Tuesday, 11 December 2007
Forms Of Landscape & 2007
Forms of Landscape is a newly available collection of poetry by A.C.Thomas. It is published by Sunmast Pamphlets in a series of five, each with a unique set of loose-leaf poems inside and original printed envelope artwork. Five pounds. Available for purchase, via email.
A.C.Thomas 2007 round-up. (For my own purposes of remembering).
Sunmast Pamphlets published these books by A.C.Thomas in 2007:
Design Of The Times - mini-chapbook containing 5 poems about the future of design.
Price: £1.
Yard - Short-story pamphlet based on a true involvement.
SOLD OUT
Forms Of Landscape - Loose-leaf poems inside printed envelope. Limited to five.
Price: £5
Various magazines published poems, stories and features including:
Elimae: 'As We Enter' - http://www.elimae.com/2007/May/Enter.html
The Creative - Featuredwriter in quarterly national magazine for Creative Writing graduates and universities.
I performed at:
BALTIC, Sunderland University, Black Swan Arts Centre, Colpitts, Gallery Glue and more.
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Exploding Alphabets perform 14/12
Friday 14 December
Colpitts Christmas Party
Alington House, Durham
Exploding Alphabets reform for yule. Featuring Graeme Walker, Clara May Warden and Adam Thomas.
The varying styles of three poets held together by a singular ethos of 'no old work'.
See http://www.nooldwork.blogspot.com/
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Friday, 13 July 2007
The Creative
The Creative, a magazine produced by the University of Sunderland, has me as their featured writer this quarter. Seek one out in a library if so inclined.
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Tuesday, 19 June 2007
Design of the times
Sunmast Pamphlets has published a tiny wee mini poetry anthology about as big as your thumb called Design Of The Times. It has various metered ruminations by yours truly about design and architecture, including a fine piece about furniture and was created using a revolutionary new paper-folding technique as pioneered by the likes of Bookville and friends. I'll gladly send a copy to anyone wants one.
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As We Enter
A small-but-perfectly-formed poetic inclusion of mine was to be found in Elimae last month. If you missed it, please find it here.
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Friday, 25 May 2007
Banoffee Pie Festival
Confirmed details for June 17th; I shall be reading poetry.
banoffee pie SUMMER FESTIVAL
is to be held on SUNDAY 17th JUNE (Father's Day!!)
the bands
THE SPIES
J BIRD & ELSIE
FREERUNNER
THE FLAMING MOES
SAUGAL MASSIE
FREAKFLAG
THESE MONSTERS
MARIPOSA
SDF
RYAN IS FUN
the singersongwriters
BETH JEANS-HOUGHTON
LEE X HALEY
BRIDIE JACKSON
RICHARD DAWSON
the artistic activities
GlueGroup gallery
life.work.art
Adam Thomas & friends poetry
razamataz lorry excitement
Jeepers Peepers burlesque girls
Penny Whipworth
Chelsea Bangs!
Dee Clover
'Brass Knuckle' Betty
DJ Sweetie Amour
the stalls
50ft Long Horse t-shirts
Kat & Bethan's stall
Record Swap for charity
Badges
Sweets
Icecreams
Frozen Bananas
Face Painting
BBQ
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Wednesday, 02 May 2007
The Creative
In the next issue of The Creative - "a magazine to enable University of Sunderland students to display their original poetry, prose, and articles relating to creativity" - I will be the featured guest writer. This is following my lecture at the beginning of the year entitled The Seawater Journals in which I presented poetry and music in response to this quotation by John Kinsella in which he describes the remit of radical pastoral poetry:
Functionality, modernity, the "awareness" of artifice in the creation of pastoral texts, the consideration of movement between urban and rural spaces - both conceptual and physical - and, fundamentally, the relationship of lyrical language and the position of the observer, the lyrical I, to the rural.
The featured poem in the magazine will be "The Mudlarks".
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elimae
A fragment of the poem "As We Enter" is due to be published in the May edition of elimae which can be found online from May 16th.
elimae, pronounced el-ee-may, and standing for electronic literary magazine, was founded by Deron Bauman in 1996 and publishes essays, fiction, interviews, poetry and reviews.
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Yard
"Yard", a short story, has been self published by Sunmast Pamphlets using the font Garamond. Enquiries as to its availability to circletide AT gmail.com.
The short story has a glaring grammatical error which cannot fail to be noticed. Discounts available to those who say nothing.
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Thursday, 08 June 2006
oak and heather
you shook
at station
after three months
precursor collision
the train from kings x
a change
as good as
a rest
commisioned your fatigue
on the platform
full of arrivals and shivers
outside, streets
of millet and rye
leaden evenings
& drains poaching water
a pencil drawn sky
down sun
returning home now
country side
it has been three months
cause and after
slow and slower
ours and other
oak and heather
as good as
a rest
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Saturday, 03 June 2006
Home and garden.
Of course, it is the mark of the ambivalence of the nation as a narrative strategy - and an apparatus of power - that it produces a continual slippage into analogous, even metonymic categories. And it is of no detriment that those words are stolen and rent and wrought in the middle of a general, winding argument. Here they are given without reference, displayed without context like sculptures upon plinths in the whitewash glare of the gallery.
The sought materiality of the essay however, is a homegiving one. It seeks to constitute in its very make up - indeed, the very essence of the material from which it is created - a sense of belonging, a metaphorical leap into supportive arms. In this way, academia is self-referential and closing and exponential, it is for us by us. But which comes first, the home-giver or the home-seeker. And what is the movement between the two?
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Wednesday, 29 March 2006
In defence of narrators.
Great plans of discourse, practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak deny benign knowledge. In the novel, absence is conspicuous; there is never mention of the conditions of possibility, of what allowed this state to come in to being, the enablement of narrative. Knowledge is formative and contains power. There are no dead facts.
This is why the narrator is more important than the critic.
Criticism undermines the universal, ridicules made on behalf of the all-encompassing, made on behalf of the authority, made on behalf of the canon. It denies the dead fact, brings flow to lakes, and movement to the seemingly inanimate. The prescription of stillness imposed by the work's claims to finality is both the censure and the closure of the text. It signals the end. In this way inference is the true means of interpretation, interpretation the reifying aspect.
This is why the narrator is more important than the critic.
And where to look? Miscegenation, crossover, dilution, fragmentation. These are the playgrounds of true discourse, not in terms of creation - nothing is more affected than the deliberately fractured, sourced, intertextual writing of an author - but in terms of deriving meaning.
The text is a single grammar, but a multiplicitous communication. Bridges of meaning span the utterance of a novel in several, simultaneous languages. And if it happens in the novel, why not culture? If the novel is read and distilled infinitely, why not culture and society of which all novels are fabricated? Hybridity is present within both text and the formations of people. The constant interplay between monology and freedom, control and play, what is said and what is meant, permeate even the most basic exchanges.
This is why the narrator is more important than the critic.
The everyday, then, is the site of multiplicity and it is this that the novel, the newspaper and the weblog is able to draw its longevity and authority. All are interactions between words and various objects in the milieu of the day, all are temporary contacts with the essence of being. The diverse peculiarities of the everyday underline social exchange, literary communication and history. The variant and simultaneous meaning preclude any reduction to a single meaning.
This is why the narrator is more important than the critic.
But this does not affect writing, and should not affect writing. It is a theory, a metanarrative the same as the others. It is a grand story that denies grand stories. It is a theoretical organisation that denies other theoretical organisation. It is a concept, a clever argument that is the denial of itself and the negation of itself and so, it is nothing. Fluidity and multiple-meaning destroys nothing and advances nothing.
This is why the narrator is more important than the critic.
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Wednesday, 22 March 2006
Those four walls.
I titled for a reason. These Four Walls, a weblog long gone and abandoned, referred to an imagination, projections onto the smooth white walls of a suburban flat. I was in the throes of boredom, incarcerated by my own laziness; a laziness that was entirely my own, but bred from an inactivity borne from a lack of postgraduate opportunities. There is nothing for us here; we must split up and look for survivors.
Walls were back in focus today also, so close as to be immediately imperceptible, but gradually visible. Today's class was dull, rhythmic and closed. A book, Women of Sand and Myrrh by Hanan al-Shaykh, was as uninspiring as it was overrated. The blinds were drawn, the projector set, the notes shuffled and - click - boredom ensued.
The central theme of the book - the imaginations of the repressed woman - was hammered into the pages; it may as well have been in bold type. Endless repetitions of meaningless (and impotently, self-confoundingly censored) sexual encounters in an anonymous and conveniently vague Arab, desert state held nothing in my imagination. For the deeply stupid, the clumsy translation even spelt out the limited and well-trod preoccupations in the final, galling sentence. Must we have everything spelt out?
It seems we must. The lecture was stringent, unfaltering and seemingly oblivious to all derailing lines of enquiry from the students. The class is taught, but it is accepted that we as human adults have a right and prerogative to pursue arguments as and when the arguments arise.
What is an Arab? Is this a political term? A geographical one? How, when the book is set as an insight into the Arab world, can it maintain any relevance when the 'Arab' world it portrays is vague and decentred? Where is the cutting edge in a book detached from any real political or religious engagement? As politically important as the book may be in terms of allowing a voice to a repressed minority, when it is devoid of any real literary quality, there is very little hope of even answering this questions with any poise or skill. There must be more valid modes of enquiry. I have more pertinent arguments than those above, but when the writing is so interminably dull, I cannot myself to elucidate upon them.
So those four walls were redundant. Nothing today, of course, reached the culmination of my morning epiphany, nothing reached the heights of that tiny, dusty room. It was brought to life in a dream and will be realised all too soon on paper. There is far to go, but the four walls of that room hold more potential than I've felt in a long time. The fecundity of networks was encouraged by fitful sleep, dots were joined in a beautiful, sprawling map of stars and lines, all claimed and postured within my tired evening's rest.
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Monday, 20 February 2006
Absence in literature
Immediately to the blank canvas while he, unbroken by language, borrows books. Things flood at the minute. Dams built within time, constraints of time, walls of time, making spaces for this and that, for all. Breached daily, we subside and gather, swell and resist. We paper the crack and plaster the fissures, avoiding disaster with each hastily scribbled appointment, note, list.
Ah, the lists. The endless nothing of things, the lists and lists – even the lists of lists! To keep track of my daily obligations I write at least fifteen lists a day, not as distraction you understand, but a necessary organisation. But then you need the lists to keep track of the lists. Enumeration breeds contempt…
Lecture was slow and burdened. A basic misunderstanding – that, namely, the purpose of literary criticism is not to inscribe an inherent of value upon a text, nor to realise its merits or sustainability, Rather, the role of the critic should be as enabler. So, when we arrive at World Literature (a capital concept) we are stung.
The cry in the classes, penned into their tiny chairs and single desks, unable to conference or permit. They hear of the world and wish to speak of their culture. In my culture, they say, this is not how we do things. You in the West, they accuse (a capital venture as well as a capital concept, no?), you in the West undermine with your authority. You think that you are the best at everything.
What does best have to do with anything? We are not administrators of taste! We are not financed by opinion and attitude! These things to not sit easy within us, they do not rest for us, who are called literary scholars or literary critics. To look at literature with regards to the world is not to state preference or dominance. It is to recognise absence.
By drawing another text into one’s culture, in encountering work from another sphere is a positive, constructive process. In regarding something truly different, we recognise its absence from our own society. The absence is a void which we readily recognise, but also a void which we readily fill.
If there is not the direct translation, if we are unable to find an equivalent, then we must reconstruct that concept, fill that void with an immediacy, with something to hand from our own culture. In doing so, we realise the formulations of our society and our history. We observe the forked paths of progress and we notice the substitutions and adaptations that progression bring. We notice what is missing, but more importantly we understand how it is missing, we understand the purpose of it’s nothingness, for absence is positive and a mirror.
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Wednesday, 15 February 2006
Anatomy Of Interpretation II
The previous post began with the present, establishing a conflict between Hebraism and Hellenism that caused the present to exist in permanent variance and oscillation between the two ideals. The post also ended with the present, and a hope for emancipation through interpretation.
Vassilis Lambropoulos however moves the argument on, stating that this present never happened. The constant flux between the spiritual goal of the past (Hellenism) and the reason-based future (Hebraism) represents the tensions and contradictions between attempting to achieve spirituality (Hellenic) through reason (Hebraic).
Hellenic autonomy has therefore come to be ruled by Hebraic reason, and has come to represent, and be represented by, disinterested contemplations of purposeless beauty, it has come to be known as the science of aesthetic – the internalised rule of autonomy. VL identifies manners, taste and style as forms of aesthetic conduct, what is essentially a question of attitude.
VL plays back through history and extracts the development of interpretation in relation to modernity. He talks of the governing States of the 19th Century and their specific evolution. Art in this social context was a tool for distinction; it was a method in which one was able to form part of an elite. However, for the masses, this canon lost all public relevance, and yet retained the discipline of interpretation.
The late 20th Century sees postmodernism occur as a desperate effort to preserve the authority of the text. Aesthetic conduct comes into play as an all-encompassing textualisation which consumes all and attempts to convert everything into ‘influence’ and ultimately, writing. Interpretation therefore for VL, resides purely within the intellectual domain. Interpretation emerged as the first political right of the middle classes which begat spiritual freedom.
Now, the only emancipation allowed by interpretation is that which it allows from itself – that is to say, from any political or social importance or relevance. Interpretation has abandoned its public role, denounced its public accountability and embraced theological politics. Hence, VL charts the demise of interpretation, and establishes a basis for an argument for restoration of the sociological movement of autonomy and a redefinition of cultural politics.
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Tuesday, 14 February 2006
Anatomy Of Interpretation I
Continuing in my somewhat sporadic vein of posting, this has all bulk and no sulk. Nil lamenting, no abstract postulating, just some plain old plagiarism and summary for the benefit of my tired
Investigating Vassilis Lambropoulos’ Anatomy Of Intepretation this week. Lambropoulos distinguishes between Hellenic and Hebraic modes of thought. Hellenism belongs to the past, and implicates society in its pursuit of art and spirit. Hebraism on the other hand pertains to the future, to modes of reason and morality. Western civilisation, that is to say Europe and its eurocentrisms, are caught between a Hellenic past and a Hebraic future. The explanation of this relationship forms the basis for the argument and the narrative of his book.
A historical reassessment is undertaken by VL in order to understand the stasis that the West finds itself in. He cites the schism of the Christian church in 1054 as the point from which Europe began to pursue the expression of form, that is to say, the illumination of matter and the arrest of time.
VL divides ‘matter’ into the worldly (material) and the spiritual (form). The Protestant church preferred the worldly, rejecting the dogma, hierarchy & highness of the Catholic church. To compensate, it found that it needed to anchor itself in something other than recurring ritual; it found solace and purpose in ‘form’, the spiritual happening of matter.
‘Form’ itself is a type of redemption, a redemption brought about through representation – that is the extraction of the worldly to the spiritual. Word, for VL, is the vehicle for representation and so language takes upon a crucial role. This becomes the new ritual, a secular ritual of verbal communication, a community of forms in which everyone is able to express and be expressed.
A prerequisite of this is faith in ‘form’, which involves a necessary rejection of both scholastic exegesis (taught critical/explanatory interpretation) or nominalist scepticism. Nominalism should be read here as the idea that a variety of objects to which a single general word (cat for instance) applies have nothing in common but the name, and the scepticism arises from nominalism implication that language bears no direct relevance to the object it describes, there is no relationship between the world and the word.
This faith in form lead the Protestant reformists to take the text as the pre-eminent type of ‘form’, because it’s basis is in language – the text represents the most eloquent example of secular communion. As a result of the elevation of text, a new mode of understanding is created to help penetrate it: interpretation.
The discipline of communion holds an inherent promise of freedom; interpretation allows an autonomous mode of communication. This spiritual liberation (from all forms of worldly authority) allows an unrestrained relationship with form and vice versa, and hence, for the religious, enabled the Kingdom of God on earth. This moment, for VL, inaugurates modernity and signals Christianity’s abandoning of notions of eternal time and an infinitely sited redemption in exchange for a pledged, personally accessible and autonomous present.
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Wednesday, 08 February 2006
Modern relevance.
I write this now, while I have the chance. I write to confirm and destroy, a summary and an execution. An execution and a resolution.
Winter winds tear me as I sleep these nights, ripped apart by dreams of obligation and inference. I have things to do, these future occupations inhabit my evenings, I work the day through before it happens.
I complain too much about this.
No writing for a while, building up as I am towards a career and an education – falsities of both flit upon the widening horizon, the yawn of a passed sundown.
Lectures on Monday and Wednesday – I hope I write to you more than this – but they improve and grow in stature as the year diminishes. A theoretical fulcrum helps, a point of knowledge on which to balance fictions.
Criticism this evening caused the book to flower. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple started slowly, a recontextualising in bold, steady occurrance, and the progression of the book beginning from a point in history that I did not entirely understand. To view beginnings though, that is to say to create beginnings, we must first be aware of a movement.
Movements are all around, necessarily. They are constant and in flux and must be written before they are to be noticed. So where is my movement, what is my relevance, where in the world am I? The nuances of my situation – do they require writing about?
No.
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Wednesday, 25 January 2006
Breconridge.
Achieving something of a fad, these early mornings, pearl light and brisk skip across the traffic lights. Past the felled trees, a community centre is building, and round the punjabi restaurant, and to home - briefly - before setting off to work. Half a pint of orange juice, half a pint of water, the obligatory marmite and tea.
The occasion of my birth has happened twice. Once and first in a snow-capped, red mountain range sitting out upon a frozen veranda amongst the iced refuse sacks and frosted asphodels. It was Colorado Springs, 2003 and I was reading, clutching to something. Then the weather snapped and we got taken upon the highway in convoy, three of us in tan coloured people-shifters, long wheelbase and drinks-holders in the back. The drifts of snow got deeper and the herds of buff and cow grew more sporadic but also denser - they fought against the cold those animals. We stopped for petrol at a sloped, attended gas station. Inside, the fridge was full and the door was open.
The mountain whined and points of light shone out, a zig-zag of macadam just visible as space between the trees. the pines grew up and out, positioned preposterously on overhangs and bends. The drifts were true drifts now, footprinted and full of history and we peered through the reflections as the car slowed into gear upon the treacherous corners, looking for mountain lions and even bears.
Stopping at a small wooden bridge, filmed with ice, we wondered. I walked, accompanied by three men and two women, all brave enough against the cold. The children stayed in the cars, laughing and sleeping at intervals. We weren't long, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, but it seemed long enough as we trudged up a compacted hill following the trails of our breath, much like this morning only more urgent and it was not work that we hurried for.
At the rise, just as fatigue began to break in, we summoned ourselves and paused. Looking around, we knew what we were here for, but the faces stared at each other first, in solemn silence, an approval of sorts before the act of looking.
At this height, the entire state could be seen.
Four crumples of mountain ridges, intersected by planes of sky and a delicate roll of land down onto the flats where valleys eased into farmland and the tiny collections of civilisation, commissioned to our eyes only by clusters of light. It was not dark but such was the scale of the thing that only the places illuminated were able to advertise, the rest was a dark guess, a landscaped grope before the uselessness of our eyes. The outlines we made clear, a difference in warmth more than anything, the sky simply registered as more nothing than the rest of the scene laid out before us.
Later, back in the car and returning home, we noticed the eighty-foot silent drop of the frozen waterfall just beyond the ledge, just beneath the land and the sky.
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Tuesday, 17 January 2006
Avoidance techniques.
Avoidance, that pleasured discretion. At this moment, according to schedule and reason, I should be overlooking my essays, crossing the ‘i’s and dotting the ‘t’s, pulling out the strands of a bibliography and weaving in the footnotes. I have become meticulous, a learned response that saves time. Just so much as a secondary glance requires me to note the author, date, publishing house and title of the book at the top of the A4 lined sheet. Similarly when writing essays, the footnote is the first to go in, before the formatting or the quotation marks even. A tiny number, then a page number and an abbreviation, my shorthand unreadable to the outsider.
I skim the paragraphs, looking for clumsy over/undersized sentences, run ons, tautologies, and the reuse of adjectives. A thesaurus is the most important book I have. Today though, I am avoiding.
I will complete this task before lunch, but with the main body of the essay done, with the intellectual hurdles and hoops passed I can relax into my day for the first time in weeks. It is for the best that I know none of my tutors or students have found this writing. So much time spent lamenting, circling and discussing. It functions as a window into my boredom at times, or a playground for plagiarists at others. Then again, perhaps they have found it. I have no way of knowing, or caring.
In the mean time, I refresh my browser waiting for a mail. Outlook Express refuses to work, so to the internet it is, with all its potencies of avoidance; the newspapers, the music reviews, the mp3 downloading sites, the endless endless weblogs, the submission guidelines for publishing houses. In deed some of these are my next pursuits – buy some music, construct a manuscript from my recent body of poetry, write an article or two. In their own way, all avoidances of writing the necessary, flawed novel, the novel I know lies somewhere between the type and the floorboards.
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Monday, 16 January 2006
Banville, Kundera, intertextuality.
It seems that both the author and the narrator in Kundera's Laughter And Forgetting and Banville's The Newton Letter have lost faith in the primacy of text. Kundera acts in a different, more transparent way to Banville, referring openly to texts by authors such as Thomas Mann and Breton, even going so far as to include a chapter with characters named Voltaire, Petrarch, Lermontov and Goethe. Banville is more subtle, employing undertones of and references to Goethe and Von Hoffmansthal.
The purpose of this intertextuality can be shown through the citing of the two critics who helped to popularise and define the term. Whilst employing different definitions and functions for the word, both Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes wish to show how meaning is disseminated or diminished through intertextuality. For Julia Kristeva, who coined the term, intertextuality involves the continual suspension of meaning through and between texts that reference each other, whilst Roland Barthes suggests that it involves a displacement of meaning, usually onto the reader. In either case, meaning and the author’s responsibility to it, is lost.
The role of the author is being lost in the narrator and vice-versa, and as a result a new author-figure is being created. By forcing the reader to consider not just the text itself, but the narrator’s and the author’s role in its construction, they allow the text to shed its definities of meaning. Kundera goes even further, forcing the reader to question even the very language the text was written in. his work being written in many languages – which is the authoritative version? Kundera tells us in one passage, “If I were to write a novel about that gifted and radical generation, I would call it In Pursuit Of An Errant Act.” The translation of this sentence is taken from the modern version by Aaron Asher. However, the earlier translation by Michael Henry Heim has Kundera naming the novel Stalking A Lost Deed. While it is fair to assume that it is not the reader’s obligation to place the two texts alongside each other in order to pore over the nuances of translation, this example (one of many) shows how both time and authorial intervention can drastically alter the weight and meaning of one sentence, as well as an entire novel.
Kundera places an author’s note right at the beginning of the novel, signalling the relevance that a specific translation holds; something that is often taken for granted in an English-speaking country where multi-linguistic understanding is not the norm. In establishing that the two authors utilise a complicated and multi-layered approach to narration, one that defies easy explanation or any claims to authenticity or infallibility, we are able to understand that the subject-matter of their books will be necessarily affected. Banville and Kundera very much take history as a central preoccupation in their works and, naturally, the role of the narrator is vital in their exploration of this topic.
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Quote unquote.
Cannot help but draw up a quote, sketch it out as some sort of context, a reminder of lost literatures, of an author constantly underrated:
A lie is only a lie when the one lied to thinks he is hearing the truth. When the liar and the listener both know it is a lie, then the lie becomes transformed into ritual. Henry James recognised this, which makes him for me the first modern novelist. Society he tells us, lives by, can only live by, necessary falsehoods.
John Banville
There be craft.
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Sunday, 15 January 2006
Banville and Kundera.
Loosening into the routine now, shifted focuses towards Banville. Initially Banville remained alone, capturer of my intellect. Unable to divide or conquer his work I was drawn into spirals of fascination and obsession, endless readings.
There can be no understanding in absorption though and so I needed another. Taking Kundera, I placed The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting alongside The Newton Letter and waited. I had vague notions of history, both are tellings and retellings, a magnifying glass upon craft and forgetting. Gradually (he says, as if the work was not his own or this pseudo-process contained no pretension) shapes emerged, the role of the narrator, the indistinguishability of it all, the creation of new words.
Author and narrator are inseparable, a term coined fictional autobiographical narrative, and this stylistic implement, a wonderfully blunt weapon, makes its own marks upon connotations of history and past-present relations. A unique viewpoint – fallible and intrusive – leads to constructions of history and warnings at the moment of interpretation. The loss is meaning.
So Kundera and Banville exist alongside each other as monuments to the major theoretical issues of our time; the reduction and understandng of self-aware, rationalising narrative forms and of the depersonalisation of modes of knowledge and discovery. This is the aim and the direction, and I have others to help me.
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Thursday, 12 January 2006
Supreme fictions.
One academic piece down, and immediately now onto the next one. I have five days. The library is surprisingly busy, the clement weather drawing out students accordingly, the morning was pale and clear, a stillness associated with spring. This winter has been endless and unmarked, without any indicators of progression. It has not got steadily colder or warmer, it just oscialltes between all of its predictabilities. It has been a long winter.
The next essay is to feature John Banville and The Newton Letter, a book that took me immediately when I read it and featured heavily in my writing on this blog. The trouble now is converting an innocent interest, the live fascination of a text and its connections, into a honed argument. Upon reading the critical heritage (the library, for once, excelling itself with laminated critiques, summaries and theses), the task immediately becomes more daunting. How to write on what has been written on before? A book that in the first instance is so infinitesimally aware of its pastiche and politics has naturally spawned a whole army of appreciators desperate to provide the study that will unlock the novella’s meaning.
Every single one of them achieves a literary anaemia in light of the others, each of them pulling out the tensions (and pretensions) of nationalism vs. revisionism and Banville’s movement away from his literary heritage (whilst drawing heavily and consciously upon a range of predecessors from Henry James’ The Europeans, to Goethe, to Shelley). They all even feature synopsises of the exact convolutions of his satire and humour, deadening and stifling it in the process. They bore me with their recalcitrant renditions of postmodern self-reference. I get the point.
So, here we are, trying to achieve something different. Impossible. But I have neither the interest nor the time to simply rehash these monuments of criticism. The printing jobs are imminent, promotion for the festivals is required, hiring of equipment is looming – the intricacies and necessities of performance, minute-by-minute, are arising. So, as head back on the metro, juddering up hills and through tunnels, I shall reread the eighty pages of the novella and try to form something. I have put down the guides and summaries.
Think of what first struck you.
It was the sex. It was the urgent, awkward, distant lovemaking, the repetition of the name of another, the blurring of faces and the merging of names. In the moonlight, in the garden, in full view of the family, in the mother’s bed, in the mother’s name, in the mother’s imaginations, all in the light of misconception and false guess-work.
No, it was the displacement. It was the inability to adhere to the project in hand, to write the biography of Newton, to project the intellectual fervour simultaneously encouraged and rejected by the historical study onto a family. The sex was merely a form of displacement. Ah, but was the displacement merely a form of sex. Coitus with the past, intercourse with a history that you’re trying to forget, sex as amnesia?
Now, at long last, perhaps we’re getting somewhere.
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Thursday, 05 January 2006
Found in translation.
Must complete thought today, must paragraph and extend, explain and quote.
Time is running out but the bills are getting paid, well all except the electricity and the gas and the council tax and the rent. But time is running out and the bills are getting paid.
Endless words ended a long time ago and I’m down to dry cognition, the bones of discourse as I pull apart a text and reconstruct it with another, a theoretical frame, Lefebvre’s illusions of transparency, the negation of realism – our live is dominated by a falsity of free intellectualism and so our environment builds us.
I remove these thoughts, patently not my own, and seam them with Paul Auster’s means and scope. City Of Glass is its own labyrinth and consciously so, denying criticism, even the banalities of postmodernity. It knows too much. The only recourse is to take it as an example of social space in itself, mirroring to an extent Blanchot’s L’espace litteraire (Auster has translated his work previously), a vessel and a gospel, a carrier and producer.
So that is the day yawning ahead, once again behind itself. I really should have finished by now.
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Wednesday, 23 November 2005
Site.
Backdated this one, making up for lost time. Application to other circumstances similar (perhaps identical on the surface) is allowed & forgiven. Create a template and displace across weeks; this is another Monday, is another Wednesday. Time-honoured, a mould of learning, feeling the same rope slip through fingers over and over again, the will to grasp evident in cogitative tracing but motor-skills ignore the impulses.
He is a collector of books, interested in the covers over the uncovering. New editions hold a fascination, yet another allusion to unpick. The final allegory – a retranslation. Who edited? do the page numbers remain the same? where do the appendices lie? Follow the serif of that type with your eyes and ask – does this increase something? My reading has hit a wall, held dead. It is all too much. But occupation is on the way, my other distractions are clearing with each morning that opens and so I expect to return soon. There is Kundera to expose, challenging his interfering narrator on his claims to clarity. Kundera wishes for it both ways; the freedom of fiction and the authority of history. Of course, in doing so he reverses them – history is freedom (a writing, an authorship of time) and fiction is authority (the individual as truth). The relations here are given, specifically in The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, through the eyes and ties of memory.
DeLillo looked promising. Previous works digested, enjoyed and remembered intellectually. Check. Seminal modern work. Check. Influential and progressive literary friends. Check. Nominal sense of postmodernity and contemporality. Check. It all went wrong with Cosmopolis though, written without true emotion, taking the construction of a world (the novelist’s greatest allowance) and cleaning it out, paring it down, sterilising it. I have only read it in starts and fits, never conducive to drawing out theme and intention, but I feel no love. However, this may lead to an essay; disillusion (or seeing what you’re trying to do but knowing you cannot do it) with a text provides concrete foundations for an argument. You have to search for the validating components of the work.
Presentations to be given on Poe (flanuer, narrators, doubles) and Ishiguro (ghosts and memory, duality) are also due in a couple of weeks so hopefully this space can return to form, be of use to me and of interest to a reader. It is a testing ground and a boundary point, so bear with me.
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Monday, 14 November 2005
On detecting two authors.
On detecting two authors, I discovered Edgar Allen Poe to be the false embarrassment to American literary history, our fragmentary flaneur and psychological botanist of the asphalt. Inventor of detectives, subjective obsessor of the ephemeral and the epistemological, he walks at night with supernatural, absurd steps and whilst circling psychological truths with an overabundance of meaning he cannot help but fall upon social comment and deliberately scything prejudice. He is all in one the trace of causes, the solver of mysteries and the mystery of a solution.
Paul Auster is to be found as his pupil, the arch-identifier with transparent cities and master-dislocater of genre, a geographer of ontologies, all beard and brain and failing eyes. Disappearing notebooks means disappearing author, he vanishes into his trilogies and translations, drawn into the complexities of city-plans of phone-calls in the night and gently ridiculous speech patterns. He knows of a knowing, and is the man of reconstruction; the thread of his discourse always concealing an awkward sensuality, the cut of his remark always filling a space you thought you saw.
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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
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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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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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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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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