Fact or fiction?
Here, Susie Linfield’s essay reviewing both fiction and non-fiction on one place, Zimbabwe. I started reading this at a different site which did not show, as it does at the top of the full article in Dissent Magazine, that it was an essay review of a set of books on Zimbabwe. But because Doris Lessing was mentioned at the end of the first paragraph, I wondered if her descriptions of the country, fictional and non-fictional, might come into it, so carried on. There is already a link to Doris Lessing’s return to Zimbabwe with her brother, African Childhoods: indentity, race and autobiography. Link directly, or you can find it in a previous post by clicking the side-panel tag link African childhoods.
Before I got beyond the first few paragraphs, struck by the vivid and detailed historical, journalistic account of Zimbabwe, I was wondering about if fiction or no-fiction was better at describing a place, a time, a people. In other words, is it the nature of the method which gets at the truth or the quality of the writing? A soon as I got to the first review, on Peter Godwin’s, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, I was forming a view.
Slowly, as the books are revealed and reviewed there is an answer to this question: that no fiction could possibly do a better job than a well crafted non-fiction: except that this leads inexorably to the paradoxical notion of all writing being fiction.
Punctilious punctuation
An English professor writes the words “A woman without her man is nothing” on the blackboard, asking the class students to punctuate it.
The male students all write: “A woman without her man, is nothing.”
The female students all chose: “A woman, without her man is nothing.”
Beyond Mann
A blog author names herself Claudia Chauchat in honour of the main female character in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain:
A snippet from a Google abstract:
A Gorgon’s Mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann’s Fiction by Lewis A. Lawson
Recalling her stay at Waldsanatorium in Davos in 1912 (during which her husband conceived the idea for the Magic Mountain), Katja Mann said that there actually “was a Madame Chauchat, who always slammed the door. At first she really did get on her husband’s nerves a great deal, but later he became very sensitive to her charm”. Her name “hot cat”, is a happy accident if it is remembered that, according to Feldman, one of the original attributes of Medusa was a “menacing, shaggy, feline head”.
Polish novelist, Pawel Huelle { 1 }, { 2 } has written a novel called Castorp. This interview explains the origins of Castorp.
Extract from Castorp (pdf) :
Sarmatian Review, September 2006:
Modern Polish LiteratureThrough a Postcolonial Lens: The Case of Paweł Huelle’s Castorp
Dariusz Skórczewski
Professional Elites in “Classless” Societies (from Marx to Debord) by Slawomir J. Magala:
This young German engineer from a middle-class family receives a crash course in the European humanist tradition from an Italian inmate of the sanatorium, Mr Settembrini. According to some critics, an Italian philosopher, sociologist and historian, Benedetto Croce, became a model for this character(1). He is also receiving an equally brief introduction to the totalitarian temptation from a Galician Jewish Jesuit, a Mr Naphta. Again, according to some critics, this character was based on a figure of a Hungarian Marxist philosopher writing in German, a sociologist, a literary scholar and a communist leader, Gyorgy Lukacs(2).
(1) Mann became acquainted with Croce, when the latter published a critical article about Mann’s — Reflections of an Apolitical Man in — Critica (a periodical Croce filled mostly with his own texts) in 1920.
They maintained contact ever since. After WWII, Croce‘s daughtermarried a Polish writer, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński , who escaped Stalin‘s Gulag and wrote one of the first first-hand accounts of it — Another World.
(2) Mann met Lukacs in 1922 in Vienna and has been influenced by the latter‘s study —The Soul and Its Forms, while Lukacs has subsequently written on Mann‘s oeuvre. Lukacs, who had been acultural commissar in a short-lived Hungarian communist government of Bela Kun, went on to become one of the most important Marxist philosophers, especially as the author of an influential — History and Class Consciousness.
Openings
Compiled by Philip Norman, novelist and journalist
THE BEST
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen….”
1984, George Orwell
“It was the afternoon of my 81st. birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”
Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times….”
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man, in possession of a large fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austin
“Call me Ishmael…”
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there…”
The Go-Between, L P Hartley
“Scarlett o’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realised it when caught by her charm as the Tarlaton twins were….”
Gone with the Wind Who wrote that?
THE WORST
“It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet.”
The Last of the Mohicans, Fenomore Cooper
“By the end of the alley the fine hairs in my nostrils were starting to twitch.”
Shadows in Bronze, Lindsey Davis
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they eleoctrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t
even know what I was doing in New York.”
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
” 124 was spiteful.”
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Philip Norman journalist and novelist who in 1968 was assigned to cover the Beatles’ own business utopia, Apple Corps, from the inside. He is the author of Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly and many other books.
Memory and forgetting
Read this article last week but did not bookmark it. Luckily it appeared again in Arts and and Letters. Pleased to place a link here for anyone who might be interested. Borges’s “Funes the Memorious” gets a mention, as does an academic paper, “Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing,” cleverly seeming somewhat like the title of Benjamin’s essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Walter Benjamin – The Storyteller
There aren’t that many Benjamin texts out there on the interweb. This one
The Storyteller : Reflections on the work of Nicolai Leskov
came my way via Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog , which in its turn arrived through looking for more on the quote in my previous post
Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli.
There is a tantalising Italian wiki on the saying {1} and a link to an English Wiki:Terentianus on its author, which doesn’t give a lot away.
When the quote wiki is automatically translated it comes out as:
Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli
Depending on the apprehension of the reader, the book their fates
which is the sort of garbled translation I am fond of because it reminds me of the sort of English in the instruction sheet in flat-pack furniture.
For a second I misread it as some sort of fear of the reader……perhaps it could just as well be the other meaning or both at the same time: as in ‘I haven’t a clue what this book is about.’ [Chucks it in the waste paper basket]; or, ‘This book scares the hell out of me.’ [chucks it in the waste paper basket]
Would be grateful for a quick lesson on where to put the full stop in a quote: is it .’ or ‘.
Doris’ onions
Well there was a large artichoke as well. Why it should matter what was in the taxi behind her rather than the interview about the award she had just been given, goes part of the way to explain the way my mind works. I guess I saw a story there. Who was the man, where had they been? Had she been writing today? Was she tetchy with the journalist because she wanted to write and not shop? That kind of thing.
The Guardian (Friday 12 Oct 07) carries a story which mentions her first words, which most of the initial pieces did not. It also embedded an edited version of the TV footage of Doris getting out of her taxi. There, as I was sure I saw the first time, were the two vegetables, or rather, the one artichoke and the net of onions. You see the artichoke first, then as she has just finished saying, Oh, Christ!”, the string of onions and the artichoke in the hands of a bewildered looking man with arm a a sling.
I did attend carefully to her response to the news of her award, loving her truculence, but my eyes were on the veg. and wondering who the man was carrying them, who turned out to be not a journalist doing Doris a favour, as was reported elsewhere, but her son Peter, who is not well.
Matt Cowan tells us it was him who did the first interview and that it was a member of his crew who opened the cab door.
Alan Taylor in the Scottish Sunday Herald under the byline, Nobel turnips wait till Lessing couldn’t care less, after a turn on Swedes being turnips, turns to the plight of the serious novel:
When I met her in London earlier this year she was as perky and feisty as usual, railing against the dumbing down of the book trade and the degenerate taste of readers. Where once her books sold in the tens of thousands, she said, they now sold in dribs and drabs.
Two other good pieces on Doris, (sorry not disrespectful, just love the sound of the name) The Sunday Times, today, Grandma has a knuckleduster beside her literary pen, and the New Zealand Dominion Post, wondering what she might say in her acceptance speech, who got the Literature prize before her.
Proust posts in Moleskine Modality
Proust’s handwriting
Proust posts in Moleskine Modality
Recommend using edit > find > type in ‘Proust’ > select highlight all. You can run through the scroll in Moleskine Modality at a rate of knots to find what you might be interested in.
This will also highlight in yellow the word Proust in the blogroll. There is a selection of Proust related links in the ‘I read’ category: English for the non-English must be very trying when this could be the present or the past tense: while orally/aurally it is perfectly clear which tense it is.
If any of the blogroll links are dead, you can at least put the relevant title or phrase back into a search engine to try to find the article. Checked one link –Aesthetics of the Windshield: Proust and the modern Rhetoric of Speed which was as dead as the proverbial dead parrot in the Monty Python dead parrot sketch(though this one may work). How Proust viewed the technology of the time is a theme I cannot tire of. There are a few others :
From The Cambridge Companion to Proust is available as a pdf. Chapter 1 : From the Belle Époque to the First World War: the social panorama, under the under the sub-heading Speed of Change, page 14.
Theories of Relativity by William C. Carter
Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing, Rhythm, History
This is a few pages in a Google abstract (fascimile) which deals with speed: dealing with the bicycle, trains, the car, cinematograph, etc.
Doris Lessing – Nobel Prize for Literature 2007
Common knowledge already – news travels fast in the digital age. On British TV this evening we see Doris disembarking from a black cab outside her house in London, to be given the news by what sounded like an American TV man. A younger, large man behind her inside the cab – holding a large artichoke in one hand and what looks like a long string of onions in the other – who, it appears from other reports, was a journo on the scene doing a good turn.
‘I couldn’t care less’ about Nobel Prize: Lessing
CTV.ca from Associated Press
The Daily Express accurately reported the next bit:
As she got out of a taxi at her north London home, Lessing told reporters: “This has been going on for 30 years. I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I’m delighted to win them all. It’s a royal flush.”
Harold Bloom thinks it’s political correctness: Reason.com
….pure political correctness. Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable … fourth-rate science fiction.
There’s a longish biography in Dorislessing.org
Appreciate some advice on the best starter Lessing.
I have posted somewhere in Moleskine Modality about her and her brother re-visiting the old haunts in Zimbabwe which is retold in this 1999 academic article, similarities Between Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing.
Also, African Childhoods: indentity, race and autobiography
by
Tony Simoes da Silva, School of English, University of Exeter.
Font size in FODII
Recommend the holding down of the Control key and rolling the scroll wheel down to get a decent size print. What you get on entry might be too small.
Proust links from Moleskine Modality
Proust : Wiki In Pursuit of Proust The curious fate of the last three volumes of the new edition: Aaron Matz
The Kolb-Proust Archive Marcel (Valentin-Louis-George-Eugene) Proust (1871-1922) Marcel Proust tempsperdu.com other Proust sites Marcel Proust: Or the Novel as writing Proust regained by Daniel Mark Epstein Doing Time with Marcel Proust Chapter 1 – Marcel Proust (Edmund White) A la Researche U of Aldelaide e-text download page
Or straight to the books:Swann’s Way Within A Budding Grove The Guermantes Way Cities of the Plain (Sodom et Gomorrhe) The Captive The Sweet Cheat Gone (Albertine disparue) Time Regained (Le Temps Retrouve)
Christopher Taylor
First time for Paleoglot a few days ago: impressed and tickled by someone who has compiled an Etruscan dictionary. This time a post: The misused miracles of autism containing a 3 min. Youtube of Christopher Taylor doing his stuff. N.B. the section when Prof. Smith talk about Berber.
Gas Plasma technology – build a statue to Joseph Longo
(1) Waste-to-Energy Plants Could Replace Incinerators
from Greenbiz.com
(2) Plasma Gasification Transforms Garbage into Clean Energy
(3) Bye, bye Landfills – A yes from Joseph Logo
Joseph Longo is a hero of the story.
There is a company in the UK called Advance Plasma Power
Being Stephen Fry
No detailed idea what it must really be like: he has started writing on Stephen Fry, so we are surely going to get a better idea.
He’s in our minds, of course, with the documentaries he’s doing, which are jolly good: although about discrete subjects, they are also largely about Being Stephen Fry as well, which is not a bad thing with someone we all seem to think is substantial as well as good fun and interesting. Fry-type preferable to Theroux-type, for me, for its greater verisimilitudinousness. One is reminded of Malcolm Muggeridges’ strictures on TV being a lying medium when watching Theroux.
The two-part examination of manic-depression or Bipolar Affective Disorder as they call it nowadays, and his own cyclothymia, in The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive seemed pretty honest to me – as was HIV and Me – but I did not like it when he went on a minor spending spree because there was no moral consequence for him of profligacy : the vast majority of severe bipolars who spend what they haven’t got end up in big trouble. They are not rich. Why didn’t he just say he liked to spend then go find someone who did the same (and had no money) in order to demonstrate the terrible consequences?
: :
[removed central section because it was ill-thought, saying not very much and mostly wrong]
In life we rarely reveal everything about ourselves: who we are is partly predicated on acting out a part we chose. When I-write, the first person in a novel, I can never tell the truth that the omniscient impersonal narrator can.
Maybe we should treat Stephen Fry meta-narratively? He is everywhere, so is to all “in tents and porpoises ” a grand discourse in his own right. He’s a bit like a gas which expands to fill the available space, in the nicest possible way of course. As well as all his veritable accomplishments in comedy, film, writing, and documentary he’s even giving sage advice on videojug.
::
Daniel Wegner’s 1999 paper, The Seeds of Our Undoing.
The last but one paragraph:
Another line of evidence suggesting a role for ironic processes in the etiology of some disorders comes from studies of what happens when mental control is rescinded. The best examples of such work are the series of experiments by James Pennebaker and colleagues. When people in these studies are encouraged to express their deepest thoughts and feelings in writing, they experience subsequent improvements in psychological and physical health. Expressing oneself in this way involves relinquishing the pursuit of mental control, and so eliminates a key requirement for the production of ironic effects. After all, as suggested in other studies conducted in my lab with Julie Lane and Laura Smart, the motive to keep ones thoughts and personal characteristics secret is strongly linked with mental control. Disclosing these things to others, or even in writing to oneself, is the first step toward abandoning what may be an overweening and futile quest to control one’s own thoughts and emotions.
The last sentence :
When we relax the desire for the control of our minds, the seeds of our undoing may remain uncultivated, perhaps then to dry up and blow away.
Useful in examining why we write on the web as opposed to in a private place. What is it that makes us decide that one thing can be public and another private? I find it difficult to put too much personal detail into blogs, though I let free rein to my thoughts: it must be IKWYL Syndrome. But there another element of reticence: it is too easy, by publishing on a blog, to demonstrate how limited one’s intelligence is! It is often written too quickly and there is not the research, thinking and elimination of much of the flotsam and jetsam that often comes into consciousness.
J B Priestly:
Many a man is praised for his reserve and so-called shyness when he is simply too proud to risk making a fool of himself
Andre Dubos
Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.
And it is to narcissism and blogging in particular that I will return when I have done a bit more reading.
Finally: the distinction between hypergraphia and graphomania. One for Stephen perhaps? Why not a QI question! Don’t worry you can have that one for free. The scenario would be even more annoying than the one fleshed out in the two dialogues in Let Fame.
P.S.
The original real reason for starting this post – just remembered – was to to examine the notion that some people are determinedly happy to muscle in on someone famous’ life (a nice example in Fryworld, the FaceBook debacle {1} {2 }), while others are more circumspect.
In the early days of weblogs, there was a lot of “Why am I blogging?” going on. I had a go in Weblogword, along the lines of it’s like writing Post It! notes, getting into the car and sticking them randomly to telegraph poles in the middle of the countryside.
P.P.S.
Now then, how many times have I used I in this post and where are the letters of John Cheever? I have recently learned that he started using the personal pronoun in his personal correspondence and fiction as he got more famous.
adfero affero
I was forced by poor memory and no early training in the terminology of grammar to give up Latin at 12, and French by O Level, but etymology has always been of great interest. In recent years, reading about languages, there was something about the economy of Latin.
Latin quotes are all over the web. This seems to be a standard list. Run down the As and before you know it you are wishing you had a good memory:
Abutebaris modo subjunctivo denuo – You’ve been misusing the subjunctive again.
What better than to be able to throw that one out at a dinner party in the full knowledge no one understood a word of it: and then getting even greater pleasure with a faux, fine blend of various species of pedantry and didacticism by explaining the subjunctive in great detail.
Or,
Ad augusta per angusta – To high places by narrow roads
Sounds wonderful, whatever does it mean? A phrase to use on the blackboard much like teachers favourite: “Paris in the the Spring” bounded cunningly within an equilateral triangle ( found in all school psychology text books).
Or even,
Ad lucem – Towards the light (motto of the University of Lisbon)
which gives me an strong desire to spend at least half an hour finding out why the U of L chose it.
Adfero affero rather appealed to me: an alliterative and repetitive (consonance?) poem in itself. It means, to bring news, report / apply, bring to bear. Unfortunately, when setting up this weblog, it got misspelt at the URL name deciding stage. Hence forever swotty Latin pedants (by which I mean experts in Latin not Mediterranean types in general) will smile as they come across the mistake. Unfortunately I am stuck with something which looks more like to bring iron than news.
Fame
Stephen Fry has added a blog to his website. His second post Let Fame, long and discursive – the length of which the concern of many of the so far over 200 comments it received – led me in short strides to some of the academic work on celebrity. One of the most interesting (though at one unscientific remove, slight barmy) studies was the effect (or not) of fame on the creative writings of Kurt Cobain, Cole Porter, and John Cheever:
The Psychological Consequences of Fame: Three Tests of the Self-Consciousness
Hypothesis by Mark Schaller (1997), Journal of Personality 65:2, June 1997 by Mark Schaller, Department of Psychology,University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada .
The abstract explains:
Three investigations tested the hypothesis, that the attainment of fame leads to chronic self-consciousness. One of these studies also examined the relationship of self-consciousness with self-destructive behavior. Analyses of Kurt Cobain’s and Cole Porter’s song lyrics indicated increased use of first-person singular pronouns after each songwriter attained celebrity. An analysis of John Cheever’s short stories indicated greater use of the first-person narrative voice following his first brush with fame. Other analyses revealed that variations in Cheever’s fame were positively correlated with use of first-person singular pronouns in his private letters and journals. These measures of self-consciousness were also positively correlated with Cheever’s self-reported alcohol use. Together, these, three studies offer the first empirical support for a self- consciousness hypothesis linking celebrity to self-destructive behavior.
and includes a quote from Leo Gaudy at the end:
In the urge to find a better, more perfect self, the possibility of uncovering a worse, more misshapen one hangs like a threatening cloud. Lurking behind every chance to be made whole by fame is the axeman of further dismemberment.
I suppose it is but a short step to the analysis of Stephen’s writing.
Although Let Fame covers a lot of ground, I am as intrigued by the comments stream. The number of comments in such a short space of time is surely a measure of fame: whatever these people are writing about, the suspicion is that they are attempting in one way or another to brush, albeit mostly lightly, against fame. Quite a few mention incidents where they were in his proximity.
It is not always easy in the writing styles of these comments to detect the humour and irony. Apart from a few quite funny ones, what comes over is the earnestness, which would seem to fit with the fan-tasy: that’s what the fan’s role in the fame nexus is. Though some of my reading suggests that built in, too, is “you can build ’em up and you can pull ’em down.”
The wiki:celebrity is quite useful. I should advise Stephen to get cracking on an edit of that entry! He could use himself as an example.
“Only connect”. One thing thing almost certainly leads to another on the web. I ended up (half wondering about myself in that medical book syndrome state) reading extracts of a book and interviews with its author, Sam Vaknin (“world expert” on narcissism ) : Malignant Self-Love:Narcissism Revisited.
In interview he says:
….celebrities fulfil two emotional functions: they provide a mythical narrative (a story that the fan can follow and identify with) and they function as blank screens onto which the fans project their dreams, hopes, fears, plans, values, and desires (wish fulfilment). The slightest deviation from these prescribed roles provokes enormous rage and makes us want to punish (humiliate) the “deviant” celebrities.
There’s a pile of it in that vein, but taking away the jargon, there certainly something there. He’s bound to have expounded a poor man’s version of narcissism and its malignancies on Oprah Winfrey. It’s the sort of book title she would love to read off the book cover as she held it high as her latest recommendation.
cutting on the action 
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