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.
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