Friday, April 30, 2010
placed, set.
However, if purely aesthetic questions were at stake, questions of love and alcoholism would not be so paramount to this study of Durrell and Lowry--despite the obvious fact that these themes are paramount to the novels themselves. Both writers deserve unflinching attention to their style, yet their themes touch upon aspects of the human condition which itself must be treated aesthetically--arguments as to why writing or making love under the influence (of alcohol and thoughts of another, respectively) continue to simultaneously draw out the worst and best of the subjectivity presently at risk. For I hesitate to refer to the persons of Lowry and Durrell: the impression their authorship makes of their personality is favorably hazy, such is the achievement of their art that regardless of how autobiographical it appears, always present is the distance that reminds the reader of that troublesome notion, the autonomy of art, its blameless separate sphere that is most blameworthy in the eyes of political-minded critics (e.g. Terry Eagleton).
back
Quite equal to the sound of a lone chirping in the night was the thought--I have wasted, somewhere, another opportunity! And where was its sign? In the land of the honest, into which I am loathe to peek. What motivates one to throw around words that sound fine together while advancing some half-buried theory of the Gothic, let's say--or what inhibits one into merely offering these ideas succinctly and usefully? Two opposing forces, that's all. The one wants to expand, savor, and never be done with an alluring thought. The other wants to know that this thought can be acquired at a reasonable price. Which are we to trust? In good writing, the choice should not be available to us. We cope with the linguistic overgrowth and blame ourselves for not getting the point--a pleasurable guilt, for a second reading will certainly resolve every ambiguity...
When the enthusiasm for vocabulary outstrips the exigency for an argument, the reader should at least be grateful for the opportunity to enhance his or her vocabulary. Peering into that blinding darkness of philosophical verbiage is a rare treat: only stylists of the first order can deliver the experience. The scenario of criticism turning into fiction is less likely than I previously thought, at least in my own criticism: guilt for abandoning the primary text is inescapable, and any bit of Durrellesque fiction I include in the critique is scrupulous to a fault, citing the master automatically without daring to stake a claim to originality.
Such fiction is self-consciously secondary while refusing to appear naive: such a work as the Alexandria Quartet would be treacherously difficult to reproduce, yet the fear of disastrous failure is less severe than the dread of one's own fiction being rejected or ignored. Thus criticism can at times be formulated as a training ground, even at the graduate level: an introductory composition course asks basically the same questions of the transfer from explorations of personal relevance to an objective reading, while bona fide literary criticism is a more varied arsenal of similarly self-centered questions...
Such as?
When the enthusiasm for vocabulary outstrips the exigency for an argument, the reader should at least be grateful for the opportunity to enhance his or her vocabulary. Peering into that blinding darkness of philosophical verbiage is a rare treat: only stylists of the first order can deliver the experience. The scenario of criticism turning into fiction is less likely than I previously thought, at least in my own criticism: guilt for abandoning the primary text is inescapable, and any bit of Durrellesque fiction I include in the critique is scrupulous to a fault, citing the master automatically without daring to stake a claim to originality.
Such fiction is self-consciously secondary while refusing to appear naive: such a work as the Alexandria Quartet would be treacherously difficult to reproduce, yet the fear of disastrous failure is less severe than the dread of one's own fiction being rejected or ignored. Thus criticism can at times be formulated as a training ground, even at the graduate level: an introductory composition course asks basically the same questions of the transfer from explorations of personal relevance to an objective reading, while bona fide literary criticism is a more varied arsenal of similarly self-centered questions...
Such as?
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
coffee
For throughout Under the Volcano we cannot escape from the pain of composition--it smarts perhaps more because the autobiographical protagonist is not a writer, or he hasn't touched his book on alchemy for months, has still a formidable collection of books from which to draw inspiration and facts but not his own misery. This is his contention, finally, with learning: he has reached his own apex though he is no wizard, he has put his sources together on paper while increasing his tolerance for tequila, realizing mescal has as much of the philosopher's stone as he will ever acquire. So much depends on the right mixture of alcohol and sleep deprivation--he says it himself, this consular Firmin, in a conversation with his younger, non-biological French brother.
"You are interfering with my great battle," the Consul said, gazing past M. Laruelle at an advertisement at the foot of the fountain: Peter Lorre en Las Manos de Orlac: a las 6:30 P.M. "I have to have a drink or two now, myself--so long as it isn't mescal of course--else I shall become confused, like yourself."
"--the truth is, I suppose, that sometimes, when you've calculated the amount exactly, you do see more clearly," M. Laruelle was admitting a minute later.
"Against death." The Consul sank back easily in his chair. "My battle for the survival of the human consciousness." (227)
The start of this drinking session began with the Consul's promise, after M. said No to tequila:
"--like Oxygenee, and petrol...If I ever start to drink that stuff, Geoffrey, you'll know I'm done for."
"It's mescal with me...Tequila, no, that is healthful...and delightful. Just like beer. Good for you. But if I ever start to drink mescal again, I'm afraid, yes, that would be the end," the Consul said dreamily." (226)
Until this point mescal has not so obviously been omitted as the bouts of elation and self-laceration muddle Lowry's brilliantly-worded landscape. I ought to warn the reader against looking back too far in the text; the language will stop you cold. The ingredients to the Consul's ontological stew will be revealed as we progress to the end, which from page 227 is a very long way off indeed. The crucial question--has he not been drinking mescal the whole time?--must be answered thus: just wait until he breaks his promise not to drink mescal.
"You are interfering with my great battle," the Consul said, gazing past M. Laruelle at an advertisement at the foot of the fountain: Peter Lorre en Las Manos de Orlac: a las 6:30 P.M. "I have to have a drink or two now, myself--so long as it isn't mescal of course--else I shall become confused, like yourself."
"--the truth is, I suppose, that sometimes, when you've calculated the amount exactly, you do see more clearly," M. Laruelle was admitting a minute later.
"Against death." The Consul sank back easily in his chair. "My battle for the survival of the human consciousness." (227)
The start of this drinking session began with the Consul's promise, after M. said No to tequila:
"--like Oxygenee, and petrol...If I ever start to drink that stuff, Geoffrey, you'll know I'm done for."
"It's mescal with me...Tequila, no, that is healthful...and delightful. Just like beer. Good for you. But if I ever start to drink mescal again, I'm afraid, yes, that would be the end," the Consul said dreamily." (226)
Until this point mescal has not so obviously been omitted as the bouts of elation and self-laceration muddle Lowry's brilliantly-worded landscape. I ought to warn the reader against looking back too far in the text; the language will stop you cold. The ingredients to the Consul's ontological stew will be revealed as we progress to the end, which from page 227 is a very long way off indeed. The crucial question--has he not been drinking mescal the whole time?--must be answered thus: just wait until he breaks his promise not to drink mescal.
atmospheric session
Is it too late in the day? Should I have begun as soon as I got home with groceries and showered? Has my mind already gone off into the common?
They want you to teach writing and literature because you are always strong with words and ideas. You just think you don't have them until there's a prompt, a pressure, a deadline, an end of times over the horizon. But it's all nonsense. Talk to yourself a little and you'll find, you can do this anytime!
Every word has the potential to turn the others into gold. Every song can change the tone subtly until you've hit the wall, then look back thinking, this could have been otherwise. I let it simply go on too long. But you'll love it later in the evening, removed from the scene; as if control issues were at stake, that you felt inclined to know the outcome already while the writer advocated risk, chance, compromise. Then the person--the owner of the personality, rather the manager and naysayer--remembers he wants to step back anyway, that he does not enjoy writing. Try to never mix up the two characters, try indeed to kill the person (smother him with rambling sentences), convince him he's inconsequential (deny his very subjectivity), and finally, rip off his head. The neck has been complaining for some time.
It's a process that simply takes longer to get started in the conscionable day.
Are you looking around again? Employing geometry to indicate you'd rather not write now--the appendage angling towards the ground as if to kiss it and snap back up? "The pain of composition was due," says Durrell's Pursewarden, to the fear of madness. "Force it a bit and tell yourself you don't give a damn if you do go mad," you'll find it comes quicker, "you'll break the barrier."
They want you to teach writing and literature because you are always strong with words and ideas. You just think you don't have them until there's a prompt, a pressure, a deadline, an end of times over the horizon. But it's all nonsense. Talk to yourself a little and you'll find, you can do this anytime!
Every word has the potential to turn the others into gold. Every song can change the tone subtly until you've hit the wall, then look back thinking, this could have been otherwise. I let it simply go on too long. But you'll love it later in the evening, removed from the scene; as if control issues were at stake, that you felt inclined to know the outcome already while the writer advocated risk, chance, compromise. Then the person--the owner of the personality, rather the manager and naysayer--remembers he wants to step back anyway, that he does not enjoy writing. Try to never mix up the two characters, try indeed to kill the person (smother him with rambling sentences), convince him he's inconsequential (deny his very subjectivity), and finally, rip off his head. The neck has been complaining for some time.
It's a process that simply takes longer to get started in the conscionable day.
Are you looking around again? Employing geometry to indicate you'd rather not write now--the appendage angling towards the ground as if to kiss it and snap back up? "The pain of composition was due," says Durrell's Pursewarden, to the fear of madness. "Force it a bit and tell yourself you don't give a damn if you do go mad," you'll find it comes quicker, "you'll break the barrier."
Sunday, April 25, 2010
crate
All that you can think of--is false and we bury the past, obviously to make it up later. The extent to which it matters is unknown. How it appears before us, maudlin tight-lipped! This is the fetish of fantasy in the Alexandria Quartet--not stealing memories from each other, the characters live in the same very philosophical space, where sin is as fluid as virtue, because everything wafts around by fantasy and erudition. Never unicorns or wizards, but succubi and doctors.
The only way I could know that I had read these books thoroughly enough was to write them myself, a few scenes and ideas of their implications, simply me removed from the text by a few days, and let us hope, after a few drinks. So that I might reveal more than I would otherwise; that I might let loose, why else? Though I am not drinking in the day. Despite the funny little secret that that entails--others haven't a clue!--as in the recent French movie (my girlfriend saw it not me) some sort of freedom ought to be achieved that carries a slight guilt. Just to know that what you are about is wrong somewhere--this adds responsibility to an otherwise drifting life...set in motion by the energy of crime, in Sade's sense of nature progressing, life advancing, only by infractions of what seems right. We needn't libertinage if there is nothing against it. Turn us outward in the wind with no strings and life fades directly, faces contort into smudges, as of too many every which way until at last, a blur. A digital image splintering into puff.
Fire and disease, rage, spin-offs. Carelessness. Obeying the impulse that permits no fissure--go there. Try not to be trite. Jumping around, then. The end of a neck, an extension of terms, the material of a tent draped yet tapered from a set of spheres, white letters on a pair.
The only way I could know that I had read these books thoroughly enough was to write them myself, a few scenes and ideas of their implications, simply me removed from the text by a few days, and let us hope, after a few drinks. So that I might reveal more than I would otherwise; that I might let loose, why else? Though I am not drinking in the day. Despite the funny little secret that that entails--others haven't a clue!--as in the recent French movie (my girlfriend saw it not me) some sort of freedom ought to be achieved that carries a slight guilt. Just to know that what you are about is wrong somewhere--this adds responsibility to an otherwise drifting life...set in motion by the energy of crime, in Sade's sense of nature progressing, life advancing, only by infractions of what seems right. We needn't libertinage if there is nothing against it. Turn us outward in the wind with no strings and life fades directly, faces contort into smudges, as of too many every which way until at last, a blur. A digital image splintering into puff.
Fire and disease, rage, spin-offs. Carelessness. Obeying the impulse that permits no fissure--go there. Try not to be trite. Jumping around, then. The end of a neck, an extension of terms, the material of a tent draped yet tapered from a set of spheres, white letters on a pair.
title waving
Asked if this worked, I hesitated. A moment passed; I realized, why I'm hesitating has something to do with the work they have done without me. This is a cause for pause! As if waiting around to be picked, assuming the world would know. Did you call them? I didn't. How did he know then? Assumes cameras are on him constantly. He wears striped pants under black so he might foreclose and no one will recover. A damn cat leaping off the counter.
How did you get this working, with a bore's help?
Deadly and insanely sick. A ceremony. How would something cruel look for us, the artists? We've heard of cruelty. Devise a system that solves for painless cruelty. Indeed, we've got it. Love. Mythmaking lovers, Durrell. Or the other source: drink. It is indeed painful but the entire point is to distract from while enhancing pain, through poetry. The fall into the ravine, not a volcano, in Lowry is likely to ruin the image without alcohol and, it seems, pot. He walked into a marijuana bar in the last 10 pages, and lit a pipe. Someone had offered to light it for him while a Mexican insulted him; the Consul by this point--by any point, really--is hazy enough to mutter that these insults are tiresome: and they are. The Consul seems to die for insulting the way a Mexican was insulting him, for it was strictly the Consul's Englishness that made for the tired old pun. The Mexican spun around, and around. A fly gathering force until the Consul is blasted in the chest--quite a "dingy way to die" is his thought, recognizing the backward thrust as from a gun.
He had just identified it and advised the owner not to use it since it throws off steal shards. Enough land in Geoffrey's body to send him over the volcano's edge and, it would seem, down into it. The screaming faces and burning walls, the finale to his perfect moment--the drunkest clarity of the entire story, or perhaps not: the scene is late, just before his death. This carries finality already, and reminds us that to drink oneself sober is the best route to the bottom: the volcano having been gorged through and exposed in the middle of it, La Sepultura. If the Consul jumps, it will be into that ravine, this is clear. But the jumping is the last mescal, premeditated. One more and that is that, and so, he sips on the final drink. Doesn't quite plunge. He is not a suicide, but a pointless murder, faintly honorable if only for the fact of a fractured, drawn-out insult provoking it.
How did you get this working, with a bore's help?
Deadly and insanely sick. A ceremony. How would something cruel look for us, the artists? We've heard of cruelty. Devise a system that solves for painless cruelty. Indeed, we've got it. Love. Mythmaking lovers, Durrell. Or the other source: drink. It is indeed painful but the entire point is to distract from while enhancing pain, through poetry. The fall into the ravine, not a volcano, in Lowry is likely to ruin the image without alcohol and, it seems, pot. He walked into a marijuana bar in the last 10 pages, and lit a pipe. Someone had offered to light it for him while a Mexican insulted him; the Consul by this point--by any point, really--is hazy enough to mutter that these insults are tiresome: and they are. The Consul seems to die for insulting the way a Mexican was insulting him, for it was strictly the Consul's Englishness that made for the tired old pun. The Mexican spun around, and around. A fly gathering force until the Consul is blasted in the chest--quite a "dingy way to die" is his thought, recognizing the backward thrust as from a gun.
He had just identified it and advised the owner not to use it since it throws off steal shards. Enough land in Geoffrey's body to send him over the volcano's edge and, it would seem, down into it. The screaming faces and burning walls, the finale to his perfect moment--the drunkest clarity of the entire story, or perhaps not: the scene is late, just before his death. This carries finality already, and reminds us that to drink oneself sober is the best route to the bottom: the volcano having been gorged through and exposed in the middle of it, La Sepultura. If the Consul jumps, it will be into that ravine, this is clear. But the jumping is the last mescal, premeditated. One more and that is that, and so, he sips on the final drink. Doesn't quite plunge. He is not a suicide, but a pointless murder, faintly honorable if only for the fact of a fractured, drawn-out insult provoking it.
recent blog tack
I at last said, what is stopping me from recreating criticism in my own mind? Let's do it, then. What? Recreate criticism. What is that? It is making a new place to play for a secondary activity. Why? It lets us know who is good and for which reasons. Can you write under this strain? Precisely because of this strain I have kept writing--the thing I love is the thing I enjoy hating most.
Get a lot of air in here? Have you captivated the audience enough to tell them that tonight they will hear a story and a critique?
This shouldn't matter as much as it does. But there are intellectuals, and there are artists. They have different names because I want them to. Because I want to know which one I really am.
An ancient question, really. Though the flame is too hot now, too waxy, to allow an accurate score. We see postgrads lingering around in a hard-wood floored living room, eating each others'...
Dizzy spells. We eat the others' bad moments. We talk to the dead. We don't want to write another paper--they always reek of opinions set down merely to annoy the artists. I tell you, they are different people. They are very few. I will prove that I am one of them and that since I have learned so much--about them---I will know that playing with punctuation is primarily a sin. Of course, one cultivates a taste for that. The department? Of English? An introduction to sin! This is what I will bring to it. You thought you lived because you played these games online, and people you could see eventually on your screen just sort of sat there like you are. And this was life--
Who took the banter out? Was it pre-focused, so that in going off like that it is repeating the discourse recorded and plugged into it--you see, a classroom. Looking round. What happened...to literature? Has it been kept alive? Where is the...rub?
Inside a bubble. I hate the blogosphere. I wish it were inside so that I know what's inside always turns out to be outside the inside. Like Schenectady, that literary trope of an equine city.
Get a lot of air in here? Have you captivated the audience enough to tell them that tonight they will hear a story and a critique?
This shouldn't matter as much as it does. But there are intellectuals, and there are artists. They have different names because I want them to. Because I want to know which one I really am.
An ancient question, really. Though the flame is too hot now, too waxy, to allow an accurate score. We see postgrads lingering around in a hard-wood floored living room, eating each others'...
Dizzy spells. We eat the others' bad moments. We talk to the dead. We don't want to write another paper--they always reek of opinions set down merely to annoy the artists. I tell you, they are different people. They are very few. I will prove that I am one of them and that since I have learned so much--about them---I will know that playing with punctuation is primarily a sin. Of course, one cultivates a taste for that. The department? Of English? An introduction to sin! This is what I will bring to it. You thought you lived because you played these games online, and people you could see eventually on your screen just sort of sat there like you are. And this was life--
Who took the banter out? Was it pre-focused, so that in going off like that it is repeating the discourse recorded and plugged into it--you see, a classroom. Looking round. What happened...to literature? Has it been kept alive? Where is the...rub?
Inside a bubble. I hate the blogosphere. I wish it were inside so that I know what's inside always turns out to be outside the inside. Like Schenectady, that literary trope of an equine city.
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