Some Blind Alleys is going into semi-hibernation from now until January, 2010. During this time I’ll be accepting and reading submissions, and checking online bookings for the CW1 course that starts Wednesday, February 17.
Have a nice Christmas.
Monthly Archive for December, 2009
Keith Payne’s translation of Víctor Balcells Matas’s new short story, “A natural history of instantaneous seduction” is something I hope every fan of this site will read, not only because it’s a great translation, but because it’s a fantastic story by a writer I hope we’ll hear more about soon, and its publication here, I think, is a great example of what Some Blind Alleys can accomplish as a journal.
Many of the authors translated on Some Blind Alleys are long dead. As a result, I rarely say anything about the author. I give the byline and bio line to the translator. In this case, that’s Keith Payne, an Irish poet and translator living in Salamanca.
Víctor, who I think is a seriously talented fiction writer, is not long dead, not famous, not even famously obscure, so I want to say a little bit about him while his story holds the top spot in the main column. He’s twenty-four years old (born in Barcelona in 1985), living and working in Spain, and awaiting publication of his first book, Yo mataré monstruos por ti (I will kill monsters for you), next year.
Keith Payne’s translation of Víctor’s story “First Love” was a finalist for the Some Blind Alleys Writing Competition.
If you read Spanish, you can check out his blog here: www.huesosdesepia.blogspot.com.
Brooding clouds in the sky over Compañía Street. A street like a flexed arm, but the blow never arrives. I wandered into Víctor Jara’s bookshop, undefiled, but possessed by the Dionysian spirit. It was just what I was waiting for, just what my life needed: a hint of inebriation, a touch of madness, action. I wanted risk in every movement, knowing that in Greek, to seduce also means to destroy. I sought destruction. I made my way to the poetry section and stopped beside a volume by Pascoli. Take from each thing the smile and the tear, says Pascoli. I closed this book and took another, something more du jour, from Michaux: Man needs a landscape within which to rage. And then another, from the poet Alberto Santamaría: When I came down, I hardly knew where my body led me. Half beaten and exhausted from these truths I took down a book from Calasso: The Dionysian phallus is a hallucinogen, we know nothing of the fidelity to cultivation and only copulate in the wild woods. Finally I tired of poetry’s instruction. I heaped all the books onto a funeral mound fancying that by osmosis Pascoli would be Michaux, and Michaux Calasso, and vice-versa: Santamaría Pascoli, and Michaux Santamaría and like this agitating all the poetry until it formed a single compendium of verse that would say everything and then I thought: now that I have read these books I need to live some of what they say.
Continue reading ‘A natural history of instantaneous seduction, by Víctor Balcells Matas’
Some of these aren’t exactly out today, but they’re recent enough. December/newest issues of the Dublin Review, Circa, Supermassiveblackhole, and the Journal of Music are all available.
What are these imperious sympathies? How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proved unkind. I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind; I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of adhesion, made me feel that I was still a part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself—not, perhaps, for the reflection has been carried very far, by snapping the thread of an existence, which loses its charms in proportion as the cruel experience of life stops or poisons the current of the heart. Futurity, what hast thou not to give to those who know that there is such a thing as happiness! I speak not of philosophical contentment, though pain has afforded them the strongest conviction of it. – Mary Wollstonecraft
A reader named JM recently contributed some comments to Some Blind Alleys following a post in the From the Editor section in which I stated I was not, as an editor, looking for convoluted, overdecorated essays.
I didn’t mean it as a controversial statement. But as a friend of mine recently said to me at a bar – let’s call him Adrian Duncan – “I fucking hate the online you.” If a friend says this, I guess a lot of strangers feel the same.
JM stated: “I can’t stand by and let one approach be effectively described as tough and durable and the other in comparison as wilting and ineffectual. It just won’t do.”
JM also pointed to the fact that biases are emerging in SBA, and that I should acknowledge the fact that this is a preference on my part, and not the way of the world. She has “noticed a studied indifference and at times, even the hint of a sneer towards the poetic, the musical, the intellectually ‘wrought’.”
The risk, she argued, is that “there is as much a danger of barking as of singing.”
It would take a long time to address even these few, small points; it would take, in fact, the entire lifetime of this journal (which will be mercifully short, I promise) to express my aspiration toward variety, and my worry – which is a very real possibility – that it will descend into pattern and monotony.
The idea that there is one type of writing that is tough and durable and another that is wilting and ineffectual is something I consider to be true (though I would say there are many other types of writing as well), but this has nothing to do, for me, with style.
I have seen writers – particularly of the perpetually emerging type – often define themselves by their style instead of what they are saying. They call their style poetic or musical. There is a certain defensiveness I’ve noticed in many such writers, and preciousness about edits and criticism they would scorn in others yet tolerate unconsciously in themselves.
I want to say that I am a big fan of what one might call poetic or musical prose – though in actual fact I think prose itself is not a pejorative term, and therefore does not need qualifiers to lift it to the level of art.
I am a big fan of Flaubert, Woolf, Proust, Faulkner. These are hardly minimalists. These are hardly barkers. I accept, wholeheartedly, that I am not publishing Flaubert or Proust or Woolf on SBA. I’m merely trying to answer an accusation that my personal taste is leading to bias.
I feel people have natural writing voices. I have, on more than several occasions, received a badly overwritten essay and rejected it because I could not say what it was about, only to receive a tour-de-force email afterward explaining what it was about – in a writing voice that was individual, honest, and, by virtue of its plainness, singing, so to speak. It had style, and that style belonged to the writer.
This suggests to me that a writer is talented, but when she sits down at a desk, she suddenly puts on a funny hat and funny clothes and starts speaking in an accent that does not belong to her.
When you ask why she does this, she might answer: because I want to sound unique. But she has completely homogenized herself into stereotype.
The more a good writer starts to sound like him or herself, the more he or she stops sounding like other people. If your voice is naturally musical (Flaubert, Woolf), you’ll write that way. If it shouts (Nietzsche, Miller, Cioran), you’ll write that way. If it’s detached and witty and intellectual (Montaigne, Baldwin), etc., etc., etc.
But underneath all these masters is, first and foremost, content. They’ve got something interesting to say.
Here at Some Blind Alleys, I do my best to maintain individuality in voice, but I do quite a bit of editing. Enthusiastic edits, for me anyway, indicate an editor’s interest in what you have to say, and a desire to help you say it in the most essential way possible.
There’s less variety in tone on Some Blind Alleys than I’d like, but I hope very much this is simply a reflection on the diversity of submissions I’ve received, and not a reflection of my bias. I have no time to individually commission essays, which is why I spend such a huge amount of time on this column asking for them.
I’m reading a memoir I’ll be reviewing shortly – a book by a well-known author who led an interesting life, creatively and sexually, in New York in the 1960s and ’70s. I’m enjoying the book, but I’m not a reader of contemporary memoir, and I’m struck by the difference between this book and what I know as autobiography.
The only contemporary memoir I read before this one was James Salter’s Burning the Days, which was excellent. The other memoirs I know of are those whose authors were subsequently exposed as liars. And I never read them.
I have glanced through, on a dozen occasions, books of collected essays by fiction writers – efforts at cultural intellectualism to break the monotony (theirs and ours) of novel-writing, and found them to be hit or miss.
There have been a few observations and rants in this column about the novel’s irrelevance and the rise of nonfiction. Reading the book I am now, I can see what makes people so suspicious about these claims.
What I know as autobiography began with The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Philip Lopate. I had never in my life considered nonfiction before buying this book, because I felt – I presumed – that fiction was a more worthy literary art form.
When I refer to things like courageous writing, I’m not referring to confessional or gossipy memoirs, or light recollections of an interesting period of one’s life: I’m talking about the best essays in Lopate’s anthology (note: avoid the last few). If you know somebody who wants to write, buy them this book for Christmas.
Every month, the Irish Film Institute (newly renovated) hosts a Stranger than Fiction documentary presentation. Tonight it’s Crude, by Joe Berlinger, about the lawsuit against Chevron by the indigenous peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon jungle.
From the IFI website:
Crude is a real-life high-stakes legal drama, set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. The landmark case takes place in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, pitting colonial rainforest dwellers against the U.S. oil giant Chevron. The plaintiffs claim that the company spent three decades systematically contaminating one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth.
Screening is tonight (Monday) at 18.30.
Artist’s note: The installation Estranged Relations was inspired by the an area of Swedish bourgeois villas, in Helsinki, that had been left in ruin since the 1940s, called Kruununvuori. The piece consists of an assemblage of materials collected from the site, combined with a photo of a hallway, melted together with a projected still image, blurring the lines of representation.
(Images follow)
Lágrimas De Eros (Tears of Eros) at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, is an exhibition of the erotic in art spanning five centuries. The title comes from George Bataille’s eponymous book Les Larmes d’Éros, 1961, where Bataille argues for the petit mort of the orgasm, the foretaste of the erotic in death.
The exhibition moves you through stages of eroticism sequentially, as a narrative: “innocence to temptation, temptation to the torment of passion, ending in atonement and death.”
This sequence moves room by room through depictions of the birth of Venus; Eve; sirens, femme fatales and nymphets; the temptation of Saint Anthony; the agony of Saint Sebastian; Andromeda; the Kiss, then closes with three videos by Bill Viola which are a heavy handed attempt at “cleansing.” They portray naked couples either underwater or entering and exiting a cascade of water; think John and Yoko under a waterfall.
Room after room of naked women gaze at you – oils, sketches, pastels and prints of lips, teeth, breasts and thighs. The exhibition suggests that the gaze is the cohesion of the erotic and death. Many of the pieces are attempts at capturing just that gaze, which may be no more than an objectified male fantasy mythologized through Eros and reflected back to him.
Not for Picasso in this case at least. His sketch Painter in a Shawl Drawing his Model at the Maison Tellier (1970) shows a woman with legs parted, exposing her vagina for the many-headed man ogling her. It is full of eyes and cocks, phallic-knobbed walking sticks, bulging codpieces and straining groins.
Throughout are many revisitations to classic myths and paintings. Most successful among them is Tom Hunter’s Reservoir #1. Recalling JW Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs, Hunter’s four bare-chested women stand in algae-covered water up to their hips. Behind is a low-slung red-bricked bridge, where you could imagine a canal barge puttering beneath through post-industrial England. One of them wears a nose ring; she has a decorated dreadlock. The women gaze at the man on the bank, whose back faces the camera. He is touching the hand of one of them, reaching out to her, or is she reaching out to him? Behind a clump of grass and wildflowers, a young cupid stares straight into the camera, at you.
The final painting of the exhibition is well placed. It is Margitte’s Les Amants. A couple, their heads side by side, are covered by individual white cloths. They are eyeless – starving you of the erotic gaze, of any gaze within which to locate yourself, yet beneath the cloth you know she is looking straight at you. Why are they cut off from us? Are they doomed to live out, alone, an existence that is ineffable? Or, united by concealment from us, perhaps it is the case as stated by the Gaughin woodcut in an earlier room, Be in Love and You’ll be Happy. -Keith Payne
