bobgarlitz

I don’t know but I like this line about it from photographer Diane Arbus–

It’s like walking into an hallucination without being quite sure whose it is."

Dyer quotes her on page 210.  What a great line! 

We’re about to embark on perhaps the last of our long sabbatical wanderings.  In ‘98 we took eight months to re-trace the travels of Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán through Spain of 1911 and South America of 1910 when he was on a lecture tour.  This time, over five months, we will end up in Paris and then Spain after starting in Mexico and staying a while in Austin, (gasp) Texas.

So this paragraph of Dyer’s struck me last night:

        The sense of being constantly in motion contributes to what has often been remarked on:  the grim, bleak quality of [Robert] Frank’s pictures.  According to another European observer of America, Jean Baudrillard, part of the pleasure of travel is ‘to dive into places where others are compelled to live and come out unscathed, full of the malicious pleasure of abandoning them to their fate.  Even their local happiness seems tuned to a secret resignation.’  That is the mood one encounters again and again in Frank’s pictures.  But what is going on in them is more complicated than that.  There is also snatched, self-cancelling lyricism, a grainy yearning that never quite has the opportunity to manifest itself fully.  The fact that someone is passing through makes those who are staying put conscious of their fate so that their resignation becomes disturbed and unsettled by the possibility–even if it will never be acted upon–of moving on.  In turn moving on acquires a taint of desperation:  the fear of being one of the abandoned, one of those doomed to stay put.  (167)

I am just past halfway through Geoff Dyer’s new book on photography, The Ongoing Moment.  I love the fact that there are no chapters.  No sub-headings, no titles of any kind.  Just white space and the occasional quotation to mark the movement of sections.  Topics unfold associatively.  Dyer looks at how various photographers handled landscape, stairs, men in overcoats, hats, fences and cityscape.  I was about to say "photographers from the classic period" and had to catch myself because this is exactly what Dyer avoids—deciding how to characterize historical periods or bothering to define genres and types.  Nor is he concerned to give us a coherent narrative, although along the way he does give lots of narrative and good gossip and telling anecdote and detail.  Mainly he reads—sees—the photos with great attention and with a mind both alert and a little off-kilter in the best out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye way. 

I am enjoying the book so much I could just spit!  I read it, savor it, slowly, each word, each phrase at a time.  Well, each paragraph.  Sometimes of course I doze, as with all books.  But I have been following Dyer for some years now and like his work.  I’ve come to think of him as the worthiest British writer to fill the gap left by the death of Bruce Chatwin.  Dyer writes about travel, often, and travel suffuses his understanding of everything. 

Yesterday I created a mood of doubt, though, and wondered if Dyer was really as good as I think he is or if I was just engaging in another bout of enjoying the enthusiasm of enthusiasm.  Maybe Dyer wasn’t that good.  I was overreacting to what is just an ordinary book.  So I looked up some reader’s comments on Amazon.  Not very many.  Official reviewers give the book high praise but I was looking for that sour note sounded by an ordinary reader that has enough truth in it to give real pause.  Nothing.  Later in the day I looked up the book on Amazon.UK.  Few readers comments and no negatives.

Then I blew up the photo of the cover to see if it is the same as the cover used here.  It is not.  Similar idea but different landscape. At the bottom is also a quotation that does not appear on the US edition:  "Quite possibly the best living writer in Britain."  Daily Telegraph  Ha!  So my taste is not entirely of my own imagining.  "Best living writer"—I’m not sure I would go that far, the reviewer for the Telegraph must have been Dyer’s book agent or one of his buddies, but at least the comment is in print for all to agree and disagree with!  Someone went out on a limb for it. 

Relieved and reassured with near-papal authority, I went back to reading the book and thoroughyly enjoying it.  No, enjoying it with perhaps "inordinate" pleasure.  Almost illegal for a book to be this good. 

Look—I’ll open to a page at the back at random and allow my eye to take in one sentence and copy it out here and even out of all context you will see for yourself just how genius Dyer is, or at least how good one of his sentences is.  Ok, ready?

And yet, through the doorways there are always glimpses of other doorways, of other photographs, of infinite possibilities.  (219)

Hmm.  Pretty ordinary sentence, isn’t it?  Oh well.  But there—I forgot to mention that in the opening pages Dyer suggests that one advantage of how he has organized the book–or not–is that one can pick it up and read different sections without moving through the whole book from front to back.  I like that.  It chimes and rhymes completely with Kenneth Burke’s cogitations on the relations between linear thought and sentence structure and chordal or atemporal musical meanings.
And it further goes with, underlines, Dyer’s structuring idea, that the photograph is the art form of the ongoing moment.  Now I’m also hoping that having done a book on jazz and a book on photography, he will next do a book on painting.  That does not seem likely.  Nor really does a book on movies–but who knows?  Architecture?  I would welcome that more than a book on film.  And as a compulsive world traveler, I would think that Dyer has more of a storehouse of notions and observations about buildings and cities than about movies. 

The sole aim of the world is to glory in itself unceasingly and to glorify us too, even amid our despair and in death, since it pushes along these shining clouds above our heads and our poems.  I see them, day and night, over the dome of Les Invalides, unfurling through all the indescribable shades of blue.  It is true, we are placed here like an encampment of canvas tents and the wind of eternity rushes on.  But anyone who takes a moment’s notice can believe that light is a form of greeting, that it has chosen the deep and fragile mirror of our eyes.  Such is the modest elevation of my thoughts as I wait for the bus in front of that monumental pact achieved in stonemasonry between Mansart and Bruant; and up in the sky is the breath of the gods.  (Everything passes:  the wind, the gods, eyes, stone, clouds, buses, and at different speeds, but in order to show that splendour lasts on–and peace be on earth to those other clouds that lie in store for us.)

Jacques Réda, The Ruins of Paris 29

The Spanish philosopher Julian Marías, father of the novelist Javier, died yesterday in Madrid.  Julian was long described as the greatest disciple of Ortega Y Gasset.  Or perhaps "legatee" would be a better term. 

http://www.javiermarias.es/main.html

D H Lawrence again, a new biography.  Here New Yorker reviewer Benjamin Kunkel describes Lawrence’s final philosophy—

Lawrence’s philosophy becomes a kind of rapt
literalism, as his ethic becomes a coldly joyous solitude: the world is
only the separate bodies in it. Here is the author of “Sons and Lovers”
and “Women in Love” insisting, in a 1922 essay, on the crucial “thing
to do”:

        And
it’s more difficult than poison-gas. It is to leave off loving. . . .
Wives, don’t love your husbands any more: even if they cry for it, the
great babies! . . . Just boil the eggs and fill the salt-cellars and be
quite nice, and in your own soul be alone and be still. . . . Husbands,
don’t love your wives any more. If they flirt with men younger or older
than yourselves, let your blood not stir. . . . And learn, learn, learn
the one and only lesson worth learning at last. Learn to walk in the
sweetness of the possession of your own soul.
       

………….

Dying of tuberculosis in the winter of 1929-30, unable to walk, and
rendered sexually impotent by his disease, he wrote these words on the
last page of his last book:

      
       

Man
wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and
once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is
to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme
triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. . . . The dead may
look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in
the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought
to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and
part of the living, incarnate cosmos.
       

—————–

In the current issue of Harper’s John Berger gives Geoff Dyer’s new book about photography a wonderful review.  He opens it with this paragraph—a piece that we could use to comment on lots and lots of things about our time—

Let’s begin from far away.  We are living today in a culture of information.  I use the word "culture" in its anthropological sense;  the information-culture has in practice no place for cultural heritages of any kind.  It stimulates calculation but consistently discourages reflection.
Thus it substitutes information (and misinformation) for knowledge or wisdom.  This is alarming, yet it’s a culture that sooner or later will spin out of control; it will not endure.  (December 87)

"Stimulates calculation" and "discourages reflection."  Is Lawrence’s "coldly joyous solitude" not most conducive to the sort of reflection Berger has in mind? 

Does anyone write about a "warmly" joyous solitude? 

Philip Roth

interview.

he ends up saying some pretty interesting things.  Here’s one passage—-

"Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about literature at all," I say.

"Ha,
ha," he says. "Now you’re talking! I would be wonderful with a 100-year
moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature
departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers
should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything
about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes,
shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should
let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they
are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale
talk. As soon as you generalise, you are in a completely different
universe than that of literature, and there’s no bridge between the
two."

Joe Monninger is working on a book on the  30s prizefighter  from Newark, Tony Galento.  Here’s Tony with a bear.  This must have been after young Joe Lewis knocked him out.    http://www.antekprizering.com/galentobear.jpeg 
Look for Joe’s book early next fall.  It’s going to be good. 

Orhan Pamuk puts his finger on quite a bit in just a few paragraphs:

That said, the drama we see unfolding is not, I think, a grotesque and inscrutable drama peculiar to Turkey; rather, it is an expression of a new global phenomenon that we are only just coming to acknowledge and that we must now begin, however slowly, to address. In recent years, we have witnessed the astounding economic rise of India and China, and in both these countries we have also seen the rapid expansion of the middle class, though I do not think we shall truly understand the people who have been part of this transformation until we have seen their private lives reflected in novels. Whatever you call these new élites—the non-Western bourgeoisie or the enriched bureaucracy—they, like the Westernizing élites in my own country, feel compelled to follow two separate and seemingly incompatible lines of action in order to legitimatize their newly acquired wealth and power. First, they must justify the rapid rise in their fortunes by assuming the idiom and the attitudes of the West; having created a demand for such knowledge, they then take it upon themselves to tutor their countrymen. When the people berate them for ignoring tradition, they respond by brandishing a virulent and intolerant nationalism. The disputes that a Flaubert-like outside observer might call bizarreries may simply be the clashes between these political and economic programs and the cultural aspirations they engender. On the one hand, there is the rush to join the global economy; on the other, the angry nationalism that sees true democracy and freedom of thought as Western inventions.

V. S. Naipaul was one of the first writers to describe the private lives of the ruthless, murderous non-Western ruling élites of the post-colonial era. Last May, in Korea, when I met the great Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, I heard that he, too, had been attacked by nationalist extremists after stating that the ugly crimes committed by his country’s armies during the invasions of Korea and China should be openly discussed in Tokyo. The intolerance shown by the Russian state toward the Chechens and other minorities and civil-rights groups, the attacks on freedom of expression by Hindu nationalists in India, and China’s discreet ethnic cleansing of the Uighurs—all are nourished by the same contradictions.

As tomorrow’s novelists prepare to narrate the private lives of the new élites, they are no doubt expecting the West to criticize the limits that their states place on freedom of expression. But these days the lies about the war in Iraq and the reports of secret C.I.A. prisons have so damaged the West’s credibility in Turkey and in other nations that it is more and more difficult for people like me to make the case for true Western democracy in my part of the world.

(Translated, from the Turkish, by Maureen Freely.)

His whole essay about his coming trial in Istanbul is at http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051219ta_talk_pamuk

Pamuk ranks with Marias as one of the most important writers of their generation (40 somethings?)

see info on his trial at  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4527318.stm

Javier Marías’s novels give some of the greatest  and most unusual reading pleasures currently available.  Dark Back of Time is a good one to begin with. 

here’s a great article about him

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/051114crbo_books

and here is his own website http://www.javiermarias.es/main.html

The back cover quotes this blurb from TLS  "[Dark Back of Time] shows sensitivity in exploring an entire shadowland of human experience just beyond the reach of words, and could be said to be a culminating point in the author’s long career.  Esther Allen’s excellent translation conveys the feel of her author’s idiolect."

The best words here are "shadowland" and "idiolect."  Even in translation, Marías
is amazing for his "idiolect."  The narrator has a distinctive way of telling his story, the prose itself feels strange and fresh and disturbing in ways that are captivating and unnerving.  He’s not to be missed.