‘A TERRACE IN ROME’ BY PASCAL QUIGNARD

Terrace-romeTomoé Hill at The Quarterly Review:

To say that Pascal Quignard’s words are a meditation or an exploration is too simplistic—there is a philosophical stream of consciousness in his writing that has a realism both enlightened and carnal which attempts to grasp the essence of human nature in a handful of grand themes. While these are revisited (and often together), the nuances of the subjects in which he finds connections ensure that an originality is retained: sex, whether the act itself or the analysis of its echoing effects on the psyche; art; mythology; books; and death, as found in Sex and Terror, The Sexual Night, and The Roving Shadows, among others. These are his themes, and memory is always present in what links them. Reading Quignard, one is struck by the feeling that they are witnessing someone transcribing his thoughts, pure and fresh as they form in the mind, or to use a fitting mythological connection, Athena springing from the head of Zeus.

A Terrace in Rome, his fictional tale of the engraver Meaume, once handsome until disfigured by an acid attack to the face by the fiancé of his lover Nanni, does not stray from Quignard’s singular view of people. The result is a seamless blending of real and fantasy. His signature fragmentary reflections come together to create a character so convincing that one could be excused from wondering if Meaume was in fact a real engraver of the seventeenth century.

more here.

‘TIME TRAVEL: A History’ By James Gleick

1002-BKS-Doerr-COVERWEB-blog427Anthony Doerr at the New York Times:

“Time Travel” begins at what Gleick believes is the beginning, H.G. Wells’s 1895 “The Time Machine.” “When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine,” Gleick argues, “he also invented a new mode of thought.” Western science was undergoing a sea change at the same time, of course: Lyell and Darwin had exploded older conceptions of the age of the Earth, locomotives and telegraphs were transforming space, and Einstein was about to punch a major hole in Newton’s theory of absolute time. Meanwhile, in literature, Marcel Proust was using memory to complicate more straightforward storytelling, and it wouldn’t be long before modernists like Woolf and Joyce were compressing, dilating, and folding time in half.

But according to Gleick, Wells was the first to marry the words “time” and “travel,” and in doing so, “The Time Machine” initiated a kind of butterfly effect, the novel fluttering with each passing decade through the souls of more and more storytellers, who in turn influenced more and more of their successors, forking from Robert Heinlein to Jorge Luis ­Borges to Isaac Asimov to William Gibson to Woody Allen to Kate Atkinson to Charles Yu, until, to use Bradbury’s metaphor, the gigantic dominoes fell. Nowadays, Gleick writes, “Time travel is in the pop songs, the TV commercials, the wallpaper. From morning to night, children’s cartoons and adult fantasies invent and reinvent time machines, gates, doorways and windows, not to mention time ships and special closets, DeLoreans and police boxes.”

more here.

‘Kenneth Clark’ by James Stourton

Civilisation-kenneth-clar-014Mary Beard at The Guardian:

In February 1969, I watched the first episode of Kenneth Clark’s famous TV series, Civilisation. I can still picture him, standing on barbaric northern headlands, explaining that “our” civilisation had barely survived the collapse of the Roman empire. We had come through only “by the skin of our teeth”. It was an incongruous scene: Clark – Winchester and Oxford educated, connoisseur and collector, former director of the National Gallery – looked every inch the toff as he walked in his brogues and Burberry over the battered countryside, where wellington boots and a woolly would have been more appropriate. But I tingled slightly as he repeated that phrase, “by the skin of our teeth”. I was just 14, and it had never struck me that “civilisation” might be such a fragile thing, still less that it might be possible to trace a history of European culture, as Clark was to do, in 13 parts, from the early middle ages to the 20th century.

A few years later, now more a devotee of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (a TV series and book devised in hostile reaction to Civilisation), I began to feel decidedly uncomfortable with Clark’s patrician self-confidence and the “great man” approach to art history – one damn genius after the next – that ran through the series. I was very doubtful, too, about the image of wild barbarians at the gates that Clark conjured up in that first episode: it was as crude an oversimplification of barbarism as his dreamy notion of ideal perfection was an oversimplification of classicism. Nonetheless,Civilisation had opened my eyes, and those of many others; not only visually stunning, it had shown us that there was something in art and architecture that was worth talking, and arguing, about.

more here.

Whose life is it anyway? Novelists have their say on cultural appropriation

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

KamilaOne of the novels I love is Peter Hobbs’s In the Orchard, the Swallows. It’s set entirely in the north of Pakistan – and is beautiful and true (a better word than “authentic”). If anyone tried to dispute Hobbs’s right to have written that book (and I should say, every Pakistani I know who has read it has expressed only admiration), I would be the first in line to defend him, and it. But the point about the book is that it’s wonderfully and sensitively written; it has no interest in peddling stereotypes, or making great claims about the place in which it’s located; there is no whiff of arrogance or entitlement. I don’t know what went on in Hobbs’s mind when he wrote it but I feel fairly confident it wasn’t: “How dare anyone dispute my right to write this?”

In fact, if you do start with an attitude that fails to understand that there are very powerful reasons for people to dispute your right to tell a story – reasons that stem from historical, political or social imbalances, you’ve already failed to understand the place and people who you purport to want to write about. That’s a pretty lousy beginning, and I wouldn’t want to read the fiction that comes out of it. Far better to understand the reasons, and perhaps even use those reasons as a way into character and story. So by all means, let’s have a broadening of the imagination. That doesn’t mean you have to leave the patch of ground on which you live – but it would be helpful if you looked at who else is on that patch of ground with you. To continually return to the same subset of humanity, and declare that there is no one else who imaginatively engages you or who you know how to imaginatively engage with, strikes me as one of the most dispiriting things a writer can say. In short: don’t set boundaries around your imagination. But don’t be lazy or presumptuous in your writing either. Not for reasons of “political correctness”, but for reasons of good fiction.

More here.

How Donald Trump Set Off a Civil War within the right-wing media

Robert Draper in The New York Times:

AnnWhen Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015, the part of his announcement speech that most clearly foreshadowed the campaign to come had to do with immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he told the crowd at Trump Tower. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” The line struck Sykes as awfully familiar when he heard it. A month before, he had run a segment with Ann Coulter, who had just published her 11th book, an anti-immigration screed titled “¡Adios, America!” Sykes was well aware of Coulter’s views, but he was taken aback when she began a riff on Mexican rapists surging into the United States (a subject that takes up an entire chapter of “¡Adios, America!”). “I remember looking at my producer and going, ‘Wow, this is rather extraordinary,’ ” he told me. “When Trump used that line, I instantly recognized it as Ann Coulter’s.”

In fact, Corey Lewandowski had reached out to Coulter for advice in the run-up to Trump’s announcement speech. The address Trump delivered on June 16 bore no resemblance to his prepared text, which contained a mere two sentences about immigration. Instead, he ad-libbed what Coulter today calls “the Mexican rapist speech that won my heart.” When Trump’s remarks provoked fury, Lewandowski called Coulter for backup. Three days later, she went on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” and, amid shrieks of laughter from the audience, predicted that Trump was the Republican candidate most likely to win the presidency. One evening this past March, Trump received Coulter at Mar-a-Lago, his estate-turned-club in Palm Beach. Though in recent years the two had developed a rapport on Twitter, she had met him face to face only once before he declared his candidacy, a lunch date at Trump Tower in 2011. Over lunch, Trump gave Coulter the impression that he had read her books. He also gave her a few items from his wife’s line of costume jewelry and told Coulter, who keeps a house in Palm Beach, that she was welcome to use the pool at Mar-a-Lago anytime.

…Still, she has become the Trump campaign’s most unrepentant brawler. When Khzir Khan, the Pakistani-American father of a U.S. Army captain who was killed in combat in Iraq, spoke critically of Trump at the Democratic National Convention, Coulter wrote on Twitter: “You know what this convention really needed: An angry Muslim with a thick accent like Fareed Zacaria[sic].” That tweet provoked disgust from fellow conservatives, among them Erick Erickson, who tweeted: “What a terrible thing to say about a man whose son died for this country.”

More here.

Saturday Poem

For My Sister Molly
Who In The Fifties

Once made a fairy rooster from
Mashed potatoes
Whose eyes I forget
But green onions were his tail
And his two legs were carrot sticks
A tomato slice his crown.
Who came home on vacation
When the sun was hot
and cooked
and cleaned
And minded least of all
The children’s questions
A million or more
Pouring in on her
Who had been to school
And knew (and told us too) that certain
Words were no longer good
And taught me not to say us for we
No matter what “Sonny said” up the
road.

For My Sister Molly Who In The Fifties

Knew Hamlet well and read into the night
And coached me in my songs of Africa
A continent I never knew
But learned to love
Because “they” she said could carry
A tune
And spoke in accents never heard
In Eatonton.
Who read from Prose and Poetry
And loved to read “Sam McGee from Tennessee”
On nights the fire was burning low
And Christmas wrapped in angel hair
And I for one prayed for snow.

Read more »