Writing Sunday

 I started off trying to get my leg of lamb into my crock pot. It will go in – boneless. I better get a week out of this. I would say I was living high on the hog, except there is no hog.

This is the kind of thing that tempts my imagination:

The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell review – the historical novel, subverted 

The Future Future is a slippery book, and the experience of reading it is one of continually attempting to grasp its various meanings and intents. This is, in a way, fitting, because Thirwell’s subject, power, is inherently evasive; he is interested especially in language as an instrument of power that both masks and reveals its machinations. As a friend of Celine’s puts it to her during one of her celebrated soirees: “It looks like a party. But don’t get it twisted. This isn’t a party. This is power, baby.”

At times, this slipperiness can be frustrating, as though Thirlwell is gesturing elegantly but vaguely in the direction of meaning. For all the wildness of the book’s plot, and for all its formal trickery, the prose maintains at all times a wistful distance from the events it narrates. He has an affection for the sort of near-aphorisms – “A legend is a story about the way no world ever realises that it’s surrounded by another world, until it is too late” – that I couldn’t help hearing in the airy tone of an Adam Curtis voiceover.

But despite its artful aloofness and occasional frustrations, Thirlwell’s prose is hypnotic and coolly beautiful. The writing is full of dreamlike leaps, not just at the level of plot, but in its sentences, too. At one point, Celine surveys the aftermath of a forest fire, and we get this darkly gorgeous image: “In the burnt grass, an exposed toad was throbbing hysterically, like a terrified heart.” Elsewhere, there are descriptions that are somehow more poetic for their almost Beckettian refusal of lyricism: “Celine and Lenoir went out walking beside the river. The river was a colour. The sky was another colour too.”

Every Rising Sun by Jamila Ahmed review – a feminist take on One Thousand and One Nights 

Every creative artist knows what it is to work under a deadline, and the harshest deadline of all is presented by one’s own mortality. The quick-witted storyteller of Arabian Nights – or One Thousand and One Nights, which is preferred because several stories originated from beyond the Arab world – responded with creative ingenuity to just that predicament. It has probably inspired more translations, retellings and adaptations across cultures, generations and genres than any other text. It has influenced the works of Leo Tolstoy and Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Proust and Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter and AS Byatt, and many more beyond the western canon.

Each new version seeks to do something different for its readership in terms of outright entertainment, literary craft, aesthetic pleasure and historical revisionism. Some succeed on some of those levels, but it is rare to find a rendition that, quite breathtakingly, comes close to doing it all. The last such work was a translation by Yasmin Seale – the only female translator of this text – who finally gave us a version without the orientalism, racism and sexism. Every Rising Sun, a novelised adaptation by Jamila Ahmed, continues what Seale began. A scholar of medieval Islamic history, Ahmed also adds historical context to her debut work.

***

Revisionist retellings of literary classics typically have sociological aims. Sometimes, they are intended to help us appreciate a culture differently. Sometimes, they seek to give voice to those who were never allowed voices. And, sometimes, they hope to fill the gaps and omissions in history. Ahmed’s lyrically imaginative evaluation of a much-storied, still-contested historical and literary past aims to do all of the above. By foregrounding Shaherazade’s life and allowing her an entirely different ending, Ahmed makes the tales more resonant with meaning and emotion than ever.

In keeping with a popular numerical trope of folklore, here are this novel’s three notable literary feats. The first is in how Ahmed’s Shaherazade circumvents the inflexible binary codes of her time. Her worlds of wish fulfilment enable more acts of transformation for the girls and women as they adventure beyond their restricted milieus and overcome obstacles. It is just as enthralling to read how these stories of bold young women captivate her listeners – who are mostly powerful men – and influence their course, altering decisions and actions. As Shaherazade reminds them: “think of the other women, khatuns and queens and sultanas and wives, who have endless patience to rightly guide their men, to save them from themselves, and who do it unseen”.

For Shaherazade, stories are tools and weapons, means of bartering and bargaining, and emblems of hope and redemption. As her journey takes her further into uncharted territories and becomes more conflicted, the girls and women in her stories also take on more outlandish challenges. She realises that “no matter how I die – a husband’s sword, a Frankish mace, an Oghuz arrow, or illness and old age with no renown – I will live in the annals of history, a woman … who dared enter the world of men.” This interlocking, layered architecture in which Shaherazade’s art imitates her life, and vice versa, is Ahmed’s second literary feat.

Now for my own stuff.

6:49 AM

I started on “Road Tripping”, I crashed. Since I was listening to KDHX, I checked my email, added a bit to one post, and then I turned to updating this one:

Chrissie Hynde: ‘I’m more relaxed now. Ageing is like being a pothead again’ - intelligence, integrity, Chrissie.........

To the prosaic: Why the US will break out first from the low-growth trap

 Krishna Guha, an economist at the investment bank Evercore, has an interesting take on what’s happening. He says the world’s biggest economy has been experiencing a rolling recession in which various sectors – housing, IT, manufacturing, services – suffer a downturn one at a time, but without the economy as a whole going backwards.

“Housing and tech went into recession first but are now troughing and rebounding, respectively. We are in the manufacturing recession, this could trough in coming months.

“By the fourth quarter, services should slip below trend as households exhaust excess savings and Fed tightening bites. But services rarely turn negative and if by then housing/manufacturing have floored, and firms hoard labour, the economy might still grow at a subdued pace.”

But the real story – the second and bigger point – is that it doesn’t really matter all that much whether the big developed economies have a soft, bumpy or hard landing. The so far unsolved question is why their collective performance has been so poor for so long, going all the way back to the financial crisis 15 years ago.

 Time to introduce the lamb to the crockpot.

9:31

Plugging along. I got distracted a little by watching the end of Leaving Las Vegas. Transistor Sister #174 July 22, 2023 has been my soundtrack for the past few hours. The lamb is stewing. I am about to head out for McClure's and supplies. I have been eschewing Firefox for Chrome; music plays better on Chrome.

The weekly newsletter is out to my 2 subscribers.

12:34 PM

I have spent almost the whole day re-writing the Paris section of “Road Tripping.” No, I have not spent every moment here in front of the computer. I did eat and shower. But I feel a bit woozy, brain pan feels full of sludge. Thing is, it not true rewrite. I have been swapping in stretches from the older version. What has taken so long is the outright changes and the parts swapped in – I put the ghost discussion from the last section in here. Just wanted to say this to somebody.

 

Thanks for reading.

 

I'm off to McClure's for smokes and then bed. I can barely keep my eyes open. 

 

The lamb turned out quite nice.

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