Book World

And now

And now for something (not so) completely different:  Topography.

Farewell blogworld

I was all set to write you a gushing, over-enthusiastic review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road which I read, awestruck, over three consecutive evenings this week, when suddenly I thought 'Does the world need another opinion on a book that everybody agrees is a masterpiece?  What on earth can I add?'

And so I closed my 'new post' window and idly surfed around my blog feeds and this struck an immediate chord.  Yes, it's true.  Far too much of my time pours itself into the void of the internet and I'm running out of energy and enthusiasm for it.  So in future I'm not planning to update Book World save for my list of books read and maybe the occasional interesting quote from books in progress. 

All the fun will continue over at Britlitblogs and the other very fine sites over in the right hand sidebar.

More procrastination than you can shake a stick at

Housebound with a convalescing child today, I found myself pottering round the (unlinkable to) iTunes podcast directory.  Now what follows may be old news to the rest of the world but I'm just catching up with how many tempting bookish podcasts there are for free download.

I already subscribe to BBC Radio Four's In Our Time and have dabbled with NPR's book programme, and Fresh Air, but since I last looked at the available podcasts several new ones seem to have appeared. (Note if you have iTunes you can find the programmes I've found under Podcasts> Arts> Literature and then click the link for 'see all')

The New Yorker has added a monthly feature of a writer reading another writer's story and discussing it with the magazine's fiction editor (note to Diana - including a Lorrie Moore story here), there are free selections of classic poetry, Emerson's essays, philosophers on philosophy, KCRW's bookworm programme and even one called 'I Should be Writing'.  Excellent.  More procrastination than you can shake a stick at.

Poetry and precision

Mark Cocker's Crow Country is an outstanding book; and what a revelation that a work of natural history is better written than many of the works of fiction I've read in the last year or so.

A book about the corvid genus of birds (rooks, jackdaws and crows) might sound a touch limited, but Cocker ranges over history, literature, personal observations as well as of earlier natural histories and brings it all together with fabulous writing.  I think it's the precision of his observation that really strikes me.  He can look at a flat Norfolk landscape and see so much that an untrained observer would simply miss: birds, the history of the landscape, its geology, how man and nature have worked together or against one another.  Best of all are his descriptions of literally thousands of rooks and jackdaws congregating at dusk to roost, then rising up almost as a single entity, a swirl of black in the sky, their harsh cries becoming almost melodious through sheer numbers.

Here's a quick example of the quality of his writing:

"Yet the sheer emptiness of the place can intensify feelings of intimacy with those things that are close.  In autumn as I walk the long road bisecting Haddiscoe, the air is filled with dragonflies and occasionally a hunting individual will fly almost at my face.  The chitin snapping together as it manoeuvres is like the crackle of electricity, or a firework fizzing before its explosion.  Then it settles on the concrete wall, its weightlessness poised on the needle-tip of its six hair-thin legs.  In a few days, weeks at most, you know its life will end.  Yet here it is, a scarlet cruciform filling itself with autumn sunlight, savouring the immensity of its existence."

The universe sends me a sign

After grumping about my latest audio book yesterday, in which Shakespeare's Globe Theatre burns down twice (once for real in 1613 and then the modern re-construction sometime contemporaraneously) the Misses Book World came home from school with permission letters for a trip to ... the reconstructed Globe Theatre and a request for parents to help out on the trip.  Such requests for parents to act as additional chaperones always accompany school trips and I have never, never been tempted.  Within five minutes of signing the permission slips I had written a letter (in my best handwriting) to the head of drama offering my help with this trip. 

A passage I marked in the Joyce Carol Oates biography I read recently comes to mind.  As an unpublished writer JCO stayed home one day reading a work of fiction by a popular author and concluded that it was so bad she was convinced she could do better and immediately set to work on a novel (which was completed in, typically, six weeks) thus proving that reading bad novels can be good for new writers who might be discouraged if they read nothing but outstanding work which they couldn't hope to emulate.

I feel (in my 'hmm horoscopes can be very insightful' heart) that the universe is sending me a sign.  What that sign means is entirely opaque to me at the moment.  Other than perhaps, to try and avoid dropping lighted matches if I do get to go on the trip.

Back to school. Hooray.

So, the children went back to school today after nearly four weeks of Easter holidays.  Home-schooling parents everywhere, I salute you; not so much for the schooling, as for the actual having them in the house part of it. 

I heaved a sigh of relief and headed straight to the gym.  I've posted on various occasions about the audio books I listen to while exercising, but I've recently hit a snag as my iPod has refused to talk to the computer and whilst I have diligently continued downloading my Audible subscription allocations, they haven't been transferring. Finally, I treated myself to a new super duper iPod (when did they get colour screens??) at duty free on the last holiday and took it for its first gym visit today.

The new 'I'm prepared to talk to your computer' iPod now has nearly 40 audio books.  So much choice!  And such a bad one I chose!  In a moment of weakness a while ago I downloaded The Shakespeare Secret after hearing an interview with the author on Radio Four (Front Row possibly?  Not sure).  Anyway, I knew at the time that anything which was being compared to The Da Vinci Code was doomed to annoy me.  And so I spent 30 minutes on the cross-trainer today almost groaning out loud at the hackneyed, clumsy, over-written, heavy-handed nonsense.  What makes it especially painful is that this is just the sort of twaddle I write.  I'm convinced that several phrases I heard are also nestling like vipers in my own botched manuscript.  Which lead to a sort of Jekyll and Hyde moment.  One voice in my head whispering 'Hey, if she can get this stuff published, so could you.  You could be published.  Imagine, published' , whilst the other voice tartly points out that the stuff is awful and that I would rather pluck out my own eyelashes than put my name to something similar.  Leaving me (the bemused onlooker) wondering really whether I shouldn't just give it up and settle down to being a reader.  And switch my gym listening to the 34 hours of Our Mutual Friend instead.

If anyone has got past The Globe Theatre burning down twice in consecutive chapters, please do leave me a comment to tell me if the book improves.

Sidetracked again, or one thing leads to another

I'm seriously wondering whether to re-name this blog The Accidental Reader.  After reporting on my reading in progress and plans for the rest of the month, in which I mentioned Joyce Carol Oates, I started hankering after reading another of her novels.  This led to my pondering the question of her amazing productivity, which in turn led me to take Greg Johnson's biography Invisible Writer down from the shelf and before I knew it I was on page 303 having read nothing else all weekend.

Some passages which struck me:

"None of her classmates or teachers knew that she had written a novel while still in junior high, or could have guessed that she had now begun a deliberate apprenticeship, "consciously training myself by writing novel after novel." For the time being, the fifteen-year-old Joyce put aside any notion of publication, throwing away her apprentice novels as soon as she completed them: "I seem to have written them as a pianist practises scales and exercises."  Some of the novels - she wrote roughly a dozen of them - were deliberate imitations of the masters she read in her classes." (p.52)

"Reading was "the greatest pleasure of civilization," she remarked to one interviewer, and in a later essay titled "Literature as Pleasure, Pleasure as Literature," she argued that "reading constitutes the keenest, because most secret, sort of pleasure."  Since her teenage years Joyce had turned her chronic insomnia into the opportunity to perform what had become, for her, a "sacramental" act, one that represented an intimate and profound communion with another consciousness.  "It is the sole means," she wrote, "by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin; another's voice; another's soul." (p.140-1)

Her devotion to Flaubert's dictum: "Live like the bourgeoisie so you can be wild in your imagination."

The critic Alfred Kazin remarked of her "her mind is unbelievably crowded with psychic existences, with such a mass of stories that she lives by being wholly submissive to them."

Discussing the almost separate life and personality that she perceives the writer 'Joyce Carol Oates' to have in comparison to the inner person who writes:

"The famous writer who consented to these public appearances, however, was "Joyce Carol Oates," a person still quite distinct in Joyce's mind from the private, invisible writer who conducted, again like Emily Dickinson, a richly rewarding interior life at home.  Joyce's only apprehension about the move to Princeton, in fact, was feeling "doomed to perform in the role of 'Joyce Carol Oates,' " whereas in Windsor she had felt comfortably anonymous as "Joyce Smith."  Two years earlier, she had chafed at the occasional "restriction to a few cubic feet of consciousness: Joyce Carol Oates,"  feeling herself "fated to spend hours as a kind of secretary to that person, answering her mail, turning down requests politely ... As Oates' public fortunes rise, mine must necessarily fall; as hers level off or decline, I gain." "

And this poignant comment on her marriage:

" "my marriage has made my life stable.  Ray is a center; perhaps the center without which .... But it's useless to speculate."  She described him as "kindly, loving, sweet, at times critically intelligent, sensitive, funny, unambitious ... Ray is an extraordinary person whose depths are not immediately obvious."  The idea of living without him would be "like the end of the universe, the obliteration of time.  Unthinkable.  If I survived his loss it wouldn't be Joyce who survived but another lesser, broken person." "

How very sad then to read of his death in February this year here and here.

After the death of a close friend Joyce in 1980, Greg Johnson's biography notes

"Joyce turned to her work for solace.... She reflected on the degree to which her own writing represented "an idyll, a true 'romance' " to which she could always turn in times of pain and confusion, For Joyce, art was always the supreme consolation: "A vision on the page; the works' integrity; allowing me constantly to change form - and to slip free.  My salvation." "

Read, reading, not reading and not yet reading

Read...

Joyce Carol Oates Middle Age: A Romance.  Again I marvel at Oates's ability to create a cast of utterly realistic and unclichéd characters, an entire social context and network of relationships that compel me to turn the page whilst satisfying and defeating my expectations of both plot and character.  The idea seemed trite: an eccentric, charismatic but apparently poor sculptor in a wealthy US suburb dies suddenly; we see how his death touches a handful of those who knew him, forcing them to re-assess themselves, make changes to their smug lives, run away from spouses, stop keeping up pretences and so on. It looks too neat and could easily have slipped into sentimentality, but always Oates veers away from the easy redemption and cuts to the harsher and occasionally happier but less pretty truth.  Outstanding.

Reading...

Mrs Dalloway.  Slowly.  Woolf is too rich for me to take more than a handful of pages at a time but I love every word.  I especially love how the apparent jumps and illogicalities of conversation or thought make perfect artistic sense.

T S Eliot's poems and this guide whose introduction is a truly excellent and interesting guide to Eliot's influences and where they took his poetry.  I've picked up a couple of allusions in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock which had passed me by before, and I plan to head off in the direction of The Waste Land now we're home from holiday.

Dante's The Inferno.  By accident.  This Penguin translation by Dorothy L Sayers has been on my shelves so long that it has my maiden name in it.  The Southam book mentioned above cites Dante as a major influence on Eliot and my readings in Gabriel Josipovici's essays The Singer on the Shore had also whetted my appetite for embarking on The Divine Comedy.  But the problem loomed of which translation to use.  On the basis of this article I bought the Mandelbaum translation but it was too heavy to take on holiday and the unintelligible introduction by Eugenio Montale rather curbed my enthusiasm.  Sayers has a very informative introduction and notes and whilst her actual translation feels dated in places she is in three volumes and therefore portable.  I'm already as far as Nether Hell without it feeling like hard work.  Indeed, I even read it by the pool on holiday (I hope the surrounding swathes of Ian McEwan fans felt suitably chastened). 

Not reading...

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell.  Purchased because it was the only book I'd heard of about Cyprus.  I got about a third of the way through while we were there and it was a case of Durrell being snooty about the English ruining the island by turning it into a clone of suburbs like Wimbledon and then taking himself off to 'the real' Cyprus to restore a house.  And what comes next is obviously the usual tale of bumpkin builders being colourfully eccentric and falling down drunk.  Yawn.  But then I hit a discussion of the, no doubt, interesting-at-the-time politics, and fell into a deep state of narcolepsy in which the book slipped from my hand never to be picked up again.  But all is not lost for Mr Durrell.  Our brief visit to Cairo has left me with a burning desire to read about non-ancient Egypt and there's an outside chance of The Alexandria Quartet making its way onto my tbr pile.  I've already read (but wasn't terribly keen on) Palace Walk, the first of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy and am wondering about The Yacoubian Building.  Has anyone read it?  Does anyone have any other non-ancient Egyptian suggestions?

Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky.  I'm not sure quite how this smuggled itself into my holiday hand luggage; possibly another Josipovici recommendation, but having taken several hours to get through just 40 pages I fear defeat looms.

Not yet reading..

April's plans are to read Dorothy Richardson's Pointed Roofs and Montano's Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas.

Clearly I haven't a hope of completing so much heavyweight reading in one month but its going to be fun trying.

Back from holiday

Cyprus

and Cairo.

There are still plenty of horses on the streets of Cairo... thankfully not in the state of those described in Rosalind Belben's Our Horses In Eygpt; though I did wonder if some of the current animals might be descendants of those First World War horses..

The length of a line

As part of my 2008 reading project I chose three poets whose work I wanted to explore further, and decided that they would each get a three month stint on the bedside table (the fourth quarter goes to Shakespeare). Without trying to read through the complete/collected/selected works I would just dip into them from time to time in the hope of adding new poems to my stock of favourites and deepening my understanding of their work.

January to March were allotted to W H Auden and his Selected Poems have duly sat on my bedside table.  Occasionally I dust them; less occasionally I open them.  Sadly, I have not managed to add a single new poem to those I already count as favourites ('Musee des Beaux Arts'; 'In Praise of Limestone'; 'In Memory of W. B Yeats'; 'The Shield of Achilles'; 'September 1, 1939').  For much of the rest of what I’ve read I’ve been defeated by the ballad-like rhythm (eg 'As I walked out one evening';' Miss Gee') or the tongue twisting challenge of work like 'O where are you going said reader to rider'.  I can’t put my finger on it but it's something to do with the length of a line.  I definitely struggle with the short lines.

So although I have enjoyed re-reading the old favourites I have decided to cut my losses and move on early to T S Eliot (who I wanted, of course, to start in April).   Last night I re-read 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock'.  Is this my absolute favourite poem?  It must be close.  I’ve written before about being haunted by his line ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons'.

I find it much harder to explain why I like certain poets in preference to others, whereas explaining why I like some novelists more than others is easy by comparison.  Eliot just works for me.  I can’t summarise or explain his work but  I know precisely what it says to me.  However, part of the “poets quarterly” project is to dig deeper, to explore some of the allusions which I vaguely ‘get’ and tease out the ones I haven’t yet seen or felt and to look at some critical commentary.

So it was a delightful coincidence then that the next essay I turned to in Gabriel Josipovici’s wonderful collection The Singer on the Shore was “Listening to the Voice in Four Quartets”.  Josipovici is the perfect critic: always sympathetic to the work under discussion; lucid and jargon free yet concerned with large issues; a close reader able to help the reader explore and enrich meaning in such a gentle and friendly way that you think you’ve done it for yourself.

Here’s an extract where he’s talking about the voice in the first movement of Burnt Norton:

“It sends us back to the beginning with a new understanding: we are beings who exist in time , beings with memories and imaginations; nothing we have done and thought simply disappears or solidifies in to a lump we are forced to carry forever on our backs.  Time and meaning constantly escape us as we move through our lives, but this is a reason for hope as much as for despair.  As Beckett so memorably said of Proust: “Only he who forgets remembers.”  The way Eliot puts it is: ‘If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable’, with the corollary that since all time is not eternally present, time is indeed redeemable.  Since we live in time we also live in memory and hope.  We use both wrongly when we use them as a means of escaping the present through nostalgia or apocalyptic yearnings; the right use is to be alive to the present, to see it always as what Walter Benjamin called ‘the time of Now’.  When we do that we realise that neither past nor future is locked into the iron tracks of necessity, that the past can always be transformed and the future holds a wealth of possibilities.  ‘Time past and time future/What might have been and what has been/ Point to one end, which is always present.’ “

I especially love that line “Since we live in time we also live in memory and hope”.