Nuances

From Maggie Nelson, Bluets:

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don't fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature--in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)--that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when and where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin's robe with it. But still you wouldn't be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.
....
63. Generally speaking I do not hunt blue things down, nor do I pay for them. The blue things I treasure are gifts, or surprises in the landscape. The rocks I dug up this summer in the north country, for example, each one mysteriously painted round its belly with a bright blue band. The little square junk of navy blue dye you brought me long ago, when we barely knew each other, folded neatly into a paper wrapper.
....
106. When I first heard of the cyanometer, I imagined a complicated machine with dials, cranks, and knobs. But what de Saussure actually "invented" was a cardboard chart with 53 cut-out squares sitting alongside 53 numbered swatches, or "nuances," as he called them, of blue: you simply hold the sheet up to the sky and match its color, to the best of your ability, to a swatch. As in Humboldt's Travels (Ross, 1852): "We beheld with admiration the azure colour of the sky. Its intensity at the zenith appeared to correspond to 41 [degrees] of the cyanometer." This latter sentence brings me great pleasure, but really it takes us no further--either into knowledge, or into beauty.

See also #170 and 226, only I am too lazy to retype them!

Austenian aphorism

Up today in the graduate seminar is a favorite novel of mine, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story. It is not really a legitimate mode of academic argument, but it's always interesting to see where Austen saw certain techniques in action - here's a passage that always catches my attention:

Not to admire Miss Fenton was impossible--to find a fault in her person or sentiments was equally impossible--and yet to love her, was very unlikely.

That serenity of mind which kept her features in a continual placid form, though enchanting at the first glance, upon a second, or third, fatigued the sight for a want of variety; and to have seen her distorted with rage, convulsed with mirth, or in deep dejection had been to her advantage.

Also up: Terry Castle's chapter “Masquerade and Utopia II: Inchbald’s ‘A Simple Story,’” from Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 290-330; and Marcie Frank's essay “Melodrama and the Politics of Literary Form in Elizabeth Inchbald,” forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.

"superPatricket"

Ian Parker profiles Edward St. Aubyn for the New Yorker (gruesome, gripping):

James met me in London. Within a few minutes, he said, “I have an odd relationship with Teddy, because he has never, ever been, in any way, cruel to me.” He described going with St. Aubyn and Shulman to a weekend party held by “the Earl of somebody or other,” at which the flirtation between St. Aubyn and a fellow-guest was painfully obvious. James also recalled how St. Aubyn sometimes reacted, at dinner parties, to a stranger’s careless remark: “A not terribly bright girl might say, ‘Ooh, that’s fun,’ and he would play with her use of language in a way that humiliated her.” He added, “It was like a wolf savaging a sheep. It was absolutely terrifying, and difficult to interfere with.” I later spoke with a woman who had had exactly this experience, in France: “I said something about a book I didn’t really know. He made me feel very young, and very stupid.”

James placed this behavior in a generational setting. “That’s what Teddy’s father used to do,” he said. In the fifties, James’s parents, both psychoanalysts, had a second home in Cornwall. David Astor, the owner of the Observer and a family friend, encouraged them to visit Arthur Koestler, who was staying nearby “with this person called Roger St. Aubyn.” (“Such was the ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ nature of things,” James said.) Roger, in his early fifties, a qualified but inactive doctor, had by this point divorced his first wife—Baroness Sophie von Puthon, an Austrian—and married St. Aubyn’s mother. Alexandra, Edward’s older sister, had just been born. “My mother described it as an incredible situation in which you had this sadistic, horrible man being vicious to his young heiress wife,” James said. “She was looking after this baby, in this doomy, bleak Cornish place, with Arthur Koestler being intellectual and not particularly nice.”

A reread of the Melrose books is on my list of near-future things to do: I was going to write an essay about St. Aubyn (and may still do so), only laziness and a preference for advancing my own large-scale projects will probably get the better of me. I also have an idea for a class I want to teach on a certain strain of contemporary fiction (projected syllabus to follow - one thing I really like about this time of year is the fact that I am bursting with thoughts and ideas that I haven't had time to pursue during the school year, and now have three months of liberty to do exactly as I like).

I read Lost for Words the other day. Minor work, but with sentences of exceptional sharpness and clarity (I try and avoid using the preposterous "lapidary"): "Her openness to infidelity filled him with an optimism that her choice of infidelity discouraged" (!).

Swim and other bits

I have a lot of tab-closing to do, and various updates, but just a few bits for now - I need to wind down and get some sleep.

Had an idyllic day today in Tel Aviv, the first day I have really had to myself for what seems like an impossibly long time. Beautiful walk along the boardwalk (sunburn!). A swim in a gorgeous 50m saltwater pool! Then a great talk on my beloved Kafka aphorisms at the university by Paul North and dinner on an outside terrace in highly congenial company at Suzanna's.

One special link: the obituary for Brent's father.

The class

I am teaching this semester is one of the strangest, easiest and most purely pleasurable teaching experiences I have ever had! Today we were reading the amazing pair of narratives by Johnson and Boswell, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

Johnson's narrative is studded with amazing formulations (“If an epicure could remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland”), but this observation of Johnson's about aphorism - mediated through Boswell - also especially caught my eye:

Besides, I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.

Red light, green light

Just read what is probably my favorite novel of the year.  It is incredibly good, and not yet published in the US unfortunately (it is going to be hard for me to put it evangelically into people's hands): Alan Warner's The Deadman's Pedal.  Aside from the fact that it includes all sorts of elements I particularly like, the prose is unbeatably perfect, and with a very different set of political and cultural alignments than Alan Hollinghurst, whose books I love but who is coming at things from a point of view that is frequently off-putting to me. 

In a curious way I was much reminded of Alan Garner, whose name is only different by one letter, the Garner of Red Shift rather than Weirdstone.  Geology, place, history, above all language and the particular vocabularies associated with various forms of expert knowledge; I can't think of another book whose idiom quite so precisely and magically as this one captures a whole world with all of its dimensions.  Stuart Kelly's review at the Guardian fortunately saves me the trouble of trying to write a better description here!

Not sure if the feel will translate in a short excerpt, but here are a few sentences I especially liked (they are unusual in the context of the novel as a whole, there is almost an aphoristic quality to the final sentence - not Warner's usual habit - which is why it stood out, though it is quite distinct from the Flaubert-Hollinghurst-St. Aubyn lineage of satirical summing-up):

The bike struggled with their combined weights on the hairpin corner at the top of the King's Way and he had to turn the handlebar gear down to second with the bright headlight of an impatient car behind them before he indicated left and pulled in.

This lay-by, so insignificant in their previous lives, had now become their place of meeting.  The need was less furtive and romantic than that the engine on the new bike struggled to take them both up the longer and steeper hill within the Brae Estate -- as Simon had discovered on his birthday.  Almost all Simon's comments on any future Nikki and he would share involved reference to a more powerful, anticipated motorbike.

Light reading catch-up

I hadn't really intended to, but in effect I am clearly taking the weekend off (tomorrow I have ambitious exercise plans and am also meeting my dad for lunch and the matinee of Nico's ballet)....

Finally had time to read some novels, soothingly!

Edward St. Aubyn's At Last is pretty amazing; I like the aphoristic mode here better than the mode of more profound commentary, but these Patrick Melrose books really are a must-read (and as I said, I think the opening chapter of this one may be the single best novel opening I've read in recent memory).

I considerably enjoyed Anya Lipska's Where the Devil Can't Go, a crime novel about Polish immigrants in London (a good recommendation from Maxine!); Sharon Shinn's Troubled Waters is what my grandmother, speaking disparagingly of certain kinds of sliced bread, would have called 'pap,' but highly readable pap; S. G. Browne's Breathers: A Zombie's Lament is absolutely wonderful (thanks to Jared for the recommendation); Robert Harris's The Fear Index is goofily heavy-handed in its Frankenstein parallels but certainly a page-turner.

Bonus link (FT site registration required, but it's more interesting than what Harris tells us about finance!): school for quants.

Curb your hypergraphia

Joanne McNeil on the blog in 2011. (Via Bookforum.)

Media blackouts

Wesley Yang finds Nassim Taleb digging in his heels at the notion of having to promote another book...

Alone enough to read

At the Times Magazine, Virginia Heffernan on the oddity of the Kindle popular highlights feature (which I am going to disable now that I know I can!):

Marked by a dotted underscore that indicates that other Kindle users have found the passages significant, popular highlights constitute crowd-sourced literary criticism. Readers, on the spot and yet collaboratively, make meaning of what they’re reading. The effect is odd — even for those of us who see literature as something readers determine incrementally and collectively.

Click on the popular-highlight passages and you will discover exactly how many Kindle readers have singled them out. “Happiness is the consequence of personal effort,” for example, was evidently highlighted 1,626 times (as of this writing) in “Eat, Pray, Love,” by Elizabeth Gilbert. In Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone,” 1,547 Kindle users cottoned to “Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward.”

Sounds about right. But many writers don’t write aphoristically, and many readers don’t read for aphorisms. In a popularly highlighted world, we all may begin to. The dotted line, like the distinctive hue or underscore that signals a word is clickable on the Web, may be a new kind of punctuation that affects contemporary style. (Amazon reports that its most heavily highlighted books include Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” and Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” as well as the Verghese novel and the Gilbert memoir.)

"Aphorizing public menaces"

From Thomas Bernhard, The Loser (the protagonist is speaking of his dead friend Wertheimer, whose suicide is obliquely prompted by the revelation that besides the perfection of Glenn Gould's performance of the Goldberg Variations it is not worth playing the piano at all - the "I thought" is the tag that keeps the narrative firmly grounded in the speaker's ruminations):

He was an aphorism writer, there are countless aphorisms of his, I thought, one can assume he destroyed them, I write aphorisms, he said over and over, I thought, that is a minor art of the intellectual asthma from which certain people, above all in France, have lived and still live, so-called half philosophers for nurses' night tables, I could also say calendar philosophers for everybody and anybody, whose sayings eventually find their way onto the walls of every dentist's waiting room; the so-called depressing ones are, like the so-called cheerful ones, equally disgusting. But I haven't been able to get rid of my habit of writing aphorisms, in the end I'm afraid I will have written millions of them, he said, I thought, and I'd be well advised to start destroying them since I don't plan to have the walls of every dentist's office and church papered with them one day, as they are now with Goethe, Lichtenberg and comrades, he said, I thought. Since I wasn't born to be a philosopher I turned myself into an aphorist, not entirely unconsciously I must say, turned myself into one of those disgusting tagalongs of philosophy who exist by the thousands, he said, I thought. To produce a huge effect with tiny ideas and deceive mankind, he said, I thought. In reality I'm nothing other than one of those aphorizing public menaces who, in their boundless unscrupulousness and impudence, tag along behind philosophers like horseflies behind a horse, he said, I thought.

(I did not find this one nearly as compelling as Wittgenstein's Nephew, but wonder how much of that might have been due to different translators - but no, the other book is funnier, sharper...)

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...

The final assignment

for the class I've been teaching this semester on style:

In “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Sontag writes, “To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility.” Adopting the form or mode of “jottings” – other “jotters” we’ve read this semester include Barthes, Koestenbaum, Sante and to a lesser extent Sebald – write a piece called “Notes on Style.” The notes should be ordered by some principle – numbering, alphabetization by keyword – that is neither chronological nor obviously logic-or-argument-driven. You are welcome to use quotations from Austen, Flaubert, James, Proust, etc. as illustrations, but you are not obligated to do so; examples from other spheres are also welcome. Be as vivid and precise as possible, and include at least one original “maxim” or “aphorism” about style or one of style’s affiliates as a self-standing item in your list of jottings.

The cracked cauldron

More Madame Bovary:

He was unable to see, this man so full of experience, the variety of feelings hidden within the same expressions. Since libertine or venal lips had murmured similar phrases, he only faintly believed in the candor of Emma’s; he thought one should beware of exaggerated declarations which only serve to cloak a tepid love; as though the abundance of one’s soul did not sometimes overflow with empty metaphors, since no one ever has been able to give the exact measure of his needs, his concepts, or his sorrows. The human tongue is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat out tunes to set a bear dancing when we would make the stars weep with our melodies.

Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres: comme si la plénitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies ã faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.

I am reminded of an aphorism that Harold Bloom used to utter regularly during the seminar on Shakespeare I took with him at Yale in the mid-90s (a famous pronouncement of Nietzsche's):

That for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts; there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.