Saturday, December 31, 2005

Stuff happens?




The Work and its author by Roger Shattuck. It came from somewhere, but I can't find the link. Got half-way through the other day, but wanting to concentrate, left it. Now, looking for it, came across Denis Dutton's, The Pleasure of Fiction, a long review of Joseph Caroll's Literary Darwinism, which had previously read, but couldn't remember details of! Although knowing the Proust piece was important (but so ignorant as never to have heard of Shattuck), once back on evolutionary psychology & lit., knew I had to read it through first. Maybe my questions about reading and writing might be answered without me having to make the effort to think too much about it.

Plenty of readers would no doubt say they would prefer to read the novels than spend their valuable time reading about them. I don't fall into that cateogry. My inchoate thoughts on this run along the lines of "When it comes down to it each person has a different way of tackling and using literature".

You can make models until you are blue in the face (and here we have two, Carroll's and Pinker's) but it has to fit reality. I suspect, with reading, you are either never going to get the truth out of people (which might point to evolutionary psychology) or there will be so many different reasons given as to make the construction of a few generalising models impossible.

Some readers keep up to date, making reading lists, actively searching out new authors; other seem to be stuck reading a central core of books over and over and are reading pretty much serenpendipitously. What does this say in evolutionary psychological terms? There are probably as many answers to this as people who read.

Is it just about pleasure seeking? We feel this is not true because it is generally considered literature is of lasting value. But then our basic instincts and their satisfaction, eating, sleeping, sex, have lasting value to us. It would be nice to think reading is more than keeping up with others. Though my interest in empathy, theory of minds and so makes me think it is a lot to do withgetting the upper hand - and quite natural in that - rather than to do with deep human values or aesthetics.Then I'm a cynic, and a devotee of Potter's Oneupmanship. In a nutshell: We want to know what they might know.

A quick and easy way to keep up with others (can't get it out of people directly for the most part) is by reading what they read. On the other hand the facility with which people through weblogs, for example, are telling everyone else what they read or are about to read is what exactly? Well, this is, to be frankly cynical to an extreme, to wear other people down al la Potter, by hinting the others, who are not reading all this stuff, are somewhat deficient in the literature department. Once this train of thought is inculcated, by the mere mention of titles (after all there is no obligation on the part of the reader to explain in full their understanding of what they have read), you are at an advantage.

As soon as you've said it, you think of people you know who you feel couldn't be reading for this sort of reason. Then the theorists comes in to tell you they don't know why they are really doing all this reading....

For now I am happy with Caroll's idea about David Copperfield and his books:


What David gets from these books is not just a bit of mental cheesecake, a chance for a transient fantasy in which all his own wishes are fulfilled. What he gets is lively and powerful images of human life suffused with the feeling and understanding of the astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them. It is through this kind of contact with a sense of human possibility that he is enabled to escape from the degrading limitations of his own local environment. He is not escaping from reality; he is escaping from an impoverished reality into the larger world of healthy human possibility. By nurturing and cultivating his own individual identity through his literary imagination, he enables himself to adapt successfully to this world. He directly enhances his own fitness as a human being, and in doing so he demonstrates the kind of adaptive advantage that can be conferred by literature.






Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Graham Greene: novel, film, novel


The Quite American 2002 directed by Phillip Noyce

Having already read the film reviews when it came out and sensing Michael Caine couldn't be right for the part - though he got praise - the film (BBC2 27 Dec 05) worked despite those, sweaty-lidded, puffy, glass-wearer's eyes. You think pretty hard to imagine an actor who might have done Fowler better.

I think what I did was combine the film with what I remembered of the book, while watching the film, making the film better than it actually was. Though it wasn't bad. Here is the perennial debate about the book and the film. Have you ever concluded a film was better than the book it came from?

Having slept on it: a strong desire to see what others thought of the film (and the book) in preparation for the re-read. Came across Greeneland: The World of Graham Greene, and a September 2004 Guardian piece by Zadie Smith celebrating Greene's centenary, with special reference to TQA. The argument: "The Quiet American, his love story set in the chaos of 1950s Vietnam, shows him to be the greatest journalist there ever was".

Greene is at now at the top of my list in the category of modern novelist who put himself and his life into his books. His anti-Americanism is topical but different from Pinter's. If my memory of his life history serves me well he visited the U.S. quite a lot despite his views.

Other articles:

A haunting portrait of US-backed terror in 1950s Vietnam

By Richard Phillips, 17 December 2002
Despite coming from World Socialist Website, published by the International Committee of the Fourth International... I can see Trotsky in my minds eye now, scribbling speeches to the last in his hidy-hole in Mexico, in between tending cacti, depicted by Richard Burton in "The Assassination of Trotsky", with Alain Delon as assassin behaving in what can only be described as as squirmingly awful fashion to illustrate guilt or something. All redemed by the presence of late Romy Schneider.... this does the film (and how it was not distributed in the light of 9/11) and the book and the previous version of the film (1958) by Mankiewicz, with Michael Redgrave as Fowler, which Greene condemned as propoganda.

Click2Flicks does a potted history of the Vietnam conflict covering the period of the film

Other articles on the film and the book and the background :

(1)
By the Bombs' Early Light; Or, The Quiet American's War on Terror by H. Bruce Franklin
published in The Nation, 3 February 2003

(2) In Our Time No Man Is a Neutral by Graham Gorham Davis, NYT, 11 March 1956

(3)
Graham Greene's Vietnam by Tom Curry

(4)
Willful Blindness by Cynthia Fuchs in popmatters.com (film review with extras)

(5) The Quiet American reviewed at BrothersJudd.com
Saw there was a weblog, so checked. Came across this on the truth behind "Boston", Upton Sinclair's depiction of
Sacco and Vanzetti. Saw the film on TV and remember feeling sorry for the two "victims" of injustice..

Budd Parr has done some book-film discussion. Unfortunately, it is mostly about books I've never heard of!



Wednesday, December 21, 2005

Fiction.




Two books: Andrew Crumely's Mobius Strip and Orwell's Coming up for Air.

Mobius
took my fancy from the title. If you know what a mobius strip is you are well on the way to guessing what may be in a novel with it in the title. We learn quite soon about a E T A Hoffmann novel, The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr, written, other sources tell us, about 1830, under the German title Katr Murr, briefly summarised at

http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/1999/cur9904

Once finished I checked around to see this way of writing was around a long time ago:

NICOLAI KLIMII ITER SUBTERRANEUM
(Nicolas Klim’s Underground Journey)

by Ludvig Holberg (1741) Translation © Dennis List, 2001-2004

The Orwell I hadn't read before. After a false start a month or two ago, I got beyond the first 10 pages on the second attempt (it all a question of mood you know..), to be pleasantly surprised. Listening to Michael Bywater's book being read by Stephen Fry on Radio 4 this week, puts me so much in mind of this. Curious to know at what stage he wrote it, see from Guardian, it was partly written in Marrakesh.




Sunday, December 18, 2005

EL Doctorow "Reporting the Universe"



Dem Wahren, Schönen, Guten

liked this and so do I:

From E. L. Doctorow, Reporting the Universe:

Henry James, in his essay 'The Art of Fiction,' suggests how fiction is made and the source of its genius as a system of knowledge. Speaking of the 'immense sensibility ... [that] takes to itself the faintest hints of life ... [and] converts the very pulses of the air into revelations," he celebrates the novelists intuitive faculty that, for example, would inspire a writer "who has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost" to write a book about the military. So that she might, as I extrapolate, walk past an army barracks and, hearing a fragment of soldiers' conversation, go home and write a credible novel about army life. This accords with my experience. I know I can hope to write well about places I've never seen and times before I was born and in voices other than my own. What is secret in all of this is not necessarily the power, as James describes it, "to guess the unseen from the seen." The secret may be that the discipline itself is capacitating, or as we've taken to saying lately, empowering. I have argued elsewhere that "a sentence spun from the imagination, that is, a sentence composed as a lie, confers on the writer a degree of perception or acuity or heightened awareness that a sentence composed with the strictest attention to fact does not." Why and how this is I don't know, but everyone from the writers of the ancient sacred texts to James himself has relied on that empowering paradox. It involves the working of our linguistic minds on the world of things-in-themselves, when, our perception shot through with memory, our consciousness haunted by dreams, we ascribe meaning to the unmeant and the sentence forms with such synaptic speed that the act of writing, when it is going well, seems no more than the dutiful secretarial response to a silent dictation.

But let's return to the idea that from one fragment of conversation overheard by the writer a whole life and culture can be projected. And of course it can be something else than a conversational fragment, it can be an image, a phrase of music, a felt injustice--any private excitement of the writer's mind so mysteriously evocative that it flowers into a novel. This, in microcosm, reminds me of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, which proposes that from the infinitesimal happenstance of a singular moment/thing the entire universe blow out into its dimensions, exploded in one silent flash into the volume and chronology of space-time.

Is this an outlandish comparison? Perhaps it would be less so if we brought God into the discussion; because if we are made in his image, then it is a truism that every work of art mimics God's cosmic creativity. (In the beginning was the Word.) The Big Bang is our newer more sophisticated though perhaps too flippant metaphor, and the intuitive use of the smallest amount of information to create a fictional world suggests more accurately, more precisely the little bang of the writer's inspiration. And if we recall Emerson's faculty of reporting (that's us) and the possibility of being reported (that's the univeerse), clearly the origin of the universe and the origin of every reported universe in the mind of the writer are isodynamic.

I'm satisfied that the ancient storytellers of the oral tradition, whose systematic fictions were to be eventually recorded in the sacred texts, would have attributed those fictions, or their inspiration, to God, would have attributed to God the consequential revelatory understandings that come of the practice of storytelling when it is done righteously, that is, in the belief that it is a system of knowledge.

Therefore, when I speak of the narratives of the Judeo-Christian heritage as fictions, and their historical communities of believers as fiction readers given, in Coleridge's phrase, to a "willing suspsension of disbelief," I am not speaking pejoratively, I am speaking as a writer about writing and reading, one who knows and can attest to the power of the not entirely rationally derived truths of good storytelling to affect mass consciousness and create moral constituencies.



Thursday, December 15, 2005

Odds and Sods



This:

"God Is With Us": Hitler's Rhetoric and the Lure of "Moral Values

by Maureen Farrell

led to


Knowledge and Propaganda

by Joseph Goebbels


But there was also:

Godwin's Law


and

Fake Authenticity: An Introduction (home page not sure)

Monday, December 12, 2005

NICOLAS KLIM’S UNDERGROUND JOURNEY




NICOLAI KLIMII ITER SUBTERRANEUM
(Nicolas Klim’s Underground Journey)

by Ludvig Holberg (1741)
Translation © Dennis List, 2001-2004

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Breathing in air, breathing out light

As a prelude to some thoughts on my my rest and recreation I would like to re-post the piece on Seville from Saturday 19 February 2005:

Breathing in air, breathing out light

Might get round to altering it one day to make it seem less like a police constable reading his notes out to the judge.



Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Does it matter the world passed me by?



A month both without English media and the internet. The idea had been to keep up with things via internet cafes, but they were further away from the accommodation and more difficult to come by than imagined. Emails were answered but there was no time or inclination to stay online in places which did not have the comforts of my study.

Back a week, a few cursory web forays stirred little enthusiasm. Checking my weblogs for comments and to remind me what I wrote last, had a feeling it might be better to write all this stuff in private notebooks. What possible reason is there for using a public arena? There are two reasonable reasons for sharing: criticism and yet further information; addition and subtraction. The best thing the weblog seem to offer for the writer in me is an appearance of being forced to get thoughts down quickly straight to a post rather than to plan and prepare in advance. The best image: the newspaper editor with all those blank pages to fill.

With a reasonable novel written by a scientist acquired serependipitously while away to keep me occupied - and the renewed habit of reading fiction - checking lit weblogs didn't seem to have the urgency it once did. Where to start? How much to read? Why I don't know, but it started at Chekov's Mistress, where there was something new to me at least: Metaxucafe

A stir at mention of Musil's anniversary: still struggling second time around on vol 1, though know his life and of his work quite well through Burton Pike's Robert Musil: An Introduction to his work. A jolt on reading in Book World of the death of Fowles: re-read TFLW only a short while ago attempting to find best way to write a story I had in mind.

Fowles was of interest to me as much because of the way he was a writer than what he wrote. His fossiking with fossils and curatorship of the little museum up the high street from the cob in Lyme Regis was according to an interview he gave [http://wiredforbooks.org/johnfowles/ ] the need for a writer to have another smaller job.
How and why he included all that geology and biology in TFLW was part of his personal story as much as the story he wrote.

The general line of current criticism of his novels seems to be that he stopped writing them in 1985. The implication: young people read novels and they want to be seen to be reading the ones that count. You don't need to read the novels: read about them and the author. Read bits of them if you can't face the whole lot. Half the entertainment in reading is in why we could start or finish certain ones while other found no difficulty.

Many writers can't write any more novels and are left stranded like beached whales; many write more novels which they might have left unwritten. Fowles was not unique in writing a dud or two and living on long beyond his best work, though another example isn't coming immediately to mind. It seems rather unfair to throw his diaries at his ouvre. A person has to have somewhere to throw his bile.

A writer whose life went into his books like Fowles was Durrell: a tantalisation of the Alexandra Quartet is how much all the goings in the fiction he participated in or witnessed. Waugh too: we know he wrote book after book which were essentially brilliantly written transcriptions of a life. There are writers whose lives have no bearing on their work. Martin Amis comes to mind except only in his first novel, The Rachel Papers. A Fowles or Waugh or Durrell would be fascinating without their novels. Not true of Amis II, though quite true of Amis I.

One thing John Fowles gives is way for a
a way for an aspiring writer to imagine how he or she might end up once famous. Fowles: secluded in Lyme Regis at the top of the hill for decades: he, a nature lover; his first wife a townie by inclination. The extracts from the diaries in the Grauniad are pretty up front about this.

The writer, famous, conscious of his fame, framing his fame in a writerly context. We have learnt Fowles was a difficult man: the essence, or maybe stereotype - or should it be archetype - of the selfish writer, subsuming other lives to his grand project.

...

No desire to get my recent experiences down on paper immediately. Happy to let them stew. There is a physical reason, too. Being calm enough not to be concerned about losing everything is great. Feeling confident of retrieving the core of it - even hoping that when something does get written down it will be more essence than detail - and not being worried about whether I will be able to or not, is uplifting. Empowering is what someone might use rather than uplifting: I can't use that word because I hate it, and its connotations, to death. I can spend more time just thinking, in a diffuse sort of way, about events, knowing that in due course an idea or two will pop up.

....

One idea that arrived as I write is the notion about Rilke and Ronda. That's his bust above by the way, standing lonely on one of the many terraces of the gardens of the Reina Victoria. He looks west towards the mountains of the Guadiaro valley. I have been before to Andalucia several times for shorter stays. My original idea about him adventuring in the immediate countryside was probably false. The view from the Reina Victoria is enough for any man, poet or not.
...

One of the things i want to get into some writing (and by means of some of the many photographs I took) is the simple fact of how a mountain profile can completely change its look in a few degrees. Now it is understandable how easy it was for explorers to get lost. They assumed the shape of the skyline would stay pretty much the same, from which to orienteer, but would find a completely different picture in only a few more strides. Since I know this myself now, I want to find writers of fiction and non-fiction who have mentioned it, and how they have expressed it.

There are of course the analogical and metaphorical uses of such experiences. The changes of physical perpective fixed in a concrete and easily explained case to show how people are constantly changing, presenting unexpected faces.

Although a writer might be able to create fiction through sheer genius, it seems unlikely anything much could come out of such an effort without deep and meaningful experiences to back-up and underly the text. I have started Peter Robb's "A Death in Brazil", which is subtitled: A Book of Omissions. That is the thing I have always seen as important in writing and film. The break away has helped me to focus on it more and more as a route into the best in creativity. Less is more in art, yet in something like travel writing, it is the accummulation of little details which keeps the reader reading, not the cartoon brevity of sparse but meaningful and beautiful prose or poetry.


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