Small World by David Lodge

Finished David Lodge's wonderful, warm, witty novel today.  It was the introductory text to my university course called Narratives of Romance and Adventure, which skated lightly over the surface of 1,700 years of literature (from Virgil through the Lay of Welund, Chaucer and Shakespeare to Swift).  Lodge's book is crammed with bright ideas and references to all sorts of literary traditions, schools of criticism and other works of fiction and poetry.  The Thames boat on which Perse McGarrigal receives his prize for writing poetry, for example, is called the Annabel Lee, which is the title of the last full poem written by Edgar Allen Poe. That's about unrequited love for an unattainable woman.  Or take the marvellous, dangerous, ridiculous Fulvia Morgana, named after the warrior wife of Marc Anthony and King Arthur's sorceress half-sister.  Brilliant stuff.

I laughed out loud throughout the book.  And I learned quite a bit too.  So, as odd as I may have thought the selection at first to be, I have been wholly won over.  It's an excellent read and an astute framework upon which to build an undergraduate introduction to English literature and theories of literary criticism.

2,000 words ... at last!

Spike finished her essay on memory and technology today ... at looooooooooooooong last (and just a teensy-weensy bit late).  But it's done and it's a more than decent job.

We've talked about its content quite a bit as Spike read articles, chapters in books and pages on the web.  I reacted instinctively against assertions that new technologies are degrading our human capacity for personal and collective memory.  I thought "bullshit" and "Luddites".  It's always wearing to read cultural Cassandras bemoaning some new fangled thing and the loss of some idealised (never extant) golden age.  I accept that change can be unsettling but just because  technology advances that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to Hell in a handcart (as some guy called Huyssen seemed to suggest).  Get with it man.  We're human.  We forget.  it's part of the condition (a position I was glad to see endorsed by some uber-smart American cultural theorist by the name of Wendy Chun).  God, think how ghastly the alternative could be: to never forget; to remember everything?  No thanks.

Huyssen's wailing conservatism made me think of Derrida For Beginners an excellent introductory text from the late 1980 by the Pluto Press.  It re-told in the inimitable graphic novel style of that series Plato's record of Socrates' discourse on the new technology of writing.  We were going to Hell in a handcart way back then as well.  (It took a user of writing to pass on the mad-Greek's nonsense but I'm sure Socrates and Huyssen would have us skip lightly over that little irony).  I mentioned this to Spike.  I think it helped.

Here he is then, in a translation from The Phaedrus.  A brave, brilliant man it seems.  One who was prepared to die on a point of principle.  But clearly, on some questions, daft as a brush.  Socrates:

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. 
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Here we go round the mulberry bush

So, for the first 42 years of my life I learned to live with the various ways your national team can fail (tragically/spectacularly/comically/unexpectedly/expectedly ... delete as appropriate) to reach the second phaseof the world cup. But I left Scotland and came to live in Australia where ... ah ... final minute Italian penalty last time, four-goal lesson in German this time. It must be me! There's always 2014.

Waiting for the game to start

It's 3:41 a.m. as I start to type these lines.  For reasons that I could not, if pressed, explain, I'm still awake; still sitting up, waiting to watch the match between England and the USA streamed live (and probably illegally) from somewhere, almost certainly not South Africa and almost certainly not sanctioned by FIFA.  So shoot me.

I ought to be in bed, fast asleep.  I'll regret this decision later today.

But I'm here.  I wrote yesterday's poem while I waited so the time has not been entirely wasted.  It may not be the greatest poem ever written.  It may not even be a very good poem but I console myself with the thought that I am writing, still trying to learn what works, still searching for the elusive combination that coheres in ways you can't quite pin down.  I might find it one day or stumble over it in the dark.  Or not.  Who knows?  The point is - you try.
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An Old Man Watching the World Cup

There are so many ways to while away the hours,
to waste your time on all life's long-lost reveries:
the daftest schemes, those boyhood dreams of ours
which we assembled in the workshop of buffooneries
devoid of limits and dismissive of the real-world powers
described as fact and practicality, mundane realities
that then conspired to hold us back or tie us down,
that tried to teach us lives with no, with not for you
nor for the likes of you upon whom fortune's frown
descends to doubt and damn all that you tried to do
because you hoped, because you dreamed, because
you never learned to settle-down, accepting less
but fought off old ideas of what the right life was
to chase may be and all you might, one day, possess.
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I've seen things you people wouldn't believe ...

A cold, rainy Friday night in Sydney.  Exactly what you need to justify Blade Runner: The Director's Cut for the god-knowns how many time and a couple of pizzas, delivered in 45 minutes.

One tries hard not to pre-judge but ...

... this does not look promising and I will not be using it for revision ahead of my exam on Narratives of Romance and Adventure.

After China ... again

For the second time I am trying to plough through Brian Castro's novel After China.  And, like before, I'm toiling badly.  It's driving me nuts and if I didn't have to sit a university exam on Australian literature in a little over two weeks time I'd have abandoned the text and my efforts to read it.

I get the concept, you know?  I understand post-modernism's rejection of coherent narrative form.  I know about Jacques Derrida and undecidability (is that a word?) or indeterminability (probably another not word I've just conjured up).  I think I get - Hell, I may even live - the ambiguities, uncertainties, contradictions and tensions of diaspora.  I can see the intention and I really do get the idea that fragmentation and the mysteries on non-linear, multiplicities of perspective challenge conventional notions of writing and / or reading any text.

My problem is that I think this emperor has no clothes on  I don't see it as a complex, challenging work that explores identity, place, relationships, the persistence of the un-modern in the modern, life and death.  I just think it's self-serving, self-indulgent narcissistic obscurantism that's in need of a good editor and a complete re-write.

I wish the text didn't bring out such negative responses in me but the simple fact is that I think Brian Castro, an obviously competent writer, has served up a half-baked, ill-conceived mess of a book.  I have no idea what it's doing on a university syllabus.  Big mistake guys; big mistake.

But ... to allow for the possibility that one is wrong yet again and is merely manifesting one's inner conservative old duffer ... here is BC in conversation with the admirable Johanna Featherstone of the Red Room Company.

Go North Young Man!!!

A significant moment, in an otherwise tedious and ordinary day, came when I was Surfing the Internet looking for information as part of our North America 2013 adventure.  The plan is that we spend at least six months away. The only definite ideas are a three-week stint in Seattle in June / July so that Spike can attend a glass course at Pilchuck then 8 weeks in October and November at Penlands North Carolina for another intensive glass course.

I thought we could head north between the two before turning south east. I know Spike wants to visit a glacier and where better, thought I, than Alaska? That had the added attraction – I don’t know why it’s an attraction – of driving across the south-west corner of the Yukon Territory. I guess the attraction lies simply in being able to say one has driven across the Yukon Territory. So I was surfing, having a look at the roads on Google; thinking how utterly amazing it is that Google maps have taken their road camera all the way to the Top Of The World Highway north-west of the Klondyke River. To be honest though the landscape looked rather dull and not very interesting for long stretches of the highway. It’s a small road (one lane in each direction) passing through flat (I guess elevated) terrain with lots and lots of pine trees.

Looking for something more interesting and ideas for accommodation I stumbled across the Ripley Creek Inn in Stewart, British Columbia. It’s not as far north as the Yukon but it’s still over 1,000 miles from Seattle. It connects with the southernmost region of Alaska. Just outside the town, maybe 30 miles before one reaches it from the east, there’s a blue ice glacier – Bear glacier

There’s a population of 500 people, the Ripley Creek Inn (part of which used to be the town brothel), the Rocky Mountains, Alaskan fjords, Strohn lake with its blue ice Bear glacier and, according to photographs, grizzly bears walking down the highway not far from town.

How can we resist it?

The Griffen Trust - For Excellence In Poetry

I stumbled through web links to come across this interesting web site.  It's a well-resourced (obviously) prize-giver of two awards of $65,000 Canadian each.  The prizes go to established poets - Charles Wright, Les Murray, C D Wright, Mick Imlah and the likes.

I enjoyed this reading (among others)

A Maxim by Carl Dennis

To live each day as if it might be the last
Is an injunction that Marcus Aurelius
Inscribes in his journal to remind himself
That he, too, however privileged, is mortal,
That whatever bounty is destined to reach him
Has reached him already, many times.
But if you take his maxim too literally
And devote your mornings to tinkering with your will,
Your afternoons and evenings to saying farewell
To friends and family, you’ll come to regret it.
Soon your lawyer won’t fit you into his schedule.
Soon your dear ones will hide in a closet
When they hear your heavy step on the porch.
And then your house will slide into disrepair.
If this is my last day, you’ll say to yourself,
Why waste time sealing drafts in the window frames
Or cleaning gutters or patching the driveway?
If you don’t want your heirs to curse the day
You first opened Marcus’s journals,
Take him simply to mean you should find an hour
Each day to pay a debt or forgive one,
Or write a letter of thanks or apology.
No shame in leaving behind some evidence
You were hoping to live beyond the moment.
No shame in a ticket to a concert seven months off,
Or, better yet, two tickets, as if you were hoping
To meet by then someone who’d love to join you,
Two seats near the front so you catch each note.

Carl Dennis at Wiki

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2010/06/07/100607po_poem_dennis#ixzz0pygHB59p
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