Robert Menasse

If you are not too plastered and fancy a bit of international literature, please come along tomorrow to Robert Menasse's talk at the Jewish Book Week events tomorrow at 12:30. He is the author of a saucy book called Don Juan de la Mancha, whose first sentence is:

"I first came to understand the beauty and wisdom of celibacy when Christa, after rubbing chilli pods between her hands, masturbated me and then expressed the wish that I – to put it in her own words – should f*** her up her a***."

It gets dirtier later on, and it's a lot of fun.

At 2:00pm Paul Verhaeghen, the acclaimed author of Omega Minor and the recipient of the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, will be in conversation with Boyd Tonkin.

These are just the very partial highlights of an incredibly interesting programme.

I hope to see you there.

AG

What Is Prescribed: A Rant

Short Shrift

Sarah Stonich

When I told Alessandro I'd write a blog piece about the state of short fiction his reaction was, "Great, literary rants are welcome." My reaction to his reaction? Damn, didn't he just say it all? essentially suggesting that anything written on the subject would be a rant, since the state of short fiction, the publishing of short fiction and the buying and reading of short fiction is nothing if not rant-worthy.

In the late 80’s and early 90’s, when I was attending Frankfurt and other international book fairs, short fiction was still promoted, the chasm between novel and short story was not so deep, and the genre was at the very least a topic for discussion. Now it seems short fiction barely merits debate.

Agents won't represent short fiction because they are convinced publishers won't buy short fiction. Publishers won't buy it because even if there is good stuff out there, agents will rarely bother reading it and typically won’t represent it unless it comes packaged with a companion novel up front for a two-book deal. So much for agents, and good luck peddling short fiction without one – at most publishing houses, a collection of short fiction has the same chance getting over the transom as the proverbial rich wanker squeezing his fat backside through the eye of a needle and into heaven.

And the readers? No one, and I mean no one has polled them or is listening to them or smartly anticipating their future in the marketplace. Publishing is so up its own arse it’s not considering the reading demographic except in the most simplistic of ways. What is backing the claim that no one reads short fiction when there isn’t any to read? Numbers are only generated for what sells, not what could sell, or should sell. For now, everyone seems to be staying the wobbly course, bent on marketing first novels by new writers. Here’s a query response that, when I opened it, made me eject chai out my nose. This is from a known NY agent recently profiled In Poets and Writers:

Dear Sarah,

I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we are not taking on any previously published or agented fiction writers. Nor do we consider short fiction.

Such a discounting of experienced writers and marginalizing of readers reveals all of what’s gone wrong in publishing. Do readers want first novels and first novels only? Really? If that’s the future, where will it leave writers, agents and publishers? The writer will publish one book, the agent will hunt down a new writer for each and every sale, and publishing houses will devolve into something akin to puppy mills.

I refuse to believe short fiction is dead for the singular reason of time, and the preciousness of time. A typical Wally Lamb novel is the weight of a doorstop and requires a month-long commitment. Time for reading is not expanding, but shrinking. The evolving – some might say devolving – (see A.G.’s blog entry below) brain is adapting to accommodate shorter and shorter messages. Diminishing attention spans react well to flash and color and novels short enough to be written on a mobile phone. So, for an industry that at its core is built upon imagination, the vast majority publishers seem to show very little themselves, and rather tend to repeat themes and copy other publishing successes with whatever gimmickry is selling at the moment, i.e. “If you liked The Ladies Tea Cake Bingeing Auxiliary, you’ll love The Anorexic Tartan Lingerie Drum Corp!” if only because the covers look alike.

I implore those in publishing to look to the future and consider that in a few years, the most successful among you may well be those who buck the hollow, go-nowhere trends that are beginning to fail before our eyes. Consider this as a scenario: Rising star agents gaining reputations by finding the best and brightest authors of fiction, particularly short stories. Imagine a younger consumer reading from whatever device or screen their literature of choice is glowing from. Imagine publishers and editors who not only succeed, but build strong houses by publishing authors they nurture into real and enduring careers rather than those they splatter on a single flash-in-the-pan title.

Imagine growing numbers of fans of short fiction demanding more.

Everyone in the industry claims to love short fiction but bemoan the “fact” that it is not viable in the marketplace. Please. Stop being such pussies and make it so.

A definition of Short Shrift

*To be given short shrift is not the blessing it once was. The source of our verb shrive (shrove, shriven) and noun shrift, which have technical meanings from ecclesiastical Latin, is Classical Latin scribere, “to write.” Shrive comes from the Old English verb scrfan, “to decree, decree after judgement, impose a penance upon (a penitent), hear the confession of.” The past participle of scrfan is scrifen, our shriven. The noun shrift, “penance; absolution,” comes from Old English scrift with the same meaning, which comes from scriptus, the perfect passive participle of scribere, and means “what is written,” or, to use the Latin word, “what is prescribed.”

Benjamin Robert Haydon

It would have been quite natural for an ordinary mind to think blindness a sufficient obstacle to the practice of an art, the essence of which seems to consist in perfect sight…

Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846), known throughout his life as a historical painter of some merit, has had little enduring success in the art world. It is rather through his autobiography, letters and memoirs that Haydon lives on today, and it is through these that his character lives on: a man with all the traits of genius with little of the requisite artistic talent.

Haydon’s life was marked by a combination of chronic eye disease, burgeoning debt and a feverish desire to assert himself as the greatest painter of his day. His determination was relentless, his passion untiring, and his character so infectious (or ‘contagious’ as Aldous Huxley puts it in his introduction to the out-of-print 1926 edition) that he seems to have genuinely convinced some of the great poets and critics of his time – including Keats, Hazlitt and Wordsworth – that he really was a genius of the first order. Keats’s On Seeing the Elgin Marbles was addressed to Haydon, who played a foremost role in persuading the British government to buy the frieze from Lord Elgin. Haydon responded to Keats characteristically:

“I know not a finer image than the comparison of a Poet unable to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the Sky!—when he must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling Sun beams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds!—now & then passing Angels on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind, with moveless wings; or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager & intent on the objects of their seeking—You filled me with fury for an hour, and with admiration for ever.”

Clearly this of Keats’s resonated with Haydon – what else was the partially-sighted historical painter but a sick eagle, forced to correct the errors of perspective in his colossal canvases by peering at one part of a painting close-to, inspecting it in a mirror, and viewing it through several pairs of strong convex spectacles stacked in front of one another from a distance? Yet Haydon’s belief in his own powers was unshakable: “My Picture today struck me […] as the most enchanting of all sights. […] It came over [me] like a lovely dream. I sat & dwelt on it like a young girl on a lover (when she is unobserved). I adored the Art that could give such sensation”.

Although Haydon’s writing is peppered with vanity and often downright vulgar, his memoirs and autobiography are nonetheless a touching and well-written insight into a man who was a forceful and inspirational member of the Keats circle. The impression we get from Haydon’s memoirs of his life – and death – is tragicomic in the extreme: in 1846, at the age of sixty, he paid a large sum to hire a portion of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly to exhibit two new paintings, The Banishment of Aristides and The Burning of Rome. Just next door, the American dwarf Tom Thumb was performing in a circus show to which thousands flocked, ignoring Haydon’s exhibition entirely. His diary reads: “Tom Thumb had 12,000 people last week; B. R. Haydon, 133½ (the ½ a little girl). Exquisite taste of the English people!” After months of desperate prayers, humiliation and an accumulation of debts that amounted to around £3,000, Haydon locked himself in his studio, his wife and daughter next door, and shot himself in front of the enormous painting he was working on. Not killed by the shot, he then cut his throat twice with a razor, his strength of character unfailing to the end. His adoration of Shakespeare marked the last words in his journal, “Stretch me no longer on this rough world”.

Twittering ourselves away

“Social-network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st-century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.”

This is from today’s The Guardian, and you can read the whole article here.

The only thing I don’t get is why Lady Greenfield is presenting this as a prediction, rather than a fact. Just walk into any train carriage in London, have a look around – if you have any space, that is, and no Metro or other newspaper is being shoved into your face – and you will see half the passengers fiddling with one or two of their mobiles, Blackberries and laptops as they listen to some podcast or other musical download.

Judging from the many vitriolic comments to the Guardian article, anybody attacking Facebook, Bebo and the likes will be called a staunch obscurantist by the twittering mob. Not even being a leading neuroscientist will save you. So I’ll better stop here myself, before getting a virtual lynching.

AG

News from Minervinopolis

Just back from a trip to Italy’s deep south. On Friday, I joined Elisabetta and children for a weekend in Molfetta, a lovely seaside town in Apulia, about fifteen miles from Bari. I call this town Minervinopolis, because the baker is a Minervini, the butcher’s a Minervini, the priest’s a Minervini, the Mayor’s a Minervini, most of Elisabetta’s friends are Minervinis, Elisabetta herself is a Minervini – there are many Minervini-named streets, and half the phone book’s entries for Molfetta are Minervinis too.

I had not been there for a while but, like the rest of southern Italy, if there is any change, it’s not much more noticeable than rock erosion. The same shops line the high street, the same people walk up and down the Corso, and football-mania is as rife as ever, with women talking about football as freely as men in the bars.

The Sanremo singing competition – a national institution – reached its climax on Saturday, after almost a week of X-Factor- and Big-Brother-like knockout stages. The winner was a ten-year-old-faced boy called Marco Carta. When they made the final announcement I was slightly confused, as I thought they had said “manco canta” – he doesn’t even sing. The winner’s song and the rest of the songs were all terribly alike, and as unmemorable as any other sung at the Sanremo Festival during his fifty-nine-year history. I only watched about an hour of it, on and off, but I spotted Annie Lennox and Kevin Spacey among the guests – now, what the hell was he doing there?

It was also Carnival weekend, with big papier-mâché carts’ processions in Viareggio, Putignano and many other Italian cities. Unfortunately, it was rotten weather in Molfetta, and the much anticipated procession didn’t show up.

On the other hand, we ate and drank in three days what we’d eat and drink in three weeks over here, and spent five times more on food and clothes than we’d normally spend in Britain. I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am to be back.

AG

"La poésie est semblable à l'amandier: ses fleurs sont parfumées et ses fruits sont amers." Aloysius Bertrand

"Poetry is similar to the almond tree: its flowers are fragrant and its fruits are bitter."

Having just read Jean Echenoz’s enjoyable documentary novel Ravel, I was looking up Maurice Ravel on the Internet out of curiosity, when I was reminded that he had composed a piano piece inspired by Gaspard de la nuit, a volume of prose poetry by the nineteenth-century French writer Aloysius Bertrand (1807–41).

Neglected in France nowadays and virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, Bertrand is a figure that I’ve been meaning to write a few lines about, just in case it might encourage readers to look into his work.

Interestingly, the major literary work of this provincial lieutenant’s son – originally from the Piedmont but whose home town from the age of nine was Dijon, the capital of Burgundy – remained unpublished during his life, which was tragically cut short by tuberculosis. Although he drew early praise from the likes of Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand for his efforts in Le Provincial, the journal he edited and contributed to in Dijon, and later moved to Paris, where he frequented the top literary salons, he was a relative outsider to the capital’s cultural establishment – due in part to his poverty, his attachment to his beloved Burgundy and his somewhat avant-garde aesthetic views.

In 1836, Bertrand signed a contract with the publishers Renduel for Gaspard de la nuit, but publication kept being delayed, to the dismay of the author, who in his final years had to endure constant disappointment on the literary front as well as the torments of illness. This work, a collection of fifty-one evocative prose poems, mostly focusing on the medieval city of Dijon – the landmarks, myths and people of which Bertrand knew intimately – was championed by the influential critic and friend of Bertrand’s, Sainte-Beuve, who in his note to the first edition of 1842 hailed it as a revolutionary milestone in the history of French poetry.

The critical consensus ever since has been that Gaspard de la nuit is the first work of French prose poetry, with significant consequences for the subsequent development of nineteenth-century literature. Charles Baudelaire was greatly impressed by its artistic approach, which consciously borrowed from the techniques of visual artists (its subtitle is “Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Collet”), and admitted that it was his main inspiration for Le Spleen de Paris (also consisting of fifty-one pieces). Therefore, if the perseverance of Sainte-Beuve and Bertrand’s friends had not paid off, and Gaspard had not finally seen the light of day, we arguably would not have today the prose poetry of the likes of Rimbaud and Mallarmé and beyond.

Sadly, Gaspard de la nuit is currently out of print in English, although translations such as the University Press of America edition may be available second-hand and in libraries.

The Canterbury Tales

Next Thursday’s reading at the Calder Bookshop will be from a new, modern-English adaptation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by the translator Chris Lauer, which is soon to be published by Oneworld Classics. As well as helping to organize and publicize the event, I did a great deal of the editorial work on this book myself, and as a result I am particularly excited about hearing the wonderful work it contains performed at the shop for the first time.

However, having read Chaucer’s entire oeuvre in the original Middle English at university, I have to confess to having been until recently a bit of a snob where modern-language translations of these works are concerned. I suppose there were three reasons for this. The first reason was that I felt that the purely aesthetic experience of reading – and especially hearing – a text like The Canterbury Tales would be compromised by encountering it in anything other than its own crunchy, alien-sounding language. It might be difficult to understand, but at least when listening to Middle English we are aurally sensitized to the actual material of the words, in a way we often are not when listening to the transparent, weightless tokens of our everyday usage. The second reason was that I am a subscriber to the view that the meaning of any text is determined by its historical context: updating a work like The Canterbury Tales could be interpreted as implying that inside every medieval text is a modern text struggling to get out, as thought the “true” text resided somewhere other than in the actual words committed to the page by the “maker” himself. This is certainly not true of Chaucer’s work: if the past of the narrator's childhood in Hartley’s The Go-Between is a foreign country, then the England of the late fourteenth century is another planet entirely.

The third – and real – reason, of course, was simply that I’d had to work bloody hard at university to get my head round Middle English, and I couldn't see why anyone else should be allowed to have such an easy ride. Indeed, as anyone of a similar academic experience will tell you, Chaucer’s language is the tip of the iceberg: something like ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ is a doddle compared to an early Middle-English text like La3amon's Brut, or even to the work of Chaucer's near-contemporary the Pearl Poet, author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At least Chaucer restricts himself to the Latin alphabet: in his day some English poets were still peppering their verses with runes.

However, working on Chris Lauer’s witty and imaginative rendering has completely changed my mind. The translator himself has made the case for a modern-English retelling of these Tales in the following terms:

“Why ‘translate’ Chaucer at all? It is perfectly clear to me that anyone capable of enjoying Chaucer’s stories and his clever insights in a modern version would also be able to learn to read the Middle English original, but the fact is that many such readers simply will not do so. I hope some readers may read this attempt at modernization and be prompted to make that effort. Perhaps the greatest reward in modernizing the text is not so much for the reader as for the translator; it’s surely the best way to oblige oneself to read this poetry closely, word by word, and line by line, while trying to keep a perspective on the larger patterns as well. In any case, I do apologize, especially to those wise readers who will be offended by any presumptuous attempt, even those much more successful than mine, to retune Chaucer’s instrument.”

When it came to making a selection from the Tales for the reading at the bookshop, I was very keen to choose a range of material that, as I have said in the publicity material that any subscribers to the Calder Bookshop mailing list will have seen, would “showcase the staggering generic and thematic breadth of Chaucer’s work”. After all, I reasoned, the genius of The Canterbury Tales is in its juxtaposition of generically contrasting material. That’s why this work has been so popular with Marxist literary critics over the years, the argument being that the tales present us with what the Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin called “heteroglossia”: a babble of competing voices, in this case drawn from every stratum of medieval society, which subversively undermines the claim of any one voice to authority. Thus, the churlish Miller’s bawdy fabliau is deliberately chosen by the Host to follow, and thereby “quite” (or match), the grandiloquent romance presented by the perfect, gentle Knight. Therefore, I thought, if I’m going to represent the true spirit of Chaucer’s masterpiece, I have to be sure to get the balance right. In ‘The General Prologue’ the Host asks the twenty-nine pilgrims for “Tales of best sentence and most solaas”, and therefore for tales that are instructive as well as entertaining, and that’s what I would give the audience at the bookshop.

However, I was, as ever, pressed for time, and so what I ended up with instead was a hastily cobbled-together medley of the dirty bits. I don’t suppose anyone will mind.


AM