Rock paper scissor

Souffrance

I think of you in that sea of graves beyond the city,
where many stones have been left, among them,

mine: a little piece of dolomite to weigh down a slip of paper.
I would have put your gloves and umbrella in the coffin,

along with one more morning in Berlin with Tanya, an hour
of pigeons rising around you, lilacs wrapped in news

stories, a minute at the barricades, another riding
on your father’s shoulders through the garlic fields, even cigarettes

left over from the occupation I would have placed there.
Instead, this notebook, a pen full of ink, and that short

poem by Hölderlin you loved, so you could go up in smoke
together: you, the notebook, the pen, the poem by Hölderlin.

In the aftermath, you are emulsion on paper, a corpse listening beneath
the ground to a train passing through a polaroid of clouds.

It was Joseph who said that for all eternity, Venice would happen only once.
You are a ghost then, following a ghost back through its only life.

Or as you say now: there were many cities, but never a city twice. 

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Rock paper scissor

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Judith Butler continues to amaze. Why on earth didn't I read her before? Was it because, subconsciously, you associated her writing with queerness (but why the superb Wendy Brown, then?). Or did I just think that the writing would be too dense, convoluted? The book has led me to Adriana Caverero's Inclinations. Looks fascinating..in line with Mary Midgley's great lecture/talk: 'Rings and Books'. Is the problem, or part of the problem, then, that there have been too many male thinkers? 

Carolyn Forche has a beautiful way of speaking. Only started the poetry but her memoir, highly recommended by Rowan Williams, has been on your list for a while. 

Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights was a dream.

This is your museum of stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir,
stones loosened by tanks in the streets
of a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Apollinaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another,
stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, hornblende,
agate, marble, millstones, and ruins of choirs and shipyards,
chalk, marl, and mudstone from temples and tombs,
stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold,
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of the city’s entombment,
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,
those that had flown through windows and weighted petitions,
feldspar, rose quartz, slate, blueschist, gneiss, and chert,
fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe
of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan,
stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,
from a chimney where storks cried like human children,
stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,
altar and boundary stone, marker and vessel, first cast, lode, and hail,
bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,
stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,
stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin, and root,
concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred,
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

Wanted to say a few things about Hardwick's Sleepless Nights..not sure if it's just my jittery state of mind or if the book is genuinely excellent, but I'm surprised the book hasn't received more acclaim (cp. Stoner, for example, which we won't hear the end of for the next five years..if there is a five years, that is..sorry, sorry..I told you about state of my mind).

Okay, I think I've realised that I'm more drawn to the tone of voice in books than to the plot or maybe even to character. Yourcenar's perfect steady and calm voice, in which you can almost hear the breathing; Breece -and this may just be my bad memory- for his gnarled, condensed, gritty sentences that hide a shadow meaning; or Fermor for his..what.. flow, exuberance?;or Paley's wise and humane manner of speaking, so to speak (thank you ll!).

Elizabeth H: stylistic brilliance and a warm, sparkling intelligence.

Somehow she had retrieved from darkness the miracle of pure style.

Her lyrical utterance is saved for her work.

The last two 'chapters'- if that's the word-are possibly the best. away from New York, with its graves next to its banks, in Maine, she lives through

winter after winter, a decade falling like snow on the top of another, soundless.

and writes about cleaning women; those who battle with repetition and the gathering of ashes, their beauty formed out of negatives.. Wandering people who gave up and take on their destiny. What can these people talk about in winter, how they fade -like all of us-with their questions unanswered.

The book is 'about'-that horrible word- what is lost, washed away to sea but also, perhaps, the idea that you cannot destroy a ruin and that sometimes, when the light is right, something of the old structure of our lives returns.

Book of the Year

Book of the Year: How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility by Akiko Busch.

This is a wonderful, profound book about: going offline, dropping out, becoming small, forgetting, absences, the ephemeral nature of the self, how things linger even though they're barely visible, erasure (in art, literature), our desire for lightness...on not being too full of yourself. How in art and life and love we're drawn to the invisible, the unsaid -and how they flit in and out of sight. Without forgetting those who are 'disappeared' by illness or cruelty, or neglect.

I picked this book up at random in Foyles because it wasn't put back on the shelf properly (actually, it shouldn't have been on that shelf at all!). What a discovery! Lost and found, our oldest of games: Hunting? Religion?

I loved the bit about finding old signs in a city (on brick walls, say). Lots of those in London. The words faded, faint traces of a bygone era, the products they were once selling now nothing but a distant memory.

In a discussion with Mary Ruefle:

On your deathbed you may remember one word; if you're lucky you may remember one person, one place; but never the whole story, and never in order.

One chapter on Mrs Dalloway (that some of you might like). Personally speaking, I would have gone for Walser or Nescio or Pessoa (or Primo Levi's 'Argon').

A moving chapter on her mother who is losing her memory, identity:

Sometimes, when she sat outdoors in the summer evenings looking at the roses she had planted years before, a calm would visit her. Some of those had grown from cuttings taken from the rose beds her father had planted decades earlier. At the time, I liked to think the pleasure in her face reflected a sense of continuity, some skein of heritage, a few slender threads of family identity that remain unfrayed. And that she was herself again.

But the self is something old and new, derived from earlier parts of life and others

that might have come into being at just that very moment in the dusk.

Books of the Year

Tim Ingold: Antrhopology & Education Rowan Williams: Being Human Olav Hauge: Selected poems Jenny Odell: How to Do Nothing Mounier: Personalism.
Maggie Ross: Writing the Icon of the Heart All very good but what really blew me away, moved me emotionally and not just intellectually were: Ingeborg Bachmann: Malina Denise Levertov: Evening Train.

The Future of Capitalism?

But there's something odd about Collier's book since he doesn't talk about China, surveillance, debt or climate change. A lot of it seems to be the kind of centrist Labour rubbish of the 90s that helped neoliberalism survive. That or a mixture of nostalgia for reciprocity and 'belonging'

We need: an 'ethical state', 'ethical firms', etc. Well, okay. But a telling line: a state can only be as ethical as the society it represents. Collier is, essentially, an advocate of the status quo. As with others his main emphasis seems to be on how to save capitalism (from what? Itself?). 

Blackburn takes him apart in the NLR:

"The values that family life depends upon—obligation, trustworthiness, commitment—are precisely those that are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism, where work relations are characterized by impermanence and unpredictability; they are systematically undermined by the need for two jobs, travel, relocation."

How to think like a human being

I've only read a few pages of one of Fanny Howe's books but I wanted to put this photo up because she's got such a gentle and sad face.

What I did want to talk about was Patricia Lockwood's devastating and acerbic critique of John Updike. Boy, does she bury him. 

Having only read (struggled through) a 100 pages of one of the Rabbit books I'm not, obviously, in any position to comment on P.L.'s brilliant take-down but a few sentences that made me think..

"Rabbit’s life, over hundreds and hundreds of pages, is a scene of sinister American superabundance, like a Walmart that sells both diapers and high-powered rifles; he glides among the people preaching the prosperity gospel of his own body. ‘What saints have to have is energy,’ .."

Okay, so what, you might ask. Another Great White Male hung out to dry. Ain't that a good thing? I think it probably is. I don't particularly see why I should have to listen to some old fogey tell me what it means to be a human being- whether white, male, great or otherwise. Sure, you can talk all you want about 'literary merit' but if the man is an arsehole and writes like an arsehole then I haven't got the time (I think I'll probably skip Handke too, on second thoughts).

Is this the destiny of most fiction? If someone writes about contemporary society then isn't it bound to come across as dated pretty soon? What sticks? Which is a slightly different question from: what sticks in your own mind? If 'Literature' is trumped as extending or deepening our moral sympathies then how does that work if you can't remember a blimmin' word of it?!

But the first question is what I'm interested in right now: are books just a higher form of entertainment and distraction in late capitalism? Do they provide us with a false sense of being educated, sensible, part of a class that can supposedly see beyond the ordinary, can read between the lines and is not, therefore, subject to the same worldly pressures and prejudices of the plebs?

What if behind all the high falutin' words literature and academia are a bit of a con and not very deep at all? What if they're something that helps reinforce the illusion that we're somehow 'civilised' even though, in our daily lives, we can't speak or think like a human being? What if, perish the thought, we're at heart sophisticated barbarians?

   

K-Punk

Mark Fisher's book really is very good. Must get his K-Punk.

One of the main ideas revolves on just how over-bearing and dominant capitalism is in all of its manifestations. An ideological system that pretends it is free of ideology, a culture that is anti-culture since there is only the blank slate and empty desire.."pure desire" or preferences, to use the language of the economists, cannot be opposed because it is "natural" or purely subjective-and therefore nothing to argue over. You go your way, and I go mine.

Desires are not subject to re-vision, to political deliberation or ethical reflection. Anything but an individual ordering his or her preferences is paternalistic, one step away from totalitarianism. 'Freedom to' is really 'freedom from'.

What isn't capital now?

Cultural, social, physical, natural, cognitive, human, affective, infrastructural capital. Just don't talk about capitalism. Everything must be put to work, made productive. Nothing can be allowed to rest, remain idle. Time is money. Everything has an opportunity cost or an implicit/shadow price.

Rituals and practices, formerly embedded in historical and social contexts, stood because of the way in which they helped us find meaning in our lives. Now, ripped out of those contexts they are aesthetic objects which we 'consume' as spectators.

The final victory of nominalism. All that remains are signs that don't point anywhere, the sound and the fury.

The world ended in 1970. Since then we've all been ghosts, rehashing lines and slogans from a previous age, sampling music whose styles have gone out of fashion. Nothing new can happen again. As G. Steiner said, there are no new beginnings.        

winterground

S crushes some garlic in a pestle and mortar, the rhythm of her hand movements carrying something from another place, a long time ago. Awareness of mortality rises to the surface, heightened by the dim artificial lamplight that burns futilely in the morning light that moves to fill the house. Like the moon in the late morning, unreal, undecided, out of place. 

It feels like Spring. Your frame of reference is the hour-by-hour but the seasons seem out of joint. Perhaps it's only a global imbalance in the cosmos and not you.

There is a kind of silence here. Other places and times have words, sounds. 11 and the light has become more even, entering its long phase. Still, you carry within you last night's dream where you were there, though I can't recall your face. In this late stage of the day one must do without images. 'And then, face to face...'.

I note the hours by the pages turned. Time has passed without any sentences being marked by/with the lead pencil, whose blunt tip makes double lines, as if to emphasize something. There are whole stretches where nothing has happened- or, you just haven't been in tune. You've been reading the book for years, so it's almost become personal- not because anything inheres in you but simply because of the passage of time. So it is.

And the old distances remain old, even now.

The light is so frail, I'm sure I've lived through this life before.

How far away my old hearts seem. Was I ever alive?

Now it's as if my heart has moved many miles away. While I've been here all the time, South, adrift.

I've forgotten how to speak (don't flatter yourself, kid, it's a general ailment). Some words passed down, unknown. That's the way it goes. The books, words, people, and images falling back into mystery. The light is brief, carries with it its own darkness, waiting to reverse, faltering under its own weight.

What is not gathered is far more- perhaps the main thing.

Why, then, speak of your heart instead of absences if not out of an old habit? As the heart no longer nourishes the heart it hoped to nourish. As I write this clouds gather, making the letters on the keyboard hard to see. Acknowledge your own faults, mistakes.

I must have lived many days like this once, my face darkening in the backyard sun, my hands shielding me from its glare. The kitchen doors flung open, bits of broken conversation and laughter from long ago floating though the smoke while all the time you concentrated on the flowers making their way through the cement floor. Now, I grown dark, is it so very different? Except the voices have fallen away..

As winter comes on
our fate to have the colder moon born in us.

Lines from K. Irby and yourself.

The Handke Question: "You can stick your corpses up your arse."

I 've got very little to say on this. My instinctive reaction was: "I don't give a fig about his politics". I think that was rash.

So, the defence goes: since you haven't read any of his books can you comment? Fair point: I cannot comment about the books or what they say about his worldview/politics..what if the books consistently (or not) demonstrate views that would make a mockery of the claim that he's a particular kind of nasty nationalist or the kind of person who would support that kind of nationalism?

Defence no. 2 Even his private or public views are abhorrent -which remains to be shown since all you've got are newspaper snippets and hearsay- his work itself stands out, is admirable, exceptional etc. and he/it should be judged on those grounds alone: play the ball, not the man.

Again, I'm torn here. I'd love to read Repetition. It sounds like just the kind of book I'd like. On the other hand, isn't there something to the notion of what Frithjof Schuon calls 'integral intelligence'? Someone can be hugely intelligent or even profound in some senses and a complete idiot in another sense? Isn't that just the fragmentation of the self in modernity and something that is actually conducive to liberalism's battle against totalitarianism or a narrow determination of human possibilities? 

So, for a moment let's take for granted that his political views are, to say the least, weird. So what? I dunno. Can one look at Freud's paintings in the same way once you've read that he (allegedly) said that a woman has only truly submitted once she's been sodomized? And then there's the slippery slope argument: how far do you go? What if a writer/artist/musician has been racist/misogynist etc.? Can art ever be "pure" or, to put it another way, is there a danger of politicizing everything? And then: whose politics?

Over the last few days there's been a lot of vitriolic reaction to Handke being awarded the Nobel. On the other hand, there seems to have been a lot of intellectual somersaulting trying to make sense of his statements..did he really say the Bosnians were "staging"  atrocities? And what exactly did he mean when he said he stands with Milosevic. What did he mean, if he said it, that "all sides" do wrong? "You can stick your corpses.." Really? Is that linguistic integrity?

I don't know if there's a coming down on one side or the other. One would hope that one could still recognize someone's work as being profound or even brilliant but at the same time be deeply uneasy about their political views. 

I'm suspicious of people who are not suspicious. 

Does that mean that those people who don't express any kind of  unease are naive? Or is there something darker to it? 

Books, etc.

The book I am currently reading

I’m always reading 5 or 6 books simultaneously. At the moment: Simic's Book on Joseph Cornell, the collected poems of Ken Irby, Mounier’s Personalism, J.Aldred’s Licence to be Bad: How economics corrupted us, Derek Jarman's Chroma, a book on R. Spaemann ( forget the name but an excellent introduction) and struggling through Spaemann’s own dense but rewarding Happiness and Benevolence. Just finished Rowan Williams’ superb Being Human.

The book that changed my life

I think books only change our lives imperceptibly ( at least they do for me). I love books but I’m also a Puritan of sorts so very conscious of Goethe’s ‘ only read as much as you can live’(not that I've read him)..ultimately that means remembering that a book is only a book. Nothing compared to love and life. The tree of knowledge..the tree...

The book I wish I’d written

 I’d say Gilead. I don’t wish I’d written anything else though because that’s like saying I wish I wasn’t me (that sounds narcissistic but I hope you know what I mean?). But Gilead for the wisdom, for the quietness in the soul that could let someone write like that. Dunno. Maybe something by Robert Walser. I wish I could write like Peter Brown with his profound and imaginative sympathy.

The book that had the greatest influence on my writing

 None. My writing is crap and that’s down to me.

The book I think is most under/overrated

Alfred Hayes is hugely underrated. Yourcenar’s Hadrian seems to be only known in small circles but is superb. She gets the tone just right. Pitch-perfect.

The book that changed my mind

M. Robinson’s The Givenness of Things. Up until then I’d lazily gone along with the assumption that Puritanism was anti- culture. Peter Brown's exhilarating Augustine of Hippo changed my idea of what a biography could be and Chesterton's brilliant Orthodoxy changed my opinion of the man.

The last book that made me cry

No book has made me cry but I had to narrow my eyes to keep the joy in whilst reading Denise Levertov’s beautiful poems about faith, ageing and mortality. Breathtaking. Evening Train.

The last book that made me laugh

Spike, of course! Milligan. Laugh out loud funny. Dario Fo is also funny.

The book I couldn’t finish

I. McEwan’s Children Act. I read up to the last five pages and decided not to complete it just to spite the bastard. An anti- religious book written by a joker who hasn’t got a clue what religion is.

Not enough time so I end up abandoning lots of books.

The book I’m most ashamed not to have read

Not ashamed because I don’t read for other people or to maintain an image of being ‘a reader’. That's  just another way of internalising the elitism of the self- righteous. Then again, I do feel that I have to read King Lear at some point since my sister reads it every year.

My earliest reading memory

Didn’t read much at all as a child. So earliest memory is really browsing the books on my sister’s book shelves and the thrill of picking out whatever interested me. Hesse’s Siddhartha..Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The world suddenly opened up.

My comfort read

I suppose I’m always returning to K. Clark’s Civilisation and Gai Eaton’s King of the Castle. The latter is a great book about choice and responsibility in the modern world. What do we really mean by liberty? The book that introduced me to Arendt, F. Schuon and G. Thibon..so that's saying something!

The book I give as a gift

I’m always giving books to my friends or trying to impress on them some writer or the other. I think it would have to be Muhammad Asad’s Road to Mecca, a brilliant autobiography of one man’s spiritual quest. Up there with Exupery in terms of the style of writing. Marred by his negative views of Shiaism.

The book I’d most like to be remembered for

Well, I still feel I haven’t written the book I want to. Let’s see. Inshallah.