walkingtalkingwriting

WE'VE MIGRATED TO "WORDSTALL"

Wordstall

YOU'LL FIND ak & mmj HERE

 Wordstall

 AS FROM LAST OCTOBER

ECHO EFFECTS: Also Seeking Shade (mmj)

"I can’t wait to try life under its shade," I wrote to myself in an ARCHIVE Note last August about Umbrella by Will Self.

The story moves between a ward in Friern Barnet Mental Hospital in 1971, trench warfare in 1918, and some events unfolding  in London in 2010. The front epigraph reads, ‘ a brother is as easily lost as an umbrella", which, so I am told (it is all contagious fiction and contested fact), is a quotation taken from the letters of James Joyce in the edition by Ellman.

Loss of brothers has frequently been scrambled into literature as a writing device (or even genre?), and is not a strange case. It is also not strange to me and I could imagine linking together in similar tri-part style, events in England involving the Russian Convoys to Murmansk in 1940, the coup and killing of President Allende in Chile on Sept 11th 1973, and a personal memory of staring at the sun from under the peaked cap of military uniform while presenting arms in the courtyard of the City of London Guildhall to the President of Brazil (?General Geizel) one morning during the long hot summer of 1976.

It is the commonplace problem of writers and readers of today: where to place our broken memories, and the fragments of our lives. It is a cataloguing problem really. For instance do my ‘Losing a Brother’ memories belong in continental South America, or during a previous time during the Second World War before I was born, or elsewhere… Or perhaps talked out over the counter of a newspaper kiosk, or as a few handwritten notes folded and slipped inside the backcovers of a book on my shelves, (say) Hayek’s, The Road to Serfdom… etc.

A novel would be one way to attempt to encompass this cataloguing complexity, although when completed  it might appear more like an untidy bundles of magazine pieces, or (as they say out west) longer form journalism, or (out east) feuilletons. As regards Umbrella, I understand the word doubles in meaning as both an anti-shell device of trench warfare, a retracted foreskin, and an intra-muscular syringe.

As well as the more common meanings  – now that I am awakening to recollection – of shademaker, and protector from the rain or sun.

I spent two month at the great Victorian asylum of Friern Barnet Mental Health Hospital during the high summer months of 1986. It was hot and the locked wards were stuffy and airless, and over lunchtime I was sometimes able to persuade one of the charge nurses, ‘security men’ types with big muscles and short hair, to unlock the ward door with the wrought iron key which jangled from the key ring on their belt. So I could escape for an hour, and walk down the gently rising and falling main passage perhaps 800 metres long which followed the original curves of the land underneath, passing motionless men and women in the corridors, past the NHS canteen, and out into the walled vegetables gardens and remains of the orchards and farming areas. These were all abandoned and overgrown with weeds and huge patches of brambles, but a few paths remained and I was able to pick my way through to a clear area and spend a time sunbathing against a wall with my shirt off and eating my lunch sandwich.

I undressed but the intensity of the sun was too strong on my bare skin.

COMING OF AGE: When the Shade Slips (mmj)

Schizophrenia: until for a moment the shade slips (or should one say the mask of self), and

We stand with no protection staring directly at the sun.

In 2012, and today it is not Friern Barnet but Highgate Mental Health Centre – the word Centre being preferred to that of Hospital. Friern Barnet closed and was sold off to developers of course, who, although I have not been back to see for myself, I expect have made a good job converting the splendid Victorian buildings to high-end residential accommodation, although I cant help thinking that theoccupants are disturbed walking from their front doors to car parks or sleeping at night by presence of so many ghosts of those for whom time stood still during the long 130 year history of the asylum before.

I am visiting my "aunty" at the Highgate Mental health Centre, where she has been detained for the last four months, although she is not mentally ill now – nor has she been for several years, but the word schizophrenia, like the ghosts at Friern Barnet, has had the capacity of stopping time for her. She is now 81, and becoming slightly frail and forgetful with age. She is also an artist. "I am an artist", she says, but adds that she has not painted anything for the last ten years. When she is out walking she likes to pick up things from the street and bring the back inside in order to have them with her to make collages. This can land her in trouble. As can her smoking habit. And sometimes people don’t like her. Why is that I ask her. My Aunty replies that a very nice woman called Gillian told her why. "The reason they don’t like you," she told me that Gillian had said, "is because you look into people’s faces, and you see things, and people don’t like that. But you shouldn’t talk about it because it will only get you into trouble".

It has.

TONITE AT THE COLISEUM: Shade for oneself is always Essential. (mmj)

"Self Wins the Booker Prize". But no, the headline is a fiction. Umbrella lost last week.

And it would have perhaps been worse if he had won. A man like Will Self is steeped in failure, indeed his writing is possible because of failure. Success might have ruined him. Will Self made the point himself in his last summer Guardian Review piece on Modernism. He also recommended Gabriel Jasopovici’s Whatever happened to Modernism? – and both have been speaking in a series of evening talks on Modernism in London this autumn.

ECHO EFFECTS – On Failure (mmj)

About failure in general - and the doubts which first found full expression in the nineteenth century, questioning the wisdom of progress, its intellectual and spiritual roots in the Enlightenment, and its inevitability, the future project of progress - failure really got going in the twentieth century, after the First World War of course, and onwards, through the rise of fascism, the Holocaust, the Terrors and the Gulags, postwar to the coups in Iran and Chile and what the CIA call the ‘backdrafts’ afterwards, and on via the two Iraq and previous and current Afghanistan Wars up to the present day. And now, facing the 2020’s and beyond...

Then about the failure in particular of writers of literature – see my September post – from Melville’s Bartleby The Scrivener (1856) down to the present day.

And about the failure of writers to read, and under what kind of compulsion are we (both to write and to read) to scribble and to decipher, suffering avoidant behaviour , since it would be worse not to, a ghostly Death State, akin to being locked up in an Asylum for all our years, the stopping of time.

...Back at the Booker, it all goes along amusingly enough; Self himself playing the royal jester to the crowd, lifting his book Umbrella as if he has just won the FA Cup, but more to show its primary function raised above our heads – to give shade.

Until for a moment the shade slips (and we stare blinking at the dangerous sun) "But No!..." Deborah Orr, who is married to Will Self, gave her own account of his winning the Booker Prize in Saturday’s Guardian; his compulsion to write against the terror of the abyss of failure (his previous book – a turkey); her falling ill with breast cancer, and undergoing treatment, lying in bed all day "passively letting chemotherapy drugs get on with attacking cancer cells", while at the same time Self is working away upstairs.

And more that "I would prefer not to" – in Bartleby style whether as writer and reader -prefer not to write about or read. And as well for myself, since I have still not bought myself a copy of Umbrella, only looked at the covers and browsed through the first pages in a bookshop again yesterday, feeling under the compulsion of being a dutiful reader and intending to do so, but having failed so far, not until I have at least finished this bundle of writing ECHO EFECTS.

The Field in which to Find which Words Work (mmj)

ARCHIVE "Teeth of… Barbed Wire?

Critical, Radical, and Topical eg: How will we run from those who would sink their teeth into us? A dog, or a horse certainly… but I have never yet been chased by barbed wire desiring to sink its teeth into me. Or I dont think so. It is a frightening prospect.

I was last chased by a teeth-sinking dog in Italy 2 years ago. I was bicycling along a quiet country lane in the narrow flat land between sea and mountains north of Via Reggio. It is a contested and constricted territory (part of Liguria) in which the main north south arteries, railways, motorways, and other roads - and pilgrimage routes – have to fit themselves between the fingers of foothills extending into the narrow plain, and the competing multi-use coastal margin of beach resorts, homes, apartments, businesses and commercial properties (including the Carrara marble yards). Set among this sculptural patchwork is some prime agricultural land, and it was along a small road between flat fields, orchards, green houses, farmhouses and small villages that I was wandering on a hired bicycle one early late summer evening. Dawdling on the pedles, the lane ran straight, and then a corner at right angles in front of a farm house, to be followed by another turn so it could resume its idyllic way past more cultivated areas of vegetables and fruit trees. Loud barking came from the farmhouse as I went round the second corner, and I turned my head to see a large yellow dog running towards me at speed, which, jumping up behind the rear wheel of the bicycle, bit me in the bum. I protested angrily, stopped and waved my arms in case the dog wanted to have a second go. However, the farmer emerged to call in the dog, clearly a much-loved family pet it returned wagging to be hugged by two children, and inadequate words were exchanged between the farmer and I not approximating to either of our mother tongues or likely internal thoughts.

I have also been chased by a horse in a field which bit me on the back of my coat collar, but never to this day chased by barbed wire. However, the link tells us that the American patent for barbed wire was awarded in 1874: the ‘winner’, Joseph Glidden of the Barb Fence Company, was a Midwest acquaintance of Uncle Scrooge – McDuck – Gugga Daddy (GD), or Tio Amaretto as we also referred to him from his pioneering days on the pampas of Argentina. GD was helping driving cattle between the summer and winter pastures, but in the lawless range wars which broke out after the barb wire came in between those seeking to enclose and those wanting the great plains left open, he knew his roaming days were over, especially when the State of Texas decreed cutting wire a felony in 1884.

--

CATASTROPHE GAMES - "We have all been groomed"

A footnote: on the BBC (Radio 4) over the weekend, a news magazine programme concerning the current perfect storm of child abuse, groping and feminism (you know who). Only a woman could have made the remark – "The whole country has been groomed", she repeated. Sex . Work. War. How true I thought her wisecrack was/is.

--

TONITE AT THE COLISEUM – The End of Man?

Another footnote on literary failure: men being doomed because they are " essentially confused, hidebound creatures, in search of certainties that the modern world has left behind". Unlike Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing or Angela Carter (say)?  In search of certainties? Yes? Err… No?

But except Hilary Mantel -  ‘Our ‘ilary’ provides all the certainties the Booker Prize judges are looking for. Topical stuff.

--

OLD MEN TRAVELLING – Phone Booth Conversation

Radical viewpoint: "Englishness is where difference begins, where the exotic starts"*.

! Do not adjust your hearing aid, or mouthpiece, you heard it right the first time !

I am quoting from a reported conversation betwen two men in their sixties – "It’d be good for you to lose some weight. Take the English leap. Get out of the Frenchified muddle you’ve been in for so long. Be lighter, more fun. Become English. Or Irish. Take the leap my friend."

The man speaking so unequivocally goes on to give the example of phone boxes/booths – "It’s not just the English ones are prettier, but they offer a comfortable and better designed space in which to relate to one another verbally, unlike the French ones, which are strange and designed for the outrageously pedantic aesthetics of silence."

OK it is a fiction being imagined by two men who both happen to consider Barcelona their home, and the truth is that these days most of the pretty red English phone boxes have been ripped out. Still instead of detournement , why not try – "a light English leap, to land on the other side, start thinking about something else, to turn around, to move."

*from Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas (2010)

Critical Roots (mmj)

We have been burning the lights here walkingtalkingwriting now for over six years. Blogging is pure energy isn’t it? Streams of electrons, blinking on off signals, the same way a string of Christmas lights works. On. Off. Over the years there have been a few gaps, when some of the bulbs in the string of lights burnt out, but over the last two years the on/off signals have been blinking away pretty regularly; a weekly flow of between 300 and 500 words, sometimes more, and at the rate of progress we have been going over the years, there must be over 100,000 words on this blog archive,

Bystanders strolling by, or readers as they are conventionally but perhaps erroneously called, have sometimes asked us about the light. "So what do you have to show?" they ask. "Getting people to stare at the lights, it is surely some kind of absurd wisecrack surely.Or a form of shock treatment. What do you have to show?"

"You tell me," I am tempted to answer, spots in front of all our eyes. Questions about the light, but rarely about the ground. After all the light illuminates a small patch. What do you have to show? It is time to begin telling.

- So in a few days time the lights are going to go out here on Typepad: a CRITICAL power failure!

- Groping around on hands and knees in the dark on a new Wordpress location: TOPICAL!

We will fumble for the plug socket, flick the switch: and how RADICAL is that!

Be on the look out!

WORDSTALL is coming, a small market stall, probably to be found outside an old peeling paint news-stand ‘ZEITUNG’ or ‘CIGARETTEN’ pavilion, filled with a range of enticing pamphlets and brochures for modern living…

1.) …Until the generators run out. Of course that is a rack we will also be filling now we are both well into our 60’s, magazine pieces on OLD MEN TRAVELLING. (‘So do you mean the story is finished? Said Don Quixote. ‘As finished as my mother’, said Sancho.)

2.) … Or we find ourselves HITTING THE POTHOLES, a category for when the ground disappears from under our feet. (‘For oil is not made, it is got. And oil thinks large. Oil thinks wide’, said the narrator - Pathe 1951, Oil for the Twentieth Century)

3.) … Or ECHO EFFECTS set in, which commonly occurs at crossing points, between one world and another. (‘The echo; the giving back of the human voice as nature-sound, is essentially a lament’. said Leverkuhn (from Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann)).

4.) … Or TONITE AT THE COLISEUM, when we sneak out for a show. Typically only old theatre stubs and stained programmes to show for it, but ‘Oh, the smell of the grease paint, and the roar of the crowd!’

5.) … Or – Yes! Yes! - we win yet more tickets for the CATASTROPHE GAMES and get another go looking at Scapolo (the bachelor). It is so addictive! For instance, even ‘Saint Walter’ (Uncle Benjamin) could not resist getting together with Berthold Brecht to plan the publication of a new magazine: Krisis und Kultur. It was of course never published.

We never said it was going to be easy: that the story 'Ticking Boxes', just posted today, belongs in OLD MEN TRAVELLING should be simple enough to decide. However, there is always a moment of doubt, a pause when my collector's hand hesitates, floating over the various racks on the market stall, but it is not a 'glorious pause' ("Truthfully, these glorious pauses do, sometimes, occur in the discordant but complementary narratives of our lives and if you choose to stop the story there, at such a pause, and refuse to take it any further, then you can call it a happy ending." Angela Carter. Wild Children) and my hand moves on leaving well alone. A sub-section of Narrative Poems may present itself within the major category of OLD MEN TRAVELLING later, where the story may go (price 10s/6d), but it is equally possible the piece will be put back in one of the boxes which are kept underneath (in the 'Archive' as it is commonly called) unsold.

PREFACE: On WordStall and “the Larger Economy of the Book”

The above phrase in inverted commas is lifted from Gabriel Josipovici, Whatever Happened to Modernism? (Yale Univ Press 2010) and suggests a city landscape into which we have now stepped back. Our old aesthetic, which we had previously called wilderness, has now also become topical, like arriving at a street kiosk. Wilderness was abstract, a theory which lacked the economy of place and activity, as the ancient Greeks would locate oikos in the topical landscape of the House of Atreus, or the City of Thebes.

TEXT It is Intermission Time

I am reading BARTLEBY & CO (first published 2000, tr 2004) by Enrique Vila-Matas (b Barcelona 1948), and I have reached page 147. It is at this point some 31 pages from the end soon after the crooked narrator Marcelo (a hunchback from Barcelona) states that he has received a letter from Derain that I find myself unable to continue reading: " I would prefer not to", I say.

Who is Derain, and what are the references to Schopenhauer's philosophy which are contained in his letter to Marcello? I long to find out, but I now do not expect to. I want to read on but somebody has slammed the book shut in front of my face. I have been doubly duped of course, both by the idea of "tracking down the labyrinth of the No", and the possibility of a thread which would lead me to the end of the book, while I am actually unable to continue.

"I would prefer not to.'' I feel this will end badly, the book I mean, or my experience of

abandoning it, and either way I am bound to end up disappointed. In fact rather than forgetting the book, I sense the book has forgotten me, here at page 147 where the reader and write part company, which is also shortly after a footnote on migraines, or the shadow from under the branches of a thorn bush, or the letter from Derain.

There are only just over 30 pages to go, but NO - it is Intermission Time – or the Coda if you prefer, and the time for re-enactment. As a constructivist gesture, I consider taping the last unread 31 pages together, but this is like Prince Charming coming to the rescue of Sleeping Beauty under the thorn bush. It would be the conclusive gesture, to bring this thing to an end, she would bite his lips rather than kiss them.

DIALOGUE: On not Writing a Book (mmj)

But it refuses to go quietly. Here are the traces of the track BARTLEBY & CO has left behind; the footnotes as the author describes them, "commenting on a text that is invisible", in a series of numbered sections -

1. Considers the life of Robert Walser, and his piece ‘The Chamber of Writing for Unoccupied Persons'.

2. On Felipe Alfonse (1928). I consider adding Roberto Bolano as a footnote of my own at this point but the author says, "He would prefer not to."

3. On Rimbaud.

4. On Musil and Hofmannsthall who "almost mythologises the idea".

5. Considers madness (eg Walser and Holderlin), and other illnesses.

6. On non-existence (Pepin Bello).

7. On Bobi Balzen from Trieste who is a "a kind of black Sun".

8. On the dialectic that it is also better to write, for example Primo Levi.

9. … But forgetting to (eg Clement Cadou and George Perec 'A portrait of the artist as a piece of fiction').

10. Marcello (the crooked narrator) fails to go to his office.

11. On Robert Derain. WHO?

12. First mention of Marcel Duchamp.

13/14/15/16. More questioning about not writing, including Roland Barthes "Where to begin".

17. On Beckett.

18/19 On Kafka, and his short story The Hunger Artist whi is asked the question "Why don't you write?"

16. Marcello (the crooked narrator) composes an imaginary letter to himself from Robert Derain. "Include Marcel Duchamp in your book", he writes,

21. Considers tricksters, and Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857).

22/23. On W’m Hazlitt "A Farewell to Essay Writing".

24. Back to Kafka's Diaries; about Scapolo (the bachelor) Marcello writes ''Scapolo is frightening, because he walks straight through a terrible zone, a zone of shadows which is also where the most radical of denials has its home and where the blast of coldness, in short, is a blast of destruction" (P 65).

25. On de Quincy.

26. Considers suicides. (and rejects the same as a strategy for those 'who would prefer not to').

27/28/29. On John Salinger.

30/31. Marcello (the crooked narrator) tells a story, ''I saw Salinger on a bus in New York".

32. On Borges (25 Dec 1936) piece in El Hogan Magazine: Enrique Banch celebrates 25 Years of a Marriage to Silence.

33. On one of Pessoa’s heteronyms.

34. On Hofmannsthall’s 'Letter': the founding text for those who say, "I would prefer not to".

35. Considers denial, refusal and autism, and Paul Celan.

36. "Derain has written to me, he really has", Marcello (the crooked narrator) claims.

37-42. Considers matters arising from Derain’s letter: Keats, Rimbaud ("Adieu" In a Season of Hell), Broch (Death of Virgil), and George Perec – "For a long time I went to bed in writing".

43. Considers rejections.

44-48. Considers Nathaniel Hawthorne's Wakefield and Herman Melville's, Bartleby the Scrivener (1985):

- Wakefield: the husband who suddenly abandons his wife

- Melville: leaving of writing because one has failed following Bartleby

"Bartleby defines a genre" writes Borges.

49. Quotes Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce describing the meetings between Joyce and Beckett where both are "addicted to silence".

50/51/52/53. On Henry Roth (born 1906) Galicia. I ask if any relation to Joseph? There is no reply to this question.

54/55. Considers mutism, and Kafka's laugh which is reported to be like "the rustle of fallen leaves".

56. On Michelangelo Antonioni’s film The Eclipse. I attempt to mention Anne Carson’s essay on Antonioni in Decreation at this point, but am unable to do so. I transcribe the text from Antonioni’s diary while in Florence: "The sun has gone, suddenly ice. A silence different from other silences. And a light distinct from other light, After that darkness. Black sun of our culture. Complete immobility. All I can manage to think is that during the eclipse feeling will probably dry up as well."

57/58.On Don Quixote’s GOODBYE.

59. On Borges' (other) TIGER.

60. Considers a fictional paranoid writer who believes the Nobel prize-winning writer Saramaga was " always one step ahead and it was really rather strange".

61. Considers melancholy.

62. Marcello (the crooked narrator) is sacked.

63. Considers Wittgenstein.

64. An interlude: DIALOGUE between NO and YES.

65/66/67. "Derain has written to me", says the crooked narrator.

When I reach the lower half of page 147, the last sentences read: "I live like an explorer. The more I advance in the search for the labyrinth's centre, the further I am away from it".

And it is at this point that the reader breaks off, abandoning the footnotes (notes without a text), prefering to remain a bachelor (or a Sleeping Beauty waiting and waiting and waiting) who from now on must discover the remaining footnotes for him or herself, living with his remorse and shame at the destruction of this harmless copy of the book.

"A writer who does not write", the author quotes from Kafka diaries, "is a monster who invites madness".

This is the new technology which he or she has discovered and unravels the labyrinth of the last of the text which awaits him or her to be completed.

A reader may become the happy sorcerer of his own text.