Life As Fiction

On not winning literary prizes

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0300

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize short-list has been announced.¹ I had a particular interest in the announcement of this short-list because I submitted a story to competition.² My name was not on it but the winner for the Kenya region is a friend, and his story - a gritty tale about a woman retaining, reclaiming, and asserting her dignity despite the depredations in the Kakuma refugee camp - is worth reading.³

My expectations, when I write and submit anything, never really include the possibility that I will be published or that I will win a prize. I send and try to forget until reminded.

Literary competitions are often merely black boxes into which manuscripts are inserted.⁴ Some churning goes on within; we are not privy to the operations of the concealed, magical text-mangling machine. At the end of the process, winners are announced, funding dispensed, contracts signed, books and anthologies published, trips undertaken, careers launched or propelled, and so forth.

Literary prizes are also, unavoidably, political. It has been said of the Caine prize (as well as other prizes, and vital publishers such as Femrite) that it has fostered a certain style of writing, inculcated certain expectations of how African writing should look like, how an African voice should sound like, and how an African narrative should be read. An “African” writer seems expected to work as closely as possible to a social-realist mode, to include something of the disenfranchised and benighted African condition, to work on a substrate made up of the conflict that occurs when the African is confronted with the West (its attendant trappings and values), to talk about the ills of Africa, the corruption, the disease, the hunger, the violence.⁵ That this mode of writing is so consistently rewarded can and probably does have a chilling effect on African writers who do not fit neatly or nicely into this mode, who do not want to work or live in an imaginative world of this kind, who do not find meaning or value in the perspectives nurtured in that genre. The stories short-listed from Kenya, Uganda, South Africa and Nigeria for the Commonwealth Prize, excellent though they may be, illustrate that this kind of writing is indeed what the judges wanted to read.⁶

The Kwani? Manuscript project was announced with gestures that it would seek to discover new voices but it is difficult to discern just how radical an emphasis they are putting on “new”.⁷ Having adjusted their deadline thrice since the beginning of 2013, they seem “plagued by delays” (a perennial African condition if ever there was one) and are yet to announce any list. I’d like to imagine that the difficulties they are facing in finalising a long-list might be a side-effect of their stated mission and ambitions.

Because competitions are so opaque, because the writers who are not short-listed can never expect to obtain any explicit feedback from the judges, because the invisible political hand at work is nonetheless perceptible in the results year after year, it is difficult, unnecessary, and unwise for any writer to invest his or her emotions in the outcome (except, of course, if one happens to be amongst the winners). Mostly, I experience a profound sense of relief to see that writers are awarded large prizes and are being permitted and enabled to live in (if not from) their art. I see a winner and get the sensation of watching a drowning child being saved.

For those of us who lose (because it really is losing if one does not win: judgement has been passed; “the shadow remains cast”) the publication of yet another list on which our names do not feature is an opportunity to remember that writing fiction is to embrace an absurdity: one writes with the conceit of hope that one’s words and thoughts matter, that one’s imagination is bright enough to illumine the hearts, minds, and lives of a small cohort of unknown kindred others, that perhaps the writer is in fact brilliant, her output perspicacious or even vatic, her existence necessary. However, those of us who remain unpublished write not because we really believe these things which we hope but because there is not an alternative: the hand that holds the pen propels itself, wending its way across the page, and it matters very little if anyone else reads these words.

A friend asks me,

Who is the imagined audience? Why should what you have written or want to write matter? How does form itself matter, if at all? Why should I be sold on this?

I still do not have meaningful answers to these questions and perhaps I never will. My only reply was, and remains, that “matters is not the same as matters in a grand way. To matter, in an age where publishing is cheap and easy, almost without barrier, is to say that individual voices matter and that they matter in the same way that individual lives matter. To ask someone why his writing matters is the same as to ask him why his life matters. What exactly is one to do upon evaluating his life and finding that, perhaps, it doesn’t matter? Should the person, perhaps, throw himself off the edge of a cliff?”

What is most pleasing to me about this list is that out of 18 writers, a memorable and remarkable 13 are women. ↩
The story I submitted, “The Women I Have Destroyed” is one man’s meandering and maudlin attempt at approaching an understanding of how women move and live in the world and how, in his role as masculine exploiter, he might have impinged on those with whom he has been intimate. ↩
“Fatima Saleh” by Alexander Ikawah. ↩
We don’t know because they don’t say, it’s all so very secretive and solemn, they are using their great big heads to elucidate the power of words and the lasting power of stories. Like gurus, they don’t need to explain themselves. (Madeleine Thien, “On transparency”)

↩
The (in)famous “How to Write About Africa” by Binyavanga Wainaina. ↩
I have only read the Kenyan story but based on the synopses of the other stories I’m willing to generalise. ↩
I submitted a manuscript to the Kwani? competition. My approach to submitting material is opposite to that of the assassin in “Kill Bill” who when asked if she’s a good shot with a shot-gun, replied that she’s a fucking surgeon with it. I’m no surgeon, but I am wielding a blunderbuss, and sending everything scatter-shot at every target in range. ↩

"The sign, in its actual and concrete usage, is thus always socially formed. Its actual use and..."

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 01:32:00 +0300

“The sign, in its actual and concrete usage, is thus always socially formed. Its actual use and meaning, in the case of language, is reciprocally determined by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. It is always set within and, in part, moulded by a particular set of social relationships between speaker and listener: that is, by particular conditions of socioverbal interaction which are themselves moulded by the broader social, economic and political relationships in which they are set. Given that all language forms are predicated on distinctive, historically produced relationships between speaker(s) and listener(s)—Vološinov mentions such cases as drawing-room conversation and language etiquette—the central analytical task is to determine how those language forms are determined by the relationships on which they are articulated and to specify how, in their inner organization, they ‘refract’ or signify those relationships.”

- Tony Bennet, “Formalism and Marxism” (3rd edn.) 64-5.

Zadie's Bad Sex

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 22:49:00 +0300

Zadie Smith’s writing about sex in her novel, “NW” is astounding in how dry, airless, and perfunctory it is. I venture that it so bad that its badness has to have been calculated. I haven’t read any of her other novels so I will hold on to this thesis, even as I wade through the dismal prose in the novel’s sexual set-pieces.

Anaïs Nin, in her essay, “Eroticism in Women,” (from her collection: In Favour of a Sensitive Man and Other Essays), says,

One point is established, that the erotic writings of men do not satisfy women, that it is time we write our own, that there is a difference in erotic needs, fantasies, and attitudes. Explicit barracks or clinical language is not exciting to most women. When Henry Miller’s first books came out, I predicted women would like them. I thought they would like the honest assertion of desire which was in danger of disappearing in a puritan culture. But they did not respond to the aggressive and brutal language. (p. 7)

Anaïs Nin is talking, not merely about erotica, but about the depictions of sexuality in literature on which men, and their certain style, had (and perhaps, still have) a monopoly. Her contention, which is worth remembering, is that when women have adopted the male-style of sex-writing it has always been a profound mistake.

In NW, thus far, I count three scenes that are key because of their intense and explicitly sexual content. Excerpt:

§28. Rabbit

On the eve of her sixteenth birthday a gift was left for Keisha Blake, outside the flat in the corridor. The wrapping showed a repeating butterfly pattern. The card, unsigned, read UNWRAP IN PRIVATE, but the slant of the p and the pointy w told her it was the hand of her good friend Leah Hanwell. She retreated to the bath-room. A vibrator, neon pink with revolving beads in its gigantic tip. Keisha sat on the closed lid of the toilet and made some strategic calculations. Wrapping the dildo in a towel, she hid it in the room she shared with Cheryl, then took the box and wrapping paper down to the courtyard to the public bins by the parking bays. The following Saturday morning she began approximating the early signs of a cold, and on Sunday claimed a severe cough and stomach ache. Her mother pressed her tongue down with a fork and said it was a shame, Pastor Akinwande was going to talk on the topic of Abraham and Isaac. From the balcony Keisha Blake watched her family walk to church, not without regret: she was sincerely interested in the topic of Abraham and Isaac.

§29. Rabbit, Run

But she had also privately decided she was a different kind of believer from her mother, and could survive the occasional anthropological adventure into sin. She returned inside and raided an alarm clock and calculator for their batteries. She did not employ any mood lighting or soft music or scented candles. She did not take off her clothes. Three minutes later she’d established several things previously unknown to her: what a vaginal orgasm was; the difference between a clitoral and a vaginal orgasm, and the existence of a viscous material, made from her body, that she had, afterward, to rinse out of the ridges along the vibrator’s shaft, in the little sink in the corner of the room. She had the dildo only for a couple of weeks but in that time used it regularly, sometimes as much as several times a day, often without washing afterward, and always in this business-like way, as if delegating a task to somebody else.

Zadie Smith writes of a teenager’s self-managed sexual awakening as though Marguerite Duras’ novel, “The Lover” never happened. Duras’ book is one in which the sexual self-awareness of a girl through the ages of eleven to sixteen is described in a way that is mesmerising in its illumination of the cavernous inner areas of young desire. Duras’ book, published in 1989 is a sort of contrapuntal reading of Nabokov’s “Lolita” (published in 1955). In Lolita we glimpse the terrifying incomprehensibility of female sexuality (in the guise, for most of the book, of a teenage girl, a “demon child”) through a middle-aged man’s eyes. In Duras’ book we get mostly the same story but from the perspective of a precocious girl-child. There are similarities throughout, in the rhythms of the two stories and importantly, towards the ends of the stories: In the same way that Humbert shows up at his long-lost love’s door many years after he had misused and abused her, the lover (also a much older man) shows up at the beloved’s door many years after they have separated and he has married. (The latter ending however bears a stronger resemblance to the one in Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” if it had a happy ending instead of the frustrating and dissatisfactory but ultimately appropriate one that it does have.) Duras has set the bar high but she has also — to mix metaphors — paved the way towards a meaningful discussion of the sexuality of teenage girls. She has done the ground-work, the heavy-work, the messy-work, of dissecting the young, female sexual mind. There is hardly an excuse for Zadie not to have attempted to carry off the above scene with a bit more felicity and awareness. The scene sounds almost masculine in its superficial haste. The haste in this scene is symptomatic of the next two scenes in the book. It’s instructive to consider Duras in The Lover:

Ever since he’d been infatuated with her body the girl had stopped being incommoded by it, by its thinness…The lover from Cholon is so accustomed to the adolescence of the white girl, he’s lost. The pleasure he takes in her every evening has absorbed all this time, all his life. He scarcely speaks to her any more. Perhaps he thinks she won’t understand any longer what he’d say about her, about the love he never knew before and of which he can’t speak. Perhaps he realises they never have spoken to each other, except when they cry out to each other in the bedroom in the evening. Yes, I think he didn’t know, he realises he didn’t know. (p. 99)

In the second of the sex scenes in NW, two lovers, Felix and Annie, toxic to each other — and Felix trying to convince himself to get away from her, having just told Annie that he has committed himself to another — have sex atop the roof of her building. She has been sunbathing but the arrival of a scandalised family makes her don a bathing suit. Excerpt:

Annie lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and exhaled it through her nose. “Life’s not a video game, Felix—there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is everybody dies at the end. Game over.” The few clouds left in the sky were shunting toward Trafalgar. Felix looked up at them with what he hoped was a spiritual look upon his face. “Well, that’s your opinion, innit. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion.”

“Mine, Nietzsche’s, Sartre’s, a lot of people. Felix, darling, I appreciate you coming here for this ‘serious talk’ and sharing your thoughts about God, but I’m quite bored of talking now and personally I’d really like to know: are we going to fuck today or not?”

She pulled playfully at his leg. He tried to get up, but she started kissing up his ankles and he soon sunk back down on his knees. It was a defeat, and he blamed her. He got her by the shoulders, not gently, and together they scrabbled to the edge of the wall, where they told themselves they couldn’t be seen. He had a handful of her hair tight in his fist, and tried to land a harsh kiss but she had the knack of turning every malevolent stroke into passion. They fit together. They always had. But what was the point of fitting in this way and no other? He felt her hands on his shoulders, pushing him lower, and soon he was level with her appendix scar. She lifted her arse. He grabbed it with both hands and put his face in her crotch. Fourteen when Lloyd first explained that to eat a woman was unhygienic, a humiliation. Only at gunpoint, that was his father’s opinion, and even then only if every last hair has been removed. Annie was the first time. Years of conditioning broken in an afternoon. He wondered what Lloyd might think of him now, with his nose nestled in so much abundant straight hair, and this strange taste in his mouth.

“If it’s in the way, just take it out!”

He grabbed the mouse-tail between his teeth and pulled. It came out easily. He left it like a dead thing, red on the white deck. He turned back to her and dug in with his tongue. He looked like he was frantically tunnelling somewhere and hoping to reach the other side. She tasted of iron, and when he came up for air five minutes later he imagined a ring of blood around his mouth. In fact there was only a speck; she kissed it away. The rest was quick. They were old lovers and had their familiar positions. On their knees, looking out over town, they came swiftly to reliably pleasurable, reliably separate, conclusions, that were yet somehow an anticlimax when compared to those five minutes, five minutes ago, when it had seemed possible to climb inside another person, head first, and disappear entirely. Afterward he lay on top of her feeling the unpleasant, sweaty closeness, wondering when it would be polite to move. He did not wait very long. He rolled over onto his back. She swept her hair to one side and put her head on his chest. They watched a police helicopter pass by on its way to Covent Garden.

By this point, it is clear what Zadie Smith is aiming for: She wants to shock us, to scandalise us, for us to say, “My God, a teenager with a giant dildo! A man earning his red-wings! This is intense stuff!”. For the next scene, a preamble is unnecessary. Excerpt:

§ 182. Love in the ruins

The door opened and the young men re-emerged in only their Calvin Kleins, one black pair, one white, like two featherweights in a boxing ring. No older than 20. They got out a laptop. The idea appeared to be like roulette. You click and a human being appears, in real time. Click again. Click again. Eighty percent of the time they got a penis. The rest were quiet girls playing with their hair, groups of students who wanted to talk, shaven-headed thugs standing in front of their national flags. On the rare occasions it was a girl they would at once started typing: GET YOUR TITS OUT. Natalie asked them: boys, why are we doing this? You’ve got the real thing right here. But they kept on with the Internet. It seemed to Natalie that they were stalling for time. Or maybe they couldn’t do anything without the Net somewhere in the mix. You try it, Keisha, you try it, see who you get. Natalie sat at the laptop. She got a lonely boy in Israel who typed YOU NICE and took out his penis. You like being watched Keisha? Do you like it? We’ll leave it there, on the dresser. How d’you want it Keisha? Just tell us and we’ll do it. Anything. And still Natalie Blake knew she was in no danger. Just do what you want, said Natalie Blake.

But neither of them could really manage it at all, and soon they blamed each other. It’s him! It’s cos I’m looking at him, man. He’s messing with my groove. Don’t listen to him he ain’t got no groove. They were satisfied to play about like teenagers. Natalie became very impatient. She was not a teenager anymore. She knew what she was doing. She did not feel she had to wait around hoping to be penetrated. She could envelop. She could hold. She could release. She sat the boy in the black Calvins on the edge of bed, rolled his foreskin down, got on him, advised him not to touch her or otherwise move unless she said so. A narrow cock but not ugly. He said: you’re quite strong-minded innit Keisha. Know what you want and that. They say that about sistas don’t they? And to this, Natalie Blake replied: I really couldn’t give a fuck what they say. She could see the boy had no useful rhythm—it was better for both of them if he simply stayed still. She ground down on to him. Rocked. Finished very quickly, though not as quickly as his circumcised friend on the other side of the bed who gave a little groan, spurted dribblingly into his own hand and disappeared into the bathroom. Dinesh you little chief. Come back in here. Um. This is a bit weird. Where’s he gone?

Just you and me. You come already, yeah? Fair enough. You know what I don’t think I’m gonna get there right at the moment Keisha. I feel a bit hot and bothered right now if I’m honest. She released him. The boy flopped out of her, much reduced. She tucked it back in his pants. She started putting her clothes back on. The other one re-emerged from the loo looking sheepish. She had a spliff left over from Camden, and together they smoked it. She tried to get them to tell her something, anything, about the people who lived in this house but they wouldn’t be distracted from what they called their “chirpsing.” We should worship this girl man. Sista, are you ready to be worshipped? You’re a goddess in my eyes. All night long baby. Till you’re gonna be begging me to stop. Till six in the morning. Dinesh, man, I gotta be at work at eight.

Zadie Smith writes of a mature woman who has a threesome with two teenage boys, and as with her previous sexual set-pieces she pornographises and vulgarises, hurrying to write away and write off the scenes. She does not linger over the moment or tell us anything that is truly revelatory of the woman’s experience. In a another chapter she writes,

When he finally allowed Keisha Blake to have sex with him it turned out to be a technical transition. She learned nothing new about Rodney’s body, or Rodney, only a lot of facts about condoms: their relative efficacy, the thickness of rubber, the right moment—the safest moment—to remove them afterward.

Which is precisely the impression one gets of Zadie’s sex-writing: We learn nothing new about women’s bodies, or women, only a lot of droll facts about the mechanics of sex. (The contrast between what Keisha learns of her body as compared to what she learns of her boyfriend’s body is clear: sex, as a way of conveying information or engendering intimacy, is dead, Zadie seems to say.)

The threesome is strongly reminiscent of the classic Mexican film, Y Tu Mamá También (“And Your Mother Too”, Alfonso Cuarón, 2001). The resemblance is so strong, in fact, that I think that Zadie Smith was well aware of exactly what and who she was referencing (She wrote a book, Autograph Man which, I gather, is all about her displaying her ability to be as hectic and encyclopedic in her knowledge as Pynchon and as well-versed in pop culture and cinema as David Foster Wallace ¹). In Mamá También, a woman in her late twenties discovers that she is soon to die of cancer and decides to take a road-trip, in an attempt to enjoy life, separate and different from what her life has been until then. She gets together with two teenage boys and thus the adventure begins. What makes Mama También so powerful is how non-pornographic the very graphic sex is. The scenes are not modular, there is deep introspection in the way they are drawn. The absurdities and fumblings of teenage boys facing an older woman, which Zadie quickly summarises here, are comprehensively depicted and detailed in the film. The woman’s frustrations, assertions, and needs are artfully presented. We get, instead of mere titillation or forgettable sexual minutiae, a substantial character study and a meaningful interrogation of sexuality. So comprehensive is it, that anything less involving immediately looks cliché, as is Zadie Smith’s circumspect scene.

She presents what she imagines are shocking tableaux: a sixteen year old with a Jack Rabbit dildo contriving to arrange for time to be home alone, to test it and her sexual machinery out; a man performing cunnilingus on a girl who is at the tail end of her period; a middle-aged woman having sex with two strange teenage boys. After presenting what I imagine she thinks are edgy scenes, she works quickly to move on, writing in “clinical language,” whipping out anatomical detail, using clichés and tropes that are by now so familiar to anyone (everyone?) that they are completely drained of affect, and their presence on the page beggars belief.

Zadie Smith seems caught, somewhat, between wanting to be daring, and at the same time, being shackled by a baffling, but understandable probity: the girl with the dildo is sixteen, no younger; the man ostensibly feasts on a bloody vulva but there is only a speck of blood — no bloody immersion here; the boys are teenagers but Zadie is careful to note that they are of age. Her instincts tend towards propriety and perhaps that explains why she seems completely uncomfortable and inept when writing about venturesome sexual activity. (This rectitude, and the conflict it causes within her is exemplified by her recent essay on “Joy”. It is a bizarre essay that gets more troubling the more one reads it: She confesses to substantial drug use in her youth – wistfully recalling the feelings of profound joy which she now forces herself to discount. She hints at having to work to sustain interest in her marriage – writing of how the advice in Women’s Magazines about “shared interests” helps. She talks of having few pleasures in daily life but not once in her truncated list of pleasures does she mention or allude to sex. The essay is a sort of mid-life crisis confessional, a coming-to-terms with marital bleakness and existential despair, a diary entry of unfulfilled need. In closing the essay we get what might be the justification for an affair because, “[t]he end of a pleasure brings no great harm to anyone, after all,” or a vindication of her wanting to end her marriage because like other mere pleasures, “[it] can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth,” or, most likely, the essay is merely much self-indulgent ado about nothing at all.²)

The scenes involving the vibrator are titled Rabbit and Rabbit, Run, allusions to John Updike and his Rabbit series of novels; Updike, that wonderful “penis with a thesaurus,” a man who I think of as the master of written cunnilingus. In NW, Felix and a menstruating Anna have sex on a roof-top, in the sun, and we get Zadie’s lazy constructions of “frantically tunnelling,” and the quite pathetic, “she tasted of iron.” This scene is written in the shadow of Updike’s great scene from Couples, and Zadie Smith had to be aware of this: she alluded to Updike previously but the dildo was more referential of Philip Roth (remember that neon green dildo?) than Updike. The roof-top, sun-lit cunnilingus, with the “clouds shunting toward Trafalgar,” however, is very much Updike. In Couples, a married Georgene and her lover, Piet, have sex outdoors, in the sun. Like Anna who asks, “are we going to fuck today or not?” Georgene is decisive and dominant and says, “Let’s make it outdoors for a change.” From Couples, we get an immortal series of paragraphs, lines, and images. The prosody threatens to overshadow any pleasure we might get from imagining the actual sex. The entire scene is worth reprinting:

The sliding glass door led off the sun deck through a playroom into their big bedroom, a room adorned with Chinese lanterns and African masks and carved animal horns from several countries. Their house, a gambrel-roof late-Victorian, with gingerbread eaves and brackets, scrolling lightning rods, undulate shingling, zinc spouting, and a roof of rose slates in graduated ranks, was furnished in a style of cheerful bastardy-hulking black Spanish chests, Chippendale highboys veneered in contrasting fruitwoods flaking bit by bit, nondescript slab-and-tube modern, souvenir-shop colonial, Hitchcock chairs with missing rungs, art nouveau rockers, Japanese prints, giant corduroy pillows, Philippine carpets woven of rush rosettes. Unbreakable as a brothel, it was a good house for a party. Through his illicit morning visits Piet came to know these rooms in another light, as rooms children lived in and left littered with breakfast crumbs as they fled down the driveway to the school bus, the Globe still spread open to the funnies on the floor. Gradually the furniture—the antic lamps, the staring masks—learned to greet him, the sometimes man of the house. Proprietorially he would lie on the Thornes’ king-size double bed, his bare toes not touching the footboard, while Georgene had her preparatory shower. Curiously he would finger and skim through Thorne’s bedside shelf—Henry Miller in tattered Paris editions, Sigmund Freud in Modern Library, Our Lady of the Flowers and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure fresh from Grove Press, inspirational psychology by the Menningers, a dove-gray handbook on hypnosis, Psychopathia Sexualis in text-book format, a delicately tinted and stiff-paged album smuggled from Kyoto, the poems of Sappho as published by Peter Pauper, the unexpurgated Arabian Nights in two boxed volumes, works by Theodor Reik and Wilhelm Reich, various tawdry paper-backs. Then Georgene would come in steaming from the bath-room, a purple towel turbaned around her head.

She surprised him by answering, “Let’s make it outdoors for a change.”

Piet felt he was still being chastised. “Won’t we embarrass God?”

‘Haven’t you heard, God’s a woman? Nothing embarrasses Her.” She pulled the elastic of his underpants toward her, eased it down and around. Her gaze became complacent. A cloud passingly blotted the sun. Sensing and fearing a witness, Piet looked upward and was awed as if by something inexplicable by the unperturbed onward motion of the fleet of bluebellied clouds, ships with a single destination. The little eclipsing cloud burned gold in its tendrilous masts and stern. A cannon discharge of iridescence, and it passed. Passed on safely above him. Sun was renewed in bold shafts on the cracked April earth, the sodden autumnal leaves, the new shoots coral in the birches and mustard on the larch boughs, the dropped needles drying, the tar-paper, their discarded clothes. Between the frilled holes her underpants wore a tender honey stain. Between her breasts the sweat was scintillant and salt. He encircled her, fingered and licked her willing slipping tips, the pip within the slit, wisps. Sun and spittle set a cloudy froth on her pubic hair: Piet pictured a kitten learning to drink milk from a saucer. He hurried, seeking her forgiveness, for his love of her, on the verge of discharge, had taken a shadow, had become regretful, foregone. He parted her straight thighs and took her with the simplicity she allowed. A lip of resistance, then an easeful deepness, a slipping by steps. His widening entry slowly startled her eyes. For fear of finding her surrendered face plain, he closed his lids. The whispering of boughs filtered upon them. Distant saws rasped. The breeze teased his squeezing buttocks; he was bothered by hearing birds behind him, Thorne’s hired choir, spying. “Oh, sweet. Oh so sweet,” Georgene said. Piet dared peek and saw her rapt lids veined with broken purple and a small saliva bubble welling at one corner of her lips. He suffered a dizzying impression of waste. Though thudding, his heart went mournful. He bit her shoulder, smooth as an orange in sun, and traveled along a muffled parabola whose red warm walls she was and at whose end she also waited. Her face snapped sideways; drenched feathers pulled his tip; oh. So good a girl, to be there for him, no matter how he fumbled, to find her way by herself. In her strange space he leaped, and leaped again. She said, “Oh.” Lavender she lay in his shadow, the corners of her lips flecked. Politely Piet asked her, “Swing?”

“Dollink. Dunt esk.”

“I was sort of poor. I’m not used to this outdoor living.”

Georgene shrugged under him. Her throat and shoulders were slick. A speck of black construction dust, granular tar from his hair, adhered to her cheek. “You were you. I love you. I love you inside me.”

Piet wanted to weep, to drop fat tears onto her deflated breasts. “Did I feel big enough?”

She laughed, displaying perfect teeth, a dentist’s wife. “No,” she said. “You felt shrimpy.” Seeing him ready, in his dilated suspended state, to believe it, she explained solemnly, “You hurt me, you know. I ache afterwards.” (pp. 53-55)

From Updike we get “Piet pictured a kitten learning to drink milk from a saucer.” From Zadie, all we get is “[s]he tasted of iron,” which every man and woman already probably knows about the taste of menstrual flow. But the laziness of that writing is not merely in her enlisting the use of a commonplace; that line also indicates that Zadie wasn’t bothered to know (or doesn’t want us to know she knows) what eating a woman on her period actually might taste and feel like: the shocking variability in texture, taste, consistency, not just from one woman to another but even of a single woman, from one month to another. She doesn’t just elide these things, she intentionally avoids the particular descriptive detail that would take her depiction out of the realm of meaningless porn and into the realm of reality and truth. Zadie had an opportunity to reclaim cunnilingus from Updike but instead she confounds and demeans her own efforts . Her sex-prose is simply so damn pedestrian.

Perhaps, though, Mrs. Smith is attempting to depict the logical end to the writing that has been done by “the Great Male Narcissists”.³ Perhaps, simultaneously, she is sketching what happens to sex when all the world is awash in porn, when our desire is mediated through pornography, which in turn is mediated by technology: We get a performance of sex, and a writing of sex, which occurs, “several times a day…and always in this business-like way, as if delegating a task to somebody else.” There’s strong evidence that this is her aim: Towards the end of her novel, when Natalie gets together with the boys who placed a Craigslist-style offer of sex to which she responded, the boys are obsessed with using Chat-Roulette (which, in the real world, rose, alongside its teenage inventor, to worldwide fame, then infamy, and finally obscurity, between 2010 and 2012). The boys are fixated watching their screen where a display of random people are connected to the carousel of the self-same service.

On the rare occasions it was a girl they would at once started typing: GET YOUR TITS OUT. Natalie asked them: boys, why are we doing this? You’ve got the real thing right here. But they kept on with the Internet…Or maybe they couldn’t do anything without the Net somewhere in the mix.

Maybe that is it: Perpetually tethered to the Internet, our desire is shaped by it, irretrievable funnelled into it, reduced through it, and we get a reality of sex that is as formulaic, reductive, derivative, and as devoid of anything substantively interior or innovatively exterior as the sex is in NW. Foucault, after all, did declare that perhaps the West has not invented any new perversions.⁴ Barret Hathcock in an essay on Nicholson Baker, observes that, “[f]or literature about sex after Updike, porn is about the only direction to take, which is why we shouldn’t go there.” ⁵ Not only does the real sex suffer, but also the writing of sex, which becomes the mass of detritus that Zadie hath wrought. We get a world impoverished because one in which the nuanced, incisive, and revolutionary sex writing in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is no longer influential. One of the most memorable out of many memorable parts of Lessing’s book reads as follows:

The night after I wrote it[my love for him], Saul did not come down into my room to sleep. There was no explanation, he simply did not come. He nodded, cool and stiff, and went upstairs. I lay awake and thought of how, when a woman begins making love with a new man, a creature is born in her, of emotional and sexual responses, that grows in its own laws, its own logic. That creature in me was snubbed by Saul’s quietly going up to bed, so that I could see it quiver, and then fold itself up and begin to shrink. Next morning, we had coffee, and I looked across the table at him (he was extraordinary white and tense-looking) and I realised that if I said to him, Why didn’t you come to my room last night, why didn’t you make some kind of explanation for not coming, he would frown and go hostile.

Later that day he came into my room and made love to me. It wasn’t real love-making. He had decided he would make love. The creature inside me who is the woman in love was not implicated, refused to be lied to.

If Zadie Smith’s goal was to mimic the Hollywood style of creating modular sex-scenes, scenes that add nothing meaningful to the narrative except watered-down titillation, that seem to cater only to directors’ need to see ever younger girls naked, and that fulfil some imagined flesh-on-screen quota, then she has succeeded brilliantly. If instead, she was attempting to write herself out of the parochial puritanical ideology of sex-as-depravity, sex-as-sin (as a feminist would), or if she was merely trying to write about the sex act in itself, then I would like to be among those to retroactively nominate Zadie for The Bad Sex Award.

Anaïs Nin’s view of puritanical ideology as it motivates sex in literature is that it subverts the very aims a woman has when writing about sex because it puts desire on the other side of morality, depicting desire as something that has only a deleterious effect on human life. Andrea Dworkin too has this view, though slightly more radical: Women are capable of internalising their own oppression; the puritanical ideology internalised by a woman is reflected in a woman writing of sex as dirt, as degrading, as a act of hate perpetrated by men and abetted by the complicit woman. Zadie’s writing of sex doesn’t seem to offer a way beyond these traditional limitations. Women in NW are brought low by sex, in the act of it they acknowledge something base about themselves, and in the aftermath, they are treated by men as low things, a perception they seem, and in turn Zadie seems, to have internalised. Alternatively, as in the case of the sixteen year old masturbatrix, her sexuality is functional, physical, mechanical, and not much else. Masturbation doesn’t have to be depicted as edifying but even the staunchest Catholic will impute some spiritual content to it (It imperils the soul, the priest will say). A feminine sexuality would have to surely be something other than merely clinical or at least be depicted in something other than staid prose.

After Natalie has sex with the two boys, her husband discovers the betrayal. She runs away from home and there is a suggestion in the text that she has sex with some other guy (Nathan) in a park (it might as well be in the street, but it’s in Hampstead Heath) in the rain, and presumably, mud, so that in a sense, “Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.” She immediately wants to be left alone (Incidentally, that the writing is sexually oblique probably makes it the best sex scene in the book). She envisions “a sudden and total rapture”, a decisive course of action that would restart her existence and allow her to break with her past, but it’s merely velleity, and proceeds to an ambiguous impotence (The kind of ending that Saul Bellow made popular). A cursory reading would suggest that sex, at this point is at its most meaningless and futile (a lesson, again, that the GMNs have hammered into us for decades), which points back to the earlier scenes and raises the question, why did the writing — the very prose — of the sex have to be invested with this selfsame abjection?

The novel, which is set in a fictional North London suburb and in New York, bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption. The Autograph Man may indeed be the nearest that a contemporary British writer has come to sounding like a contemporary American; the result is disturbingly mutant. (“Fundametally Goyish” by James Wood in The London Review of Books Vol. 24 No.19)

↩
Alternatively, Zadie was adding her profound voice to a deeply meaningful metaphysical discourse:

For Smith, then, the choice of joy is unreasonable, even insane — although nonetheless right. But Aquinas would ask how a choice that was right — that conformed to how a human being should live — could be unreasonable. It would seem, he might say, that Smith is confusing what is commonly taken as rational with what she has learned is really rational. In one standard sense, an act is rational to the extent that it helps bring about what you want to achieve. Aquinas notes that most people take bodily enjoyment as their ultimate goal: “the majority pursues corporeal pleasures.” To the common mind, therefore, it is rational to act for pleasure. But what Smith’s life has revealed to her is that most people are wrong about the goal of life: it is joy, not pleasure. She has, in effect, learned that acting for pleasure is not rational. Aquinas would also suggest that Smith is wrong to see human being as the only (or ultimate) source of joy. In his theological view, human loves needs to be grounded in and directed toward the eternal reality of a God who is identical with love. (The Joy of Zadie Smith and Thomas Aquinas by Gary Gutting in The Opinionator, Jan 10, 2013)

↩
As David Foster Wallace labelled them. ↩
Michael Foucault, A History of Sexuality I ↩
“I Know It When I See It” in Lady Chatterley’s Brother by Scott Esposito and Barret Hatchock, 2012 ↩

"There is common agreement about only one thing, that woman’s erogenous zones are spread all..."

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 10:46:58 +0300

“

There is common agreement about only one thing, that woman’s erogenous zones are spread all over her body, that she is more sensitive to caress, and that her sensuality is rarely as direct, as immediate as man’s. There is an atmosphere of vibrations which need to be awakened and have repercussions on the final arousal.

…

How can a man even become aware of a woman’s all-over-the-body-sensitivity when it is covered by jeans, which make her body seems like those of his cronies, seemingly with only one aperture of penetration? If it is true that woman’s eroticism is spread all over her body, then her way of dressing today is an absolute denial of this factor.

”

- Anaïs Nin, ‘Eroticism in Women’, in In Favour of the Sensitive Man and other essays (W.H. Allen, 1978)

Postmortem: Submitting my first manuscript

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 10:49:00 +0300

Writing fiction is difficult. This has always, in theory, seemed obvious to me but in practice, the shock of confronting the fact broke my spirit. Writing a manuscript, editing and revising it, with a deadline in mind, and finally submitting it in time, broke me to pieces, physically and mentally. The toll was unbelievable and the trauma was real. Never in my life have I had to work so hard, with such sustained intensity and for such a long time.

Last month, I submitted a novella to the Kwani? Manuscript Project, a pan-African literary contest run by the Kenya-based Kwani? Trust (which at this point is essentially, and somewhat lamentably, even though laudably, the singular voice of literary Kenya). Kwani? have mentioned that they received close to three hundred submissions and that the winners will be announced in December 2012. That means that the judging panel (whoever they may be, as yet undisclosed) have approximately sixty days during which to read three hundred texts. Mercifully, about a month before the deadline (17.09.2012), Kwani? cut the minimum acceptable word-count in half, thus allowing the submission of novellas, which are what I imagine most first-time writers submitted. Still, even if each submission is no more than fifty thousand words, that is still a lot of reading to be done. Unavoidably, a lot of work will slip through the cracks of insufficient time and too much fatigue.

Literary competitions are notoriously difficult to officiate (and thus neglectfully officiated)¹. All that those of us who submitted can hope for is that we are each given a fair chance. The first chapter of each book should at least be read before the text is discarded from the slush pile and sent into the flames. As such—and this is also obvious from the writer’s perspective—that first chapter should be the best chapter of the book. In my case I grabbed a middle chapter that I thought was the strongest of the lot and slammed it in the front, labelling it “Chapter 0,” plot mechanics be damned. God help me.

I’ve been working on the manuscript that I submitted for almost a year. However, only in the penultimate month of writing and editing did I truly find my style, and the voice I wanted the story’s narrator to have. Obviously, that was a disastrous situation to be in. For the last month of writing, I was working in twenty hour shifts, sleeping for four hours, rewriting much of what I had written earlier. I was close to collapse in the last two weeks so I took the plunge and cut the novel in half, taking what was slightly over one hundred thousand words and using only fifty thousand of them. There was simply not any time in which or strength with which to edit the rest of my material. I wrote an approximately one thousand word ending two days before the deadline and settled on a conclusion to the story that I had not envisioned months before.

I can imagine that there are those A+ students who were perfectly organised in everything they did, had outlined meticulously and had transcribed (I write on paper, thus a necessary step), edited, proofed, rested and reviewed their manuscripts a month before the deadline. I remember those kinds of students because in school, I hated them for their mercenary efficiency which I simply couldn’t duplicate but that seemed a prerequisite for success in anything. My body, my work, my life are all of a piece: messy. I have learnt to accept myself for what I am.

I learnt, during this ordeal, that I had to be strong in the chair. I sat, and over time, my body became a new kind of organism, moulded to the wood of the chair, hunched over the table, huddled around my laptop, my pulse throbbing to the cadence of the fan. Earlier in the year, I injured my lower back. I never thought that I would again be able to sit for long periods in a straight-back chair without having to medicate away excruciating pain but at some point during those twenty-hour shifts, my body became the chair. Sitting in the chair became more comfortable than lying in bed, more natural than standing, more rejuvenating than breathing. On the morning that I submitted the manuscript, I looked at the ceiling and had the sensation that I might, in troth, never ever leave that chair, that I had somehow become a part of the earth, planted in that space, for eternity, and I felt a sense of peace unlike anything previous. But as soon as I clicked the “send” button, my back began to hurt and as I stretched and went through the movements that I was instructed would maintain a healthy spine, I heard uncoiling tendons snap and pop like petrified cartilage.

I have learnt that there is no defeating the mathematics that governs production (and productivity): If I have a target word-count, I must first translate that into time. I know that I write x words an hour and that I type y words an hour and that I read z words an hour. I must calculate how long I will take to do the basic work, and make a prudent estimate of how much time I will need in order to bring it to completion. I didn’t do this the first time round and thus compounded my suffering no end. Unfortunately, there is no way to time how long I will take to achieve a certain creative goal, how long I will take to find a tone and texture that can characterise the prose.

I have learnt that I must include in my calculations an additional week for editing and another for proofing. A text, like a seared steak, apparently needs to rest. Because I went directly from transcribing, to editing, to proofing, to submitting, I am now, a month later, still finding the most outrageous and egregious typographical errors (for instance, instead of “anodyne” to describe the ameliorating effects of one character’s presence on another, I used the word “bromide”; “he’s” and “she’s” blended into each other, and so on.) I have learnt that planning additional time for contingencies eventually leads to a schedule whose duration tends towards infinity.

Initially, I had hoped that I might have, as part of my process, someone other than myself read the manuscript prior to submission. Well, everyone is busy and the only way to do that is to pay someone or press-gang others from my writing group (I don’t have one) into doing it as part of their obligations to the group. I no longer believe that such a stage is necessary. I know my novel best and my goals are to satisfy my current level of taste and literary need. Besides, it is really gauche to expect anyone else to want to read my manuscript and to expect feedback. That’s just crazy.

I have learnt that professional writers (who produce quality prose consistently—maybe they get remunerated for it; consistency and quality are the watchwords) are heroes in every sense of the word. Consider: you spend the bulk of your day and energy and nights in some state of literary alertness; you are either writing, reading or taking notes. Even if you have, and you surely must have, a day job, you are always working, within yourself, towards the goal of your vocation. You spend your nights in painful hours working to produce a text. Your wrists and fingers suffer muscle spasms and cramps; your joints have intermittent and uncontrollable stiffness; your arms and the muscles under your armpits twitch with pathological menace; the pads of your fingers are chafed; from time to time migraine flashes and nausea make it impossible to work; and this over a year, perhaps longer. Eventually, you produce your work and you can read it from start to finish without envisioning and wishing for your own death. Then you have to put your completed work in a drawer and forget it because there is no one who will publish it and not even your spouse, who loves you for all that you are, will read it².

I have learnt that in the question of “Who am I writing for?”, I have to realise that I am writing for myself. It would be nice to be read by someone but the goal of my exertions is to engage in a sort of dialogue (in the Harold Bloom sense) with the writers I love and who have done me the tremendous honour and benefit of writing the books they have written. I am writing for them, to thank them, and to talk to them and their work. It is not necessary that I ever be read. It is necessary that I read and write well (writing being, after all, merely the completion and continuation of the process of reading).

Before I resolved the question of “Who am I writing for?” I went through lengthy doldrums. I considered and planned on ways to kill myself. I imagined giving up everything, focusing on securing a career and never touching a book again. I remember the late nights and the physical and emotional pain. I recall wanting very seriously and very urgently to do away with myself. I recall crying as I wrote and wishing someone would help me achieve prose of a kind that would not dishonour everything I hold dear and that would not reveal me to have not only failed myself in this pursuit but also squandered my life as a whole and jeopardised my entire future. I recall panic attacks, heart palpitations and feeling that my body would shut itself down. I recall anguish, feelings of inferiority, hopelessness, despair.

I have learnt that burn-out is a very real phenomenon.

I have never worked as hard as I have done this year. I have never exerted myself to this extent. I have never before watched my body wither under the pall of an obscure but resonant dream. Now that I know what it takes to be a writer (that is, someone who writes—I don’t know how to be one who is paid to write), I know that it’s the only life I can aspire to and remain true to the deepest movements of my spirit.

I have learnt that I want to write another novel. But before that I want to spend this month revising my current manuscript in order to get it to the length and scope that I had originally intended.

I have learnt that writing is only pain. There is nothing else to it except the beauty that is paradoxically inherent to all genuine human suffering.

I have learnt that I can create something and be reservedly proud of it in spite of its flaws and my failings.

The Pulitzer Board wrote a public letter and attempted to acquit themselves. ↩
I was fortunate enough to have a girlfriend who helped me edit portions of the manuscript when I was too worn out to read or type any longer. ↩

The Eternal Break-up Scene (Fellini, "La Dolce Vita", 1960)

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 03:05:46 +0300

[In a car parked on the road.]

Her: Why do you treat me this way? Not even a dog gets treated like this! If you loved me a bit, you'd understand some things.
Him: Sure.
Her: You don't love anyone.
Him: Don't scream.
Her: You don't know what loving means.
Him: But you do know don't you?
Her: You've got a hard, empty heart. You only care about women, but not love.
Him: You've been saying it for hours. Stop. I want to go home.
Her: Some men are happy to be loved and don't look for other women. You're the only one like this. What a disaster.
Him: [Shouting] My disaster is having met you. I can't stand having you around anymore. Go away. Forever.

[She gets out of the car and starts walking along the desolate benighted road.]

Don't be silly. Come here.

Her: No. Leave me alone. Let me live.

[He starts the car and drives to her.]

Him: Come on you idiot, get in.
Her: No.
Him: You're such a...
[He cuts her off stopping the car in her path. Calmly.] Get in.
Her: [Still weeping, standing on the shoulder of the road.] What do you want from me? You miserable worm. You'll end up alone like a dog. You'll see. Who'll stay with you if I leave you? Who could ever love you like I do?
Him: I can't waste my life loving you.
Her: You say I'm crazy, that I live outside of reality. But you're off the road. [Pleading] You've found the most important thing in life. You have a woman that loves you, who would give her life for you. You ruin everything. You're always restless, unhappy.

[She climbs into the car.]

[Endearing; sweetly.] Marcello, when two people love each other, nothing else counts. What are you afraid of?

Him: [Severe] Of you, of your selfishness, of your miserable ideals. You offer me a miserable life. [Shouting] You only talk of cooking and bed. If I accepted, I'd end up like a worm. I don't believe in your maternal love. I don't want it. I don't need it. This isn't love, it's brutalisation. I can't live like this. I don't want to be with you any more.
Get out!
Her: No! You're disgusting! I feel sorry for you!
Him: And you make me sick. Get out!
Her: No! I'm staying here with you.
Him: You are not. Get out.
Her: No.
[He drags her out of the car; she bites his hand; he slaps her.]
Him: It's over. Get lost.
Her: Hoodlum.
Him: Get lost. [He throws her out.]
Her: You are a thug, a bastard. Damn you.
[He speeds off leaving her on the pavement.]
Him: Get picked up by a truck driver!
[She weeps until dawn. As the sun rises she sees him speeding back to her. She runs to him and enters the car. They drive off together.]

Desire is grief made concrete

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 11:11:00 +0300

Or grief is abstracted desire. I was thinking along these lines: considering the typical sex and death juxtaposition, and wondering at how, in moments of piqued desire, one feels a sense of sadness, a sense of finitude, even in a moment of ecstasy that feels eternal.

Defective, through no other fault / we’re lost, and only punished / in living with hopeless desires (Dante, Inferno, Canto III)

Taken over by desire, I have a sense of terrible loss, as though by acting on the desire I am somehow engaged in a preemptory act of mourning; mourning not just my death, that must surely come and make all this desire minute and irrelevant (heaven) or inexorable and impossible to satisfy (hell), but also the death of all those around me who must eventually leave me alone in my anguished solitude; a solitude foreshadowed in the terrible isolating desolation of desire. In Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, he says that sex and death does not mean that we are thinking about death while having sex but that it poses the question of what it is, exactly, that we think about while having sex (and presumably, also, while we are dying).

This scene from Samuel Maoz’s exquisite film, Lebanon (2009), speaks to this idea:

I finished my freshman year in high school when I lost my father. They called me in class and told me he was dead. Heart attack. Then my teacher took me aside, hugged me. She spoke to me, but I did not understand a thing, just felt her tits against me. Then she took me home in her car. I had a boner all the way home.

Anyway we finally arrived. We got into the house. It was full of people. When they saw me they came to me. They all wanted to hug me, but I did not want that. They would have felt my hard-on. My teacher, however, thought that it was psychological, like trauma from losing someone, things like that, you know? So she follows me into my room and tells me that I should cry; that if I cried, then, I would feel better. And so I thought if I cried she’d hug me again.

So I focused and started telling myself: “My father is dead. He died, I am an orphan, I have no father, my father is dead.”

And so I started to cry. What to do? And things went just as I predicted. She pulled me to her, hugged me and told me: “Yes, cry my darling. Cry it all out.” And my thing was pressing against her belly. And I knew that she felt it.

So I kept crying and she kept holding me tight. And for a minute, or more, I was crying. Pressed against her tits, smelling her smell, the smell of her hair, and my cock rubbing against her soft belly. And suddenly I felt her pull me strongly towards her, and move slowly with me. I stopped crying and bit my lips to hold it in. And then she whispered:

“Do not be ashamed, do not stop, let yourself go, cry, you have not finished yet.

“Let go, my darling,” she says. “Let yourself go.” And so I did.

I felt it rise and then bang! And then I come, I’m coming and coming.

And she hugged me, trembling with me.

And I felt, really free, just like she said.

(48:00 - 52:00)

"The night after I wrote it[about my love for him], Saul did not come down into my room to sleep. ..."

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 00:36:00 +0300

“The night after I wrote it[about my love for him], Saul did not come down into my room to sleep. There was no explanation, he simply did not come. He nodded, cool and stiff, and went upstairs. I lay awake and thought of how, when a woman begins making love with a new man, a creature is born in her, of emotional and sexual responses, that grows in its own laws, its own logic. That creature in me was snubbed by Saul’s quietly going up to bed, so that I could see it quiver, and then fold itself up and begin to shrink. Next morning, we had coffee, and I looked across the table at him (he was extraordinary white and tense-looking) and I realised that if I said to him, Why didn’t you come to my room last night, why didn’t you make some kind of explanation for not coming, he would frown and go hostile.

Later that day he came into my room and made love to me. It wasn’t real love-making. He had decided he would make love. The creature inside me who is the woman in love was not implicated, refused to be lied to.”

- Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Years after these beautiful words were written, we now have Naomi Wolf and E.L. James nattering on about the goddess located squarely in the vagina.)

Cervantes on "Hysterical realism"

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:33:00 +0300

When James Wood penned that famous article where he coined the term hysterical realism (a catch-all phrase to describe —or perhaps circumscribe— the sprawling post-modern novel packed as it is with digressions, anecdotes, intertextual exegesis, social analyses, and so forth) I assumed that he had stumbled upon an original insight. He had found a way to say what we were all vaguely thinking and feeling but couldn’t articulate. He reminded us of Zadie Smith’s pronouncement that,

“…it is not the writer’s job “to tell us how somebody felt about something, it’s to tell us how the world works”. She has praised the American writers David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers as “guys who know a great deal about the world. They understand macro-microeconomics, the way the Internet works, maths, philosophy, but… they’re still people who know something about the street, about family, love, sex, whatever.” ¹

James Wood’s definition of hysterical realism is encapsulated, I think, when he says,

The DeLilloan idea of the novelist as a kind of Frankfurt School entertainer - a cultural theorist, fighting the culture with dialectical devilry…Nowadays anyone in possession of a laptop is thought to be a brilliance on the move, filling his or her novel with essaylets and great displays of knowledge. Indeed, “knowing about things” has become one of the qualifications of the contemporary novelist. Time and again novelists are praised for their wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge. (Richard Powers is the best example, but Tom Wolfe also gets an easy ride simply for “knowing things”.) The reviewer, mistaking bright lights for evidence of habitation, praises the novelist who knows about, say, the sonics of volcanoes. Who also knows how to make a fish curry in Fiji! Who also knows about terrorist cults in Kilburn! And about the New Physics! And so on. The result - in America at least - is novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very “brilliant” books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.

It is therefore interesting to see that Cervantes made a similar observation almost four centuries prior, an observation that sounds uncanny in its similarity to a description of hysterical realism. In the preface to Don Quixote he notes:

Other authors can pass upon the public, by stuffing their books from Aristotle, Plato, and the whole company of ancient philosophers; thus amusing their readers into a great opinion of their prodigious reading…And then the method of these moderns is so wonderfully agreeable and full of variety, that they cannot fail to please. In one line, they will describe you a whining amorous coxcomb, and the next shall be some dry scrap of a homily, with such ingenious turns as cannot choose but ravish the reader…

He finds the extents to which authors go to show their erudition remarkable:

I have neither marginal notes nor critical remarks; I do not so much as know what authors I follow, and consequently, can have no formal index, as it is the fashion now, methodically strung on the letters of the alphabet, beginning with Aristotle, and ending with Xenophon, or Zoilus, or Zeuxis…

It seems as though in literature, education, and perhaps any other field glutted with youthful enthusiasms, the new complaints are practically the same as the old complaints. The world turns and everything stays the same.

Zadie Smith later decried her love for The Novel of Ideas (a love and ambition shared, as Wood noted, by many contemporary writers), and in interviews spoke of her wanting to put such novels behind her: “To be honest, I hope those ‘books of ideas’ as you put them are in my past. A novel shouldn’t be an essay. Its ideas, if it has them, should be a bit more diffusely spread. I don’t care about staging debates anymore. I don’t think I ever really did – it was just easier than writing properly.” However, from the early, and admittedly inconclusive comments on the book, it appears that she has written yet another Book of Ideas (Every early reader is apparently under an embargo and so there aren’t any reviews yet). ↩

Remarks on Geoff Dyer's "Zona"

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 10:45:00 +0300

Geoff Dyer asserts that the age at which a young man begins to truly discover literature and film is between the late teens and early twenties. In Zona, his excursion through his personal tastes and education as constellated around Tarkovsky’s Stalker, he describes a journey and life that is rich, rewarding, and completely foreign to me.

My late teens and early-to-mid twenties were a confused mess of broke, uncultured desperation. In many ways, that is how my life still is. Immediately after Secondary School, the movies I watched that entirely transformed my outlook on life were The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999) and Waking Life (Linklater, 2001). It wasn’t so much the spell-binding action of the former that got me: It was the image, near the beginning of the film, of Neo plucking from a shelf, Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, that stuck in my memory. It signified to me that Neo’s apotheosis was born of and firmly rooted in literacy and philosophy. Waking Life confirmed this idea. Waking Life is a movie about big concepts and in many ways it is a philosophical tour de force to both the new initiate and the acolyte. For years I misinterpreted these two movies. I bought into the action movie fairy tale that the only hard work necessary is an imaginative focusing of energies and creative visualisation. I lost my way in self-help, and the occult until eventually I discovered that the idea of a short-cut is flawed. The story of Neo isn’t the one told in The Matrix. It is the one that occurs before The Matrix begins. It is the story of Neo’s self-education over many arduous years. Similarly, Waking Life wasn’t about the power of lucid dreaming but of lucid living (as evidenced by the title) by actively engaging with logic and ideas. I was in my twenty-fourth year when I became - for real lack of a better word - literate.

A late education is better than no education at all. I take comfort in that. Geoff Dyer’s book is engaging instruction for someone like myself who is only now in life getting to know the filmic and literary canon, and with at least a decade of reading, watching, and thinking remaining before I can even begin to feign familiarity.

Of course, the real prize here, as with any book on close-reading, is Dyer’s close reading of Tarkovsky and his work. He does enough I feel to entertain anyone though a good number of the observations are not really insights but trivia or autobiography, minutely footnoted.

He gives his opinions on various films, but often in passing. In particular, I was baffled by his assertion that “La Double Vie de Véronique (1991)” is a terrible film. Was he being genuine? Later in the book he incriminates himself somewhat when he describes one of the last scenes in Stalker:

Stalker’s wife walks towards the wall and then sits down, turns to the camera and takes a cigarette from her packet. A dreadful moment, this, for me. By lighting and smoking a cigarette she turns herself, instantly, into something hideous. That sheepskin coat, we realise now, must stink of cigarettes— and her hair. And it’s not just that: I hate all gestures associated with finding, lighting and smoking a cigarette.

In Véronique the starlet of the film smokes cigarettes several times. She (Irène Jacob) is a young and terrific beauty. Much of the film is spent simply in observing her walk, stare, read, be. The attention is lavish and a man must have a heart of brick to not fall in love with her during the course of the film. I can imagine Dyer experiencing this then, almost two thirds into the movie, watching the horrible spectacle of her - naked in bed, lying on her stomach, a golden dappled light spread over her, her nipples barely visible - lighting a cigarette and smoking it in what is one of the most luxurious close-ups I have ever witnessed. Dyer must have felt suicidal or at least apoplectic.

Véronique also acknowledges Tarkovsky in a set-piece that might well be Tarkovsky’s truest signature. Early in Stalker, Stalker leaves home to go on his odyssey, against his wife’s wishes. Her anguish is palpable as she collapses onto the floor and wails with that grief that all women know and feel with such singular force:

After Stalker leaves, his wife has one of those sexualized fits (nipples prominently erect) of which Tarkovsky seems to have been fond, writhing away on the hard floor in a climax of abandonment. (Cf. the second resurrection of Hari, in Solaris, coming back to life, so to speak, in a see-through shorty nightie after drinking liquid oxygen.)

The penultimate scene in Véronique is of Véronique with her new lover, a writer, and in fact, a stalker, her stalker. They have just made love and she, laughing, asks him what he wants to know about her. She empties her purse before him and she acquaints him with the history of the revealed objects, objects that in turn reveal her history and habits. He fixes on a series of photographs she took while visiting Krakow. He notices a particularly beautiful picture of her. But the picture, while of her, isn’t of her. It is the picture of her doppleganger, now dead, who at the time of the picture was staring into the bus, marvelling at the sight of herself in the bus taking pictures of herself. Véronique collapses and weeps with an inexplicable, all-encompassing grief, as though, the most difficult questions in her life have been answered and she has just realised the terrible loss. She lies on the bed, writhing away in a climax of bereavement. It’s a Tarkovskian sexualised fit. Then, it becomes something else: Her lover caresses her, kisses her, mouthing at her tears. It’s soon clear that he’s inside her, making love to her, trying (as many men before and since have tried and will try until the end of eternity) to calm the hysteria with his penis.

For a purist like Dyer, that scene, in a film of such undeniable beauty, must have driven him insane and prompted him to write that,

Kieslowski’s “The Double Life of Véronique” made straight-ahead porn seem tasteful by comparison.

That, is quite probably, his most dishonest statement in the book. However, we understand his hysteria.

But did you see what I’ve did for a good portion of the review? I’ve turned a review, an ostensibly critical analysis, into an opportunity for autobiography. That seems to be the modern trend after all, but I question its usefulness. Just like Hip-hop’s monstrous and growing appetite lead to it subsuming and consuming every other genre especially those other two important genres of black culture: R&B and Soul, it seems that the confessional has almost completely subsumed critical essay writing so that now every essay is a reflection on the writer’s life through the prism of the piece of literature under discussion. Perhaps this isn’t a new trend but has always been the case. Still, I question the value of this approach. The narcissism of it all is a little overwhelming, and I don’t doubt that it forces everyone into a process of self-mythologising, or simply, myth-making.

Dyer’s book is said to owe a debt, or at least to give a nod, to Barthes’ “S/Z”. I wonder if Barthes’ text is as loose, casual, and often unserious as Dyer’s ¹. Names are mentioned, and a few quotes are given but the overall impression is one of lightness, and worryingly, of pandering to popular taste. I wanted (needed) an exposition that took its premise and its subject more seriously than Dyer’s does. I don’t object to having fun but when I ask myself what I’ve learnt from this book, I find that I’ve learnt a bit about Dyer, his various likes and dislikes, his ineffable wit, his obsession with owning a dog in spite of never actually owning one ², and the two occasions when he might have had a menagé a trois but didn’t. If that’s all then Dyer is not much different than Paul Carr (except that thankfully Dyer is proud of his pedigree and erudition while, lamentably, Carr is content only to scrape the very bottom of the muckiest barrel, as exemplified by Upgrade). I doubt if Dyer’s book has anything to offer to someone already moderately versed in the canon of cinema, literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis.

In conclusion: An enjoyable, fun, light, quick read. But I mustn’t be disingenuous: If the measure of a book is in the extent to which the reader highlights its pages then this book is an important one: I highlighted it a whole lot.

Kevin Breathnach’s review (TNI) does an excellent job at teasing out the similarity between Dyer’s book and Barthes’. ↩
Kieslowski, who I now conclude is Dyer’s nemesis, also has a real fondness for dogs. In Trois Couleurs: Rouge his attentive gaze turns a German Shephered and a Yorkie into incarnations of the divine (or, more moderately, the sublime). Those animals are not in the film merely for the cute-overload. They have personality and purpose, and highlight the old saw that you can tell everything about a person by how he treats his pets. ↩

"Adam Mars-Jones remarks: ‘Amis doesn’t so much inhabit his characters as leave them to seethe like..."

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 00:45:00 +0300

“Adam Mars-Jones remarks: ‘Amis doesn’t so much inhabit his characters as leave them to seethe like charged rods in a viscous bath of language. The pleasures of reading Amis are electrolytic.’ I agree, and would add that the pleasures of reading Lawrence, his characters tossed like lumps of coal into the furnace of his prose, are bituminous; and the pleasures of reading Pynchon, his characters arrayed like silicon modules under his California sky, are photovoltaic. I’m still waiting for a novelist who can perform cold fusion.”

- A comment in a London Review of Books review of Martin Amis’ “Lionel Asbo”

A short note on Béla Tarr and Tarkovsky, and religion

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 01:11:00 +0300

I find it impossible to seprate Tarr from Tarkovsky. To my mind their work is intertwined in a deep way that I hope to one day understand better. The idea that “Tarr does not believe in God” ¹ is worth contrasting with what Geoff Dyer (Zona) says about Tarkovsky,

Now, one might want to ignore the Orthodox Christian aspect of Tarkovsky but it’s unignorable—unignorable but, at least from my point of view, confusable.

Lars Iyers commentary on Béla Tarr ↩

"What would Béla Tarr would think of your damp?’, W. says. ‘What would he make of it?’ W. has become..."

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 12:18:00 +0300

“

What would Béla Tarr would think of your damp?’, W. says. ‘What would he make of it?’ W. has become obsessed with Béla Tarr. He’s a genius, says W. He says he only makes films about poor, ugly people. The ugly and poor are his people, that’s what he says, says W.

Béla Tarr was going to be a philosopher. But when he started making films . . . No abstraction for him, says W. He’s completely devoted to the concrete, says W. To what he sees in front of him. He’s not like us, W. says. He doesn’t float nebulously into the most general and most confused of ideas, into our clouds of unknowing.

‘Béla Tarr doesn’t believe in God’, says W. ‘He’s seen too much to believe in God’. A little later, ‘He takes years over each film’, says W. ‘Years! Every kind of obstacle is placed in his way. His producers die of despair. His cinematographers leave in disgust. He runs out of money’. And then, ‘His films are full of drunks. Full of drunk, aggressive people like you’, says W. ‘And mud. His films are full of mud. That’s where you belong’, says W., ‘in the mud’. Béla Tarr made his first film when he was sixteen, W. says. Sixteen! Sixteen! That’s when he started, says W. ‘When did you know’, says W., ‘when did you know you’d never amount to anything?’ When did I take refuge in vague and cloudy ideas that have nothing to do with the world?

There’s something absolute about my yard, W. says. You can’t get beyond it. Some great process has completed itself there. ‘What did you do to those plants? Desecrate them?’ and then, ‘What’s hung over your washing line? What was it, before it started rotting?’, and then, ‘Were those once bin bags? My God, what have they become?’ Béla Tarr would discern what is absolute about my yard, W. says. He’d register its every detail in a twenty minute tracking shot. The sewage, the concrete, the bin bags and rotting plants … the yard would mean more to Béla Tarr than all our nonsense.

Béla Tarr said that the walls, the rain and the dogs in his films have their own stories, which are much more important than so-called human stories. He said that the scenery, the weather, the locations and time itself have their own faces. Their own faces! Yes, we’re agreed, the yard, the horror of the yard, is the only thing around here in which Béla Tarr would be interested. (pp.58-60)

…

W. has wheedled £2,600 from some academic fund or other. It’s time to give something to the world, he says, rather than taking. Because that’s what we always do, he says, we take from the world.

We should send the money to Béla Tarr! Send it all to him! Béla Tarr’s our leader. How long have we been waiting for a leader? But there he is, working in Hungary, on the central plain, a long way from us. No doubt his producers have deserted him. No doubt he’s lost another cinematographer … We’re agreed: he needs our support, and we need his leadership.

But how are we going to get the money to Béla Tarr? Should we go to Hungary ourselves? My God, says W., what would he make of us? Two buffoons on the central plain! What would he think? Isn’t life hard enough for him as it is? He uses non-professional actors, says W. of Béla Tarr. We talk of the great speech in Damnation about coal scuttles and suicide. It’s the best scene I’ve ever seen in a film, I tell him.

He agrees. And the bit in the mud with the dog, with Karrer on all fours barking at the dog. Nothing better. Because that’s where we’ll end up—in the mud, covered in mud, barking! At each other, if no one else! Barking—in the mud! (pp.67-8) …

As we cross Mutley Plain, looking out of the window of the bus, W. speaks of his obsession with the great Hungarian plain. Béla Tarr spent six months visiting every house and every pub on the plain, W. notes. He said he discovered mud, rain and the infinite, in that order. Mud, rain and the infinite: nothing to W. is more moving than those words. (pp.158)

”

- Lars Iyers, “Spurious”

A.O. Scott of the New York Times promotes Teju Cole

Thu, 10 May 2012 16:15:23 +0300

In an otherwise useful review of the new documentary on would-be Nobel laureate W.G. Sebald, A.O. Scott writes,

So “Patience (After Sebald)” may not, in the end, offer much in the way of explanation. It does not solve the puzzle of an oeuvre that, as it made its way from German to English, established its creator as a major and unique force in world literature. Once you read him, you may discern traces of his influence everywhere (in a book like Teju Cole’s “Open City,” for example) and may find yourself collecting thoughts and perceptions that qualify as Sebaldian. Whatever that might mean.*

Those last two sentences are jarring aren’t they? Initially, A.O. Scott dithers saying,

The only problem — or, rather, the characteristic paradox — is that “Sebaldian” would have to mean something like “systematically resistant to classification.”

However, the whole point of his review is that there is something describable and identifiable as quintessentially, and meaningfully, Sebaldian, a puzzle which remains partially unsolved, he says.

What then is the point of mentioning that Teju Cole’s methods and effects are Sebaldian? No sooner has he done so than he abdicates responsibility for any meaningful answer - that he does not give but only suggests - he may have to the question “What qualifies as Sebaldian?”.

“Whatever that might mean,” he says, so that we don’t hold him responsible for his words. Is anything Sebaldian? Or is everything? Or just Teju Cole’s Open City?

I’m inclined to believe that Mr. Scott doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. I’m further inclined to believe he merely read James Wood’s review of Open City in The New Yorker where Wood points out that,

[“Open City”] does move in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work. While “Open City” has nominally separate chapters, it has the form and atmosphere of a text written in a single, unbroken paragraph: though people speak and occasionally converse, this speech is not marked by quotation marks, dashes, or paragraph breaks and is formally indistinguishable from the narrator’s own language. As in Sebald, what moves the prose forward is not event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry, a firm pressurelessness (which is to say, what moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing). The first few pages of “Open City” are intensely Sebaldian, with something of his sly faux antiquarianism. *

James Wood takes a stand on the matter of defining what is Sebald. He shows some conviction, which only makes the last lines of A.O. Scott’s review more distasteful and almost entirely promotional without the compensation of any real insights: “you may discern traces of his influence everywhere,” A.O. Scott says, yet he only gives a single, solitary example which he then immediately disavows.

"Happy childhoods return to haunt self-deceivers mostly. Those who have had them seem to sink into..."

Wed, 02 May 2012 20:01:49 +0300

“Happy childhoods return to haunt self-deceivers mostly. Those who have had them seem to sink into an adulthood that is a state of depletion, or to advance without consciousness of their luck into a happy adulthood. In childhood, the moments of consciousness that we later recall occur precisely when we are not happy, but those high moments transform themselves by a miracle into a memory of happiness, as though stones had hatched. What makes them sweet to us is that they took place during a time we have forgotten but which is part of ourselves. Memories yielded by that time are as from a golden age, although their gilding has almost certainly been subsequent.”

- Candia McWilliam, “Debatable Land”, p.47.

My problem with Diablo Cody

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:44:00 +0300

In 2007, a script by Diablo Cody was turned into the movie “Juno”, a rousing success which earned her the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. When I watched the film, I was immediately taken by it. I watched it with a smile through out; my eyes moistened on cue and at the end of it I felt the release of pectoral constriction that comes after running a moderate distance and collapsing on a patch of grass underneath a bright, clean sky.

Almost half a decade later, the film “Young Adult” was released, a product of the same creative team as “Juno”. From the beginning of the film I was cringing. My arms were folded tight over my chest and I was more restless than the day I watched my dangling, lacerated finger get stitched back into its proper place. My reaction to the film was the exact opposite of what I had felt for Juno.

In Juno a teenage girl gets pregnant courtesy of her equally teenage boyfriend. She goes through the process of finding a suitable couple to adopt her child. She gives birth. The new parent takes possession of the child. Juno continues with her life and blissful relationship with her high-school sweetheart.

In Young Adult we are introduced to a writer of novels for middle to late teens (young adults, hence the title). She is rather successful having penned a series of vampire novels that, in her words, “are everywhere.” She is a drunkard (or at least, we see her drink a lot), she is slothful, untidy and messy. She is dishevelled and unkempt, except when it becomes necessary to deploy her looks as an asset, whereupon it becomes patent that she—played by Charlize Theron—is indeed one of the most beautiful Caucasian women on the planet. One day, she receives a missive from her ex-boyfriend. He’s just had a baby, and as new parents are wont to do, he’s helpfully included a picture of the chubby marvel. In the middle of the night, waking from an anonymous one night stand, she packs up to go back to her home town—where he lives—to win him back. His baby, his job, his wife, are all boring burdens, she believes. She’s there to relieve him of them and give him a life. However, there is no redemption to be had: she causes mayhem between generous swigs of neat bourbon, learns nothing, and to some extent gets what we feel must be her comeuppance.

In watching Young Adult, I was forced to consider Juno more critically than I previously had. The sheer amniotic warmth of Juno made it impossible and seemingly unnecessary to think. YA jangled and jarred my nerves so often and so rigorously that all I could do was pause every few minutes to take a deep breath and criticise.

Then, I realised what had happened: I had been manipulated. Juno, the girl, is eminently likeable. She is sweet, gentle, fresh-faced and as pure as the driven snow. Ellen Page with her open impressionability; her round, absorbing eyes; her ovoid, kissable pout; her sing-song voice that all but demands that a guitar be strummed as she speaks—this is the kind of young girl for whom anyone will do anything if she asks. In the film, she is precocious and the sex—and the story—which began, as these things tend to do, with a large, sumptuous armchair, redolent with history, is all her initiative. Still, somehow, we can’t help feeling that Juno is chaste, good and generous.

The film is structured in such a way that Juno is never bad, never wrong. Yes she had a baby at a young age—a stupid mistake (are there any other kind?) by any measure—and yet she weaves such a compelling narrative of her romance with her colourless, hapless, essentially good-hearted boyfriend that this teenage disaster seems, not tragic, but right ¹; not a catastrophic cascade of wild, uncontrollable, unstoppable, hormonal infatuation and insuperable ignorance but a consummation of all the things that a good, stable relationship should be, an inevitable, if slightly premature culmination of love, friendship, empathy, sympathy, respect and commitment. It’s an essentially Catholic message without the sacrament of marriage, hence the conflict.

But it is not really conflict because in Juno there is absolutely nothing at risk or at stake. Will she lose her boyfriend? No. Will she be ostracised? Not really. Will she disgrace her family? No. Will she be forced into single-motherhood? God no. Will she be scarred for life? Never, if we are to believe the sunny ending. Will she lose anything at all? No.

Does Juno then speak to any of the realities of teenage pregnancy? Ramblings on the Internet screamed yes with vehemence but unless one is an upper-middle class white girl whose life is perfectly cushioned by an endless layering of safety nets and safe guards, this movie must have been puzzling, fantastical and with aspects of a sort of modern fairy tale.

The tears Juno cries are the tears that are shed freely when we know we are safe and so we indulge in our pain in ways that are also safe. There is nothing self-destructive here. The question is: Why does Juno have to be so likeable? Is this true? Is this honest? Is this, at all, real? What does her fundamental, bone-deep, niceness got to do with the story of a teenage girl, pregnant and giving her baby away for adoption? Why is Juno’s faultlessness the core of the story?

The answer, to my thinking, is the same as the answer to why Mavis (the anti-heroine of YA), is so despicable: By painting a character in one distinct colour, by casting her in a single lambent light, it makes it easy, elementary, to elicit whatever response you want from the audience. You can’t hate Juno so you must sympathise with everything about her. Even when you feel the sting of doubt, you must cheer for her because what kind of Godless person are you if you hate the Virgin Mary? Conversely, Mavis is so abhorrent, so irredeemable that you must see that she is deplorable. There is nothing more to her. Her self-loathing narcissism is fuel for all our other judgements and responses to the film. This is, fundamentally, emotional exploitation of an audience by a writer.

YA is a revenge mission masked as literature. We all remember the mean girls in high-school². We remember their refined beauty, their genetic gifts of such a high quality that the hostility of these girls, their condescension, their abusiveness, their entitlement, all seemed justifiable and even acceptable. In the face of such dazzling creatures we recognised that we deserved to suffer. We had to be punished for being lesser humans. The hierarchy of all things sentient seemed perfectly clear: If someone could be so wonderfully beautiful, if such a person—so obviously a gift to the rest of us—could actually exist on this planet then it must be up to us, the unwashed masses, to be her subjects. Supreme beauty is a numinous thing: we do not question the caprices of our gods.

Diablo Cody then goes about unleashing the full load of vitriol on such a girl. Ostensibly the question is “what happens to those mean girls, those true beauties, once they reach middle age”? Mavis has been divorced already, now she makes it her business to be a home-wrecker. She doesn’t even seem to need to work. Success for her is not a matter of exerting effort but of whimsy: it comes naturally. Therefore, she can dedicate herself to ruining the lives of others (just as Cody has systematically gone about ruining the life of her lead character).

Juno’s beauty is physical, but it seems to emanate from a solid core of goodness. Her redemptive powers are so great that she transforms the couple she engages to be parents. The man, a hopeless case not of mid-life crisis but of an inability to grow-up, discovers himself and his passion, through her and leaves his wife in order to go pursue his dream. Juno cries when this happens, after all, being good is so difficult. Meanwhile, Juno bequeaths the now single woman the one thing she has always wanted while simultaneously helping her get rid of a no-good man. “If you’re still in, I’m still in,” she says. Juno feels everything.

The men in the film are throwaway characters, placed there to highlight Juno’s goodness. Her boyfriend (Michael Cera) is so ineffectual and insubstantial that his voice always quavers with effeminate tenderness. One wonders how he mustered the energy to relieve Juno of her virginity. The other guy, the would-be adoptive father— he too is a cypher.

In YA, the men (also two) work as agents of morality. This time, the men are good, with honest aspirations and noble intentions. They want to do the right thing, they feel deeply and are passionate about where they are in life. When we first meet Buddy he is preparing baby formula and telling her that spontaneity is, for him, a thing of the past. Later, when he briefly kisses her, we see it as noble respect for the history they share, an honourable act of closure, even though a sign that his battlements are wavering under the onslaught of seduction.

Patton Oswalt, as Matt, is a cuddly cripple with his own home-brewery where he ages bourbon diligently, with great sensitivity, meticulously. Mavis quaffs down his Special Reserve without taste, discernment or compunction. But no one would ever accuse Oswalt of being handsome (endearing as he is) and so when Mavis sleeps with him in a fit of depression, drunkenness and self-loathing after being rebuffed by Buddy (who must have been the prom king or captain of the football team), it is a fillip for all of us geeks who were perfectly invisible to the beautiful girls of our youth.³ We contemplate, with relish, how low she has fallen and how we have sweetly—vicariously—triumphed.⁴ The lead up to that moment is a series of brutal, publicly humiliating blows that range from wine being spilt on her outfit to complete public rejection even after she confesses—also publicly—to having once had a miscarriage by the now happily married Buddy. She takes a beating, and we, sitting in the arena, watch with glee as she is dragged through the muck. There are few movies that take such delight in showing a human hit rock bottom.

YA is Cody’s great insult to the mean girl set. She’s got a very large soap-box in the shape of a big budget Hollywood film. She stands on her pulpit and shames every one of those girls in a very public way. It is petty, it is narcissistic, it is trite.

By tying her audience into the same straight-jacket in both films, by robbing us of any opportunity to think through the common humanity in all people, she forces us to feel what she wants us to feel. She’s too evolved for a laugh-track but the emotional cues are all there and we are forced to respond to them or expose ourselves as soulless. Juno (good) will be rewarded (and slightly tested?), Mavis (evil) will be punished, and so on, ad infinitum. What Diablo does so cleverly, is gesture towards nuance that isn’t there. But if from the beginning we know that Juno will not suffer any permanent damage, then what is the point? If Mavis is doomed to eternal loneliness, emptiness, shame and dissatisfaction in spite of her success and beauty, then what is the point?

There is the question of a writer’s duty: Isn’t a writer supposed to manipulate the audience’s emotions to achieve an effect? There is nothing at all to the question because nobody should manipulate anyone else’s emotions. It is simply dishonest, it is disingenuous, it is evil, it smacks of moral, and if not creative then at least philosophical, bankruptcy. The task of literature is to enquire honestly into human nature. Such honesty, when it is there, always reveals that there is more to a person that what seems obvious, whether they initially appear to be good or bad. Cody abandons honesty and bullies us into accepting her opinions and conclusions.

What do voice-overs in movies really tell you? There is a theory, to which I am partial, that voice-overs are an immediate signal to distrust the narrator; they are a signal, in a sense, that a bit of self-deception is going on, that the narrator is not who she says she is. ↩
[Update 4122012: I notice that Ebert raises many of the same issues that I do. However, he liked the film.] In Roger Ebert’s review of “Young Adult”, he notes,

There are countless movies about Queen Bitches in high school, but “Young Adult” has its revenge by showing how miserable they can be when they’re pushing 40.

↩
Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die Patton Oswalt is a symbol of the authentic geek (whatever that means). That is precisely why, for Young Adult, he was chosen to play the role the high-school geek who somewhat grew up. ↩
Geekdom as simulated ethnicity

As geekdom moves from the cultural fringes into the mainstream, it becomes increasingly difficult for the figure of the geek to maintain the outsider victim status that made him such a sympathetic figure in the first place. Confronted with his cultural centrality and white, masculine privilege—geeks are most frequently represented as white males—the geek seeks a simulated victimhood and even simulated ethnicity in order to justify his existence as a protagonist in a world where an unmarked straight white male protagonist is increasingly passé.

↩

"The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Volume V, Chapter XLIII: MY father took a..."

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 03:32:10 +0300

“

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Volume V, Chapter XLIII:

MY father took a single turn across the room, then sat down, and finished the chapter.

The verbs auxiliary we are concerned in here, continued my father, are, am; was; have; had; do; did; make; made; suffer; shall; should; will; would; can; could; owe; ought; used; or is wont.—And these varied with tenses, present, past, future, and conjugated with the verb see,—or with these questions added to them;—Is it? Was it? Will it be? Would it be? May it be? Might it be? And these again put negatively, Is it not? Was it not? Ought it not?—Or affirmatively,—It is; It was; It ought to be. Or chronologically,—Has it been always? Lately? How long ago?—Or hypothetically,—If it was? If it was not? What would follow?—If the French should beat the English? If the Sun go out of the Zodiac?

Now, by the right use and application of these, continued my father, in which a child’s memory should be exercised, there is no one idea can enter his brain, how barren soever, but a magazine of conceptions and conclusions may be drawn forth from it.——Didst thou ever see a white bear? cried my father, turning his head round to Trim, who stood at the back of his chair:—No, an’ please your honour, replied the corporal.——But thou couldst discourse about one, Trim, said my father, in case of need?——How is it possible, brother, quoth my uncle Toby, if the corporal never saw one?——’Tis the fact I want, replied my father,—and the possibility of it is as follows.

A WHITE BEAR ! Very well. Have I ever seen one? Might I ever have seen one? Am I ever to see one? Ought I ever to have seen one? Or can I ever see one?

Would I had seen a white bear! (for how can I imagine it?)

If I should see a white bear, what should I say? If I should never see a white bear, what then?

If I never have, can, must, or shall see a white bear alive; have I ever seen the skin of one? Did I ever see one painted?—described? Have I never dreamed of one?

Did my father, mother, uncle, aunt, brothers or sisters, ever see a white bear? What would they give? How would they behave? How would the white bear have behaved? Is he wild? Tame? Terrible? Rough? Smooth?

—Is the white bear worth seeing?—

—Is there no sin in it?—

Is it better than a BLACK one?

Tristram Shandy does a lot of things, but one of those things is spinning out to the most distant conclusions the possible effects, anxieties, and contradictions that could emerge from complete faith in Enlightenment philosophy. Walter Shandy is obsessed with the prospect of filling his child’s brain-cabinet, which, according to Locke, is empty at birth (“how barren soever”). He is overwhelmed by the task before him, and takes great pains to plan and control every aspect of Tristram’s birth, education, and experience so as to fill that cabinet with all the things that could conjoin to make him the perfect man — scholarly, brave, virile, wise, and respected. Tormented by the possibility of misfortune and the vast and unreliable community of people surrounding his son, Walter finds his plans for Tristram are all miscarried or obsolete.

In the particular analogy I’m drawing here, Walter finds it necessary to equip his son with all the auxiliary verbs and teach him how to use them so that Tristram will have the facility of discoursing about things he knows nothing of, first-hand. He will be able to derive probing, even personal questions for topics completely foreign to him, leading beyond the merely speculative into the affective, relational, aesthetic, and moral possibilities of experience. The joke here is that even while Walter insists that it is impossible (or irresponsible) to imagine what one has not personally experienced, the questions he asks are themselves wild feats of imaginative inquiry.

What is a blog, other than one person, of limited experience, armed with speculative imagination?

”

- On auxiliary verbs and [blogging]

"I don’t suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don’t..."

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 10:26:06 +0300

“I don’t suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don’t understand our imaginations, how wild our imaginations can be.”

- Rowena from Things To Come - 1936 - H.G.Wells

"…it was…he thought, a momentary vision glimpsed for a second in an adolescent dream,..."

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 05:49:01 +0300

“…it was…he thought, a momentary vision glimpsed for a second in an adolescent dream, then dispersed like steam into the real atmosphere of traffic-jams, serial murderers, prime ministers and Soho rent. But its spectral haze was sharper and clearer than the glare of the everyday and, against all evidence, was taken to be the only reality, its vapour trapped and distilled in the mind, its image, scents and textures bottled and laid down against the long, lonely melancholy of adulthood.”

- Stephen Fry, “The Liar”, p.279

"Sperm is very cheap, and womb space is very expensive; our reproductive strategies and preferences..."

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:03:11 +0300

“

Sperm is very cheap, and womb space is very expensive; our reproductive strategies and preferences are built around that.

What a male wants from a female: the ability to give birth to a healthy child. The younger the better.

What a female wants from a male: the ability to provide for her child.

Most 14 year old males can’t “provide” anything except lots of sperm.

”

- This particular comment on the hebephilia debate, though witty is problematic and a reductionist view of sexuality.

When discussing evolutionary mating strategies, it’s not immediately clear that young males are incapable of providing. Isn’t it more likely that pre-civilisation males could actually provide (hunt, protect) from a young age?

In Kenya (and I suspect much of Africa), the initiation ceremony (culminating in circumcision or body piercing or tooth removal) took place around the age of fourteen, after which the boy was formally recognised as a man and fully expected to find a wife and start a family. By sixteen, the traditional male was a man, in all facets.