On pointless virtuosity

In his 2008 collection Song & Dance the poet John Fuller unveiled a new form: the autogram. This, he explained in a helpful note, was 'the imitation of a poet's work limited to using only the letters found in his or her name'. The following lines, for instance, use only the letters appearing in the name of . .  but can you guess?

Hail ami!

Wilt halt? Wilt wait?

What am I? An animal in a hat? Naw.

(Am I a Milan wit? A Taiwan tin-man? Naw!)

No prizes for that one. The others are trickier, and I'll admit to not 'getting' them all straight away, or in one case at all. But - how to say this politely? - I  really couldn't be bothered. An adroit pastiche is something to admire, to be sure, but a highly predetermined exercise such as Fuller's leaves me cold. What exactly is it that are we being invited to admire? The pastiche itself or the tight constraints within which it has been executed?

Fuller's autograms are certainly virtuosic but strike me as perfect examples of pointless virtuosity, making the location where the engagingly ludic becomes, well, merely ludicrous. Gilbert Adair once observed that 'clever-clever' does enot mean 'double clever' but 'half clever'.  I think he was referring to Tom Stoppard who, in Travesties, gave cleverness a bad name, soaring far beyond the ability of any audience to follow his giddy virtuosity (involving cut-up Dadaist limericks in French, I seem to recall)

The French, with their lightly-worn and culturally embedded stanbdards of intellectual  pretension are much better at this kind of thing, both as writers and readers. The Oulipian authors in particlar, worked gleefully within masochistically severe self-inflicted restraints to test both their own startling ingenuity, the outer limits of form and their readers' forebearance. You know the kind of thing - Perec's novel La Disparition (which excludes the letter 'e') or his 5,000 word palindrome; or la Vie mode d'emploi in which an apartment building is systematically and painstakingly explored and inventoried, room by room, using as a navigarting principle the Knight's move in chess. There's a place for all this of course, and a distinguished one, but it can all seem awfully remote from the pulse of life.

The poet Luke Kennard's latest collection, Cain, (published by Penned in the Margins) won this year's British Book Design and Production Award. It really is a beautiful piece of work, comparable in apperance to one of Alasdair Gray's exquisitely-wrought novels. It's beautifully printed in black and red and the acclaimed centrepiece is a series of thirty or so prose anagrams based on a passage from the Book of Genesis, the 'am I my brother's keeper' bit about Cain and Abel.

'Virtuoso' (from the Italian virtuoso) has the Latin stem, vir, implying manliness.. That masculinuty can best express itself through dazzling technical adroitness, facility and (by implication) commitment to an artistic practice is flattering for us blokes, but unsettling too..

I recall several 'virtuoso' performances in the past year or two. and as it happens they were all by men: One that springs to mind is Robert LePage at the 2015 Edinburgh Festival in a seamless (and often bloodless) epic  involving a model apartment building (shades of Perec) and an army of unseen assistants making it all happen. It will be re-staged at the Brbican next year. It had its moments, and many of them, but I was often reminded of the Charlie Parker recording Bird with Strings, in which the saxophonist performed in front of an orchestra, killing stone dead the very thing he was best at - wild improvisation unhampered by sheet music and orchestration. It was, I suppose, an ill-fated bid for artistic 'respectability' aimed at the posh, and quite horrible.

I suppose I prefer work that has a raggedy, unpolished feel, from Trout Mask Replica to . . . well, you know.

Autogram extract copyright John Fuller

Man with a Movie Camera

Another recycled TLS blog, this one about a favourite film.

Is Man with a Movie Camera, a sixty-seven-minute silent film directed by Dziga Vertov in 1929, really the greatest documentary ever made? Yes, at least according to a readers' poll in Sight & Sound magazine. This came as no surprise to cinephiles – the film has topped so many lists over the past eight decades that it may be time to declare it hors concours and give some other contenders a chance. It is to documentary film what Ulysses is to the modernist novel and (it could be argued) the two masterpieces share a common approach, a common aesthetic. They are both complex and minutely-detailed explorations of contemporary urban life and entirely, monumentally, momentously modernist.  . . . .

Man with a Movie Camera declares in its opening title card (itself a mini-manifesto) that the film was made without a script and contains no dialogue or inter-titles because it aims to offer an “international absolute language”. This is not just an aesthetic gesture, but an attempt to overcome the daunting communication problems of a country with a vast range of languages and cultures.

The result remains to this day a thrilling and audacious work of art, still fresh, energetic, provocative and wonderfully funny – remote from the much-derided "tractors and wheat fields" clichés of later Soviet propaganda. It is  an unalloyed pleasure to watch, and re-watch, and not only for film-buffs.

The BFI Blu-Ray reissue earlier this year features a fine musical accompaniment composed by Michael Nyman, while a big screen version, promoting this release, had a score by the wonderful Alloy Orchestra, derived from the director's notes to his original composer, and so perhaps closer to what Vertov had in mind.

The disc comes with many extras, including Vertov's little-known sound film Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs about Lenin) from 1934, a slice of Stalin-era propaganda that admittedly features plenty of tractors and wheat fields, but a lot more besides. It was commissioned by Stalin to commemorate the anniversary of Lenin's death and to persuade the Soviet people that he was Lenin's natural heir. It's not as immediately engaging as Man with a Movie Camera and is less likely to appeal to a modern audience, but it is certainly worth a look, not least for its intriguing literary connection.

(A declaration of interest: my chance discovery some years ago of W. H. Auden's long-lost renderings of Russian peasant songs, turned into sub-titles for the first London screening of Three Songs about Lenin, led to an invitation from the BFI to provide an essay for inclusion in the booklet accompanying this release.)

In May 2009, the TLS published my Commentary on the Auden material – a bundle of manuscripts, typescripts and shot lists that record a brief collaboration between the poet and the Film Society's Ivor Montagu, a rush job calling for technical know-how which may be seen as a dry run for Auden's rhythmic, metronome-timed commentary for the celebrated Night Mail (1936).

Three Songs about Lenin was last shown publicly in Britain in 2009, at a BFI screening  prompted by the rediscovery of the Auden verses. This one-off event was a partial re-creation of the original Film Society programme on October 27, 1935, a typically eclectic matinee that featured some German commercial shorts, a nature documentary about sea urchins, a dazzling abstract film by Len Lye and premieres of two films of lasting importance: Housing Problems, Arthur Elton's seminal study of the effects of poverty, followed by Coal Face (with its Auden madrigal and Benjamin Britten score). Some of these were screened before an expectant modern-day audience settled down to watch the main feature. I had seen it for the first time a few hours before at a trial screening and had been moved to see Auden's subtitles re-united with the original film. But that was in an empty theatre – this was in a crowded cinema.

In an early sequence in Three Songs about Lenin a Muslim woman removes her veil and joins a reading class in a village school. There were admiring murmurs in the audience and a ripple of applause as Auden's subtitles blazed on the screen:

My face in a dark prison lay 

And blind my life remained 

No learning mine nor light of day, 

A slave although unchained 

Till through my darkness shone a ray, 

And Lenin’s truth I gained.

"Dziga Vertov" was the pseudonym of David Abelevich Kaufman (1896-1954), invariably and inaccurately translated by film historians in the West as "spinning top". The term really means "gyroscope" – not a nursery toy but, far more resonantly, a piece of kinetic precision engineering, a modern device for the machine age. 

My novels of the year

This is the time of year when newspapers publish their 'best of' lists, giving literary hacks the chance to do some low-key log-rolling, or score-settling, or even to go public with a declaration of their particular favourites. One is, struck, as always, as much by the more flagrant omissions as by the ritual inclusion of Ali Smith's latest, whatever it is.

This has been in several respects the worst year of my life (or rather, as Homer Simpson would gently point out, "the worst so far"). I shan't bang on about Brexit and Trump, or personal or professional travails (all boring), and will simply point out that at least it's been, by way of consolation, a remarkably good year for fiction. Or what we have to call 'literary fiction', to distinguish it from the mulch..

A clutch of great novels appeared over the past twelve months, some of which will certainly last and be read by future generations. We need these writers, many of whom are under forty. and are not ever likely to become crowd-pleasing best sellers; will never be picked up by Richard and Judy's Book Club. They are in many cases published by the tiny independent outfits. who do so much to enrich our real literary culture. These are the writers I like, the writers I need.

So, at the end of a particularly rotten year year here are books that offer some hope, if that's not egregiously hyperbolic:

Dodge Rose by Jack Cox (Dalkey Archive Press)

An enormously impressive debut by a very young Australian writer who lives in Paris. I wrote about it for the Literary Review and confessed that I found much of it utterly baffling. It's experimental, to put it mildly, and consistently startling. Cox is a writer to watch. Who knows where he'll take us next.

The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride (Faber)

An extraordinary year for our best living writer (and you can quote me on that) and this, her second novel, has met with mixed critical responses. I loved it, and think that it's even better than her great debut A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. The author appeared last month on BBC Radio 4's Any Questions alongside the foghorn bigot Nigel Farage, running rings around him.

The North Water by Ian McGuire (Scribner)

I reviewed this harsh and unsettling novel for the TLS here. It's Moby Dick unplugged, and one of the most violent  and bracingly disgusting books I've ever read. The author's sense of the period, and of the sordid milieu, is absolutely convincing and often upsetting. This, one feels, is what the ghastly business of whale fishing was really like.

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Tramp Press)

The author's first novel in ten years, and it's taken the world by storm. Two big literary prizes already and huge critical acclaim. I wrote about the novel for the Literary Review (but you'll have to subscribe to read that). Here's a short blog  about the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize, which the author won.

Anatomy of a Soldier by Harry Parker (Faber)

I blogged about this blazingly original debut novel here.  It came out at the start of 2016 and made an immediate impression - a visceral account, by inanimate objects, of a military catastrophe. An astonishingly strange idea, brilliantly executed and entirely memorable. It seems to have dropped off all of this year's lists - perhaps I'm wrong in thinking it was published in 2016? It is, with Forbidden Line, the best debut novel of the year, although it's impossible to imagine two more different books. A good thing, surely?

This Is The Place to Be by Lara Pawson (CB editions)

This is not a work of fiction, nor is it a memoir, but it's certainly one of my books of the year, The author is a former BBC war correspondent, spending much time reporting the bloody conflict in Angola. She describes terrible things beautifully. It's also about her childhood, her life today in East London and her many friends and lovers, past and present. It's tough, candid, tender and true. There is real life here in abundance. 

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter (Faber)

I blogged about this wildly successful novel here. It hardly needs further recommendation - and you've probably read it anyway. An assured interrogation of loss. 

Martin John by Anakana Schofield  (& Other Stories)

'Not for the faint-hearted' seems to be the consensus. To which I say 'balls'. This extraordinary account of a sexual pervert with a fabulous range of personality disorders (some almost endearing, most not) is a brilliant, bleakly comic exercise in style - Schofield has formidable gifts and ferocious powers of concentration. Like Beckett she works with impotence and ignorance, her prose is stark and full of shrewd repetitions and redundancies.

Forbidden Line by Paul Stanbridge  (Galley Beggar Press)

I've just finished reading this, the author's debut novel, published on 1st December. It took me a week and put me in a genial frame of mind that has lasted until now. A more joyous literary extravaganza hasn't come my way in years - it's an absolutely magnificent single-minded masterpiece and as mad as all get-out and I love it. Read my blog about it here.

Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine  by Diane Williams (CB editions)

Bewilderingly original. Williams is new to me and on the strength of this wonderful collection of short (and often very short) stories I plan to read everything she's published, and as a matter of urgency. She navigates the mundane and makes it fresh and strange - a unique sensibility, and a brilliant stylist.

I publish this blog on the same day that the Goodreads Fiction Book of the Year is announced. With 30,154 votes Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty, published by Flatiron Books, is the winner. 

Six responsible adults. Three cute kids. One small dog. It’s just a normal weekend. What could possibly go wrong?

The only author I've heard of on this dire list is Ian McEwan (Nutshell comes in 17th with 1,300 votes). You can see the complete list here  Am I missing anything?

Onward!

The Cambridge Humanities Review

For less than the price of twenty cigarettes you can take out an annual subscription to the Cambridge Humtnities Review, a journal of literary and intellectual essays. It's a handsome production:

© The Cambridge Humanities Review

The CHR, edited by Daniel Mattore, aims to revive the spirit of the Cambridge Review, a publication which originally ran from 1879 to 1998 and featured writing by an illustrious cohort of contributors including Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michael Oakeshott, Clive James, Simon Schama, and John Rawls.

Contributors to its successor, no less illustrious, have included Lord Rowan Williams, Professor David Runciman, Paul Cartledge, Sarah Symmons, Judith Turner, Lord Maurice Glasman, and (oh dear) Alastair Campbell.

The CHR was established in 2012 as (to quote from their website) 'an independent journal of literary essays and reviews written by academics, students, and a range of other wriiters. It covers the latest in literature, art architecture, critical writing, and academic monographs, as well as including photo-essays and other kinds of essayistic work'.

Not completely comfortable with 'essayistic' but that quibble aside the CHR is clearly a Good Thing, and a real bargain.

The journal bears the motto of the University 'hinc lucem et pocula sacra'  (from here we draw light and sacred draughts). Sacred draughts are always beneficial so I didn't hesitate to splash out the eight quid it costs to subscribe. If you visit their website you can also find a useful house style guide, which deserves wider circulation - it brims with clarity and good sense.

The current issue has a photo-essay by Judith Turner about the late Zaha Hadid and reviews of (inter alia) Paul Kingsnorth''s fine novel The Wake and the Collected Poems of Stevie Smith..All good.

http://www.cambridgereview.net

Lonely as a cloud

The most familiar lines in all of English poetry:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

But how many readers really understand the import of the first line? It doesn't mean, as most assume, that the speaker was 'as lonely as a cloud' (clouds aren't lonely because they tend to move around in large groups); rather it means that he wandered, alone and lonely, in the same way a cloud wanders.. It's the poet who is lonely, not the cloud, and this makes sense if you I mentally add punctuation thus:

I wandered lonely, as a cloud

That floats on high . . 

Pathetic fallacy my aunt fanny.

Wordsworth's best known poem - so familiar that it's almost invisible - is the absolute embodiment and articulation of the Romantic tradition. It was prompted by a particular event. on 15th April 1802 - a Thursday - when Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came across a "long belt" of daffodils during a walk beside Ullswater in stormy weather. The inspiration for the poem (written two years later) was not the walk itself but Dorthy's journal entry, in which she described the daffodils as they 'tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake'.

(Pause to reflect that a modern day Dorothy would probably have written n 'literally' for 'verily'.)

The poem was published in 1807 and revised in 1815. What if Wordsworth had more accurately begun:

We wandered lonely, as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and ills

When all at once we saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils .  .

It's not much worse, is it? But that 'golden' makes me wonder. They're yellow aren't they, daffodils?

Some cultural artifacts are, as I say, familiar to the point of invisibility. I blogged about the case of Tennyson and Turner here.

Poetry books of the Year

Since nobody has invited me to nominate my poetry books of the year I shall do so below, for sherry and giggles. This list doesn't include The Poems of T. S. Eliot in two mighty volumes from Faber, or the engaging Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith from the same publisher, or the hefty new collected poems of Basil Bunting (any of which I'd love to receive from the publisher,, if either Faber is reading this). I've overlooked Don Patterson's acclaimed 40 Sonnets because . . . well, you can't like everything and in any case it was published in 2015, so ner.

Five titles stand out for me this year and here they are alphabetically, by author:

Nancy Campbell  Disko Bay (Enitharmon Press)

Campbell has spent a lot of time in remote parts of Greenland, and here reports back. The opening poem 'Umiarissat / The Seal People' has a mythical simplicity:

   I watch four shadows pass the sun
   They are not men, these bearded ones
   with fat, stooped heads and shining skin
   aboard a boat with no beginning.

Campbell's concerns are language, myth, community, the natural world and its degradation, ice and sea and clouds, the sun, the moon, extreme coldness, darkness and hard light. Her poems create and satisfy a taste for purity and austerity.

An outstanding debut collection, an iceberg drifting silently into the shipping lanes of British poetry.

Buy it from the publishers here.

Michael Cullup  Matelot  (Greenwich Exchange Publishing)

Matelot (pronounced 'matlow') is about life as it used to be in the Royal Navy. The author, in an unnecessary apologia, admits that much of the language is 'salty'. It certainly is and I wouldn't have it any other way - this is the sweariest collection of poetry you'll ever read. I blogged about it here.

Buy it from the publishers here.


Will Eaves The Inevitable Gift Shop (CB editions)

From the New Statesman review:

‘The Absent Therapist, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize, was a fragmentary novel of many voices. Here, Eaves has produced a work of even more disparate and uncategorisable form. There are chunks of prose memoir (his grandmother’s dentures), criticism (why E M Forster was wrong about Mr Micawber), observation (everything from the profusion of cable ties in packaging to the threat of artificial intelligence) and one-line statements: “I eat fish with a clear conscience because they neglect their young”) alongside beguiling poems that touch on memory and childhood.’

There's more prose than poetry in the alternating sections of a book that defies classification, resists summary and rewards many readings. A rumination on the nature and practice of writing,
it's also about everything else. The most stimulating, thought-provoking and consistently original book I've read this year.

   

Buy it from the publishers here.


J O Morgan Interference Pattern (Jonathan Cape)

I reviewed this and Morgan's previous collection In Casting Off (HappenStance Press) for the TLS here. Morgan is a complex talent, his poems miraculous and meticulous investigations into life, death and what comes in between. 

Interference Pattern has been shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot. Here's what I said at the end of my review:

Eliot comes repeatedly to mind in reading Interference Pattern because, in its originality and lucid intelligence, in its tragic grandeur and sophistication, it is a poem that could come to be for the twenty-first century what The Waste Land was to the twentieth.

Alice Oswald  Falling Awake (Jonathan Cape)

I first became aware of Alice Oswald in the 2004 edition of Nemo's Almanac (see below), the addictive and diabolically difficult literary competition that's been running for more than 125 years, and which included these lines:

At eight o'clock, I opened the window to the woods 

and an owl about the size of a vicar 

tumbled across in a boned gown

The following year's Almanac told me that they were taken from Alice Oswald's 'Owl Village', a poem in her second collection Dart (2002). I bought it straight away on the strength of those three lines. Who wouldn't? Since then I've read everything she's published with unalloyed pleasure and huge admiration, and her latest collection, while not perhaps the best to date, leaves most of her contemporaries in the shade. Falling Awake is her seventh collection and first since Memorial (2011) and the title snagged my attention, recalling as it does Ian Hamilton's first volume, the ingeniously entitled Pretending Not to Sleep.

Falling Awake is marvelous.

The two Cape publications can be obtained online (but please use abe.com and not blasted Amazon)

The Bookseller announced earlier this year that in 2016 that sales of poetry books in the UK generated a revenue of more than £8 million. Of course there's no money in poetry - but there's no poetry in money either. Bdmn tsch!

And finally . . .

Nemo's Almanac 2016 (edited by Ian Patterson)

Since I first came across it as an undergraduate I've been failing to enter this fiendishly challenging literary competition, now in its 129th year.

There are six themed  quotations (mostly poetry) for each month of the year which, correctly identified, earn the competitor ten points. So the highest score will be 730 (the extra 10 points coming from the quotation on the cover, which tends to feature the words 'Nemo' or 'Almanac'. You're not allowed to use the internet . . . I've been poring over the latest and have identified three. Probably.  My personal best is higher, but not much higher. The pleasure for me (as a non-competing fellow traveler) is to use the quotations as a prompt to further reading - see above.

You can buy copies direct from the editor ℅ Queens College, Cambridge, CB3 9ET

£3 each or four for a tenner. Cheaper than Christmas cards . . .

Listomania

Two lists of names. No prizes for recognising either source:

Marion Duncan, Walter Falter, Ted Fantasia, Stella Flashman, Irving Fox, George Glave, Mabel Goodale, Donald Green, Lucinda Hamilton, Mary Rose Haze, Dolores Honeck, Rosaline Knight, Kenneth McCoo, Virginia McCrystal, Vivian McFate, Aubrey Miranda [.]

In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O'Brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer who had his nose shot off in the war and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters, and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip

The first comes from Lolita; the second from The Great Gatsby.

Humbert Humbert's dreamy recollecttion of the boys and girls in Dolores Haze's class lends each of them a shadowy literary afterlife as potential Lolitas. They are unrealised shades. Lolita herself appears in the list as a spectral presence as the last name of Mary Rose Haze and the first of Dolores Honeck, but the other names, while suggestive, are never too suggestive. Ted Fantasia and Vivian McFate are intriguing, but neither of them has ever prompted a novel. 

J. G. Ballard once wrote: "The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality." This view is nothing new. The fictitious writer X. Trapnel in Hearing Secret Harmonies, the last volume in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, rehearses the same paradox in virtually the same phrases:

People think that because a novel's invented it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it's true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that …

Trapnel was based on the real-life Soho writer Julian Maclaren-Ross, and we may reasonably infer that Trapnel's view is close to that of Powell\s own take on literature. That the author writes the world into being is a familiar observation.

More from Gatsby:

From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett's automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies came too and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink and the Hammerheads and Beluga the tobacco importer and Beluga's girls.

Nick Carraway, recalling some of Jay Gatsby's guests in Long Neck, seems to fish them out of memory's acquarium. Like the Lolita class register, each of these names is a never-to-be-written novel-in-waiting.

I'm half in love with such minor, walk-on parts, each less than a cough and a spit. A particular  favourite is Teddy Lemon in Barbara Pym's Excellent Women:

“Well”, hesitates Mildred, remembering Teddy Lemon, our Master of Ceremonies, with his rough curly hair and anxious face, and his troop of well-drilled, tough-looking little boys, “they are very nice good boys, but perhaps you should go to a Kensington church if you want to see glamorous acolytes.”

But to return to lists. The heartbreaking end to Fitgerald's novel has Gatsby's befuddled father showing Nick Carraway a piece of paper - what he knows of his unknowable, now dead, son.

He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On the last fly-leaf was printed the word SCHEDULE, and the date September 12th, 1906. And underneath:

Rise from bed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6.00       A.M.

Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling . . . . . . 6.15-6.30   "

Study electricity, etc . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.15-8.15   "

Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.30-4.30  P.M.

Baseball and sports . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4.30-5.00   "

Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it 5.00-6.00   "

Study needed inventions . . . . . . . . . . .  7.00-9.00   "

                GENERAL RESOLVES

No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]

No more smokeing or chewing

Bath every other day

Read one improving book or magazine per week

Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week

Be better to parents

What we would now call a 'to do' list (and nowadays there's likely to be an app for that). It appears as a found object, a fragment from outside the fiction, and is all the more moving for that. All the more life-like. Or like life.