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Monday 25 January 2010

The ICA -- use it or lose it

The ICA is one of my favourite London venues. It’s had an incredible history, staging a legendary discussion with the Situationists, exhibiting Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti’s controversial art about the sex industry (the original display is now on show at the Tate Modern’s rather dull Pop Life show) and, of course, that notorious Einsturzende Neubauten performance...

I’ve seen loads of great talks there (and, admitting an interest, helped put on a few). One fascinating evening saw a discussion between ex-Angry Brigade John Barker and ex-Weather Underground Bill Ayers. Another, a truly bizarre meeting of the late G.A. Cohen -- author of Why Not Socialism? -- and Slavoj Zizek. Unfortunately, I missed the night where satirist Chris Morris heckled Martin Amis for his anti-muslim comments.

As well as the talks and the great cinema (where else would you be able to see the new film of Coetzee’s Disgrace or the documentary about Derrida?), the ICA has one of the best bookshops in the country. I visit regularly for their large selection of the latest theory titles.

Last year, I was saddened to see the long-standing and excellent talks' organisers James Harkin and Jenn Thatcher leave, and this Saturday’s Guardian gives clues as to why this may have happened. It seems that the financial crisis has bitten deep and even more redundancies are expected -- there is a fear that the debt is insurmountable.

This is both an important cultural venue and a key independent bookshop in the life of the capital. Have you not been before? It’s just off Trafalgar Square , 5 minutes from Charing Cross Road station -- you can fit it in on the way to Buckingham Palace! I urge you to use it -- to lose a place like this would be a tragedy.

Rowan

Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: art, personal

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Friday 22 January 2010

King Lear, madness and my grandmother

It is not only in Hamlet that Shakespeare presents us with the travails and terrors of madness: it is a recurrent theme in very many of his plays. (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest... well, actually, every play of his that I know some little about reflects on madness in some way; I understand that Shakespeare uses the words 'mad' and 'madness' more often in Twelfth Night than in any other work, so doubtless I should focus my attention there soon.) Sadly -- and this has happened to Dickens too, I think -- Heritage stops us seeing Shakespeare for the troubling and unsettling writer that he manifestly is: "The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say." The times are ever-troubling; and it is always the time to speak in a heartfelt way against the present's deadening cant. These are not sane times; Lear is as untimely as it has ever been.

Shakespeare was writing when what constituted the written English language, what constituted the very tools which he went on to fashion into the best ever expression of those tools, was still particularly unsettled. And how he wields words seems to reflect a view of the self that suggests that what constitutes the self -- fashioned on the stage merely by the playwright's words, of course -- is itself ever-unsettled. Shakespeare’s language is an erratic, antic, fizzing brew which captures, and expresses existentially, a particular take on the non-fixity of the human state. He is a poet not of an age, but for all time because time is written into the ambiguity -- the play -- of his writing, and into the ambiguous, uncertain, unanchored, disarranged characters he sets before us. His language moves -- his characters move -- as we move as time moves...

Fools, as numerous readers have noted, are wont to be wise, and kings can often be very foolish. If he had been fully in his right mind, Lear, surely, should have known that his daughters, Goneril and Regan, were far from virtuous, were far from the ideal caretakers for his Kingdom in his dotage. That is, unless we are to presume that they became so particularly venal only after being gifted a share of their Father's estate -- which pushes our credulity too far, I think, but does reinforce the idea that once Lear's madness is large in the land, other madnesses will be loosed and liberated. Lear's unquieted state is apparent, if not at the absolute moment he begins to divide his Kingdom, certainly at the instant he forgets the previous dutiful, loving nature of his favourite and youngest daughter Cordelia; he certainly fully loses control when her lawyerly response ("I love your majesty According to my bond; nor more nor less") mocks and highlights his frankly ridiculous decision to divest himself of "of rule, Interest of territory, cares of state". (Cordelia, of course, is not quite herself at this juncture either; two suitors await in the wings when she says: "when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty.") There is madness in the air, then, as soon as we began to read or watch the play. The moment Gloucester believes of Edmund that his other son Edgar could ever conceive of his murder, we know for sure that the mayhem that has infected Lear's brain will flow through the whole of his realm.

It has been a commonplace since at least Foucault wrote his History of Madness that the pathologising medicalization of several morbid unhappinesses has robbed us of access to the kind of Foolish wisdom that attempts to support Lear and his friends throughout the play in counterpoint to Lear's own self-destructive, but occasionally self-illuminating mania. When a king shows himself a fool it is time for his Fool to show wise counsel. This Foolish, supportive wisdom is echoed in the subplot in which Edgar disguises himself as Tom of Bedlam and guides his now cruelly blinded father to a limited form of spiritual rebirth at Dover Cliff.

My grandmother who died, aged 97, three years ago, quite mad from dementia and the attendant ravages of age, was central to my upbringing -- "The oldest hath borne most: we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long." She is central still to my moral universe. Her socialistic dictum, that you can only sleep in one bed, the concomitant of which is that those who have more than one bed declare themselves to be embedded in excess, remains core to my worldview. Her degenerative illness manifested itself in many tragic and demeaning ways, but two strange Shakespearian wisdoms arose: she confused family members (I was often thought to be my father, and vice versa); and she disremembered the trivial and the everyday whilst clearly recalling events from 50, 60 and even 70 and more years ago. The pattern, I'm sure, is familiar to everyone with elderly and infirm parents or grandparents. Time's tyranny was now, with her, differently manifest. And, of course, came at a high and often distressing, sometimes comic cost.

I do not believe in ghosts, but during my own recent weaknesses, my grandmother has been fully in my thoughts. So fully that I've smelt her cooking in my flat and, on my pillow, the distinctive, beautiful scent of her face and hair -- a memory which must come from my own now distant childhood. I have, in truth, felt much closer to her than I did during the long years of her failing mental and physical health.

Lear is certainly not a play only about madness, it is, speaking colloquially, a mad play. It is such a beguiling work because it is a bit all over the place. Sometimes, Shakespeare's poetry takes him so far into the human that he feels timeless, but many aspects of Lear can't help but foreground the Jacobean. The messy nature of the play, however, also underscores something very human -- humans are not neat! Their emotions, their desires, their hopes and fears are messy, ridiculous, unfounded, grandiose, illogical, perverse. Their madness sometimes allows them to see the world's madness, sometimes reflects that madness, and sometimes is merely an awful, lonely, destructive vortex...

A kind of order is restored to Lear's domain at the end of the play. But the order comes at a terrible human cost, and the order is itself contingent: Lear dies, whilst humbled and grief-stricken, still haughty and half-mad; his favourite Cordelia dead in his arms; Gloucester is blind; and, of course, Goneril, Regan and Edmund's corpses litter the stage. Humankind cannot bear very much reality and is ever loath to admit that death has undone so very many. We are not only born astride our own graves, but arrive wailing into an overcrowded cemetery: "When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools." Learning to live with ghosts isn't an option but an essential life skill. Lear leaves an unstated, dying curse in the air: this is ever his kingdom, and we are never out of it.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, poetry, theatre, william shakespeare

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Wednesday 20 January 2010

Introducing... Mr Rowan Wilson

To help keep things moving here on ReadySteadyBook, the matchless Mr Rowan Wilson -- a very dear friend, and already a contributor to the site and regular commenter -- will, in the future, be blogging alongside me. He'll be writing one or two pieces a week, so do please make him very welcome...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, rsb

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Monday 18 January 2010

Best of European Fiction series

Tonight, I'll be at the South Bank Centre for A different window: reading European fiction, in which Aleksandar Hemon (editor of Best European Fiction 2010), AS Byatt and Tom McCarthy will discuss their personal readings of European writers such as Kafka and Nabokov and the impact of European fiction on their own writing. Sadly, I understand that the event is now sold out.

However, on Wednesday, another Best European Fiction 2010 event is happening with Andrej Blatnik, Jon Fosse and Christine Montalbetti discussing their work and reading from BEF 2010. The Monday event is really just a prequel for the Wednesday event so, if you've missed out on tonight's gig, make sure you don't miss out on Wednesday's session where you'll have a real chance to engage with some very exciting writers. More at the South Bank website.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: events

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Thursday 14 January 2010

Hamlet and I...

It is often quite obvious why a particular text speaks to us in a particularly powerful way at a particular time in our lives. As with anything human, however, the reasons might be obvious, but they are not always clear or clearly linear. We might be sad and look to something uplifting; or we might seek to find consolation in something that mirrors our melancholy.

I have no wish to parade the details of my own recent, continuing and sometimes crippling grief here, but I have been thinking a lot about why certain texts have touched me so profoundly of late and why others have left me cold -- left me, that is, how they found me and offered me no way out of my grief nor any way into themselves with the concomitant comfort that that might gift.

My grief has been all the usual and varied colours of sadness and madness. It has been searing, voluptuous, numbing. I foresaw that it would be -- I have been unhappy, unsettled, unbalanced before (who has not?). I did not foresee that, this time, for much of the time that I was most antic and most lost, most peculiarly undone, I would have taken from me (I would, I suppose, take away from myself) that which had always been of such solace to me. Quite simply, I could not read.

The chapter and verse of what caused this unsettling self-loss, all the tawdry trivia that led me to lose one of the things that has always been one of the anchors by which I keep myself tethered and focussed, are of no importance. But I lost much, not least my home (not my house, this is not a tale of financial woe, corruption or swindling) and my "girls" (my beloved dogs, who now live away from me and with my family) and more besides. These are quotidian losses: people lose more than I lost everyday. Indeed, my loss is hardly fully loss: it is a subtraction of excess tied to a form of self-imposed internal exile. These are slender removals, unrare ravages, commonplace catastrophes. They are, in truth, unworthy of comment or further delay.

Moving away, I presumed a royal road, if not to health, at least to non-grief. I hoped some enforced quiet would allow time for restorative reflection and, almost the same but not wholly synonymous, time for reading. But I could not read. I could not settle. I could not sit still. I could not read. (I could, as ever, drink -- and drink I did.) Later, when I could settle, when I could sit still... still, I could not read. I became adept at staring into space. I hadn't realised it was such a skill. I did not realise that it could become something so exceptionally honed. I never imagined it could be preferred over anything and everything; most especially, over reading. But sitting still and staring is not a story. So I shall move past my unmoving, and move on.

In early December, I picked up a cheap paperback copy of "Hamlet". I'd never read "Hamlet" nor even seen it performed. The play has such cultural weight that a presumption of familiarity is attributed to anyone who might by considered by others to be "well read" (or some such). But the play -- the play that Harold Bloom calls a "poem unlimited" -- had almost wholly passed me by.

I'm not sure why I picked it up. I'm not sure why of the countless books in my book-lined, book-overloaded little flat, this tatty copy of "Hamlet" suggested itself as the book that might awaken me to books. But it did. And it did so insistently. You will all, I'm sure, know the outlines of the story of "Hamlet" better than I did. And, surely, unconsciously, half-consciously, I knew that something in the story of Elsinore's Prince would unsettle my settled misery, would unencumber me of grief's sometimes comforting carapace, would make me aware that my own madness was merely the mildest confusion, a pale mania, cousin to mourning but a distant relation worthy of consideration but not the insistent indulgence I had been giving it.

Hamlet runs ahead of Hamlet. And the rest of the players are, at least, two steps further behind. Why does the Prince overmourn a father it seems likely that he loved dutifully and diligently but not excessively? The Fool Yorick gave him more love as a child than did his uxorious, unfatherly father. It was Yorick who played with him ("He hath borne me on on his back a thousand times") and Yorick who received the child Prince's tender love ("those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft"). And why does the Prince bait and berate Ophelia? Unable to love her, it seems, and able only to play with her feelings (played, perhaps, and perturbed, for sure, by his own feelings) and then able to put on a play for her, Claudius and the court, a play that seems to suggest that our several performances of our own, presumed self-same selves are always aware of an audience and are doubly inauthentic -- to our never self-same selves and to those hypocrite lecteurs ever beyond and baying.

Hamlet is a study in the negotiation we each make with the (in)authenticity of our self, and our grief, and with what that self loses even as it becomes more madly itself via the very losses it witnesses and articulates. Further, we witness the loss that articulation itself is -- and non-articulation too: Ophelia's madness leads to her early ruination and death, and to one of the play's most beautiful set-pieces in Gertrude's speech about her drowning. We witness ambiguous double-binds and, binding, rooted ambiguity.

In my own minimal madness, I read "Hamlet" and I heard Hamlet call. Heard him speak to himself, of himself and half-realise he could hardly keep up with even that utterly, definitionally, self-limiting performance. I realised, along with Hamlet, lesserly, that my own disquiet was perforce undone by its (limited) creativity and coherence: the coherence of my incoherence mocked my incoherence. But, better, more simply, I read. I sat still and I read. And I read some more.

It turns out that almost every other line in "Hamlet" one already knows. The play reads like a sourcebook to all that has been written since. Bloom suggests that Shakespeare invented the human (a sense of the secular, self-questioning subject). I doubt that. Hamlet uninvents the (notion of a) coherent self even as the most fully human character the stage has ever seen steps forth -- at the birth of subjectivity, Hamlet, our extreme contemporary, shows the subject to be a kind of fiction. Hamlet validates and allows for the self's self-incoherence; the undoing of the self is the self's own self-making. My local madness will pass. Our general madness will not. Something comforting therein is almost claimed.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: personal, poetry, theatre, william shakespeare

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Tuesday 12 January 2010

Raymond Federman

Dan Green on Raymond Federman:

Raymond Federman was generally associated with those American writers who in the 1960s and 70s began writing what is now called "metafiction," but there was always something about Federman's work that seemed different, its self-reflexivity even more radical and enacted in a more aggressive way. Where Barth and Coover laid bare the devices of fiction allegorically (J. Henry Waugh as "author" of his fictional baseball world) or through the occasional narrative disruption (the "author" making his presence known, as in Barth's "Life-Story"), Federman's fiction was more direct and unremitting in its undermining of narrative illusion. With its prose freed from the constraints of typographical bondage, climbing up, down, across, and around the page, and its "stories" of writers attempting to tell a story without quite succeeding, Federman's fiction as represented in Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976), still his most important books, challenged not only reader's preconceptions about fiction but also basic assumptions about reading itself (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere

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Monday 11 January 2010

Hatherley on Southampton

Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism, and RSB interviewee too, of course, has a wonderful entry about that finest of Southern cities, Southampton, up on his sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy blog:

The main reason for all this obsessive city-cataloguing, this rewriting and rewriting of the same piece - other than certain writing commitments combined with residual guilt from endlessly complaining about the place's provincialism despite my (and almost all my former Southampton friends) contributing to this in our small way, by fucking off to London or even further at the earliest opportunity - is that Southampton presents itself as a puzzle. Every time I go there the question 'how did this happen?' presents itself. How did this city, which by all accounts was once the undisputed regional capital (a perusal of The Buildings of England's extremely complimentary 1966 entry on the city is instructive here) get to the point where an entire stretch of its centre, as large as a small town, was given over to a gigantic retail park? How is it that the 16th largest city in the country has the 3rd highest level of violent crime and the 3rd worst exam results, despite being central to one of the most affluent counties? And does any of this have anything to do with the fact that the city contains what was, when built, the largest urban mall in Britain? (More...)

Those dear friends from other fine Southern towns, for instance Portsmouth, are invited not to comment!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet

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Wednesday 06 January 2010

Leo Tolstoy as hedgehog

A Piece of Monologue brings my attention to two things: the fact that it is the centenary of Leo Tolstoy's death this year and, also, to a number of articles over at the Guardian related to all things Tolstoyan...

I've read precious little Tolstoy, and nor have I read Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on the lad, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. That essay keeps being quoted at me, however, so I think I'll use the fact that I'm likely to be snowed in this evening to see what all the fuss is about.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors

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Wednesday 06 January 2010

Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award

The Three Percent blog has posted its 2010 Best Translated Book Award: Fiction Longlist. Some great looking titles on it -- I'm particularly keen to read Ghosts by César Aira -- but no room, it would seem, for Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones (translated by my friend Charlotte Mandell)...

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: awards, blogosphere

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Tuesday 05 January 2010

Ellis Sharp's 'Dead Iraqis'

Ellis Sharp's blog The Sharp Side used to be one of the most acute and prickly blogs out there (out here!?) in the blogosphere, but either Ellis stopped blogging as much or I stopped paying as much attention as I should have been doing and he, and his blog, fell from the front of my mind. Regardless of that, it seems that Ellis has actually been rather busy...

Over at the New Statesmen Mark Fisher (author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (part of the excellent Zero Books series) -- which I'll review as soon as I see a copy -- and blogger at k-punk) reviews Ellis's new book of short stories, Dead Iraqis:

Sharp replaces the dominant pastoral image of the English countryside, not with a deflated quotidian realism, but with a different kind of lyricism, one coloured by revolt: fields and ditches become hiding places or battlegrounds; landscapes that on the surface seem tranquil still reverberate with the unavented spectral rage of murdered working class martyrs. It is not the sunlit English afternoon that is "timeless", but the ability of the agents of reaction to escape justice (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, book review

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Tuesday 05 January 2010

Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoyevsky

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume life of Fyodor Dostoevsky "is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language - and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century":

Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed into a single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works -- from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov -- by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book news

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Monday 04 January 2010

Three Tom McCarthy talks

Our friend the author Tom McCarthy is on the road:

First, Tom is in conversation with with Jonathan Lethem about his new novel Chronic City at the LRB Bookshop on 7th Jan. Details at the LRB site.

Second, Tom is discussing how European fiction has influenced his writing and "English" fiction in general in a three-header with AS Byatt and Aleksander Hemon at the South Bank on 18th Jan. Details on the South Bank Centre site.

Third is an appearance at the Grand Palais in Paris, with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Jacques Roubaud, on 29th Jan. Details at monumenta.com.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: tom mccarthy

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Monday 04 January 2010

Albert Camus' death

Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, on the 7 November 1913 into a working class family. The Diary Junction Blog today continues:

When he was still very young, during the First World War, his father was killed, and his mother suffered a stroke on hearing the news. Camus won a scholarship and studied at the lycée in Algiers until 1932. Thereafter, he took various jobs, joined the Communist Party, studied at the University of Algiers, and married Simone Hié. He also contracted tuberculosis.

Then, 50 years ago today, at the age of 46, he died in a car accident near Sens, in a place named Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. Wikipedia tells me that "in his coat pocket lay an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train, with his wife and children, but at the last minute accepted his publisher's proposal to travel with him. The driver of the Facel Vega car, Michel Gallimard — his publisher and close friend — was also killed in the accident." In the car was the manuscript for The First Man (Le premier homme) an autobiographical work about his childhood in Algeria and was published in 1995.

More cheery fodder, about other gone-but-not-forgotten authors, can be found in the Guardian's Living in the memory: A celebration of the great writers who died in the past decade.

Welcome to the Teenies. Be assured, we can expect more deaths!

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, deaths

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