A terrific and hilarious book review by a guy I attended the graduate program in writing at LSU with – Sam Anderson. Back then he was just funnier and smarter than everybody. Now he’s one of the most infamous book critics in America. And an essayist.
By now, everybody has heard about Helene Hegemann, the seventeen-year-old German who has finally made people wonder whether “mixing” in literature is artistically viable.
And if you have not, it’s only because literature has become such a boring topic that not even a major literary scandal – or at least what seems like a scandal to us English-speakers – registers.
What annoys us least about this is that somebody has stolen passages from another book. What annoys us most about it is that a seventeen-year-old is getting published and winning prizes when we can’t even get our fabulous story about alienation published in a literary journal nobody reads.
I, for one, like the idea of mixing. I’d mention at the end, in an appendix, who I mixed, but that’s me.
We allow music to be mixed without accusations because we recognize what’s being mixed (i.e. the theft is too blatant to be suspicious) or because we hold, perhaps, a higher estimation of ownership on a pattern of words than a pattern of notes.
Anyway, I hope this girl keeps mixing. And pissing off traditionalists.
This review first appeared in the Irish Times, February 13, 2010.
A literature of real life
GREG BAXTER
Sat, Feb 13, 2010
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto By David Shields Hamish Hamilton, 208pp. £17.99
DAVID SHIELDS’S Reality Hunger: A Manifesto is a frank and articulate expression of frustration with the contemporary literary novel, as well as an inspiring argument in favour of the essay and of radical compression in fiction.
It’s half a dozen other things as well, but it is most coherent and electrifying as a declaration of the rise of autobiography as the most vital and relevant form of writing.
The novels being written by our most recognised authors, the book suggests, and all those who want to be like them, are necessarily “predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless”. The problem isn’t that these novels are good or bad. The problem is that we as a society “can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic form”. Your response to Reality Hunger will largely depend on how true these suppositions sound to you.
Shields’s position is this: it is no longer possible to write a conventional novel that will perform a function as art – that is, to recover the sensation of life as it is lived. We want reality, but literary convention – or the long-uncontested position of the novel at the top of large-scale written endeavour – keeps serving us marionette shows.
“When I read fiction,” he writes, “I keep thinking, Why is this guy talking in these funny voices? Why doesn’t he put down these puppets and say what he wants to say?”
You may find yourself, if you like to write or read novels, quick to disagree. But there’s a twist. Shields, the American author of the New York Times bestseller The Thing About Life is that One Day You’ll Be Dead , did not write Reality Hunger: he assembled it.
The book contains more than 600 numbered passages of varying lengths. Of these, it appears, he’s written about 20. This is not quotation but collage. (There are no quotation marks, and no one is referenced until the appendix.) It’s not a sign of Shields’s abilities or inabilities as a writer – which I admittedly know nothing about – but an attempt at “an evolution beyond narrative”. “Long live the anti-novel, built from scraps,” the book states. And what scraps.
“All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.” That’s Walter Benjamin. “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life.” That’s Viktor Shklovsky. “If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.” Naipaul. And so on, from giants such as Montaigne, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Woolf and Cioran, to contemporary writers including Joan Didion, Geoff Dyer and JM Coetzee, to musicians, artists and film-makers.
Collage, of course, changes the nature of statement. Suddenly, nothing is proclaimed with certainty. Everything is proposed. Collage destroys absolute authority along with the pretence of originality. Rather than absorb or resist an argument, we observe the author exploring his subject.
A note of caution here: sometimes Shields is as satisfied to push us with platitudes as he is to electrify with the unexpected. (He also employs a term worth forever condemning to damnation in hell: the “lyric essay”.)
The book begins: “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time has been an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist considers reality into the work of art.”
On or about these very times we inhabit, something has happened to human imagination. It has changed, and it is never going back. We long, as we always have with art, for risk and immediacy. But artifice no longer satisfies this longing – at least not the artifice proffered by the “run-of-the-mill 400-page page-turner”.
I don’t think the literary novel is dead. I think it’s undead. In order to save it from annihilation we have made it a genre: we have taken our understanding of the word “novel” as a kind of writing with no rules and replaced it with a formula of exactly predictable progressions, illuminations and tragedies. If you’re having trouble figuring out what some character in your new novel is going to do, give me a call. I can tell you. But, more importantly, who cares?
“The world exists. Why recreate it?”
Reality Hunger states: “Autobiography is the lifeblood of art now.” The reason why this is the case is the most compelling and convincing argument in the book: because when all your arrows are spent, “the way to write is to throw your body at the mark”.
Shields’s rhetorical strategy, which is effective, and I would say necessary for a manifesto, is to reinvent literature as a life-or-death crisis. Art has evolved. The evolution of art is a battle that takes place within us. It is a fight not between the forces of convention and innovation but one between artists and reality.
Reality Hunger calls for literature “as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom seeking”, a literature “built entirely out of contemplation and revelation”.
This type of writing – this non-fiction truth-speaking – exists as a compendium of epiphanies; it begins, as Montaigne has told us, with conclusions; in it, the author does not create surrogates for herself. She is herself, or all the selves that she contains. She does not dramatise. She essays.
“What I want to do is take the banality of nonfiction (the literalness of ‘facts’, ‘truth’, ‘reality’), turn that banality inside out, and thereby make nonfiction a staging area . . . for investigating the most serious epistemological questions.”
Had I not, serendipitously, spent the past few years refocusing my attention, as a reader, on great nonfiction, classical and modern – partly out of disenchantment with contemporary fiction but also out of a growing astonishment at the urgency contained within honest self-exploration – I would never have believed that nonfiction was a higher calling in literature than fiction. But I have, so I came to Reality Hunger a convert.
Greg Baxter’s memoir, A Preparation for Death , will be published by Penguin Ireland in July
© 2010 The Irish Times
Some Blind Alleys, the online journal of new Irish writing and visual art, will transform over the next few days into Some Blind Alleys, Creative Writing Courses – Dublin. Please do not be alarmed if it resembles Robert Patrick in Terminator 2 when Arnold Schwarzenegger shoots him with the grenade launcher (or whatever). Even after the major work is done, there will still be some tweaks that take place over the next week. I don’t have a test site set up, and so all changes will just clumsily take place live and for everyone to witness.
You’ve also probably noticed the advertisement for the Summer Reading Series. Shortly, full details of the night on April 23, and the two events that follow, on July 3 and September 3, will be available.
All creative writing courses this spring have been filled. The next term will begin in May and June. Access to the Student Centre are of SBA will be unaffected by the transition.
Once upon a time there was a young man who became an heir to a massive, if unexpectedly bequethed, fortune. Unexpected, only in it being so sudden. The heir, Sebastian, was an only child.
Among many other things, he inherited a very large country estate in the improbably sylvan valleys to the north of the city. With the estate came a lifelong servant / butler / groundskeeper / cook / nurse / handiman – who was called: – it doesn’t matter; Sebastian never used the man’s correct name and merely refered to him as Paddy…
“Go blow dry the fucking lawn, Paddy,” he bawled down the phone, from his bath, one morning, “I’m going to throw a fucking party, okay.”
It is war. The general leaves the barracks and walks to the trenches. A recruit follows him. In war there is no rest: if you are not shooting, you march or you clean your rifle, march or take a drink. The general marches to the trenches. There is a din of gunshots, a bomb or two, maybe even cannon fire. The recruit follows him, nervously, his hand on his head because he has not put his helmet on right. With the other hand he clutches a rifle. He is far too young, he trembles. The general is experienced, he does not tremble. He marches and is not bothered by the shoes, helmets and cadavers he tramples over, the bodies are stacked against the fences in piles that bleed just like a Pollock painting. The general jumps over the dead as if it were a game, and the recruit follows, cowering, spluttering in the smoke. In next to no time, the general stops beside a pile of badly stacked sandbags.
“This is not protected,” he says, but he does not crouch down. He is brave, or perhaps he is just a hard man, he no longer feels anything.
Continue reading ‘Ratatat: a philosophical discourse on war, by Víctor Balcells Matas’
Some Blind Alleys has been, by the most basic measurement – readership – a real success. As far as online literary publishing in Ireland goes, surely its success is unprecedented. But that might be an unfair statement, since there’s heretofore been no online literary publishing success in Ireland.
Google Analytics tells me Some Blind Alleys is popular. On average, hundreds of unique visitors are landing here every day, and a staggering majority of those visits come from Ireland (a good thing: it means Americans and Germans searching for porn aren’t landing on you accidentally and often). Traffic to SBA, in late 2009, peaked at 500 unique visitors a day. A day. Traffic is now, without offline events like launches and Christmas parties and banner and poetry competitions, down to about 350 unique visitors a day. The majority of these visitors are return visitors.
Since September 1, 2009, there have been over 21,000 unique visitors to Some Blind Alleys. According to Google Analytics, 95 per cent of those unique visitors are from Ireland.
The first explanation for the site’s popularity is that contributors – many of them former creative writing students in the SBA Workshops – were telling compelling stories, and they were telling them with urgency, in a plain and familiar, but hardly artless, style. In essays, authors were speaking in conclusions. There was no hazy downtime. The subject, often, was self, but sentimentality was absent. The translations were powerful. The stories were wild, unconventional, and made people shout (inwardly) – “That cannot possibly be a short story!”
Another reason is the pure accident of the site’s structure. It combined literary content with the intuitive and ubiquitous online publishing form known as the blog. Rather than dumping a month’s worth of content onto the site every quarter, or every month (an intuitive model in print publishing), I published one thing at a time. This turned out to be the right way to publish, but the right way was also unsustainably time-consuming. Still, I expanded. In order to increase activity on the site, I added Plugs. And when I wanted to add more activity, and be more blatantly identifiable as an agent of frustration with the status quo, I added the From the Editor column, which, I suppose (or admit), was a blog. I then added a column for contributors to review. This activity brought massive traffic. Soon, at least one of these columns was being updated every day, and often more than one column a day, and often the same column more than once a day.
It will come as no surprise to people who work in the arts community, who work very hard to support the arts for very little or no compensation, that I edit, manage and develop this site entirely in my free time. This story is familiar to many who are trying to commit their support to the arts while trying to make ends meet: I have a full-time day job, another full-time evening job (teaching), and another job trying to write my own books. I also review books for the Irish Times. What I earn from all these jobs adds up to what I owe yearly on my house – which I ingeniously bought in February 2007.
Last autumn, I decided to take a break from writing. I’d been writing a lot, for a long time, both nonfiction and fiction, and when I tried to begin something new, I was out of ideas, and even out of experience with which to come up with ideas. I’d used everything, and as a result, writing had become a habit, an enterprise in pure form. So I threw myself into work at Some Blind Alleys. The early mornings and late nights usually reserved for writing were used, instead, for reading and editing submissions, developing the site, and producing SBA content.
Something I hope readers are not consciously aware of when they visit: each piece accepted for publication on Some Blind Alleys is rigorously edited. It is cut, re-arranged, re-formulated, and every sentence is screwed on tight. I have always known that, as someone who wants to support good writing, my interests were in the wild, the raw, the honest, the obsessive, the destructive. But a lot of this stuff requires heavy editing.
My decision to become serious about Some Blind Alleys was not just an issue of a bit of free time; it was based on my belief that good writers should be paid for their work. And I believed that I could make something so compelling that people would beg to fund it, just so they could continue to read new essays by new, mostly unknown truth-tellers – people from or living in Ireland (more on why locality is important later). In fact, that was what the launch, in October 2009, was all about (the site had been running for almost a year). That was why I asked Anne Enright to speak. I wanted to draw attention to the impressive work being published on the site, so that I could realistically apply for funding – funding that would allow me to pay contributors.
As everyone who works in the arts – and relies on funding for survival – knows, 2009 was a tough year to ask for funding. There are a lot of deserving organisations out there that did not get funding. Some Blind Alleys was, unfortunately, one of them. I’m not going to poor-mouth. A lot of good literary organisations got funding cuts. A lot of really good independent theatre companies, by the way, were annihilated. There simply wasn’t much money to hand out. I accept the decision: funding in the arts is not a charity. You must excite and inspire. And keep trying.
I wrote, in the very first From the Editor entry, that literary journals should pay contributors or stop publishing. My justification for publishing without money to pay was based on my conviction to work toward that goal. I asked authors to participate for free by assuring them that I would work tirelessly – as much as my free time allowed – to insure that one day SBA would be paying for writing. That horizon, which seemed, only recently, extremely close, has now drifted indefinitely out of reach.
But it’s not just about paying the contributors you know. It’s about the lost art of commissioning in literary journals, and attracting writers you don’t know. I have admired everything I’ve published on Some Blind Alleys, and for lots of different reasons. But the pieces that stick out are those that explored the lives of other people – Ibsen, Auden, Kavanagh, Johnny Massacre, and others. The reason they stick out is that they represented the direction I wanted the site to take toward balance.
An essay that is personal, that is purely literary, is compelled from within the author. But there is more to the essay – obviously – than explorations inward. To get very good writers to commit themselves to an exploration outward – toward Ibsen or Auden or whomever, or whatever – often requires remuneration for their efforts.
Many have suggested that I seek revenue from advertising. I’ve got space in my third column for a large skyscraper ad. Would I sell out and put an advertisement on SBA? Would I sell paninis? Bicycles? Competing creative writing courses? In a second. But I know nothing about sales. I imagine it is just as time-consuming as editing, or moreso.
Online entities grow, or they stagnate. They evolve, or they become irrelevant. There must be excitement intrinsic to the parallel narrative of the life of the entity itself – what will it offer next? What will it do or say next? – or your audience will look for something else. In print, it is highly unlikely that a reader, while reading your literary journal, will have, within arm’s length, a thousand other journals just like yours. But that is effectively the predicament the online journal faces. Nobody has a monopoly on good content on the web.
Almost nobody reads Some Blind Alleys on the bus, or in bed, or on train or airplane journeys, or sitting outside on a warm day looking over the sea. An online audience reads online. One click of a mouse, and they are reading something else. If Some Blind Alleys was ever going to compete on the web, it was going to have to be interesting in itself, different, controversial, clear, identifiable, local, and active, locally, offline.
Last autumn, the heavy and steady increase in traffic was in large part due to the fact that there was always something going on in town. Drinks, launches, readings, parties, competitions, collaborations, prizes, etcetera. That turned out to be another time-consuming job.
When I started, at the beginning of January, to write again – and specifically to write nonfiction – I had to quit regular updates on the From the Editor blog. To write nonfiction, one must, I think, say nothing unless one wants to say it all at once. And to say something all at once takes not one lunch hour but two or three months. One can easily improvise small-scale controversies with blog posts, but to do so – to constantly release the pressure valve of one’s enmity, awe, and curiosity – means nothing accumulates to the condition of essay. Column 2 was introduced to allow contributors to add life to the site in whatever way they saw fit. In this way I wanted to pass ownership of the site’s intrinsic life to the community of people reading it. There was good stuff, but it, too, required editing.
When my own writing started to gather some momentum, I also ran out of time to edit, or to even thoughtfully consider new contributions. Even though SBA has always been a place primarily interested in the essay, overwhelmingly the submissions are short fiction. I haven’t even opened dozens of them. This is not fair to those who submitted, but there’s no way around it.
If I got a sudden rush of essay submissions today, it would take me weeks to get around to reading them. It’s not just that I don’t have time to make Some Blind Alleys better; I don’t even have the time to keep it as good as it is.
Without the resources to maintain, manage, develop, and lead the evolution of Some Blind Alleys, I hereby announce my intention, in a few days, to go into hibernation as an online journal. Some Blind Alleys, the website, will remain here as a resource for the creative writing workshops. The workshops are healthier than ever, and still producing (or witnessing the emergence of) incredible new talent that ought to be published. There will be a blog column that will amalgamate the From the Editor and the Plug columns, and – importantly, very importantly – there will be an announcement shortly concerning a new SBA venture this summer. New updates about that venture, and other events, will be posted sometimes on the site, but always on the SBA Facebook and Twitter pages.
Updates will continue this week – the Last Days of Some Blind Alleys – with more terrific contributions, so it’s not quite over yet.
The journal, as it looks now, will be preserved, and in autumn, I hope to revive it, restore it, and continue publishing well-written, honest, and vital essays as well as unconventional short stories, great translations, and outstanding visual art. But to truly regroup and seek alternative funding possibilities, editing work has to cease. There are still three new banners to go up – winners of the banner competition – and they will do so once SBA reappears as an online journal. Submissions to the site are hereby closed until further notice. Essayists, however, will have an opportunity to bring their work to a large audience in the new venture to be announced shortly. So stay tuned.
In the meantime, I want to thank the readers and contributors, everyone who helped on the development side, designers, writing contest judges, launch guests of honor. I want to say thanks to those people who donated money in early 2009 and made that launch a reality, and to all those people who contributed to the grant application.
Please leave Friday night, April 23, open.
The nail on the back of my right thumb has an imperfection that I find very cool. It is a defined brown-maroon stripe running parallel to the left side of my nail. I don’t specifically remember what I did to cause it. I have a memory of biting my nail to such a degree that I was able to peel it back. I pulled the nail; it looked and felt like a wood shaving, all the way down to the cuticle. When I tore the nail away with my teeth, blood started to swell in perfect red globules. I remember endorphin-rich, comfortable pain. But I chewed my fingernails a lot when I was younger, and variants of this butchery happened more than once. There is a joy in trying to see how far you can push toward the destruction of your fingers. Today, my nail is perfect, except for this stripe, which grows fainter every year.
If you look at the surface of any of your nails, you’ll notice three distinct parts, each with their own colour. At the bottom, it is pale pink. This part is the factory. It is where blood and tissue is turned into the protective shield that is the nail. It is curved, and flexes upwards into the next part of the nail. That part is a darker pink, and with the curve of the pale part, the entire effect is that of an expanding sky with an intrusive glare of sunlight. At the top of the nail is the end, the white ridge.
I like to think of this part like a young man who leaves home. It is still connected, and will leave after a long growth period. I think everyone attaches random associations such as these to little things in their lives. I remember a carpet in my parent’s house that had a red, black and yellow floral pattern. I always used to walk on the yellow part as the red was lava. The black part was my army, holding back the lava. Every child did this. I don’t know if people stop doing this as they get older. I haven’t stopped completely, although I can’t think of another example. I want to remember all of the things I conjured when I was a child and to still have that optimism that comes from trying to avoid lava. These associations are metaphysical proofs of one’s own individuality, of knowing that noone else thinks the same way.
On my nail, my blood stripe runs through all three parts.
-Pete Harpur
Art and the Contemporary World is hosting a forum of the public role of the critic on Monday, February 15, at the NCAD.
What is the public role of the critic? What are the expectations and responsibilities of criticism today? And is it possible to conceive of a coherent public to which critical practices would in fact be responsible?
To realise that you are but fragments, that the short and the longer and the longest of times are nothing but fragments … that the lifespans of cities and of countries are nothing but fragments … and the earth a fragment … that development in its entirety is a fragment … that perfection cannot be … that fragments came about, that they continue to come about … no road to travel, only to arrive … that the end is without consciousness … that then nothing can be without you and that thus nothing can be …
Those people who die without having known their illness, their mortal ilnesses … life would then be unbearable…
The stream has frozen over, the spring has frozen over, the summer has frozen over, the winter has frozen over, people, animals, sensations, everything … that spoken word that just shuts the world off …
