An idea for an Anglican revival

Peter Cole tells Mark Thwaite about what inspired him to produce The Dream of the Poem.

I am not religious in the conventional sense, but every Friday night/Saturday morning the first year I lived in Jerusalem, I went with an Iraqi-Jewish friend to these middle of the night sessions which simply blew the lid off of any notion I had previously held of what poetry was and might do. Traditional and religious Jews from a variety of Eastern countries, including Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Bukhara, and elsewhere, would gather at 3 a.m. between the autumn holiday of Sukkot (Tabernacles) and the spring festival of Passover and, for some four hours, sing intensely beautiful, kaleidoscopic and sometimes mystical poems along a variety of Arab scales and modes, with soloists stretching the lines in the aural equivalent of arabesque fashion and the ragged, informal chorus (of which I was a part) joining in as the solos trailed off.

This “devotion” — though the English word hardly begins to get at what was happening — was accompanied by whiskey, snuff tobacco, boiled potatoes with salt, pepper, and fenugreek, phyllo pastries filled with spinach, cardamom-spiced tea, and much more, including the occasional fistfight. That first year in Jerusalem showed me not only a new kind of poetry and a new notion of literary reality, but a new kind of Judaism.

An instant of extreme happiness

Last month I was slightly hasty in heralding the release of A Voice from Elsewhere, a collection of late essays by Maurice Blanchot, beautifully translated by Charlotte Mandell. However, I understand it is now available. SUNY Press even offers a PDF of the first chapter. It reveals a rare Blanchot moment as he begins with a biographical reference.

When I was living in Èze, in the little room (made bigger by two views, one opening onto Corsica, the other out past Cape Ferrat) where I most often stayed, there was (there still is), hanging on the wall, the likeness of the girl they called "The Unknown Girl from the Seine", an adolescent with closed eyes, but alive with such a fine, blissful (but veiled) smile, that one might have thought she had drowned in an instant of extreme happiness. So unlike his own works, she had seduced Giacometti to such a point that he looked for a young woman who might have been willing to undergo anew the test of that felicity in death.

He then goes onto discuss the poems of Louis-René des Forêts which also refer to this mask.

New Handke novel (in German)

According to a German site (new to me) dedicated to Peter Handke, the greatest living Austrian writer had a new novel published last month. The title Kali: Eine Vorwintergeschichte is translated by publisher Suhrkamp as Potash: a Pre-Winter Story. It seems to have elements of the story of Austrian schoolgirl Natascha Kampusch. But the book description in Suhrkamp's comedy English makes it no clearer.

Existence and "guilty" pleasures

When Bloglines updates with an array of new posts to read, there are a few I always go to first. The Existence Machine is one of them. And it's one year old tomorrow. I hope it continues to gather the readers it deserves.

Such anniversaries can cause problems though, as Richard of Baltimore discusses. At some point, usually after a year, the blog takes on an identity separate from its author, and the need to speak which gave birth to the blog in the first place finds the blog has become an obstacle instead.

So, my own blog now refuses to allow overtly political posts, and the kind of philosophical/confessional posts Spurious has made its own, also seems beyond it. Hence the short, sharp posts here of late. There are only so many times you can say the same thing. But here I go nonetheless, mistakenly.

The regular blogosphere references to "guilty pleasures" has really irritated me of late. Take a look at this cartoon in the New York Observer which has doing the rounds recently: the Guilty Pleasures of the Literary Greats. It shows William Faulkner greedily watching TV and offers the caption: "In the early '60's, William Faulkner would, without fail, excuse himself from his dinner guests to enjoy his favourite T.V. sitcom: Car 54, Where Are You?".

Setting aside the unnecessary apostrophe (why do people think that to pluralise a number you need to give it a possessive apostrophe?), where is there any evidence that Faulkner felt remotely guilty about his enjoyment? I mean, if he felt it, wouldn't he hide the reason for leaving his guests?

Of course, this philistine drivel flows from the assumption that Great Art is a Platonic realm and good for you like a sermon, while "guilty pleasures" are what we'd all prefer to engage in instead. When I read litbloggers on this subject, for example the otherwise excellent LitKicks just the other day, it's like they've been taken over by the Nick Hornby hypnotoad. It isn't about snobbery but making the distinction between an ephemeral need and what is needed at the deepest level. How many times does it need saying? If a mass-market, blockbuster paperback offers to fulfil the latter need, then please tell us about it!

This is why I read litblogs, to find the books I need to read on a very personal level. As I don't read mass-market, blockbuster paperbacks, I'm open to convincing suggestions. I'm not a snob you see. I'm happy to "confess" that I watch lots of trash TV. Top Gear and Most Haunted are among my favourites (even though I don't drive or believe in ghosts). But if I'm going to write here about what I watch, I'd prefer to write about Eloge de l'Amour. Not because I'm "ashamed" of the others or because I'm trying to put up an intellectual front, but for the same reason restaurant critics write about eating the finest food and not about shitting it out.

Formal desperation

When we think of Saul Bellow's work what we think of is a certain tone of voice, a tone of voice that combines the utmost formality with the utmost desperation.

So begins Gabriel Josipovici's introduction to The Portable Saul Bellow. This alone is why I love reading Bellow and also why he is more than just an "essayistic" novelist of ideas or of "period pieces" as suggested by Dan Green in his perplexing appraisal of Bellow. It's good to see the Library of America is continuing to collect the novels, with the latest trio reviewed by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in the LA Times.

In fact, thinking about it, the imperative of that tone of voice applies to all my favourite authors. Formality on its own - the literary novel, for example, as practised in this country - is suffocating, a dead end, while desperation on its own - what might be called Cult writing - is a hollow substitute for the raw life it seeks to communicate. Absence is everything.

A song for BS Johnson

The Pernice Brothers, a band I quite like a lot, has a song called BS Johnson on Live a Little, their latest LP (which I have yet to hear). The chorus goes:

You were gone by 42
There'd be no rigid form for you
Jammed into a plot where you never would fit
A tiny manuscript with a hole cut in it.

You can hear how good it is on the band's AV page. The LP also reworks Grudge Fuck, one of Joe Pernice's best songs, written when the band was The Scud Mountain Boys. The original is much better.

Bookshop chat

This is a 15th Century bookshop in Lewes, north of Brighton, called, er, The 15th Century Bookshop. Lewes is an oasis in philistine southern England. Virginia Woolf owned a house a hundred yards or so away from the High Street, where this picture was taken. And, this week, on a stall outside another bookshop nearby, I saw copies of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Delillo's Mao II and a book called Torture in the Eighties. Unfortunately, I had to report the shop to the authorities for failing to display the obligatory tattered Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Applying restraint

I've just read All Whom I Have Loved, the latest Aharon Appelfeld novel to be translated. Like all his books, the simple rhythm of the prose makes it easy to continue reading. Aloma Halter's translation - despite the awkward title - has the quality of invisibility achieved by Dalya Bilu, the best of Appelfeld's various collaborators. It is also easy to regard him as "an interesting minor novelist". The limits of his novels, their silences, suggest a lack "more important" or "ambitious" novelists have the ability to fill. The latest novel is no different. It is narrated by Paul Rosenfeld, a nine-year-old boy, living in the aftermath of his assimilated parents' divorce and the shadow of growing anti-Semitism in 1930s Europe. We've been here before in his two best novels, The Age of Wonders and The Healer. And, as in both of those novels, there is an idyllic holiday with the mother while an artistic father flails about in a culture increasingly hostile to Jews. For these reasons, All Whom I Have Loved seems contrived. Yet I still find it exhilarating to read a novel with such restraint. Nothing is psychologised. The boy reports what happened without a controlling knowingness, without any sentences reporting the thoughts and feelings of anyone except himself. In reading novels by Appelfeld, the world becomes mysterious, frightening and wonderful all at the same time. Imagine what contemporary fiction would be like if this constraint was applied universally.