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Sunday, 30 October 2005
Terribly advanced for his age.
The waiting hours are over, the time today being slacker than usual, British Summertime coming to an end.
Today I settled on a focus for my essay, a culmination of my thought here over the past few posts, and drank tea, reheated food and rediscovered a post-rock urge. Militaristic drumming and a hyphen, what more is there you could want?
I missed it though, the time-change. For no real reason, last night I took herbal sleeping remedies and slept with earplugs. I am not aware of a sleeping problem. I have suffered I the past with nauseous bouts of insomnia, sickly dawns that never end, but not now. A night like it I have never known. Emptier and overwhelmingly insular, no dreaming or disturbance. I wasn’t aware of how irregular and distracted my sleep is, how often I wake and move and turn and move, wake and turn. Last night was nothing, it didn’t exist. Today is the only evidence that yesterday even happened. There was no foothold for my awakening, it arose straight from a moment where I decided to go to sleep.
As a child this sense that one woke immediately as soon as one fell asleep (based in the lack of facts to prove you were ever asleep; I never saw myself asleep) was a common bewilderment. Perhaps, my juvenility was attempting to cognitively grasp the notion that the present doesn’t exist, that the future moves seamlessly into the past and that the present is nothing more than a realising, an allowance.
Yeah, perhaps. That's exactly what I was thinking, unaware, aged six.
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Saturday, 29 October 2005
Weekender.
A full, heady two days off. A proper Saturday and Sunday full of laze and precipitation, mountains of inky paper and purposeless drifts to the newsagent, to the supermarket, to the park.
Paid for it though, this space.
Nearly sixteen hours of full work on Friday, first at the office and then at the public house. This seriously impacted on my ability to absorb culture this weekend.
A set of avant-garde music nights have formed a regularity in the city at the moment, featuring derivations of folk and electronica topographies, organic movement splintered and repeated by laptops, L.E.D. driven appraisals of the British musical heritage. These situations are impossible to go and enjoy.
At a venue where I myself regularly perform, in the company of peers and advocates, and massively mindful of the grant I have just received to organise a cultural event, I cannot relax. I am cajoled into needing to network, to value myself against the stock of my achievements, to ask the participation of promising musicians in my own little variation on the graph. More pertinently, I have no real qualification to justify this role.
I walked past the alley, listened to the strains of an accordion over erratic synth punches, and continued walking. Instead, I pushed through the shadows and made my way down to the quay. Meeting friends was easy, easier now.
Sat in ornate, homely anachronism of a bar, anonymous from the outside, remarkable from the inside - all stained glass pre-Raphelites and Victorian trim. The high ceiling betrayed the crammed space; a series of circular tables demarked the lounge into pockets of hustled conversation. We sat and talked of the leer and debauch of a Friday night, smugly confident in our conservative surroundings, and also of the judgements of people, of the hallucinogens of last night (C. watched seasons change, leaves heal, roots burrow), of football, our last escape.
I have become thankful for distractions.
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Wednesday, 26 October 2005
Regeneration.
The (a) novel is slowly sedimenting in my head. Somewhere, someone is switching a light on and off. The girl, previously blurred and washy like a watercolour challenge, is gaining an identity. She may or may not be called Anna; a tribute, a palindrome. She begins and ends this thing, this affair with our married & estranged engineer. She will be vaguely supernatural, naturally super vague. She talks in repetitions, levers meaning into pauses, conducts with silence. She is a figment.
Read Ishiguro in a day. A Pale View Of Hills tempted and then banished any creative thoughts; hopelessly accomplished for a debut at twenty-eight years old. I was taken by the structure. The struts of the novel were not of plot but of theme. The plot was cloth - coloured linen - laid across wooden splints many times, a layering, the process of which softens and obscures the hard, solid form that lies beneath. To the eye is seen undulations, a rise and fall like breath, movements of tiredness, of absence, of comma use and stilted conversation.
The structure must be there. I am learning.
Spoke too much in the lecture tonight, postulated at length about the title of the book, the linguistics of the book, the mirrors of the book, the femininity of the book. Grew fond of the sound of my own voice. Argued half-vehemently for distortion-through-false-memory rather than false-memory-displaced-through-guilt. Either way, it is irrelevant. Ishiguro knocks haunting psychology and regret into last week, creating a set of quasi-truths, a set of lies best explained through the hyphen. My syntax and punctuation meanwhile has become overbearingly obvious.
Walked back through town after the lecture having spent my last doubloon on a filthy strong filter coffee to stave off the heavy eyes. The old brewery which towers in town, a legacy of production, employment and identity, is to become a 'city of science' as rumour has it. A complex of biochemical labs, guinea-pig farms and hands-on interactive museums. Thousands of jobs to come, and maybe one that will keep my clever, foreign girl here. It is a good thing. I have no-one to tuck me in at night otherwise.
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Monday, 24 October 2005
Enclosures around the limitlessly wordless.
Tempted not to say anything to the keyboard tonight, but the ease of Jamaican lager and a Drum Gold rolled sedative have persuaded me, I am drawn in like a journalist gravitating towards fiction after the taste of gin...
Yesterday was spent pleasantly labouring over Dickens (tonight you will get no lit.crit because nothing remotely new was raised in tonight's lecture and because I have lost the Ishiguro book I am meant to have read by Wednesday) and then walking, vunerably - as all walks in my neighbourhood are - to the bus-stop. I got on a bus and went to work; the other, second work.
Usual mixture of slump and chump in the bar, returning to an old shift which I have not worked for three months and finding nothing, thankfully, changes. Same mix of dog-owning, paranoid secondary-school teaching batchelors, the odd flimsy muso, and plenty of the frighteningly assertive breed of middle-aged female ale-drinkers. The ending scene is me shouting, "time to finish your drinks please" to a gaggle of shitfaced mothers slavering over a bearded ukelele player thrashing out Dylan on a piano clearly half an octave short of a symphony.
Then today: notably, and finally, raining.
Tonight however I am just thinking, pondering my next move, buying a little time. I have many things to accomplish, time willing. I have much to sleep too, time willing. In the meantime, there is a whole wealth of cloth from which to tailor yourself an opinion; make sure you be visiting the fantastic And So It Goes, Side Effects and Spurious for explosion, extraction and exclusion accordingly.
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Sunday, 23 October 2005
Heteroglossia.
R.W. Dickenson’s assertions about my writing deserve something.
A direct, referential promotion of his comments? A literary construction, taking his post as adage and seed? Hyperlinked favourites from his expanding, penetrating catalogue of nether-fictions? A simple thankyou, old bean?
Assimilation is the greatest form of flattery. R.W. Dickenson’s contentions that the city is my most powerful character broke me, beautifully. I confess. I cannot help but scene myself, sketch my position into my academic wanderings, give a reader the sense of not simply what I have been reading, but where.
So, borrowed I-Mac graceful and almost weightless upon deep-grained ‘20s accounting bureau, anglepoise lamp both angled and poised, tottering structures of CDRs and invoices, a shock of cigarette butts in the ashtray, and myself situated within another grey Sunday, myself a weekly monochrome.
Earlier, upon the flowered kitchen table I annotated stolen lectures and essays on Bakhtinian textual ventriloquy (Wilkinson*) and Cordery’s hesitations upon spatial instability. The context; Charles Dickens’ Sketches By Boz.
Slowly, slowly, and with a rereading of R.W. Dickenson’s signpost (the fluidity, acuity and brazen insight of his writing, as ever, undermines his pretensions to submersion beneath my concepts. The concepts are mainly his, stolen and appropriated. This much is evident from his complicit grasp of the subject...) a structure grew; a structure involving the day, my academic reading and my keenness to form an appropriate and deferential response.
Sketches By Boz is masterful, and all to often reduced to an example of 'early formative Dickens'. In using voice to replicate the polyphonia of a city, there is no equal. Joyce’s Dubliners is child’s play. At the centre of Dickens’ writing one feels a plurality, a sense that language is not monolithic but belonging; each utterance holds signifiers peculiar to the speaker. Meaning therefore, crucially relies on the reception of the speech by another person, which is also plural. Interaction between the two parties has therefore an unfinalisable play and potential to create new meanings. Think of text message misunderstandings, of lost tone in emails.
Dickens takes this precept and hurtles around the city, throwing voices in a commission of reportage, omniscience, mimicry and detachment. Infinitely aware of not only the play between two speakers, he is also devastatingly mindful of the lag between narrator and author. He is experimenting with literary and narrative forms in a way that seeks to express the multi-vocality of the streets.
In the different sections of the sketches, Boz, the central narrator, shifts in viewpoint, knowledge, voice and proximity to the street-life he portrays. Boz is fragmented and elusive but there is a deliberate act of authoring cutting through and across the narration in order to cast deliberations upon social strata, architectural function and class movement. Boz falls like a shadow upon Dickens’s chosen subject, unquantifiable but perceptible, abstract but wholly there and undeniably influential.
The city is created by Dickens; he is ‘of’ London. The author, and here we drift back to the room with the wood-grained desk and grey aspect (now accompanied by two balls of feline affection), is not only a capturer of the city, but a redefiner also. Reifier too, perhaps.
[It is worth that noting at this point that, quite brilliantly, my host’s I-Tunes has randomly selected London Is The Place For Me by Lord Kitchener. No further comment needed.]
The author is instrumental in delimiting and challenging social space through a series of bewildering complex authorial moves, moves I lack the foresight to understand let alone implement. This interplay – how a novel shapes and is shaped by its surroundings – is the requisite of accomplished writers. I simply walk the streets, trying to avoid rainy determinism.
Dickenson is of course right. The city is the greatest character of them all, providing a dialogical playground between sociality, space, author, narrator, character, voice and reader. At present I inhabit and observe the city, thinking that perhaps poets are of the country and novelists are of the city. The merits and implications of the form hold a key to the nature of their residences, the residences a key to the form. But that is another story…
*The intention of including author names is not to name-drop, but remind myself that none of these ideas are my own.
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Friday, 21 October 2005
Ch-ch-ch-changes.
Changed blog template, previous one had cramp, silly tiny central column.
Hopefully this one is clearer and with nicer colours too.
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A return to form.
Hiding my maddening anger, he challenges me, yeah - but so what?
It's just that, I reply, it's just that the opening up of spatiality in modern critical theory has to be at the expense of the reader. I sound desperate.
I don't agree, says he.
It makes perfect sense, I argue. Your negative reaction is a product of the subordination of space in social theory - pause for breath - circa 1880 to 1920, you know... fin de siecle and all that?
I don't agree, says he.
But you haven't even read the fucking book, I plead, exasperated.
I bet you're jealous, says he.
***
Right now, I am sitting in my room, pondering the effects of a seventeenth hot lemon and the possible repercussions upon the third-world of my quite ridiculous tissue consumption. I have a cold, which makes me irritable, which makes my head hurt. It also makes it quite hard to convey notions of social space, of human geography to anybody without getting irate at their complete inability to grasp the concept; a complete inability stemming, of course, from my woefully inadequate attempts at synopsis and argument.
If I don't understand myself, then I cannot possible attempt to engage others.
Outside there is a fine, persistent haze of rain and two cars parked. One is a green Rover, its colour identical to the higher, older leaves of the ivy plant which climbs my window frame. On the opposite side of the street is a black BMW, its colour mimicking the slick tarmac it rests upon.
Life is always about interplay, not simply one set of circumstances implementing themselves on another. Cause and effect are doomed in contemporary life. Just as modernization (in an industrial change, new technologies, global trade kind of way) leads to modernism (of art, literature, science, philosophy and politics) through a need to steady social life during a period of considerable disintegration so then art and literature are able to reflect back upon the processes of modernization and accentuate, support, deny and provoke them. In truth, as history looks back, the beginnings of the two movements are inseparable and inextractable. The contemporary has changed, and social-life must adapt. In doing so it changes the catalyst that caused it. A red car passes the black BMW, travelling towards the give-way junction and slowing.
A previous post suggested that the prominence of spatiality in human thought and endeavour may well herald and/or be indicative of the postmodern age. But a definition of space is needed. We talk not of space as a contextual given, as a physicality but as an organisation of the physicality as a social product.
It is the turn of a taxi, Newcastle coat-of-arms proudly jutting from the driver's door, to wait for a TNT delivery lorry. There is a patient filing-in behind the obstruction of the green Rover and then a slightly fatigued gesture from the wheel as the taxi driver pulls out and continues up the road, the arc of his trajectory round the Rover momentarily measured by a spread of water, water now dissolved into the general greyness of the road.
Time and space are the objective form of matter and all three are inextricably connected. Indeed the nature of the relationships between the three are a central theme of history, philosophy and science. Space itself might be empirically measured, given dimensions but its organisation and meaning is a product of society, as Lefebvre argues, space is political and ideological, it is a product literally filled with ideologies.
There is a danger however, of just seeing the notion of space as a white page onto which the actions of groups and individuals are written, encountering no obstacles other than the echoes of past generations. The creation, naming, reification, living-within is a dialectic process, a two-way continuous happening in which the environment shapes its inhabitants, and man shapes the environment. Man gives functionality to the material, and so the theory of spatiality is necessarily a social one.
And where better to explore this notion within the covers of novels? Joyce's Dublin, Doblin's Berlin, Auster's New York, Sinclair's London, all books which are shaped by the cities they describe but also books that themselves wield a creative tool able to shape. They carve in symbols and signs, turn cathedrals into metonyms and motorways into thighs, they splash paint into the sky and stamp libraries into the pavements, attesting to words that were unspoken and conversations unworded.
So of course one man's window-aspect is another man's parking space, is another man's irritating delay, and the green rover is gone, the taxi driver is late and my inclement, shivery view of Friday afternoon is restored, reminding me why I didn't go to work today.
But I got this wrote, yeah, which is halfway towards doing something productive I suppose.
***
[Much of this post owes direct or oblique reference to Soja's Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion Of Space In Critical Theory, a book which whilst dubiously structured (it claims its haphazard argument is entirely appropriate given the fragmented nature of its topic - hmmm.) and unnecessarily alienating (it talks of spatiality for eighty pages before actually defining it - erroneous seeing as it claims that its use of 'spatiality' is fascinatingly unconventional and precise - hmmm again.) but does have passages of lucid theoretical exposition. However, these passages usually appear at a juncture in which another theorist is quoted, leaving the sense of wishing you'd read those theorists instead. John Berger and Henri Lefebvre are two I shall have to investigate more thoroughly.]
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Time out.
Mindful of my previous blog and the excesses of boredom, I have now come full circle in barely having enough time to write of anything. This blog seems to be entirely constructed of a tiresome moaning about workloads (workloads I happily brought upon myself) and a turgid walkthrough of basic literary theory. My slender understanding then offers a strained application towards post-war fiction, before finishing with a pirohette of hacked about symbolism.
I can't decide which I prefer/loathe the most.
Previously, readers could indulge themselves with poems, short-stories and declarations upon ennui and static living, the precise length and weight of my latest turd, exactly how many spoonfuls of sugar I'd consumed in a day, fantasies about drainpipes and the colour of my walls.
Instead, now you have to endure endless ramblings about me catching the Metro to such-and-such, the fallacies of plot in the English novel and tepid illustrations of my half-induction to the cultural sector.
But I think I'll continue, if only to spite myself. The literary posts, while not accomplished, were never meant to be. They are a cautious finding, the attempt to stand up once more in academia as the sands beneath my toes shift and the undertow attempts to haul me back to sea. They allow an exploration, not a definition, and as such should be read best as a summarising of the arguments of others through the eyes of one desperate for an opinion, an idea of his own.
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Thursday, 20 October 2005
Battered pork balls.
So much of life is punctuated by journeys that one begins to wonder whether it is indeed the journeys rather than the destinations that are of importance.
Once again, after packed public transport (doing my head-cold no good whatsoever) against a background of discontented murmurings, we review and readdress this meaning of Fictions Of Displacement - my university module title. The window of the lecture room is open, drawing in the disturbance of a busy wet road, kept in time by the gentle breezy slap of the blinds against the sill. They would put in double-glazing, but they'd have to sack the lecturer.
We are introduced with a smile, a crackling tape player emitting a Received Pronunciation reading of today's book. Grids are sketched with an erring hand upon the whiteboard in preparation for an icebreaking session with our new tutor.
We have summarised inter and intra cultural movements - between and within - before but they come to the fore again in light of Timothy Mo's novel Sour Sweet. Mo provides us with a Chinese family transplanted, face and all, to London but within this also portrays a shifting family make-up; gender reversal and authority dispersion playing out as boundaries of language and varying levels of adaptation allow the family members to cope, with varying degrees of success. The family structure however does not cope, but nor does it disintegrate entirely preferring to defer, allow, cajole and gently stretch its way into the fabric of an Anglo-Chinese existence.
The tutor threatens us with Freud for a moment, talks of dream interpretation and of condensation & displacement but falls short of asking me to describe last nights dream (a dream which I, incidentally, transcribed onto this very blog but the gods were censoring and the post was thankfully lost). The blind continues to slap on the sill as the tutor's peculiarly tight trousers tighten further and begin to define his crotch with some accuracy, dangerously close to an overwhelmed Estonian student but thankfully the wind changes, the window swings and the tutor is forced into action to save the window from smashing. The crotch is withdrawn, and Freud as a tool for criticism is forgotten.
Which is just as well, for psychoanalysis makes for GCSE discussions, and its predilection for reductionism is inappropriate for Mo's book; a book which by and large is obvious and not particularly revelatory about either its subject matter or the postcolonial literary form. To the author's credit though, he denies any attempts of simplification. The interweaving, ever-changing complexity of family relationships, business acumen and social responsibilities rarely unfolds or presents itself to us in the book.
Narratorial aides are used in the form of flashbacks (and the abhorrently clunky sections about Triad culture, which, as I suspected, were robbed wholesale from a history book) but this is a fairly straightforward telling of a generally more complicated tale. The Chinese in the novel are willing and skilful to adapt to the business markets, but less adaptable to the UK's cultural aspect. Obvious as this seems, Mo is astute in creating this tension not from anecdotal, East-meets-West awkwardness but rather from an unfamiliarly evolving family unit; a prevalent and telling occurance in more contemporary times.
The family Mo describes do not come from 'typical' Chinese families but from more realistic and unconventional ones. The central female character Lily for instance, was raised as a boy leading her to confound the patriarchy and dominate the family in times when men were still very much the breadwinners and wives the meek cleaners. Instead, driven by a business head and a steely will, Lily works front-of-house in the restaurant and Chen, her husband, is forced into the kitchen. Sour Sweet therefore recognises family influence as much as cultural, and in doing so portrays a far better sense of multi-culturalism not just as chalk-and-cheese incompatibility but a series of self referential and ordering changes and assimilations in which the culture not only affects how the family functions, but the functioning of the family actually influences how they are able to receive and adapt to the British way of life.
Although inestimably let down by his decision to include a gangland Chinese crime sub-plot (one imagines the editor screaming "we need more twists, Timmo, more twists!" into a mobile), Mo inevitably succeeds in some aspects, and fails in others. The class meanwhile, presumed bored, are just thinking. Nothing razors the intellectual slump particularly but some valid points are raised towards the end, comments about the level of heating in the room mainly.
Then to the journey home, as anticlimactic as the ending of this post/review/journal (the damn categories of confessional and literary that I have established for myself are proving useless), until the train doors slid open to reveal the session's tutor sharing a carriage home with me. And it was there that I gleaned most, derived personal preferences, discovered his personal interest in Ackroyd and the publishing details of his subsequent book on the man. Glossing over my background we also arrive at a mutual likening for post avant-garde droning electronica-skiffle, if that’s what the kids call it these days (twenty-four, I'm getting on), although his was tinged (tarnished?) with a slightly more eighties, Eno slant.
More learnt, though, on that train home, more connection felt that at any other point so far on the course. Not because anything perceptive was said, not because any real relationship beyond academia was established but just because the end of the seminar didn't just end with a damp, sodden stomp home in the drizzle. It started and ended with a journey.
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Wednesday, 19 October 2005
Disclaimer.
I have become delirious. And so have you.
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Monday, 17 October 2005
Moving walls.
A beautifully paced day in the end, Sunday. I was wrong and hasty about its confinements. The sky’s constitution opened a little, just broke like an egg-shell into blues. And most of the day, when not strolling across the moors and recreation fields amongst hollering and bellowing young men playing within imaginary lines, was spent in a slow but sophisticated thought.
Of course things got muddled, and when Graeme came round he spoke with more electricity and elocution than I, but all the same, things became clearer. Primarily, I miss my girlfriend.
But time must be given to construction and reifying one’s own sphere of existence. Looking at the pile of novels, modern mainly and of varying weight and punch, I was delivered to ideas of postmodern geographies, the impact of space upon both critical theory and human thought.
Must an opening up to notions of spatiality be accomplished at the expense of temporality? Must there be some sort of shattering, an earth-movement to crack the clocks? Space and geography is all too often a given. History takes place upon a map already drawn, the conscious and precise creations of history – brimmed with purpose and angle – pronounce actions and define stories. Today I did this and that and now I am doing this and that. You don’t ask where, or whether my surroundings remain the same as yesterday, whether perhaps a wall has moved or a floor has shifted.
But in the modern - sorry, I forget I am dealing with critical work – in the contemporary age it is becoming impossible to tell a story in a straight line; impossible to structure a sentence without being given over to parentheses, authorial interruption and semicolons.
The crisis of the modern novel is nothing more than a change of narration. An event cannot be seen as a dot on a straight line, rather it must be viewed as a dot amongst a network of lines, an expansive web of interconnections with a relevance beyond chronological ordering. Taking into account the simultaneity and extensions of events and possibilities lead us to this site, leads us to a night sky, autumnal clear, with feint vapour trails joining the stars.
Temporality then remains back in the day, it plays no part in the midnight that I write in. Spatiality must now take centre stage as a rising postmodern geographical prominence, milky white and more than a little lost in its own ontology.
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Sunday, 16 October 2005
Neighbourhood watch.
Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it. Bertrand Russell
Sunday is Sunday, trawling around room looking for artefacts and stimulation… can’t leave for have an appointment at two. So I’m filling space, reducing time.
Open window close window, move ashtray, pick up cutlery from floor and align it with floorboards in head, place upon desk, adjust volume, lift head and catch eye of pedestrian, the child is in a white t-shirt, there is the money, I have no money.
They’ve cut the trees from the end of my road, hacked noisily through the trunks, dead apparently – rotting from the inside - employed a surgeon with a yellow van just to make it official.
There was a chase last week. Five police cars, ten officers on foot and a helicopter all pursing a perennial youth through the scrubby undergrowth and the undergrown scrub that clumps in the end-of-road planters. I was stood making a decision about carrying home a set of discarded shelves and he shot over the pavement and into a line of traffic, weaving back tire shredded, sparking his way down the white lines and through the traffic signals, down the restored Victorian birdwalk, across the woodchipped playground and off, away, into the allotments. Cue tubby uniforms padding around, clutching their oversized utility belts, panting and shouting urgently into their wee walkie talkies.
Ahh, the protection, the reassurance, the uncovering, the detection.
Apart from that nothing moves round here, save the discarded ovens and unattended BMXs. Do you want to come over and kill some time?
Arthur's Hill, Sunday. The very notion of urban constriction.
As Spurious would no doubt say, that's bad Fenham.
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Goat in the machine.
[Technical problems last few days, which seemed to have changed my colour schemes and dispensed with a few peripheral details (photos, my name and email, a creative urge, the small matter of the fucking words I spent time writing), so apologies if your visits here have been punctuated with the white screen of internet death.]
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Wednesday, 12 October 2005
Newton's shore.
So you've read books.
So you can list the dates of them at all.
So that one reminds you of then, and then, and your childhood.
So where is the insight?
We understood the misconstruing of nature, the weaving of fictions, the turn of word just like a thing, we understood it all. Talk of von Hofmannsthal, Goethe's Elective Affinities, Rilke's end-lines (the tripping over a rhyme as though the translation did not know it was there), the sonata, exposition and development and recapitulation. Talk of excessive orders, pressured acounts of the world, false systems of colour, harmony & concept hand in hand easing over the threshold like a shadow surging towards my friends Ottilie, Charlotte and Edward.
Banville's The Newton Letter has been my site of study this week. Irked slightly by a less than impacting lecture/seminar but warmed by the resonance I have struck with this remarkable book, it has been another long Wednesday. A loss of faith in the primacy of text was achieved some time ago. But Banville's revisionism forced me to reread and reread. I rarely suffer from this fate, this level of absorbtion that I feel compelled to start the book immediately and once over but my Tuesday was given to a reissuing of concept and, by necessity, a renaming of parts. In encouraging rereading, Banville encourages revisionism and thus takes us closer to the core of his concepts.
Banville's narrator revises everything. Settling into a cottage to complete seven years worth of biography on Isaac Newton, he befalls an intellectual madness, a clouded obsession with the family he rents the cottage from. He displaces his intellect, his passion onto the lives of the inimitably ordinary family, inventing his own reality - just as Newton - inventing a history of modern thought.
But slowly he must start to reaccomodate his mental journeys, house them in sites specific and more relevant, especially as he mimics the story of his subject (Newton) by becoming embroiled with women, and in particular the nymph Ottillie. Soon his desire of knowledge leads him to expend the relationship with Ottilie (he never made love to more than an idea) in pursuit of the mother of the house Charlotte. But in his lacivious epistemological pursuits, he realises the lack of absolutes and - once again mirroring Newton - falls into disillusionment, instead making love to a spectre, half-woman & half-construction. He continues to sleep with Ottillie whilst imagining Charlotte, even doing so unaware in Charlotte's bed, holding his creation - Charlottilie.
And as his grasp upon definates and answers and schemes loosens, so does the story of the situation around the family, the story that he has created composing of Irish stereotypes and flights of fancy. All of it are shown to be untrue. The drunk father has cancer, the aloof Charlotte is in fact heavily medicated, there is no scandal surrounding the young child of the household and Banville's historian retreats to the artic tundra to write a letter about giving up on a book.
It is the book I wished to write.
It has been said that novelists have an uncanny predilection to guessing the gravity and purpose of human endeavor and in doing so seem almost prophetic in their tales of fiction. They tell stories laden with foresight, unknowing but knowing. In reading The Newton Letter I experienced something I imagine happens to many writers. I read a book that I had already written in my head. The country retreat, the pregnancy, the solipcism, the doubles and dualitys; all there in my book. But, and not for the first time, just as I was considering extracting the novel from my head (and from the red-covered a5 exercise book that had slowly filled up with character study and plot development), I stumbled straight into a gleaming, proud example of the kind of work I wished to create but one far superior in language, concept, in... every way.
What to do though? Stop reading? Of course not. I must simply absorb, reflect and move on and perhaps one day will write a better book (if comparison holds any weight), or at least one that fits me more comfortably, one that allows me and is allowed by me.
-
'I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered all before me.’
Isaac Newton
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Sunday, 09 October 2005
All around the watchtower.
A night drawl tonight, just back from work and the slowly ending ten-hour shift. Saturday was to be the day of buying books, of study and progression but rather turned out to be a rainy pursuit around town buffeted by hungry mobs and stiff-armed mothers. Didn't locate a single copy of the books I need to have read by Monday. Mo, Baville, Doblin - where are you? I expected nothing more than this.
And then to the public house, site of victories and recoveries for well over a year now, drawn in by an uncustomary cry for help from the strongest person I know - not well after suspicious and unwanted chemical was added to a casual night-out beer - and so trapsed across Byker Bridge, looking out over what was formerly an empire of sorts, the art-set compound, until I reached the warmed wooded interior of the Arms. I'm back like a front oppositional.
Been in various states of elation, adrenaline and non-commital exhaustion the last few days. Fully aware of my lack of adherence to obligations, fully aware that I have not repled sufficiently to a single birthday well-wisher, fully aware that sometimes more is less. I only offer that these words are a wind-down, which is why I haven't written them to you.
Fruit is the key of course; a healthy immune system, filling my hours with travel and destination, sleeping at right-angles. Capacitating my intellect for a minimal bursary, overworking for a brute, obsessional fix and subjecting myself to hours of smoke and banter for a few pennies, I am not to complain. This is entirely what I expected, and of course wanted, dear free internet public diary journal online confessional weblog.
Oh yes, this is the commentable life. Without comments.
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Friday, 07 October 2005
Always complain given the chance.
Gentle dry plaintiff, tired wise
with the whys of the world
your heavens backlit so you see nothing
as you stare into tonight’s gloom
until.
Bought hues upon the spreadsheet today, and raced downstairs to meet volunteers not knowing their direction, nor inclination, nor strength. Hours in the office absorbed by lists and the demands of lists, buying a certain amount of time from the truth with speculative skirting around, giggling at the centre of friends.
So more poet than confessor. Have mountains of anxiety, more guilt for my own time than anything but am falsely aware of the order of things and that which matters first, matters most. This affects reading.
Chronicles and narratives to push through, steaming the pages apart. Yet to buy Berlin Alexanderplatz or The Newton Letter, fucked if I cannot find it in the New Media driven library or the target-quota pressured Waterstones in town. Clogged, damp fingerprints offer a history in kind, a trace of my paltry attempts to gallop through the list on a limp donkey. Too caught up in my own tales; the boast of prostitutes abandoning babies and pebbledashed terraces with triangle sliver gardens as though we were all part of a large cake in my childhood, a cake to be dissected in turn by the ruminations of an amateur historian (a purposeless writer swaddled in myth) and sentences that never breathe or stop.
So balls to that. And here’s to drinking slowly quickly quickly on a Friday fervoured by too much work, unable to kip, a damp hanging of clothes in the air, the frame of a streetlit window, the echoes of distant Cameroon, blue note breakbeat polka mash-up from three streets away and hey! another, yet another, momentary lapse of talent.23:50 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Thursday, 06 October 2005
Thankyou.
i) Brown square of cardboard, unfolded - inside lies black concentricity, Calexico and Iron & Wine pressed
together – just beautiful.
ii) Towers of books including Auster translated to graphic novel, Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, Kundera’s Laughter & Forgetting and – crucially – Markson’s Reader’s Block.
iii) Numerous beautiful words in cards or by electronic post from India Green, Monty, Zoe-my-You’re-Growing-Up, Hedgehodges, Infinity Monkey, Duflop, That Bastard In There, Pol Pot, Hank, Minature Rose Rolene, The Huge.
iv) Shit, my friends sound like wrestlers.
5) French text gibberish at midnight from RWD.
f) Private Eye dropping onto my mat every two weeks for a calendar year.
¬) Perfect Partner stub and Oyster Boy love from Ms Cumberland Arms.
£*) More I have forgotten. I have a lot to learn xxx
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Tuesday, 04 October 2005
Seek medical advice.
Trying to resist attempts to complain of exhaustion, but I'm too tired to fight myself. Seasonal change, Nature's way of saying, the warning signs of illness, call for a rest: who cares?
I want to be productive.
I want to stream out databases of lofty Arts patrons and funding-conglomerate overseers and draw up endless lists of volunteer attributes whilst pacing miles of pavement to distribute promotional literature all over the city. I want to converse intellectually about the formatting of the brochures, dole out simple truisms of marketing, proof-read to within millimetre spec. boundaries whilst taking calls from urgent, asphyxiating short-film distributors.
But at the same time I want to sketch out loose paragraphs on the Nietzchean relationship to Joyce, pad out jotted notes upon Andrei Bely's St. Petersburg and its use of the theories of cubism before the theories of cubism were established, as well as commentating perceptively on the ideals of rememory, of adoption and adaption, of sickness and magic within the sweltering pages of Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea.
But simultaneously I want to meet bars full of people and exchange narratives of the day, little bolstering tales of exchanges over the photocopier, or a murdered lunch in the bistro behind the castle, or of the best way to stifle depression on your wedding day, or the apparant insanity of all house-cats, all of this previous to lightshow cinema-scores involving the elite avant-garde of challenging American guitar music.
But then in the meantime I need to fill string bags with bruising aubergines, folding peppers and punctured cherry tomatoes, all leaking their sweet sap onto my canvas shoes, while I sling an old Army-issue 80 gallon rucksack over my shoulder and hike up the street, peering into doorways and stepping over faeces, heading towards the laundrette, remembering that I have left soup to simmer, a tepid dance of cardamon seeds and coriander, sprigs of yard-grown parsley and tough carrots, wishing i hadn't thrown my watch away.
No chance.
The shivers retreat into my spine when I talk of them and the aches wilt from my brow, but the paining of exhaustion is there, sure enough. Fitful sleeping, anxious waking, subdued and pallid, the visage of an outward-bound invalid, someone who is constantly queried on his complexion.
There is no reason for it, I say, no reason at all, I have been eating well, keeping out of the night air, going to bed early.
That'll be it, they say, that's it.
What? says I.
You have had too much sleep.
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Monday, 03 October 2005
Preamble.
Lateness is not a virtue, so must be quick. Starting new job today as an organiser of disparate culture, bibbed volunteers and enveloped mailshots. Keen to learn, slightly fretful of the impression I gave of myself as much more than myself, but keen to learn. Sell myself as a learner, an absorber, the media sponge. Perhaps not think about it too much.
Lecture tonight on the Global City; am to talk on Joyce's Dubliners. Have decided that Joyce's portrayal of human activity is rooted in Nietzche's Eternal Return Of The Return in which he theorises (forgive the summary) that time is infinite but the occurances within it are finite thus leading to the possibility that everything that occurs will repeat itself, forever. In the face of this thought, we are paralysed.
And this is Joyce's characters all over, forever returning home, bereft against the backdrop of Dublin and its political, social and religious conventions, dying in the face of ambition, impotent in the face of possibility. They end up where they began.
So, sell myself as learner...
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Saturday, 01 October 2005
Morning again.
Missed a day without even realising yesterday, wrote a post in my head about fifteen times but never made it to the keyboard. This morning's lecture will be brief too having just a written a lengthy and vague and overdue letter to an old friend. There is an element of dislocation in my life at the moment, with regards to social geography in particular.
The departure and remaining of best friends in different places, the flight of a girlfriend, the continued progress of my family through trial and circumstance while I lead a selfish, spear of a life, jutting out upon this headland, upon a cape with no real purpose, no real distance, certainly no pay and perhaps no future. That is a predicament, a predicament to be used as a tool for provocation if nothing else. I appear to remain stationary, but will never come back to anything.
And yet there is a tiny bravado in my work at the moment. An sliver of arrogance allowed by feeling the needle slip and pop into the groove and the gentle swell of sound, the physical means to thought, a tiny, tiny pursuit echoed in the doubling of words but held in the rocks, the general faint and nervous thought that I might be heading somewhere.
*
Transitional
First he said:
It is the woman in us
That makes us write--
Let us acknowledge it--
Man would be silent.
We are not men
Therefore we can speak
And be conscious
(of the two sides)
Unbent by the sensual
As befits accuracy.
I then said:
Dare you make this
Your propaganda?
And he answered:
Am I not I--here?
WCW (to R)
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