Against the pay

In regard of the free for all over review copies, payments and book blogging credibility, I'd like to say I'm open to "invitations" to not review a book.

German poetry anthology oddity

The latest LRB, the contributor's notes: "Michael Hofmann’s anthology of 20th-century German poetry is out next month".

Eh? Wasn't this out last year? I can't be wrong because I bought it. It arrived, much to my disappointment and dissatisfaction, with a different cover to the one advertised.

But it seems I am wrong anyway. I have The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems that is a paperback and has 220 pages, while the new one is from Farrar Straus Giroux, is called Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology, is a hardcover and has 544 pages. However, it does have the same cover.

Opening every day

Vague thoughts about discontinuing this blog. Perhaps nothing more to say. No wish, at least, to go further in this direction. Then again, discontinuing the blog would be the same as carrying on. It isn't a book or a body of work. More like breath condensing on a pane. So, vague thoughts instead. Go with vague thoughts, the thoughts that lap like waves. Why, for example, was there a peculiar calm when I sailed into Portsmouth Harbour trapped in the bilges of HMS Victory? With the sea becoming shallower and the space between seabed and 3000 tons disappearing fast, I felt nothing. To die so close to home, I thought, after having survived the long mission (which didn't happen), wouldn't that be terrible? No, not really it seems. I didn't mind; not even then.

A vague answer arrived later when the Victory sailed into view again. Against all habit, I listened to BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime which, so far this month, has been Hardy's The Trumpet Major, read by Julian Rhind-Tutt. Great name. Despite being from Wessex, I didn't really know Hardy. So I listened with interest. Bob Loveday leaves Overcombe and his unrequited love to join Nelson's flagship. Is this really Great English Literature, this affected Mills & Boon tripe? I listened on. A Napoleonic love triangle. A 19th Century soap. One stilted sentence after another. A reticence in ten parts. Listening on, however, brought the indifferent calm, and sleep soon followed. Sentence upon sentence plumped up the pillow. Sheep and more sheep gliding over a gate. It's also why, I realise, that since beginning to read Thomas Bernhard's Frost in bed, I've been unable to read it anywhere else.

Today he admitted he had burned all his paintings. "I had to get rid of those things that were a perpetual reminder of my worthlessness." They had been like ulcers, opening every day and silencing him. "I did it quickly. One day I realized I'd never make it as a painter. But then, the way everyone does, I refused to believe it, and protracted the agony for years. And then, the day before I was due to leave, it struck me forcibly."

In not being able to read the book anywhere else, nor at any other time except before sleep, I recognised the need for a calm that only one sentence followed by another and then another can bring. It's also why I can't stop reading even to take notes, to remind myself later on, in daylight, what it was that moved me so much. Not one about the repetition of 'jab' on page eight, nor the intriguing mention two pages later that the narrator was reading "a book of Henry James's" (so unThomas Bernhard), or the valley (so Bernhard) on page eleven in which the painter says "you can walk back and forth for hours, without the least anxiety" and was "like walking centuries before human settlement". It would be like waking up to annotate a dream. All these thoughts about reading, however, all these wonderings about the peace of descending into sleep in spirals of sentences however dark they are in themselves, all these thoughts came to me as I read, they were part of the descent, they were what I sought and what I sought to end.

Also, don't apply if you haven't read Blanchot

The Times and The Booktrust Teenage Prize have teamed up to launch a competition for budding book reviewers. Write us a review of any book (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, etc): it doesn’t matter whether you loved it or hated it. The only rules are that you can't have studied it at school and the review must not be more than 150 words.

Don't you just hate that word: budding?

A bursting unity of opposites

The Financial Times is a good source of quality book reviews. Yesterday it printed Mark Ford's of The Notebooks of Robert Frost.

[O]ne regularly comes across embryonic formulations that are both thought-provoking and pertinent to Frost’s poetics: “Metaphor may not be far but it is our farthest forth”; “The object of life is to feel curves”; “All a man’s art is a bursting unity of opposites”; “No surprise to author none to reader”.

All very interesting. So it's a shame that Ford (author of the wonderful Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams) should frame the review around the canard of "difficulty".

T.S. Eliot suggested that the complexities of contemporary civilisation meant that modern poetry in turn “must be difficult”. And, certainly, most American poets of the era - those we read today, anyway - subscribed to this view. The work of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and of Eliot himself, is formidably difficult. Even after decades, it often still baffles its explicators.

"The great exception" he adds "was Robert Frost", no doubt to sighs of relief from stockbrokers seeking some light verse on their commute. But Eliot also said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood", which might explain why those named poets are "those we read today".

That line of Eliot's comes from his long essay on Dante in which he admits to have been "passionately fond of certain French poetry long before I could have translated two verses of it correctly" and that obtaining "an immense amount of knowledge" about Dante before reading him "is positively undesirable". So Ford's contention that "Eliot and Stevens shivered with distaste at the idea of writing poetry that was intelligible to the masses" is a snotty misrepresentation of the meaning of difficulty. Their poetry might puzzle its explicators but it still gives me, a mere reader, immense reading pleasure. Maybe, I think now after reading the review, it's because their poetry contains (and uncontains) that "bursting unity of opposites". One has to read the words - leap aboard the roller coaster of language - to experience those complexities in all their reality. There are few poets who do this. So why are we being constantly warned off?

John Minihan's Beckett

Beckett ... was aware of himself as a photographic subject. "He had a great face for black-and-white and he certainly posed," says Minihan. "The first time I took out the camera in room 604, he posed. The way he held his glasses, for example, may look casual but was deliberate."

The return of Paul Ableman

I used to have a clipping from the Sunday Times circa 1987. It was a one-off column by Paul Ableman (unknown to me then and since) in which he discussed his mammoth diary project. He wrote thousands of words about each day. I remember reading that he saw this as the future novel, one step on from Joyce. It wasn't very convincing. Yet I kept the clipping.

Only recently I wondered what had happened to him. Literary fame hadn't come to him. So much for so much work. I remember the hunched figure in the accompanying photograph.

Today, via Peter Stothard's blog, I discover that he died last week and that he wasn't the lonely failure I'd assumed.

Genre fiction and literary prizes (again)

Lindesay Irvine of The Guardian's books blog admits it's an old chestnut but asks it again anyway. Why do genre novels never win the literary prizes?

While she recognises that there is a distinction between literary and genre, a convincing definition is not offered, hence the demoralising parade of ventriloquist dummies in the comment section:

I can remember feeling very cross that Barbara Vine's 'A dark-adapted eye', and others of hers as well, were never on any literary prize shortlists. I think this kind of book is often so enjoyable that the fact that it can also be brilliantly written passes people by.

What passes by this reader is that brilliant genre writing enables one to pass it by. It's a shame the supposed guardians of literary culture continue to set up the straw man of "beautiful/brilliant writing = literary" for the yokels to burn down.

If there's one reason why this blog exists, it is to challenge the assumptions of British culture about the 'literary'. Over two years and longer, I've posted blogs defining literary fiction, and observed that it tends to be only genre writers and their fans who are perplexed about their exclusion from the literary prizes (which, I must say, aren't terribly literary anyway). I've even asked an apparently taboo question: why aren't literary writers given genre awards? But it seems I'm having no impact and the dummies are winning the day. At least in that respect I'm following in the finest literary tradition.