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Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
Melita SchaumSome Guts
Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease Swipe Right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill Life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal Wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix Prose Poems
Pietro di Marchi, trans. by Peter Robinson -
A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
· ‘King of Infinite Space’: The Virtue of Uncertainty
· AI: Signs of the Times
· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
New Fortnightly Serials
from The Ruinad
Anthony Howellfrom White Ivory
Alan Walland much more below this column.
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Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections, Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
Previous Serials
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying · Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
AND read here:
· James Thomson [B.V.]
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Blogs, spurious and routine.
A Fortnightly Commentary on
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
by Mason Currey
Knopf | 304 pp| $24.95 | Picador | £12.99
Spurious, Dogma, Exodus
by Lars Iyer
Melville House
By MERRITT MOSELEY.
LARS IYER’S WIDELY-DISCUSSED and much-admired trilogy of novels, Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus, prove hard to categorize. They are at the same time comic and grim—comprising an apocalyptic view of the modern university and a grim take on the possibility of philosophy, all presented as comedy. In Exodus, the third installment, W., one of the two philosophers—or would-be philosophers, or philosophers maudit—whose actions and conversations make up the series, has retained his university job on a technicality but is now teaching badminton philosophy. An occupation of his university to protest the fate of the humanities fizzles out inconclusively. In despair over their failure to think, to be heroes of thought, W. and Lars drink Plymouth gin and talk about philosophers—sometimes admitting they don’t understand them. More than anything else, the narrator Lars reports the attacks on him by his friend and colleague W., who savages his idiocy, his disgusting flat, his physique, his clothing and his dancing.
A typical comment from W.:
Or this:
When, in Dogma, W. gets a chance to appeal his dismissal, he asks Lars to accompany him, because “he wants the equivalent of an idiot child, W. says. He wants the equivalent of a diseased ape with scabs round his mouth throwing faeces around the room.”
NOT MUCH HAPPENS to Lars and W. in the course of these three books, and the trilogy ends almost arbitrarily without overt resolution and without any summing up. Readers have been reminded of Vladimir and Estragon and there is certainly something Beckettian about Iyer’s two philosophers—they can’t go on, they’ll go on. If there is hope in this story it comes from its being told. Lars, the narrator, about whom we learn only what he reports W. saying about him—which is often abusive and exaggerated—keeps telling the story.
The three novels are undoubtedly funny, perhaps most likely to stir nervous laughter from those who share their concern about the decline of humanistic education. But they are deadly serious, too, and not just about philosophy departments. Iyer is trying to demonstrate the malign consequences of capitalism and neo-liberalism across all of society. There is real outrage about its victims.
Are Lars and W., then, representatives of what post-industrial, consumerist western society does to philosophers? In part. Their constant references to real philosophers—Weil, Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig, Blanchot, Kristeva—better philosophers, philosophers compared to whom they are “hinderers of thought”–testify to their feeling that they have missed their time: “Sometimes, W. thinks it’s fallen to us: the great task of preserving the legacy of Old Europe.” Like almost every noble ambition this one is quickly subverted: “We’re delusional, W. says. He knows that. We’ve gone wrong, terribly wrong, he knows that, too. But don’t we belong to something important, something greater than us, even if we are only its grotesque parody?”
LARS AND W. are victims of their time and place. In one of his outcries, W. says, “The thinker needs a milieu . . . A place to think. Kant in his Konigsberg, walking the same route every day. Kierkegaard in his Copenhagen, wandering among the crowds . . .” Perhaps this explains why, having visited Middlesex University and agreed that it has the “crappiest of campuses,” they seem unsurprised when before the novel ends the philosophy department at Middlesex has been shut down.
But if they are victims of belatedness, of their milieu or lack of it, of the triumph of soulless social conditions, their plight is also their own fault, and they know this, too. They worry that “We’ve nothing to do: isn’t that our problem? They observed that great philosophers (unlike them) “have always had unfeasibly high voices.” But beyond their voices, their “stupidity,” their “idiocy”—acknowledged by both, with W.’s saving proviso that he is less idiotic than Lars—there are their habits. One of these, for instance, is spending far too much time drinking. But more broadly, they lack system. In his clearest acknowledgement, W. declares
There was a time when W. had the necessary structure, when he was one of the fabled postgraduates at the University of Essex:
W. IS RIGHT, of course. They do need a system, a structure, a routine. For examples of how they might arrange their lives to produce thought, we can turn to Daily Rituals, a recent book by Mason Currey. Interestingly, this book originated as a blog (at http://dailyroutines.typepad.com), just as Spurious did (http://spurious.typepad.com). Mason Currey relates how, wasting time to keep from completing a writing assignment, he began looking into the daily routines of successful writers, which became his Daily Routines blog: an effort which required him to settle down to a daily routine himself, with a 5:30 wake-up time. The result is Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. The subtitle is a little misleading, as he includes scientists and architects and philosophers, as well as composers, painters, and writers: a hundred and fifty-five in all.
W and Lars could benefit from some advice about drinking from George Sand or Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote that “the very excellent organization of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor.”
It is true that few of Currey’s artists have to teach, while, as Lars’s report of W’s report about his university laments:
What of the creators who interest Lars and W.? Kafka, for instance? They are lost in despairing admiration for him. How did he live?
Despite having a full-time job at an insurance company, Kafka finished work at 2 in the afternoon, took a nap, did ten minutes of exercise naked at an open window, took an hour’s walk, had dinner, and sat down to write at 10:30 p.m.
Despite having a full-time job at an insurance company, Kafka finished work at 2 in the afternoon, took a nap, did ten minutes of exercise naked at an open window, took an hour’s walk, had dinner, and sat down to write at 10:30 p.m., working for hours before snatching a little sleep in the wee hours and then going to his job. Kant fixed his own routine about age forty; rising at 5 a.m., he lectured and wrote, and ate lunch until about 3:00; he then took his walk, every day at 3:30, visited a friend (the same friend every day, Joseph Green) and after a bit more work, retired at precisely 10:00. Notice the importance of a more ordinary person as friend: as Kant has Joseph Green, Kafka’s walks were often with Max Brod, his supporter and literary executor. W. and Lars wonder:
WHAT ABOUT KIERKEGAARD? Kierkegaard is the looming presence in Exodus—the philosopher of despair—the one thinker of whom W. concedes Lars some awareness, if only because Lars is half-Danish. He explains the Kierkegaard project: “We have to become more Kierkegaardian than Kierkegaard, W. says. More Danish than the melancholy Dane!” They will work backward from all of Kierkegaard’s finished works, to his mind, his cultural milieu, even his physiognomy. Of course, like most of W.’s ambitions, this one declines into bathos:
Oddly this does not deter them from lecturing on Kierkegaard on their speaking tour around the perishing universities of Britain. W. frequently reads lines from Kierkegaard that he has transcribed into his notebook, and even says “Kierkegaard foresaw us . . . He knew we were coming. Why else would he write so many pages on the dangers of religious enthusiasm, of drunken religiosity and of religious phantasmagoria?”
Now, Kierkegaard—there was a man with regularity and external structure. He wrote in the morning and then took a long walk through Copenhagen at noon each day, returning to write for the rest of the afternoon and part of the evening. He had some peculiarities associated with the way he took his coffee, which was more a syrup made of energy-giving sugar than a real liquid, but he hewed to a system that helped him produce the collected works, spanning Lars’s windowsill, with “their sober spines, the different colours. . . the sheer bulk of them . . ..”
THE THREE MOST common disciplines that go up to make successful method in Daily Rituals are: early rising (many of these people rose at dawn; Balzac got up at 1:00 a.m.; it isn’t clear when he woke up, but Mozart always had his hair done by 6:00 a.m.); napping—from Joan Miró’s difficult-to-imagine fifteen minute nap, through many one to two hour lie-downs, and even Jerzy Kosinski’s four-hour nap every afternoon; and—most important of all—walking. Just a few of the dedicated walkers in Currey’s book are Beethoven, Kierkegaard, Freud, Jung, Mahler (three or four hours a day), Faulkner; Kant (every day at the same time), Kafka, John Milton (three or four hours, in his garden), Franz Schubert, Victor Hugo, Dickens (a three-hour walk every afternoon promptly at 2:00); and Tchaikovsky, one walk in the morning and a two-hour walk in the afternoon.
W. knows this and he used to know it better—his systematic day as a postgraduate included regular walks. There is a long passage about walking:
Soon, the suggestion of walking as a way to ideas, having then become walking as a way to have ideas about ideas, peters out into ideas about walking. The most amusing is W.’s analysis of the differences in the two men’s “philosophy of walking.”
So much for walking, now a topic for philosophizing and blame-placing.
Iyer nicely captures the results of lives conducted without system in a system almost without life. W. and Lars will never be heroes of thought and sometimes they give up on the bare possibility of thinking—because the times are bad but just as much because they lack a daily ritual. They will never produce Either/Or or the Critique of Pure Reason. But Iyer’s brilliant perception is that their fecklessness makes them alive, makes them surprising, makes them funny. No one would want to read three novels about the real thinkers, with their productive customs, Thomas Hobbes’s nap or Victor Hugo’s daily visit to the barber. But W. and Lars, drinking gin on the train, or brainstorming a new philosophical system (Dogma), with rules like “always use Greek terms that you barely understand,” addressing a bored audience of six in Nashville or watching their pro-Humanities protesters all fall asleep, have a variety that custom cannot stale.
♦
Merritt Moseley is a Professor of Literature at the University of North Carolina at Asheville in the US and the author of several books on recent British fiction. He is still casting about for a daily routine.
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Publication: Monday, 25 November 2013, at 01:58.
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