The Editors Converse - Reading Lists (4/4)

S:

I didn’t know about the Tin House neglecterino list, no, but it sounds like a useful resource. It’s not a publication I’ve turned my attention to enough, so this might be a good time to start. Yes, you’re right about the inclusion of Lessing being a little odd - I don’t think Nobel laureates need to be rescued from the ash-heap of public forgetfulness, do they? - but Green (H.) makes a lot more sense: outside of the UK, I don’t know how popularly read he is (he may even be a primarily academic pursuit, even here: a writer’s writer, right?), and Dodie Smith falls into that category of a writer who’s known for one popular work but whose other output tends to get left by the wayside, a little unfairly.

(Speaking of the ‘Joycean moment’ Rochelle and I are about to do the most middle class thing in the world: no, not ‘vote Labour’, ha ha!, but do a joint reading of Ulysses, the results of which, if they have concrete form, may be coming to a blog near you, if you don’t behave yourself.)

Your list I like, and I’m sure there’s a whole host of work I could add to it, though most of it would fall in the bracket of work by authors who themselves are wildly non-neglected, but some of whose writing gets overshadowed massively by their celebrated output: so, Kerouac’s Doctor Sax and Old Angel Midnight come to mind straight off the bat - dense, post-Joycean engagements with language and landscape that come as a hell of a shock to the system for any reader who’s only encountered On the Road and The Dharma Bums before (and, again, like many of your examples, not perfect, but certainly interesting, and with flashes of brilliance: the flood of the Merrimac in Doctor Sax is among the best things Kerouac wrote). I could probably trawl my brains for more esoteric examples, but that’d be silly, and distracting. Just keep reading.

I think you may have mentioned Motorman before, and it was suitably intriguing then, although I’ve fallen away to a certain extent from that kind of genre / post-genre writing, at least for the time being (although, if you’ve not read it, I can recommend John Crowley’s Engine Summer, which, although narratively more conventional from the sounds of things, contains some genuinely astonishing writing, and moves at a pace which, at times, can be described as glacial: it’s the kind of post-apocalyptic novel to which only, say, Studio Ghibli could do justice in adaptation).

Otherwise, I’m just ploughing through old-school poetry proper: none of this dabbling in cross-genre intertextuality. Get hence, I tell thee, get hence! New stuff and old: there’s so much, in fact, hiding on my shelf I’ve not given proper due to that I don’t really need to engage in anything new for some months (not that that’ll happen, by the way). I’ve been re-engaging with Alan Baker’s Variations on Painting a Room, his chunky ‘collected pamphlets’ from 2010, which is great: it’s really interesting watching him move from a broadly realist, Objectivist-tinged mode to more open, collagist forms that deploy repetition and fugue structures. His newer work’s really good, too: a KFS pamphlet came today, comprising two short sequences which have an antic, Peter Hughes-y vibe to them, but still very much Alan’s own voice (slightly more melancholic and caffeine-fuelled than PH, definitely). Revisiting O’Hara, too, because frankly - ha! - I’ve only really scratched the surface of that particular treasure-hoard. I guess it’s easy to take the greats for granted, but that’s a silly excuse, as why take for granted something that’s still more vital and exuberant than 90% of everything else on the shelf, even half a century after he died?

G:

The whole depth/breadth thing has always bothered me. I know it’s a gross generalisation, but you like that kind of thing, so here goes: writers often get known for books, which, while worthy for their day, begin to lump together in a mass of familiar prose and plot arcs and aspirations.

I finally finished the Mueller novel I’ve been stalling over for months, The Appointment. Elsewhere I think you made a point about the ‘worthiness’ of a certain kind of writing in ‘Nobel’ terms; problems of history, accountability and guilt, how to deal with war, genocide and recovery. As if there’s only the binary of WW2 and post-WW2 for laureates to fit into. Yes, there’s a type there, and the same feels true of the kind of work that breaks through in other terms.

Do you remember we once had an argument about compassion fatigue? You (belligerent bastard that you are) accused me of a failure of empathy for arguing how Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood, had given me greater emotional access to the Nazi genocide than reading Eli Wiesel’s Night. And yet both books stand in my memory as powerful and vital accounts of a history I can never have direct access to.

Ultimately, there’s no real breadth of vicarious experience from that kind of writing. If you read every contemporary prize winner, every year, it’d be like reading the same novel over and over, with the names changed. This isn’t an argument in favour of Booker’s Basic Plots (BBPs), but an attack on the inability of most writers to make a reader feel like there are other possibilities in the world, other structures or habits. What I feel we’re talking about is finding the kind of books whereby you can’t just squint and feel like you’re staring at another vanilla-magnolia pastiche.

For now I’m continuing with breadth. There’s too much out there for me to dive into oeuvres right now; I’m trying to rebuild my love of/faith in books, writing, the ambitious wildness of the world’s libraries. Trying to find titles which don’t fit comfortably into BBPs; I guess I’m looking for a literature of anomalies. Engine Summer’s on the list.

I’ve three titles with me at the moment. Just finished Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, which is so mischievous and brilliant and falls apart into rushed chaos at the end, but without dissipating its energy. Currently on Burroughs’ Junky, which is awful and weird. As Ballard recourses to physical disability, cars and erotica, so Burroughs, even in this early book, repeatedly associates to insects, centipedes. After that, I’ve Aldiss’ Galaxies likes Grains of Sand, for which I have a relatively blank slate of expectations.

So, a closing salvo: books with introductions by other authors, such a roulette wheel. Ali Smith’s intro to Carrington drips with hyperbole and adjectival juice-bites for the jacket. Allen Ginsberg’s introduction to Junky is gripping and wonderful, but also stylish. I liked the prose. The Aldiss edition has some kind of hybrid fronting the book: a next-level geekery extemporising about Aldiss’ career, which swings into a fairly brutal take-down of publishers’ fears of fake-publishing short story collections as novels-in-parts.

Anyway, I figured it’s better to open more worm cans at the end of these dialogues than pretend they should be cleanly and clearly rounded off. It’s a living conversation, non? Maybe we should just start posting it up, one letter per day, and just let it grow. We’ve already got a sub-conversation going on email.

===

This ought to be the last part of this conversation, but maybe we lied. Maybe there'll be a part 5/4 tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow already happened and you're reading this in another version of time. We don't actually have any answers. We're only the Editors. You, dear Reader, curate the world yourself.

The Editors Converse - Reading Lists (3/4)

S:

I’ve not read Bluets, but The Argonauts did feel like a game-changer, partly because of its subject matter, and partly because it brought to light a tendency in recent non-fiction writing to ignore generic and formal boundaries, producing something that feels entirely new in the process (I’ve covered this ground pretty comprehensively in my stalled exchange with James, so won’t go over the same material here). Not sure how relevant it is, but there’s an excellent titbit about compositional methods from the Wave collection, where Maggie Nelson explains to Wayne Kostenbaum about how she writes poems on scraps of paper and napkins, and then carries the collated material around with her wherever she goes. It’s a fractured method of writing - something she contrasts with the more conventional procedures she applies to prose - which I can appreciate, and it’s precisely these little nuggets of writerly practice that make interviews with poets and their ilk so useful - it’s so much more valuable than the pseudo-scholarly gossip that often underpins literary biographies.

Claudia Rankine, too, has been a key part of my reading: both she and Nelson seem to have found a way to reinvigorate socially engaged writing in a way that combines the personal and the political, and feels immediately accessible for a general reader without sacrificing either formal invention or their innate radicalism. But they also feel strangely unrepeatable: both The Argonauts and Citizen will undoubtedly be incredibly influential, though not necessarily in terms of form or even theme, but rather as goads for the rest of us, on either side of the pond, to radically up our collective game. (Another nugget from the What is Poetry: Ted Greenwald - who’s in the reading jumble, too - bemoaning the decline in *creative* competition in poetry, the sense that we might be driven to greater compositional heights by the output of our peers and friends: jealousy as the great begetter. Think of Brian Wilson making Pet Sounds after hearing Revolver, and McCartney returning the complement with Sgt Pepper. I’m sure there are more literary examples I could have leant towards, but that’s always the analogy that’s at the forefront of my brain.)

Gratifyingly, Michael O’Brien’s work turned out to be as exciting as I’d hoped. Not sure why the hell I’ve not been reading him for years, to be honest; it feels like an irredeemable oversight on my part. Still, I’m glad to have discovered his work now, even if it is a little late in the day. I feel like he’s just the tip of an iceberg of poets with long and respected careers who’ve somehow, for whatever reason, managed to slip through the cracks of critical attention (or mine, at least). My mission for the next few months is to try and plug a few of those gaps: the world is absolutely stuffed with exciting work, both old and new; you just have to keep reading without jaded eyes.

In an entirely unrelated note, tell me about Motorman.

G:

Well now, I wholeheartedly second everything you say about Nelson and Rankine, and glad for the extra bits I didn’t know about Maggie’s process. I’ll let that rest and move on because I’ve been thinking about anti-novels lately, or anti-narratives. And your query about Motorman sparks a few thoughts.

Do you know about Tin House magazine’s ‘Lost and Found’ section? The list is, fortunately, online, although the articles themselves are subscription-only. (And at time of writing their store is undergoing maintenance so I can’t see much more.) Anyway, I very much like the outcome of a ‘reclaimed from the heaps’ reading list, although the principle itself is somewhat, I dunno, distressing/frustrating? It’s obviously subjective: I’d hardly put Lessing and Henry Green, or Dodi Smith on those lists, but you can’t tell when these pieces were written from the list. There’s certainly some interesting stuff on there, regardless - it looks like a better ‘hit’ than ‘miss’ approach for me. (It is, I should add, exclusively prose, to the best of my knowledge).

At the same time, it leans toward American and ‘literary’ more than my tastes in recent years. If I had to draw up my own list of lost and founds, it might read with a mix of difficult and delightful, but all, to me, perspective game-changers in terms of what a novel can do (yes, OK, if I were being blunt they’re books that accept the whole ‘Joycean moment’):

David Ohle Motorman (originally loaned, then gifted, by Andrew Bailey, total legend that he is)

Ann Quin Berg

JG Ballard The Atrocity Exhibition

Kenneth Gangemi Olt

David Thomas The White Hotel

Renee Gladman The Activist

Robin Blaser The Holy Forest

Ursula Le Guin The Dispossessed

Flann O’Brien The Third Policeman

Boris Vian Heartsnatcher

I’m sure there are others I’ve forgotten for now and would need to hunt through shelves to recover. I can’t describe any of these as ‘perfect’ books but they definitely stuck with me in ways that other books haven’t. And by ‘stuck’ I mean they left an emotional smear across my otherwise numb and vacuous heart/soul echo chamber, like the remains of a vampire’s supper entrailed across a crypt floor.

Against these there’s a stack of less successful experimental novels:

Frederick Rolfe Hadrian VII

Juan Filloy Op Oloop

…

And what am I doing? I actually was on the verge of trawling through shelves to remind myself of all the bad writing out there and then I thought: list-making is a mug’s game. Some books work better than others, but this division into ‘successful/unsuccessful’ or ‘good/bad’ is kind of pointless. I’ve been spending too much time on the internet. Bump those two up into the top category and add the proviso there are dozens more. Yes, your point is spot on: “the world is absolutely stuffed with exciting work”.

So, I’ll do what I was semi-avoiding and offer up a quick precis of why Ohle’s Motorman moved me so much: I can’t honestly say what it is ‘about’ but it is laced with a passion for life and survival in ways few books seem capable of celebrating. The protagonist, whose name I’ve forgotten, has several minor hearts and a few major hearts. He sounds semi-robotic. He drives about, escapes the State, seems to be some kind of retarded expression of a free-wheelin’ sixties independent spirit operating in an early Thatcherite/Reagan-esque or even McCarthyan, ‘This World has Moved On’ authoritarian regime, which expresses itself benignly through doctors and malignantly through a kind of militarised police force.

And our hero has to basically chase down his old mentor - who was a state doctor type, possibly, but has since gone rogue - before too many of his hearts pack up and cause his main heart(s) to go into arrest. Or something like that. It’s urgent, you care for him. It’s written in bursts of poetic prose, almost like diary entries, each one barely contingent on those around to start with, but the narrative grows through fragments into a coherent dissonance.

You follow his urge to write love letters to a woman you’re never quite sure exists, but he’s madly in love with. You follow his quest through various deranged biomes and territories, his encounters with madnesses in the swamps and mists, weird episodes which seem hostile at first, turn into safety, etc. It’s that movement between safety and danger, and the continuous urgency of having to keep moving, chasing, to survive, wrapped up in the bizarre love story underwriting it, which may or may not be a false hallucination/implanted memory. I mean, I’m cobbling it all together, it was so weird I had to half-guess what was going on with it.

At the same time, it’s so joyfully written, so open-minded and clean to read. And funny and emotive: the prose is a beating heart, it bleeds energy and feeling. I haven’t read another book like like that, which also managed to catch me on the first page.

A lot of gushing and I’ve done all that without even checking the contents of the book again. The memory of reading it sits like a hazy-shaped ball of happygoo inside me somewhere. That’s the stuff I crave these days.

And to be honest, I haven’t had that feeling from poetry for quite a while. Maybe I had a slight tang/buzz off Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution and maybe I’m forgetting other stuff...

But yes: quite, quite too long. Any recommendations along those somewhat indefinite lines?

===

The short answer: no, never. The nails in the coffin - Part 4 - tomorrow.

The Editors Converse - Reading Lists (2/4)

S:

Lot’s to chew on there, but before I carry on, two points of note: one, your mention of the E.T. Atari game - which is rightly notorious - reminded me of a wonderful thing I stumbled across a while back, a vintage-style game based on The Shining, which is a thing of beauty and a joy forever; and two, I’m very tempted to put the word ‘foray’ in the foregoing into scare-quotes, just to get the rumour mill grinding away.

But these are passing fancies. Back to the poetry. It feels like, however disconnected you might be feeling, you’re still a little more plugged in to proceedings than I’ve been. The work that’s most exciting me at the moment, pretty much across the board, has been translation, often of poetry with a well-established vintage. Peter Hughes’ Cavalcanty is foremost in this list - his versions of Petrarch are one of the primary reasons to keep reading in the 21st century, and Cavalcanty is on a par, though it’s a shorter collection. I’ve not read the whole caboodle yet, but it already includes one of my favourite stanzas in history (both human and geological):

      the worst thing about being a dalek

      is how remote you feel from tender flesh

      & how every sexual position

      makes you feel more like a fucking bollard

I could probably babble on about Hughes’ control of the line (there’s a musical play of line endings against run on sentences, with syntactic units seeming to end with the line, only to continue and throw the reader into a momentary tailspin), his employment of competing registers and vocabularies, and the sheer vigour of his ear, but all of that would be rather academic and pointless: what matters is that the poetry’s never boring, the biggest sin. Every line’s an event, which you could unpick and unpick, but there’s a motive force to the music that keeps driving you on: a lot of this is probably due to the ‘voice’ (old-fashioned concept, I know, but it suits) that Hughes creates here, and in the Petrarch.

Who else? NRYB have just reissued Paul Blackburn’s Proensa, a translation of Provencal troubadours, and a precursor in terms of its technique to Hughes’ own work (they’re both offspring of Poundian and Buntingesque notions of translation). It’s arguably not as immediate as Hughes, but then I think Blackburn’s intention was more ‘trad’ in that he was creating workable translations rather than versions or new poems in their own right. But any translation’s a new poem in its own right, right?, and PB’s troubadours have a lot of energy and music. The versions of Bertran de Born, in particular, are exceptional (Pound turned his hand to BdB, too, in some of his earlier poems).

I’m sure there’s plenty else that’s been on my radar, but that can wait until further into the conversation. Excitingly, a copy of Michael O’Brien’s Sills has just touched down in the front hall, so that’s the rest of the day accounted for. Also, as a final thought: what’s more authentically punk than a book that’s been dipped in black gunk?

G:

Well now, ‘foray’ sounds a little more polite than, say, ‘fray’ or ‘fracas’ but let’s not throw petrol on that fire just yet. (*nudge nudge*)

I’ll stick to the poetry because I realise I do have a backlog of reading in my head. I could blab about a couple of other things I picked up second hand

Joseph Moncure March’s The Wild Party is fun, but dated by the spate of scatalogical open mic doggerel proliferating around and about. You also have to think yourself into the age, and that’s a difficult job when you’re trying to squeeze your way past the somewhat male-fantasy drawings in the illustrated-by-Art Spiegelman edition; and I’m trying to re-read Astrid Alben’s Ai! Ai! Pianissimo, which, a bit like AK Blakemore’s book reads like it’s had a little bit too much of the energy edited out of it, but really only a couple of names stand out from the last year or two: Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine.

I guess it’s the form that attracts me most. A kind of prose-poetry series of stanzas/blocks. Where Christian Bok’s Eunoia (and some of Susan Howe’s collections) shapes the ‘paragraphs’/‘word-squares’ very rigidly, Nelson’s poetry and Rankine’s Citizen feel completely organic, open, instinctive. The form drove me through their work like teenage joyriders on methamphetamines, but this despite the absolutely serious, intellectual backbones.

Rankine you probably know all about already. Citizen weighs a hundred times more than the paper it’s printed on. I feel like it deserves more than a couple of throwaway sentences here, but it has been reviewed and acclaimed extensively. My main interest is that it’s an essay-poem, which is a tradition, and as with a lot of these sensationalised texts, there’s not much discussion of that form: Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Charles Bernstein being two of the more recent exponents I’m aware of, but the tradition is French (and, a quick online search suggests, commonly French Canadian) with exponents in Victor Hugo, Montaigne and others. The form needs more attention, as it serves a very strange purpose.

Especially in Nelson’s work. I was lucky (I think) to read bluets before The Argonauts. They’re both great, but they’re also pretty much a set; bluets (I have no idea why I’m spelling it lower case, it just feels right) pretends to be an essay about the colour blue, but extrapolates into autobiography, gender, social commentary, identity politics, liberalism, depression, difficult relationships, asides about the state of academia, all that stuff. It’s brilliant, though maybe a little bit too intellectual in places, but those heightened moments of thinking are off-set by the other extreme - some incredibly difficult, honest moments of emotional exposure. The stuff on blue, also, made me happy someone had set out to challenge William Gass’ On Being Blue, which, despite some sharp insights and a wealth of intelligent magpie-ing, left me thinking it was an unredeemably creepy book.

The Argonauts feels a little more self-conscious by comparison: perhaps knowing people are watching makes for language that’s a little more, I don’t know... Intentional? A few moments felt as if they were intended to be read by certain people, statements that needed to be made, but they didn’t weave smoothly into the rest of the essay. It is, however, a much more positive book than bluets, with childbirth, family, finding feet, etc. One of the funnier moments, from my perspective, is her moments of liberal doubt about naming their child something they later found out suggests a Native American identity, and oh hashtag cultural appropriation what?

Nelson’s work has a way of using prose-block fragmentation that made me wonder if it’s still a valid form. I tried re-reading Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk, and it struck me as heavy-handed masturbation. And then I’m tilting over into those little square till-books, with aphorisms and random life advice, which function in similar ways. I can’t help feeling there’s a very rich range in the ‘book-of-paragraphs’ genre which Nelson has steered away from by going more toward ‘essay-poem’.

But, like you said, that kind of categorisation starts to sound like academic wrangling over imaginary horses. So I’ll stop with one of the quotes that jumped out at me from Nelson:

once something is no longer illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe, in the same way (The Argonauts)

===

Does it get better? Does it ever get better? Find out tomorrow with Part 3!

The Editors Converse - Reading Lists (1/4)

Simon Turner and George Ttoouli caught up in the e-ther to discuss recent reading, like intellectual rats hooked to literary electrodes, to see if there's any charged writing around to get their pleasure muscles jumping.

===============

S:

So, I was thinking over what you’d said the other day during your jaunt to sunny Leamington, about how you’ve been feeling a little removed from the various poetry scenes in the UK. I have to admit, and did at the time, that I’m feeling similarly removed from proceedings, due to a combination of age and contrarianism. That said, there are plenty of individual poets out there whose work we admire; it’s just perhaps that we’ve allowed context - poetics, infighting, aesthetic battles, the scurf riding in the wake of the Poetry Wars - to fall by the wayside. Which might not be such a bad thing, all told.

One of the things I’ve been reading lately is a collection of interviews from the Poetry Project that Wave Books has just published, and even though I’ve only just begun dipping into it - it’s a treasure-trove in so many ways - one theme that’s come up with a degree of regularity is the notion that, ultimately, scenes, movements, poetics, aesthetics, don’t really matter: what matters is, as a reader, finding out work you admire; and, perhaps more importantly, as a working poet, finding like-minded people you can become friends with, and with whom you can share your work and enthusiasms. Everything else is just politics.

So, partly because it’s fun to discuss one’s reading in a general sense, and partly because I wanted to get back on the G&P pony, what say you to an improvised textual discussion of our recent reading? What have we loved, what have we hated? Which neglected voices do we want to crow from the rooftops? Which over-rated prize-winners would we choose to bury beneath impenetrable layers of feculent landfill? Thoughts?

G:

I’m fairly sure it should be ‘faeculent’ just because it was too close to fecund for my tastes. That said, it does remind of a story I heard recently about people mining landfill for rare earth metals and along the way, someone somehow managed to dig up the worst Atari game ever made, something related to E.T.

But that’s a long way off topic. I’ll admit, I’m not actually that long into reading for pleasure again. I’ve been trying to compile a list of titles to revisit, acquired over the past few years or so, with the intention of (re-)reading with a little more attention. Looking over my shelves, my tastes have changed a lot.

But, that said, this is improv, so I’m going to dive in with what’s been on my mind. I mentioned, during our foray in the park, Rupert Loydell’s new book arrived in the post - Dear Mary (Shearsman). I actually wrote a review of it, and it may even be live before this conversation is ended [insert link here if so].

Another one that has been on my mind: AK Blakemore’s Humbert Summer (Eyewear). I met ‘AK’ several years ago when I was working a London job and she was winning awards. I was struck by the poems’ images back then and when I glanced through the copy in my local Waterstones, was struck again, although there was a sharper edge to the syntax, a little more punk to the language. I didn’t buy that copy because someone had smeared it with black gunk and it was the only shop copy (don’t even know what it was doing there, frankly), but ordered from the publisher. I dipped into it, ran out of time, dipped back in... The usual story. But it’s still interesting enough, has enough difference in language to conventional stuff to mean I’m going back to it.

Which reminds me: the images were the reason I got into Nathan Thompson’s work, though really his schtick turned out to be voice. I never did pick up his last Shearsman. Might be time to start dishing out the spondulix again. Sad to have lost touch with him. I’m fairly sure I had a parcel lined up to send him, then lost track of his email and postal addresses.

But community: that was actually a conversation I started to have with Theo in January. I feel like our ‘community of like-minds’ is spread all over the place: from Birmingham to Athens, Australia to Cornwall to Singapore. It would be nice to have the money to visit them regularly, though that might drive me mad. Still, I feel like the Midlands has a big red band of no around it, driving all the like-minds away. Something akin to Baker’s description of how birds reacted to his human shape.

===

This was originally called 'Recent Reading', but the conversation happened so long ago, the hot dust of zeitgeist is now the frozen sheen of yesteryear. Part 2 tomorrow.

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (4/4)

"Fizzy-cola bottles with their light and dark theology and fearsome sugary tang of doubt."

SC:

Not questioning is a problem. I hope I use poetry as an enquiry, or perhaps an interrogation, of philosophy, theology and language.

Sometimes you write poems that are about yourself, your friends, your family which could be read as memoir. Do you think it’s more difficult for women to do this and remain, to the reader, detached as men can? I use characterisation in my poems, partly to avoid this, and so that any details appropriated from my own life are allowed to exist outside of the context me.

So for example, we both talk about faith (or lack/doubt) in our poetry. Do you find that you are asked personal questions about religion?

And, while we’re adopting this serious tone, what’s your favourite pick ’n mix sweet? Mine’s fizzy-cola bottles with their light and dark theology and fearsome sugary tang of doubt.

RML:

I don't know if I have ever done pick'n'mix! I used to like Kola Cubes when I was a kid. And white chocolate mice. Those sherbet flying saucer things too, with cardboard shells that stuck to the top of your mouth.

I was talking – well emailing – Clark Allison earlier about this whole idea of us being present in our poems. He quite rightly said we can only write about what we experience, but I was adamant that I want my poems to move away from confession. They obviously are about things that interest or concern me, but it doesn't mean the narrators are me, or that everything said in the poem is me speaking, or that what happens in them happened to me.

I have no idea if it's more difficult for women to be as detached. I don't see why it should be, and there are plenty of experimental women writers who choose not to write autobiographically or confessionally. It's also quite clear that even the likes of Lowell and Plath construct their own poetic personas. Everything is mediated!

So yes, characterisation, disruptive syntax, parataxis, jump cuts, collage, multiple voices etc are all useful tools to disabuse readers that it's me opening my heart up.

I do sometimes get asked about the content of my poems, yes. It's sometimes interesting to talk about the sources of ideas, but it depends who is asking. Despite our 'postmodernist loss of metanarratives' it's amazing how many universal ideas and stories do still exist, and the idea of the spiritual (or religious) is definitely one of them.

SC:

I think you’re ignoring the epiphanic nature of the pick‘n’mix counter.

===

© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017

YES RUPERT, STOP IGNORING THE EPIPHANIC NATURE OF THE PICK'N'MIX COUNTER. - GT.

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (3/4)

"Russian protest occasionally reappears in some of the later poems in the guise of a rubber duck."

RML:

Well, I look forward to the new ten poems... Yes, the male presence is interesting, something I've played with in Dear Mary, though more as a possible erotic presence or sexy male hunk than menacing presence.

I love Robert Lax's work, but it's so bare and minimal that I don't often find that it leaves room for associative texts, variations or responses, whereas the annunciation is already part of a complex web of ideas, images, theology, belief systems and associative stuff that one can go on forever responding and reinventing. I mean just that jump from angel to devil to snake to Jim Morrison of the Doors is easy. I can't do that with Lax! (He might have been relieved.)

What I do like is the sense that both Lax and Merton were in many ways recluses who lived apart from the world yet were able to intelligently observe and comment on it. I feel too awash in information, images, texts and music to get that kind of perspective. Though I wouldn't mind being a hermit in Tuscany for a while – as long as I could fly to New York or London every so often. And before you laugh, remember Thomas Merton was the kind of solitary person who sometimes jumped over the monastery wall to drink whisky with his friends and publisher. A civilized way to live, I feel.

SC:

Perhaps. Merton scores very low in Hermit Top Trumps though.

RML:

Possibly, although I think he has high spiritual superpowers which sometimes win out.

Anyway, what about this idea of themes and specifics within a web of stuff rather than on its own. Did you feel the Fra Angelico was outside your subject areas? How did you get from that painting to the ideas you used?

SC:

I didn’t. As you mentioned earlier, the annunciation has a complex web of associative images, texts and references in popular culture, so I came to it through different means. I don’t think I looked at the painting until we were several poems in. I’d written a few poems about Mary previously concerned with the bodily reality of giving birth. At the time of writing the Snow Angel Annunciation poem, I was mostly inspired by Pål Moddi’s version of Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer, the music video of which features the Norwegian folk-singer sitting on the steps of a church near the Norwegian/Russian border in sub-zero temperatures, the church having decided that it was too politically risky allowing him to play inside the church. That sense of faith being silenced and being forced to exist in the margins is present in that poem. Russian protest occasionally reappears in some of the later poems in the guise of a rubber duck.

I imagine when I look more closely at Fra Angelico I will be more interested in him. I like monks and nuns… not in a 1970s Nunsploitation kind of way though.

I have this web of ideas developed over thirty years of varying degrees of religious education, misinformation and re-constructed fragments in which to piece together my annunciation poems. Sunday school, Catholic friends at university, Jesus cartoons, religious music, a research interest in mysticism and the Robert Powell movie Jesus of Nazareth left plenty of material to build my new annunciation nest with.

Can you think of any more hermits for Hermit Top Trumps?

RML:

I guess Thoreau has to go straight in the set. Perhaps Saint Francis and some of the Desert Fathers. After that I kind of run out of steam. I don't think hermits is a specialist area of mine at all! If I thought harder it would be rather heavy on Christian mystics and recluses though, despite my shelves full of poets.

Marginalized belief is interesting... Sydney Carter, the poet and songwriter ('Lord of the Dance' is his most famous) writes well about spiritual doubt, and the tension with faith, which of course is much more interesting than people who are sure about everything. My friend A.C. Evans always talks about the 'leap of doubt', with a nod to existentialism and gnosticism, as well as a cynical take on occult and conspiracy theories. My own mix of Sunday school, church and reading liberal and postmodern theology, along with the death-of-god and humanist strands, not to mention fiction by the likes of Charles Williams and Tim Winton has produced my own peculiar take on it all, which as I put in 'Sudden Impact':

      We must look at what

      we see, make up our minds, pay attention

      to surfaces and the different ways they

      catch the light through religious smoke.

This religious smoke, along with new age smoke, and fundamentalist smoke, seems to me to cloud everything.

It's not so much faith being silenced, as doubt being silenced; we are asked not to question at all. And if we don't engage with thinking and questioning we seem to end up with pick'n'mix anything-goes woolly new-age nonsense.

===

© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (2/4)

"Poets can be like the people who open jars for you after you’ve done most of the work yourself"

SC:

I don’t think these annunciation poems would have happened for me if you’d just emailed me a copy of the Fra Angelico painting one rainy Sunday.

Poets can be like the people who open jars for you after you’ve done most of the work yourself. They come along and unlock the mechanism and you think, ‘well, I was almost there’ but, in the end, they did open the jar for you because, before they came along with their jar-opening words, you were just looking at some jam (maybe Marmite if we’re talking contemporary art) through glass, scraping away the label or reading the contents list trying to imagine how all that might come together…

Sad. No toast for you and along comes this poet and out come the jam-words and everyone can have toast.

Slava was the result of me trying to open two jars at once and making a mess all over the floor. The first was the poet Robert Lax whose ekphrastic blue/black poem continues to fixate me. It really isn’t much more than, as you say, mimesis and yet something lives in the words that doesn’t in the Reinhardt painting it mirrors.

Perhaps it’s the poet himself, or, perhaps, something that the poet brought to the painting that I couldn’t.

The second jar was the polyarnik Vyascheslav Korotkin who appeared in the Guardian as photographed by Evgenia Arbugaeva. He’s the real Slava. I don’t know if I imagined a whole new life for him. I didn’t want to get too personal. Nevertheless, his life fascinated me. Turning him into a monk allowed me to work at the two emerging ideas at once. I’ve never met Lax or Korotkin but both unlocked problems I needed to work through and I had to find a way to enjoy toast with them.

I guess I did something similar in my re-imaginings of the annunciation. I wanted to re-introduce elements such as the difficult family dynamics, secrets and unreliable male figures that are erased from the gospel version of the story and work out how those erasures were problematic for me. Whilst also, hopefully, entertaining with my brand of heretical religiosity.

RML:

So, I guess like me, though perhaps with different concerns, you are weaving stories (in poetry) around and from paintings or stories or other poems? I think the idea of layers is one that I found myself peeling away when I started to think about why the Fra Angelico annunciation in San Giovanni Valdarno appeals to me so much. It's not just the image itself, it's the fact it's the least known and regarded of his annunciation paintings, the fact it used to be in a small room behind the church altar which you had to squeeze in to, and then all the symbols and motifs I had to read about to understand. Lilies, porticos, blue dress, abstract floors, not to mention early ideas of perspective; and then the centuries of annunciation paintings everywhere in Western Europe, not least of course in every tiny Italian church you care to enter.

And of course I am fascinated by this asexual, often muscular being, with glorious wings, in conversation with this placid and devotional, slightly bewildered virgin woman, who even as it happens seems to have ideas of 'Queen of Heaven' dumped on her. Where's Joseph in all this? Why are so many of the angels so prettified and resplendent? There's a magical moment being painted here, basically a kind of alien encounter – things from another world arriving in the human world. I somehow wanted to write about all that, hence the variations and retellings of the annunciation story, imaginary paintings by those, like Francis Bacon, who never did and probably never would, paint an annunciation, and a wider set of poems about Italy, colour, abstraction, and contemporary art. The series still seems to be spiralling away from the completed Dear Mary book into new areas, hence our collaboration.

Did something like this happen between Lax and Korotkin for you? I mean Lax does come with various baggage attached: ideas of being a hermit, his murky past in America, his friendship with Thomas Merton and Ad Reinhardt, the very cult nature of his work: elusive in language and style, but also in its availability! You suggested that sending you a Fra Angelico jpeg wouldn't have done anything, presumably just a Lax book wouldn't have either? It's associative and contextual stuff, plus the personal links we bring as individuals to a subject, yes?

SC:

Yes. I guess so. My nest of words. Your nest of words. The nest of words around certain iconic images. We’re all throwing bits of nest at each other as we interact and consequently making new nests or maybe adding extensions to the roost. Everything from the nest gets used and re-used and you can see the architecture of my brain-nest in my poems. To quote Vahni Capildeo, ‘language is my home’ and I think I can more easily understand the Lax poetry and the accounts of Korotkin’s life and build nest-images with that than I can with the Fra Angelico painting. Although, to contradict myself, I also found Evgenia Arbugaeva’s images a necessary handle on Korotkin’s life and Lax’s poetry is often concretely imagistic.

In some of my annunciation poems, I’ve changed the story completely. I was fixated, for a time, with the idea of a menacingly male angelic presence. The bluebeard figure of Leonard Cohen and the androgynous David Bowie are both symbolic of more complex, contemporary ideas of female sexuality. Both are just as problematic as the original.

It’s a strange scene, something of a monolith, that if looked at closer unravels like a green field, which you can either decide is just a green field and get on with your life or you can lie down and listen to how it’s an infinite number of other things.

You know I think I’ve just thought up ten new annunciation poems whilst writing this. Second book?

===

© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell in Conversation (1/4)

Sarah Cave and Rupert Loydell recently collaborated on a series of annunciations (sort of), published as Impossible Songs (Analogue Flashback 2017). They talk about ekphrasis, religion, philosophy, nests and pick'n'mix. Also poetry.

====

"It would be rude not to leave a few feathers of my own in my unfolding of the work"

RML:

Your poems often adopt disguises, appear to be about one thing but are actually about another. I'm thinking about Moomin poems that aren't actually about the trolls, and annunciation poems that are not really, or just, about angels and virgins.

SC:

I blame my Brown Owl.

The first art work I remember making – that didn’t consist of my parents standing next to a strange abstract expression of a house – was a pasta Jesus smiling serenely from a cardboard canvas. I suppose, even then, that was more about lunch.

The sense of the absurd is important in the poems you mention but this absurdism is also underpinned with a serious reflection usually existential. I think poetry has displaced my sense of character and Moomins, rubber ducks, angels and virgins are all fragmented apparitions of my understanding/misunderstanding of philosophy, theology or life. I studied philosophy for a time and wrote more interesting marginalia about Heideggerian shadow-puppets than I did essays about the sublime. I use masks and puppets as ways to express a sense of displacement, either my own or someone else’s.

Writing a straight description of a painting or an event has its place but it isn’t the kind of poetry that I’ve ever wanted to write. This approach loses some of the extra-imaginative content of life. If I went to a gallery, for example, I wouldn’t want to respond to the art work in this way because I would be missing something important in the exchange between me and the artwork. It would be rude not to leave a few feathers of my own in my unfolding of the work. Moominmamma wouldn’t approve of such behaviour. The Moomins throw up their own problems. As somebody else’s literary invention, there’s the risk of writing too closely to the original. Something new has to come from the interaction to justify it.

If you want to read stories about the Moomins then there’s this writer called Tove Jansson who does a great job. For the Annunciation, I recommend The Gospel of Luke. That’s my favourite.

The point of ekphrasis is to respond to something. Not just repeat the same thing.

The point of ekphrasis is to respond to something. Not just repeat the same thing.

RML:

Yes, of course, although ekphrasis is also to do with mimesis and the translation of image into language. But like you I want to bring some different ideas and ways of thinking to my subject matter.

In your Slava poems it is almost as though you invented a character, a state of mind, and a place for him to live, and then wrote what happened. Most of my work gets fixated on an event or idea, in the Dear Mary poems the annunciation, and work from there. I loved thinking about seeing the annunciation through a surveillance camera, or re-imagining it as an alien encounter (which I guess in many ways it was!), and looking at some of the different paintings that artists have done.

There's part of me always thinks it would be better to somehow just get my readers to look at the Fra Angelico annunciations in San Marco, Florence or San Giovanni though... I'm not trying to be modest, but there is a sense that words don't do them justice. But I hope the different ways of thinking about them, and about the whole concept of another world intervening in the human one, is a different experience. It's that intervention that I am fascinated by at the moment.

I always work in series of paintings too.

===

© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017

The Loveard-Turner Letters (8): JL to ST

Dear Simon,

Well, it’s been a while. A thousand apologies. I had fallen down a well.

I have to admit that the idea of non-fiction as such doesn’t have the same power to compel me. Already its diction seems to constrain it, defined via negativa – what it is, well, it isn’t fiction. Immediately, maybe, it is cast into shadow because of this. I have heard good things about H is for hawk (in fact, it was a present that I gave to my brother – a bird obsessive – years back), about The Argonauts, and indeed I studied Portrait with Keys at university – a great book, indeed.

I have been trying to think why this is, and provide a genealogy, and examine whether it is something that pertains to me, something that pertains to non-fiction, or some mixture of both. Perhaps, it is simply because the tradition is larger, and there is so much to read anyway. So much to read. Or possibly, it is something else more definitional at play here. I’m not really fussed about non-fiction as such, because I’m not really fussed about fiction as such. The question is, and should always be: is the writing good? And by the writing, I mean both on the level of the sentences, and the larger structures that the sentences go together to create. Now you can debate what ‘good’ is, but it is quality that matters – but this is what you’re saying, no? This applies to genre too. Whether it be recounting the life of a bourgeois woman in 1920s London or a future society in which we worship Our Ford doesn’t matter. It simply and only has to be good. And indeed both Mrs Dalloway and Brave New World are excellent. I studied Portrait with Keys alongside A Secret Agent, Ulysses and Good Morning Midnight; I wasn’t really aware of it as non-fiction.    Taxonomies in this case can work against the reader rather than help. So often taxonomies are the province of the obsessive and completist, and better for museums and dead things.  

My own reading is haphazard at the moment: there is De Troyes Arthurian Romances, there is DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, and all the while I’m also in the belly of Moby-Dick.

I’m looking forward to (among many – as always, there is an avalanche of them) two books in particular, Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth and Malcolm Lowry’s The Voyage That Never Ends. I have read their two central works, Invisible Man (1952) and Under the Volcano (1947), and my oncoming reading is, in effect, all that they could manage after. Both of them had epics mapped out, but what we have are aborted attempts, premature births, limbs. This happens sometimes, it seems. Christopher “I’m . . . a writer” Isherwood envisaged epics, but mostly ended up cobbling together his novels from fragments. Truman Capote much advertised his Answered Prayers to be an American In Search of Lost Time, but it never really materialised. Lowry had an idea for a cycle of novels (the number projected seems to have been possibly three, or possibly five, or possibly seven). In some ways, Michael Hoffman’s description of this cycle in the introduction sounds almost like, if only superficially, Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet (an underrated remarkable work) in its self referentiality.  The book The Voyage That Never Ends is made up of fragments and extracts that were intended to one day form this larger non-existent effort. Ralph Ellison wrote Juneteenth for years and years from 1954 to his death in 1994. There is something appealing about reading these unfinished posthumous works. Apart from the standard literary pleasure, there’s the sadness at what could have been, but also perhaps a certain morbid fascination.            

One constant in my reading for a while now, I think, has been following where the river flowed after the initial white rapids of what we might call literary modernism. We have those central figures: Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Faulkner. And then the river rushes through and on and under, picking up new and different sediments, flashing over different landscapes. I got my dousing rod, and followed. I listened out for those slightly less known, like Henry Green, Ford Maddox Ford, Dos Passos, or simply those who came later and still carried that modernist roar of the twenties, like Lawrence Durrell and Malcolm Lowry. More recently, James Hanley, Henry Roth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Bernhard, Henry Green (again), Mario Vargos Llosa, Thomas Pynchon. I want to read Döblin, Broch, Quin, Cary, Cortizar, Lispector, Toomer. Maureen Duffy (who you recommended) too.

There is something about the sensibility and energy of these works that has a powerful hold on my imagination. (Had you guessed?) I don’t want to necessarily theorise about this (though I could try), nor make a case for their superiority to other works (because does that get us anywhere?). But I think this perhaps gets closer to that luminosity that I mentioned before.

I look at the lists above. Who is the obsessive and completist now? The line from DeLillo about lists being a form of cultural hysteria comes to mind. A cultured cultural cultish hysteria.

Yourz,

James

The Loveard-Turner Letters (7): ST to JL

Hey hey!

First of all, colossal apologies for taking so long to reply to your last email.  It’s been Christmas – you may well have noticed – which necessitated a great deal of cooking, eating, washing up, planning of the next meal, etc, etc.  Besides that, an excellent crop of new books and movies has made its way into the house, and I’ve been dipping into those with appetite and glee (Renata Adler’s selected journalism, After the Tall Timber, has been a highlight so far, and a lot of energy’s been poured into clearing my schedule to watch Abel Gance’s five and half hour silent masterpiece Napoleon, which the BFI have just released in a new print)*, a fact which has necessitated ignoring the outside world – or the close approximation of the outside world that the interweb provides, at any rate – for the last couple of weeks.  But rest assured!  I have not neglected your previous missive, and have been turning its more salient and meaty points over in my mind as best I can between bouts of competitive potato-eating and Harry Potter marathons.

To address some of your concerns: yes, you’re probably right that Woolf’s novels will outlast her diaries and letters, without a doubt.  Indeed, the diaries and letters as literary artefacts are explicitly dependent upon the high critical regard in which the novels are held.  (This is probably as true of other great literary journal-keepers like John Cheever and James Schuyler and Christopher “I’m . . . a writer” Isherwood, though the picture is greyed and blurred a little by the Goncourt brothers, whose journals are afforded the serious attention and respect which have long been denied their no-longer-read-at-all-by-anyone-anywhere-even-academics novels.)  Perhaps it’s simply a matter of particularity, even perversity, on my part: I simply don’t want (or don’t think I want) that sense of finish, of ‘luminosity’, that you’re seeking and finding in Woolf’s work: I’m genuinely more interested in her quotidian thoughts on what she’s reading at any given point, what she had for breakfast on Saturday, the particularities of tiny mundane detail, provided for their own interest and pleasure and nothing more.**

Perhaps, if I were in a less controversial or contrarian mood – but when’s that ever likely to happen? – I might temper my argument, and suggest that my impatience with ‘trad. fic’ – and my concomitant drift towards the fringes (essays, diaries, novels that break apart under the strain of their own construction) – is really in part a reaction to a certain arrogance on the part of Fiction, considered as a monolithic bloc: an arrogance that sees itself as the final arbiter of the ‘literary’, and that views other forms not as important and vital genres in their own right, but rather as little more than jerry-built adjuncts to Fiction’s self-confessed pre-eminence in the field of Wordery. 

That’s probably yet another straw man, I’m sure – I should probably start charging by the penny, I’m putting together so many hay-stuffed effigies: at this rate, by the end of the month, I’ll have, well, some pennies, anyway – but I still think I’m raising something resembling a valid point, however grumpily and idiosyncratically I might express it.  Why mine Woolf’s diaries for what gems of information they can express about her ‘real’ work?  Can’t we treat them as a pre-eminence in and of themselves?  Hmm?  There was a very good article by Geoff Dyer in the Guardian fairly recently (actually over a year ago now, but by my standards, that’s recent) that touched on this issue.  (You can read it here if you wish.)  Dyer raises a whole host of other points beside, but one of his observations struck me particularly, pertaining to the differing values one expects, respectively, from fiction and non-fiction: fiction, according to the schema Dyer lays out, is a refuge if you’re after style and joy; non-fiction, however, can be viewed as a rather more austere and utilitarian harbour, providing nought but facts and content.  (The French Riviera vs. Portsmouth, basically.)  “In a realm where style was often functional,” writes Dyer, “nonfiction books were – are – praised for being “well written”, as though that were an inessential extra, like some optional finish on a reliable car.”             

Dyer, of course, is sketching out this clichéd view of non-fiction to provide a semi-ironic backdrop for his advocacy of the more recent advances in the field – and many of the names that get referenced in the article have popped up on my own radar,*** in many instances producing in the process some pretty unforgettable and forthright emerald blips: yes, I am running this metaphor into the ground, thank you for noticing – but I would say that this cliché does still pertain to a certain extent.  If I am overzealous in my non-fiction boosterism, I feel it’s somewhat warranted: over-correction is better than the complacency of no correction at all.    

This reply, I realise, is already radically breaching the limits of what’s reasonable, both quantitatively and qualitatively, so I should probably sign off soon, but before I go, and as a means of providing a little bit of gravy for the next mind-meal you send my way, one of the books that snuck into the house over the festive break was The Storm (1704) by Daniel Defoe.  I’ve only glanced at and dipped into it so far – not least because it’s not actually mine, but my good lady’s, and there’s a whole Byzantine edifice of social etiquette pertaining to the matter of who gets to read books first in any given household, the complexity of which would make a medieval Japanese nobleman’s head spin clean off his shoulders – but what’s notable, aside from its subject matter, is the sense that Defoe is both creating and defining a form, and simultaneously defending it aesthetically, even as he calls it into being.  We could probably call that genre ‘long-form journalism’ or ‘literary non-fiction’, depending on our mood, but whatever it is, it feels alarmingly contemporary.  Discuss.          

 

Yours, as ever,

Simon

PS: Happy New Year, by the way! 

*My hope is that there’s a revolution-tinged secular holiday which is celebrated in France some time in the next few weeks with which can coincide my screening of the movie, to really make an event of it.  I don’t want to have to wait till Bastille Day, for God’s sake.

**I’m probably the only reader – I’m certainly in a minority of readers, anyway – who gets far more excited by technical details in a writer’s biography than the endless, prurient cataloguing of their turbid emotional lives: how many words got written on August 16^th, say?; what kind of pens did they use, and where did they buy them?; had they read Proust before or after they began work on their third novel, etc, etc?

***Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait With Keys, in particular, is now a personal favourite of mine: genuinely one of the best things I have read in some years.  I was planning to re-read it, so that I could more properly answer your perfectly reasonable request for some concrete detail regarding my reading habits and preferences, but realised I’d lent the book to a friend – oh, the hubris! – and so can’t fulfil my duties in this instance.  Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, too, feels like a game-changer, though everyone and their maiden aunt has written about that, and extensively, so I’ll limit my comments to say simply that I enjoyed it immensely.  H is for Hawk, if you’ve not read it, should wing its way to your ‘must read’ pile pretty soon, too.    

The Loveard-Turner Letters (6): JL to ST

Yo, 

In a preamble, I would have to agree, re: the strawmanning of academia. If we are to, as Trilling said, attempt to consider things complexly it is necessary for me to acknowledge: there are many in literary departments up and down the Archipelago doing good and interesting work, and that so with passion.  Indeed, I enjoyed my degree (in the long ago days) immensely.  Primarily, I think my reservations are to do with: a) how this good and interesting work is reaching the Commonweal as a whole*, b) if the modes of language used aren’t a net (an Iris Murdochy–Under-the-Net-type-net) that traps and hampers rather than frees, and c) if the strictures of academia, as currently constructed, deprive (say, in the case of philosophy) us of figures like a Kierkegaard, a Nietzsche, a Plato.

But let’s refine your point further. You mentioned a certain old-fashioned impulse to have the author be live and well on the page contra Barthes, but simultaneously what you’re asking for is something that sounds at least pretty modern, or at least postmodern. A foregrounding of the apparatus, a self-consciousness.  You want – in a manner – a self-conscious text, perhaps not metafiction, but meta-nonfiction, a metaessay (though, one assumes, not simply one that only describes its own making, but is also about something else).  You note an ennui, a distaste concerning “the mechanics of outright fiction.”  I wondered if this had to do with an inauthenticity that you were tasting.  Trilling wrote about the distinction between sincerity and authenticity.  Broadly, he says sincerity is about saying out loud what is in your heart, and authenticity is to do with being oneself.  Your insistence on the mess and stuff and muddle is to ask for a kind of realism or authenticity.  Simon says, Thoughts don’t come from nowhere.  Simon says, Thoughts emerge from the mess, the stuff and funk.  Simon says, Show me this.  Is this that familiar move that we have seen in our literature, the restless attempt to get at something truer or ‘real’, etc?  So if modernism is (v simplistically) the literature of consciousness (Joyce, Woolf etc), and postmodernism (v simplistically) the literature of self-consciousness (Calvino etc), this is a move away from fiction as such, toward a non-fiction that has this awareness, this self-consciousness about how it is made?  Is this a useful way to think about what you’re saying?  Or not?  What does Simon say?  

So far, the prime example you’ve given is Dept. of Speculation (2014), which, broadly speaking, is a novel, and I think an example that is more squarely in what we might call the essay would be helpful.    

To add a discordant chime to your literary spidey-senses: your particular thesis doesn’t hold – at least with the evidence you bring to bear.  It is without question that, say, Woolf’s diaries and letters are of very great worth**.  Francis Spalding has, like you, speculated that it is these that will last, and have the most value.  I think this is a stretch – wonderful as they are, the diaries and letters don’t exceed the brightness cast by the luminous stream formed by Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1932). Equal in value, perhaps, but they don’t outshine her fiction.  Bennet, I think, is fair game here.  (I don’t know enough about Simon Gray or Thoreau to say.)  But are these representative figures?  If one casts the net (not an Iris-Murdochy-Under-the-Net-type-net, but a book-and-writer-nabbing-type-net) further, it isn’t clear to me that you will dredge up enough driftwood you need to prop up your thesis.  Your examples are journals, diaries.  Things that are done in private, and may or may not, have an intended audience beyond the writer themselves.  To run with that, James Joyce’s letters (even the dirtiest ones) don’t have the value of that lodestar Ulysses (1922); Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks (1954) are very beautiful but I doubt will accumulate enough clout to overtake his other work (nor should they, I think).  These are very narrow examples, of course, but I think for you to give the tendency of your thoughts (The Simon Tendency) more power there needs to be larger theory of the case, and more luggage inside that case.

Yrz,

J.S.L.

* Not in a calculated impact way, but I do think that advocacy of reading and literature as such could play a larger role in what departments do.  Maybe.  My thoughts are hazy as a Pea Souper, or Air Gravy.

** This description of Woolf’s diary is so great that it needed to be here, and it felt relevant to what you’re thinking about.  From A Writer’s Diary (1954): 'What sort of diary should I like mine to be?  Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.  I should like it to resemble a deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.  I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and collapsed, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.'