two in the first year I had tenure, but at this point I really have no good reason to say no, it is an important part of service to the profession); so I think that really my goal for the rest of the month is to write those two letters and get to work on Sterne and Richardson so that when I leave for Ottawa I at least have something down on paper in the way of draft. I may only have a week or so in Cayman between the return from Ottawa and the departure for New York, and it will be foolish to count on getting a lot of work done then; and my notion for the work I'll do during the New York weeks, aside from school catch-up stuff and the seasonal flood of letters of recommendation, is that it will be a good time to give the style book a wholesale going-over...

Four sous/spit

From Marcel Mauss's essay "Techniques of the Body," in Techniques, Technology and Civilisation, a catalog item:

Care of the mouth. Coughing and spitting technique. Here is a personal observation. A little girl did not know how to spit and this made every cold she had much worse. I made inquiries. In her father's village and in her father's family in particular, in Berry, people do not know how to spit. I taught her to spit. I gave her four sous per spit. As she was saving up for a bicycle she learnt to spit. She is the first person in her family who knows how to spit.

The electric trephine

Last night I read the first hundred pages or so of The Swarm (one of the last couple left of the January Humane Society haul), but Dorothy Dunnett has spoiled me: it is not at all bad, I guess, but the proportion of 'fact' to fiction was not what I found myself in the mood for ("You see, depending on the isotope -- you do know what an isotope is, don't you?" "Any two or more atoms of a chemical element with the same atomic number but with differing atomic mass." "Ten out of ten! So, take carbon" - real actual dialogue!).

So I put it aside and delved through the miscellany and came up with a book I've been meaning to read ever since I first read Oliver Sacks's piece about it in the NYRB (open-access PDF), Frigyes Karinthy's A Journey Round My Skull. It is an extraordinary little memoir about Karinthy's experience undergoing surgery to remove a tumor from his brain. This is a bit I especially liked (it gives the feel of the book's texture):

Incidentally, I have often noticed that my gestures are not original. I hold a cigarette exactly as my father did, and I have a way of turning my head that reminds me of a certain ex-Prime Minister of Hungary who once looked round in Parliament with an expression of surprise when some of us shouted a protest from the journalists' gallery. It is only when I am alone that I become conscious of these unnatural gestures, and once recognized I find them embarrassing. It amuses me to recall my first flight in an old-fashioned, pre-war aeroplane. I was alone with the pilot, who sat in front of me. Not a soul could see what I was doing, yet I found myself sitting in a rigidly conventional attitude. Carefully placing my hand in front of my mouth, I gave an embarrassed little cough. Then I tried to find the correct position for my hands. First I laid them carelessly on the sides of the 'plane, but I soon let them fall on to my lap and began strumming absent-mindedly with my fingers, as I had seen a fashionable actor do on the stage.

Rogue sociology

Just finished a really wonderful book, Loïc Wacquant's Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. I cannot now remember where I heard about this book (presumably it was cited in something else I must have been reading to do with sport, re: my obsession with swimming and techniques of the body), but it was excellent indeed. How can I never have read Bourdieu's "Program for a Sociology of Sport"? Hmmm, if I weren't so obsessed with language, I would have to be a sociologist instead of a literary critic, this particular kind of sociology is almost the most interesting thing I can think of...

(Swimming and boxing have a good deal in common - and one of the wonders of the modern world is that although I am sitting in a lounge at the Owen Roberts International Airport in Grand Cayman I have just pulled up an interesting reference from Wacquant, Daniel F. Chambliss's "The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on STratification and Olympic Swimmers"...)

Anyway, here is my favorite bit, the meat of the book:

[S]parring is not only a physical exercise; it is also the means and support of a particularly intense form of "emotion work." Because "few lapses of self-control are punished as immediately and severely as loss of temper during a boxing bout" [ED. That is Konrad Lorenz], it is vital that one dominate at all times the impulses of one's affect. In the squared circle, one must be capable of managing one's emotions and know, according to the circumstances, how to contain or repress them or, on the contrary, how to stir and swell them; how to muzzle certain feelings (of anger, restiveness, frustration) so as to resist the blows, provocations, and verbal abuse dished out by one's opponent, as well as the "rough tactics" he may resort to (hitting below the belt or with his elbows, head-butting, rubbing his gloves into your eyes or over a facial cut in order to open it further, etc.); and how to call forth and amplify others (of aggressiveness or "controlled fury," for instance) at will while not letting them get out of hand.

...

To learn how to box is to imperceptibly modify one's bodily schema, one's relation to one's body and to the uses one usually puts it to, so as to internalize a set of dispositions that are inseparably mental and physical and that, in the long run, turn the body into a virtual punching machine, but an intelligent and creative machine capable of self-regulation while innovating within a fixed and relatively restricted panoply of moves as an instantaneous function of the actions of the opponent in time. The mutual imbrication of corporeal dispositions and mental dispositions reaches such a degree that even willpower, morale, determination, concentration, and the control of one's emotions change into so many reflexes inscribed within the organism. In the accomplished boxer, the mental becomes part of the physical and vice versa; body and mind function in total symbiosis.

The Viennese literary coffeehouse

I was stymied after reading Jo Walton's new book the other night (it arrived in my office mailbox at a point of singularly low morale, as if in response to some unarticulated but profound wish for the book I most wanted to read in the world - thanks, Torie!) as to what I could read next.

I thought I might just read Walton all over again, but delving through the stacks piled up on the living-room floor dealt me Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew, which I read with considerable satisfaction.

(For some reason I have been obsessed recently with the possibilities of the sentence - I really need this sabbatical to start so that I can get some real work done! I went to the preliminary meeting last night at the Guggenheim for Tino Sehgal's new show "This is Progress", and had various conversations with other folks participating which made me realize that I am sort of uncomfortably bursting with ideas right now that I can only shed by writing books - I think the style course I've been teaching will find its way in the near future into a couple of essays, but that perhaps what I had thought of as two complementary book projects [notation of human behavior in bread-and-butter of the novel/transmission of forms of culture that are not best represented by conventional verbal forms of notation] are really a triptych [bread-and-butter of the novel/forms of culture resistant to notation/sequel to bread-and-butter that is not about epistolarity, the first and third person voices, etc. but is instead just about SENTENCES, unconventional and non-chronological ordering systems, the tension between aphoristic and narrative modes, etc.] that can only be achieved by multi-year sustained application of maniacal effort! ARGHHHHHH! I need to put myself into some kind of a trance state whereby the intellectually perceiving brain just communicates directly to the eyes and hands without the intervention of troublesome human-conscious mind - in fact I am going to go and move around the furniture in the living room now to create a better work area to facilitate this...)

Anyway, this site has a very good description of Bernhard's book, with a full excerpt of what is undoubtedly the funniest section, so I will instead quote the thought-provoking discussion of how the actors at the Burgtheater ruined Bernhard's play The Hunting Party:

The absolutely third-rate actors who performed in the play did not give it a chance, as I was soon forced to recognize, in the first place because they did not understand it and in the second because they had a low opinion of it, but being a makeshift cast assembled at short notice, they had no option but to act in it. They could not be blamed even indirectly, after the failure of the original plan to assign the principal roles to Paula Wessely and Bruno Ganz, for whom I had written the play. In the event, neither appeared in it because the whole ensemble of the Burg (as the Viennese call it, with a kind of perverse affection) joined forces to prevent Bruno Ganz from appearing at the Burgtheater. Their opposition was prompted not only by existential dread, as it were, but by existential envy, for Bruno Ganz, a towering theatrical genius and the greatest actor Switzerland has ever produced, inspired the ensemble with what I would describe as the fear of artistic death. It still strikes me as a sad and sickening piece of perversity, and an episode in Viennese theater history too disgraceful to be lived down, that the actors of the Burgtheater should have attempted to prevent the appearance of Bruno Ganz, going so far as to draw up a written resolution and threaten the management, and that the attempt should have actually succeeded. For as long as the Viennese theater has existed decisions have been made not by the theater director but by the actors. The theater director has no say, least of all at the Burgtheater, where all decisions are made by the matinee idols, who can be unhesitatingly described as feebleminded--on the one hand because they have no understanding of the theatrical art and on the other hand because they quite brazenly prostitute the theater, both to its own detriment and to that of the public--though it has to be added that for decades, if not for centuries, the public has been prepared to put up with these Burgtheater prostitutes and allowed them to dish up the worst theater in the world. When once these matinee idols, with their celebrated names and feeble theatrical intelligence, are raised to their pedestals by the mindless theatergoing public, they maintain themselves at the pinnacle of their artistic inanity by totally neglecting whatever theatrical potential they possess and shamelessly exploiting their popularity, and stay on at the Burgtheater for decades, usually until they die. After the appearance of Bruno Ganz had been prevented by the machinations of his colleagues, Paula Wessely, my first and only choice for the role of the general's wife in the play, also withdrew. Thus, having foolishly entered into a binding contract with the Burgtheater, I had to put up with a first performance that I can only describe as unappetizing and that, as I have indicated, was not even well intentioned. For, faced with the least displeasure on the part of the audience, the totally untalented actors who were cast in the main parts at once took sides with the audience, following the age-old tradition by which Viennese actors conspire with the audience against a play and have no compunction about stabbing the author in the back as soon as they sense that the audience does not take to his play in the first few minutes, because it does not understand it and finds both the author and the play too difficult. It goes without saying, of course, that actors ought to go through fire, as they say, for an author and his play, especially if it is new and has not been tried out before, but unlike their colleagues in the rest of Europe, Viennese actors--and especially those at the Burgtheater--are not prepared to do this. If they sense that the audience is not instantly enthusiastic about what it sees and hears after the curtain goes up, they at once desert the author and his play and make common cause with the audience, prostituting themselves and turning what it pleases them, in their infantile presumption, to call the premier stage of German-speaking Europe into the world's first theatrical whorehouse.

The rest of the passage is also well worth reading, but I must stop typing up rants and get on with my day...

"Dance capsules"

At the Times Magazine, Arthur Lubow on the fragility of modern dance:

Unlike drama and music, which also unfold in time, dance is not dictated by a written script or score. Although choreographers may sketch out a work for themselves with notes, dance is still taught primarily by one dancer to another, “body to body,” as the saying goes, the way the arts were transmitted in ancient cultures. A sculptor’s blocks of stone or a painter’s pigments are paragons of stability compared to the human clay that the choreographer molds.

The gesture of a dandy

From Roland Barthes' essay "Cy Twombly: Works on Paper," in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard:

Through TW's work, the germs of writing proceed from the greatest rarity to a swarming multiplicity: a kind of graphic pruritus. In its tendency, then, writing becomes culture. When writing bears down, explodes, pushes toward the margins, it rejoins the idea of the Book. The Book which is potentially present in TW's work is the old Book, the annotated Book: a super-added word invades the margins, the interlinea: this is the gloss. When TW writes and repeats this one word: Virgil, it is already a commentary on Virgil, for the name, inscribed by hand, not only calls up a whole idea (though an empty one) of ancient culture but also "operates" a kind of citation: that of an era of bygone, calm, leisurely, even decadent studies: English preparatory schools, Latin verses, desks, lamps, tiny pencil annotations. That is culture for TW: an ease, a memory, an irony, a posture, the gesture of a dandy.

Tearing my hair out

The literary convention of using facial expressions and bodily gestures as a shorthand for the notation of emotion. (Via Bookforum.)

Ostrich Eggshell Beads

Chris Wingfield on anthropology and the making of the material world:

I increasingly realised that just as I had set out to learn how to make Ostrich Eggshell Beads as the best way of understanding the techniques and technology involved, so Henry Balfour and his colleagues such as Francis Knowles had set about learning to knap flints in order to under[s]tand the objects they collected classified and displayed. A course in technology was central to the Oxford Diploma in Anthropology until 1940 and was taught primarily in the Pitt Rivers Museum. While today Anthropologists are formed by being made to write texts as part of their education - usually a doctoral thesis - in the first half of the twentieth century, the making of anthropologists in Oxford frequently involved the making of material objects at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Technology, however is not just about objects and tools - things we use to do things - but is crucially about the way in which we do them - techniques. Central to the 'French tradition' of studies of technology is an essay published by Marcel Mauss Techniques of the Body in 1934. Mauss focussed on the ways in which we learn to use our bodies as members of society and the differences to be found in techniques of walking, swimming, sleeping, standing and sitting as well as other basic biological functions. Mauss wrote about his experience in the First World War of having to change 8000 spades in the trenches because English troops could not use French spades. To capture the way in which we are formed by these learned techniques of being and doing, Mauss coined the term habitus - 'the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason.' The body, Mauss suggested, was 'man's first and most natural instrument.'

...

The objects that fill the museum are not themselves the techniques that are the components of the habitus - our learned ways of being and doing things. They are instead the material forms that are the result of the action of human bodily techniques on various sorts of matter. The objects in the museum come alive as evidence for the history of human techniques and technology when imagined in relation to the human bodies that had to act in particular learned ways to create them.

When approached in this way the museum objects become the sites of a sort of micro-archaeology. They can be investigated for evidence of human bodies acting in particular ways. The techniques are inscribed into their material form as the effects of human action. There are also many tools in the collections which were themselves used to have an effect on other things and became in the process extensions of the human body - a paddle, a knife or a stone blade - and these too make most sense when imagined in relation to the action of that human body.

"Inward"

Alex Danchev has a useful TLS piece on some new books about theatre. I need to start reading some of the critical stuff in this field for my notional new book project - really what I love reading is strange and wayward primary sources of all sorts, but my next book will need some sort of responsible methodological background, even if in the end it is scarcely visible in the book itself...

Really I have to finish this other book, though, before I can start thinking about my next one!

I am writing very steadily this week. I have strong thoughts about the enabling conditions for writing. One is that a quota system works for me, where once I'm writing (which is of necessity only a small proportion of my actual life, as it requires there not to be too many other demands on my attention) I just have to write X number of pages every day, from start to finish, and withhold all judgments concerning quality.

For this book I particularly needed a mental boost, and so I am writing just now with a very soft graphite pencil on the pages of a sketch book - it means that I can cover a lot of pages with a feeling of ease and power!