Ragtags & bobtails - bits of 2020

1. Allergic to Harold Bloom
Looked at the table of contents for Harold Bloom’s How To Read And Why – no Judith Wright. From the second Sargent began talking about it I knew there wouldn’t be. Yank additions & the Euro cannon.

Bloom says he is writing for the solitary reader, “the reader with one candle.” I suppose he means people who read desperately, for their lives, who are so poor or constricted as to only have one candle, as it were, one source of nourishment, one focus, one lifeline out of circumstance. He says that, from time to time, people like that have written to him in gratitude and he was “so moved he was unable to reply.”

Really, dude?
Not to a single one?
Your whole life?
Not one postcard with “Thank you” scrawled in the blank spot?
No wonder you haven't read Judith Wright.
(Why do we leave these judgements to arseholes?)

2. Reading Shakespeare’s Wife
The most shocking phrase: people too poor to have names.

Even taking apart the few of his sonnets I have taken apart phrase by phrase, I’ve come to the conclusion that what Shakespeare had was a huge variety of experience, stunningly clear perception and absolutely unparalleled access to his own processing. His whole body registered an experience, any experience, and translated it verbally, exactly, instantly.

… drops his knotted root – is a serial observation of the cross-section of a weed; you see it as he saw it and registered it, from the top down, in sequence.

Tolstoy has something of the same gift, all those graduated descriptions of the transition from one state of mind to another, from feeling to perception to motive to decision.

3. Colm Toibin, The House of Names
The difference between tragedy and grand guignol is that tragedy doesn’t include the forensics. I swear to God the next thing I’ll read is The Cambridge History of Music, Volume I.

The Things My Hands Do

sweep and wash the floors
scrub the tracks for the shower doors and the sliding door to the back, scrub the doorframes, scrub the shower doors
scrub the toilets, the bath, the shower stall, scrub the counters, clean the hairbrushes and combs, clean the mirrors
clean the stove, bleach the sinks
put and take dishes into and out of the dishwasher, put them away
put and do and take and fold the washing
clean the doors and doorknobs
clean the window gutters
sweep the stairs
rake the front garden, water and weed the front and back, water the inside plants
take the rubbish down to the bins, take the bins out and bring them in
clean the kitty litter, buy and haul the kitty litter, cleaner, bleach
vacuum inside, vacuum the car, empty the vacuum cleaner, recharge it and put it back together
clean the keyboards and screens and mice
handle the mail and the banking, the endless tracking of small sums of money

they do this as though Trump isn’t raving, as though the ice-shelves aren’t breaking

Ain't no mountain high enough

He's always been beyond contempt. This is criminally negligent, or was: he's been so "incompetent" at this for so long it takes the "involuntary" out of involuntary manslaughter and takes the manslaughter out of the murder by means of indifference &/or malice aforethought.

To date 60,000+ counts of...

Through repeated acts of blindness & refusal to act; through repeated orders to hijack, sequester and hide medical supplies ordered, paid for & en route to various states (what is he going to do with millions of masks?); through refusal to attend task force briefings and/or answer questions; through hucksterism of snake-oil "cures;" through advocating self-treatment with household bleach; through support for the anti-lockdown protests, he has become the mass murderer of US citizens & residents on the mainland.

Ain't no Nuremberg big enough; ain't no Guantanamo bleak enough.

From the first thing he ever said, from his descent down an elevator to a crowd he had paid to joyously stand at its foot (his feet); from his refusal to send aid to Puerto Rico, there never was.

On the nightstand

dreams of integrity

Strange Attractors

It seems to be out of print, Alan Garner's Red Shift. Which is a shame. Its Roman Britain sections catch the utter weirdness of imperial collapse. Its glimpses into the idolization of any local egregiousness afterwards are creepy and horrifying: Delinquent & murderous nutjobs become the strange attractors of chaos. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, whose internalized imperial order has collapsed, they are creepy, horrifying, and terrifying.

Collapse empowers them, so strange or insane they’d never be heard from otherwise, attractive because they offer certainty in completely uncertain times.

Caveat emptor.

But Also, Easter -

Virus Days

"Publishing from the Provinces”

The most obvious meaning of the title of Ivor Indyk's essay is that Australian publishing is “from the provinces” of the world's geography as well as from the southern extremities of the old British Empire. Though Indyk immediately says this is not what he means, it is still something I’d like to examine for a moment. The provinces of Australian writing lie at the bottom of two stacked English language gravity wells, not just one.

The two great centres of English language publishing are London and New York. The geographic outer provinces of publishing are everywhere, even in London and New York. The question of provincialism goes on and on; it all depends on who has the talking stick and where the azimuth is. (Hence the irregular Gobshite Quarterly essays or rants under the general title “Every Edge A Centre.”)

Non-empires have small (i.e., unimportant, unbroadcast) literatures. If a work is found to be astonishing, e.g. Norwegian Knausgard's six volumes of autobiography, the work is translated, its author praised, raised and highly paid. Norwegian writing is not.

Norway is not a current or recent world power: there are no colonies or former colonies where Norwegian is a mandatory subject at every school, Norwegian books are on every syllabus, and Norwegian is the lingua franca of business, government, social mobility and ambitious writing.

The literary/artistic worth of things written, painted, played, drawn, built or projected is often inseparable from the current economic power and associated standing of the culture producing it, its possession of cultural colonies.

This point was elided when post-colonial literature in English was called “Commonwealth Literature,” complete with intellectual sniff. There was no real azimuth outside London. “Literature” stood alone and above the working class, slanting the clattering factories, the conditions of women, gunboat diplomacy, slavery, trading triangles and the bloody reality of imposed paradigms. The Church of the Book stood beside the Church of England, a two-person trinity as immanent, eternal and unchangeable, regarded and disregarded as the original.

The concerns of the books we studied were held to be universal or universally applicable when they were often, also, if not only, the concerns of a (foreign) ruling caste.

In my own literal province, “American Literature” only appeared as a studyable subject during the Vietnam War. (Britain left the Common Market in 1964. Time to study our new paradigm, our new friends, defenders, masters...)

(Perhaps I was the only one befuddled. Perhaps I resisted understanding that all these magic nets of language were also foreign and self-interested flim-flam. My parents’ and culture’s quarrel with “education” was based on the long experience of a working class and religious minority of the political nature of education. Perhaps I resisted their understanding because I resisted their insistence that that was all there was to it. I was already outside the family and the group. I was a teenager, a foundling, mix-up at the hospital, a writer to my fingertips and spine.)

But Indyk is actually anxious to discuss a certain kind of writing, what he calls "the outer provinces" of imaginative writing in English in Australia.

He describes and discusses five titles: the novels Blindness and Rage, by Brian Castro, Border Districts, by Gerald Murnane, and The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, and the poetry collections Empirical, by Lisa Gorton, and Heide, by Pi.O. All these are recent titles published by Giramondo Publishing, of which Indyk was the founding editor and publisher.

Of Castro he says:

… [T]his play of mirrors, of repetitions and inversions … is characteristic of the imagination at full stretch, in the province of literature I am describing…. In this far province the imagination rules, in its own unruly fashion.

Of Murnane he says:

It is as if he is out to demonstrate, that the imagination which produced … worlds within worlds is still active, still revelling in its own inventiveness.

Of Wright he says:

Wright’s most recent novel The Swan Book begins with just the kind of recursion I have been examining … that movement in which the imagination seeks to expand beyond the condition of neglect or indifference, or in the Indigenous case negation, to declare its power.

Of Gorton and Pi O he says:

Both titles make use of citation and montage, and draw on an encyclopaedic range of sources, and both mobilise expansive perspectives through these means.

And of this type of work in general he says:

The sense of being unregarded, and therefore unconstrained (the element of play), the recursive inventions of an imagination which seeks to move beyond its frontiers, the encyclopaedic aspiration which seeks to discover the whole world in a remote part of it – all these suggest a willingness to experiment with perspectives, in both space and time, both formally and in terms of the responsibilities perspective entails.

From the type of work these writers create Indyk moves on to describe the writer's hope and puzzlement at the general response to it:

To reside in the literary world, in the outer provinces of publishing, is to become used to the discrepancy between expectation and response. Each book carries a unique significance and value, both because of the effort that has gone into its crafting, and because of the contribution that its writing makes to language and the imagination. I suppose no public response could ever do justice to this sense of value… What to make of this craziness, the absence of readers?

I understand Indyk's sympathy for writers whose books are lost in the marketplace because they do not do what more commercially successful books are doing. I admire him for going to bat for the writers he publishes. At the same time I think there are other contours to the situation.

Indyk says, “Each book carries a unique significance and value, both because of the effort that has gone into its crafting and the contribution that its writing makes to language and the imagination.”

There’s a marvellous passage somewhere in Pilgrim At Tinker’s Creek where Dillard describes, vividly, how our stupendously over-productive world runs on wasted effort: uncounted trillions of unnecessary sperm, rivers of unfertilized fish-eggs...

The built-in prodigality of natural processes means that some writers will produce some books which don't find readers. Effort alone does not create significance or value. Significance and value are communal judgements. They can't exist in isolation; they can't come into being because one individual announces them. There's nothing as isolated as an unread book. A book's contribution to its community or culture is also a communal judgement and decision.

On the other hand, not belittling the kind of book and writer Indyk is describing is a matter of common decency and respect. Respect is a matter I’ll return to in a moment.

If we ask, How can a largely unread book contribute to language and the imagination? answers can begin to emerge.

If books like these were taught they would start to become known, their methods shown to have value, as saying something the community or culture can learn, as seeing something that had not been seen before, saying something the community or culture might find beautiful or witty or amazing. Under those conditions books like these could begin to make a contribution to the community's language and imagination. Books like these have to be aggressively championed into communal awareness before they can become part of a culture's conversation.

Failing that, being admired and discussed by, and influencing, other writers is the only way this kind of writing can make a contribution to culture. Books selling 50 copies or so (which is the figure Indyk quotes for Brian Castro's title — in any case, books selling fewer than a thousand copies in Australia) will not be able to contribute to "language and the imagination" unless a significant number of those copies are bought or read by productive and more widely circulating writers who use or praise the original work. The chance that posterity will resurrect and re-evaluate an unknown or forgotten work is so small the notion should be classed as a delusion.

The kinds of writers Indyk is speaking of used to be called writers' writers. The phrase implicitly admits the work doesn't have a wide readership. But it also includes respect for the work and the writer's skill. Sometimes it also means the work has been mined more than once for useful tropes or techniques, making/keeping the writer's reputation alive at least in the writing community.

In general, baroque or rococo recursiveness in writing is the taste of a small percentage of readers. It’s a literary game you do or don't enjoy, a taste you may or may not have. Once these books become more widely known and perhaps taught, discussed, acknowledged, I suspect their popularity would still be on a par with a week of Difficult Listening.

But respect and influence and popularity and money aren’t the same things. Only a thoroughly mercantile culture would insist they are.

Working in or from the outer provinces is hard on artists generally, not just writers. You hear of one, a completely neglected genius of a painter, fifty years ahead of his time, who spends the last twenty years of his life in illness and alcohol, when in New York he’d’ve been rated as highly as De Kooning. You hear of another, who's left the schmoozing art world altogether, makes watercolour sculptures, pencil drawings, and laser print collages, hundreds of works in his basement no one has ever seen. You hear of a third, whose experimental fiction doesn't sell, who destroys his marriage and reputation because he can find no publisher for anything beyond a book review.

In a culture where limitless personal ambition is encouraged and the operating principle is winner take all, my question is: But how much should the "losers" lose?

Mercantile culture most often speaks of writing/art in terms of prizes, print runs and sales. The real question is respect, of which money has become the general index.

How can Australian culture respect its artists? (A subset of respecting everybody.)

This is a genuine question. The farthest province of physical and imaginative Australian cultural production also contains the opposite of being ignored into artistic nonexistence. That opposite is being worked to death, out of sight, into functional nonexistence because your work is in such demand.

The farthest province is a shed in the outback. It contains the forced labour of elderly Aboriginal painters.

And so in my Moebius strip of a question, the other side, the same side, is this: In a culture where limitless personal ambition is encouraged and the operating principle is winner take all, who are the winners?

And how, and how much, and what, should the "winners" win?