George Saunders Interview and Story Club

 This is an intriguing interview George Saunders did with Stephen Colbert on The Late Late Show recently. Even though I haven't read his new book of short stories Liberation Day which he's plugging here, I've become an avid follower of Saunders' Substack blog called Story Club. 

    Some of the themes and approaches he advocates in chatty, witty form during the interview are explored in more depth in the weekly posts of Story Club, often via the prompts of a famous short story he wants to examine or by thoughtfully responding to an email from a reader or aspiring story-writer. The importance of seeing where the story takes you without too strict a plan or structure in place; the pre-eminence of discovery and risk-taking over premeditated invention or having a point to prove (or something unitary to say); the embrace of fun, surprise and humour in how you approach your writing, rather than seeing it as a tortuous, self-lacerating process. 

   I really warmed to how, in one of his posts, Saunders described his own evolution from a struggling stylist endeavouring to write like Hemingway or Tolstoy or one of his other realist masters and not having much success in terms of publication and not feeling he was getting anywhere artistically; but then pretty much giving up on trying to write "great literature" and (with a sense he had nothing to lose) instead starting to just "goof around" and write more intuitively and spontaneously, seeing what would come out. Only then did he start getting published and begin to garner acclaim, ironically discovering his own voice just when he'd given up on trying to find it.

   

There'd Better Be a Mirrorball

 

"I'd throw the rose tint back on the exploded view"

Dean Young RIP

Dean Young passed away last week at only 67, a poet I greatly admired. A moving tribute from his editor at Copper Canyon Press here.

The Ancient Mariner at Watchet Harbour, Somerset

 

Bring Down the Government

  Like many people, my music-listening habits tend to go in phases, often influenced by what I come across on the radio (mainly Radio 6 or 3) or websites like Bandcamp or The Quietus, or read about in Wire magazine. I prefer that aleatory quality to it, as I do with the poems, books and authors I come across, at odd moments believing there's an underlying order or interconnectivity to my magpie-ish pecking which signals to me I'm heading in the right direction, whatever that might be.

   The last few months, for example, has seen a revisiting of Radiohead mostly sparked by a celebration of OK Computer's 25th anniversary on Radio 6.

  

Among numerous delights, 'No Surprises' shone out for me in its overlayering of an apparently mellow, anodyne melody with subtly dark, almost dystopic lyrics, especially the lines "Bring down the government/ They don't speak for us now" which could come from a raucous punk song but carry so much more force and depth when delivered in this subdued, understated context to acoustic guitar and a glockenspiel-lead tune.

   In this summer when by far the worst, most inept, most corrupt British prime minister ever to hold office has led his own government to all but implode, Thom Yorke's sweetly crooned lines seem to have resonated with all the more significance.  

Homage to Joyce, Dedalus and Kate Bush

 To celebrate the centennial of the publication of Ulysses, here are three very different responses to that astoundingly multifarious and kaleidoscopic masterpiece, whose lasting resonance has yielded generations of notable epigones, byworks and intertexts. Firstly, the modernist composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) with his Thema: Omaggio a Joyce (1953), startlingly ahead of its time in taking a recitation of Chapter 11 of Ulysses by Berio's then-wife Cathy Berberian and - using tape-manipulation techniques - subjecting it to a "reorganization of the phonetic and semantic elements of Joyce’s text".

  Secondly, I've been reading Chris McCabe's novel Dedalus (2018), a beautifully presented edition created by Henningham Family Press. At first I thought the concept behind this project was too ambitious to work: a sequel to Ulysses? Which writer would think they could manage a continuation of the greatest novel ever written? But in truth I've been won over by McCabe's wildly imaginative take on the day after Bloomsday, very much his own revisioning of the interweaving stories and themes and characters of Ulysses born of an intimate knowledge and passionate enthusiasm for the novel. Years ago I did a Poetry School course lead by Chris on "Ulysses as Poetry" and as well as some chapters that stand as worthy imitations of Joyce's interior monologue prose-style, other chapters metamorphose into visual or sound poetry in a way which feels much in keeping with Joyce's ludic approach both in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

  Finally, the wonderful video for The Sensual World by Kate Bush, which memorably uses the words of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in 'Penelope'. As we know, KB is having a moment this month thanks to Netflix's Stranger Things, which I'm a big fan of particularly for the nostalgia-drenched soundtrack and a plethora of references to tropes from early 80's TV and movies. It's great to see a resurgence of interest in 'Running Up That Hill', which will hopefully send people back to the marvellous Hounds of Love album - and indeed The Sensual World in all its far-reaching, haunting beauty.

Ilya Kaminsky: Testimonies from Odessan Writers

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/03/24/conversations-to-the-tune-of-air-raid-sirens-odesa-writers-on-literature-in-wartime/ 

Electronic Music from Ukraine

A new release on Bandcamp from the US label A Strangely Isolated Place: "To help continue the much-needed support for the people of Ukraine, we have produced a compilation from one of our favorite Ukrainian-based netlabels, Energostatic Records. Released as part of our Portals deep dive series, the feature includes a remaster of specifically curated tracks, in both individual and mix form. These tracks are available here on the ASIP Bandcamp page as Name Your Price, with all proceeds going to Save The Children and their specific activities supporting Ukraine at this time. asip.me/stcukr"

Happy 100th Birthday, Ulysses

  A dedalian bloom of internet articles and radio programmes to celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses in the past week or so, which coincided with Joyce's 40th birthday on 2.2.22 (I'm sure, as a lover of Dante, he was drawn to that rhyming of numbers too.) Due veneration and recognition of its pivotal importance somehow still seem tempered in some quarters with bafflement or peevish contempt for its supposed "impenetrability," as though holding it up as a great cultural monument absolves you of the need to actually read it. Even Anne Enright in The Guardian, while showing some regard for the novel and for Joyce, repeats the notion that "it's a novel in which nothing happens" whereas surely the opposite is the case:

"It is an epic of two races (Israelite — Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). […] It is also a kind of encyclopaedia."

This is an excerpt from a letter Joyce wrote to his friend Carlos Linati, quoted in the most fascinating of the articles I've come across, "Deadline Ulysses" by Phillip Keel Geheber in the LA Review of Books, who makes the point that up to a third of the novel was added at the final revision stage in 1921 including some of the most original, innovative material.

   Just as Ulysses repays frequent re-readings throughout a lifetime, because its kaleidoscopically multiple perspectives and layers will yield a intrinsically different novel to the reader at different points in their own timeline, so does it morph and undulate in its wider valency to history and society. What I keep noting on my current re-perusal is how much a novel for own rancorous, divided times this is. Most of the other high Modernist classics   - from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and The Waste Land to A La Recherche, The Man Without Qualities and The Magic Mountain - counterbalance a fraught vision of fragmentary modernity with plaintive nostalgia for a more stable age d'or when high culture supposedly held societal values in place and liberal humanist sensibilities had not begun to suffer dissociation. Joyce - a life-long socialist (in distinction to almost every other major Modernist) - was more inclined to celebrate the bustling, interactive heterogeneity of the modern city than deplore it, in particular foregrounding the rich linguistic buzz of different registers and idiolects weaving in and out of one another. 

   However, in choosing a second generation Jewish inhabitant of Dublin as his wandering mock-hero, Joyce hones in on the potential prejudice and ostracisation caused by what we now call "othering". You might miss them on a first reading, but the early chapters involving Bloom (especially 'Hades') are subtly dotted with moments of "micro-aggression", of slights and shrug-offs, nothing overt but enough to mark him as an outsider within the bluff, jokey discourse of Dublin street-life. This rises to a mock-heroic climax in his encounter with The Citizen, a one-eyed Cyclops who demonstrates that nationalism of any kind (even the anti-British, Irish nationalism with which Joyce had some sympathy) invariably masks a xenophobic agenda - as we have seen disastrously writ large in the age of Brexit and Trump. But Bloom's rejoinder to the antisemitism of the grandiloquent myope sums up the novel's underpinning ethos: 

    "Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life (...) Love"

   This is why Joyce's encyclopaedic epic of the human race, of the human body in all its fallibility and persistence, culminates in a small act of kindness between two apparent outsiders - Bloom the intinerant Jew, continually on the run from thoughts of his wife's adultery and his son's death in infancy, helps out Stephen Dedalus the malcontent poet, in flight from the nets of state and religion and thoughts of his mother's recent death. Nothing happens in Ulysses the way it does in War and Peace or A Tale of Two Cities or even Middlemarch - but if a profoundly rich and detailed celebration of the ordinary "life for men and women" and an unlooked-for action of support for another human being is nothing then we need to keep reading and re-reading the novel for another hundred years.