Capping the bottle with the genie in it

Ulrich Baer interviewed on reading, writing and other things that matter:

UB. …yeah, but, if you think about them, Baudelaire—I’ve never thought about them this way—Rilke, Celan, I mean there is a reason that I moved toward them from a certain direction, I started with Baudelaire and then I went to Celan. My native language is German. I couldn’t get to Rilke until I had passed through Celan…

GW. …why do you think that is…

UB. …who deconstructs—Celan deconstructs German in a very fundamental way, in a way where you can’t really reconstitute it afterwards. That’s why I call him the last poet of modernity. He’s at the end of a tradition and of a language used in a certain way. I’m not sure if that can ever be redone. And for him this is because it passes through being the language of a kind of mechanized genocide that is not easily dissociated from German as a language. And for me Rilke was too–the German was too melodious and it was too good, in a way. It was too complete, and actually had this promise of transcendence. And I thought, oh he’s promising something greater in German. And then I went back to Rilke after Celan and I translated Rilke into English. So, in some ways, what I find in Rilke is that it’s not the German which makes this promise, but he as a poet is continually trying to find this other place in himself to have some greater awareness, which means it’s not bound up with his German and his incredibly great gift for poetry. He was one of the greatest, a gifted rhymer—he was rhyming way too much. Lou Andreas-Salomé said to him early on, “you’re a great poet” –when he was 19 and she was his lover, she’s 36—and she says, “you’re really great and really talented but you really are overdoing it with the rhyming” (laughs). Take the foot off the pedal a little bit. It’s too much. It was too much in a way, too much “poeticity” in his poetry. And then Rilke kind of pares it down. So in the Elegies, later on, they actually, in a weird way, take away the poetic aspects, the artifice, and get to something—for me—more essential. He gets to something about how language relates us to the world.

I am keen to read The Rilke Alphabet.

One more letter

Index is now sent. Have also rather haplessly written to see if I might be able to elicit a few blurbs, though the fact is that if all you have is someone's Twitter and Facebook contact information, it is relatively unlikely that they will respond! I have three already, notionally, so really that is enough....

My January spell in Cayman is almost at an end. On my return to New York, I am going to be plunged immediately into the thick of a very busy spring semester - next week will be frenetic, but after that I hope I will be able to settle in to a good work and exercise schedule.

The letter R:

Raymond, Derek, 57
reading, 92-94, 176; addiction to, 3; childhood, 4, 7, 35; developmental stages of, 8; at different ages, 68-70; ethics of, 1-2; “mouthy,” 27-28, 30; pathologies of, 3; for pleasure, 6-7, 8, 133; speed of, 3; voluminous, 7; as way of life, 8
realism, 15-16, 153
record-keeping, 126
rejection, 85-86
Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson, 140-41
repetition, 41, 56-61, 63, 172-73; and humor, 57-60
rereading, 9, 35-36, 69
revision, 71, 98; by re-typing, 122
rhetoric, 73; see also periods
Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa, 56, 84, 97
risk-taking, emotional, 171
Rousseau, Confessions, 109
rule-breaking, 180n4

The letter S

Sacks, Oliver, case studies of, 8, 97
Sante, Luc, “Commerce,” 123-26; “French Without Tears,” 60-61
Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Words, 109
satire, 42-44
Sayers, Dorothy L., 4
scale, 89, 103-104, 138-39; see also miniatures, models
scholarship, novelistic qualities of excellent, 8
science fiction, novel of ideas and, 179n2
Sebald, W. G., On the Natural History of Destruction, 137; The Rings of Saturn, 2, 135-46
selection, 3, 9; as argument, 12-13
sensation, literature of, 18
sensibility, 15, 89, 136-37
sensory experience, 113-14
sentences, 71, 122, 147; of Gary Lutz, 26-27; glimmer of, 2; in Proust, 94-95; and paragraphs, 95; reading for, 11-12; as units of meaning, 9
Sévigné, Madame de, 145
Shakespeare, King Lear, 2, 144
Shklar, Judith, 69
Shklovskii, Victor, 7
short story, traits of 16-19, 31
Shriver, Lionel, The Post-Birthday World, 21-23
simile, 20-21, 58-59
slang, 119
sleepovers, 7, 134-35
Smith, Adam, 7, has love-hate relationship with Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, 43
Solomon, Andrew, originality of, 97
Sontag, Susan, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 75, 121
sound, 71
Spark, Muriel, 17
spelling, 180n4
sport, 6
Spufford, Francis, The Child That Books Built, 4
Spurgeon, Caroline, 5
stage directions, 9
Stephenson, Neal, Anathem, 179n2
Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 61
story, 29; as model versus vector, 64
strangeness, literary style and, 20-21
Strauss, Richard, and morality of taste, 155-56
structure, 124
Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, 12, 56
style, 2; affiliated with sentences rather than character, 135; bleak, 169; clinical, 75; and emotion, 165; and ethics, 154-55; etymology of, 12; and experience, 18; experienced in time, 55-56; in the European tradition, 136; free indirect, 47-48, 166; and global literature, 129-30; as instrument of the self, 176; as key to the heart, 13; “late,” 70; and morality, 13-15, 21-23; not affiliated with narrative, 14?; in proportion to occasion, 65; perfection of, 170-71; as performance of sensibility, 21; as repository of character, 12, 15; and the senses, 113-14; and sexuality, 161; and speech, 132; sublimation of emotion into, 167; as topic, 49; and writing, 112-12
surfaces, 164
sweets, 120-21, 144-45; see also chocolate
Swift, Jonathan, 39, 42
syllabus design, 69
synecdoche, 5, 20, 128
synesthesia, 119-20

Indexed

Indexing has an incredible allure for me. I have been marking up references on post-its and sticking them in the margins of the proofs; this morning I consolidated the individual entries into alphabetical stacks, then began typing in one letter at a time (Word will alphabetize once I type in entries, but I need to do it letter by letter so that I can keep track of which individual entries to consolidate - if you typed them all in higgledy-piggledy, you would end up with a good deal of subsequent reformatting still needed).

Probably nobody but myself and perhaps a copy editor or two will ever look closely through the index, but I like the way it presents an alternate route through the book, with each letter of the alphabet - in this case of this sort-of-memoir - representing a kind of self-portrait in miniature.

(This index isn't nearly as complicated as the last one I did! Fewer options here, too, for activist indexing, though in compensation there are more opportunities for mildly humorous entries.)

ABCs

Not ABCs of the novel - ABCs of the style book! One of my favorite stages in book-writing is when I get the copy-edited manuscript back from the publisher, usually along with a customized style sheet that includes all the proper names given in the text. (Here was a bit of something similar for The Magic Circle.) This book doesn't have a lot of unusual nouns in it, but it does have an amazing canon of proper names. Too long to paste in the whole thing, but this will give a taste of it:

Aciman, André
Acocella, Joan
Adorno, Theodor
Alexievich, Svetlana
Allworthy, Squire
Anthony, Piers
Assingham, Fanny
Augustine, St.
Austen, Jane
Baldwin, James
Balzac, Honoré de
Banks, Iain M.
Barthes, Roland
Beckett, Samuel
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell
Bennet, Elizabeth
Bernhard, Thomas
Berlin, Isaiah
Blake, Nicholas
Blake, William
Bloom, Harold
Boileau, Nicolas
Borges, Jorge Luis
Boswell, James
Boyd, William
Brainard, Joe
Breton, André
Browne, Sir Thomas
Bruen, Ken
Buckner, Brent
Burgess, Anthony
Burke, Edmund
Burroughs, William
Burt, Stephen
Burton, Robert
Byron, Lord
Carter, Angela
Celan, Paul
Chandler, Raymond
Cheever, John
Child, Lee
Christensen, Kate
Crichton, Michael
Coelho, Paulo
Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur
Conrad, Joseph

Other minuscules

A point of considerable curiosity to my students, especially as we looked at amazing books at the Berg Collection at the NYPL on Thursday evening: the long "s"...

Things neatly arrayed

The alphabet soup arrangement is especially compelling.

La disparition/A Void

The French original is by Georges Perec; the translation is Gilbert Adair's.

Anton Voyl n’arrivait pas à dormir. Il alluma. Son Jaz marquait minuit vingt. Il poussa un profond soupir, s’assit dans son lit, s’appuyant sur son polochon. Il prit un roman, il l’ouvrit, il lut; mais il n’y saisissait qu’un imbroglio confus, il butait à tout instant sur un mot dont il ignorait la signification.

Incurably insomniac, Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to his watch it’s only 12.20. With a loud and languorous sigh Vowl sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust.

The Zinc Finger Consortium

I am coming down with a lung ailment and it is making me grumpy.

But this quotation made me happy: “We now have a full alphabet of zinc fingers,” Mr. Lanphier said, “but when we started the company it was like typing a novel with two fingers.”

X.

Is a letter, which, though found in Saxon words, begins no word in the English language.

Two by Perec

The first image is from Portrait(s) de Georges Perec; the second is from Ian Monk's translation of "The Exeter Text" in Three by Perec.

Manga eyes

Tawada Yoko on the fate of the ideogram amidst competing systems of reading and writing, courtesy of Bookforum. Here's a bit I especially liked:

It’s been ten years now since I’ve had a European ask me why the Japanese still haven’t given up their ideograms. Instead, I’ve noticed a growing interest in ideograms. The children at the German schools where I’ve given readings have shown far more interest in the Chinese characters than my texts. Maybe this has something to do with the texts. Even when I write in German, image-based script in the broadest sense is still present in my texts. I don’t know if the growing interest in ideograms can be explained more by the interest in manga culture or China’s economic growth. No matter whom I come in contact with—employees at a computer store, academics, people at arts organizations or the artists themselves—everyone wants to know more about ideograms. Perhaps this is part of a global process in which visual thinking is taking on a more central role.

When I’m writing, I’ve often found myself inspired by German words like “Stern-kunde” (star-science, or astronomy), “Schrift-steller” (script-placer, or writer) or “Fern-seher” (distance-viewer, television). It always seemed to me as if two ancient Germanic ideograms were being joined together to make a new word. Romanic languages surely sound more melodious and colorful than German. English has a spare, modern elegance that German sometimes lacks, and my love of Slavic languages will never vanish. But for me the building blocks of German words have an ideographic character that seems to be crucial for my writing.

(I note that before clicking through to the piece itself, I took the word "Letter" in the essay's title - "The Letter as Literature's Political and Poetic Body - to mean letter in the sense of epistolarity.)