Tuesday, October 10, 2006
The build-up to the Booker Prize
has completely passed me by this year (a sign that last September was insufficiently full of other distractions, I think), but Kiran Desai has won this year's prize for The Inheritance of Loss. Earlier today I was reading John Crace's digested shortlist and having two contradictory thoughts: (a) while I find his "digested in 400 words" features almost invariably very funny, there's something dispiriting about seeing a whole heap of them all together like that--not good for the soul; (b) I am not having much of a desire to read any of the finalists. I seem to be off certain kinds of literary fiction recently--it's partly because I've had so little time for reading, but I find that what I've got I want either for nonfiction or for my particularly favorite kind of literary stuff (nb Richard Powers counts) or else, you know (but I don't seem to have had enough of these around recently), trashy novels about vampires. The Booker Prize needs more vampires!
Monday, October 09, 2006
A pumped-up version of oneself
Adam Liptak at the New York Times tells the story of a prosecutor whose self-published novel got her bumped from a case that bore a close resemblance to the one in her book. What I like: the brief quotations from the novel.
“Intoxicating Agent,” which Ms. Dudley paid to have printed, is made notable by Ms. Dudley’s acknowledgment to a local newspaper that her fictional heroine was “a pumped-up version” of herself.
Ms. Danner, Ms. Dudley writes, has “the poise and sexiness of a dancer, the brains of a scholar and the protective passion of a mother.”
“She had always been attractive,” Ms. Dudley continues, “but now, having reached middle age, experience, confidence and poise further enhanced her beauty.”
Oh dear.... Not that there is anything wrong with the wish-fulfilling main character thing, lots of good crime novels have idealized versions of the author in the place of investigator.
“Intoxicating Agent,” which Ms. Dudley paid to have printed, is made notable by Ms. Dudley’s acknowledgment to a local newspaper that her fictional heroine was “a pumped-up version” of herself.
Ms. Danner, Ms. Dudley writes, has “the poise and sexiness of a dancer, the brains of a scholar and the protective passion of a mother.”
“She had always been attractive,” Ms. Dudley continues, “but now, having reached middle age, experience, confidence and poise further enhanced her beauty.”
Oh dear.... Not that there is anything wrong with the wish-fulfilling main character thing, lots of good crime novels have idealized versions of the author in the place of investigator.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
The torpedo of mediocrity
From William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798):
About the middle of the year 1788, Mr. Johnson instituted the Analytical Review, in which Mary took a considerable share. She also translated Necker on the Importance of Religious Opinions; made an abridgment of Lavater's Physiognomy, from the French, which has never been published; and compressed Salzmann's Elements of Morality, a German production, into a publication in three volumes duodecimo. . . . It perhaps deserves to be remarked that this sort of miscellaneous literary employment, seems, for the time at least, rather to damp and contract, than to enlarge and invigorate, the genius. The writer is accustomed to see his performances answer the mere mercantile purpose of the day, and confounded with those of persons to whom he is secretly conscious of a superiority. No neighbour mind serves as a mirror to reflect the generous confidence he felt within himself; and perhaps the man never yet existed, who could maintain his enthusiasm to its full vigour, in the midst of this kind of solitariness. He is touched with the torpedo of mediocrity.
About the middle of the year 1788, Mr. Johnson instituted the Analytical Review, in which Mary took a considerable share. She also translated Necker on the Importance of Religious Opinions; made an abridgment of Lavater's Physiognomy, from the French, which has never been published; and compressed Salzmann's Elements of Morality, a German production, into a publication in three volumes duodecimo. . . . It perhaps deserves to be remarked that this sort of miscellaneous literary employment, seems, for the time at least, rather to damp and contract, than to enlarge and invigorate, the genius. The writer is accustomed to see his performances answer the mere mercantile purpose of the day, and confounded with those of persons to whom he is secretly conscious of a superiority. No neighbour mind serves as a mirror to reflect the generous confidence he felt within himself; and perhaps the man never yet existed, who could maintain his enthusiasm to its full vigour, in the midst of this kind of solitariness. He is touched with the torpedo of mediocrity.
The adjectival style
Rachel Cooke interviews Barbara Taylor Bradford at the Observer Woman. This one gave me a pang, my English grandmother would have liked it: she loved those books. (They were the first ones I ever read, I think, where the heroines all have emerald or violet or turquoise eyes.)
Friday, October 06, 2006
Lots of good things
at the Guardian Review; I am slightly horrified to see there's a whole new round of ambivalent pieces about Jonathan Franzen now that The Discomfort Zone's been released in Britain (I want to read that book for myself, I read a bunch of reviews that convinced me it's a must-read--will link once I get to it), but more appealingly there's Chris Petit on Derek Raymond (it was pre-blog when I discovered Derek Raymond c. 1997-98, but rest assured that I was completely obsessed and couldn't stop talking about him, he is one of the great literary geniuses of the twentieth century in my opinion--one of these days I'm going to reread all of his books and rave here about how amazing they are) and Michael Dibdin on the new thriller from Benjamin Black aka John Banville. My alternate-universe self is living in a very grimy studio apartment in the West Village (sixth-floor walkup) and writing noir novels possibly with vampire/shapeshifting elements to them, and working the night shift word-processing somewhere in the Financial District to pay the rent.
Baby steps
From Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (it is now more than a year since I smoked what I fully intend to be my last cigarette ever, or if "ever" sounds overly dramatic then at any rate for a very long time, I have no intention of relapsing & in fact am currently suffering from a wretched cold that would be far, far worse were I still a smoker so it is direct confirmation of the rightness of quitting, and yet this struck me as a wonderfully good description--the female protagonist's brother is in the hospital with serious head trauma following a car crash):
Coatless, she cut a surveyor's line to the Shell station she'd been daydreaming about for a week. She pasted a sum on the counter and asked for a pack of Marlboros. The cashier laughed at her: two dollars short. Six years since she'd thought of buying a cigarette, and the price had doubled while she was stupidly staying clean. She made up the difference and dragged the prize outside. She put one to her lips, already buzzing from the taste of the filter. With a shaking hand, she lit it and drew in. A cloud of indescribable relief expanded in her lungs and inked into her limbs. Eyes closed, she smoked half the cigarette, then carefully stubbed it out and slipped the unsmoked half back into the back. When she returned to the hospital, she sat on a cold bench in the horseshoe drive, just outside the sliding glass doors, and smoked the other half. She would brake her descent as much as possible, a long, slow ride back to exactly where she'd been before her six brutally won years. But she'd savor every baby step back down into enslavement.
Coatless, she cut a surveyor's line to the Shell station she'd been daydreaming about for a week. She pasted a sum on the counter and asked for a pack of Marlboros. The cashier laughed at her: two dollars short. Six years since she'd thought of buying a cigarette, and the price had doubled while she was stupidly staying clean. She made up the difference and dragged the prize outside. She put one to her lips, already buzzing from the taste of the filter. With a shaking hand, she lit it and drew in. A cloud of indescribable relief expanded in her lungs and inked into her limbs. Eyes closed, she smoked half the cigarette, then carefully stubbed it out and slipped the unsmoked half back into the back. When she returned to the hospital, she sat on a cold bench in the horseshoe drive, just outside the sliding glass doors, and smoked the other half. She would brake her descent as much as possible, a long, slow ride back to exactly where she'd been before her six brutally won years. But she'd savor every baby step back down into enslavement.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
In York to collect the pay
Mary Beard has a great piece at the TLS on life in Roman Britain (no subscription required). I've pasted in a big chunk of it below because I found it so appealing; I am addicted to this sort of thing from reading the novels of Rosemary Sutcliffe as a child. It would make an interesting topic for an essay--well, probably someone's written it already--the obsession with Britishness in the English children's literature of my (American but British-inflected) childhood, it's there in Susan Cooper (who is I believe American) as well. And obviously the Roman empire is still totally the model for everything from Star Trek to Star Wars, it's the pattern our imaginations run along when we want to meditate on that sort of thing. I'm too lazy to look for the link, but Garth Nix (whose Sabriel trilogy is one of my particular favorite things in all the world) wrote somewhere about the whole thing being inspired by a photograph of Hadrian's Wall in which the landscape south of the wall is all green and luxuriant, while the bit to the north is still completely covered with snow. Evocative.
Anyway, here's Beard:
Hadrian’s Wall must have been a decidedly undesirable posting for a soldier in the Roman army. Many a British schoolchild has reflected on just how undesirable it was, with the help of W. H. Auden’s engaging piece of doggerel, “Roman Wall Blues”:
Over the heather the wet wind blows
I’ve lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.
The rain comes pattering out of the sky
I’m a Wall soldier; I don’t know why.
The mist sweeps over the hard grey stone
My girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone . . . .
And so on, in much the same vein.
What neither the children nor, I suspect, most of their teachers have often realized is that this poem – as its title hints – was originally a song, with music by Benjamin Britten (quite how “Blues-y” Britten managed to be we shall probably never know, for his score is lost). It was written to be part of a radio documentary for the Home Service broadcast in 1937, on the ancient and modern history of the Wall. In fact, this Reithian background probably explains some of the poem’s coyness: when Auden goes on to characterize an irritating Christian mess-mate as being against “kissing” (“There’d be no kissing if he had his wish”), it’s hard not to imagine that Auden had something a bit more raunchy in mind.
Auden’s script of the whole programme survives intact. It is an imaginative interweaving of two stories. The first features a motley family of tourists making a visit to the fort at Housesteads: the kids are enthralled by their guidebook’s account of the building of the Wall; Dad refuses to be impressed (“I’m glad they put up notices to tell you what’s what. It looks to me more like a housing estate after the builder’s gone broke”). The second story, told in song and spoken dialogue, is that of the Roman garrison, with their discomforts and troubles, lice and all. It ends on an unsettling note, as Auden poses the question that dogs so many histories of Roman Britain: whose side are we on in this conflict between invader and native? Auden’s answer is bleak and even-handed. There is little to choose between Romans and Britons and not much moral difference between (Roman) Imperialism and (native) barbarity: “That man is born a savage, there needs no other proof than the Roman Wall. It characterizes both nations as robbers and murderers”. The very last line of the script must have struck home in the late 1930s: “Whoever deprives an unoffending man of his right, is a barbarian”.
The fact that Auden’s lyrics are less well known now than they were twenty or thirty years ago has little to do with changing tastes in poetry, and not much to do with the disappearance of Classics from the school syllabus (the Romans in Britain still have a secure place in Key Stage 2 of the National Curriculum). It has more to do with the fact that teachers can now offer their pupils authentic Roman voices from the Wall and dispense with Auden’s ventriloquism. These voices come from the famous documents that since the 1970s have been unearthed at the fort of Vindolanda. Never mind the fact that Vindolanda is actually a mile south of the Wall, or that the overwhelming majority of the preserved texts date from a period before it was even built. The documents discovered there, written on small sheets of wood – letters, complaints, lists and accounts – bring us much closer to real Roman soldiers than Auden ever could. How far they have captured the scholarly and popular imagination is shown by a television vote on Britain’s “Top Ten Treasures” in 2003. BBC viewers put them second only to the finds from Sutton Hoo.
Out of the hundreds of texts so far discovered, the popular favourite is a letter from the wife of one officer to another, inviting her to a birthday celebration (“I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival”). This has been a godsend to teachers looking for a female angle in the generally blokeish world of Roman military history. It has also launched a load of nonsense about just how like us the Romans were (they even had birthday parties . . . ). More interesting are the apparently more austere documents. A “Strength Report”, for example, of the cohort garrisoning Vindolanda at the end of the first century AD gives the lie to our usual image of cohesive, individual units of the Roman army, based all together at a single camp. Out of the 750 soldiers who made up this cohort, more than half were absent from base: including over 300 at the neighbouring fort at Corbridge, a handful on some business in Gaul, eleven in York “to collect the pay”. When you subtract the fifteen sick, the six wounded and the ten squaddies with an eye infection, only 265 at Vindolanda were “fit for active service”. Other documents in the collection give the Roman view of the military capabilities of the “bloody Brits” (Brittunculi), list the impressive quantity of poultry consumed in the officers’ mess, request that hunting nets be sent, or record the dispatch of new underwear.
Anyway, here's Beard:
Hadrian’s Wall must have been a decidedly undesirable posting for a soldier in the Roman army. Many a British schoolchild has reflected on just how undesirable it was, with the help of W. H. Auden’s engaging piece of doggerel, “Roman Wall Blues”:
Over the heather the wet wind blows
I’ve lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.
The rain comes pattering out of the sky
I’m a Wall soldier; I don’t know why.
The mist sweeps over the hard grey stone
My girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone . . . .
And so on, in much the same vein.
What neither the children nor, I suspect, most of their teachers have often realized is that this poem – as its title hints – was originally a song, with music by Benjamin Britten (quite how “Blues-y” Britten managed to be we shall probably never know, for his score is lost). It was written to be part of a radio documentary for the Home Service broadcast in 1937, on the ancient and modern history of the Wall. In fact, this Reithian background probably explains some of the poem’s coyness: when Auden goes on to characterize an irritating Christian mess-mate as being against “kissing” (“There’d be no kissing if he had his wish”), it’s hard not to imagine that Auden had something a bit more raunchy in mind.
Auden’s script of the whole programme survives intact. It is an imaginative interweaving of two stories. The first features a motley family of tourists making a visit to the fort at Housesteads: the kids are enthralled by their guidebook’s account of the building of the Wall; Dad refuses to be impressed (“I’m glad they put up notices to tell you what’s what. It looks to me more like a housing estate after the builder’s gone broke”). The second story, told in song and spoken dialogue, is that of the Roman garrison, with their discomforts and troubles, lice and all. It ends on an unsettling note, as Auden poses the question that dogs so many histories of Roman Britain: whose side are we on in this conflict between invader and native? Auden’s answer is bleak and even-handed. There is little to choose between Romans and Britons and not much moral difference between (Roman) Imperialism and (native) barbarity: “That man is born a savage, there needs no other proof than the Roman Wall. It characterizes both nations as robbers and murderers”. The very last line of the script must have struck home in the late 1930s: “Whoever deprives an unoffending man of his right, is a barbarian”.
The fact that Auden’s lyrics are less well known now than they were twenty or thirty years ago has little to do with changing tastes in poetry, and not much to do with the disappearance of Classics from the school syllabus (the Romans in Britain still have a secure place in Key Stage 2 of the National Curriculum). It has more to do with the fact that teachers can now offer their pupils authentic Roman voices from the Wall and dispense with Auden’s ventriloquism. These voices come from the famous documents that since the 1970s have been unearthed at the fort of Vindolanda. Never mind the fact that Vindolanda is actually a mile south of the Wall, or that the overwhelming majority of the preserved texts date from a period before it was even built. The documents discovered there, written on small sheets of wood – letters, complaints, lists and accounts – bring us much closer to real Roman soldiers than Auden ever could. How far they have captured the scholarly and popular imagination is shown by a television vote on Britain’s “Top Ten Treasures” in 2003. BBC viewers put them second only to the finds from Sutton Hoo.
Out of the hundreds of texts so far discovered, the popular favourite is a letter from the wife of one officer to another, inviting her to a birthday celebration (“I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival”). This has been a godsend to teachers looking for a female angle in the generally blokeish world of Roman military history. It has also launched a load of nonsense about just how like us the Romans were (they even had birthday parties . . . ). More interesting are the apparently more austere documents. A “Strength Report”, for example, of the cohort garrisoning Vindolanda at the end of the first century AD gives the lie to our usual image of cohesive, individual units of the Roman army, based all together at a single camp. Out of the 750 soldiers who made up this cohort, more than half were absent from base: including over 300 at the neighbouring fort at Corbridge, a handful on some business in Gaul, eleven in York “to collect the pay”. When you subtract the fifteen sick, the six wounded and the ten squaddies with an eye infection, only 265 at Vindolanda were “fit for active service”. Other documents in the collection give the Roman view of the military capabilities of the “bloody Brits” (Brittunculi), list the impressive quantity of poultry consumed in the officers’ mess, request that hunting nets be sent, or record the dispatch of new underwear.
At the Guardian
Lucy Mangan considers some of the books and authors that have meant the most to her, including Enid Blyton:
I am listing Blyton instead of a single book because the fact is, she wrote the same one eight billion times a year: it is both pointless and practically impossible to elevate one above another. Wherever you start, you will soon have the measure of proto-lesbian George, dickless Dick, Anne the idiot, Julian the interwar home counties' answer to Jack Bauer, and Timmy the dog. They neither change, evolve nor behave in any way approximating that of real people, probably because their inventor was possessed of only two adjectives - "Queer!" and "Rather queer!" - which weren't as interesting then as they are now.
But it doesn't matter. Just as the plottiness of Dan Brown or Jeffrey Archer is sometimes all you're up for in adult life, so Blyton's linear, literal narratives are all kids require at some point or other. If you're a natural reader, you may realise after the capture of the 97th group of smugglers in a not-particularly-well-hidden cove that you are ready for a spot of characterisation or some oblique light commentary on the human condition. If you're not, you probably won't. But you will have learned something about telling a good story - and how to make a bed out of bracken.
I am listing Blyton instead of a single book because the fact is, she wrote the same one eight billion times a year: it is both pointless and practically impossible to elevate one above another. Wherever you start, you will soon have the measure of proto-lesbian George, dickless Dick, Anne the idiot, Julian the interwar home counties' answer to Jack Bauer, and Timmy the dog. They neither change, evolve nor behave in any way approximating that of real people, probably because their inventor was possessed of only two adjectives - "Queer!" and "Rather queer!" - which weren't as interesting then as they are now.
But it doesn't matter. Just as the plottiness of Dan Brown or Jeffrey Archer is sometimes all you're up for in adult life, so Blyton's linear, literal narratives are all kids require at some point or other. If you're a natural reader, you may realise after the capture of the 97th group of smugglers in a not-particularly-well-hidden cove that you are ready for a spot of characterisation or some oblique light commentary on the human condition. If you're not, you probably won't. But you will have learned something about telling a good story - and how to make a bed out of bracken.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
The technological sublime
Jill Owens interviews Richard Powers at Powell's. He says some things about voice that make me unbelievably impatient to read The Echo Maker: I've got it right here, am hoping if possible to squeeze it in somewhere this weekend....
Best kept guinea pig
Lots of book-related stuff at the New York Observer this week, including Adam Begley on Cormac McCarthy's new novel (it's a thoughtful review, but doesn't persuade me this is one for me to read, though I prefer post-apocalyptic to Western as a mode: the only McCarthy novel I've read is All the Pretty Horses, didn't take to it at all, in fact McCarthy is on my short list of novelists that might be worth reading just so I can explain why I dislike their books with greater conviction and less irrational prejudice); also, Robert Gottlieb on the recent spate of books and movies about Britain's royals. I definitely want to see The Queen (strange to say, unless I'm misremembering I have not seen a single movie in 2006; the last thing I remember seeing was Syriana, which I found myself referring to in class the other day). Resolution for 2007: see more movies! This has been my resolution every year for the past five or six, never happens, but there's always a chance....
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Scotch tape and the Houellebecq balloon
Sam Lipsyte at the Believer on traveling with the great French novelist. (Thanks to the Dizzies for the link. I can't wait for the paper issue: the always interesting Stephen Elliott has a piece on the Middle East, full text not available online....)
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Legislating virtue?
Lionel Shriver (at the Australian) takes down the notion that art should be censored. It's a great piece, go and read it for yourself; these are the last two paragraphs (she's got a good tone, doesn't she?):
Until some new self-righteous law stops me, I will continue to write characters who don't follow the rules. My characters are not necessarily representative of the communities in which they live, and I will not hesitate to make them Armenian or Catholic or Pakistani, even if they're not portrayed as perfectly emblematic of Armenians, Catholics or Pakistanis as a whole.
My characters are full of prejudices. My characters may not like Chinese people. My characters may believe that homosexuality is unnatural. My characters may slander Islam, or belief in crystals, or my father's Presbyterianism. My characters murder schoolchildren, plot to massacre two billion people overnight and hit their husbands over the head. My characters are obnoxious, spiteful, seething, difficult, resentful and inconsistent; and no, my characters will not always take their six-year-old kids to therapists to get help. My characters think abominations. In other words, my characters are the closest approximations I can contrive of real people.
(Thanks to Critical Mass for the link.)
Bonus: here's my post on Shriver's excellent novel Double Fault, which I have found myself thinking about very often since I read it; in fact, I see that Shriver has become part of the constellation of writers I refer to constantly here on the blog. I must see if I can get someone to let me do a real review of The Post-Birthday World when it comes out next year.
Until some new self-righteous law stops me, I will continue to write characters who don't follow the rules. My characters are not necessarily representative of the communities in which they live, and I will not hesitate to make them Armenian or Catholic or Pakistani, even if they're not portrayed as perfectly emblematic of Armenians, Catholics or Pakistanis as a whole.
My characters are full of prejudices. My characters may not like Chinese people. My characters may believe that homosexuality is unnatural. My characters may slander Islam, or belief in crystals, or my father's Presbyterianism. My characters murder schoolchildren, plot to massacre two billion people overnight and hit their husbands over the head. My characters are obnoxious, spiteful, seething, difficult, resentful and inconsistent; and no, my characters will not always take their six-year-old kids to therapists to get help. My characters think abominations. In other words, my characters are the closest approximations I can contrive of real people.
(Thanks to Critical Mass for the link.)
Bonus: here's my post on Shriver's excellent novel Double Fault, which I have found myself thinking about very often since I read it; in fact, I see that Shriver has become part of the constellation of writers I refer to constantly here on the blog. I must see if I can get someone to let me do a real review of The Post-Birthday World when it comes out next year.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
