Cat Power!

We had another hard frost this morning.

I spent some time this morning writing and reading my email.

I did catch the 9:45 bus, and went off to Payless. I came back here, and caught another bus down to the south Walmart. Work gave me a gift card, and I used it. No Minnetrista. No visiting CC.

The night was spent working on the blog. I did not touch a single of page of my pretrial detention journal. 

I watched Blue Beetle. It was not terrible, and was very good when it dealt with the family. 

Now it is midnight, and I am going to bed. Church tomorrow.

 I recommend Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert; The Pitchfork Review is here, and I think spot on.

All Classics Are Funny states its thesis as “If it isn’t hilarious, do you really think anyone is going to be reading it in ten thousand years? I didn’t think so.” It opens with this supporting example:

THE MOST FAMOUS OPENING LINE in American literature is also one of the silliest. “Call me Ishmael,” says a New England deckhand. That is a joke. Imagine Good Will Hunting opening with an establishing shot of Matt Damon’s character hammering a nail and saying to the viewer, “Call me Socrates.” There might be some symbolic meaning behind “Socrates,” an egghead who famously knows more than others because he understands he knows nothing. But the Boston accent would still boil “Sah-craw-tees” to a delightful pulp. The dissonance in Melville’s opener is the same, and it’s not a one-off. The great American novel, Moby-Dick embodies several narrative forms, but the one it begins with is comedy.

And further down has this:

War and Peace might be the most famous novel of all time, but not enough people hear about the bear. Let the people know about the bear! Given the austere reputation of the novel, it’s hard to avoid the assumption that War and Peace is good in a capital-G sense—that is, Good for you. Why all the fuss otherwise? And if it’s not a kind of narrative vegetable, then perhaps it’s a kind of literary strongman: War and Peace wants to conquer you, to force you into obeisance by sheer, magnificent word count. Add in the consequences of the high-minded adaptations that have defined War and Peace in the public imagination, and you end up with the novel as a cultural palimpsest of itself. By abstraction, by reputation, by mediation, readers believe they know War and Peace without ever having to open War and Peace, and one of the main things they know is that it’s a humorless book.

Worth reading if you are serious about books or writing or both.

CC keeps popping up in my thoughts. Today, while out and about, I talked myself out of going by and finding out what is going on with her. She has set her phone up so incoming calls go to a voicemail that is not set up. We parted ways two months on a sour note from both of us. What has bothered is this: if I am to forgive her trespasses against me, does that mean I must associate with her still? Put another way: have I really forgiven her, if I refuse to associate with her? When I came back today I read today's Daily Reflection from Sister Vassa, PUTTING FIRST THINGS FIRST, wherein I found a solution to my problem. No going back to someone who sees any damage done on the way to her own ends as justified by meeting her needs.

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4:24 PM

I like Sonic Youth, but never really followed the band. I do know enough to pay attention to him, even more after reading the interview Thurston Moore Looks Back on 30 Years of Sonic Youth. Which includes this bit for any writers reading this blog:

RK: What was the intent behind Sonic Life?

TM: For me, writing is such a joy and I’ve always thought of myself as a writer. I’ve published and edited and written poetry for years—I published a poetry journal; I teach a writing class at Naropa University. I’ve always been very engaged with literature, but it’s never had the profile of what I do with music, obviously. I always harbored a desire to write a book-length text. I knew the easiest device was to write a memoir at this point. It was to be mostly about music essaying within the confines of a memoir. It allowed me to actually just write.

I knew that I wanted to write this book just to be in the joy of writing and get into the art of writing. Everything about it—even getting into a whole year of editing—I enjoyed that immensely. The practice of editing a long manuscript was as joyful as it was writing it. The construction of the book, the publishing of it—these are all things I really love. For me, that was pretty much how I wanted to get my feet wet with all this.

Another piece from The Millions caught my attention, being about history: Éric Vuillard Is Rewriting the Writing of History.

The decorated French writer Éric Vuillard is attempting something audacious: to rewrite the way history gets written. This has won him prizes and plaudits and an international readership. But not everyone is thrilled.

***

Which brings us to the people who are not thrilled by Vuillard’s enterprise. His previous book, The Order of the Day, won France’s prestigious Goncourt Prize. That book focused on two events during the rise of Nazi Germany: a 1933 meeting at which newly elected Adolf Hitler shakes down a gathering of rich bankers and industrialists for money to fund his dream; and Germany’s occupation of Austria in 1938. In this book, as in An Honorable Exit, Vuilllard occasionally slips into the minds of his subjects, the way novelists do. For instance, there’s an episode when the Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg is summoned to Hitler’s alpine chalet, where he’ll get bullied into agreeing to put Austrian Nazis in charge of the country. As his car climbs toward the chalet, Schuschnigg’s anxiety climbs with it. Once again, Vuillard gives us the chancellor’s thoughts: “The border lay just ahead, and Schuschnigg was suddenly seized by apprehension. He felt as if the truth was just beyond his grasp.”mu

This bleeding of fictional techniques into a historical narrative did not sit well with Robert O. Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia who specializes in modern European history. “When Vuillard also tells us what participants in these events were thinking, he resorts inevitably to fiction…,” Paxton wrote in his review of The Order of the Day in the December 6, 2018 issue of The New York Review of Books.  “Unfortunately we can’t tell which parts of the text are his creations, which rely on period archives, and which come from memoirs written in afterthought. He has chosen his details not for their explicative value but for their revelation of human folly.” Paxton acknowledges that Vuillard has indeed “done some homework and his narratives are generally accurate, but he likes to heighten the impression of absurdity[….] Vuillard’s delight in irony seems to have outweighed exactitude.”

Or has it actually heightened exactitude? I go back to Vuillard’s suggestion that rebaptizing the Battle of Cao Bang as “The Battle for the Pewter Mining Company of Cao Bang” would confer on it its “true importance.” This reveals both his delight in irony and his relentless quest for exactitude. The two are not always mutually exclusive; they can be symbiotic. 

I would think if we know the method, then we can use it to evaluate the results. This is not new — in my opinion — the ancient Greek and Roman historians were not exactly known for quoting from the archives.

While in prison, I read a short story and a novel by AS Byatt. I had heard of Possession, but neither read the novel nor saw the movie. Today the news is that Byatt died: AS Byatt: a life defined by literature.

Her fiction arrived in a literary landscape still overshadowed by the angry young men of the 1950s – Golding, Sillitoe – and then had to compete in one dominated by the noisy young men of the 70s and 80s (Amis, McEwan, Barnes et al). “I think we’ve had rather too much dirt rather than not enough,” she remarked with typical outspokenness at the time. “These up-and-coming brash young men poncing about, waving their blood and thunder and condoms!” Her own touchstones were Iris Murdoch and Angela Carter. She was utterly unmoved by literary fashions, daring to pronounce the then Orange – now Women’s – prize “sexist”, and called Harry Potter “infantile” in the New York Times in 2003. But she was warmly supportive of inventive new talents she felt deserved more attention, such as Lawrence Norfolk, Adam Thirlwell and Ali Smith. As Alan Hollinghurst says: “She was a great encourager to me and many other younger writers back in the 1980s and 90s.”

I also learned from The Guardian's ‘This might be the last thing I ever write’: Paul Auster on cancer, connection and the fallacy of closure how Paul Auster is ill and done with novels; another writer I got around to reading thanks to prison. I agree with what he says about closure:

In a recent interview, Auster described the American obsession with “closure” as being “the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of. When someone who is central to your life dies, a part of you dies as well. It’s not simple, you never get over it. You learn to live with it, I suppose. But something is ripped out of you and I wanted to explore all that.” In Baumgartner, Sy reflects for a long time on phantom limb syndrome, describing himself as “a human stump” and yet the “missing limbs are still there, and they still hurt, hurt so much that he sometimes feels his body is about to catch fire and consume him on the spot”.

The cat showed up — he has been camping out next door. Right now he is devouring a can of cat food. I am almost out of smokes. I have been writing up blog posts, including this one for several hours now, and downloading more music. I have one more long post I want done before I get any further. The email is down to 17 emails!

 6:57

And I will close with this bit of inspirational song:

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