Tag: books

2022 Redux

2022 has been a bit of a dog.

Alright let me pour this little cognac and break it down for you1 I just discovered that this is in fact a 2021 joint, but you remove it from my significant 2022 listening over my dead body

Screenshot 2022 12 20 at 18 27
Screenshot 2022 12 20 at 18 28

My conclusion at the end of the year is that I’ve been suffering from a form of anhedonia and chronic, mild/medium, depression. Drink took up more of a role than it should have, I think to tackle the anhedonia, which led to considerable fatigue and ofc probably made the if-that’s-what-it-is anhedonia worse. My social manner was careless, sometimes borderline deplorable, and discouraging to forming new acquaintance, my already middling intellect very weak2 its natural state is C-, it can reach fairly high on occasion, but this year dragged relentlessly at a skiving, bedridden U. It was something of a relief to realise, 2/3rds of the way through that this seems to be a mode i go into from time to time, much of my teenage years for instance, which the natural intellectual ebullience of teenage years mitigated. but as i get older it feels more existential, more a symptom of decay rather than personality, emotions wan to the point of expiry, still protecting a battered and beleaguered heart by rolling up in a ball, cutting cords that should not be cut. Viva Las Vegas.

This all needs to be corrected or at least worked on to the extent it can be. They who strive upwards the angels can save, as the Goethe epigram to Under the Volcano goes. Resplendency in 2023. Let’s do it. And in the interests of identifying what I’ve enjoyed so that I may enjoy more, and better, in 2023, Here Is An End of Year List…

Oh before I do that, an interview with Svetlana Alexievich I read earlier this year, where she said something that captured an important criteria for the things I like. It’s the central paragraph, but I’ll quote the whole thing because it’s so forceful:

SA:

In Chornobyl Prayer, there is this story from the wife of a dying liquidator about how he’s dying horribly. When she wants to approach him at the hospital, they don’t let her. They tell her, “Forget that it’s a human being you love; it’s matter that needs to be deactivated.” I was struck by her words—her texts—and captured them. It was on the level of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.

The things that people said were unique. These were texts from some new life of another world that is approaching very fast now. We have Chornobyl, coronavirus, the revolution, war. We are approaching a new reality for which we are not prepared. But Chornobyl is beyond all that because of the cosmic scale of the catastrophe, cosmic in the sense that it’s a shock to our understanding, our worldview. It’s something entirely new.

Why is this theme so important to me? Because when people can’t understand what’s really happening with their mind, you have to listen to the language of their bodies, how they speak about it themselves, how they try to translate their feelings into words. The body is also a text, so I tried to combine two texts: culture, which didn’t really help me much in this situation, with the text of the body.

These were texts from some new life of another world that is approaching very fast now. Svetlana Alexievich’s work operates beyond and at the margin of the new reality, as does Diego Garcia (see books: below), so does, for instance Alex Ward’s music, particularly last year’s Gated, dealing with moods and emotions that are unfamiliar only because they are not yet hackneyed, using modes and methods designed to framebreak, violently if necessary, inherited models. This is art enables us to retune our antennae to pick up the ‘odds and ends of messages coming out of nowhere’ (Kipling, Wireless) from the future.

Ok, The List:

The Book

Three books on a beech table, The English Understand Wool is on top, with a colourful, childlike cover, a picture of slices of cake. Under it is Gerald Murnane's Last Letter to a Reader, with a muted grey cover, and Diego Garcia, with Fitzcarraldo edition's characterist dark blue cover for fiction.

Helen DeWitt – The English Understand Wool

It’s a very short book, barely even a novella. I read it sitting on a bench in Cádiz’s Plaza Mina to the sound of fountains and children playing football.

A leafy, sunny square in Cadiz
Plaza de Mina, Cádiz

It forms a loop, beginning and ending at the same point. Its manner is as its narrator: precise, fastidious about the right terminology, fastidious about the differences between one thing and another, and how a thing should be done, how one should approach a thing. The sentence cadences are succinct and didactic, the effect in such a brief piece is lapidary. Within its short chapters lie gins, traps, nets, so that you reach the end, sit back, consider some of the book’s aspects, and rapidly find yourself considering the transmission of culture, the nature of understanding, the acquisition of knowledge, and the moral framework which these entail, before going back again to read the text once more and find where, exactly, these considerations might lie in its deft, light, and poised prose (HDW is an exceptional prose stylist – Swift is a good comparison, they both relish the interplay of sly meanings). It is so short that, like a pop song, you can play, rewind, and play, finding the ‘best bits, and delight in the detail and the phrasing.

The concepts with which Helen DeWitt plays cover a wide ground of thought, across literature, language, coding, heuristics, probability, business, getting things done, and anthropology, to name a handful. These are not all the standard inputs to literary work, and they provide tensions, rules, systems, motivations and structure to the behaviour of her protagonists and to the world they perceive and their management of it. It’s all very lightly done, with anything superfluous removed. Although an insight from reading the more clearly satirical Lightning Rods, the comparison that springs to mind is still Jonathan Swift, in eg A Tale of a Tub, where he is managing multiple implications, references and sometimes contradictory meanings in single sentences. That tension in concision is present also in DeWitt’s writing, and also provides the springs of the humour of her writing. These areas of knowledge bring freshness to the prose and thinking.

To take one example, I was pleased I had read Ernest Goffman’s Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face to Face Behaviour before reading TEUW. Goffman subjects the notion of ‘face’ (as in ‘saving face’) to minute scrutiny and analysis, and it seems to appear very lightly a couple of times in the book, and perhaps contributes partly to the crucial motif of mauvais ton, literally ‘bad tone’ but a better translation would be ‘bad form’. As that translation will indicate, its an expression of class snobbery, though a largely benevolent one – behaving meanly to the people who serve you in some way would be mauvais ton for instance. The motif sits at the centre of some of the dynamics in the book: class v cash, the notion of terroir as a form of cultural knowledge, transmission of knowledge and the optimal syllabus for this.

Helen DeWitt is interested, and her books are interested, in the methods and manner of doing things well, and the tools that relate to that. I won’t land the dreadful word Important on her, but this brings a fresh joy to the writing, and a sense that someone is engaged in the current world and our theoretical and practical understanding of it, combined with a strong artistic sense (across the arts), and most importantly with writing that makes you look up from the page and sit back in sheer pleasure.

Also

Gerald Murnane – Last Letter to a Reader

I picked this up in a very rainy Sydney, along with the 2019 edition of his never-properly-published novel A Season on Earth. As far as I can tell, it’s only fairly recently that you’ve been able to buy Murnane easily outside of Australia, so I use my intermittent visits to pick up the Giramondo editions. The ontology of imaginative and real places in fiction and memory is both process and subject for Murnane. In Last Letter to a Reader he re-reads his books and writes about what he remembers of his feelings during their composition, what he thinks he meant, what strikes him now, what he discovers in writing down the nature of the experience of re-reading his books. That may sound painfully refined, but it’s not; it’s a very good, colloquial, easy-to-read introduction to his writing, thoughtful about finding meaning in the act of writing.

very wet view through a window of a crossroads, the pavement and road glistens
A f’ing wet Sydney

Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams – Diego Garcia

A very good, perhaps surprisingly good book. The narrator is a ‘we’, proxies you assume for the actual authors, a couple drifting in Edinburgh, in a sort of precarious post-student life I remember very well, suffering from a form of hypersensitised post-GFC and creative anomie. Periodically the narrative will bifurcate into a double-columned page, when they are apart from each other. The subject of the book, addressed both obliquely and directly, is the forced expulsion of the Chagos Islanders in 1965 as part of the creation of a US Air Force base on the Mauritian island of Diego Garcia, among others, and the last British colony, The British Indian Ocean Territory.

The yoking together of these two worlds shouldn’t work. at all. As described it looks morally wildly self-indulgent for one thing – connecting two people living in London and Edinburgh. But it does work. it’s very well written for a start, with a strong sense of material surroundings and cultural artefacts, with a fluid prose style to convey this well-selected contemporary bricolage of post-GFC culture.

But the overall reason is the book’s purpose: to describe a connexion between brutal colonial displacement, migration, the places people will go, the experiences there, the people you will meet and with whom you’ll interact, and overall an experience of ‘emergencies happening at different speeds’ (to take a line describing a visit to A&E).

One half of the we is Mauritian, which provides one simple part of the equation. But in general, the notion of sagren – Sagren, to the Chagos refugees, a mix of nostalgia, desperation and overwhelming sorrow – a sickness for home so intense it can be deadly – is connected to anger. These feelings are applied to the sense of being dislocated in a time of ‘Emergency’, to the creative and financial state of the two narrators, and the life-story of Chagossian they meet for a short while on the streets of Edinburgh, all coming together to present a sense of the current state of things, whose axis is the Walter Benjamin quote silently injected in the text here:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.

It’s adventurous, daring writing with a sense of what it wants to do with that formal sense of adventure, and it’s well-written so that it carries it off without feeling like… to use a critic’s phrase ‘a partially successful experiment’. I was hesitant about using that phrase, but it’s useful because it allows me to describe the book correctly: it’s a wholly successful experiment, which covers terrain that will surely become increasingly relevant: how countries manage more widespread migration, both economic and that of refugees of some sort or another.

Currently we would rather see migrants die, immiserate them to the point of suicide, or force them via restricted routes to death purely because we do not choose to have the moral capacity to help. (Hey, Suella, what’s your KPI on suicides in detention? Deaths in the channel? Presumably 0 is not an optimal discouragement index score for you?)

More generally, Stephen Bush put it well earlier in the year:

Refugee policies are easier. We can say with extreme confidence that anyone in Ukraine has a compelling case for wanting to leave it, so governments can streamline the process by allowing anyone with a valid passport to treat that document as a visa. And we know what refugees need to make a better life for themselves in a new country: support for their mental and physical health needs, free and easy access to the labour market and help integrating into a new country, usually but not exclusively in the form of language lessons and somewhere to live.

Your country’s ability to do these things is a pretty good test of how effectively governed it is. If your planning and housing system doesn’t have enough flexibility and spare capacity to accommodate some refugees, you almost certainly have a sclerotic planning and housing system. If your community colleges can’t provide them with good enough language skills — people who were already working and living perfectly happily in another country — to enter your labour market, you almost certainly have a very bad adult education system. And if your political class doesn’t have the wit to allow anyone with a valid Ukrainian passport visa-free access to your country, then you almost certainly have a low-wattage political class.

If your country cannot do any of these things, congratulations! You are almost certainly the UK and you are almost certainly heading for a second successive lost decade.

https://www.ft.com/content/8e941a78-4d4f-4bdf-9e3a-2f290ab342ac

The Film

Flux Gourmet (dir. Peter Strickland)

Flux Gourmet is a film that takes the relationship between food and sound partly explored in Berberian Sound Studio much much further. In doing so Strickland creates conceptual spaces for exploration that might otherwise be unmappable. It is also an amusing ‘what if’ whimsy where ‘sonic catering’ is an artistic space with many artistic collectives vying for bursaries, funding and attention, as well as creating a slightly satiric kink out of the modern socialised fetish seen on food programmes for capturing the sound and sizzle of cooking as something sensuous, extending that into the mundanity of the bourgeois in the supermarket via a series of mime scenarios.

That is the space the film creates and in which it operates, but the main dynamics are where and how this mixture of sensualities are digested and absorbed, and what if you are incapable of digesting them, getting acidic flux (comparable to the sonic flux which is a source of artistic and dramatic contention in the film) and flatulence. The mode of the writer and recorder is meticulously captured in a brilliant performance, again, v delicate and underdelivered, from Makis Papadimitriou. Strickland reverses the vulnerable Englishman in the Italian setting of BBS, with Makis suffering social discomfort in an absurd English mixture of rigid dinner party performance (after dinner speeches are given by each of the collective, each of them excellent), and avant-garde resistance and fetishistic subliminal reaction to those social rules.

The other ruleset in this space is performance and ‘backstage’, where audiences show their gratification in post-performance orgies. What intimacies are available in which spaces, where do we… where are we able to… reveal ourselves, our intestinal and gustatory beings, our sexual fetish – what is the interplay in these spaces, what freedom created, what constraints at play. What role does the private performance of writing and recording have? What is the internal, what the external? Stones (played by Makis, and no Strickland is not frightened of the grotesque or heavy handed joke), sits, a slightly malevolent shadowy outline in the glass panelled toilet, undergoing who knows what malevolent transformation under pressure of these culinary, artistic and social dynamics.

The sound, as you might expect, is extraordinary, spacious, dense, discrete – the writer and recorder’s flatulence is barely registered, the speech of the actors is beautifully captured – that speech in itself nuanced, from Asa Butterfield’s slightly dreary and shy wealthy dropout London, to Gwendoline Christie’s poised, over-rich, and melodramatic depth, and ofc Fatma Mohamed’s crisp, autocratic, ironic voice (god, she and her voice are beautiful). Birdsong and field recordings fill the night and the ‘thinking walks’ the collective go on. The sonic performance and malevolent background miasma of recorded food is also exhilarating and appropriately vicsceral. So yes, the sonic space is, as ever, as rich as the pictorial, dramatic and scripted matter.

The overall effect is to create an unusual mood, a space for new emotions and interactions to be at play, allowing the discovery of something new and unfamiliar.

The Music

Sprints – A Modern Job EP

I don’t know, this is hardly the best or most interesting music released this year, but something about its full-throated, youthful, dublin exuberance hit the spot. It is perhaps a form of nostalgia, but it felt fresh enough to bypass feelings of ‘why are people still doing the exact same thing 30 years on?’ feeling I get from most indie music These Days.

I should have listened to more Alewya, who as far as I can tell released several flawless EPs this year. I’ll rectify that over the festive period.3I didn’t, but did get some tickets for her later in the year

It’s a long time since I’ve listened to music as obsessively as I once did, my listening better classed as skimming these days, but here is a playlist of tracks that have in some way stuck with me, no particular order though Calm Down was a clear favourite of the year, and SAD GIRLZ LUV MONEY close behind it.

My god so much indie here. What’s going on.

Oh, and in an otherwise ok I suppose album, The Voltarol Years, Half Man Half Biscuit recorded one of their best ever songs, Oblong of Dreams, a love letter to the Wirral, with the characteristic mix of the mundane, the pastoral, death and the available sublime just at the end of a local field path, all coming together to provide that peculiarly uplifting compassion that for me is their hallmark (more than their ‘humour’).

Albums not represented here, among others.

Deadly Orgone Radiation – Desecration of Form

(Get well soon, James)

OXBOW & Peter Brötzmann – An Eternal Reminder of Not Today / Live at Moers 

Oren Ambarchi – Shebang

Dawn Richard & Spencer Zahn – Pigments

Lady Aicha & Pisko Cranes Original Fulu Mziki of Kinsasha – N’Djila Wa Mudjimu

Soccer Mommy – Sometimes Forever

$ilkMoney – I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore

Television

This was nearly universally bad, from what I saw. Incredibly conservative4MES sums it up very well in the track Systematic Abuse: ‘it is the same’. However, the prison scenes in Andor were very strong, perhaps because they had their origins in the ’70s film THX1138. So that’s my 2022 vote.

Otherwise, watching the original BBC Edge of Darkness from 1985 was my television highlight. As someone on Twitter said, it does not let up, and is dense with meaning and thought, with substantial direction and the acting, especially Bob Peck of course.

Food

Nandine 

It felt like being a goddam prince visiting a distant land eating at Nandine. The quality in detail was exceptional, from mezze to baclava. I exited the building transformed, almost exuberant, such is the power of a good meal.

a plate of roasted aubergines on a thick orange sauce, with green and red leaves on top
A full plate of richly spiced kurdish food, with sea bass, onions, peppers and tomato

40 Maltby Street

Transformative in a different way – does what a restaurant should do: restore you, but not just in terms of nourishment. Eating three well-constructed, lightly imaginative dishes and taking their recommendation on wine leaves you feeling spiritually and mentally restored too.

My Friends Don’t Like Me, They Don’t Like the Way I Do  

I struggled to maintain social relationships this year – my response to my mental state is to withdraw.

But thanks to those who were in some way a part of it: Dave, Alex, thomp, chuck arrowsmith, gyac & darragh (for Dublin inter alia), tracer hand, ronan, sean, tim, cis, mark s (and the wider ilxor slack cru) carmen, hew, jules, matt, aliya, colleen, calum, jack, james, jem and ofc the infinitely patient comrade alphabet.

as always the people who insist on sticking around for some reason, despite the intermittent communication and erratic manner, are the best part of me.

Bring on 2023.

What’s up?

I had a surprisingly nice evening.

Cycled up to the British Museum in the face of a bit of headwind for The Age of Stonehenge exhibition.

West from Waterloo Bridge

The recent Age of Nero exhibition had been a bit crap but this was excellent. Strong recommend.

The curation was superb. Yes a wall of axe heads can be moving and beautiful. The range of artefacts showed the extraordinary saltatory leaps in technical and cultural innovation in Europe, threaded round the development, domination and eventual desuetude of Stonehenge.

The whole was mysterious and beautiful. Exemplified by the extraordinary Nebra Sky Disk. No I didn’t take a picture. Go see it.

Figures with quartz eyes and detachable penises on a serpentine boat

Detachable penises! Dead beaker folk!

Beaker woman with child in swaddling protected with dog-tooth pattern of bones

Also lol aurochs were massive and scary. Stood another head or so above humans.

hi dere

Then went to the Museum Tavern. I always forget that it’s surprisingly beautiful inside, with a wonderful bar.

The Museum Tavern

So home, on the back of a now glorious tailwind, to a very basic but a very nice chick pea soup that had been cooking in the oven for eight or so hours.

chick peas, bay, garlic and onions

Now off to continue reading Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s really excellent The Mushroom at the End of the World.

Lowenhaupt Tsing’s use of the concepts of assemblages, time creation and contamination between humans, fauna and the environment contributed significantly to my enjoyment of the exhibition, which after all depicted people carving tools and history and gods and art out of the cosmos. The overlapping assemblages of stone, time, stars, bone and swirling mystic design, transforming to sun worship, bronze and gold should in ALT’s depiction not be seen as progression but a change in the assemblage of elements, and cadences, a new set of lithic, cosmic, and anthropological contaminations and influences.

So, yes, sorry for the bland post. Pepys this is not. But I had a surprisingly nice evening. And that is a thing to be celebrated.

Crossing the Streams

A very good interview on the business model and economics of streaming here:

Episode 5: Jozefien Vanherpe on the Economics of Music Streaming | Machines & Masterpieces (castos.com)

Worth reading this Steve Albini thread as a complement to it:

I wonder whether the success major labels have ultimately had in negotiating the shift to streaming will also play through into video/broadcasting. Netflix unquestionable turned the tables up by making incredibly innovative, far-sighted use of CDN technology (Content Distribution or Delivery Network), Edge connectivity and variable bitrate management, but they face/faced two challenges:

  1. It’s a content first world – which means paying up front for subscribers by creating content, and as Jozefien Vanherpe points out, it’s difficult to predict the return on cultural goods.
  2. Once you reach saturation point with subscribers in the US, the job of expanding becomes a lot harder for localisation reasons (cultural, language and indeed compliance and technical). China is closed off to Netflix as a major revenue generator outside sharing some content via a partner, see my bit on Peppa Pig. Network technology coverage in India and the African content is a challenge. Europe is highly fragmented in terms of language and legislation per viewer.

Broadcasters have existing distribution channels and play the rights/D2C risk balance much more easily. Are we going to see the equivalent of the major label dominance in video streaming?

Publishing is of course the other area where incumbent businesses were extraordinarily slow and defensive in their approach to new technologies, but it’s not clear to me that e-books have disrupted to the same extent – certainly we’ve seen v little innovation in the publishing space as far as I know. Academic publishing is still in a heavily fortified mode. But this is no longer an area of strength for me, so this is just guesswork based on what little I see.

The Pram in the Hall

A year or so ago I wrote something prompted by reading a 2017 piece by Claire Dederer about the art of ‘Monstrous Men’. The piece focused on Woody Allen, but moved on to talk about the complicity of accusation – how it is a denial of one’s own monstrosity – and how she herself, as a writer who withdrew her time and attention from those she loved, was also in some way ‘monstrous’.

I thought it was too much to place all writing in the same space as the sexually predatory crimes of Monstrous Men, Woody Allen included, but it did make me want to talk about some writers, all of whom I liked very much, all of whom were women, who deal with the need to share writing and love – love partly in the form of the demands of child-rearing – and in doing so shared something of a similar methodology and voice. To the extent it can be called a ‘voice’ (it would be a disservices to constrain to one voice these different writers), it is the sound of the negation of the dominant, dogmatic male line of argument, the assertion of what is true and what is not true, over a course of a project which is the exclusion of doubt.

This tweet from Jay Owens reminded me I had that unfinished piece sitting in my drafts, but the bit about Dederer was not really relevant to it, so I’ve removed it from here.

I have however taken a quote from her essay as the jumping-off point.

But here’s a thing I have done: written a book. Written another book. Written essays and articles and criticism. And maybe that makes me monstrous, in a very specific kind of way.

…There are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.

There were a couple of other things in the essay that prompted the thoughts that lead to writing this. One has already been quoted, her reference to Cyril Connolly’s malign phrase, ‘The pram in the hallway’ (‘There is no more sombre enemy of art than the pram in the hallway’). The other, connected, is this:

Does one identity fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That’s the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: Is your motherhood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.

These questions, that reference, immediately brought to mind two books: The Last Samurai by Helen deWitt, and Little Labors by Rivka Galchen. Both deal, in different but linked ways, with writing and motherhood.

They’re both wonderful books. They show the capacity for interruption that having a child brings. They use it, are defined by it – by the impossibility of single-minded exclusive and exclusionary focus, which ‘the pram in the hallway’ says art requires. And they don’t just deal with it, they are formally shaped by it. In The Last Samurai there are continual, often quite long digressions of nested interruptions. The interruptions themselves become the content, before the original, interrupted voice, resumes. In this sense they are not interruptions, there is no main thread that is being disrupted. The demanding voice of Ludo (the narrator Sibylla’s child) is as much the book as is the narration. It is a partnership. In a sense it is a handing over of voices.

Little Labors formally represents the capacity for interruption of thought and concentration differently. It is a short book comprising very short entries on having a child and being a writer. The suggestion is that the form has been imposed by the demands, the responsibilities of having a child. Yes they are little entries, but they are undoubtedly labors, because of the presence of a child. The labors are also those of the child. The entire book seems to me an explicit riposte to the pram in the hallway point of view. This was represented beautifully in a passage that was excerpted as ‘The Only Thing I Envy Men,’ in The New Yorker:

I now envy men, but for just one thing. What thing? It is true that at the moment the baby is beating a small wooden cutting board against the ground, that the cutting board had at one point had on it an apricot I had sliced into tiny bits for her, she has since sat on some, and smashed some into the ground, she has taken a lengthy interest in my wallet, she has held the supermarket-discount-points card at a distance, then put it in her mouth, then held it at a distance away again, she has not yet learned to crawl but can drag herself across the floor to the edge of a set of stairs I am hoping to keep her from exploring further, she has gathered fuzz from the shag rug here at this rental cabin that has been obtained as a luxuriously imagined Room of One’s Own, she has been interested in having her hand inside of my mouth, and has not been interested in lying down, she is now trying to pull herself up along a ledge and is now trapped in a position from which she can discover no out and so requires rescue by the large being (me) who is always with her, later she needs rescue simply from being on her stomach, and so in brief moments, between these activities, I have one-third of an associative thought, about that story “Pregnancy Diary” by Yoko Ogawa in which a woman’s sister is pregnant and very nauseous throughout the pregnancy and the narrator begins making grapefruit jam for her nauseous sister, and the sister loves it, it’s the only thing she can bear to eat, and so the narrator keeps making it even though she read a sign at the grocery store that the grapefruit was not safe, and so she believes she has ruined the baby … but really I’m insufficiently upset about not being able to think, and then the baby falls asleep. She sleeps on her back, slightly tossed to the side, with both arms in the same direction, like she’s in a boat I can’t see. Her breathing in this moment is making her glow like an amulet. I had been talking about gender envy. The one thing I envy. The first gender-envy thoughts I have had really in my entire life started maybe not immediately following the arrival of the puma in my apartment, but shortly after, when the puma spent a lot of time spinning a wooden cookie on a rod, or maybe shortly after that, when I took her for her first swim in a pool and she persisted uncomplainingly even as it began to rain. The envious thought was simply that a man can have a baby that their romantic partner doesn’t know about. 

Little Labors – Rivka Galchen

For a man the pram in the hall is a potential enemy of art, for a mother it must form a part of it.

For me Rivka Galchen and Helen deWitt give a new voice to literature. It is a non-dogmatic voice, it is humorous and vulnerable open (edit: ‘vulnerable’ was poor choice of word); because it is open to interruption it is stronger than a voice which is not open to interruption. And by ‘interruption’ I mean anything that might swerve the argument, the focus, the single-mindedness, the dogma, the ‘this is the way it is’-ness, the dominant interpretation or narrative, the power.

Anything that might baffle the paradigm, to use the translated words of Roland Barthes in The Neutral.

It isn’t really interruption as such – it is the fabric of thought and discovery.

This Little Art by Kate Briggs is an essay on approaching and exploring the ideas and acts of translation, mainly but not at all solely through the act of translating Roland Barthes’ late lectures. In one section she writes about one part of the Barthes lecture course she translated.

In this digressive, excursive teaching, the practice was never to be exhaustive or systematic: to work or walk in a straight line toward some generalising theory, an ultimate grand idea. Instead to set down a fantasy. And then to induce from the fantasy, a research project. The fantasy for this year of a form of living together that would accommodate rather than dictate the individual rhythms of a small-scale community. Allowing for something like solitude, as Barthes puts it, with regular interruptions. What kinds of structures, spatial or temporal, would enable this? Where to look for suggestion and detail, for models and counter-models that could be stimulated, or already find their part-equivalents, in life? 

[He then cites works which he proposes to look at]

The inquiry will proceed sketchily, says Barthes. Each lecture will offer just a few lines of approach; open a few possible dossiers. I’ll only be marking out the contours of these zones of interest. Like the squares on a chequerboard, he says, which perhaps one day I’ll fill in. Marking out the spaces, setting the places. A place for animals. Also for bureaucracy, for flowers and food. I see it like a table: seating you next to you and you next to you, anticipating the conversations between topics, the arguments.

This Little Art – Kate Briggs

Although here this method is being used to understand what a community allowing for something like solitude with regular interruptions might look like, to look for examples and reference points, the method he describes is itself perhaps also the method by which this community might be achieved.

Accommodating rather than dictating individual rhythms; this was a notion that came to Barthes when seeing from his window a mother dragging a child along:

In the lecture course titled How to Live Together, the fact that we can go too fast, or indeed too slow, for other people, for the person we are supposed to be accompanying, or is supposed to be keeping company with us, the person you are hoping will stay with you, your listener, your reader, the child you are trying to walk to school, is the central issue: the lecture course’s crystallizing theme. A theme embodied by the sight of a mother glimpsed from Barthes’s window, walking out of step with her son. Too fast. Dragging him along by the hand (so that he is forced to run to keep up). This fact and lived theme of what Barthes calls disrhythmy, and the power dynamics that are in play, and the disturbances it can cause. The question of the lectures, then, will be how to find a way of walking (being, living, also reading, writing and thinking) together that might somehow take account of our different rhythms, not through enforced synchronicity, but allowing for them: you read faster than I do, you get up earlier than I do, and eat later, you race ahead while I walk more slowly, and yet still (in this fantasy that Barthes is hoping to simulate in life) we’ll find ways of coming together, points in the day for companionship, offsetting, modulating, interrupting our competing desire for solitude.

This Little Art – Kate Briggs

Disrhythmy, for Barthes, is caused by different idiorrhythms. Of course, the thing with a baby is that its idiorrhythm must be yours, as a mother. It wants something now. Its not interested in a Barthes chequerboard that allows for accommodation. But writing and composing in that way as a method, a method of accommodating that id as a writer, but also of asking ideas, the paragraphs and words on the page, and the reader themselves, to accommodate it as well.

This is not a group of writers, but they do refer to one another – Rivka Galchen to Helen deWitt’s The Last Samurai because…

..it takes so many pages into the main section before you recognize the narrator’s gender as female, and then so many pages more before you realize that the narrator of that section is a mother, in fact a single mother, who is trying to develop herself as a scholar and who tries to solve the problem of presenting a male role model to her son

Kate Briggs to Maggie Nelson’s section on policing mouth-exploring in This Little Art:

When my youngest son was a baby I had a bright hot technicolour dream that was the picture of him choking. This had the effect of elevating my adequate policing to the levels of nervous (paranoid?) surveillance. I’d hand him a slice of squashy ripe pear at lunch-time and watch as he’d try manoeuvring it delightedly into his mouth. Then suddenly doubt the size of it, the consistency of it, and to his great distress, whisk it away (I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! – don’t cry: I’ll cube it! Let me mash it!). 

Looking back, I think what troubled me the most was the thought (the thought and also the reality) that the smallest lapse in my attention, even (even and especially) with respect to the most ordinary everyday things – eating a pear for lunch, sitting out among the dry leaves in the garden – could have consequences on this other, life-or-death scale. The stakes felt everywhere and for that period of time almost unbearably high.

She also insists, via Galchen’s Little Labors, on seeing ‘little’ as meaning ‘small’ not ‘minor’. If we are to allow this sort of writing to have equal worth, we must allow for its smallness. The fact that accomplishing a brief paragraph of thought may be a form of labour, and may need to be accomplished in small periods of time between distractions. Allowing thoughts and observations to be placed on a square and to relate to the things next to them, not in a tightly ordered narrative argument that says if this is true then this must be true, but to communicate, to be suggestive. A series of partnerships, reader and author, both contributing, author and the people and things that demand their time.

A voice to accommodate distraction and disjunction, whether it’s Galchen’s brief chapters and little labors, Maggie Nelson’s stanzas of thought, the cadences of a child’s insatiable desire for learning in The Last Samurai, perhaps these make way for a new way of writing and reading.

On one of the long afternoons that has since bled into the one long afternoon of Iggy’s infancy, I watch him pause on all fours at the threshold to our backyard, as he contemplates which scraggly oak leaf to scrunch toward first with his dogged army crawl. His soft little tongue, always whitened in the centre from milk, nudges out of his mouth in gentle anticipation, a turtle bobbing out of its shell. I want to pause here, maybe forever, and hail the brief moment before I have to jump into action, before I must become the one who eliminates the inappropriate object, or, if I’m too late, who must harvest it from his mouth.

You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth-exploring. In the fact of this fact, Winnicott holds the relatively unsentimental position that we don’t owe these people (often women, but by no means always) anything. But we do owe ourselves “an intellectual recognition of the fact that at first we were (psychologically) absolutely dependent, and that absolutely means absolutely. Luckily we were met by ordinary devotion.

The Argonauts – Maggie Nelson

Absolutely dependent. That absolutely dependence relies on the attention of the person who may also be writing the words you are reading. And therefore our intellectual recognition of that fact should perhaps be allowing the interruptions, relishing the tone of voice and type of writing that allows for them. It may also mean reconfiguring what ‘good’ is, so that Dederer’s question “Is your motherhood making you a less good writer?” – with all the demands on time and concentration and emotion – is not somehow determined by the editorial rejection of that voice: the little, the associative, the interrupted.