Prodigiously alive

When Michel Leiris encountered the work of Alberto Giacometti -- and wrote the first ever piece about this then still relatively unknown sculptor in the journal Documents in 1929 -- he immediately recognised the 'tender sphinx':

One finds some objects (paintings or sculptures) capable of responding more or less to the exigencies of true fetishism, to the love of ourselves, projected from the inside out and clothed in a solid carapace which imprisons it within the limits of a precise thing and situates it, like a  piece of furniture of which we can make use in the vast strange chamber we call space...like the true fetishes which one can idolize (those which resemble us and are the objective form of our desire), prodigiously alive.... the beautiful expression of that emotional ambivalence, the tender sphinx that one always nourishes more or less secretly, at the center of oneself.

Of course, I'm relying here on Laurie Wilson for this piece of Leiris (pp. 95-96). Why is it that the journal, Documents, is so impossible to find, either in libraries nearby or the long white depth of the web?

The sentences frighten us

When we have sentences in our heads we still can't be certain of being able to get them down on paper, I thought. The sentences frighten us; first the idea frightens us, then the sentence, then the thought that we may no longer have the ideas in our heads when we want to write it down. Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is to write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

Thomas Bernhard, Concrete

And what's more, Rudolph, when we write other people's sentences down, we feel calm for that moment, but it's only a very brief respite.

An ever-ready faculty of enthusiasm

To George Sand who, in her letter to Flaubert, had predicted that Sainte-Beuve would be 'the last of the critics' -- the 'others' being 'either artists or idiots' -- Flaubert wrote on 2 February 1869:

You spoke of criticism in your last letter, saying it will soon disappear. I think, on the contrary, that it's only beginning. The trend is the opposite of what it used to be, that's all. (In the days of La Harpe, critics were grammarians; in the days of Sainte-Beuve and Taine they're historians.) When will they be artists, only artists, but real artists? Where have you ever seen a piece of criticism that is concerned, intensely concerned, with the work in itself? The setting in which was produced and the circumstances that occasioned it are very closely analyzed. But the inner poetics that brought it into being? Its composition? Its style? The author's point of view? Never.

Such criticism as that would require great imagination and great goodwill. I mean an ever-ready faculty of enthusiasm. And then taste -- a quality rare even among the best, so very rare that it is no longer even mentioned.

What infuriates me daily is to see a masterpiece and a disgrace put on the same level. They put down the mighty, and exalt those of low degree. Nothing could be more stupid or immoral.

He might have been writing only yesterday.

Something of a throwback to the eighteenth century literary salon

I move now from the very tangible livre de poche of the wonderfully weird to a soon-to-be expansive virtual literary salon for all minds that have grown irritated with meek or sycophantic reviewing -- or indeed the ubiquity of satiny promotional shots of writers positioned against bookcases that the biographical piece, which passes for a review, only uses as a visual metonym for assumed writerly credentials (unless an image of a wharf and a turbulent, lived-through sky can do it instead): I refer to the new countering energy of Sydney Review of Books.

One of the most important nooks in this salon is Critic Watch. Here, after a fascinating discussion of the recent reactions to the problem of faint-hearted reviewing, both in Australia and elsewhere, Ben Etherington analyses the puzzling silences and concurrences of 'the Anna Funder phenomenon' in his provocatively titled piece 'The Brain Feign'. He then goes on to respond to what he calls the 'tautology of public and critical opinion', where 'the critics are right because the public are buying the book, the public are right because the critics are recommending it', with a rallying cry that is not so much aimed at the critics themselves but at those of us with a sharp observation about them we might want to share:

What is to be done? The decline polemic is supposed to end with a witty but rousing call for unyieldingly rigorous, critical criticism. In Faint Praise, Gaile Poole suggests that the decline polemic might just be another part of the game:

The venom. The scorn. That asymptotic decline! The charges are so excessive, so extravagant, they rest so shakily on the myth of a Golden Age of reviewing that clearly never existed that it’s tempting to dismiss them as typical publishing fare.

Anyway, another kick up the bum seems pointless when the problem appears to be structural, particularly at the juncture of print’s decline and the self-promotion attending so much activity online.

The other solution has been to establish a new forum for the kind of criticism that the critical critic would like to see. Hardwick’s venom helped to beget the New York Review of Books, which would in turn beget the London Review of Books during a journalists’ strike. Perhaps. But these periodicals draw on an international cosmopolitan elite fanning out from those two most cosmopolitan of cities, both with a plethora of super-elite universities nearby. Such models seem an unlikely panacea for the Australian field.

I would like to make a different suggestion, and one that does not rely on a spontaneous eruption of critical rigour, nor on creating a Golden Forum. And the model is a local one: the ABC’s Media Watch. It is a wonderful mechanism, not just because it has an unyielding sense of journalistic standards and ethics, and pursues corruption to its inevitable source in journalism’s ever-intensifying commodity character. One just as often tunes in to find out what has been in the news, because it can be more informative, and certainly cathartic, to see somebody filtering the sewage than to plunge in oneself. (Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show plays a somewhat similar role for the 24-hour news cycle in the United States.) What is needed, then, is ‘Critic Watch’. The tasks and ethics of watching criticism would be somewhat different, though. Certainly the ‘invidious backscratching’ would need to be exposed – it seems there is a lot of it around. Its essential function, however, would be to interrogate judgements of taste and the way such conspicuous acts of discrimination shape the literary field. ‘Critic Watch’ would read criticism against its critical object, and consider the plausibility of the judgements being made. It would be something of a throwback to the eighteenth century literary salon and the practice of aesthetic disputation. Not only would critics need to defend their professional integrity, they would need to defend their taste.

Read slowly to avoid complications

As publishers keep pressing on us taller, fatter and wider editions of books that might once have fit in our bookcases but now have to be shoved in side-on so that the bubble-wrap feel-it-for-yourself cover of Michel Houellebecq's latest novel can only been known as Territory -- and that visible only because its neighbours happen to be older and smaller upright volumes -- it is a wonderful thing to come across a magazine of weird literature, as the editors call it, which could be tucked in on any part of your person or your house or flat, no matter how small. It is a marvel, too, because nearly every page in this tiny tome has something that you might want to tear out and affix to the cover of a notebook or the wall beside your desk. Since most of the pieces of 'words', 'flash', art, 'illiterature' and more -- the term 'poetry' is eschewed -- could roll into the pit of your palm, they tempt the light-fingered and those whose art or word-making relies on springing from something lively. A 'Disclaimer' near the beginning of theNewerYork reads: '[Read slowly to avoid complications. You won't like some of this work.]' and then some erasures. I won't try to reproduce the erasures.

Gone in the grate

The central motif of Geordie Williamson's The Burning Library: Our Great Novelists Lost and Found -- Walter Benjamin's idea of the lasting work of art as a slow-burning fuse, or as Williamson has it,  works that continue to glow even as the remnants of more brightly flaring books have 'gone in the grate' -- is actually a melancholy one. As I read this book I could see these glowing works staring without blinking from the dusty coal hearth in our dining room, behind the electric column heater that we never put away as Sydney's weather always changes (and our house is too small -- there is nowhere to put it). Geordie Williamson had hunted out these still warm books in second hand shops, the bookcases of friends and the online market. I imagine they had the smell and toasted edges of the David Foster essay collections I once found in a charity shop in Adaminaby. That said, many of my favourite Australian novels are in this kind of shape, from the unspeakably worn greasy cover of Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children to the multiply broken backed Angus and Robertson editions of John Shaw Neilson's poems and Joseph Furphy's Such is Life. Such is Life indeed.

In his introduction, Williamson quotes from David Ireland's 1979 novel, A Woman of the Future:

It is a continent of dreams we inhabit, a waiting continent. All who have set foot in its bush, its lonely places, know that silence. The continent is dreaming. We have felt it and been afraid...and retired to the outer rim.

While this idea of the continent dreaming has been used so often in the last few decades, and in such a confusion of hurried misappropriation -- in itself suggestive of the very fear that Ireland describes -- it's impossible not to recognise, immediately, the immense complexity of otherness that we continue to avoid.

Williamson adds:

The outer rim is a pretty good description of where we perch today. Some will claim that this retirement is more conscious than fearful, a principled turning away from the centre [....] From where I'm standing, though, in the thick of an intense engagement with a number of neglected Australian authors, it looks more like a loss of nerve.

While Australia, with our penny-a-piece language and the disconcerting similarity, to so many in the northern hemisphere, of our rows of fast food outlets and lowering furniture stores and kitchen showrooms -- along with the apparent absence of successfully titular castles, or at least indigenous multinational brands -- while this country might be more prone to a bargain basement attitude to book production, I found it hard not to think, as I followed Williamson's argument, that he was describing what was happening to Anglophone fiction in every country where it struggles to keep roots in any kind of soil. The difference, perhaps, is that the sheer number of irretrievable cultural and human losses, and the press of the unknown millennia that we feel in every part of this land -- that Delia Falconer describes in such evocative detail in her book on Sydney -- is often balanced by only the slightest or most smugly meaningful of publications and a suspiciously vigorous obsession with real estate.

An edited version of Williamson's introduction can be found here (if this link won't let you read the whole piece, try googling it). Interestingly, in the online edited piece the brief bright book has gone cold in the grate; in Williamson's book, as I read it, it has slipped through the teeth and lies thin and lost in the ash.

In fact depth does not matter

It is through our writing that we see this a little more clearly, or so we kid ourselves, as Bernhard's Rudolph observes:

I might call myself relatively independent. But shackled and imprisoned like everybody else. Impelled by disgust rather than possessed by curiosity. We always spoke of clarity of mind, but never had it. I don't know where I got this sentence from, perhaps from myself, but I've read it somewhere. Perhaps it will turn up among my notes sometime. We say notes to avoid embarrassment, although we secretly believe that these sentences which we blushingly call notes are really more than that. But we believe the same of everything to do with ourselves. This is how we swing ourselves over the abyss, not knowing how deep it is. And in fact the depth does not matter if everybody falls to his death, which we know to be the case. (Concrete)

Rudolph also reflects on some of the words his maternal grandfather hated or loved. 'Thought process' was an expression that he hated; 'cacophony' one that he loved.