"Kept from myself"

Walter Benjamin to Gretel Adorno, April/May 1940, on the text that would later be published as "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "As for your question about my notes, which were probably made following the conversation under the horse-chestnut trees, I wrote these at a time when such things occupied me. The war and the constellation that brought it about led me to take down a few thoughts which I can say that I have kept with me, indeed kept from myself, for nigh on twenty years. This is also why I have barely afforded even you more than fleeting glances at them. The conversation under the horse-chestnut trees was a breach in those twenty years. Even today, I am handing them to you more as a bouquet of whispering grasses, gathered on reflective walks, than a collection of theses. The text you are to receive is, in more ways than one, a reduction."

Vocational

Just reread a book that made a great impression on me when I first read it ten years ago, Alice Flaherty's The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain. Still very struck by these final lines:

The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don't, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again.

The drift from fiction

Geoff Dyer and others on the blurriness of the line between fact and fiction.

Words and miles

At the Atlantic, Nick Ripatrazone on why many writers run:

The steady accumulation of miles mirrors the accumulation of pages, and both forms of regimented exertion can yield a sense of completion and joy. Through running, writers deepen their ability to focus on a single, engrossing task and enter a new state of mind entirely—word after word, mile after mile.

One day I really am going to write a personal book about exercise....

Bright in its proper station

From Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland:

[O]ne generation of ignorance effaces the whole series of unwritten history. Books are faithful repositories, which may be a while neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will again impart their instruction: memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. Written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has past away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot be rekindled.

The task at hand

Via Preeti, Amitava Kumar's ten rules for writing. I agree with much of this, but roundly dissent from #9 and #10 - I like working on more than one book at once (though admittedly they are always books of different genres - I wouldn't think that working on two novels at once would be particularly productive for most people, so in that sense it may be good advice - but on the other hand, don't we all draft something, leave it for a while and write something else, then come back to revise?).

Minute particulars

Someone was recently asking me to write a post about time management and writing, it is something I should weigh in on: but I am not always a good role model, to say the least. I like the part where I read and think and get a first draft down on paper as a speaking script, but it is not as enjoyable to turn it into something publishable: I am pleased with this essay, but also full of self-reproach that I did not turn it into an article shortly after I first wrote up the basic material in 2006!....

(This essay may also be the first publication in which I have cited Facebook crowdsourcing as a scholarly source.)

Available through JSTOR now, anyway: "The Minute Particular in Life-Writing and the Novel."

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.

Closing tabs

I have been remiss in the matter of closing tabs! Partly because I have a draft blog post open that I haven't gotten around to finishing - this is unusual for me, mostly I just whip 'em off, but I am due a correction for a missing chapter's worth of endnotes that vanished from the style book, I pasted in the notes but need to add numbers and check carefully so that I am not piling error upon error. Partly because I am having what is basically an amazing writing and exercise retreat in Cayman, with many posts at my other blog and much typing of quota (it's not draft as such, more notes and thoughts, but it is accumulating at a fine rate - I am at about 18K and if I keep working steadily I should have gone through the whole novel before school starts, which is the idea - sometimes I can keep writing quota for some weeks into the semester, but this September I have two major triathlons and a brand new lecture course with a clutch of seminar leaders to work with, and it is not going to be sensible even to try!).

So:

Rebecca Mead on why it's silly to distinguish rigidly between reading for pleasure and reading for self-improvement, especially in adolescence.

A great interview with Coach Dave and his fiancee Megan, who have been burning up the trails this summer! It's the first time I've worked with a coach for quite a while, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.

Twin novelists: an interview with Lev and Austin Grossman.

David Gerrard on the badness of Geoff Dyer's most recent book.

“read Caleb Williams—a strange book—”

Julie Park on Jane Porter's pocket diary.

Straining your ears for the response

Tim Adams interviews Hilary Mantel for the Observer Review:

I always write in terms of scenes, and for a big scene in one of the Cromwell novels I will prepare for several days by going through all my notes and all my sources before diving into the writing. At that moment where I commit to the writing it is exactly like walking on stage. All your senses are alive and it is as if you are straining your ears for the sound of a response.

Another bit caught my attention too, in response to a question about the huge success of these books: "I never expected it but it gives me great pleasure though, because I saw it as a continuation of what I had been doing. Right from the first page, the first paragraph, it was like: "Ah! Now you see everything you have done was aiming at this!" I think this project is the thing I could have done that nobody else could have done, if that doesn't sound boastful." I am overdue a post about writing, only I am (a) waiting till frenzy of school year is over and (b) full of trepidation about airing thoughts and plans, as there does tend to be a dynamic in which one speaks about a future project and then loses interest in actually executing it! Definitely some thoughts on writing soon, though - I have been writing very little this year (other than tens of thousands of words of these reports for the tenure review advisory committee!), and it has actually been very helpful in terms of letting the desire and the ideas well up in me and want to burst out in a sustained stint of effort over the summer.

The observation of our observing

Alberto Manguel in the NYT on the aftermath of his stroke last year and what it showed him about language and thought:

If thought, as I believe, forms itself in the mind by means of words, then, in the first fraction of a second, when the thought is sparked, the words that instantaneously cluster around it, like barnacles, are not clearly distinguishable to the mind’s eye: They constitute the thought only in potential, a shape underwater, present but not fully detailed. When a thought emerges in the language of the speaker (and each language produces particular thoughts that can be only imperfectly translated), the mind selects the most adequate words in that specific language, to allow the thought to become intelligible, as if the words were metal shavings gathering around the magnet of thought.

I am eternally grateful to Manguel because although I do not think it is the perfect book about reading, The History of Reading is sufficiently like the book I myself would write on the topic that it has saved me the trouble of doing so myself! (Have been having various exciting thoughts on what books I might want to write next, only I know that sharing them often lessens the impulse to write them, so will keep it all to myself until things are a bit further advanced.)

Another good brain bit in the NYT, in case you didn't see it: Ron Suskin on how Disney provided a language for his autistic son.

Prospective

It is ironic that the only thing that gets me to do massive and thorough tidying-up at home is the prospect of an imminent departure! However certainly my apartment will be nice and orderly to return to in early February: there is always room for further improvement in the matter of books and papers, but I've gotten a lot of stuff cleared away and effected the traditional end-of-semester expurgation. (If you wait long enough, all papers ultimately can be thrown away!)

I have had a not onerous but fairly long list of things to sort out before leaving, but the mail has been put on hold, prescriptions refilled, cat supplies replenished etc. etc. Will pick up the bicycle from the store this afternoon. Have assembled a lovely pile of books to bring with me: it is my general resolution for 2013 to write less, and though I am hoping January will let me finish two revisions (the style book and an article on the particular detail in life-writing and the novel) and get some work done on a secret project (Moby-Dick is involved!), mostly I will just be exercising and reading, reading on a vast and ambitious scale. It should be glorious!

I have misplaced my real digital camera and my phone camera doesn't provide the click-to-enlarge option, so titles may be obscured, but this will give the flavor of my coming weeks:

Also: next Saturday, bioluminescence!

Bit #2

From Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Volume 1:

For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had gotten nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature's other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called "writing." Writing is more about destroying than creating. No one knew that better than Rimbaud. The remarkable thing about him was not that he arrived at this insight at such a disturbingly young age but that he applied it to life as well. For Rimbaud everything was about freedom, in writing as in life, and it was because freedom was paramount that he could put writing behind him, or perhaps even had to put writing behind him, because it too become a curb on him that had to be destroyed. Freedom is destruction plus movement. Another writer to realize this was Aksel Sandemose. His tragedy was that e was only able to perform the latter part in literature, not in life. He destroyed, and never moved on from what he had destroyed. Rimbaud went to Africa.

Things you love

A great writing exercise from Laini Taylor, via Sara Ryan (whose lovely YA novel Empress of the World has just been reissued):

Do this exercise where you freewrite about the book you would write. (“Writing about” is so much easier than “writing”.) Don’t just describe the plot. Try to get at the feeling of it too, the mood and atmosphere. Be fanciful. You won’t have to abide by this, it’s just an exercise. Think about this too: imagine you are browsing in a bookstore or library, reading flap copy. You’ve had this happen before, you read flap copy that makes your heartbeat speed up, your mind brightens. This book is what you want, it is full of things you love, that fascinate you. You can’t wait to read it. What are those things? Come up with your own ideas that will speed up your heart and brighten your mind.

Only one novel of mine was written at all under this sort of sign - The Explosionist. My first novel was the book I felt compelled to write rather than the book I felt huge desire to read, and it was a strange and exciting feeling when I realized - after perusing the shelves of the Bank Street Bookstore to see whether anything else had come out that could reproduce the thrill for me of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Garth Nix's Abhorsen books - that if the book I most wanted to read didn't yet exist, I had to write it!

The new novel has not been written under exactly that sign - it was more a compulsion to tell a story that would capture some of the intellectual charisma of the theory and practice of role-playing games, plus longterm desire to write something that reimagines The Bacchae. Then when I was revising, I kept on saying to myself, "I just need to make this world as much a one that readers want to enter as I feel about the world of Fringe...."

Writer as corporation

Interesting interview here with YA writer Cassandra Clare about the business of writing.  I have none of the gifts she clearly possesses in abundance - for all sorts of reasons, I am very lucky to be a professor rather than a writer trying to make a decent living off publishing fiction! - but I like reading about the truly entrepreneurial...

The superiority of classical restraint in writing

At the Paris Review, Harry Mathews on translating Georges Perec and Marie Chaix:

The photograph of Marie Chaix on the back cover revealed a woman of thirty-two and great attractiveness. When John Ashbery first saw her, he remarked how pretty she was, then corrected himself immediately: “No, not pretty—beautiful.” Her beauty was not that of any stereotype: strong-featured, full of energy and passion. From the start I fantasized about having one of my noncommittal affairs with her. I knew ahead of time that I was safe from any deeper involvement, since she was married and the mother of two little girls. What I did not know was that she had never cheated on her less-faithful husband but now felt inclined to indulge in a small infidelity of her own.

Our interest in one another had preceded our meeting. Two months before, in the hope of one day winning her, I had composed a four-page handwritten letter intended for her, in which I deployed every seductive wile my experience as a writer could supply. I was pleased with the results and confident that they would dispose Marie to think of me as someone more than her translator.

It then occurred to me that this was a shabby way to approach the woman I had come to know in her book: an intensely serious and compassionate human being who had generously taken her readers into the intimate, moving world of her feelings. I tore up my handwritten letter and replaced it with a page containing a dozen typed lines of a formality for which written French is perhaps uniquely capable (“Madame, I have the honor and pleasure of being the translator of your admirable book…”). This was the letter I mailed her.

Marie’s reaction was not what I had foreseen. She later told me that her first impulse was to drop everything and get on the next train to Venice. She wanted to see this mysterious American who had unexpectedly appeared in her life. It was as though my original letter had been encrypted in its typewritten replacement. (This incidentally delighted me as definitive proof of the superiority of classical restraint in writing to the rhetoric of expressionistic overtness.)

A folded paper

Middlemarch, book 4:

Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing?  If it happens to have been cut in stone, though it lie face downmost for ages on a forsaken beach, or 'rest quietly under the drums and tramplings of many conquests', it may end by letting us into the secret of usurpations and other scandals gossiped about long empires ago: - this world being apparently a huge whispering-gallery.  Such conditions are often minutely represented in our petty lifetime.  As the stone which has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labours it may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe.  To Uriel watching the progress of planetary history from the Sun, the one result would be just as much of a coincidence as the other.

Friday night miscellany

Closing tabs:

Pankaj Mishra is unforthcoming at the FT on Susan Sontag (site registration required), to an extent that caused me to look up his earlier review and find it also somewhat withholding.  I must confess that I am vaguely negative on Sontag; her abuse of her personal charisma (or at any rate the way that it distorted her ongoing intellectual development) is unattractive to me, and the only book of hers I can say really had a deep influence on me was Illness as Metaphor, which I read when I was quite young (14, 15?) and which along with Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, which I read around the same time, opened up to me a vision of the sort of book I might want to write.

Maud Newton interviews Alison Bechdel about Are You My Mother?, which I must acquire as soon as possible.  Here's the bit that most interested me (more details in Judith Thurman's New Yorker piece, unfortunately not available online - and I left my copy in the seat pocket on the plane, so I can't retype the relevant bit):

I do write first, but my writing is very drawing-based. I actually write in a drawing application, in Adobe Illustrator. So I'm not just writing in a word processing program, I'm creating these panels on the page and I create little text boxes for the narration or dialogue and I'm able to move that stuff all around. I'm thinking about the page as a two-dimensional field as I write, which feels to me like a kind of drawing even though I'm not drawing with a pencil or not drawing much. I will do occasional sketches. So that takes a really, really long time and that's how I get the whole story mapped out. If you saw the pages at that point, it would be just blank boxes with the text and the dialogue, with the narration and the dialogue and maybe a few images dragged in here and there.

Super-librarian Dave Lull already left this link in the comments, but the opening chapter of Edward St. Aubyn's latest is a must-read.

Miscellaneous light reading around the extremely frayed edges:

Sherwood Smith's Banner of the Damned, which I found appealing but also frustrating (Smith is one of the most hugely talented fantasy novelists of her or indeed any other generation, and yet she writes books so idiosyncratically that it hugely limits enjoyment and readership - in many respects this is much better than George R. R. Martin, only I thoroughly see why his books have reached a much wider audience and hers have internal constraints that will prevent them from doing so).  Cannot imagine that I or, really, anyone else will ever teach such a class, but it would make a very interesting student assignment in a novel-writing class oriented towards epic storytelling and fantasy: it is such an unusual mix of the remarkable and the perverse in terms of storytelling virtues and vices.

Anthony Neil Smith's depressing and mesmerizing All the Young Warriors, which I highly recommend (it will thoroughly depend on your own reading preferences whether you will read either Smith or perhaps neither).

And now I am going to go and consume brain candy in the form of the second half of Robert Crais's Taken....

Face down

Dwight Garner on Kindle Singles.

Also: "They were not two watches."  (Courtesy of L. Lee Lowe.)