from 'De Profundis'

And the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you. I must do so. I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you. One cannot always keep an adder in one’s breast to feed on one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one’s soul….I must take the burden from you and put it on my own shoulders. I must say to myself that neither you nor your father, multiplied a thousand times over, could possibly have ruined a man like me: that I ruined myself and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand….Terrible as what you did to me was, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

Rebecca Solnit is fucking amazing

In other words, he created an atmosphere that was uncomfortable or dangerous for women, which would be one thing if he were working in, say, a small office. But that a man who controls some part of the fate of the world apparently devoted his energies to generating fear, misery, and injustice around him says something about the shape of our world and the values of the nations and institutions that tolerated his behavior and that of men like him.

- "Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite," collected in Men Explain Things to Me, which a friend sent me today and I am reading while slow-roasting chicken in the oven (and I picked that dish so I could take my time with it)


More TomDispatch columns by Rebecca Solnit

something's got a hold on me and I don't know what

I've got a pen, I've got a notebook, I'm good to go.

This also struck me, from the same interview (French was an actress before writing -- maybe that's why she can inhabit her characters with such scary completeness):

I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day. I love acting, too, but this is the one that was working out. This is the one that not only pays the mortgage but also lets me work every day. With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all. With this, not only, my God, do I get paid to work every day, but even when I was not, I could still work every day. No one could stop me. I've got a pen, I've got a notebook, I'm good to go. That's a marvelous thing.

 I have to remember that. Nobody else gets to decide. Not Amazon, not Hachette, not Sonny Mehta, not David Remnick, not anyone. No one can really stop you.

(Except yourself. But that's a whole other battle. That's the important one -- Zelda Fitzgerald: "....when I can get the tranquility of spirit necessary to write the story of myself versus myself. That is the book I really want to write.")

empathy

I thought, I can't write these characters with the author's judgment being implied. I can't be going, "Who do you think you are?" or "I think this is shallow" or "I think this is superficial" or "You've got no morals." All of that is irrelevant because for these characters, that's not who they are. No one thinks they are shallow, superficial people with no moral center. They are doing these things for excellent reasons. It's my job to get to that reason and give that reason with all the power and punch I could.

The same applies to Scorcher. In his own mind, Scorcher is desperately killing himself to do things right. I thought, if I can get that, that he's not just this pompous git, that he has a reason for being what he is, and he puts passion into it, just as the Spains put passion into being who they are. Even though it may look as if they are just this wad of fake tan and Hugo Boss, they are putting the same passion and determination into that that Fiona is putting into the struggle of living on small wages and desperately trying to get a photography exhibition up and running. It just comes out differently.

If you are going to be on the artist's side of the fence, your job is to place a bit token in the jar of empathy. You don't get to abdicate that purely because you are dealing with people who in real life you find completely uninteresting. If I was going to write this book -- and the idea was there; it's not like I had another one -- it's my job to make sure that these characters had the space to make their argument. And I figured, if they did, if I did that with the respect that it deserves, that with any luck -- please God and touch wood! -- Scorcher would not turn out to be an obnoxious person to spend several hundred pages with and the Spains would not turn out to be unsympathetic victims. I have to say I have no clue if it worked.

- Tana French

And she succeeded brilliantly. It's a beautiful, heartbreaking book.

all hail web two-dot-oh!

....man, it's probably mean of me to say, but looking at the Goodreads reviews of Sophie Hannah's novels you can see where some peoples' reading comprehension -- or lack thereof -- just slams them into a wall of Do Not Get and they blame the author. Well, this always happens with bad readers -- they remind me of the eighteen-year-old kids I taught in English Comp 101 who found everything "boring" -- Martin Luther King, Thoreau, Alice Walker, Charlotte Perkins Gilman....everything.

But at least the kids were eighteen. And at least they weren't writing "reviews" that get posted on a website which has been bought by the biggest monopolistic bookseller in the world, and which are now possibly influencing sales, contracts, what have you....ah well. There's a reason I'm not on that site anymore. Well. Many reasons. This is a small one.

(Yes, I know. I'm on a hiatus. Posts like this are why I'm on a hiatus.)

Very early in my life it was too late.

....By luck or fate, I was enrolled in a creative writing class taught by Alexander Chee. I turned in stories and essays and he nodded and smiled and said they were just fine, but he urged me to do more, to my utter confusion. One day we walked across College Row to get coffee and he shook my story in front of me and said, “Why don’t you write what you really want to write? The way you really want to write it?” I confessed had no idea what he meant. We detoured from coffee and he took me to his office and handed me a copy of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. Alex directed me to the opening:

One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, ‘I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.

Alex wanted me to see how that opening zigzagged back and forth in time, and contained the vast emotional landscape of the entire lyric novella: time and loss, beauty and desire, grief and ecstasy. I saw instead her subject as the pulsing, raw center that beats at the heart of every page of Duras’ prose. I saw instead her sentences like machete-cut trails through virgin growth to get at unspeakable wounds. I saw a way to tell my own story.

- Aja Gabel

Daisy Chainsaw - Hope Your Dreams Come True

Short film based on the Angela Carter story "The Lady of the House of Love" from The Bloody Chamber.

clearly strangewaysradio.com has all my news needs completely covered

"Recent Posts":

• Pulp: a Film about Life, Death & Supermarkets set for UK theatrical release
• Lamb announce details of 6th studio album - Backspace Unwind
• The Cure announce 3 headlining Riot Festival dates this fall!
• Sinead O'Connor announces new album - The Vishnu Room
• Tricky offers free download of 5 song package, 54U
• Lykke Li releases 3rd LP I Never Learn - listen to 3 tracks
• Strangeways Featured Video: Ballerina Black - Brixton Rain
• Kasabian announces new album and stream of first single, eez-eh
• Stream 2 full tracks, teasers of all tracks from Echo & The Bunnymen's new LP Meteorites
• New genus of velvet spider named after...Lou Reed???

breaking radio silence briefly

Because this is too good not to quote:

It’s never been so easy to pretend to know so much without actually knowing anything. We pick topical, relevant bits from Facebook, Twitter or emailed news alerts, and then regurgitate them. Instead of watching “Mad Men” or the Super Bowl or the Oscars or a presidential debate, you can simply scroll through someone else’s live-tweeting of it, or read the recaps the next day. Our cultural canon is becoming determined by whatever gets the most clicks.

....What we all feel now is the constant pressure to know enough, at all times, lest we be revealed as culturally illiterate. So that we can survive an elevator pitch, a business meeting, a visit to the office kitchenette, a cocktail party, so that we can post, tweet, chat, comment, text as if we have seen, read, watched, listened. What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists — and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it.

- Karl Taro Greenfeld

yet another hiatus

I really don't want to join the growing non-chorus of blogging women who've silenced themselves (do popular, or even regular, male bloggers ever agonize about shutting down their blogs? My guess is.....no) but going on hiatus from Tumblr (and Goodreads about six months? ago) made me realize that I still use the internet in unhealthy, distracting and even destructive ways, and that's dangerous for any addict, and especially dangerous for me. (And I keep just using this blog in a Tumblr-like way, which is frustrating, just "reblogging" videos or quotes or pictures, and sometimes adding little comments, but not always.)

I'll keep the archives here up at least for a bit, and I might continue the booklog, because I like logging what I read and it's convenient to have it all in one place. But right now I'm just really not happy with how irrationally I use my time online, and I need to stop.


ETA: I was going to lock my goddamn Tumblr, but apparently that's not possible, which I did not know when I signed up for that. Fucking A.

'My hero: Lucasta Miller on Emily Brontë'

What difference does it make to see the original manuscript of a literary text rather than just read the printed version? As someone who once nearly sullied a priceless Charlotte Brontë manuscript in an American archive with one of my own tears, I would say it makes all the difference. Faced with the real thing, my pretensions to being a detached and objective researcher dissolved.

go away

from the Odyssey

Now, as they talked on, a dog that lay there
lifted up his muzzle, pricked his ears…
It was Argos, long-enduring Odysseus’ dog
he trained as a puppy once, but little joy he got
since all too soon he shipped to sacred Troy.
In the old days young hunters loved to set him
coursing after wild goats and deer and hares.
But now with his master gone he lay there, castaway,
on piles of dung from mules and cattle, heaps collecting
out before the gates till Odysseus’ serving-men
could cart it off to manure the king’s estates.
Infested with ticks, half-dead from neglect,
here lay the old hound Argos.

But the moment he sensed Odysseus standing by
he thumped his tail, nuzzling low, and his ears dropped,
though he had no strength left to drag himself an inch
toward his master. Odysseus glanced to the side
and flicked away a tear, hiding it from Eumaeus,
diverting his friend in a hasty, offhand way:
“Strange, Eumaeus, look, a dog like this,
lying here on a dung-hill…
what handsome lines! But I can’t say for sure
if he had the running speed to match his looks
or he was only the sort that gentry spoil at table,
show-dogs masters pamper for their points.”

You told the stranger, Euamaeus, loyal swineherd,
“Here, it’s all too true, here’s the dog of a man
who died in foreign parts. But if he had now
the form and flair he had in his glory days —
as Odysseus left him, sailing off to Troy —
you’d be amazed to see such speed, such strength.
No quarry he chased in the deepest, darkest woods
could slip this hound. A champion tracker too!
Ah, but he’s run out of luck now, poor fellow…
his master’s dead and gone, so far from home,
and the heartless women tend to him not at all…”

With that he entered the well-constructed palace,
strode through the halls and joined the proud suitors.
But the dark shadow of death closed down on Argos’ eyes
the instant he saw Odysseus, twenty years away.

-- tr. Robert Fagles

'mini-me'

IN LOVE with this pretty blue house and matching free little library. (via flickr)

oh yes

Is your email-writing voice very different from what ends up on the page in a story – that narrative construction you use with the collection?

I can’t write incorrectly. I find it very difficult to just relax and have spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes and punctuation – I cannot do that. But I can’t do that even if I write a shopping list, so that’s not surprising. I can’t be casual, so it’s more correct. Sometimes I have fun writing it nicely – doing parallel constructions or, you know – but of course it’s more relaxed than a formal story, but it’s still a piece of writing that has an effect whether it’s a really good friend or a business email so I’m still quite conscious. It’s amazing how you can write something quickly and when I reread it – I always reread my emails – I make mistakes and I’m confusing and you’d think after all this time I could write a quick email that would be absolutely perfect, but I can’t.

- Lydia Davis interview

one less bee

Haven't been able to afford 611 Supreme in quite a while (and before that, it was the pancreatitis), but we had some really good times here a couple of years ago. Quite sad.

we separate like ripples on a blank shore

"I years had been from home," Emily Dickinson

I - Years - had been - from
Home -
And now - before the Door -
I dared not open - lest a
face
I never saw before

Stare vacant into mine -
And ask my Business there -
My Business - just a Life
I left -
Was such - + still dwelling there?

I fumbled at my nerve -
I scanned the Windows o'er -
The Silence - like an Ocean
rolled -
And + broke against my Ear -

I laughed a Wooden laugh -
That I - could fear a Door -
Who Danger - and the Dead -
had faced -
But never + shook - before

I fitted to the Latch - my
Hand -
With trembling Care -
Lest back the Awful Door
should spring -
And leave me - in the Floor -

I moved my fingers off, as
cautiously as Glass -
And held my Ears - and
like a Thief
+Stole - gasping - from the House.

+ fled     + Remaining there     +smote -
+ quaked -


About 1862, Fascicle 21 (H 181).

via

Kevin Hearn put together a beautiful tribute concert for Lou Reed

and here's the finale.

Usually this song gives me the pip, but the way everyone does "doo doo doo" as soaring gospel is fantastic, AND THEN THE FUCKING SINGALONG, man, I was in tears.


March 2, 2014, would have marked Lou Reed's 72nd birthday, and on March 1, 2014, the Canadian music industry joined Kevin Hearn, of Barenaked Ladies fame, in tribute to Reed, his work and influence.

Over the past several years, Hearn was Reed's musical director and friend. His journey to land this coveted role as Reed's right-hand man is a long and personal one. To say that Reed had an impact on Hearn's life would be an understatement.

Beyond Hearn's relationship with Reed, many other Canadian musicians were touched and influenced by the late singer's music. On March 1, they came in droves to CBC's Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto to sing his songs.

Rosa da Silva as Anne Frank in the new play “Anne,” in Amsterdam

dammit Jason

Walking back from DSHS the other day we passed a bar on Pike with all the windows/doors open (Seattle is like New York in the sixties, no A/C) and that haunted, lost, perfect aching "high lonesome" voice floated out with one line to catch my heart like a hook: I put my foot to the floor to make up for the miles I've been losing / I've been running out of things I didn't even know I was using....

Pick apart The pieces of your heart

I have pulled myself clear

'Dare greatly, and if you must sin, sin nobly'

He entered the study and took the chair opposite the Rosh Yeshiva. Schulman closed the tractate of Talmud he was studying and opened the Bible without uttering a word, then noticed Decker was empty-handed.

"Where's your chumash?" the old man asked.

"I didn't bring it."

The rabbi closed the leatherbound book and waited.

"I ate traif today," Decker said.

"What did you eat?" Schulman asked.

"A Big Mac."

"Was it good?"

Decker smiled.

"Actually, it was terrible. The meat wasn't tainted or anything like that, but it didn't go down well."

"Hmmm," said Schulman. "If you were going to eat traif, why didn't you splurge on delicacies -- lobster, shrimp, filet mignon?"

Decker shrugged.

"I could never figure it out," Schulman said, pondering. "When bochrim go astray, they sin in the most mundane ways. Instead of committing adultery with a beautiful woman, they have sex with the ugliest zonah around. Instead of dining in the finest restaurant in L.A., they go to Taco Bell. Such lack of imagination. It defies logic. Why did you aim so low, Peter?"

"I don't know. I guess if you want to debase yourself, you don't do it in high style."

- Faye Kellerman, Sacred & Profane

'My favorite part of writing is taking stuff out'

But I rarely find getting rid of my words to be an emotional trial. On the contrary, when I can remove a limp adjective or superfluous sentence from a novel chapter or essay, I feel a rush that is a bit like being airborne. For every word I cut, I seem to have more space between my ribs, more lung capacity. I feel simpler and calmer, my head pleasantly lighter. And later, when I turn my work over to an editor, he or she is bound to make some more deletions. I love editors who get rid of things. 

- Pamela Erens

YES.

(Editing is FUN. Writing is....not.)

the one to whom you reach out

The experience at MoMA would have turned most people mad – sitting still for that length of time, neither speaking nor moving. (There was a concealed hole in her chair, with a chamber pot fitted beneath it, so she didn't have to get up to go to the loo). Abramović was not daydreaming. The whole point of the exercise, she says, was to be fully present, concentrating on connecting with whoever came in to sit down opposite her, and "I never saw so much pain in my life." The huge number of people who wept, she thinks, was brought on by this staged situation in which "there is nowhere to go except in yourself. It was shocking. But how simple it was."

Before the show opened, both Abramović and MoMA half worried that no one would turn up. As the thing took off, celebrities started to drift in to sit opposite her, including, inevitably, James Franco – and then Ulay came. Abramović broke protocol and reached out to grasp his hands across the table. Everyone cheered. "I absolutely didn't expect he'd come to sit. The moment he sat – and everyone got very sentimental about it, because they were projecting their own relationships on to us – but it was so incredibly difficult. It was the only time I broke the rules."

Will you go ahead To the aventine

Just 1000% in love with her work right now.

To Become a Rich Man with Three Hundred Stone Seals

On a less fucking heartbreaking note, Qi wrote little captions on his sketches -- and the one I liked best was about one of water buffalo, where he rather glumly notes something like (paraphrasing here) "I drew water buffalo for my disciples" (students?), "but then my family wanted another painting of water buffalo, so I did this one. The best paintings are the ones you draw to amuse yourself" -- i.e. not because your relatives say "Oh but the one you gave away was so nice, can't you make us another one just like that?' Heh.*

Sadly I couldn't find a reproduction of the awesome rooster waking up the world with his crow by the gourds, but this one at the Met is pretty great too:

*yes, you have indeed heard of this guy, trust me

fingertip

I always forget the Frye Museum is in my neighbourhood, because I never leave my house, so yesterday we actually broke the shackles of the grocery-store-library-and-home-again route and wandered up there, and the place was open and free and so we went in. There are two big exhibits right now, Isamu Noguchi and Qi Baishi: Beijing 1930 and Mark Tobey and Teng Baiye: Seattle/Shanghai -- the influence of East and West, the American-Japanese sculptor learning from the Chinese master calligrapher and the American making friends with the Chinese painter who came to teach at the UW. Noguchi's drawings were pretty OK (we liked his nearly negative-space studies of slouching and sitting monks best), Qi's were masterful and witty (there is a giant colourful one of a BIG rooster by a gourd vine), we couldn't fucking stand Tobey's appropriative "fake Shanghai calligraphy" (what the actual FUCK) and I liked Teng Baiye from the first sighting I had of him as an art dandy in an inscribed photo:

Too goddamn cute, right? (The pose! The smock!) But his paintings, all fucking THREE of them (there were tiny photos of a few more, in a dimly lit room where a self-aggrandizing short film by Tobey droned on, and on, and on) and they were just....genius, I can't even say it any plainer than that. No reproduction does justice to them, they just popped off the walls. (This was before I found out he apparently did them in one sitting with his goddamn FINGERS -- the descriptions of the time about his methods sound a little romanticized, but hell, ink fingerpainting produced that? If I fingerpainted with ink, it would make Pollock look like Rembrandt, for Chrissakes.)

....it's no good, in reproduction they just look pretty-pretty. And you entirely miss this completely wild blend of abstract and realism -- the little cherry (?) blossoms in the left painting look realistic, but you get close up and realize they're not detailed at all -- mainly sort of pink blobs. But they look just right. (This was in Qi's drawings, too, the use of extraordinarily simple line, almost all suggestion, just a few details here and there somehow holding the whole.) (T said later that when I leaned wayyy in to look at the painting of cranes, the docent/guard/volunteer/whoever leaned pretty far out at a matching angle to make sure I wasn't going to, IDEFK, eat it like Francis Dolarhyde with Blake or something. I did devour it, but only with my eyes.) I kept going back to the "Bird on Rock" -- it was just so perfect, the pose, the angle of the tail and beak, you have to go see it.

 

But the reason there are only three (THREE) of his paintings on display is terribly upsetting -- apparently he taught at the UW a bit, got a scholarship to Harvard, knocked around New York, visited Europe, then went back home, taught painting for a while -- and then there was the Japanese invasion, he worked in a factory assisting refugees as a patriotic duty, and then, of course, the fucking Cultural Revolution and the one book I found (David Clarke's Chinese Art and Its Encounter With the World) with any information about him cut me off right there, thank you Google Books and your fucking limited views -- "His paintings were denounced as spiritual pollution, his overseas connections brought suspicion on him, and as a result he was forced to do manual labour." And his wife divorced him, probably to save their children. Dear God, I don't think I want to know any more than that. What happened to him? To his hands?

And just to prove that the ungodly flourish like the goddamned bay tree, Tobey went on to have a long, successful, dull, fradulent career. I was so mad I couldn't speak a word nearly all the way home. The true artist gets ground up in the machinery of politics, and the faker has more than a dozen pieces of shit on the museum walls.

Contemporary documents about Kwei Dun / Kwei Teng at Chinese American Eyes

Whether Tobey’s work had remained “American” or become “oriental” was a subject of debate among contemporary observers in the United States. Merrill Rueppel, the director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, wrote in 1968 that Tobey was “never for one moment anything but an American,” explaining that he had “taken the calligraphy of the orient and made it the foundation of his own art without becoming oriental.” Similarly, William Seitz, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, wrote that in Tobey’s work “the Eastern dragon had been harnessed to Western dynamism.”*

In China, similar questions regarding the extent of foreign influence on the work of Teng Baiye were raised. Scholar David Clarke notes that Teng’s “sojourn in the Pacific Northwest and his sophistication in handling both Western and Chinese cultural knowledge gave him valuable resources with which to contribute to the task of assimilating lessons from elsewhere while building a national culture [in China in the 1930s].” Nevertheless, after 1949, and especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), Teng’s paintings were denounced as spiritual pollution. He was condemned to manual labor and few of his paintings survived.

- Frye museum website


*no seriously, it says that