James Meek on James Kelman

"The real reason Kelman, despite his stature and reputation, remains something of a literary outsider is not, I suspect, so much that great, radical Modernist writers aren’t supposed to come from working-class Glasgow, as that great, radical Modernist writers are supposed to be dead."

For every David Foster Wallace, there are about three hundred Colm Toibins.

For a change...

...here is something more populist, or at least more current: Timothy Garton Ash's excellent appraisal of Wikileaks's impact.

Please read this

A stunning, stunning, stunning review of Garcia Marquez's Living to Tell the Tale, by Michael Wood.

Larkin's Deceptions

Even so distant, I can taste the grief,
Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.
The sun's occasional print, the brisk brief
Worry of wheels along the street outside
Where bridal London bows the other way,
And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,
Forbids the scar to heal, and drives
Shame out of hiding.  All the unhurried day,
Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.  Slums, years, have buried you.  I would not dare
Console you if I could.  What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?
For you would hardly care
That you were less deceived, out on that bed,
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfillment's desolate attic.

How to write a novel

1) Imagine the beginnings of a scene: The narrator, driving to another city with his half-sister; or maybe an artist at the cusp of her first encounter with Society and its machinery of Approval.

2) Meditate on the so-called "themes" that the scene will embody. Think of subtle ways to "mediate" them. Discard these ways for more bombastic ones. Remind yourself of James Wood, and his injunction that a theme not be too "legible", which is to say visible, and visibly awkward, to a critic of his stature. Then see that your closeness to your novel prevents your ever grasping exactly how "legible" your themes are. (Besides, isn't it better---especially for a tyro novelist---to be legible than obscure? Or is that too fraught a question to ask? Who the fuck knows?)

3) Return to the scene. Describe a perfunctory specific. "The rise and fall of her hair was inevitable; it was like dusk on the steady plateau of my ardor." Laugh at the florid sub-Nabokovian stupidity of what you have just written. Erase it. Affect sincerity. "Her hair. The slither and collapse of it. Its unashamed brownness. The way it slides, unsupervised, into the suggestive folds of her breasts." Allow yourself an outfaced smile at the epithet "unashamed". Wait for the querulous voice inside you that says: "But breasts are always suggestive. And haven't you heard that "slither and collapse" somewhere else before?" Panic. Flip to page 29 of The Folding Star, in which the object of the narrator's fantasy, Luc Altidore, is described thus: "Through the coming hour I would see that tumbling forelock dry from bronze to gold, and get to know the different ways he mastered it, the indolent sweep, the brainstorming grapple, the barely effectual toss, and how long the intervals were between forward slither and lustrous collapse." Tear your hair out. Spend the next few hours with your heart in your mouth, scrolling endlessly through lines you've already written, surveying them for other instances of unconscious plagiarism. Cringe at the odd hackneyed phrase. Sit back in your chair and look upwards in a conscious mime of someone who has a big problem.

4) Watch youtube videos of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3, 3rd Movement, until a time in the early am. Go to bed.

You can have a Bach fugue...

...this one, by Glenn Gould, comes to mind.

Note to myself

Nicholas Spice on Peter Carey's ventriloquism in Parrot and Olivier in America: "But the laws of fiction are harsh and you can’t sacrifice interest to characterisation."

It says a lot about the central voice in my novel that I have to keep reminding myself of this.

Michael Wood on Christopher Isherwood

"‘I am a camera.’ This statement is often taken as a simple assertion of a documentary impulse or desire. ‘I am a camera with its shutter open,’ the full sentence goes, ‘quite passive, recording, not thinking.’ But of course cameras don’t say ‘I’, and don’t tell us they are not thinking. Isherwood likes the complication lurking in such simple figures. The hero of his later novel, A Single Man (1964), says he is ‘like a book you have to read. A book can’t read itself to you. It doesn’t even know what it’s about’. Just before the statement about the camera and its passivity Isherwood had written this amazing paragraph (the opening of Goodbye to Berlin), where the unthinking apparatus takes interesting omissions of verbs, launches a generalisation and manages to turn a simile into a historical judgment:

'From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.'

Some camera. And yet of course the metaphor is not meaningless, or damaged by all this mental activity. It is an introduction to the Isherwood of the stories, a person whose self is in his observations, not his (fortunately rare) dips into introspection. The person who is a camera at the start of this book becomes a city at the end:

'Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.'"